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Continuum Studies in Continental Series Editor:James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA

Continuum Studies in is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major Deleuze, Guattari contribution to the field of philosophical research. and the Production of the New Adorno s ofLife, Alastair Morgan and Number in Heideggers , Michael Roubach Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Balibar; Ranciere, Nicholas Hewlett Badiou, Marion and St Pau~ Adam Miller and Democracy, Alex Thomson , Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and the Genesis ofRepresentation,Joe Hughes Edited by Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke Simon 0' Sullivan Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Stephen Zepke The Domestication oJDerrida, Lorenzo Fabbri· Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucaults Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Heidegger and a ofFeeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and , Michael Bowler Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger; Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell Heideggers Early Philosophy,James Luchte The Irony ojHeidegger, Andrew Haas Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Nietzsches Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nzetzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited byJames Luchte The Philosophy ofExaggeration, Alexander Garcia Duttmann Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Sartres Phenomenology, David Reisman Who s Afraid ojDeleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert Ziiek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman continuum." ----~==~-~~~.~.. ------

ContinUllDl International Publishing Group The Tower Building I' 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Contents Suite 704 London SEI 7NX i: New York, NY 10038 i:" I WWW.continuumbooks.com

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" Notes on Contributors vii , © Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke and Contributors 2008

I I' 1. Introduction: The Production of the New 1 j' All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form I or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor­ Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke mation storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 2. Sci Phi: and the Future of Philosophy 11 British LIbrary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Gregory Flaxman A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-1O: HB: 0-8264-9953-8 3. and Desire 22 ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9953-0 Bifo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 4. The Readymade: as the Refrain of Life 33 Deleuze, Guattari, and the Production of the New/edited by Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke. Stephen Zepke p.em. Includes bibliographical references. 5. Art Methodologies in Media Ecology 45 ISBN 978-0-8264-9953-0 Matthew Fuller 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995.2. Guattari, Felix, 1930-1992. I. O'Sullivan, Simon, 1967- II. Zepke, Stephen. ill. Title. 6. In Praise of Negativism 56 B2430.D454D49 2008 194-dc22 2008010480 7. Affective Vectors: Icons, Guattari and Art 68 Chapter 21 is translated and reprinted with permiSsion from Felix Guattari, Cartographies Schizoanalytiques, Editions Galilee, 1989. Felicity Colman

8. A Portrait of Deleuze- for Contemporary Art 80 John Rajchman

9. The Production of the New and the Care ~fthe Self 91 Simon O'Sullivan

10. Thirty-four (New) Ways of Expressing 'Becoming/ Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Thinking' Through the Literary Work Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King's Lynn, Norfolk of Art and Sexuality 104 Dorothea OlJwwski ------======-=-----.------

11. Readymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel: Deleuze, Badiou and the of Art Practice David Burrows 116

12. as the Promise of Happiness: Waste and the Present Bea~ty 128 Clazre Colebrook Notes on Contributors 13. ~ontemporary Matisse (Variations in Three Two One) Eric Alliez ' , 139

14, Deleuze and the Production of the New Daniel W. Smith 151 Eric Alliez: Professor of Contemporary at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London. 15. Sonic and Cultural Noise as Production of the New: He is the author of many books and articles including, in English , T~e Media Ecology of Tales from the Conquest of Time (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Mzchael Goddard 162 Signature ofthe World. Or, What is the Philosophy ofDe leuze and Guattari? (Continuum, 2005). He has recently published La Pensee-Matisse (with Jean-Caude Bonne) 16. The Aesthetic Paradigm (Le Passage, 2005) and L'(Eil-Cerveau. Nouvelles Histoires de la peinture moderne 173 (in collaboration withJean-Clet Martin) (Vrin, 2007). He is the general editor of the (Euvres de and is a founding member of the editorial board 17. Time with Light of the journal Multitudes. Darren Ambrose 184 I: Darren Ambrose: Visiting lecturer in Philosophical at Birmingham I Institute of Art and Design. His monograph, The Persistence ofSkepticism: Levinas 18. Jazz Improvisation: Music of the People-to-Come Beyond Hegel is forthcoming. He is also the editor of Deleuze and The Fold: Eugene Holland 196 A Critical Reader (with S. McKeown) (Palgrave, forthcoming). He is currently working on completing a short fIlm. 19. Novelty and Double in Kant Whitehead and Deleuze ' Bifo (): Professor in the Social History of Communication at Steven Shaviro 206 the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. He was an important member of the Italian Autonomedia movement, and is today involved in various media-activist 20. Resistance and Creation: An Introduction groups. Author of many books, including Felix (Luca Sossella Editore, 2001) to G:uattari's 'Consciousness and ' (English translation forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Skizomedia­ Davzd Reggio 217 Trent'anni di mediattivismo (DeriveApprodi, 2005) and La fabbrica dell'infelicita (DeriveApprodi,2001). 21. Consciousness and Subjectivity David Burrows: Reader in , Birmingham City University, UK. He is a Felix Guattari 222 widely exhibited artist based in London. Recent shows include 'All over the new smart', FA Projects, London 2008, 'Popnosis', Chungking Projects, Los Index 233 Angeles 2005, 'Moonage Daydream', Praz-Dle~vallade, 2005, and 'New Life', Chisenhale, London (and UK tour), 2004. He is also co-founder (with Simon O'Sullivan) of the art-fIction group 'Plastique Fantastique' (see www. plastiquefantastique.org) . : Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK Author of, amongst others, and Representation: From Kant to a

" Notes on Contributors viii Notes on Contributors ix Dorothea Olkowski: Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorad~, US: Author Poststructuralism (E.dinburgh University Press, 1999), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge, of Gilles Deleuze and The Ruin of Representation (University of CalifornIa Pres.s, 2001), Un~tandzng Deleuze () (Allen and Unwin, 2002) and 1999), and The (In the Realm of the Sensible) (Edinbur?"h and ColumbIa Deleuze: A GuideforthePerplexed (Continuum, 2006). " University Presses, 2007). Editor of, amongst volumes, Gilles Deleuze and the Felicity. Colman: Lecturer in Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne, Theater ofPhilosophy (with Constantin V. Boundas) (Routledge, 1994). AustralIa. Co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art (with Barbara Bolt, Graham Simon O'Sullivan: Senior Lecturer in ArtHistory/Visual Culture at Goldsmiths Jones and Ashley Woodward) (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). Author of the forth­ College, University of London, UK Author of various articles and essays cox:ning Deleuze and Cinema (Berg, 2009); editor of the forthcoming Film and on Deleuze, Modem/Contemporary art and aesthetics, and the book Art Phzlosophy: Key Thinkers (Acumen, 2009). Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2005). Greg~ry ~axman: Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Com­ Currently working on a second monograph on The production of Subjectivity. parauve LIterature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, US. Editor of John Rajchnlan: Associate Professor and Director o~ MA Pro~s, Theory and The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of the Cinema (University of Min­ Criticism, 20th Century Art and Philosophy, UniversIty of ColumbIa, US. Author nesota, 2000), he is currently completing a monograph Gilles Deleuze and the of Constructions (MIT Press, 1998) and TheDeleuze Connections (MIT Press, 2000). Fabulation ofPhilosophy and a comprehensive anthology of philosophical writings about the cinema. David Reggio: Research Fellow in the Department of History, Go~dsmiths Col­ lege, University of London. Author and. translator of m~y arucles on Jean Matthew Fuller: David Gee Reader in Digital Media, Centre for Cultural Studies Oury, Deleuze and Guattari; has worked WIth two of Guattarl s ment~rs, Dr.Je~ Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK Author of various books includ~ Oury and Professor Jacques Schotte. He is currently preparing a senes o~ publi­ ing ~ehind t~ Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Autonomedia, 2003) and cations on Mental pathology and (Osvaldo Cruz Foundauon). Medza Ecologzes: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005). Steven Shaviro: DeRoy Professor of English, , US. Author Michael Goddard: Lecturer in Media Studies, University of Salford (School of of many books including The Cinematic Body (University of ~esota, 1993), Media,. Music and Performance). Author of numerous essays on Deleuze's Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about (Serpents Tail, 1996), and aestheuc and film theories. He is currently writing a book to be published by Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (University of Minnesota, Wallflower Press on the filmmaker RaUl. Ruiz. He is involved with translation 2003). His blog is 'The pinocchio Theory' (http://www.shaviro.com/Blog) . projects of Franco ~erardi's (Bifo) essays on media, immaterial labour and psy­ chopathology. He IS a full member of the Adelphi Communication Culture Daniel W. Smith: Teaches in the Department of Philosophy at . and Media Research Centre. ' He is the translator of Gilles Deleuze's : The Logic of Sensation (Continuum, 2004) and Essays Critical and Clinical (with Michael A Greco) Felix Guattari (1930-1992): Philosopher and psychoanalyst. Author of numerous (University of Minnesota, 1997), as well as 's Nzetzsche an~ the boo~, inclu~g .(in English translations) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm Vzcious Circle (Athlone, 1997) and Isabelle Stenger's The Invention ofModern Sczence (~di~a UmversItyPress, 2005) and The ThreeEcologies (Continuum, 2005), and (University of Minnesota, 2000). He has published widely on topics in contempo­ WIth Gilles Deleuze. Anti-Oedipus (University of Mimlesota Press, 1983), A Thou­ rary philosophy, and is currently completing a book on Gilles Deleuze. sand Plateaus (Continuum, 1988) and What is Philosophy ? (Verso, 1994). Alberto Toscano: Lecturer in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK E~ene . Holland: Professor of French and Comparative Studies, Ohio State Author of The ofProduction: Philosophy and between ~ant ~nd ~mversIty, US. Author of Baudelaire and Schizoana1:ysis: The Sociopoetics ofModern­ Deleuze (Palgrave, 2006), editor/translator of ,. On Be~~t (WI~ Nma zsm (C~bridge University Press, 1993) and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Power) ( Press, 2003) and Alain Badiou: Theoretzcal Wntzn~ (WIth Ray Introductzon to Schizoana1:ysis (Routledge, 1999). Brassier) (Continuum, 2004). Editor of the journal Historical . Maurizio Lazzarato: Independent Sociologist and Philosopher. He has written Stephen Zepke: Teaches Philosophy at the U ni~ersity ofVienna, Austria. ~e has numer~us books originally published in French and Italian, including: Les published widely on the intersection of philosophy, ~es~etics, art. He IS the. Revolutwns du capitalisme (Empecheurs de penser en rond, 2004), Lavoro imma­ author of Art as Abstract Machine, and Aesthetzcs zn Deleuze and Guattan teriale: Forme di vitaeproduzione d~soggettivita (Ombre corte, 1997) and Vzdeofilosofia, (Routledge, 2005) and the editor of the forthcoming Deleuze and Contemporary percezzone e lavoro .nel.post1ordzsme (Manifesto libri, 1997). He is a founding Art (with Simon 0' Sullivan) (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). member of the editonal board of the journal Multitudes. 2

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Production of the New

Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke

The problem of the new

The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset, even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for this to be recognized. What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new. For the new­ in other words, - calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers ofa completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita. What forces does this new bring to bear upon thought, from what central bad and ill will does it spring, from what central ungrounding which strips thought of its 'innateness', and treats it every time as something which has not always illl existed, but begins, forced and under constraint? (Deleuze, 1994: 136)

Philosophy begins with difference, and thus with the production of the new. But, Deleuze warns, because this difference is 'in-itself' a repetition, producing a new thought (as the repetition of difference) always runs the risk of simply recognizing at the end what was presupposed at the beginning, a circle which, Deleuze tells us, 'is truly not tortuous enough' (1994: 129). This poses the problematic of our volume quite precisely; how to maintain the repetition of difference, as the production of the new, while resisting the gravity of the circle of recognition and its representations? How, in Deleuze's words, can this circu­ lar thought be 'tortured', provoking a convulsion by which the of the ontological equation 'being = becoming' appears as the and dif­ ference attains its own concept? (1994: 41). This question, and it is the question of this volume, asks how we can achieve and maintain the production of produc­ tion, and thus the genuine production of the new. How, in other words, can the new, while never stopping being a concept, and the production of new , also work in the world as the means and end of a practical philosaphy? p , i:

11 1 3 Introduction 2 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New the flow _ before they have congealed into recognizable and represen~ble And yet we may be forgiven for feeling like we have heard this question fonus _ in affects. In this way the becomes a trajectory of transfonuatlon, before, for the 'isolated and passionate cries' announcing the new that Deleuze inasmuch as the artist constructs from the continuous variation of an heard in 1968 have by now become the familiar refrains of Deleuze and expression (affect) capable of embodying its continuous deve~opment, capabl: Guattari scholarship. This is not to say such refrains are wrong, and yet, we that is, of producing a difference (1988: 543). The productlon ~f the new lS would claim, ~ey call for something more. This is a very practical necessity, a therefore a fundamentally material and aesthetic process, involvmg the con- necessary reslstance to the academic scholasticism of Deleuze and Guattari ction of sensible aggregates that are themselves creative. This is no doubt studies, as well as to the altogether more ecstatic, and certainly more perfidious for the great interest in aestheti~ practices found ~ Dele~e and c.ommunication of cognitive , where the human capacity for innova­ = Guattari's work, to the point where Guattan has explored an aesthetlc para­ tlve ~ought has bec?me a new realm of exploitation. In this sense the pro­ digm' in which art becomes the privileged example of resistance within the ductlon the ne~ lS as much a political question as a philosophical one. .0: realm of contemporary politics. . In fact, It lS ~ ~uestl~n .of folitical ontology that begins from the critique of its We have been then especially interested in this volume to pursue thlS cluster present condltlons ( bemg ) in order to embark upon the careful construction of themes: (1) the importance of artistic practices for producing the new; I of mechanisms of engagement ('becoming'). Only a critical engagement with ',I (2) aesthetics _ understood in its widest possib~e ~ense.- as ~?SSibly ~e ,most our present, however this might be construed, is capable of producing 'the important political mechanism today, not only m lts guISe of mnova~?n and power of~e eternal return to the nascent state' (Guattari, 1995: 92). '' and all the other avatars of the 'new' found in the advernsmg and ~ere Nletzsche's 'untimely' emerges as the eternal horizon of thought, pro­ marketing affect-industries, but also for their resistance; (3) the as yet largely un~e­ d~cmg a 'sci-phi' or 'philosophy of the future' as Gregory Flaxman's essay in veloped resources offered by Guattari's solo work. In these ways we have tned thlS volume suggests, c~pable of announcing a 'people yet to come' created by to take seriously Deleuze and Guattari's question: 'I a ~o~ceptual o~ aes~etlc . But ~ere is escapist or romantic about i[ thlS event-horIzon of the new, and It does not simply lead 'out of this world', Why does [capitalism] keep its artists [ ...] under such close surveillanc~ - ~ I ~ Peter ~all~d has recently sugg~sted in his rendition ofDeleuze's 'redemp­ " though they risked unleashing flows that would be dangerous for capltalist tlve par~dlgm (2006: 80). The new 15 an outside that exists within this world, and production and charged with a revolutionary potential, so long as these flows as su~ It must be cons~cted. Indeed, we insist on this point; it is only through a are not co-opted or absorbed by the laws of the market? (1983: 245) practlcal engagement Wlth the world (which could perhaps include, but only as a first moment, a 's~btraction' from it) that we can create something new. This This surveillance and control operates by the absorption and instrumentaliza­ woul~ be the meanmg of Deleuze and Guattari's famous declaration: 'We tion of art and aesthetics by the market. Today we are wimessing a new growth cre.atlOn. "WJ lack resistance to the present' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 108). Eric in the 'culture industries', where art is hyped as a remarkably successful com­ Alliez has ~een incisive on. this point, powerfully insisting on the importance mercial product. But it is precisely art'S ability to construct. new se~sa~ons, and necesslty of constructlon for Deleuze's philosophy of expression. As his unheard, unseen, and altogether inhuman affects that while making It s~ essay here puts it: 'CONSTRUCTION = EXPRESSION = BECOMINGS'. appealing to capital's unquenchable desire for new commod.itie~, also ~arks It Producing .the new i~ then our Nietzschean health, our untimely politics, and out as _ for Deleuze and Guattari at least - a force of genume mventlon and ~ such reqUITes the diag~:lOsis ~f our present illnesses as the necessary comp­ political resistance. Despite this seemingly ambiguous position of contempo­ lime~t to the therapeutlc attnbutes of creative thought. We have already rary art Deleuze flatly states the difference between 'art' and 'commodity': mentlo~ed two of o~ contemporary ailments, the cliched repetitions of Academla, ~d the delirious ones of capitalist production. We will return to both. [W] orks of art are much more concrete, funny, and moving than commercial But on the slde of 'therapeutics' we would also like to draw attention to another products. In creative works, you [md a multiplication of emotion,. a ~be~tion aspect of our thematic that has determined many of the essays here, the impor­ of emotion, the invention of new emotions, which are to be dIStInguIshed tance ofan: and aesthetics to the resistance to our present, and to the production from the prefabricated models of emotions you find in commerce. (Deleuze, of pro~uctlon. For Deleuze and Guattari the means of producing production is f~und m.a 'm~terial vitalism', 'the matter-flow as pure productivity', the throb­ 2006:289) bm?conJ~ctlons ~d disjunctions constructing 'Nonorganic Life' (1988: 454). Here we also find the sense of Guattari's elevation of art as the model for politi­ Pohtlcal.reslstance 15 constructed by an 'artisan' or 'artist' who follows this mat­ cal engagement; art is an autopoiesis of affects whose proliferating excess escape ter-flow m such a way as to turn it expressive, by rendering the singularities of I 5 Introduction

1 '1' 4 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New '1:,1 ',II 1::111 read as essentially affinnative and liberating. , Nomad, Smooth Space, c~pit~ed .structur:s ~f subjecti-?-ty and social , most importantly the . The capitalization of these terms imparts some se~se. oft~J.e discursIve SIgn and Its linear relatIOns reducing affects to neutral referents and emphatic use to which they have been put, as ~etaphors for an a przorz r:~lst­ the banalities which 'everyone knows ...' (Deleuze, 1994: 130).' This ~o pr:~ven ance that never existed, and now only appears m the slogans of an uncntIcal 'I I~ the politIcal of art, or of, in a less institutional sense, creativity and inven­ and already tired 'affinnationism'. . . tIon; they restore ~e reality of the affect by unleashing its constructive power. This is nowhere more the case than in the Academy, not only m .s0:t:>hy No longer .sub?r~ate to a that 'has' it, or to a sign that represents it, d the other but also in management schools, where a pubhshmg the affect lives m Its autopoiesis, in its production of ever new 'content' and the :d University industry feeds on this ever-increasing production of cliche, and expressi~ns it gives birth to. Guattari states it boldly: 'the aesthetic paradigm - creates profits through tying this pseudo 'innovation' to an economy of .bulk the cr:atIon and composition of mutant percepts and affects - has become the oduction. This has

1 , ' Dele~e and Gua~tan prOVIde a means of producing the new within a capitalism who can fail to hear a certain weariness in the last words of Foucault - almost that I.S Itself prenn~ed on novelty and 'creativity'. Indeed, today the euphoria of a lament _ where Deleuze writes of our contemporary world that 'it is the advent creatIon operates .m the everyday, and is a favoured buzz-word of capitalism's of a new form that is neither nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove new e~trepreneunal class: ' and creativity, concept and enterprise: worse than its two previous forms' (1988: 132). Indeed, Alberto Toscano, in his the~e IS. ~eady an abundant bibliography' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: lO). essay here, draws attention to a 'negativist' and even 'paranoid' Del:uze that SUbjeCtIVIty now finds a new conformity: Revolution! Creation! Invention! Here echoes Melville's Bartleby, and finds there a strategy of linguistic antI-produc­ enforc.ed ~~solescenc: has ~ecome the schizo-logic of the capitalist production tion that would construct the unconsumable. Michael Goddard's 'case study' of of subJeCtIVIty, where , no different from mobile phones, must be for­ the '(un)popular' Industrial music of the band Throbbing Gristle explores a simi­ ever u:t:>graded. How can a new future arrive and survive amidst its ersatz lar , arguing the band 'literally constructed their experimentation out of the marketIng concepts and ever more fleeting new dawns? Deleuze and Guattari excluded detritus of a crumbling industrial society' . And Clare Colebrook argues have a:guabl~ d?ne more than any other philosophers to analyse this new form that art's use of 'waste, debris, refuse and spent goods' explores a dimension of of social administration, this new 'society of control' disseminated bv the com­ 'the radically incommunicable' that offers 'incalculable potentials'. Along with modity form?f the new. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis ha:s perhaps Gregory Flaxman's discussion of a Deleuzian '', all of these essays sug- taken a while to take hold, not least because their philosophy has often been

I' 6 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Introduction 7 gest an aesthetic resistance to capitalism found in its excreta and excess, which The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to as Flaxman has it, 'violently ruptures our "sensus communis" '. surround the entire earth. In fact, total war itself is itself surpassed, toward But there are also other Deleuze's to draw upon in our search for creative a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has ~en charge of strategies of resistance. Strategies no less committed to a new future and people, the aim, worldwide order, and the States are no more than objects or means but advocating a '' in the world as their means of production. (See, adapted to that machine. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 465) Deleuze, 1989: 172, and Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 75) This would be the purpose of Modem cinema, Deleuze argues, which restores to the body its con­ While in the face of such overwhelming, violent and tragic gea-political nection to the world before this has been colonized by capital, before it has been a volume of philosophical essays may appear insignificant, Deleuze and instrumentalized in a commodity. Darren Ambrose's essay explores just such a Guattari steadfastly maintain that the conditions that make the World war body, an~ a belief, as it emerges in the experimental cinema ofAnthony McCall. machine possible, its constant capital (resources and equipment) and human John &gchman also addresses this body in his discussion of the 'intolerable' variable capital (especially in its cognitive aspects), 'continually recreate ~.ex­ shock to thought Deleuze finds in nea-realist cinema. In a wider sense it pected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives d~termmmg is a belief in sensation as an antidote to our shame at being human that animates revolutionary, popular, , mutant machines' (1988:. 465). T~IS ~pect of much ofDeleuze and Guattari's writings on art, as ifart returned us to Nietzsche'S the war machine, which finds its 'paradigm' in the creatIve , Its unfort~­ 'innocence of becoming', and to the child's wide-eyed visions of the eternal nately incomparable, but nevertheless competitive means' (1988: 381), IS The immediacy of this child-like sensation privileges the body as the cru­ r~turn. precisely the aim of the essays here, and althou~h w~ would n~t claim that our CIal realm of aesthetic engagement, a realm Stephen Zepke explores through a volume is a war machine in this sense, we hope It mIght contnbute to the pra­ of the 'affectua: readymade' as a heterodox line of , duction of such a machine as it is combined with other, unforseen components. and that also explodes in Eric Alliez'g incendiary invocation of Matisse's Fauvist Books are only read, but in this they can become weapons too. ~orce-signs. Similarly, Felicity Coleman calls for a redeployment of the artistic Icon, recharged with sensation the better to work against its (capitalist) self. The contributions to this volume, all ofwhich were specifically commissioned Against communication to address our problematic, not only evidence a variety of inflections on the ~roduction of the new, but most share a criss-crossing of disciplinary bounda­ Recently, the struggle of creative forces to resist their ins~en~ation and nes and practices that injects them with an insubordinate vitality. This is absorption by the capitalist axiomatic has been. expl~red m ontologIcal te~~. precisely the sense ofwhat Matthew Fuller calls 'art methodologies' which 'ooze This is to embark upon a line of research outlmed m Deleuze and Guat~ s out and become feral' proliferating beyond their institutional containment. Anti-Oedipus, the book which first warned that both capitalism ~d revolutIon . 1, ~ "this s:nse, we hope, ~e volume also attains its consistency in something of shared the same 'logic': schizophrenia (Deleuze and GuattarI, 1983: 246) . a crazy patchwork, WhICh fits together pieces ofvarying size, shape, and color, Extending this insight, Bifo, in his contribution to this volume, argues that con­ and plays on the texture of the fabrics'. Here, Deleuze and Guattari offer an art temporary communication technologies, and the ~verload .af. th~ h~an analogy we like, this patchwork texture of the volume would flash and shift in sensibility they achieve, have instituted a form o~ schIZo~~ema mdiscernlb~e the hands and heads of its readers, giving it a haptic and hallucinatory affect from a capitalist chaos. This faces us with a terrifying possl~ility that the cha~tIc 'prefiguring op art' (1988: 526). forces of capitalism's communication industries now constItute ~ur o~tol~gIcal If the utilization of Deleuze and Guattari within the Academy is a soft version plane of . As a result, capitalism no longer confines Its SchIZO m the of cap~e, ~en a harder, more urgent and terrifying 'take up' of Deleuze and madhouse but has normalized them, making them the entirely everyday symp­ " toms of contemporary pathology. In response Bifo advocates pra:tices that '" Guat~ IS bemg exercised in State violence, where, as Eyal Weisman points out, o~ DeleUZIan concepts such as 'smooth space' have become instrumental in coun­ can act as what he calls 'velocity transformers', means of reconnectIng to the ter-'terrorism' practices (Weisman, 2008). Never has Deleuze and Guattari's 'slow becomings' affecting human sensibility. Simon O'Sullivan: in his essay phrase been more apposite: 'Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to here attends instead to an 'affective-gap' opened up by art, or mdeed other save us' (1988: 551). Indeed, the 'smooth space' in which the tanks drive intr;spective practices such as Buddhist meditation, w~i.ch, he ~gues, esta~lish thr~ug.h the walls ~d houses of Palestinian villages, is also the smooth space of a certain 'stillness' as the condition of genuine CreatIVity. Slowmg down IS, as capItalIsm, and the total peace' it enforces: Deleuze and Guattari remind us throughout A Thousand Plateaus, not opposed to speed (and even absolute immobility is part of the spee~ v~cto~), but .resists the instantaneous but nevertheless regulative speeds of capItalism, ItS deSIre for ~=-~==~--~~==~----......

Introduction 9 8 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New in the new schemata oflateral or retrograde) ( ... a] man in charge of the very an ever more rapid turnover, and for its condition; ever faster 'communica­ or inorganic matter (the domain of silicon), (Deleuze, 1988: 132). But, tion'. In fact, the onto-political question here is what Guattari calls' chaosmosis' rocks , " . it is also 'a man in charge of the being oflanguage (~at formless, mute, ~l1Slg- a 'primordial slowing down manifested in finite speeds', but one that neverthe~ nifying region where language can find its freedom even fro~ ,:hatever IS ~as less 'inhabits chaos' (1995: 112) and is capable of expressing its complexitv, to say), (1988: 132). This third aspect, a 'strange language Wlthmlans:uage capable of thrusting its infinite velocities of invention into the ~ stul~g ' form of expression that marks the end oflanguage as such (1988. tempos of capital. ~1) works as a stuttering and stammering interruption to the endless, e~pty However, if schizophrenia is the engine of capital as much of its resistance exchange of information and commodities on .the. market: ~d t~ the bl:the then a strategy ofacceleration might also be called for. This would be to embrace subjectivity produced there, innocuously repeatlng Its cons~tutlve lIDperatlVes. the schizophrenic movements of the market in the cause of their 'absolute ' l'ncrl1i~tic breakdown however, is also a breakthrough, It offers new forms ~eterritorialisation': 'Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ThIS 1 b- ., , of relation, new rules for combination, a new sensual ~~ collec~ve syntax. accelerate the process", as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the is that we It is precisely this' explosion' (one ofDeleuze and Guattarl s fav0m:-te term~ for h~ven't se~~ anything yet' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 240). This suggests a art) within language, and by language, that, as Alberto Toscano pomts out, can kind of polItlcs of excess, not an anti-production so much as a hyper-production, 't us to think of a production of the new that is not merely beholden to the a mad proliferation of capitalist desire beyond its relativization within the bour­ perIll 1 . th insidious grip of compulsory creativity'. For both Deleuze and Guatt~ en geois Oedipus. A 'mad constructivism' that, as Guattari impishly suggests, acts as such a production - at the very edge of the th; an unleashed libidinous force: 'The Puritans still have too much control over see~bl~ a~d sayabl~, sI~~ted between sense and non-sense - involves a subJectlvatlon full of ill will as cons~er society!' (2006: 79). This would imply that the problem is not com­ Deleuze says, one that, recalling the comments with which we beg~, 'lacks the modi~es, or their consumption, but the way they impose a kind of capitalist compass with which to make the circle' (1994: 130). Such aesthetlc ruptures, morality on our desires, bodies and . VVhat then, would a 'mad con­ such 'crossings of the line' that, as John Rajchman's essay elaborates, Deleuze struction' of commodities be? One answer is found in Eugene Holland's essay, finds in Foucault, constitute the very terms and possibilities of freedom to~ay. where he suggests that the improvisational refrains of free Jazz overflow their This is also a key contribution of Guattari, who tirelessly elaborated an ethICo­ commodity form to construct new social territories that may emerge in, but are aesthetics at the very heart of processual subjectivation. As suc~ we are pleased n:ver reducible to, the market. Instead, these improvisational processes take to able to publish David Reggio's translation of, and introduCtlon to, a ~an: of flIght for themselves, they become autopoietic. This then, could be the potential ' Cartographies Schizoanalytiques which lays out the co~plex stakes of ~ubJectlva­ for an accelerated capitalism, an absolutely schizophrenic capital that releases tion within psychoanalysis. Guattari's essay also mtroduces the Impor~t self-organizing units of 'surplus-value'. Such an 'event' is also explored in David g concept of a 'molecular' unconscious, a libidowith a 'processual ~nergy s:eenn Burrow's essay, where he suggests it is artists and art that construct anomalous dynamic relations far from their point o~ eq~rilib~U~' , an~ re.n:sI~g the gener­ spatio-tempo~ blo:s, br:aking with the typical and habitual. Art is in this way alised economy of equivalence' structunng capItalist subJectlVIty . ~~a~s ~gmg us mto Its becoming and creating, as Matthew Fuller puts it, The new, we would suggest, is a libidinal production achieved tru:0u?h ~ shifting alliances and migrations of senses and material'. range of possible strategies: through an abs.olute accele.rati~n of capItalism s All these arguments imply a return to what Deleuze and Guattari, drawing flows; through a slowing down and even stillness op~nmg vacuoles of .non­ upo~ Foucault, have called 'subjectivation'; the processual and autopoietic pro­ communication'; or through stutterings and stammenngs, moments o~ mde­ ductIOn of new aggregates of sensation-thought, a new 'Thought-brain' as terminacy operating as a new affectual syntax. In each case it is ~ questlon of Deleuze.~d Guattari put it (1994: 211). Like Guattari, Bifo suggests that this practices that are capable of interrupting the circular representatlon~ and r~c­ means pIttlng processes of chaosmosis against the chaos of communication sub­ ognitions demanded by the affectual eco~omies Of. the ~ass media and Its merging us, in order to return to what we had so triumphantly thought we had marketing and advertising industries, practlces by whICh differen:e could ~d overcome, human sensibility itsel£ In this sense we once more recall the final a new body. The production of the new theref@re proposes a schlZo-aesthe~cs :vords of Deleuze's Foucault, where it is precisely our own 'super-humanity' that against schizo-capital, a logic of sensation against a logic of profit, embodi:d ~ put at stake, and th~ question is clearly asked whether overcoming humanity in strategies succinctly summarized by Deleuze, and extendable to all str~tegIes m the new technologies of the present is something to be unreservedly cele­ of resistance: 'art necessarily produces the unexpected, the unrecognIsable, brated. ~eleuze..f~u~ault's future man does indeed sound like the dystopic and the unacceptable. There is no such thing as commercial art. It's a apotheOSIS of caPItalISt control and communication, a man 'who is even in charge of the animals (a code that can capture fragments from other codes, as contradiction in terms' (2006: 288). b ~~'

10 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

In conclusion then, and as the final moment of disce . . Deleuze and Guattari's clinical d .. al. rnmg the outlines of perhaps as . an cntIc proJect, we would remind ourselves Chapter 2 . a correctIve to our own cautions and reservations, of the·o an~ ~a~on necessary to the production of the new. In this Guattari ~/ 1- ~~a;thO~t ~ degree, ~e political activist steeped in philosophy, is ~nce !~~ Sci Phi: Gilles Deleuze and the Future f~r a 10~atIc . And notJust paradigmatic but also pragmatic, calling as he does of Philosophy condition beyn:~~men~ that can be the only condition of resistance, the only reSIStance may create a new cosmos: Gregory Flaxman

[PJerhapsroduction I'm delirio. us, b ut I thom k we ,.re m a penod. of absolutely fantastic P , creatIon, and revolution with regard to the em f people. Thi~ is what I mean by molecular revolution: it's not a s:::::~~'sono~ ~ p~o~, l~'S something I feel, something I live through in enco~ters in Introduction mstItutlons, m affect. (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 9) , Whenever he was asked about the future of philosophy, and he was asked often, Gilles Deleuze responded with impatience. 'It's very trying' , he admitted, since such speculation invariably subjects the future to the dire mood of the present. Bibliography We ask about the futui-e of philosophy as if it were a wayward whose pros­ pects had become the subject of increasingly dire prediction: What will become Deleuze, G. (1988) Fouca lt tran S H . Press. ' u , s.. and. MmneapoIis: University of Minnesota of it? Will it survive? Or, as Deleuze mocks, 'is it dead?' Wagers as to the future of philosophy almost always entail the subde suggestion that philosophy has Dele~e, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Ima trans H . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pre~. .. Tomlmson and R Galeta. no future, that the species we call 'philosopher' is nearing extinction. This sen­ timent could not be further removed from Deleuze's own philosophical De~:~~~~(~;;:;.' Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia inclination. Indeed, Deleuze undertakes his joyous creation of concepts by Deleu~e, G: (1995), Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. M.Joughin N Yo k· C . refusing the of what everyone knows or, by extension, the good Umverslty Press. . ew or. olumbla sense of what everyone predicts. Mter all, he wonders, what is the future if not Deleuze,A H dG. (2006) ' Two He· . gtmes OJ,.f M adness, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 tran that which surpasses all manner of speculation, eluding the probabilities and Dele~e~ t.e:n~~ M. Ta~nma, ed. D. L~pouj.ade. New York: Semiotext(e).' s. predictions of the present, giving rise to 'becomings which are silendy at work, R HIM suattan, F. (1983), Antz-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans which are almost imperceptible?' (Deleuze and Pamet, 1987: 2). ur ey, . eem and H R Lane Minnea Ii U· . . Deleuze, G. and Guattari F (1988) A Th po s: mversity of Minnesota Press. With this in , we might begin by inverting the question as to the future London: Continuum. ,. , ousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. of philosophy to ask, instead, how we can speak about a philosophy of the future. This question could be said to frame Deleuze's entire oeuvre, devoted as it is to De~~e, G a;~Guattari, F. (199~), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and a deterritorialized from the traditional constituents of . ~rch e. ew York: ColumbIa University Press GuJattan, ~. (1995), Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans P B . philosophy (e.g. subject and ), but even Deleuze credits Nietzsche as the . Pefanis. Sydney: Power publications . . ames and one who first posed this question as a problem and project. The subtide of Guattari, F. (2006), The Anti-CEdipus trans K Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evi~ 'Toward a Philosophy of the Future', effec­ York: Semiotext(e). Pap~,. Gotman, ed. S. Nadaud. New tively indicates the re-orientation of philosophy towards the unknown and Guattari,dB' F. and Rolnik S. (2008) ,0M le cu la r Revolution in Brazil trans K Cl h unknowable. Whereas time unfolds in a present (Chronos) that filters the future an . Holmes. New York: Semiotext(e). ,. aps ow into the past but effaces both dimensions in favour a perpetual here and now, Hal~:::', P. (2006), Out of this World, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Nietzsche calls 'untimely' the event that escapes the of the present. 'Following Nietzsche, we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, the Weisman, E. (2008), Hollow Land: Israel's of Occupation. London: Verso. untimely', Deleuze writes, which consists in '''acting counter to our time and ,a

12 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Sci Phi 13

thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come" , other realities - or, should we say, of plurality? 'We believe in a world in which (1994: xxi). But how does Deleuze himself undertake this untimely mission, the are impersonal and the singularities are pre-individual', evacuating the representation of traditional or chronological time in favour of Deleuze writes: this is the 'splendor [... J of the science fiction aspect' (1994: a philosophy that opens itself to a new , measure and rhythm of thinking- xx). Metaphysical anomalies, baffling mutations, tears in the fabric of space­ to the future? , time, cracks in the universe: science fiction introduces signs and images that Perhaps it is in light of this challenge that we should understand Deleuze's 'do not compute' according to the science of this or any other world, but which insistence that philosophy ought to aspire to new means of expression. 'The for all that we cannot discount. Rather than uphold the sacrosanct nature of time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book as it has been science qua , science fiction undertakes to fictionalize science, divert­ done for so long,' (1994: xxi) Deleuze explains, but if this assertion is frequently ing its information flows into all kinds of alternative realities, at once utopian quoted, it is rarely comprehended in view of the recommendation that and cautionary, uncanny and familiar. 'We are therefore well aware, unfortu­ precedes it. Only a page earlier, in the midst of a description of the nature nately, that we have spoken about science in a manner which was not scientific', of modern philosophy, Deleuze writes: 'A book of philosophy should be in part Deleuze writes (1994: xxi). But is there really anything 'unfortunate' about this a very particular species of detective fiction, in part a kind of science fiction' fictionalization of science or is it rather the good fortune of philosophy to have (1994: xx). The first of these genres is readily amenable to the more traditional recovered a sense of fortuna, of a chance event or becoming? procedures of philosophy; but the case of science fiction, which concerns us For Deleuze, science fiction avails itself to philosophy at the very point when here, is more perplexing and problematic. At first blush -let us admit - we may the latter's own 'weaknesses become manifest', which is to say, when philosophy well be tempted to take Deleuze's suggestion as a joke that marks the distance arrogates to itself the job of determining the future according to what it deems between the privileged sphere of noble and the generic imagination of possible. The problem with the possible is that it contracts the future into a prob­ popular plots. But insofar as Deleuze adopts the of science fiction, he abilistic and statistically governable determinable space, when in fact the future does so immanently, in' the absence of parodic distance. Far from invoking the is defined by so many forking paths, so many divergences, that we cannot possi­ recitation of Klingon codes or the proffering ofJedi parables, Deleuze's exhor­ bly entertain or reconcile them except as 'incompossible' or even 'im-possible'. tation should be understood in the sense in which German renders science We cannot conceive of the future according to an ensemble of possibilities pre­ fiction as 'Zukunftsroman' or 'future book'. What would it mean, literally, to cisely because no ensemble could completely or consistently organize the create a Zukunjtsphilosophie, a future philosophy? possible. The possible does not preexist the event but is created by the event, Under the auspices of a genre devoted to the future, Deleuze seems to Deleuze suggests, and the same quasi-causality should be affrrmed of the future, say, philosophy might yet engage the problem of the future rather than prede­ which no possible event can prefigure but the eventuation of which creates termining its own. Science fiction always begins by departing from what we possibilities. Inasmuch as Deleuze calls himself a metaphysician, his is not a know, setting its protagonists out on errands, physical or meta-physical, into the metaphysics of reason and representation but one that looks to science fiction wilderness. Whether by undertaking a real voyage or an equally real 'voyage sur in order to imagine an entirely different (or 'virtual') reality: place', the philosophy of the future plunges thought into those domains where, or when, we can no longer quantify the world in terms of what we know. Deleuze How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows never ceased to lament that the prototypical approach of philosophy defaults to badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write the question of 'what is . , .?' The structure of this question always tempts us to only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our divine an essential and overarching answer, but science fiction introduces a new knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. kind of question with which philosophy might likewise begin anew: 'what if ...?' (Deleuze, 1994: xxi) Inasmuch as philosophy traditionally returns to those transcendent elements that exist beyond the vicissitudes of space and time, the question 'what if .. 2' The problem of representation introduces entirely different premises, rebuffing the pretense of a real world in favour of the reality of pretenses: the truth, so to speak, of all other questions _ In this respect, perhaps we can define this particular problem of philosophy even 'what is ...?' -lies in the untruth or fabulation which constitutes a kind of and, thence, of its science fictionalization in the context of aesthetics, which mise-en-pensee for all philosophy. traditionally determines the field of the possible to the exclusion of the reality The eventualities of science fiction are not 'of this world' because in this of the real. 'It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be genre the integrity of our world disintegrates, obliterated by the insistence of founded on what can be represented in the sensible', (1994: 56) Deleuze once , If

Sci Phi 15 14 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New should hardly surprise us. 'The a priori is defined as being ind~pende.nt ~f remar~ed, for th~ insistence upon rendering aesthetics according to conditions experience, precisely because experience never "gives" us anythmg whIch IS ~f pOSSIble ex:penence, or what we can simply call the concepts of representa­ universal and necessary,' (1990a: 11) Deleuze explains of Kant, but what we oon, paradoXically defines experience in advance of experience. In the Critique should begin to grasp here is that, by virtue of.extendingitselfto th,e univer~al, ofPure Reason, for instance, Kant seeks to elaborate a 'transcendental aesthetic' representation is no less extended to the unIverse. "Whence ~t s e~dunng by defining the concepts that render sensation possible and intelligible. "While conviction that the aptitudes and limits of reason are so enurely valid as to Kant affinns that the mind must be 'affected in a certain way' in order to pro­ apply not only to all human but also to any ali~n . !ndeed, voke ~ought, and th:nce the very labour of critique, he finally turns away from Kant appears to have been convinced, like many of hIS con~emporarIes, that the b:~g of the s~~s~ble we experience in order to offer an exposition of the God could not fail to populate every comer of the cosmos With all manner of condi~ons of pOSSIbility for such experience. Hence, the conditions of possible beings, at least some of whom were likely to be wiser and more advanced, but e:xpenence are defined as a priori, but as principles which have the status of all of whom were subject to the faculty of reason and the structure of repres en­ nght these con~tions must be applied to experience and, reciprocally, experi­ tation. Indeed, the real trick of representation is not just to imagine ourselves ence must ~e s~bJected to these conditions. 'Representation means the synthesis the centre of the universe but, in the same moment, to project our own image of that whIch IS presented', Deleuze writes. 'Synthesis therefore consists in the . back into the stars. Kant's own Copernican tum notwithstanding, we humans following: a diversity is represented, that is to say posed as contained in a repre­ suffer from the of sufficient arrogance that how cold and sentation' (1990a: 15). lonely our small sphere, we manage to see '~e eyes of the uni~erse.focused To represent is to re-present as ..., to consign the signs and events of experi­ telescopically from all directions on our actIOnS and thoughts (NIetzsche, enc.e ~o a .transcendental-linguistic structure that exists in advance ofexperience, 1989: 246). As Nietzsche mused: 'All the regularity which so impresses us about anocipaung ~e futur: in its own habitats. Subjected to this regime, the subject the course of the stars and in the chemical process coincides fundamentally of representaoon projects this structure from one moment to the next as a 'first with the properties which we ourselves project into things, so that we impress re~etiti~n',. namely, the continuity of its own experience. The modulation of objects m ome, or movement, is thereby determined in accordance with the ourselves with it' (1989: 253). This may well explain why, in science fiction, seemingly every sp:cie~ of ~abit ?f the subject itself, a mobile milieu, which anticipates itself in the prolep­ alien manages to speak English, but it also begins to suggest the illUSIOns SIS of I~ ~~ common sense. Not only does the subject impose the conditions through which our science fictional philosophy will ultimately ?ave to ~ass. of P?sSIbility on experience, but the adequation of object and subject, of the "Why? Because representation suits a spirit of enlightenment that IS endemIC to s:nsible and the transcendental, constitutes the synthetic agreement we tradi­ science fiction. In the first place, the genre relishes portraying the rudiments of ~onally define as 'truth'. Synthesis entails both reproduction and recognition scientific analysis and logical investigation, for these constitute the most basic msofar as .we repr~duce. different parts of space, through time, and then go indexes of its rational, technocratic landscape. And, in the second place, the beyond ~IS synthesIS by~tue of relating the represented manifold to an object. progress of this outer-space enlightenment (true to its terrestrial counte~art) "Whether mnocence or Idiocy, representation is grounded on the promise that all too often sets out for new worlds with the assurance that anywhere m the any and every encounter is subject to recognition, according to which we medi­ universe human laws and values will obtain and that 'things are ultimately the ate the. encounter according to our mechanism of ideas, and same all over'. If science fiction strikes so many as a conservative genre, this is conclUSIOns, only then to discover - or re-discover - the 'truth' of that object, because its flights of utopia or dystopia too often confirm traditional valu~s and namely, that it confonns to our knowledge. In the [mal analysis, the vast tropol­ transcendent Ideas, assuring us as to the essential coherence of the Ulllverse ogy of representation that philosophers have so carefully accumulated - the and the purpose of enlightened reason, the ideal of democracy and the endur- resemblances among , the oppositions between predicates the ing resilience of the family. . . . an~o~es amid judgements and so on - condemns thought to a model of rec­ It is against this tendency, or in the name of Its Violent provocaoon, ~at ogrnoon whereby we are always bound to discover, or re-discover, what was Deleuze calls upon science fiction. In view of the predilection of representaoon, always already there and what we always already knew. we might say, Deleuze affinns the reversal of its'logic, which in this case be~s . For th~s reason, representation imagines that we can account for just about any witness to something profound, rebellious and revolutionary. The correcove Ill.age,. SIgn or phenomenon under the sun, or beyond it, because representation aspect of science.fiction, its desire to salvage the present and to mend the very eXiSts ~ advance of any image, sign or phenomenon. Representation casts its tears in space-time that the genre introduces, must be understood as the last cate~one~ and concepts in the belief that nothing can escape its vast network, reactionary _ and reactive - gasp against the emergence of the unknowable. and if thIS network extends beyond our planet earth into outer space this ----~--_r:::======::::~... I.------~ ~ 16 Deieuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Sci Phi 17 Insofar as science fiction stages those situations in which conservative values often and ultimately intervene to rescue the genre from more dire alternatives around. Are we still waiting -like citizens in the hinterlands, like the address in from a panoply of other actualizations, then perhaps we should understand Kafka's parable 'The Imperial Message' - for word to reach ~s? C?r have ,,:e cho­ Deleuze's affection for the genre to derive from his willingness to unleash these sen to ignore the news, to laugh it off, like ~e .good ~o~ m NIetzsche s fable alternatives, to press them to delirious and irreversible extremes. If science fic­ who treat the proclamation that ' With denslOn? Or, rather, has the tion ~eguIarly portrays the deliberative efforts of common sense, we might say news already reached us, have we heard and ~~ernalized ~e message, and that It musters all of its vast, epistemological machinery precisely in order to unconsciously 'chosen' to repress it? Perhaps thIS IS the meanmg of.the uncon­ create exceptional and exceptionally enigmatic encounters that outstrip any scious itself - to refuse to understand, to misunders~d, to remam unready, common sense - the detection of a strange monolith on one ofJupiter's moons unwilling and unable. In any case, the apocalyptic book IS ~ne th~t musters the (?OOl: A Sp~e Odyssey), the discovery of a heretofore unknown biological spe­ annihilation of the three great forms of transcendence With whIch the coher­ Cles from a dIstant galaxy (Andromeda Strain), the appearance of an astronaut's ence of philosophy is typically associated, namely, what Deleuze calls God, dead Spouse on an orbiting space station (Solaris). Mankind and the World ('a coherence which is no more our own, that of man­ kind, than that of God or the world. In this sense, it should have been an apocalyptic book' (1994: xxi) ) ...... The eventuation of disaster - The mission of sci phi consists in accomplishing preCISely thIS tnpartIte death­ first, the death of God, the divine judge whose 'sufficient reason" bore the Deleu.ze always recoils from representation because it threatens to relegate the burden of choosing the best possible world; second, the death of man, to whom e~enence ~f ~e sensible to the domain of the possible and, thence, the pre­ (the abstract 'Law') fell in the absence of God or transce.nd:nt dIctable. ThIS IS why he turns to science fiction, for the genre guarantees not , Good; and, third, the death of substance, the last and perhaps .the tn~est only the generic commitment to a kind of realism (i.e. plausibility), but the apocalypse, demanding as it does the death of traditional ontology - ~f Bemg. sensi~le commitment to the reality of an experience, however inexplicable that As we have already suggested, the first or divine execution fell to NIetzsche, expenence may prove. In this light, it may surprise some to learn that in his though he quickly recognized the limitation of God's ~eath. In one of the most preface to Difference and Repetition, where he invokes science fiction in order to memorable sections of The Gay Science Nietzsche descnbes how a madman runs describe the project of a future philOsophy, Deleuze laments the failure of his into the market to armounce the death of God - only to be met. with laug~ter. Mterwards he reflects: 'This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandenng - !I! own ~ook. Despite hi~ own declaration about the need to transform philosophy, III to wnte a book of philosophy along the lines of science fiction, Deleuze seems it has not y~t reached the ears of men. Lightning and ~unde: re~uire time; the Iii. to regard Difference and Repetition as having fallen short of this mark. 'What this light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still reqUIre to be seen book should therefore have made apparent', he writes, 'is the advent of a coher­ and heard' (1974: 125). A good many of the citizens, Nietzsche tells. ~s, are ence which is no more our own, that of mankind, than that of God or the world. non-believers, atheists, but these people have not relinquished the diVIDe so In this sense, it should have been an apocalyptic book' (1994: xxi; italics added) . much as they have displaced it. Whence the destruction of the second form of In~ee.d, D.~leuz~ seems t~ augur that the science fictionalization of philOsophy, transcendence, of human transcendence. As Deleuze argues, this task fell to or SCI phI,. whIch finds Its paradoxical point of departure in the imperative Foucault who dissolved the subject into historically specific arrangements of to leave behmd the world - or to destroy it. 'Sci phi' enjoys a particular relation forces, a' dispositif. 'We can already foresee that the forces within man do ~ot to apocalypse, which it unleashes on the regime of representation in order to necessarily contribute to the composition of a Man-~o~, but may be o~:rWIse deterritorializ: thought from its transcendent mooring: 'modem thought is invested in another compound or form', Deleuze wntes m Foucault, ~ddint> ~at born of the failure of representation, of the loss ofidentities, and the discovery 'even over a short period of time Man has not always existed, and will no~ eXist ofall the forces that act under the representation of the identical' (1994: xiv). for ever' (1999: 124). And yet, for Foucault as for Nietzsche, the destrucnon of But this is also where modem thought has fallen short. The character of con­ the transcendent remains abortive, accomplished within one framework only to temporary philosophy notwithstanding, Deleuze suggests that we must Come be displaced onto another one, the world or sUb,stance.. . to grips ~th the fact that the 'failure of representation' does not prevent its In order to understand this metaphysical shell-game, we mIght conSIder ~at perpetuanon or perpetual fantasy. We continue to call upon the constituents of in each case (God, Man, Substance) we are dealing with the presence of a kind an old coherence despite the 'advent' of a new one. It is as if the events of of theology. This is obvious enough under the auspices of God, ~o whom modernity have gone unnoticed, as if word of disaster had not yet gotten creation, decision, causation and, thence, representation are referred m the last instance. In the absence of God, though, the function of transcendence passes ------~------~"!-"------~1,.... ------~

18 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Sci Phi 19 to the subject and to. the. governance of its faculties, which submit sensible phe­ or Deleuze himself, we can glimpse the alien world beneath the nonnal order nomenon to detennlllauon (synthesis). The plenitude of divine transcendence gives way to the Man-Fonn, who legislates in accordance with an empty tran­ of things. . The sci phi-Iosopher wears the sensation of his encounters on hIS body and scendence (not God but the Good). Finally, with the death of Man _ the ain whether these are marks that have sculpted his or her delicate flesh, or Man-Form, subject of the signifier - transcendence assumes the fonn of sub­ b r , . the out-of-this-world impressions that have resolved themselves in expr~ssIOns, ~tance, of Being, that lies at the heart of so many modem . Substance or the that have fonned the delicate folds of grey m~tter.. Like the IS the last guarantor of transcendence, and surely the closest to immanence but rotagonist of Close Encounters, whose literal and existential purswt begms when it still lingers over immanence like a kind of fog that imperceptibly rises above he catches sight of a UFO from his truck late in the evening: as he peers out the the event horizon. Even in Spinoza's remarkable philosophy of immanence, driver's side window, the blinding light from the craft above leaves a sunburn where the plane of nature is composed of the so many modes of substance, on only the exposed side of his face. The scars, burns and rashes o~the philoso­ Deleuze suggests that transcendence has not yet been displaced.: the modes pher are only the most literal figurations of the affects that de~osI~ themselves refer to God, 'nature naturing itself. In this respect, the exhortation for philos­ on our faces - the affect which philosophy must conceptualIZe ill tum. For to a kin.d of science fiction should be taken as the literal imperative op~y be~ome Deleuze, the very nature of the concept emerges from close encounters with to lIberate fr0r:n thIS last substantial ground, from the pretense of Being, but I~ something unprecedented and even apocalyptic, which cannot be represented as to acknowledge, he did not manage to carry through this Dele~e I~.qwck but must be thought nonetheless. Consider for a moment the concept (or con­ It should have been an apocalyptic book .. .' How can we destroy destruc~on: cept of the concept) that Deleuze and Guattari create in the opening pages of substanual transcendence - 'the world' - without destroying the coherence of What is Philosophy?: a new (or, indeed, any) philosophy? Wouldn't this apocalypse unleash us from any finn ground, scattering 'our' molecules into mere chaos? There is at some moment a calm and restful world. Suddenly a frightened face looms up that looks at something out of the field. The other person The Deleuzian sublime appears here as neither subject nor object but as something ~at is v.ery differ­ ent: a possible world, the possibility of a frightening world. ThIS possIble wo~ld is not real, nor not yet, but it exists nonetheless: it is an expressed that eXISts While the sense of a groundless philosophy and a new metaphysics infuses virtue only in its expression - the face or an equivalent of the face. (1994: 17) ally e~eryth~g ~~t Deleuze writes in the wake of Difference and Repetition, es~ecially With Felix Guattari, the eventuality of apocalypse and, thence, of sci Notably, these lines read more like stage directions than they do a philo- phI trul! emerges at the end of his oeuvre. In lWzat is Philosophy?, Deleuze and sophical disquisition: contrary to expectations, to the traditional appeal to an ~uattan stage the. production of .philosophy and its creation of concepts in a overarching category, the concept of the other person takes shape according kind of apocalypuc aftennath. Like so many works of science fiction which to a kind of occasion or scenario. The concept configures its components begin in the wake of the end of the world (of nuclear holocaust, bi~IOgical (empty field, looming face, possible world) accord~g t~ ~ kind of mise-en-scene, catastrophe, alien invasion, evolUtionary burnout etc.), the 'constructivism' of and it is this manner of performing the concept, whIch IS illseparable from the ~hilosophy must develop and orient its procedures in relation to a prior destruc­ concept itself, on which we might linger. The scene is s:t, the drama or dyna­ Uon whose precise source we may never know. Nevertheless _ and this is mism established, by virtue of an image of space, as if a camera had been Deleuze's point - philosophy does not begin with the destruction but rather placed in the midst of an incomprehensible landscape: we find no structures, with those who have witnessed the apocalypse, with the seers and s~vor~ no points of reference, only a stray rectangle of space -let us say, outer space - whose faces wear the marks of an inconceivable event Platonism tell us that the into which, without warning, 'a frightened face looms up that looks at philosopher's soul touches the heavens, but science fiction reminds us that this something out of field'. We could say that the frightened expression ~efers to visionary fligh t - this anamnesis - also lends the philosopher an air of madness. an image off-screen, but insofar as this image is, withheld, the expreSSIOn alS? The wide-eyed seer of strange signs, the mad scientist labouring to invent produces an unseen image. In the absence of what it perceives, ~e face co~su­ new machines, the intrepid explorer desperately searching for life elsewhere: tutes a strange reflective surface - but reflecting what? Why thIS expreSSIOn, the new philosopher will become each in tum, and in tum each will be this fright? The answer Deleuze and Guattari give is that ifwe are to stray from ridiculed for having become a stranger to his or her World. We hardly need to the automatism of habits, cliches and opinions, thinking demands a provoca­ leave earth to indulge in the science fiction of philosophy when, like Nietzsche tion, even a kind of violence. ,. f

20 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Sci Phi 21

Only under these apocalyptic auspices can we understand the paradoxical which is itself sublime - sublime because the mind has been incited to complexity that constructivism acquires, for while 'something in the world abandon sensibility and employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality. forces us to think', the concept itself does not represent the world. The con­ (1978: 92) cept, Deleuze and Cuattari explain, 'does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates' (1994: 21). In effect, the occasion for the concept may The predominant 'feeling' (Stimmung) associated with the sublime is power well take shape around such coordinates, but the concept consists in the sensa­ because, unlike the experience of the beautiful, where we feel the of tions, intensities, differences that are selected and folded into the event of our faculties with nature, in the sublime we experience the power ofour faculties to exist thinking. In this regard, we might invoke the similarly apocalyptic moment that in the absence of nature, ofsubstance, of the world. Kant describes, in the Critique ofJudgment, when the mechanism of representa­ In the final analysis, the sublime forms the dynamic basis for a new means of tion breaks down. Indeed, Deleuze and Cuattari develop their constructivism conceptualization because it consists in the failure of representation, when we along the lines of the 'dynamic sublime', but unlike Kant, who makes this are unable to schematize sensible experience as a product of the imagination. failure the basis for an even more complete sublation (Avjhebung), Deleuze and For Kant, as we know, it is the faculty of reason that intervenes in the last instance Cuttari extend the sublime into the constituents of a non-representational and to form a concept, effectively raising the failure of imagination to synthesize in-substantial philosophy - a sci phi. In the third critique, Kant divagates the empiricities into the transcendental triumph of reason. But if Kant's dynamic elaboration of reason into the realm of aesthetic judgements, which were here­ sublime amounts, at some level, to the 'labor of the negative' avant la letter, we tofore relegated to the conditions of possibility for experience rather than have cast this apocalypse in order to dramatize an entirely different conceptual experience itself. But here aesthetic judgements are formulated on the basis of process. We do not witness the apocalypse, but we encounter another whose , as a result of which Kant entertains those exceptional eventualities, at face, whose affects, bears witness to the unknown, the outside, the future. Based once remarkable (singular) and universal (onto-genetic), that we call the beau­ in sense without reference to an external world (Umwelt), folded into thought tiful and the sublime. The latter describes an experience whereby the sensation without designating an internal world (Innenwelt) , Deleuze describes his philos­ we encounter - a sensation that would normally be represented by the faculty ophyas transcendental , though we might just as well dub it sci phi. of the imagination and under the auspices of moral common sense, of reason­ provokes its collapse. 'For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form', Kant explains; rather, the sublime 'concerns Bibliography ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which Deleuze, C. (1990), Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. does admit of sensuous presentation' (Kant, 1978: 92). But what is it that we H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, cannot imagine or represent to ourselves? What is initially responsible for exer­ Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: University of cising this? Columbia Press. Deleuze, G. (1999), Foucault, trans. S. Hand. London and New York: Continuum We are concerned here with the dynamic sublime, the provocation of which Press. Kant elucidates in a number of examples ranging from tumultuous oceans to Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, trans. M. Taormina. chaotic battlefields. But in every case, he writes: 'If we are to estimate nature as New York: Semiotext(e). dynamically sublime, it must be represented as a source offear .. .' (1978: 109). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and In other words, Kant displaces the 'cause' of the sensation in favour of the sen­ G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. sation itself, offright, which is prolonged in the breakdown of the imagination. Deleuze, G. and Pamet, C. (1987), , trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. To reason is left the task of picking up the scattered fragments, of synthesizing New York: Columbia University Press. the breakdown of the imagination into a concept. Inspired by the world, the Kant, I. (1978), The Critique ofJudgment, trans.]. Meredith. New York: Oxford. dynamic of the sublime nevertheless takes place in the absence of the world: Nietzsche, F. (1974), The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Press. the affection gives rise to the action of reason on the imagination, to the self­ Nietzsche, F. (1989), 'On Truth and Lying in an'Extra-moral sense', Nietzsche on affection of faculties' action upon each other. 'Thus the broad ocean agitated Rhetoric and Language, ed. S. Gillman and C. Blair. New York: Oxford University by storms cannot be called sublime', Kant writes: Press.

Its aspect is horrible, and one must have stored one's mind in advance with a rich stock of ideas, if such an intuition is to raise it to the pitch of a feeling Alterity and Desire 23

I admit that the writings of the two philosophers present ambiguities in this regard. Furthermore I have to admit that in my work of the 'political transla­ Chapter 3 tion' of Deleuze's and Guattari's thought, I have sometimes identified desire as a positive force opposing dominant powers. But this vulgarization has to be corrected. Alterity and Desire Desire is not a force but a field. It is the field in which a strenuous battle takes place, or better said, a dense intertwining of different and conflicting forces. Bifo Desire is not the good boy, not the positive force of history. Desire is the psychic field in which imaginary fluxes, and economic interests con­ tinuously clash. There is also, to make things clear, a Nazi desire. The field of desire is central to history, because upon this field the forces In the semiotic becoming of capitalism, the soul is set to work. This is the that playa crucial role in the formation of the collective mind - that is the pre­ essential feature of the post-industrial transformation, the transformation we dominant direction of the social process - mix, are superimposed and get into observed during the last decades of the twentieth century. conflict. In the course of this transformation thought has shifted its focus; since the Desire judges history, but who judges desire? 1970s the word alienation has disappeared from the philosophical vocabulary, Since the imagineering [imageneering] corporations (Walt Disney, Murdoch, and the historical and humanist context in which its developed has Mediaset, Microsoft, Glaxo) have taken possession of the desiring field, vio­ also dissolved. Post-structuralist thought has shifted the issue of alterity towards lence and ignorance have broken out, the immaterial fronts of techno-slavery new conceptual parameters. Notions like 'desire', 'discipline', 'control disposi­ and mass conformism were shaped; and the field of desire has been colonized tives' and 'biopolitics' have taken the place of the Hegelo-Marxist analytic by these forces. notions. As a result, the problem of power formation and of independent social This has become the active field of desiring movement. With the expression subjectivity has presented itself under completely new parameters. 'desiring movement' we do not understand a desiring subjectivity that becomes Here, I want to analyse these issues by starting from the reflections of authors movement, a subjectivity seen as positive for the simple fact of carrying desire. who in the last decades of the twentieth century have thought about the desir­ As if there was no desire in violence. ing and the disciplined body: , Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Desiring movement means: a movement able to act efficiently in the forma­ come into my mind, as does Jean Francois Lyotard. tive field of desire, a movement aware of the central position of the desiring Furthermore, another name comes into my mind, who, in this context of field in social dynamiCS. Movement is a force, desire a field. mutation adopted a very different point of view, focusing his attention on con­ cepts like 'simulation', 'implosion' and 'catastrophe': I am thinking of Jean Baudrilliard, who in the 1970s polemicized against those theoretical positions Limit, otherness, reassemblage engaging with the of desire. This polemic remained marginal in the philosophical discussion of those years, We can think of alterity as an aspect of the limit problem, or, equally, as an but today it reveals a dense kernel of political and theoretical implications. aspect of (com)passion. By reconstructing these positions, I will try to encompass a field of cultural Anti-Oedipus reminds us: 'I am an other,' and reveals that the question of and artistic phenomena that, in the last half-century, have dealt with issues alterity cannot be posed in simply social terms, as a relationship between one of discomfort, suffering, alterity and alienation. individual and the others surrounding him. Alterity is the pulsating, phantas­ mal imaginary drive moving and transforming the very of subjectivity. Alterity is the producing Unconscious. And what the Unconscious produces is Desire is a field, not a force the singular existence in its complex relationship,to the world. But the problem of the limit is not posed in Deleuze and Guattari's texts. A simplified reading of Deleuze and Guattari's thought has often misinter­ In Hegelian language, the limit problem is conceptualized by the term 'alien­ preted the notion of desire. In Deleuzian language, and in its reading of what ation': otherness is the limit of the self, its diminution and impoverishment. can be called 'desiring movement', desire is very often understood as if it was In the dialectical context alienation is understood as the limitation of the sub­ a subjectivity, a positively marked force. ject in its relation with the other, thus it is a ofotherness as limitation. 24 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Alterity and Desire 25

Hegelian dialectics attributes to the historical process the task and the possibil­ Guattari would say: a chaosmotic concept, because chaosmosis means a con­ ity of overcoming the limit, and to realize a totalization in which alterity is wiped ceptual, formal, paradigmatic process of emergence out of what seems to be out. But we have abandoned this idealistic claim, we do not believe in totaliza­ chaos. tion and we do not understand the limit as a reduction ofpower. The relationship with otherness establishes psychic and social dynamism. It is shaped in dis­ A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on turbed forms for that have changed over the course of history, a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability particularly in the time after modernity. and gives it consistency (reality). A concept is therefore a chaoid state par The' compositionist' critic of dialectics turns the notion of alienation into an excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought, affirmative expression.1 Within 'labour compositionist' thought, alterity is rec­ mental chaosmos. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 208) ognized as limit, but is also a condition of a growing self-empowerment. Social recomposition is exactly the process by which the relationship with the other The encounter between autonomous Italian and desiring French thought is developed linguistically, affectively, politically and transformed into a con­ was not a fortuitous happening brought about by political or biographical scious collectivity, an autonomous , a group in fusion that rebels and events. At a certain stage, in the midst of social struggle, it was necessary for the builds itself. autonomous movement to make use of schizo analytic categories in order to Starting from the awareness that alterity sets the limit of the existent organ­ analyse the formation process of the social imaginary. ism, the labour compositionist movement understood this limitation not as a In the same way, in the midst of psychoanalytic practice, it became necessary loss, an impoverishment, but as an opening for a possible collective experience for Guattari to make use of socio-critical categories in order to analyse psycho­ founded on conflict. The inexhaustibility of the limit (because the limit does genetic processes, as Guattari himself explains in his book Psychanalise not find a solution in any historical synthesis) also means the inexhaustibility of et transversalite, published in Italian with the title Una tomba per Edipo. the delight in the other who, as limit, becomes extension as well. The methods of autonomous thought and converge in the Having abandoned the historicist approach, it was possible to understand compositionist approach, which drives the primacy of the constituted subjectiv­ that the science of social transformation is closer to the chemistry of gaseous ity into the background, and searches in the molecular dimension for the states than to mechanist sociology. It is not a question of an ensemble of wills processes of transversal formation of those unstable, changeable, provisionary, [ volonta], but of fluxes of the imaginary, depressions of the collective mood, singular assemblages that we call subjectivity. Subjectivity does not exist before sudden illuminations. its own process of production. How is it possible to explain that the workers of Abstract dispositives connecting fluxes; Valves, taps, blenders; cutting, mixing the world, in a particular decade, everywhere start to sing the same song? and combining fluxes and events; There is no subject in opposition to other This is a complex phenomenon, like a storm formation above the oceans. subjects, but transversal fluxes of the imaginary, of technology, of desire pro­ In order to understand the phenomenon of the sixties, that muscular relaxa­ ducing vision or concealment, happiness or collective depression, wealth or tion of the whole neurovegetative system belonging to occidental humanity, it misery. is necessary to ask ourselves which substances, which languors, which sniffings On the other hand, the historical process is not a homogeneous plane onto [annusamente] , which long waits have made it possible. Social insurgence is the which homogeneous and linearly identifiable convergent projects manifestation of an infinitely complicated architecture in which psychic, imagi­ oppose themselves. It is rather a heterogeneous becoming where different nary and material fluxes - the structuring of daily experience - converge. segments such as technological automation, panic psychosis, the circulation of international finance and identity or competitive obsessions are put into action. Heterogeneous segments are not summed up nor standing in mutual opposi­ Depression and chaosmosis tion; Guattari states that they link up (agencement). Planetary events appear as whirling and incomprehensible clouds. But what Similarly we have to explain how it is possible that at some stage sadness takes does chaos mean? Chaos is too complex a shape of the world for humans to be over, and the fragile of collective happiness collapse one after the able to approach it through any given categories. other. More subtle sensors are necessary in order to capture extremely subtle phe­ nomena, more complex categories are needed in order to interpret seemingly Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question random processes; an algorithm of a higher degree is required. of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotiv. It is not a natural given any " 26 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Alterity and Desire 27

more than air or water. How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and elements and vibrations it finds increasingly difficult to contract. Old age is permanently reinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with Universes of this very weariness: then, there is either a fall into mental chaos outside the mutant value? How do we work for its liberation, that is, for its resingulariza­ plane of compositions, or a falling-back on ready-made opinions ... (Deleuze tion? (Guattari, 1995: 135) and Guattari, 1994: 213-14)

Felix Guattari asks this question on the last page of his last book published Chaos is too complex an environment to be decoded by the explanatory grills in 1992, soon before that August night in which he allowed death to carry him available to us; it is an environment in which fluxes are circulating that are too away. quick for our mind to be able to elaborate. His second-to-Iast book "What Is Philosophy?, written with his accomplice Gilles Subjectivity or rather, the process of subjectivation, constantly endures chaos. Deleuze, was published a few months before, in 1991. These two books have Subjectivity is shaped exactly by this ongoing relationship with an infinite many topics in common, but most of all that of chaos and of old age: two topics velocity out of which the conscious organism extracts the means to create a in a tight relationship as we shall see. provisional, variable and single cosmos. Subjectivity does not get on with the side of order, as order immobilizes it: chaos is an enemy but also an ally. We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more dis­ tressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness. (Deleuze and the enemy. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 191) Guattari, 1994: 201) How is it possible to elaborate the infinite velocity of the fluxes without having Deleuze and Guattari write this in the first lines of the last chapter of "What to suffer the disintegrating repercussion of panic? Concepts, artistic shapes, Is Philosophy? And to the question 'what is chaos?' they give this answer in the friendships are the velocity transformers that make us able to elaborate more same page: slowly that which is infinitely quick, without us having to miss infmite complex­ ity, without us having to submit to the triviality of opinion, of communication, There are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colourless and of redundancy. The process of subjectivation creates semiotic, artistic, emotional and politi­ silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. (Deleuze and cal bonds through which chaosmosis becomes possible. Art, as an example, Guattari, 1994: 201) creates semiotic devices able to translate the infinite velocity of the fluxes of reality in the slow rhythm of sensitivity. Deleuze and Guattari designate those Chaos appears when the world starts to run too quickly for our to be sensitive translators 'chaoids'. able to appreciate its shapes, understand its meaning. Chaos appears when the flux is too intense and quick for our emotional ability to cope with. Over­ Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or the sensa­ whelmed by this velocity, the mind opens up to panic, an uncontrolled stirring tion, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos - neither of psychiC energies, a prelude to depressive deactivation. foreseen nor preconceived. Art transforms chaotic variability into chaoid vari­ In the introduction of "What Is Philosophy?, a fantastic and tormenting [strug­ ety [ ...]. Art struggles with chaos but it does so in order to render it sensory. gente] book on the edge of an abyss, Deleuze and Guattari said that it was time (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 204-05) to think of old age. Old age opens the doors to a chaosmic wisdom, a wisdom able to elaborate with all the necessary slowness the infinite velocity of fluxes. Becoming subject is not a natural process, but a process that takes place in contin­ Chaos chaotizes, and disentangles any consistency into infinite pieces: the uously mutating social, economic and mediatic conditions. problem of philosophy is to construct planes of consistency without losing the infinity out of which thought arises. The chaos we are dealing with has both a mental and a physical existence. The old age of the world

Not only objective disconnections and disintegrations but an immense weari­ The two books mentioned above were published at the beginning of the 1990s, ness results in sensations, which have now become woolly, letting escape the those transitional years beyond modernity, marking the age of the dissolution \ 28 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Alterity and Desire 29

of the happy community, and of the formation of a new productive system in the continuous of the desiring energy beyond depression, through which the architectures of collectivity disentangle, the worker's community is and beyond the obscure (but also illuminating) experience of depression. destroyed by technical change, labour becomes precarious, and collective intel­ In depression there is a truth: as we have read 'the struggle against chaos does ligence undergoes a process of submission whose ambiguous features are not take place without an affinity with the enemy.' Depression is the vision of difficult to decode. the abyss of the non-being of sense; poetic, conceptual, as well as political crea­ In those years Guattari rethinks the problem of becoming subject. Modernity tion are paths of chaosmotic creation, the construction of bridges on the abyss has constructed chaoids: political reducers of complexity, semiotic translators of the non-being of sense. FriendShip makes the creation of bridges possible. of sensibility, conceptual transformers. In their aging years our two friends Friendship, love, sharing and revolt. discover the dissolution of the modern chaoids, and perceive the reappearance Chaosmosis is a book searching for the cosmos-creative points traversing chaos, of chaos. Was their aging perhaps related to the aging of the world? searching for the levels of (aesthetic, philosophical, schizoanalytical, political) Demographers confirm it: aging is the destiny of the planet. The demo­ practice making the singularization of chaos possible, that is, a cut through graphiC curve has slowed down. Fifty years ago, demographers forecast that a singular plane crossing the infinite and infinitely fast flux. humanity would reach twelve billion inhabitants, now we know that we will not exceed nine billion. Decreasing birth rates prevail in all cultural areas except Infinite speeds are loaded with finite speeds, with a conversion of the virtual for the Islamic world. into the possible, of the reversible into irreversible, of the deferred into In tune with the aging of the world, our two cartographers of chaos were difference. (Guattari, 1995: 112) faced with the problem of disentangling sense [senso]. The years after 1989 - a year marking a sudden hope for world peace and at Philosophy is the creation of concepts, and concepts are chaoids able to cut the same time a sudden reappearance of war - were years of dramatic, painful out a singular cosmos, a modality of projective subjectivization. Art on the other and obscure mutation. The Yugoslavian slaughter was looming on the horizon, hand, is a singular composition of chaos through form, gesture and environ­ the fall of the Soviet Union announced the resurfacing of nationalism, which ments assuming a concrete corporeality in the space of communication, vision then found in Putin its incarnating figure. Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism and projection. was starting to affirm itself as a political identity for a majority of those people With the expression 'aesthetic paradigm' Guattari refers to the privileged excluded from the world's wealth. Ecological catastrophe emerged as an unstop­ position that sensibility acquires in the present age, when productive and com­ pable perspective after the Rio de Janeiro summit, where American president municative relationships lose their materiality and embed themselves in the Bush senior proclaimed the impossibility of compromising the American stand­ space of sensible projection. Aesthetics is the discipline dealing with the attune­ ard of life. ment [] of organism and environment. This attunement is disturbed by In those years Felix Guattari was registering the accumulation of these signals the acceleration of stimuli in the infosphere, of semiotic inflation, of the satura­ of barbarization - the resurfacing as well as the violence accompanying tion of any attention and conscious space. Art registers and signals this struggle, the victory of capitalism on a world scale. The border of conceptual creation but at the same time sets the conditions to discover new modalities of becom­ was shifting, fragmenting and recomposing in new directions, very often miss­ ing: aesthetics appears at the same time as a diagnostics of the pollution of the ing the horizon, missing both sense and recognizability. psychosphere and as a therapy directed at the relationship between the organ­ Depression: we do not find this word in Guattari's writings, it remains at the ism and the world. border, as if it was an incompatible object to the creationist energy animating his Guattari establishes a privileged relationship between the aesthetic and the work., his research and his existence. But if we carefully read the last chapter of psychotherapeutic dimension. The problem of the relationship between cha­ Gilles and Felix's last common book, we will recognize there a discourse on depres­ otic velocity and a singularity of lived time becomes crucial. In order to cling to sion, on confusion, on the darkening of the horizon: the emergence of chaos. the temporal flux, the mind has to construct its own temporalities: refrains, these are singular temporalities, making orientation possible. The notion of refrain brings us to the centre of the schizoanalytic vision: refrains are the sin­ Aesthetics of the refrain gular temporalities, the individuated niches of the selfwithin which it is possible to create the cosmos. Chaosmosis is the beginning of a reflection that Guattari has bequeathed to us to Philosophy, the arts and schizo analysis are practices of singular chaosmotic continue to develop, a reflection on the creation of a singular cosmos; that is, on creation, that is, they allow emergence from the infinite flux refraining raa

30 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Alterity and Desire 31

[ritornellizzanti] configurations that constitute the map of one's existence. remember the reason for anything, while the new video-electronic generations Refrains though, might 'harden up', that is, they could transform into seem to be dragged into panic vortices until they plunge into the spiral of semiotic, ritualistic, sexual, ethnic and political obsessions. depression. The problem of sensibility thus becomes the problem of politics, On one side, the refrain constitutes a protection from the chaotic wind of the and the problem of the redefinition of a new ethical perspective cannot be infosphere, from the semiotic fluxes that drag like turbulent winds. In the shadow set aside. At the beginning of the new century, the end of modernity reveals of the refrain it becomes possible to construct your own path, your own sphere itself as the end of the humanist heritage. Hypercapitalism is emancipating of semiotic relevance, of affects, of sharing. itself from its Western heritage and so called 'values'. But this reveals a terrible On the other side, the refrain can become a cage, a rigid system of interpreta­ panorama: capitalism without the heritage of humanism and the Enlighten­ tive references, and of obsessionally repetitive existential paths. ment is a regime of pure, unlimited, inhuman violence. Schizoanalysis steps precisely into these points of neurotic hardening in the The mind is put to work within precarious economic and existential condi­ refrain. Analysis here is not anymore intended as an interpretation of symp­ tions. Life is subordinated to work by a fractalization of consciousness and toms, nor as a research into hidden content that pre-exists the neurotic fixation, experience that crushes the coherence oflived time. The psychosphere becomes but is intended as a creation of new foci of attention able to induce a bifurca­ a nightmare scenario and the relationship between human beings is peeled off tion, a path deviation, a rupture of the closed circuit of obsessive repetition and its humanist membrane. The body of the other is no longer situated within a able to open a new horizon of possibilities for vision and for experience. range of empathetic perception: slavery, torture and genocide become normal Chaosrrwsis is set in a specific historical dimension, that of the hazes and procedures in coping with otherness under un-empathetic conditions. The uni­ miasmas that began to spread in the early 1990s, and that now, 15 years later, versalism of modern rationality gives way to the violent logic of belonging. For seem to have invaded every hole of the atmosphere, of the infosphere, of the the decomposing brains in the big infospheric blender God appears as the nat­ psychosphere. ural path to salvation, and obviously this is the same diabolical trap. Religious To breath has become difficult, nearly impossible; actually one suffocates. integralism and worship of purity blend with ignorance and depression, and Every day one suffocates, and the suffocating symptoms are scattered along feed ethnicist and nationalistic tendencies. daily life paths and along the highways of planetary politics. The world panorama becomes Islamicized, and submission becomes the The possibilities to free oneself are scarce, we know it. Trustworthy maps or main of the relationship between the individual and the group. Whilst desirable destinations do not exist anymore. There is no alternative to capitalism the collective dimension is denuded of any desiring energy and is reduced to because, by becoming semio-capitalism, it has swallowed in the grinding machine the skeleton of fear and necessity, the cohesion to the group becomes compul­ of exchange value not only life forms, but also thought, imagination and hope. sive and obligatory. And conformism is the last shelter of without desire Perhaps we should put the topic of aging at the centre of our deliberations, and autonomy. as Deleuze and Guattari do in the introduction of "What Is Philosophy? Aging is not anymore a marginal and rare phenomenon, as it was in past generations when the aged person was considered to be a depositary of precious knowledge Ethics and sensibility for the community. Senility is becoming the major condition of a humanity that has no longer the guts to place a stake on the future, as the future has become In this narrow passage the very notion of ethical consciousness has to be an obscure and dreadful dimension in which only the reckless could cast new rethought. Ethical consciousness cannot be grounded anymore, as it was in the and defenceless human beings, in order to soon after leave them at the mercy modern age, on the harmony of Reason and the WilL The roots of of info-storms. have been torn forever, rationalism cannot be the principle direction of the Today aging becomes the m;yoritarian social condition and at the same planetary humanism that must be conceived. time it becomes the condition that metaphorically best explains the energe1;ic The ethical problem today is set as the problem of the soul, that is the sensi­ exhaustion affecting humanity. Libidinal energy decays when the world tivity animating the body, making the body able to open empathetically to the becomes too quick to be elaborated by the slow times of emotion, and when other. The chemical and linguistic soul we are speaking about is the plane on entropy takes possession of cerebral cells. Decay oflibidinal energy and entropy which a recomposition of bodies might take place. are two processes going along the same tr;yectory. The reconceptualization of humanism has to be grounded on the aesthetic The social brain gets rotten, as in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. paradigm because it has to be rooted in sensitivity. The breakdown of modern Alzheimers' disease becomes the metaphor of a future in which it is difficult to ethics has to be understood in the context of a generalized cognitive concern: the F I

32 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New paralysis of empathy in the social psychosphere. The acceleration of the medias­ phere, the separation of knowledge from bodily experience, the de-eroticization of public space within the digital sphere, the penetration of the competitive prin­ Chapter 4 ciple into every fragment of social life. These are the causes of the diffuse dis-empathy in social interaction, the diffused cyclothymia, the waves of panic and depression alternating in the psychosphere. The aesthetic paradigm has to The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life be seen as the basis of schizo analysis or ecological mind therapy. Guattari and Deleuze avoided the vaguely apocalyptic tone by which I am Stephen Zepke expressing myself. I know it, but anyway we have not sworn eternal loyalty to our teachers. The rhetoric of desire - the most important and creative contri­ bution the authors of Anti-Oedipus brought to movements of hope - seems exhausted to me today, and is waiting for a dimension and a movement able to In a typically apocalyptic tone has recently blamed contempo­ reactualize it. In What Is Philos&jJhy?, and particularly in Chaosmosis, the rhetoric rary art's failure, its 'nullity' and inSignificance, on Marcel Duchamp. With the of desire seems to be soothed if not silenced, while the awareness of the entropy readymade, he announces, 'all the banality of the world passes into aesthetics, of sense, of diminishment, aging and death emerges within the existential expe­ and inversely, all aesthetics becomes banal', a communication that 'truly brings rience and the historical perspective. That's what we need today: anon-d.epressive aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end' (2005: 52). Felix Guattari, on the consciousness of depression. other hand, places the readymade at the beginning of his 'aesthetic paradigm', and makes Duchamp the harbinger of a re-vitalized creative act. 'Marcel Translated by Claudia Mongini. Duchamp declared:' Guattari quotes approvingly, '"art is a road which leads towards regions which are not governed by time and space'" (1995: 101). Both Note Baudrillard and Guattari see the readymade as ushering in a new immanence of art and life, but, whereas for Baudrillard this has led to the absorption of any

I The term 'compositionist' [composizionista] was coined at the end of the 1970s possible resistance by the 'generalized aesthetics' of the market, for Guattari within the context of the Italian autonomous movements. It is used to re-define the readymade is the mechanism by which aesthetics becomes the transforma­ the idea of social class in terms broader than those describing its relation to labour tional process opening up new possibilities for life. movements. More than an ontological category, social class is understood in terms The readymade is one of the foundational strategies of contemporary art, of a composition of forces - imaginary projections, political actions and cultural and as such embodies art's contemporary dilemma: on the one hand its instru­ sedimentations - emerging through collective and social work. This conception of mentalization, and on the other, its renewed power of resistance. It is only in the collective parallels the shift from the static concept of 'subject' to the more understanding this seemingly paradoxical present that aesthetics as a political procedural term of'subjectivation' in Bifo's work after 1977, the year in which practice (one both homogenizing and heterogenetic) can be both resisted and Guattari got in touch with the Italian social movements. (Translator'S note) unleashed. Elaborating this paradoxical present of the readymade will therefore have Bibliography two aims. It will first of all allow us to understand Guattari's claim that art prac­ tices offer 'a paradigm of reference' for contemporary strategies of political Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and' resistance (1995: 91). This will then enable the construction of an alternative G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. genealogy of the readymade that contests its inheritance by the 'neo-avant­ Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and garde' of Conceptual art, and outlines the conditions for its reappearance J. Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications. within contemporary art as a force of political resistance. What then, is a readymade? Guattari argues tltat the readymade - he is dis­ cussing the fIrst, Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack (1913) -

functions as the trigger for a constellation of referential universes engaging both intimate reminiscences (the cellar of the house, a certain winter, the r--

34 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New I The Readymade 35 I rays of light upon spider webs, adolescent solitude) and connotations of a matters of expression in the movement of territoriality: the base or ground of cultural and economic order - the time when bottles were still washed with art' (1988: 349). In making the readyroade the ground of art - and so not really the aid ofa bottle brush .... (Guattari, 1996: 164) I Duchamp's idea at all- Guattari and Deleuze transform art into life by making I life a fundamentally aesthetic process. The Bottle Rack appears here in the double register of what Guattari calls a By freeing matters of expression the readyroade is the first act of an onto­ 'refrain'. A refrain is constructed by the detachment of a material object from genetic process, one that includes within the aesthetic paradigm the 'spectators' the seeming self-evidence of its form, function and meaning, allowing it to con­ experience (qua creative act) as an example of an animal constructing a terri­ geal a singular and immediate assemblage of sensory affects (winter, a ray of tory. As a result, Guattari and Deleuze claim, 'we no longer know what is art and. light, solitude) that gives a 'feeling of being'. This ontological eruption cataly­ what nature' (1994: 185). It is at this moment that the readyroade is re-made ses a 'virtual fractalization' in which involuntary memories (reminiscences) and against Duchamp, a moment that will be crucial for our discussion of the ready­ more elaborate cognitive procedures inducing 'countless sentimental, mythi­ made's later inheritance. Let us return to Duchamp's 1955 interview with James cal, historical and social references' are produced. This gives the refrain its Johnson Sweeney from which Guattari quoted to catch the significance of this 'active way of being', what Guattari will call an autopoietic 'heterogenesis' that moment: 'I believe', Duchamp said, 'that art is the only kind of activity in which gives to the affect its 'diverse components oftemporalization' (1996: 160). The man, as man, shows himself to be a true individual capable of going beyond the affects generated by the readyroade therefore go beyond the conditions of animal phase. Art is an opening toward regions which are not ruled by space possibility of the subject-object relation (space and time are no longer the and time' (1973: 137).2 There are three important points to be taken from this transcendental conditions of experience, rather heterogeneous durations are for our non-Duchampian genealogy of the readyroade: First, it deterritorializes produced as experience), just as they go beyond the form - content distinction a piece of the world in order to express a territory (it is an animal expression underlying discursive representational schema (form no longer simply expresses and not that of a human subject); Second, the affect produced by the content but constructs it). In this way the readyroade constitutes an 'aesthetic readyroade expresses a series of relations between a territory and its outside paradigm' that is not distributed by either subject - object or form - content that ignores subject/object distinctions, and is not, as Duchamp has it, 'an divisions, but creates instead an 'enunciative substance' or 'subjectivation' pro­ intellectual expression' (1973: 126); Third, the readyroade is in constant con­ ducing affects as 'objectities-subjectities' (Guattari, 1995: 102) that crystallize tact with a multiplicity of possible futures (these being the non-Duchampian being-meaning in an ongoing and nonlinear process. Guattari evokes Duch­ regions beyond time and space), and so produces conformity or resistance to amp hand in hand with Bakhtin to make this point, (1995: 14 and 1996: 164, the powers controlling the present. 198) claiming that the readyroade is a genetic and 'polyvocal' creative act in Guattari's insistence upon the readyroade's creation of affects clearly counters which 'the "spectator" in Marcel Duchamp's sense' becomes indiscernible from Duchamp's claim that the readyroade is a 'snapshot' or 'sign of accordance' the diverse spatio-temporal realities created by the affect (1995: 14).1 This between it and the laws governing its (1973: 27-28). For Duchamp, this imbues the readyroade and the refrain it produces with a Benjaminian aura of choice is entirely independent of the readyroade object, which merely exists as singularity by which it escapes the 'mechanics of social domination' reproduced 'information' (1973: 32) indicating that a conceptual decision (a 'nomination' in the 'Capitalist signifier' and the individualized subject. (Guattari, 1995: as he called it) has taken place - 'this is art' - that reveals the epistemological 105-06 and 1996: 164). The readyroade thus gives art - but as we shall see not conditions (and most famously their institutional structure, as in the celebrated just art - a necessarily political function, inasmuch as it can give rise to 'an exis­ case of the Fountain) that determine this nomination to be 'true'. For Guattari, tential singularisation correlative to the genesis of new coefficients offreedom' the 'existential territory' constructed by the readyroade is self-referential and (Guattari, 1995: 13). autopoietic, and its affects access an infinity of virtual 'universes of reference'. For Guattari the readyroade marks a shift from art to an aesthetic paradigm This gives Guattari's readyroade an ontological function of 'cosmic becoming' that does not efface art but marks its renewed relevance within contemporary and 'continual creation' that is quite opposed to the epistemological function life. What is most significant, and perhaps surprising, about this shift is that it of the readyroade according to Duchamp (Guattari, 1995: 66 and 71). It is this has always already taken place. In A Thousand Plateaus Guattari and Deleuze difference, as we shall see, that determines two trajectories of the readyroade frod the readyroade at work in animal behaviour that 'unclasps' a material ele­ through twentieth century art, one of which I will call 'affectual', and the other ment of its surroundings in order to incorporate it into a refrain that expresses 'conceptual' . an existential territory. 'Territorial marks are readyroades. [Les marques territori­ Duchamp's readyroade famously made anyone an artist, and anything art ales sont des readyroade] [They are ...] merely this constitution, this freeing of because it revealed art's conditions as epistemological (i.e. conceptual) and 'r

\ 36 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The R.eadymade 37 institutional rather than based upon an artistic skill, or on any aesthetic taste. information from its ideological circulation, in order to feed it back into the While it is also true that Guattari's readymade can be anything and achieved by social body as affects of a revolutionary refrain: 'We hope to transform', they any animal within the aesthetic paradigm, the logic of this 'democratisation' is announced, 'each piece ofreality into an artistic object that will penetrate the quite different. Duchamp's readymade rests upon the 'visual indifference' of its world's consciousness, revealing the intimate contradictions of this society genetic and ideal act, an act open to all inasmuch as all it required was a 'com­ of classes. Death to all institutions. Long live the art of the Revolution!' plete anaesthesia', the complete subtraction of the affect from art. (Duchamp, (Katzenstein, 2004: 296). This was not simply a rejection of art in favour of 1973: 141). For Guattari, the readymade is a vital process that constructs exis­ politics, but the development of aesthetic strategies whose political effects tential territories from affects, but this is a 'democracy' that is neither human, were produced through artistic means. As Ruben Naranjo, a member of the nor disinterested. This is not to say that Guattari's readymade is more 'demo­ group, explained, their aim was 'to have art open a space in which social reality cratic' than Duchamp's, but as we shall see, it is to argue that Guattari's 'affectual is offered in a dimension that exceeds denunciation of the kind usually readymade' is the war machine of a politics of sensation that Duchamp and provided by social or political chronicles' (quoted in Camnitzer, 2007: 65). Conceptual art's 'informational' readymades in fact counteract. This approach was exemplified in the group's work on the exhibition 'Tucuman Duchamp's readymade, via the '' made by Conceptual art in Arde', mounted in partnership with the Argentinian General Confederation the late-1960s, offers an anaesthesia - and not an aesthetics - in which art of Labour in 1968. The exhibition was a response to the severe impact of the becomes immanent to life through its manipulation of the signifiers and con­ dictatorship's rationalization program on the province of Tucuman, particu­ ceptual structures producing the any-subject-whatever of capitalist life. This larly to the closure of the sugar refinery that was the main employer in the immanence is perfectly captured in Duchamp's off-hand remark concerning area, and to the concealment of its adverse social effects by the promotion of the Bottle Rack:. 'I just bought it' (Cabanne, 1971: 46). So although Conceptual a fictional development program for the area through the media. The exhibi­ art extended the readymade into the new political reality of the 'info-economy' tion 'Tucuman Arde' not only documented the effects of the regime's policies, emerging at the time - a turn as important as it was influential- by dematerial­ as well as the mis-information about it disseminated through the press, but izing it and turning it into discursive 'information'. Conceptual art njects the turned these exhibitions themselves into media events. The exhibition was very aspect of the readymade that Guattari sees as potentially liberatory, therefore designed to establish 'an information super-circuit' (Katzenstein, the materiality by which it produces its heterogeneous affects. In this sense the 2004: 321) that took the mass-media networks and the information dissemi­ democratization achieved by the 'conceptual readymade' fixed its genetic con­ nated by them as readymades, in order to catalyse a new territorial expression ditions in linguistic universals - whether these were understood from the of the 'people' achieved through revolution. 3 perspective of analytical philosophy or - and so subordinated it Despite the emphasis on 'information' as a readymade, the 'Tucuman Arde' to the political mechanisms of contemporary capitalism. This 'sterilisation' and exhibition nevertheless departs from the understanding and use made of it by 'neutralisation' of the readymade places its material of expression 'under the American Conceptual artists. First, 'information' quareadymade, is understood exclusive control of binary and linear relations' found in the anaesthetized and as an ideological and affective material, and not simply as a signifier or a con­ anaesthetizing 'Capitalist signifier', and lead to it being politically' overcoded' cept. Second, the aesthetic employed does not mimic the administrative and (Guattari, 1995: 103-05).4 As Guattari and Deleuze put it in their scathing rejec­ production mechanisms of capitalist culture, but instead creates a polemical tion of Conceptual art, the information-readymade merely reduced 'the concept event that seeks to provoke a Marxist revolution. Third, the abandonment of to a doxa of the social body or great American metropolis' (1994: 198). What the art institution this involved is based on a 'refusal of prestige' (Katzenstein, remains to be seen is how certain heterodox strategies of art of this time utilized 2004: 310) that seeks class solidarity with the proletariat through a refusal of an 'affectual readymade' to attack the bio-political structures of semio-capital­ individual identity in favour of the collective. The statement accompanying the ism, and in this way gave new possibilities of resistance to contemporary art. exhibition in Romario puts it clearly: My first example is the Argentinian Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia (Avant­ Garde Artists Group) who used readymade information as a mechanism by Implicit in the events were the guidelines of a new approach postulating art which art and life could be brought together, but did so from a Marxist posi­ as a positive, material activity that would modify the milieu that generated it. tion that critiqued the ideological manipulation of information and the [... J Revolutionary art proposes the aesthetic event as the nucleus within censorship of art by (bourgeois) institutions, as mechanisms of state repres­ which all aspects of the human situation - economic, social, political - are sion exercised by the military dictatorship that had taken power in 1966. In included and unified. [ ...J It performs an action that truly transforms social response this group explored an 'aesthetic' use of the readymade that removed structures; in other words, it is a transforming art. (Katzenstein, 2004: 319) ~ 1

38 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The Ready~de 39

The exhibition itself was a multi-media event incorporating written material, 'innovations' of the info-economy and the marketing of its signs, and the con­ mural photographs, and recorded voices played over a loudspeaker system that formism of a personal freedom limited to acts of commodity consumption. The immersed the spectator in a kind of informational 'assault'. The exhibition also conceptual readymade qua commodity therefore contains the polyphonic and utilized other 'affectual' strategies, and walking in people stepped over the autopoietic oscillations of the refrain within the networks of iterated redundan­ names of owners of sugar plantations in the area, coffee grown in Tucuman was cies it reveals, which pre-determine its expression and instrumentalize its served (without sugar) and the rooms were darkened every ten minutes to rep­ constructive power. But because modernity'S 'aesthetic paradigm' rests upon resent the frequency of child death in the province (Camnitzer, 2007: 65-66). the de- and re-territorializing of matters of expression, the possibility always These affectual expressions of the political situation in Tucuman utilize the exists for the readymade to go beyond its capitalist limits by introducing autopoi­ readymade in a way directly counter to Duchampian 'anaesthesia', but what etic 'directional components' (1988: 345) capable of expressing and constructing remains problematic about this strategy, at least in Guattari and Deleuze's an as yet unknown future, and of extending our aesthetic plane of composition terms, is the residual '' of its Marxist affiliation and the way this into an 'energetic Cosmos' (1988: 378). In this way the readymade remains subordinates aesthetic to political aims. 'Tucuman Arde' remained committed a part of this world, but it exists in the world as the refrain of a people yet to a concept of class contradiction that limited its refrains to the rhythm of to come, at once art and life, it acts 'like the vectors of a cosmos that carries [the dialectical negation. As a result, the rupture produced by its deployment of people] off; then the cosmos itselfwill be art' (1988: 381). information-readymades was contained by its aim of consciousness raising, This sense of the readymade as an expressive mechanism capable of creating restricting the territorial 'group individuation' produced by 'Tucwnan Arde' to a people yet to come can be found in the work of Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. the expression of an already constituted people. This is not to reject the politi­ For Oiticica the readymade was an affect, a mechanism of ' sensorial-corporeal cal effects of 'Tucuman Arde', but it is to recognize that their strategic use of participation', (1999: 41) through which ideological forces were not so much the readymade did not allow for the type of 'construction' that defines the confronted as bypassed in the production of new modes of life. For Oiticica 'modem' in Guattari and Deleuze's sense. the affectual readymade was not only produced by the deterritorialization of Modernity, for Guattari and Deleuze, is defined by new forces constituting an everyday object, but he saw this as being integral to the world. These are the cosmic forces sending us into space, the molecular the everyday life of the favela of Mangueira in Rio de Janerio, where he lived. forces operating at the atomic level of matter, and the new machinic forces In the favela a co-operative and affectual environment was constructed around emerging within the cybernetic networks of our computerized age. It is these and through the readymade as an expression of freedom in the face of the forces that organize our molecularized and deterritorialized global society, and military dictatorship that had taken power in 1964. Oiticica attempted to extend that no longer distribute the 'people' into 'classes' but constitute new bio­ this experimental and improvisational style of life to a wider public by inviting political 'populations' as fluid territorial expressions constructing the plane of their participation in his museum installations. (1999: 9). One, Tropicalia, immanence of late-capitalism. These populations, deterritorialized 'majorities' (1967) was a large installation of what Oiticica called 'penetrables', small cabins and 'minorities', constitute the modem matter-force of 'a people of oscillators made from wood and cloth in the style of slum dwellings. These cabins diffused as so many forces of interaction', (1988: 380) populations that coalesce around the light of the gallery through their colourful fabrics, producing an intimate and are dispersed by their ongoing production of affects. Although The Grupo environment containing certain objects and texts associated with favela life, de Artistas de Vanguardia understood that in the aesthetic paradigm of the mod­ and invited the participant to make these spaces habitable with these materials em world the communication of affect constructs political territories, their and others of their own choosing. The aim then, was not to represent favela life, 'romantic' expression of a conceptually pre-constituted 'people' failed to appre­ but to offer its processes of territorial construction - both with and as ready­ ciate the political stakes of the modem affectual readymade, what Guattari and mades - as unconditioned modes ofparticipation, as processes ofself-organizing Deleuze call the construction of 'a people yet to come' (Deleuze and Guattari, and collective creation that could spread 'minority' affects through the museum 1988: 381). Modernity in this sense means the deterritorialization of old exis­ institution. tential territories such as class, and a of populations through This is what Oiticica called 'environmentation', a term that combines the archaic affects such as racism, or through the recoding of flows by refrains concepts of 'territory' and 'creation' in a contingent process expressing a constructing the 'majorities' of capitalist production/consumption (Guattari repressed but nevertheless real social freedom. Oiticica's emphasis on partici­ gives the example of television (1995: 16-17». It is in this sense that modem pation meant the readymade only existed in the affect it produced, but this capitalism is fundamentally 'aesthetic' inasmuch as it explOits affect as the hori­ affect was unconditioned, introdUCing the greatest possible freedom into proc­ zon of the future, but this future is trivialized and controlled in the constant esses of social formation. 'What emerges in the continuous spectator-work I 40 Deleuu, Guattari and the Production of the New The Readymade 41 contact', he writes, 'will therefore be conditioned by the character of the work, singular social transformations. One work, Catalysis N (1970) involved her in itself unconditioned. Hence there is a conditioned-unconditioned relation­ travelling on a bus, the subway and the State building elevator with a ship in the continuous apprehension of the work' (quoted in Camnitzer, 2007: white hand towel stuffed into her mouth. The extreme of this per­ 170). This, Oiticica writes, is 'a totally anarchic position' (1999: 9). This 'uncon­ formance belies the complexity of the work and its force of social engagement. ditioned' element introduced by the readymade is however, neither vague nor Although this work's 'content' lies entirely within the spectator's 'affective unclear; it is the virtual of an unknown people and future that is actualized by response', (Piper, 1996a: 32) it differs from our previous examples by project­ the work. In this sense, the 'work' - a process and not an object - exists as the ing this response against its social programming, and particularly against future it constructs within the realm of the spectator's experience, and as such 'racism, racial stereotyping, and xenophobia' (Piper is a black woman) (1996a: its affects are the seeds of unconditioned creation. Here, the readymade is a 242). The social programming of affect is not understood according to 'politi­ material object, its experience, and the process of construction it instigates, cal' criteria, as it was by the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, and nor is its making it, Oiticica says, 'an instigator of creation - "creation" as such: this proc­ resistance imagined as an undetermined process of creation, as with Oiticia's ess completes itself through the dynamic participation of the "spectator", now work. Furthermore, the work exists entirely independently of any institutional considered as "participator" , (Oiticica, 1999: 8). Oiticica therefore draws upon structure. Indeed, Piper explains, 'the work as such is nonexistent except when minority experience in the favelas as a liberatory process, but does not speak in it functions as a medium of change between the artist and the viewer' (1996a: its name. Rather than attempting to raise the proletariat's consciousness he 32-33). As a result, the artwork is created in an encounter that affects a life, that instead attempts to involve the museum visitor in an aesthetic plane of imma­ causes a new relation - a change- to take place. The necessity for this work arose nence that is already under construction in favela life. Unlike the Grupo when Piper experienced an overwhelming 'invasion' of her 'aesthetic isolation' de Artistas de Vanguardia then, he did not attempt to reject the museum as a by events in the 'outside world' (1996a: 31). This rendered any artistic practice bastion of bourgeois power, as in his work the 'museum is the world: dailyexpe­ that did not directly confront these events inane and superfluous, and revealed rience' (1999: 9). art's institutional context as a significant limit to its possible affects. What Nevertheless, Oiticica's emphasis on spontaneous and aleatory creation per­ needed to be done, Piper realized, was to take art outside the institution in haps requires an idealistic affirmation of the 'anarchic' nature of these processes order to unleash the full power of its catalytic event. 'I like the idea', wrote, in order to maintain their 'freedom' within the museum institution. Further, 'of doing away with all discrete forms and letting art lurk in the midst of things' this openness to the undetermined risks, as Guattari and Deleuze put it, 'over­ (1996a: 37). doing it' and producing a jumble' or 'scramble': 'All one has left is a resonance Piper's readymade is 'bio-aesthetic', being both her own body, and the ideo­ chamber well on the way to forming a black hole' (1988: 379). Here it is the logical affective circuits (refrains) that produce it and are reproduced through very openness of the readymade that risks simply repeating, without difference, it. But beginning from this socially determined body qua 'readymade', she the social forces it wished to change. The spectator, rather than constructing a attempts to free its material in order to introduce an alterity into its social self­ new future, would simply consume the agreeable experience of 'playing around' evidence (racism, but not only racism as her performances are projected against offered by 'art'. Indeed, Guattari offers a critique of the 'complementary sick­ minority 'identities' as well) capable of catalysing bifurcations in existence. As nesses of the 60's counter-culture' that can be broadly extended to the work of such, Piper's production of affects operates at the precise point of subjectiva­ the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia on the one hand, and to Oiticica on the other tion, where the standardized and normalizing affect integrating the individual (and to their contemporary inheritors; 'institutional critique' and 'relational into the 'majority' is re-singularized, recharged with the unknown. But despite aesthetics'). The first would be an example of what Guattari sees as 'putting too the importance of the aleatory and open nature of the affect produced in this much emphasis on the social to the detriment of the molecular texture of the event, it is nevertheless premised, and produced, by a careful and precise analy­ desires involved in the intra-personal economy of individuals', while Oiticica's sis ofexisting social conditions. Piper calls this element ofher practice 'meta~art', work would be a case of 'mi~udging the constraints relative to effectively taking and it is a conceptual process she extends to all aspects of her work. It is this the sphere of political interests into account in favour of an often muddled element that avoids any romantic appeal to an outside, whether this is a pre­

exaltation of spontaneity' (1988). constituted people, or an unconditioned event: J It is in the early performances of the American artist Adrian Piper that we see a path emerging from these two problems, one in which she understands the In elucidating the process of making art on a personal level, meta-art criti­ readymade as both a normalized affect constructing a repressive existential ter­ cizes and indicts the machinations necessary to maintain this society as it is. ritory, and a device capable of deterritorializing this affect in order to catalyse It holds up for scrutiny how capitalism works on us and through us; how we I 42 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production oj the New The Readymade 43

therefore live, think, what we do as artists; what kinds of social interactions we us: 'The victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it have (personal, political, financial). (1996b: 27) installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution's fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal' (1995: 177). This Here, Piper's work resembles Guattari's concept of 'schizoanalytic metamod­ is surely the ambition of the readymade as Guattari develops it, and as I have elisation'. Metamodelization begins from an analysis of the repressive forces tried to extend that development here, it brings into existence an aesthetic par­ that homogenize affect by standardizing its expressions (Piper's 'meta-art'), adigm in which the political efficacy of art is achieved in those humble and yet and 'treats' this malady by introducing a 'readymade' capable of catalysing singular events that invent new possibilities for life. In the readymade life polysemic bifurcations that escape their social overcoding. Such overcoding becomes a . It remains to be seen what use contemporary artists can operates, for Guattari, primarily through language's domination of expression, make of it by following its heterodox tradition to create new futures. and more specifically through the signifier's linear and binary system capturing the affect in the position of a neutral 'referent' (Guattari, 1995: 76). Piper's action of stopping up her mouth is especially significant in this respect, allow­ Notes ing her to 'cross the barriers of non-sense' (Guattari, 1995: 68). In doing so Piper's performances inhabit an alterity close to madness, but only in order to 1 Guattari draws on, but does not reference, Duchamp's 1957 text, 'The Creative Act' (1973: 138-40). create an affect that revitalizes 'everyday' sensation through the eruption of an 2 Eric Alliez (2003) has already pursued this encounter of Guattari and Duchamp, unmediated, and invariably humorous, real. It does so by 'unclasping' (the and my account here owes much to his. But whereas he wishes to reject Guattari's term is Guattari and Deleuze's) her own body from the social conditioning that use ofDuchamp, and by implication the heritage of the readymade in contempo­ has produced it, and from the artistic institutions that might separate her per­ rary art, in favour of a Matissean chaosmosis of sign-forces, I believe this ignores formances from these conditions. In this way Piper produces an affectual the possibility of a Guattarian readymade, not to mention the undeniable fact of readymade, one appearing only in the process of producing new affects, a proc­ the readymade's centrality to contemporary art, while putting too much weight on ess, perhaps, capable of catalysing new social territories in and as life. painting, even, or perhaps especially, on a painting-against-painting. Art has become life, and nothing but life, butthis in no way, at least for Piper, 3 For example, Joseph Kosuth drew on the philosophy of A 1- Ayer to argue that invalidates this work as art, or her activity as an artist. Indeed, she argues that works of art are analytic that established the truth conditions of 'art' this method is preferable to that of 'an artificial environment or theatrical itself. In a more structuralist vein, Robert Smithson drew on Claude Levi-Strauss action' because in these events the spectator relinquishes their 'role as essen­ to explore the structuring opposition of Nature-Culture in his 'Site-Non-Site' works. tially passive "substance" on which the catalytic agent works, in order to become 4 The conceptual readymade could therefore only 'mimic' the forms of control that part of the catalytic agent' (1996a: 34). Piper argues that for the catalytic event had in fact already determined it. Conceptual art, like the Information theory it to have its full impact the viewer must be unaware that they are experiencing often drew upon, 'takes as its point of departure a homogeneous set of ready­ art, which is precisely the problem with galleries or museums, which 'prepare the made signifying messages that are already functioning as elements in biunivocal viewer to be catalysed, thus making actual catalysis impossible' (1996a: 45). In relationships, or the elements of which are biunivocally organized' (Deleuze and the gallery situation the viewer is no longer a 'spectator' but has become, and Guattari, 1988: 198). Similarly, Guattari talks of '''ready-made'' significations' that this describes the situation in Oiticica's installations quite precisely, a 'partici­ he contrasts to the 'zones of imbalance' produced by the artistJean:Jacques Lebel pating artist' (1996a: 34). Ironically, Piper suggests that we do not need a more (1988). This argument has already been made in art-historical terms by Jeff Wall 'democratic' art but one that is less so. It is only when we are forced to confront (1985) and Benjamin Buchloh (1990). alterity in and as our lives - and not as 'information' or as a museum 'experi­ ence' - that a sufficient 'shock' can be administered that might provoke an Bibliography affect that escapes the gravity of its self-evidence. It would be in this shock that art would call forth a new people, and it is only in this call that art can both be Alliez, E. (2003), 'Reecrire la postmodemite (Notes)', Tresors publics. 20 ans de crea­ political and achieve its immanence with life. tion dans les Fonds regionaux d'art contemporain. P~ris: Flammarion. Indeed, this is the startling conclusion that the 'affectual' lineage of the ready­ Baudrillard,1- (2005), The Conspiracy of Art, trans. A Hodges, ed. S. Lotringer, made implies, that by placing art in the midst of life, by making it the vital New York: Semiotext(e). mechanism of life's own process of becoming, art provides not only the condi­ Buchloh, B. H. D. (1990), 'Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic ofAdmin­ tion, but the criteria of any revolutionary politics. M, Guattari and Deleuze tell istration to the Critique ofInstitutions,' in October 55, 105-43. MIT Press. r-­ I

44 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Cabanne, P. (1971), Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R Padgett. New York: Da Capo Press. Camnitzer, L. (2007), Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Chapter 5 Austin: University of Texas Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Art Methodologies in Media Ecology Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), "What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. BurchelL New York: Columbia University Press. Matthew Fuller Duchamp, M. (1973), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press. Guattari, F. (1988), 'Jean:Jacques Lebel, Painter of Transversality,' Globe E, 8, trans. M. McMahon, online at http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/#issue8 (accessed on 12 May 2008). Art is no longer only art. Its methods are recapitulated, ooze out and become Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Baines and feral in combination with other forms of life. Art methodologies convey art's 1- Pefanis. Sydney: Power publications. capacities to enact a live process in the world, launching sensorial particles and Guattari, F. (1996), The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: BlackwelL other conjunctions in ways and combinations that renew their powers of distur­ Katzenstein,!' (ed.) (2004), Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the bance and vision. Art methodologies are a range of ways of sensing, doing and Avant-Garde. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. knowing generated in art that are now circulating more haphazardly, perhaps Oiticica, H. (1999), 'Position and Program' (1966) and 'General Scheme of the less systematically, and requiring of a renewed form of understanding in order New ' (1967), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. A. Alberro and to and develop them. Art methodologies are cultural entities, embodied B. Stimson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. in speech, texts, sounds, behaviours and the modes of connection between Piper, A. (1996a), Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art things that share and develop, work on, art's capacity of disturbance and the 1968-1992. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Piper, A. (1996b), Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume 2: Selected Writings in Art Criticism multi-scalar engorgement of perception. 1967-1992. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. As art systems proliferate, sometimes clenching into magnificently puckered Wall,1- (1999 (1985)), ''s Kammerspiel,' in Conceptual Art: A Critical dots, at other times unraveling into torrents of work and of life, art methodolo­ llnthology, eds. A. Alberro and B. Stimson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. gies shuttle back and forth between entities in art systems and other domains with a certain range of freedoms, encountering and staging constraints. The generation and circulation of art methodologies invokes a formation of art that is not a conservative system pushing a named, trimmed and dealt with few up the heights of a pyramid built on the mangled achievements of many others, the classic paradigm, but a system that condenses and spews out moments of relationality. This happens with no necessary connection to named entities such as author, piece, project, owner, artist, provenance. Art methodologies circulate, gain traction, shift, die off, amongst a more gen­ eral flocculation of ideas, styles and modes of inflection. A diffusion is occurring in which art methodologies can pop up unexpectedly, not even recognizing themselves as art, indeed possibly not even having that filiation in a genealogi­ cal sense, but connecting to it by means of arrival via a different phylogenetic route, or move in a way for which the idea of such a tracking is ludicrous. Such an understanding of art methodologies relies on an understanding of cultures as living processes involving stability and diversification that assemble circula­ tion vectors, hot, cooling and intermixing, driven by invention and mutation, that act as pulsional zones for the circulation and invocation of signs and dynamics. That is, art methodologies may exist at this scale, they might drive cultures or be sucked along in their wake. I 46 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Art Methodologies in Media Ecology 47

Cultures, media ecologies mixed in with and passing through them, are con­ In this way art methodologies as an idea is too fragile, or its scope too veyors of heat, materials and intelligence that at once provide a means, with their small, to conform to the totalizing ambitions of movements demanding own particular rhythms, for the mix and conservation of modes and the multi­ the complete subsumption of everyday life by art as characterized by, amongst scalar conveyance of potentially mutational effects and dynamics, that themselves others, the later Situationist InternationaL What is described here is not a intermingle, block, and replicate dimensions of relationality, congealing as classic takeover bid but a shifting and opening of the permutational matrix of events, medial entities and processes of subjectivation. They certainly exist in influences and possibilities between intersecting fields, the registration of an and as the classically defined sense of media as systems for storage, processing apparent torsion in cultural dynamics releasing the expressiveness of s and distribution of cultural material, but also pass along without them. insubordination. Indeed, the proliferation of art methodologies into other forms oflife cannot simply be understood to be good, democratic, enabling or humane in the way Context that everything is supposed to be participatorily dressed up nowadays; or simply grindingly joyful and Christian in the mode of a 'don't worry be happy' brand Some context is useful for describing this shift. One aspect might simply be the of . Art methodologies share part of the wider question of knowledge massification of art education undergone in some parts of the world since the stemming from their contribution to the curse fingered by Paul Rabinow when middle of the twentieth century. To take the British Isles, ifwe assume that most he says, of the 'anthropological problem', that, 'anthropos is that being who graduates from art schools since the 1960s are largely still alive that means suffers from too many logoi' (2003: 6). (This is to place surplus consciousness that there are several tens of thousands of people around with some kind of art as a foundational condition, not as a calculable excess figured as emancipatory training. Clearly not all of them are now artists or designers in a way that is rec­ from or compensatory to social position.) Art is a means of alienation, a pre­ ognized by art systems. What then happens to the ideas, ways of seeing the cious source ofself-mutilation. Anthropos is a residue and shaper of evolutionary world and doing things that art allows for and entrains? I am not interested forces, and one of its subcategories is man. Man, is a pathological animal, here in making an account of so-called 'transferable skills', but more in how (Nietzsche) a sick animal, (Burroughs) a plague (Margulis) that is also traversed, accretions of cultural reflexes and modes of intensification moving through used as a nutrient sac of protein-bearing pus or as a breeding ground for numer­ populations, at microscopic or larger scales, invent their own means of circula­ ous other sicknesses, language and culture being virulent amongst them. To tion, mutation and alliance.1 speak of art methodologies requires a way of recognizing culture that is beyond Another contributing current is the context of art as popular culture. One man. We should be attentive to its particular traits and capacities but not get aspect would be the more systematic celebritization of art, but another, more stuck in its skin. interesting instance would be the TV series Jackass, mixing the precisely trau­ In his discussions of Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze sets up the term 'Method' for matic end of art with bodies (i.e. that of Chris Burden), with skate culture, and particular attention (Deleuze, 1988; 1992). Method is the means by which the time-rhythm of TV . A more simple example, the migration of art Spinoza fabricates a machine capable of travelling across the universe and at methodologies into pop music is reasonably well charted, and more interest­ the same time, dig into or suffuse microcosmic scalar realities, allowing them to ingly remains a serious zone of contention, but to account for the phenomena be composable, alienable from common sense, into the realm of geometry and it is necessary to do more than recognize the mapping of ideas and means from love. Methods are procedures, regimes, tricks on the self, which allow us to get one relatively stable cultural domain into another. What are described here as beyond everyday perception and the rule of the commonplace. possible contextualizing dynamics, are perhaps more adequately also under­ What is Philosophy? expands this vocabulary of method by describing the stood as symptoms. three modes, variations, variables and varieties that the book's three planes, or Equally, the circulation of art methodologies can be seen as intersecting 'daughters of chaos' philosophy, science and art produce as they cut, each in with and feeding off a more general reflexivity, self-observation woven into the their different way, through the arcs of life, of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, actions of the self. Here the entity functioning as a self may range from a pro­ 1994: 208). Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on sensual perception in art is duction process, a dance move and its stability and variation, the repertoire of immensely productive as one parameter of a fine speculative matrix, but it an erotic subculture at sizes scalable from the sub-individual to massifying level misses out many other kinds of dynamics running through both contemporary or a cybernetically self-monitoring national corpus or a personal fitness regime. art practices and, for the context of this text, the art methodologies that run Aesthetically charged entities and modes move through social and communica­ through, parallel to or away from them. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari's tive formations, providing many other kinds of entity and dynamic with their work provides useful resources in describing art methodologies within and justification and metre.2 beyond art systems. " 48 Deleuze, Guattari and the Produaion oj the New r il.rt Methodologies in Media Ecology 49 Variations are precisely what Eric Alliez produces in his striking commentary co-evolutionary coupling between organism and place, such a coupling also on "What is Philosophy? They are a multiplication of resonances within an requires something more than the vivid, gleeful and subtle account of the inter­ evolving conceptual domain: in the way that a body builder rips muscle in order fibrillic rush and curse of nature. The recognition of sensation by sensation to allow the tissue to increase its density and capacity, fibers multiplying, generates intelligence, melody itself instigates pattern finding, and reflexivity intensifying the capacity of others, philosophy rips thought, nurturing and is born. Ultimately, the book's own trajectory gives way to a recognition of the anticipating, feasting on its growth. Variables are entities that are recognizable as kinds of indiscernability that the book's three arcs, art, science and philosophy, being independently meaningful given the construction and adoption of a par­ themselves give rise to. From this vantage point, it is possible to see that the ticular scientific perspectival system. Slowing down a sound in order to map it tracing of the three irreducible arcs is done so fastidiously, the better, by means as a waveform; designing an instrument with sensors responsive to certain parti­ of them, to join together so much that is incommensurable and thus to make a cles; or trimming or extending the lengths of a limb or tail-feather in order to moire of their clean geometry. The three daughters of chaos are themselves just match these variables against others, such as measured of walking, or as much an effect of the melody between them and the beings that come into mate selection. Such variables are always rinsed out from a more inchoate gesta­ existence through and actualize these fields. tive background. Chiming, not necessarily concording, with figures such as After the coupling of art with ecology (in 'Percept, Affect and Concept') it is Brouwer and Poincare, Deleuze and Guattari extend the classical mathematical sensation's coupling with composition formed on the plane of aesthetics that formulations of intuitionism. Varieties, produced in art, are dimensions arising becomes of importance. The terrain of what art might be, in Deleuze and from .the intersection of art, as it slices across the fecund turmoil of life, which Guattari's reworking ofit, expands somewhat: set offby the vividness of a phrase partially autonomize sensation as a process of being, and through this autono­ or a figuration of the world, 'We become universes' (Deleuze, 1994: 169). mization, allow it to retum with greater ferocity and passion into the world. Before it becomes a question of style however, amongst art's capacity of varia­ In "What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari's account of art lacks engagement tion, its ability to manufacture compounds of sensation, are discerned some with art practices that do not have perception as their prime aim and mode or great types, varieties of variation: the vibration; the clinch or embrace; and with­ indeed as a mode in which they can be adequately experienced or understood. drawal, division and distension. These mark spatial and sensual forces of Interpretative approaches to art based on the primacy of affect can end up arrangement, the fluctuating distribution of closeness providing a moment of smothering other kinds of dynamics which may be present, active and produc­ sheer transit, or a gasp, a pause, a shudder that opens up thought and serenity tive. 4 With the ascendancy of one interpretative category, art's engagement or the clenching that sends shocks from one element in the composition to with technicity or other forms of intellect equally risk being obscured. Despite another (Deleuze, 1994: 168). These figures occur later too. Revolutions do not the delimited scope of Deleuze and Guattari's figuration of art in "What is occur solely as a chartable series of political events, nor necessarily in their Philosophy? however, what it does provide is a vivid way of thinking through ideas structural or psychic denouement, but reside in the vibrations, clinches and and practices as dynamic elements in manifold systems.5 Art provides a light­ openings at the moment of their making (Deleuze, 1994: 177). In revolutions ning rod to sensations, a discipline for fmding the means to allow sensation at all scales be comings pile up to make cairns as way-finding marks for others. to couple itself with a multiple form of materiality, that of the work, painting (Can revolutions, like art entities, be said to embed persistent blocs of sensa­ or but it is also more than that.6 Deleuze sets up as much in his earlier tions that are untimely? Does the intensity of a holy orgiastic roarer with the extended meditations on sensation's interactions and inherence with logic livity ofAbiezer Coppe always trump the betrayal of a Cromwell?). What is clear or mathematical figurations; sensation neVer goes uncomplicated and without is that these capacities, for variation' attributed to art are recapitulated, trans­ consequences (Deleuze, 1990; 1994). When the pair's last book turns to posed into other forms oflife : buzzing, breaking and conjugating in composition. art's affiliations and resonances with ecology and oikos, in the chapter 'Percept, This typology, this grammar of conjunction, differentiation and resonance Affect and Concept' the centre of gravity in the discussion becomes too moves across works, across bodies of work and disciplines, and beyond into multiple to leave perception anchored as the ruling principle of art and a forms of life: Following this outward trajectory ofvibrations , clinches and open­ whole universe of dynamiCS opens up to make their capacities felt. Sensation, ings it is possible to give a quick idea of the scope of other art methodologies, coupled with its resonance in space, in the capacities of behaviours, and I do not want to present a full bestiary, but to set'out a few observable kinds: physical affordances becomes melodic, something that is built out of the inter­ play between things and which produces them as things. Given an ecological Secorui-lYrder . Memetics is concerned with analytic identification of understanding of art, the idea of art as sole purveyor of the divided labour coherent units of culture (at scales ranging from phonemes to religions), and of perception falls by the wayside.7 Indeed, if art begins with the animal, the the dynamics by which they mutate or find themselves conserved. It uses the I I " 50 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Art Methodologies in Media Ecology 51 tools of evolutionary theory to design metrics for trackIDg the longevity, of some media or electronic art, made almost inevitable by the easiness of fecundity and variability of such cultural elements. Second order memetics digital media. Instead it engages precisely with the politics of parsing and adds to this the insights gained by the recognition of the observer. Second order the sensational universes of transformation. memetics is done live, as something itself susceptible to memetic analysis but If the above are indicators towards the recognition of art methodologies in the also subjecting any 'coldness' of analysis to the torsion of multiple inherence in wild it follows that the proposal here is not to set up a possible in the cultural processes it recognizes as being fugitive, mutational and wild. which a certain phrase, gesture, mark or breath can be recognized as prOviding Perception dilation. Art methodologies are sensual, but they also act on the an articulation space for say, the moments of intensive non-thought which material of sensation. Ducts of thought are engorged with sensation. Nerve abstract expressionism aimed at physically epitomizing; the quick ironic per­ bearing surfaces and cavities are subject to thickening and scraping, they sprout ception of figures, whose recomposition as mass-reproducible drawings aimed sweat, call forth tongues, carnality is encountered immediately, an immediate at sticking a knife in the guts of a society that is equally as rancid as oneself, typi­ hammer blow to the whole body, but also slowed, distended, stretched to points fied by say, George Grosz. Such precipitations from art clearly do occur and are beyond their capacity to be borne without being added to. Whether they are valuable and productive, but these are not things that I want to track as a matter austere or muscular and liquid, hypertrophic and maddened such art method­ of priority and in part because there is no inherent need for them to occur ologies, like love, generate extended fields of carnality operating across different 'first' in art. It might be more interesting to also look for isomorphisms of meth­ scales and registers of matter. ods in art occurring ex natura. The unready. Art methodologies are not necessarily 'ready'. Art combines a transversal handiness, with universal cackhandedness: a capacity to get stuff done to make something happen without the encumberance or guiding hand In and out" of art of prerequisite skill or the right equipment or training. Art's angelic punkness is awkward and ravenous, insisting on the power to release its refined, curious One of the ways in which it is useful to set out such a question is in relation to ignorance in places where knowledge is securely lodged, spreading out its the navigation or creation of the boundary between art and non-art. This is a nervous system to catch the ripples of unheard of suns. Tools and aesthetic domain which is buzzing, engaged in oscillations which are at times crackling dynamics are opened up to objects and processes to which they are not stand­ backwards and forwards so fast that they are indiscernible, ruptured or irrele­ ardized. If philosophy is a meta-discipline, art methodologies open up the space vant, at others in a rigid tick-tockIDg and apportioning of function when it for a meta-antidiscipline that is broken, twitchy and brilliant. seems all that counts is the process and mechanisms of demarcation. These dif­ Producing times. Art subjects itself to testing in real life, in real time but also in ferent regimes that set up pattern finding routines, or rinse out elements the time of art - a temporal dimension in which one is in dialogue with both containing substances above a certain threshold, provided a key point of refer­ 'what is no longer possible' and what has not yet been done, with resources ence for the artist and acute theorist ofart - Alan Kaprow. Deleuze and Guattari's from objects, traditions, ideas and waste distributed - sinking into and emerg­ "What is Philosophy? ends with the remark that art is always dependent upon, ing from time. Such time is also related to the experiential thickness of carnality. if not inherent in, non-art. Whilst its set of scalar references is different, Art stages the occurrence of things, their revelation or palpability in a way which in Kaprow's collection of essays and other texts, The Blurring ofArt and Life, one resists their easy ability to be known. That is, art insists upon the staging of an of the key poles of activity is this flickering negotiation of art and non-art. engagement with it that includes the simultaneity, that is potentially endlessly Compare the following as sample statements: in the survey text, 'Experimental maintained, of all stages of anticipation, delay and cognisance. Art' of 1966 Kaprow states, 'This acceptance as art, no matter how late it comes, Feeding a this into a that. Aesthetic circuits and procedures, from an instant is in my view the goal' (of experimental actions) (1993: 77). In the 'Manifesto' neural reflex to a method, from a certain glance to a particular device, establish of the same year Kaprow writes, 'The task of the artist is to avoid making art of themselves as scalar entities and dynamics within the compositional dynamics any kind' (81). It is of no interest to use such statements to posit a possible of life. They set out a field to which they refer, patches of colour, repeated inconsistency in Kaprow's work. What does garner interest is the means by movement, attention to certain streams of information, the idiosyncracies of a which this tension is set up and navigated, by a tb-ing and fro-ing between art skill or a set of optics, habituations and patterns are formed. Given this, a clus­ and non-art. What Kaprow is after in both of these texts and in others, each tered set of art methodologies can be seen in the transposition of such dynamics following distinct trajectories or gambling on the play of experimental forces, is where the displacement of reference becomes a displacement of processing to set in a condition in which life, or experience, can be heightened. and modulation. Feeding a this into a that refuses the trivial arbitrary mapping Indeed, 'Experimental art can be an introduction to right living, and after that I \ 52 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Art Methodologies in Media Ecology 53 introduction art can be bypassed for the main course' (Raprow, 225). This I the manual and the haptic relaxes the relation between eye and hand, colour continual back and forward across the boundary of art and non-art knots the and line. fields together without caring for primacy in whether one grips or penetrates The corporealities that art invents allow subtle filiations and perversions to the other but revelling in the interplay of forces, co dings and tensions that run their fibers through the painter, the user of the work, the organs, modes their interplay makes possible. I and entities that art systems grow by, and ultimately, what sprouts from them, If one trajectory of art is that it frees itself first from God, then from nature, and by these means art exceeds its own organization. Eye, hand, canvas, brain, then from retinality, it also uses these opportunities to experiment with open­ paint, light, confluences sprawl and fight, egg each other on, thrown together ing up voids and disarticulations within and from art itself. There are now or out of whack by the use of photographs, sitters, a piece of land, a jar of flow­ multiple art worlds, or universes of reference which are not and cannot be ers. Willem de Kooning's later are well known for their way with boiled down to one set of terms, dynamics, infra-structures and art systems. colour and the acrobatic movement of their labile juicy brush, but also for the None of this should be taken as implying that they are inherently of interest; question of whether his gradual contraction of Parkinson's disease during their what is important is that there is now a fundamental dissensus about what art is, production reduced him to a mannerist assemblage of learned muscle move­ where it is located, who activates it and in what ways it is spoken about. There is ments, merely making twitches amongst paint placed ready for him on the for instance an art system devoted to science-art collaboration in the United palette. At what level do we situate an art methodology? A residual nervous tick., Kingdom that is almost entirely fabricated by one biomedical public relations a spasm? With some justification, Deleuze and Guattari refuse the pictures pro­ fund; or a range of counter institutions throughout northern Europe devoted duced by the mad or by children a properly named place as art. But I would to electronic art, a genre which is rarely allowed in to other sections of the art suggest that the categorical edge they set down is too sharp. Art methodologies world; there are commercial art sectors which are unable to recognize or even allow a perspective that is 'beneath' this scale focusing instead on the popula­ sense anything much beyond the end of their own always terminally involuted tions of reflexive entities that traverse 'works', bringing them to life, but also nervous systems; and there are immense pointless resources of hope poured sometimes exceeding them or being born there. into art as a quasi-mystical pyramid scheme. Part of this dissensus is in the ravenous nature of art, that it takes on the world, but also its ironization. Such a move produces a familiar : the Attention readymade allowed anything to be taken as art, but it also allows art to be taken as anything, any old crap. A cleaner working in a gallery accidentally demol­ One such art methodology that Raprow used in order to make sense of this ishes an installation and tucks it away into the rubbish. Everyone howls with boundary transition between art and non-art is attention. Recognizing that delight, the news comics of course, but no-one more so than the artists. 'Attention alters what is attended' (Raprow, 1993: 236). Raprow mobilized the And this is one point at which art methodologies detach themselves from art phenomenon of the observer, a state of recursive interaction within a system as systems. Art systems, the familiar media ecologies of gallery, press-release, col­ an everyday technique running at different moments, according to different lection, blurb, statement, magazines, reviews, prices, festivals, sponsorships and rhythms through both art and other forms of life. Attention was both part of so on, mesh with but do not subsume art methodologies. The fact that art is the life, but could also be performed, attended to itself, with another person, with equivalent of shit, can be set up as an authorized relationship both securely wal­ objects and in relation to a media system such as video and thus folded into lowing in its own wonderful ephemerality and as a gormless incarnation of the other circuits of attention. Attention was something that could be mobilized in most valuable-per-square-millimetre single object in the world. Shit that is more daily life in actions such as hand washing. The method was to carry out such an diamond encrusted than a crown is the happy horizon of much contemporary action with the coding, the condition, that what is so enacted be parsed, paid art, but it misses what is leaking out sideways from the two poles of this outworn attention, to think about its full set of interrelations with the world, and the act paradox. so reflected upon, as it occurs, as a sensual and thoughtful process. The dissensus of art is in part what makes such a mobility possible, but it is Raprow's technique of paying attention, partly as an engagement with the also something inherent to art as a set of internally differentiating and symbi­ ideas ofJohn Cage has its roots in Natural Phil0sophy, certain aspects of Zen otic tendencies and capacities. Deleuze writes of the way in which, 'the eye, ' and its plunge into mundanity, , every moment at which one tries to having abandoned its haptic function and become optical subordinated itself calm or excite or sensitize or flay consciousness to the point that it can receive to the tactile as a secondary power' (2003: 127). His writing on Bacon roils with the fullness at many scales, of what is occurring around and through it. It is the shifting alliances and migrations of senses and material. The optical dismantles cheapest, most available of perceptual modification: an. attempt to forestall I 54 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Art Methodologies in Media Ecology 55 humans' propensity to 'inattentional blindness' (Mack and Rock, 2000). In the another. Indeed, art as a media system that includes the function of storage, work of Gary Snyder the same figure, wiping away grease from the hands after 'preserves' (Deleuze, 1994: 163) forming barricades of percepts and affects against work, appears as an intermediate, and hence very rich moment. Accidentally time, or constellations that leak through it, setting up a reserve that is outside time the mind opens to a 'calm and clarity', when 'glancing up at the passing clouds' or more accurately, in consciously evental time. (Snyder, 24). Paying attention is to ask in what way is it possible to set up fields 6 Deleuze brilliantly formulates the former approach in his book on Bacon (Deleuze, 2003). or domains of resonance with others? (animals, social processes, visualization 7 For a related discussion on art and ecology see Fuller, 2008. systems, soap, water, hands) as iffor the first time, at which point everything needs to be taken into account but also with the knowledge of practice, of tacit everydayness. Bibliography Art methodologies do not necessarily endure as blocs of sensation. More wraithlike, they also disappear, vapourize, become inadequate, but also emerge Alliez, E. (2004), The Signature of the World, trans. E. R Albert and A Toscano. out of sensation's doubling, the recognition or apprehension of melody to London: Continuum. be found in attention and elsewhere. The question is not necessarily as with Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: PracticalPhilosophy, trans. R Hurley. San Francisco: City larger assemblages of entities and dynamiCS, to find ways of making them Light Books. more incisive, disrupting and revealing. Such things are too substantial, too Deleuze, G. (1990), , trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. C. V. coherent at multiple scales to qualify simply as art methodologies. However, Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1992), Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M.Joughin. New York: art methodologies will traverse from one scalar reality or set of selves or relation Zone Books. of dimensionality across to others and, knowing this, allow them to be Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia worked on. Art methodologies in the wild, without a line back to more endur­ University Press. ing entities, from subjectival aggregations to institutions or economies of Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic ofSensation, trans. D. W. Smith. London: whatever degree of fictivity are inherently difficult to mark down, to track or Continuum. to prescribe with a uniform metric. Art methodologies are out, and that is Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and perhaps enough. G. BurchelL London: Verso, 1994. Fuller, M. (2006), 'The Expressivenes of Insubordination' , The Hartware Guide to Irrar tiona~ eds. 1. Arns and]. Lillemose. Dortmund: Hartware MedienKunstVerein. Notes Fuller, M. (2008), 'Art For Animals', DeleuzelGuattari & Ecology, ed. B. Herzogenrath. London: Palgrave. 1 'Transferable skills' is educational audit jargon for something you learn by doing Kaprow, A (1993), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed.]. Kelley. Berkeley: one thing that you can also use for another thing. For instance, if you can walk to University of California Press. the photocopier, you can also walk to the bookshelf. Lash, S. and Urry,]. (1993), Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. 2 Scott Lash and John Urry note in a similar vein that at a time when 'aesthetic Mack, A and Rock, L (2000), Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. reflexivity comes to pervade social processes' (1993: 54) there is a greater and Rabinow, P. (2003), Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: more 'democratic' (1993: 50) distribution of symbol systems allowing for various Princeton University Press. observers to suggest that 'postffiodernism is in effect the generalization of aesthetic Snyder, G. (1990), The Practice of the Wild. New York: Northpoint Press. to, not just an elite, but the whole of the population' (1993: 133). 3 See also Fuller, 2006. 4 There are a number of examples to be found in recent theoretical work where the renewed respectability ofrelegating art simply to the domain ofaffect also becomes an acceptable means of effectively refusing to acknowledge the complex politics' ofwork which might indeed involve affect as becomings, but which multiply them, making their own becomings of becoming that are coupled with other dimen­ sions of relationality, not being reducible to them. S Theirs is also a figuration that is historically free-floating, important in that it releases the power of untimeliness, of refusing the lock-step of the one thing after F

" In Praise ofNegativism 57

'increasingly insolent and calamitous rivals', all laying claim to the honorific status of creators of concepts: Chapter 6 Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, market­ ing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized In Praise of Negativism hold of the word concept itself and said: 'This is our concern, we are the crea­ tive ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in Alberto Toscano our computers.' Information and creativity, concept and enterprise: there is already an abundant bibliography. (1994: 10)

The marketing of concepts, not least the very concept of marketing, is among those elements of contemporary life that for Deleuze instigate a crucial pre­ philosophical affect: 'the shame of being human' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: Create. Invent. Innovate. Network. Under the non-authoritarian hegemony of 107). It is noteworthy in this regard that Deleuze's thinking, often distilled capitalist realism such ubiquitous imperatives have come to occupy the place of into a kind of colourful mantra of positivity, has been making the rounds of the seemingly exhausted, or unduly crass, industrial command: produce. Con­ business schools and managementjoumals, where his unalloyed contempt for currently, we witness a tendency to present a putative resistance to the exigencies the kind of cogitation that would result in 'the simulation of a packet of of accumulation in terms congruent, if not synonymous, with the ubiquitous noodles' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10) is cheerily ignored in favour of a language and culture of the new capitalism. Behind the very notion that a phi­ seemingly limitless' democratisation' of the disciplinary and formal conditions loneist capitalism is to be countered by an emergent politics of invention, there for creativity. frequently lies the conviction that value is produced by a theft of time, a capture Among the virtues of 's wilfully monotonous portrait, Out of capacity, a parasitism of ideas. Hence, the so-called primacy of resistance. of This World, is the salutary reminder that in Deleuze the conditions of creation Production for commodity-exchange is to be undermined or perverted by an are stringent, forbidding and hard to square with any of the interests borne by unbridled creation dictated either by the connectivity of desire, or - in an the human individual or group. There is nothing comfortably empowering incompatible but equally anti-capitalist formulation - by the recognition of real about Deleuze's image of creativity. According to Hallward's provocative identi­ needs. The 'defensive innovation' that binds inventiveness to the capricious fication of Deleuze with the theophanic tradition, his 'correlation of being, demands of capitalist novelty is to be undone. The cooperative governance of creativity and thought' leads to an ontology wherein all beings and processes decoded flows through networks that oversee everything from extraordinary are acts of creation (or 'creatings'). These creatings in tum are aspects or renditions to speculation on sub-prime mortgages calls for the cooperative expressions of a univocal creative power which sediment into limited creatures transindividuality of rhizomes no longer instrumentalized by some transcend­ that must be liberated from their embodied bounds and returned to their vir­ ent aim. Briefly, the problem with capitalism is that it does not go far enough or tuality, singularity or individual difference, in what Hallward dubs a 'redemptive fast enough down the avenues of creativity, that its embrace of interaction is logic'. Thus, 'a practice geared to the exclusive criteria of creativity as such will always stunted by its myopic bottom line. The often discordant optimism of be perfectly expressive of the intensity and vitality of being as such' (2006: 2). much contemporary thinking regarding the struggles between a horizontal Accordingly, 'the profile of a Deleuzian artist' would be of one who must' con­ politics of creative connection, on the one hand, and the vertical extractions of template everything and do nothing. Incapable of action, [he] would become capitalism, on the other, must also be chalked up to the idea that if capitalism a being of pure sensation, of sensation in its most disinterested and non-reflex­ always comes second the reappropriation of creativity is not just possible, but ive state' (2006: 104-05). Hallward makes a forceful case for viewing Deleuze as perhaps imminent. a thinker for whom creatures (i.e. individuals, classes, objects or any other In "What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari famously registered the apparent properly actual entity) 'get in the way of creat}on' (2006: 148) and thus as a proximity between their understanding of creativity, philosophical creativity in proponent of some kind of subtractive recipe for wresting the pure intensity of particular, and the increasingly bullish discourse of marketing, innovation, and­ being out of extensive and stratified amalgams. But the wish to freeze-frame to mention their chief nemesis in those pages - communication. The tale they tell Deleuze's inaction as the current competitor of a properly committed or deci­ is one of the perpetually renewed antagonism between philosophy and its sive philosophy leads Hallward to overstress the dimension of intuition to the I 58 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New In Praise ofNegativism 59 detriment of construction, of passivity to the detriment of process. I think we gives insufficient weight to the colonization of linguistic capacities under can mamtain a view of Deleuze as in some regard a thinker of creative pUrifica­ capitalism. In What is Philosophy?, they write: tion without papering over the fact that his is always a purity of artifice. This is notjust the artifice of the eternal return, which affirms the new 'in its producing, Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the con­ liberated from its causes, conditions or agents' (Hallward, 2006: 150); it is what cept and the event. But here the concept has become the set of product lies at the core of Deleuze and Guattari's equation of nature and production in displays (historical, scientific, artistic, sexual, pragmatic), and the event has Anti-Oedipus, and more strikingly perhaps, their recuperation of Hegel, when become the exhibition that sets up various displays and the 'exchange of they write: ideas' it is supposed to promote. The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. (1994: 10) Creation and self-positing mutually imply each other because what is truly created, from the living being to the work of art, thereby enjoys a self-positing Ifthe consolidation of' cognitive capitalism' can be treated as something besides of itself, or an autopoietic characteristic by which it is recognized. The con­ propaganda, it requires a recognition that the harnessing, management and cept posits itself to the same extent that it is created. What depends on a free incitement of linguistic creativity and inventiveness is of primary concern to any creative activity is also that which, independently and necessarily, posits itself project of resistance, to the extent that capitalism's engineering of concepts in itself: the most subjective will be the most objective. (1994: 10) and events goes beyond the domam of exhibitions and sales - to transform the very character oflabour, or indeed the very anthropological coordinates of But can such a concept of creation allow us to be spurred by shame into some­ creativity itself. thing other than the inactive contemplation of creativity 'as such'? In order to explore how Deleuze might figure, in Osborne's apt phrase, as a Deleuze and Guattari frame their very notion of resistance in terms of the 'paradigmatic witness agamst compulsory creativity', I would like to take a combat of creation agamst communication. But the current jargon of novelty detour through 's confrontation with the crucial question of the would rather see a happy coexistence, or even a potent hybrid: creativity is com­ creativity in and oflanguage. Vrrno's rejoinder to Chomsky's speculations on munication and communication creativity. As a recent panoramic analysis contends, this theme constitutes a crucial reference for an understanding of the linguistic this verbose and 'creative' capitalism tries conditions that subtend the production of the new under cognitive capitalism, and his understanding of neoteny and aphasia constitutes an important coun­ to squeeze every last drop of value out of the system by increasing the rate of terpart to Deleuze's salutary 'negativism' vis-a-vis language, as explored in Essays innovation and invention through the acceleration of connective mutation. Critical and ClinicaL How can we construct a critique of creative reason at a time A new kind of productive commotion is being achieved through an active when the imperatives of communication and creativity meld; when 'the one refiguring of space and time, which has the effect of making knowledge into who works is (must be) loquacious', when 'dialogical speech installs itself at the a direct agent of the technical-artistic transformation of life: knowledge and very heart of capitalist production' (Vrrno, 2001: 181)? It is my contention that life become inextricable. (Thrift, 2006: 281) only a closer attention to the problem oflanguage can permit us to think of a production of the new that is not merely beholden to the insidious grip of com­ The rational consensus and convivial discussion that Deleuze and Guattari pulsory creativity. For, as Deleuze himself noted at the end of his reflections on railed agamst in What is Philosophy? have long been abandoned for the sake of the societies of control: 'The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the an economy of qualities that glories in working at the 'sub-representational' or burrows of a molehill' (1992: 7). 'affective' level. Hence the ambiguity registered in a recent paper trying to It is precisely in the process of uncoiling the serpent of post-Fordism that enlist Deleuze in a polemic agamst the stultifying enthusiasm and moralism Vrrno directs us towards a symptomatic dispute concerning the relationship that surrounds popular discussions of creativity: 'Deleuze is the great symptom between language, human nature and revolutionaryjustice: the televised debate and even ideologue of the creative turn but he is also its best diagnostician pitting agamst Michel Foucault, held in 1971 in Eindhoven. He and - at times scathing - critic' (Osborne, 2003: 510). My aim in what follows is presents the debate as signalling the definitive divorce between scientific mate­ to further this criticism, but to do so focusing on the idea of creation as a resist­ rialism (here represented by cognitivist inquiry into the species-specific human ance against communication, but a resistance that takes place within language. language faculty) and (here somewhat counter-intuitively The reason for this is that the manner in which Deleuze and Guattari's anti­ represented by the archaeology of epistemic set-ups and the genealogy of dis­ communicational philosophical ethic prepares an attack on marketing concepts cursive formations). Vrrno rightly identifies the notion of creativity itself as the 60 Deleuze, Guattan and the Production of the New In Praise ofNegativism 61 fundamental bone of contention. Foucault and Chomsky are not just at what is 'always already' at the heart of human nature is made evident through cross-purposes, their respective blind-spots will define the very ground on which the historicity of capitalist exploitation - Chomsky, whose he appre­ Vrrno wishes to deploy his theses on immaterial labour and a new kind of ciates, errs by over-specifying linguistic capacity and indeed linguistic freedom political naturalism. Chomsky's defence of a notion of human nature rooted in in terms of a form of creativity which is bound to a 'universal superlanguage', the deep-seated structures of man's linguistic capacities provides the impetus rather than to what Virno deems a 'simple potentiality' (2003: 23). In other behind unsparing critique of behaviourist social engineering and his support words, Chomsky's modelling of creativity in terms of discrete infinity under­ for an anarcho-syndicalist politics of cooperation and human flourishing. For stands novelty in terms of possibility rather than in terms of a human nature Chomsky, the 'safeguarding of species-specific creativity is the regulative idea characterized by 'indeterminacy' and 'devoid of internal articulations'. For which alone can legitimate civil disobedience' (Vrrno, 2003: 17). But what are Virno, creativity thus appears not in terms of the 'normal' production of new the specific parameters of this notion of creativity? Chomsky himself defmes statements through an innate system of grammatical constraints, but in terms them in Language and Mind: of a political anthropology for which man is a fundamentally underdetermined being, a potential, unspecialized animal: 'The living being which possesses the The core problem of human language [... ] I take to be this: having mastered language-faculty', writes Virno, 'is the living being which is born aphaSic, mute, a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions an infant (infant literally means "not speaking")' (2003: 23). For Vrrno then, that are new to one's experience, they bear no simple physical resemblance Chomsky over-specifies human faculties, and in so doing considers them to be and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's innately contained in an individual, eliding the key aspect of language-based linguistic experience; and one is able, with greater or less facility, to produce creativity, what makes the speaking animal perforce a political animal: 'trans­ such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty, and inde­ individuality', defined as 'the way in which, within the individual mind, the gap pendently of detecting stimulus configurations, and to be understood by between species and individual is articulated' (Virno, 2003: 21). But why give others who share this mysterious ability. The normal use of language is, in this a political valence to these issues of philosophy oflanguage? Not, pace Chomsky, sense, a creative activity. (Chomsky, 1972: 100) because we require an adequate concept of human nature on which to base political action, but because a post-Fordist capitalism bent on 'unlimited flexi­ CruCially, linguistic creativity is normal, and the everyday discourse of human bility' and (echoing the Deleuze of the Postscript) 'uninterrupted formation' animals is 'innovative, free from control by external stimuli, and appropriate to increasingly depends on exploiting the 'neotenous' character of the zoon logon new and ever changing situations' (Chomsky, 1972: 100). But more importantly, echon, on foregrounding that which under 'traditional' conditions remained a this idea of creativity, as furthered by Chomsky's pioneering work on generative mostly invisible premise: 'neoteny, non-specialisation and so on, no longer tran­ and universal grammars, is based on the notion that human language is charac­ spire in a state of exception, that is on the occasion of a crisis, they are a terized by infinity - both in the permutations of its structure (Chomsky, 1972: fundamental component of everyday administration' (2003: 50). 110) and in its possible performances (Chomsky, 1982: 429) - and that it is Similarly, rather than seeing in linguistic disorders such as aphasia a mark of composed of discrete units: 'Discrete infinity is the root of linguistic creativity' the dysfunction of the normal creativity of language, Vrrno prefers to mine (Virno, 2003: 15). Moving from the creative aspect oflanguage use to the ethi­ them for insights into a social condition which increasingly addresses the most cal vision of human creativity it feeds into, Chomsky will revive the classical basic of human capacities as what is being put to work. It is here that Vrrno's notion of creativity as being perforce bounded and indeed empowered by its denunciation of the Habermasian ideal of communicational transparency immanent parameters and limits: 'Without a system of formal constraints there dovetails rather nicely with Deleuze and Guattari's own at discussion, are no creative acts' (Chomsky, 1982: 395). It is arguably this bounded infinity while more closely addressing the difficulties that inhere in telling creativity that allows man to maximize the possibilities of self.realization in society. What and communication apart: 'In the order of the spectacle the expropriation of counts for language - that it is 'a process of free creation; its laws and principles language coincides with the appearance of its unlimited power, not to mention are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free with the misleading realisation of its "transparency"' (2002: 122). Virno goes and infinitely varied' (Chomsky, 1982: 402) - can be said, albeit in speculative on to ask where a notion of freedom of speech, or freedom oflanguage, could terms alone (to the extent that for Chomsky creativity remains a 'mystery'), be located today and - following a Benjaminian intuition, relayed by Agam_ about human creativity in general, inclusive of its social and political aspects. ben's Infancy and History - responds that it is to be sought not in loquacious I would like to pause here, on the key plank ofVirno's criticism of Chomsky's dialogism, but in the opacities and blockages of infancy and aphasia, as condi­ notion of creativity. For Vrrno - who crucially argues that it is 'only now' that tions that show us the 'event' of language by testifying 'that it is while it could 62 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New In Praise ofNeg~tivism 63 not be' (2002: 122). Freedom of speech is thus to be developed by reclaiming account is the manner in which the war against cliche, far from operating as 'that which, in successful communication, remains nevertheless unrealised, a haughty disdain of commonplaces, instigates a far more perverse strategy. At opaque, "aphasic'" (Vrrno 2002: 122). a time when even 'the reactions against cliches are creating cliches', a froptal Just as Vrrno suggests that contemporary conditions lead us to seek the matri­ struggle appears doomed. Bacon's lesson in 'negativism' requires an initial ces of politics in the philosophy oflanguage, so we could argue that Deleuze's abandonment to the cliche. This is what Deleuze registers in Bacon's use of suggestions for strategies of resistance against the 'shame' of marketing and photography. Inasmuch as 'what we see, what we perceive, are photographs', communication (strategies that it would be difficult to characterize as straight­ Bacon's immersion bespeaks an intimate acquaintance with a kind of percep­ forwardly 'political') are best exemplified by his late writings on 'life and tual . But this will to lose oneself in photographs, to absorb oneself in literature', collected in Essays Critical and ClinicaL Neither directed towards photographs that 'already filled the entire painting' when the canvas remained an exploration of normal creativity - which, for better or worse, Deleuze and empty, is the prelude and correlate of their stark negation: 'Only when one Guattari seem to identify with the nemesis of philosophy, doxa - nor hoping to leaves them behind, through njection, can the work begin' (2005: 65). This identify a pure potentiality as the lynchpin of political radicalism, the solitary negativism vis-a.-vis photography, and its articulation with Bacon's use of'manip­ and exacting literary experiments surveyed by Deleuze have in common a vision ulated chance' over against 'seen or conceived probabilities' is an important of creativity as the achievement of a kind of speechlessness, a methodical break­ example of a constant in Deleuze's many dramatizations of creative activity - down of normal creativity in the name of an asocial creation. In a way, the the focus on delineating or diagramming the singular processes which are aphasia that Vrrno, via RomanJakobson, regards as the revelation of a kind of invented as so many solutions to 'liberate life'. Though this life may be univo­ human invariant beneath the capitalist imperative to proliferate and e~oy cal, and creativity in a sense monotonous, the processes themselves, especially inventive speech has for Deleuze an ontological (and vitalist) valence. Writing, in their negative-destructive side, are the site of remarkable ingenuity and as the production of a kind of unspeech, is the harbinger of a Nietzschean invention. I would suggest that the most vital lessons in Deleuze, even or espe­ 'health', whose aim is 'to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within cially for those who find his vitalism uncongenial, is to be sought by attention to man, by and within organisms and genera' (Deleuze, 1998: 10). Neither normal these mechanisms the creation of which is the conditio sine qua non of any access nor potential, the kind of creativity it calls for is to be conquered against human to 'purely intensive power'. nature, and indeed against language itself. A certain kind of rigorous aphasia is Of course, all of the Essays Critical and Clinical are concerned in one way or thus to be regarded as the artificial (if'self-positing') product of operations that another with the power of univocal being, understood principally as an outside. strip away the accretions of doxa, and of the organism itself as the fettered This notion already points us to a key aspect of Deleuze's conception of creativ­ bearer of deep-seated and interested beliefs in given social and biological ity - that the mechanisms of extraction are not generic, but specific to a given arrangements. Artistic and literary creation is consequently depicted as an often domain of being and practice ('language', 'literature'), much as the idea of a imperceptible war against the stereotypes and opinions written into our very transcendental exercise of the faculties in Difference and Repetition suggested that linguistic and perceptual faculties. the proper object (or rather being) of sensation, the 'sentiendum', is precisely that Though famously pitted against the negativity of lack and the dialectic, which cannot be sensed but only the senses can lead us to, as their limit. In Essays Deleuze's vision of art qua resistance is shot through by a profoundly destructive Critical and Clinical, the theme of the production of a 'foreign language' from impetus - by what he terms, with reference to Melville's Bartleby: 'a negativism within a given language translates this idea of the outside. As Deleuze writes, beyond all negation' (1998: 71). Creation, if it is to evade the snares of opinion and communication, demands a preliminary and patient extirpation of every­ a foreign language cannot be hollowed out in one language without language thing that mires us in the reproductive interests of society and the organism. as a whole in turn being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse This is of course the theme of Deleuze's memorable depiction of Francis side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any Bacon's battle against cliche. In order to make chance operate, in order for the language. They are not interruptions of the process, but breaks that form artist to become a spiritual automaton, our cognitive, cultural and biological part of it, like an eternity that can only be revealed in becoming, or a land­ saturation with images, beliefs and reflexes, with probable behaviours, must be scape that only appears in movement. They are not outside language, but the countered: 'everything [the painter] has in his head or around him is already outside oflanguage. (1998: 5) in the canvas, more or less actually, before he begins his work [ ...] so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty But how is this outside elicited? Following his abiding conviction that intui­ it out, clear it, clean it' (2005: 61). What is especially arresting about Deleuze's tion and construction go hand in hand, Deleuze is suspicious of any theory that \ 64 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New In Praise ofNegativism 65 would posit a vertical visitation, a miraculous immediacy. A kind of perverse breaking with protocols of variation, substitution and combination to produce ascesis in and of language is instead called for: 'There are no straight lines, non-linguistic events (,visions') that only occur from within language. Thus we neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are encounter Artaud, who 'extracts from the maternal language ... breath-words created in each case to reveal the life in things' (1998: 2). But the detour that that belong to no language, and from the organism, a constitutes this syntax is not the product of mere distraction or a fortuitous that has no generation' (1998: 16). Melville's Bartleby, for his part, reduces the pathology; it is always the offspring of a 'protocol of experimentation or activ­ arsenal of protocols characteristic of schizophrenic writing to a minimal for­ ity' (1998: 7). In this regard, perhaps the most promising concept adduced by mula, draining, in the most unrelenting and exasperating manner, the social Deleuze for trying to think through how to counter compulsory communica­ element of language, and giving way to a post-linguistic silence that is also a tion, and its framing of 'creativity', is that of procedure. In fact, rather than form of pure passive resistance ('the growth of a nothingness of the will'): mapping political potentials through the study of the pathologies oflanguage, 'The formula burgeons and proliferates. At each occurrence, there is a stupor as Virno does vis-a.-vis aphasia, Deleuze, especially in his discussion of Louis surrounding Bartleby, as if one had heard the Unspeakable or Unstoppable. Wolfson's schizophrenic writing, outlines mental pathology as literary form. And there is Bartleby's silence, as if he had said everything and exhausted As he writes: 'psychosis is inseparable from a variable linguistic procedure' language at the same time' (1998: 70). With Beckett's late television works, the (1998: 9). procedure-process famously aims to 'exhaust the whole of the possible', and But it is precisely in his meticulous account of Wolfson's work, as contrasted the resulting 'subjective' figure is also marked by a kind of negativist ataraxia: with those of Roussel, Brisset and Artaud, that Deleuze introduces an important 'one remains active, but for nothing' (1998: 152-53). The overall schema that distinction within the very idea of procedure. For, according to Deleuze, Deleuze adduces for Melville's Bartleby can thus be seen to cover the array of Wolfson, unable to produce a transcendent use of schizophrenia, is incapable process-procedures that are so many disparate instances of the writing of the of truly making contact with the outside: outside:

The transformations never reach the grandiose level of an event, but remained It is as if three operations were linked together: a certain treatment of mired in their accidental circumstances and empirical actualizations. The pro­ language; the result of this treatment, which tends to constitute an original cedure thus remains a protocol. The linguistic procedure operates in a void, language within language; and the effect, which is to sweep up language in its and never links up with a vital process capable of producing a vision. [ ...] In entirety, sending it into flight, pushing it to its very limit in order to discover Wolfson, the procedure itself is its own event. (1998: 11) its Outside, silence or music. (1998: 72)

We thus have, on the one hand, protocol-procedures, mechanisms that do not The link between Deleuze's war on communication, his vision of an imma­ attain a veritable 'extraction', on the other, procedure-processes, which break nent dislocation of language, and a subjectivity that breaks with the socio­ with mere self-reference (namely, being 'their own event'). As Deleuze goes on biological species-coordinates of speech (and of Chomskyan creativity) is to say: patent. Indeed, for Deleuze, the aim is precisely to subtract a stuttering language from the compelling interests of speech. This involves a commitment The procedure pushes language to its limit, yet for all that it does not cross to a certain ontology oflanguage. Ifwe take language to be 'like a homogeneous this limit. It lays waste to designation, significations, and translations - but it system in equilibrium [... ] defined by constant terms and relations', the sub­ does so in order that language might finally confront, on the other side of its traction is impossible, but if 'the system appears in perpetual disequilibrium or limit, the figures of an unknown life and an esoteric knowledge. The proce­ bifurcation', according to Deleuze, the experiment of stuttering, the refusal of dure is merely the condition, however indispensable it may be. (1998: 29) communication and achievement of aphasia might be pulled off (1998: 108). Using a Keynesian metaphor, 'language [must] be put into a state of boom, close The exoteric mechanisms of negativism are the preludes to an esoteric, onto­ to a crash' (1998: 109). logical moment. This semantic and phonetic guerrilla that Deleuze glimpses in the works of Thus, whilst Wolfson's immanence to the procedure locks him into a very his 'few writers' certainly responds in some respects to the call for a creative productive but perhaps not truly creative protocol, Deleuze's heroes - Artaud, resistance against capitalist communication. But it is also beset by a number of Melville-Bartleby, Beckett - carry procedure into process, which is to say into problems, with which I'd like to conclude. The most evident of these regards the outside. In all these cases, language is forced into a kind of unspeech, the orientation towards the outside, the veritable that governs the -,

I 66 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New In Praise ofNegativism 67 mechanisms of extraction inventoried and beautifully described in Essays It could be argued that in such a conjuncture, there is nothing immediately Critical and Clinical. Though the procedural exhaustion of the possible is sup­ subversive, whether de jure or de facto, about invocations of the sub-representa­ posed to make possible a renunciation of 'any order of preference, any tional or of creativity, whether as an innate capacity perverted by capitalism or as organization in relation to a goal, any signification' (1998: 153), the 'becom­ the telos of a process of exodus (or extraction). It is perhaps time then to ing that no longer includes any conceivable change' (1998: 26) is clearly the valorize a properly negativist or 'paranoid' moment in the work of Deleuze: terminus of the procedure-processes that allow literature to issue into Life. 'From a certain point of view it would be better if nothing worked, if nothing Though it is clear how the heroes of imperceptibility that people Essays Critical functioned' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 7). Accordingly, the figure of anti-pro­ and Clinical make themselves impervious to the grip of social and linguistic duction, of the body without organs as an instance of repulsion, 'the unproductive, conformity, of doxa, it is also difficult to ascribe to their methods of rigorous the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: disinterest and indifference powers of political resistance beyond the merely 8) might be a fitting 'regulative ideal' in this cloying age of compulsory creativ­ allegorical. ity. As Deleuze himself remarked in a 'Letter to a Harsh Critic': 'Real and pretend What is more, the wresting of a non-representational vision out of the schizophrenics are giving me such a hard time, that I am starting to see the structure of possibilities constituting language and its discrete infinity is not attractions of paranoia. Long live paranoia!' (Deleuze, 1990: 3). unique to Deleuze, nor are its outlets necessarily endowed with the anti­ communicational virtues he extracts from the literature of the outside. As Bibliography Judith Schlanger notes, the logic of invention - as evidenced in Arthur Koes­ tler's The Act of Creation, among others - has often been conceived in terms of Chomsky, N. (1972), Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace. an instrumental use of the non-linguistic for eventually communicable ends Chomsky, N. (1982), 'A Note on the Creative Aspect of Language Use', The Philo­ (Schlanger, 1991: 79). Similarly, in a recent investigation into managerial sophical Review, 91: 3, 423-34. thinking on the virtues of dyslexia, Christian Marazzi has pointed to the man­ Deleuze, G. (1990), 'Letter to a harsh critic', in Negotiations. New York: Columbia ner in which the informational saturation-bombing and 'anthropological University Press. shock' that characterizes contemporary financialized capitalism has turned Deleuze, G. (1992), 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', October, 59. 3-7. a linguistic pathology into a subjective 'comparative advantage'. Fortune 500, Deleuze, G. (1998), Essays Critical and Clinica~ trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. among others, has honed in on 'dyslexic achievers' as a category of managers London: Verso. who mine their condition for the Deleuze, G. (2005), Francis Bacon: The Logic ofSensation. trans. D. W. Smith. London: Continuum. capacity to alter and create perceptions, an extreme awareness of the envi­ Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984), Anti-Oedipus, trans. R Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R Lane. London: The Athlone Press. ronment in which one is immersed, a greater-than-average curiosity, an ability Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), "What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and to think in images, intuition and introspection, multi-dimensional thinking H. Tomlinson. London: Verso. and perception, a capacity of feeling thought as real, a vivid imagination. Hallward, P. (2006), Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: (Marazzi, 2004: 105) Verso. Marazzi, C. (2004), 'Dislessia ed economia', Forme di vita, 2-3,104-19. The emergence of a discourse about dyslexia as an entrepreneurial virtue, a Osborne, T. (2003), '''Against creativity": a philistine rant', Economy and Society, 32. gift, emerges from 'isomorphism between the continuous flux of incremental 4,507-25. innovations and the evolutionary thinking of dyslexics'. In other words, agram­ Schlanger, J. (1991), 'La pensee inventive', in Les Concepts SCientifiques, eds. maticality, non-discreteness and non-linearity appear as requirements of a I. Stengers and]. Schlanger. Paris: Gallimard. creative interaction that no longer depends on the dialogic rules of communi­ Thrift, N. (2006), 'Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodifi­ cation lambasted by Deleuze and Guattari. For Marazzi, this exploitation of cation', Economy and Society, 35.2, 279-306. Virno, P. (2001), 'Lavoro e linguaggio', in Lessicq postjordista, ed. A. Zanini and what might have previously appeared as a dysfunction of language is part and U. Fadini. Milano: Feltrinelli. parcel of the 'logic of the functioning of the new capitalism [which] consists in Virno, P. (2002), 'Masia e liberta di parola', in Esercizi di esodo. Verona: Ombrecorte. its way of interiorising by necessity everything that lies outside the specifically Virno, P. (2003), Scienze sociali e 'natura umana', Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. economic field, in its capacity to transform all changes, all infinitesimal and incremental inventions, into innovative leaps' (2004: 117). -­,

Affective Wic~ors 69

perceptual change that especially engages Guattari's thinking on aesthetics, is art's capacity to mutate the aesthetic regulators of subjectivity. He writes: Chapter 7 'Patently, art does not have a monopoly on creation, but it takes its capacity to invent mutant coordinates to extremes: it engenders unprecedented, unfore­ seen and unthinkable qualities of being' (Guattari, 1995a: 106). This aspect of Affective Vectors: Icons, Guattari and Art the potential qualities of ontological formation of being, by the inventions and mutations engendered through aesthetic passage becomes something central Felicity Colman for Guattari's political thinking about solutions for social issues. 'The decisive threshold constituting this new aesthetic paradigm', he continues, 'lies in the aptitude of these processes of creation to auto-affirm themselves as existential nuclei, autopoietic machines' (1995a: 106). Although art is produced 'in the According to Guattari,' 'intellectuals and artists have got nothing to teach socius' it still manages to produce 'vital elements' according to 'creative objec­ anyone' (1995a: 129). Despite the cooption by corporate bodies of artistic tech­ tives' that can be put to the service of 'warding off' and 'transforming' the niques, styles and forms, Guattari nevertheless argues that art retains an 'ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion', in people's lives and the impend­ autonomous, catalytic power - a power that can change the very social group ing 'chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon' of the planet (1995a: 130-35). from which it may have sprung. The creativity enabled through different Guattari argues that art work is constituted with 'a double fInality'; functioning aesthetic modes of art (whether plastic or performed, ancient or contemporary, independently of the social realm that produced it, it is then either embraced music, literature etc.) is what functions as a (potentially creative or destructive), or rejected. Although the freedom to play with the components of any para­ actioning force. In these terms, Guattari's work offers a focused model for digm is generative of change, Guattari will argue that creative change can only thinking how aesthetic modes, such as those produced by art, offer ways out occur when dominant authorial coding systems (psychoanalysis, capitalism, of confIned models of subject-object fusions of homogenous subjectivation. communicative language) are ruptured, shifted or mutated through aesthetic Guattari's model of aesthetic activity is nothing ifnot practical. 'Ifyou ask ecolo­ functions. This transversal action enables individuals to access a creative breadth gists what they intend to do to help the homeless in their suburb', Guattari as a supplement or alternative to their given social frameworks. observed, 'they generally reply that it's not their responsibility' (1995a: 128). The art machine as a whole organization registers gestural points as instances Guattari's critical condemnation of 'the ecologists' (his contemporary green of singularity that erupt within and disrupt normative subjective functions - the movement) is emblematic of his continual search for ways that people could desire to spray a graffiti tag, or the need to touch an object that may be deemed practically implement knowledge and service their existential health and their 'out of bounds' . Engaged in the social sense of aesthetics, as Guattari asks us to political commitments, against what Basaglia observed (after Gramsci and Sartre) see it, the autopoietic function of subjectivity as a creative force traces sprays of to be the 'peacetime crimes' of those intellectuals and professionals trapped in vectorial triggers and the transitive forms of aesthetic events (destruction, the service of the dominant classes in their implementation of deterministic death, desire, etc.) and marks up subjectivation affects with the impact scientifIc ideologies (Basaglia, 1987: 143-223). Guattari's 'future', as I shall dis­ of a range of qualities. Singular aesthetic modes thus function processually as cuss here, is the time of the new that is given by art, as an autonomous mutative a Turing machine, spinning out force fIelds that gather more affects as they aesthetic. This aesthetic is specifIcally notable in iconic forms which may appear spread them, disturbing, infecting, but also acting as barometers for change. to be the most rigid of material and immaterial objects, but are in fact, as Affects are not inherent in bodies that aesthetics later reveal to have been potently pliable as every other form on the planet. changed, but are present as the future affects of a body in a specifIc social situa­ Continuing the trans-disciplinary approach to materiality found in the philo­ tion, and as such are a pre-conditioned state of being. For example, the market sophy of Manturana, Varela, Stengers and Prigogine, Deleuze and Guattari for impact post trauma-event materials (the idolatry of absent architectural pragmatically argue that art provides new aesthetic percepts for humans sites) reveals the infInite mutations of the social immanence of cultural mores through a neuro-modifIcation of perceptual capacity. ModifIcation occurs and rituals. The art machine offers a consistency -of aesthetic values that are and according to culturally specifIc technologies of engagement, such as we see in can be put to the therapeutic service of constructions of subjectivation: fIrst the shifts in anthropomorphic communicative devices concerning gesture and through analytic cognisance of the constitutive and component controls and speech or sound (Guattari gives the example of the Turing machine and its demarcations of dimensions of being, then second, by a transversal access to capacity to mathematically compute procedural possibilities). The aspect of other ontological dimensions, through aesthetic activities. Guattari claims that I 70 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Affective vectors 71 aesthetic machines (and he names the now iconic styles of rap culture, and rock example, because it sketched out an endpoint, a delineated path for post-pop music (1995a: 97)) offer an unhinging of any fascist regime, or, as with the mass (otherwise known as the trans-avantgarde, and the post-modem), that led to media, can manipulate the psychological constitution of subjectivity towards the cultural commodification of every revolutionary tendency within capitalist greater totalitarian controls and degrees of infantalization. marketplaces. The modality of time that most interested Guattari was that of An art machine thus performs an aesthetic function - it creates one of many the future state of the larger eco-aware world, and the present possibilities of 'systems of value' that makes a requisite (sometimes revolutionary, sometimes activism enabled by post-media forms such as free radio and underground epochal, sometimes pretend) sweep of the social constructions (agencements) media practices. The best aesthetic machines for Guattari are those that func­ that constitute subjectivation (Guattari, 1995a: 54). Understanding the lining tion as resources, offering in thinking the reconstruction of subjectivity, of the artistic pocket - whether artist or participant - is to engage with the ones that engage and actively function within the socius to produce pedagogic anthropomorphous production of value systems currently in place in our post­ pathways for living, new modes of communication for workers of all types. media marketplace, as in the work ofweb-centric groupS ofgatherers, toolmakers Guattari mentions only a few artists by name by way of illustrating his points; and entertainers. But production processes of subjectivation are often a camou­ 'the delirious machines ofJean Tinguely' (1995a: 42), Van Gogh (1995a: 93), flage for another type of machine that simply rearranges subjectivity to its place Marcel Duchamp (1995a: 101), Matta (1995a: 5), the 'absurd-machines' of in that system. 'The most gripping and prophetic representations of these bod­ Man Ray or Schwitters (1995c: 120, 138), 'underground art' where 'we find ily rearrangings', Guattari notes, 'are found in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, some of the most important cells of resistance against the steamroller of capi­ Brueghel and especially Arcimboldo' (1996: 122). Therapeutic camouflage can talistic subjectivity' (1995a: 91), and 'happenings' - of the sortJean:Jacques be found even at the iconic level. These art works are not metaphors for life, Lebel facilitated, whose work Guattari saw as 'the constant search to tum enun­ they are life in the marketplace. ciation inside-out' (1988). These artists that Guattari hinges his points on The kind of art that interests Guattari is specific - it involves aesthetic para­ perform transversal movements across material and intellectual cultural forms. digms that enable interactive, free, collective communication. Like Deleuze, he And yet, Guattari states that he wants to speak of a 'proto-aesthetic paradigm' is drawn to artists who instigate vectorial fields through their work; who demon­ rather than 'institutionalised art', in order to appeal to aesthetic paradigms strate that the infmity of an apparently smooth and seamless power field is in that hold 'a dimension of creation in a nascent state' (1995a: 101-02). Engag­ fact made up of atomic pockets of subjective constellations. These offer an ing a Duchampian reconfiguration of the diagrammatic orders of aesthetic opportunity to escape/enhance existing power regimes that may be masquer­ thresholds of sense so as to fuck up the dictation of formal properties of sensi­ ading as some type of political position. As deterritorializing processes bility, Guattari draws upon the Peircean 'icon of relation' where continuums of force more and more components into subjectivity, spaced-out submissiveness subjectivity are fused by the machinic code (1995a: 25, 43-45). Diamonds and is in need of vectorial disciplinary measures, in order to restore alertness and skulls display the economy (and consistency) of this aesthetic. It is against this productivity. In his book on Francis Bacon and in his cinema books, Deleuze is sense of market-coded iconic fetishization that I want to redeem the category concerned to explore how art forms render affects as temporally mediated of the 'icon' from its categorization as a homogeneous modelling signifier (in forces. Guattari's interest in art is similar, although bound to its therapeutic both its art historical deployment as a classification machine, and also in potential for engendering mental health. Guattari's sense of the Peircean icon engaging a territorializing affect) to Guattari thus addresses art forms in terms of the impact that the activation include a focus on its equally heterogenetic powers for metamodelizing in dif­ of temporal paradigms of affective forces have upon an oriented subjectivation; ferent aesthetic regimes. Guattari's theory of metamodelization provides a this auto-regulatory modality operates in a myriad of ways upon subjectiva­ means to both disengage and reinforce subjectivity bound to the expressive tion machines within various capitalist economies (1995a: 19). Both Deleuze economy. Once we can read the prescriptive of constitution (whether religious, and Guattari's work on art offers criticism of the histories of aesthetic forms in psychoanalytic, animistic etc.), the catalysing affects of aesthetic modalities can terms of their repressive paradigmatic regulation of human subjectivity. 'As open to the time of the new. Felix says: before Being there is politics' (Deleuze and Pamet, 1987: 17). Guat­ Icons are regarded as symbols of things that hold within their dumb configu­ tari had no time for the trivialization of specific ideas and the flattening of rations enormous power and engender cultural-and gender-specific pedagogies. concerns that is required for the corporate classification of art movements by Icons are the products of social and historical movements, and provide pow­ 'the managers of contemporary art', which he saw as leading to populist erful political components to modelled subjectivities and communal values approaches by artists (Guattari, 1986: 40-41). Guattari did not agree with the through their collective activation and continual performance. Of stoic disposi­ semiotic position of Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard on the post-modem aesthetic, for tion, icons articulate powerful points of ontology between many things; they 72 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production oj the New Affective ve~tors 73

may simply be a name, a food type, a story, an orthodox coda, a colour, or orna­ Critiquing the erroneous structures that govern the ways in which subjectivi­ mental pattern that might form a cross, a swastika, a hammer and sickle, a pink ties gain access to political content, Guattari sketched out new modes of triangle, a red star. W'hen illustrated, worn, raised, eaten, defiled or revered, an developing subjectivity in the post-media era developing in the 1990s (1995a: icon's symbolic powers are activated and become affective vectors for further 4-5, 96-97). As Gary Genosko has extensively detailed, Guattari's theoretical actions and behavioural responses. The omnipresent authorial power of icons work produced a model for thinking about the practices of subjectification, has raised attention to the recent developments in affective subjective constitu­ which was detailed not as any kind of formula for society, but as a practical tion, through the catalysing events of the cartoon caricatures of the prophet means of instigating the types of experimental and alternative research that Mohammed, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan, the burning of nation­ would then engender new methods for research (Genosko, 2002: 22). For state flags, and the censorship of iconic dress, and adornment in schools and at example, if you have access, and you are not living in a country that extensively work, an artwork called Piss-Christ, a film called . Each of these exam­ censors the Internet (China, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma), then you will be aware ples (and there are many more)is an instance where an iconically coded event that new modes ofinterpersonal interaction (not without its share of creeps and holds the potential power to affect a transmutative shift in the collective subjec­ vampires, as in every realm) and new dimensions of mutated subjective forma­ tivity. Icons are the vectorial points of communities - communicative of mores, tions have been drawn through this information machine - resulting in a rituals, concepts, gender designations - they are political and cultural exegeses proliferation of new forms of singularization. However, the methods by which of subjective formation. The authoritarian nature of the icon continues to subjectivity locates itself among the infinite networked layers is still under the strengthen its social movement, engaged as it is as an information spider har­ control of specific iconically activated affective powers that direct searches and vesting more content, more bodies. To consider the icon at the level of its access suitable knowledge networks. This is a new kind of therapeutic delirium, symbolic realm and thus its political force, is to enter the aesthetic domain; an offering infinite information within which subjectivity undergoes various forms expressive situation of a topological and preferential iconic economy that holds of mechanic camouflage in both its historical and vernacular passage. Despite power over the formation of people and communities. Today, historical icons claims of 'dis-intermediation', the same old prescriptive controls over subjectiv­ hold a mobile complexity that is still limited in part due to technological ity are in operation, as we see in social networking sites. W'hat has shifted is the impediments (to be removed in the foreseeable future), but what of new economic distribution of financial gain from artistic output, as evidenced in the iconologies - those that have been, and are yet to be created? W'hat do they auto-distribution of art, literature, music and so on on the Internet, which nev­ produce, these iconic machines (to coopt Guattari's terminology), in what ertheless still relies upon standardized iconic significations for their emergence domains can they not be spoken, seen or heard, what forms of power do they and paradigmatic meaning. Critical awareness of the ways and means that icons hold over people, and how do they engage those powers? are engaged as aesthetic vectors within the post-media age directs attention to The metamodelization of subjectivity is not concomitant with a theory of the institutionalization and compartments of metaphysical controls. We can interactivity or relationality in art. Rather, the immanence of art - or aesthetic only see different paradigms through interactive communication, and that perception - follows the nomos of a fleet-in-being, wherein a nascent power can mode of communication must be learned in order to understand exactly how be enabled to affectively produce new forms, and create pathways to 'new uni­ new network systems of subjectivities operate. Even when offering the aesthetic verses of reference' for subjectivities (Guattari, 1996: 109). It may take decades value ofa fake subversion, art directs us to how such metaphysics can be switched, or even hundreds of years for power generating pathways to emerge and be coopted, for example, by a feminist bodily aesthetics. Or consider how children seen (such as we observe with the formations of monopoly media controls, are able to free play with subjectivation models through art. dominant gene pools, the feminist movement). For example, a new anarchist In Guattari's view, an art machine is a material, hand-made social apparatus movement is currently underway, mobilizing itself against the iconic elements that has been falsely bound by a number of expressive economies (theatrical of axiomatic economic systems. The latter are based on the creation of a wealth gesture, the cinema, language, religious signs and icons). The radical and exten­ reliant upon the maintenance of a subordinate gender that will continue to sive possil;>ilities of art (as with all machines) is thereby missed and misunder­ produce future armies, workers, and the exploitation of natural resources for stood under various systems (Marxist, Freudian, capitalist), which ascribe the purposes of maintaining the currently unsustainable modes of living in the values according to relational inscriptions that Festrict subjectivity (cf. Guattari, first world. And the former - the new anarchist movements - are busy produc­ 1995a: 55). Using Guattari's theory of the metamodelization of subjectivity we ing their own iconic machines, because, as Guattari outlined, social subjectivity can see how the art machine can create certain options - pathways - that provide requires a 'machinic centre of subjective autopoiesis and self-affirmation' the right kind of environment for subjective machines to explore and articulate (1995b: 10). their own functions. Aesthetic paradigms such as art can reorient component \ 74 Deieuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Affective Vectors 75 values of (subjective) machines and act to direct existential 'cures'. (Guattari, In displaying patterns of categorization, modes of thinking, and the dimen­ 1995a: 5~55). ' should be prescribed like vitamins', writes Dr Felix: 'Care­ sions of power in their relation to subjective agency, iconic machines expose ful now. Old as you are, you'd feel better if you took some poetry' (1995c: 10). prescribed passages of subjectivity, empowering subjects to speech and to Emphasizing attention to the 'processual creativity' of subjectivity, Guattari silence, and enabling the identification of cultural-physical determinations of explores the transmutative affect of the autopoietic, 'self-referential' deploy­ activity; they are 'tools for transversality' (Guattari, 1995a: 130). Comprehen­ ment of the undeniable, and mostly unavoidable modelling factors in life: wars, sion of the specific types, and awareness of the breadth, of the affective impact migration, ecological disasters, diseases, economic, vernacular or spiritual pur­ of neurological-metaphysical manoeuvres (performed by all manner of institu­ suits, biological, geological, agricultural and political cycles (1995a: 13, 60). tions and material cultures, such as new technologies of gaming demanding How subjectivity is oriented through such social events is dependent on proc­ different motor-neural inter-activation) upon individuals and communities (the esses of territorialization, charted by semiotic 'redundancies' in the Guattarian biological imperatives demanded of women and men to perform their culture), sense - such as the icon (Guattari, 1984: 153-54; Genosko, 2002: 174). attunes subjectivation to its autntological dimensions. Transmutation­ The notion of the icon is subsumed under pure and mixed . event: art-event, geo /bio-event, game-event. Transmutation-event =subjectivation In Peirce's terminology, an icon indicates a mimetic state, and thus, as Guattari change. Post-media players recognize that the machinic universes they choose, sees it, is symptomatic of a transference of similitude for subjectivity modelling or are chosen to engage with are a paradigm of which they are only a part, but (Guattari, 2000: 60). In Deleuze and Guattari's use of the Peircean icon as a which they may modify through their aesthetic techniques. Play (a tool for art specific case of the diagram, the icon is inserted in the wheel of rhizomatic for­ and pedagogy) operates as a prehensive cognitive device capable of'metamod­ tunes, coordinating the generative and transformative machinic components elising' the machinic world that affectively dictates and directs our terms of thrown out by any given universe (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 146). Deleuze engagement. and Guattari's diagram is drawn from the Peircean categories of index, icon Subjective modelling operates interactively through a collective and continu­ and symbol, however they stress that instead of continuing the Peircean linear ous passage of work, to re-play sensorial, genetic, ecological and machinic distinctions based on semiotic relations, they have borrowed his terminology to affects. What types of machines control which way this power circuit will travel, instead indicate movements of 'territoriality-deterritorialization relations, not spewing out its cosmic energy, and forming all manner of new things? A work signifer-signified relations' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 531 n41). Further, of art is first of all bound and formed within its specific machinic virtual loop, they note that the role of the diagram as a whole is 'irreducible to either the an 'event of its encounter', a residual phenomenological empiricism that con­ icon or the symbol' (1988: 531 n41). In this sense, the icon is but an orienting textually grounds the processes of systemic values into historically tagged forms. component of the first of two 'inseparable' vectors - the stratic vector that orients Iconic machines work within their situation, which they perform and display as distribution of territorialities and their machinic assemblage (Guattari, 1984: affective vectors (points of transformation, and points of singularization which 153; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 145). In terms of the abstract machines ofsig­ are then able to be collectively accessed). Art machines thus engage and mutate nification, control and expression that produce and form subjectivation, the the collective of iconic discursivity - the content of which is the manifestation icon affects a continual operation of'reterritorialization' - this is the 'dreary of social and political issues at both global and local levels. world of the signifier' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 112, 116, 142). While I con­ Within the post-media world, art is freely given to subjectivity in a range of cur with Guattari that to separate 'the icon' from its larger strata performs a gift giving: as an existential remedy for de territorialization; as an existential structuralist modelling manoeuvre, I think that under certain aesthetic regimes, quantifier for the actions required for the reconciliation of schizo existence; as icons affect vectorial distribution and thus perform processual praxes; display­ a supplementary, optional treatment for healthy living; as value-laden civic leg­ ing processes that are also investigative of structures and systems even in acies, and so on. Each instance of the gift of art has a particular meaning and and because of their rigid configuration. We can see this distribution where inference, within a given situation, and an undeniable ontological privilege - defacement of the local 'despot or god' results in censorship, imprisonment, but even that remains specific. War and religious iconography; I-pods that assassination or death by the authorities, and in critical art practices that ques­ relieve and relive the pressures of dark places; Violent and beautiful fantasies tion and engage the icon in such a way that a de territorialization of the indicative on screen, mis-shapen and lovely of human form; Unqualified love­ iconic affect occurs, often through a form's analogous performative expres­ object; Hand made, or found on the beach on a clear, cold afternoon; A child's sions of reterritorializing processes, where matter is rearranged (Arcimboldo, toy mass-produced under third world conditions of subjugation; A brilliant Tinguley, Emin), and excessive processual factors (time controls, racial con­ guitar riff. We can locate specific art forms and critical practices that convey trols, gender controls etc.) are thrown into relief. what can be recognized as a new iconography that communicates the 'vectors I 76 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Affective vectors 77 of subjectivation' (Guattari, 1995a: 25). These vectors enable a collective com­ In the Anti-Oedipus, the machines producing subjectivation within affective munication: the action of repeating the white pigment outlines of Namarrkon­ fields are addressed in terms of limitations, restrictions and servitude to sadistic the Lightning Man on a rock wall in Burrungguy (Kunwinjku), a woman wearing models: ofdesire, ofthe social- there is nothing else (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 29) . a latex dress studded with nobbly-tits (Bourgeois), the recital of rabbit­ In the letters he sent Deleuze that contributed to the construction of this first shit haikus (Mekas), a fake flag fooling us with soft attention (Zikos), rocket­ collaborative book, an entry under the title 'Icons and Class Struggle' indicates launchers hand-woven into tapestry rugs (Baluchi), a film of the night Guattari's interest in the affective powers of what we now describe as network migration of sand-crabs by the ocean (Sala), a video of a softly-spoken woman machines, and the way their iconic codas draw subjectivities into social assem­ with dark hair who refuses the simplistic labels of terrorist-hero (Salloum). blages. Iconic manifestations, noted Guattari, employ a degree offiliation (in Such forms are the 'true work of art' - offering an 'incredible mutation', as the theological sense of the term): 'Icon = the manifestation of a presence' Guattari described the politics of subjectivity - created in and through move­ (2006: 188). With the Peircean icon, reiterates Guattari, 'you have a continuous ment, post-media metaphysical art that articulates the new modes ofnon-human passage from signifier to signified. Passage in the nature of things. Real passage. subjects: Just as scientific machines constantly modify our cosmic frontiers, The image of the bee is not a symbolic representation, but a real inscription in so do the machines of desire and aesthetic creation' (Guattari, 1995a: 54). the orchid's machinic code' (2006: 188)., Twenty years later, in Chaosmosis, Art constitutes and charts complex, yet knowable fields for post-capital terri­ Guattari refines this position: an affective theory of subjectification is not a dia­ torial movements; however this composed place is not a recomposition of grammatic chart plotting political points ofdifference, rather it is a psychological parts, but the embracing action of post-subjectivation. How do we navigate to praxis of the degrees of mutation-revolutions of communication - a 'multitude the poly-dimension of processual future-subjectivity? Through fields of joy of modalities ofalterity' (1995a: 96). This is what situates a politics of being as (Guattari is ever positive, searching for modulations of desire as a way to a singularity, and thus grants it a degree of autonomy, of pride; the cloak of embrace a healthful, schizo-life) ; affective vector fields that continuously reform decorum and inhibition, fascism and revolution. A crystal heart's gonna break you and recast ontological formations. Briefly, we locate this line of thinking in down. 2 An affective field may be fixed to a limited degree by a particular Guattari's political theorization of affective subjectivation. Art can activate and machine-society's increments of life, but the kinetic architecture of machinic deform aesthetic icons that are paradigmatic corrals, subjective pockets for subjectivity causes unpredictable vectorial impact. This field is difficult to existence to strut in and hide out. conceptualize; it is not audio-visual, but is created through all sensorially manip­ Guattari writes in Chaosmosis; 'The primary purpose of ecosophic cartography ulated neuro-ontological functions. Guattari gently guides us through this is thus not to signify and communicate but to produce assemblages of enuncia­ aesthetic topology of time: 'affect is not a question of representation and tion capable of capturing the points of singularity of a situation' (1995a: 128). discursivity, but of existence' (1995a: 93). Aesthetic passageways are created Art captures points of singularity, offering itself as the gift-egg of intensity. The through the pathic social relationships created through and by means of the forms and modalities of movements of art, (the singular) bodies or things cre­ affect: the vectorial field coagulates into recognizable machinic assemblages ated, map a situation with transversal vibrational flurries, forming pack-groups, that we come to know about, apprehended via 'ontological, transitivist, trans­ spaces, temporal dimensions, refrains of all kinds, which are in turn subject to versalist and pathic consistencies' of 'affective contamination' (Guattari, 1995a: the ranges and scales of determinate and indeterminate processes of the mod­ 92). Again, Guattari holds our sanguine hand through this weave: it is not elling of subjectivation (economic, geo-physical, passional and so on).1 To point relational or representational, but a fabrication-machine, the repetitive rhythms to a politics of the singular (as Guattari insists upon) through the notational of a loom, a light; love: 'The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of pressure points of localized affects is to enter into the neuro-metaphysics of a unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impover­ vectorial field in operation (whether a psychiatric office, a kitchen, a dassroom, ishment, which leads to a recreation or a reinvention of the subject itself' a recording/artist's studio, a cinema, a bedroom, a vegetable garden, a factory (Guattari, 1995a: 131). etc.). Different to an heterotopic site, transversal mutational adjustments within Aesthetic paradigms are passages for the political formation of thought, and a field, or trans-fields, are rendered as a fabric of intensive forces that activate of existence. Aesthetic visibility is dependent upon one's critical awareness of vectorial affects within subjectivation (Guattari, 1995a: 123). This is the praxis the dimensions of spatial and temporal controls that restrict or enhance one's of engagement that artists employ to create art-events in a quest for formal reso­ political vision and situation. But to invoke an aesthetic is to situate the models lution that may become iconic (either for underground or mass market and exemplars of a specific place and its definite belief systems, formed in large purposes), a trans (versal) portation through affective vectors in order to gener­ part by the discourses of governance of that site. Icons cue us to the terms of ate orientations towards meaning, in both its minor and axiomatic configurations. governance of subjectivation machines, and alert us to the conditions of --­,

I 78 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Affective vectors 79 regulation and future production within a governed economy. Iconic econo­ Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A ThousandPlateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre­ mies - hairstyles, the production of honey, the education of children - are nia, trans. B. Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. specific to their communities. Each has its codes, gestures and rituals operating Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy~, trans. G. Burchell and as temporal boundaries with which to model specific subjectivities and main­ H. Tomlinson. London and New York: Verso. tain regulatory authority. Against such determining codes of existence - at all Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987), Dialogues, trans. H .Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Comlubia University Press. levels - is the recognition of a sense of 'the new', something that, even for Genosko, G. (2002), Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. London and New York: a nanosecond, exists as a yet non-assimilated accomplishment, mutating 'dissi­ Continuum. dent vectors' (Guattari, 2000: 45). Aesthetic paradigms allow us to articulate Guattari, F. (1984), Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. R Sheed. this new, through soma-affects of the subjectivation machine: it is 'existence' London: Penguin. (Guattari, 1995a: 92). Art performs a constructive and largely generous civic Guattari, F. (1986), 'The Postmodem Dead End', trans. N. Blake, Flash Art, 127, task; it is necessary for the proper functioning of societies. Societies and indi­ 40-4l. viduals need art to help them to form thoughts, and open up access to divergent Guattari, F. (1988), Jean:Jacques Lebel: Painter of Transversality' , trans. M. McMahon, systems of knowledge, histories and memories. Of course, art can be put to the GlobeE, 8, online at http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/#issue8 (accessed service of all kinds of political interests, and although regarded in many socie­ on 12 May 2008). ties as a privileged folly, art works ofall types offer the paradigmatic consideration Guattari, F. (1995a), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and of a particular condition that as yet, are unable to be articulated through other J. Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications. Guattari, F. (1995b), 'On Machines', trans. V. Constantinopoulos,foumalofPhiloso- discursive methods. Expressive of the range of movements of life, art practices phy and the VisualArts, 6, 8-12. record and articulate through iconic gestures that are revelatory of transforma­ Guattari, F. (1995c), Chaosophy, ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). tive points of time as modal of power. Art can bypass the false Guattari, F. (1996), Soft Subversions, ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). territorialization of nationalisms; cut through the hierarchical configuration of Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton. London and freedom of communication; present up to the minute accounts of the habeas New Brunswick: Athlone Press. carpus of any given regional locality; enunciate the historical-political organiza­ Guattari, F. (2006), The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. K Gotman, ed. S. Nadaud. tion of gender and ethnicity; render the ephemeral sense of a mood or glimpse New York: Semiotext(e). of the future through a shift in scale or palette. Astutely, art documents those Sonic Youth (2000), Nyc Ghosts & Flowers, Geffen Records. moments in the world where one senses that social and cultural energies are shifting, or being forced to change. Mutation of a system produces changes in ontology, thereby generating shape for other developments: New time = new icons. The substance of art is of such anomalous and repetitive moments of movements of aesthetic systems.

Notes

1 Transversality is Guattari's movement-machine (Genosko, 2002: 200-01), figured as a modality for improved clinical communicativity, as with any machine, expect a corporate takeover. 2 Sonic Youth, 'Renegade Princess', Nyc Ghosts & Flowers.

Bibliography

Basaglia, F. (1987), Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writing> of Franco Basaglia, trans. A. M. Lovell and T. Shtob. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R Hurley, M. Seem, H. R Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. I A Portrait ofDe leuze-Foucault 81

Research

Chapter 8 Already from the very start, with Rayrrwnd Ruusselin 1963, Deleuze stressed the importance of the arts, and in particular the , in Foucault's efforts to A Portrait of Deleuze-Foucault expose and cross the lines of seeing and speaking that condition our knowl­ edge. More than anyone else, Deleuze made the arts seem essential to Foucault's for Contemporary Art very idea and practices of thinking and research. In particular, the questioning of the 'visual' of the arts in 'thinking' (or in the games of thought) is not John Rajchman restricted to what Foucault writes in the 1960s about painting (about which he projected a book - and also later destroyed one on Manet he had written), but also appears later when he gave up such classical 'readings' of painting in favour of 'minor writings', at the border of fiction and document, such as 'The Lives of Infamous Men' - strange 'real fictions', more compelling than literature, Why read Deleuze's Foucault again, anew, for example in contemporary art? which he himself, with deliberate perverse pleasure, extracted from administra­ How might it be of use to artists, curators, critics or historians as well as, at the tive archives - works which we in our 'post-conceptual' sensibilities would have same time, to philosophers, ? no trouble calling 'art'. They suggest an approach to the unresolved problem Intended as a work of 'un-mourning', written just after Foucault's death, and of the relation of the arts to the kind of 'politics of truth', which Foucault saw produced in tandem with his study of cinema, Deleuze's book gives a picture of displacing the role of the 'literary intellectual' and the 'sanctification of writ­ new ways of thinking about art, with art, of doing research, having ideas in art ing' and 'text' in the 1960s. Deleuze likens the lives of the infamous, called or through art institutions. Deleuze conceived it as a portrait - a drawing, upon to make themselves visible and say-able to Power, to characters in haunted by its subject - of une pensee, a singular style of thought, depicted as a Chekhov, and sees them as part of an analysis of the conditions of writing that 'multi-linear ensemble'. But it is very much Deleuze's sketch; and it is remarka­ instead of looking up to the fame of those who have power looks down to the ble, retrospectively, how the lines and basic parameters of his portrait - archive, deviations of those who do not. And, when still later, Foucault proposes to insert diagram, topology - continue to resonate not simply with art practices today, the notion of artistic work or 'oeuvre' within a larger history of different 'tech­ but also with fresh ways oflooking at older ones. In a strange way Deleuze's por­ niques of the self it is again the issue of saying-the-truth that matters - as for trait is thus of a thinker about to enter the arts, as ifpoised to re-enter the game, example, in the art-confession or art-trauma relations. Deleuze's portrait serves the field, the theatre or drama of art or art institutions today. Who then, is this to cast the changing question of art in Foucault's own oeuvre in such terms. But Foucault, who haunts Deleuze's portrait through its peculiar lines and sense of what then is it about the often humorous 'underside' of which 'crossing the line'? Who is it for those doing their bit in the larger dispositifs or accompanies Foucault's research into their lines or borders and the 'perilous' 'machines' that condition and control ways of seeing and speaking today? How efforts to cross them, which involves the arts, and especially the visual arts (and might this thinker emerge from the shadows to play and 'play with' the game of vice versa)? What kinds of relations do the arts have to the larger dispositifs that art and artists, at once exposing and undoing its rules, while multiplying, diverg­ at once condition and constrain what we know of ourselves at a time and place ing, giving rise to a series of new players, new masks? (with our related habits of self-description, sel£.examination etc)? What did For in fact it was precisely Foucault who first stressed the role of mask and Foucault mean when, in contrast to regular historians, he insisted in calling his double in Deleuze's own 'philosophical theatre', his own notion of what it own works of research, 'fabrications' or 'fictions' at the borders of the machines means to 'dramatize ideas' inventing new dramatis personae. Today we have the that delimit the available to us, and the kinds of relations we can have to singular hybrids of a Deleuze-Bergson, a Deleuze-Leibniz, a Deleuze-Spinoza, a them? We approach here the problem I am calling 'research' in my portrait of Deleuze-Nietzsche, who constitute this drama of a new 'image of thought'. But, Deleuze-Foucault (as well as their differences). What is 'truth' or 'desire for inseparable from this drama and this game, Deleuze also fabricated contempo­ truth' for example in the arts or artistic researcll? And what is a b'order, a line, rary hybrids one of which I'll call 'Deleuze-Foucault'. It is the portrait of this what does it mean to cross it, in the arts, in philosophy, in their relations with hybrid figure I'd like now to briefly sketch in turn, imagining how it might enter one another? the strange, sprawling, globalized, directioniess, money-driven, often facile No doubt there is a whole institutional side to Foucault's tireless, endless thing we now like to call 'contemporary art'. efforts, armed with note-cards and archives, to cross the line, and to see, to talk, I 82 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New A PtYrtrait ofDeleuze-Foucault 83 to act autrement. It involves groups not simply within the university or academic 'modules' or genes in a kind of information-science update of phrenology. institutions, but also, at the same time, in relation to groups, movements, prac­ Brain-science cannot tell us in advance how to create - that is more a matter of tices, acts outside it. Itwas the larger function of this 'critical attitude' which he a 'lived brain' whose rules cannot be specified in advance, which encounters at once adopted and tried to work out in his research, and the many relations it events which require the invention of new paths or circuits leading to new ways involved, the games it allowed him to play with himself and others. It was part of seeing, talking, acting. Give me a brain, a new brain, new spaces and times in of his peculiar 'neo-Kantism', his way of playing with the very idea, the very which to think. When neuroscience tries to locate 'creativity' in the brain it question of 'critique'. This 'critical attitude' and the corresponding desire, often just reproduces notions of 'cognition' built into its experiments, thus taken as conditions of producing new ways of seeing and talking, might be reinforcing the 'most stubborn' presuppositions of a logics of recognition. With called an attitude of dis-identification with knowledge - captured, for example, in the problem of 'control' goes the problem of a 'non-objectivisable' brain, his late remarks about' getting away from himself' in and through his research neither Program nor Gestalt, as a new area in which to play the game of dis­ (se deprendre de soi-rnime). Foucault's many hours.in libraries and archives gave identification, of which research into the 'knowledge-power' basis of cognitivist him a keen sense of just what it means to have new ideas, invent new ways of savoir (source of so many new categories and deSCriptions of ourselves) would seeing, outside or at the borders of the particular assumptions or objects form apart. historians normally take for granted, but also in the larger stories we tell of our­ selves - our public or collective memories, our private biographies -just what it takes to 'cross the line', just how 'analysis' of the line itself figures in those Groups efforts, essential for 'new' ideas. Here, Deleuze was concerned with a rival to philosophy that had another sort How to play the games of dis-identification, in art, in thought, in the relations of relation to Foucault - the rival of information or communication today to be or eXChanges between the two? There is an institutional side to the question. found in brain science and the whole realm of savoir of 'the cognitive'. How How to make room for such activities within institutions, against institutions, might artists or thinkers today cross that sort of line? ill the short brilliant for those acts for which there pre-exists no knowledge? How can one help 'insti­ 'appendix' to his Foucault, Deleuze sketches this question. In what ways might a tute' what remains 'outside' the institutionalisable rules of sense? ill the 'new Foucault' go on to extend Foucault's own preoccupations with the 'being aftermath of '68 this question was linked to a new kind of social invention - the of language' to the sciences of life and of work found in the 'modem' (i.e. creation of groups and 'collectives' of different sorts, at some distance from nineteenth-century European) 'episteme'? The new 'communicational' rival the School or University as from well as from the Party and party politics, tied derives from changes in work and life, as well as from a new post-war 'info-tech' up with another kind of 'movement'. But of all the groups thus invented in the regime of machines in work as in leisure, which would assume the shape of a '68-aftermath, the one that Deleuze took to be itself something really new was new type of' control' , different from 'discipline' or 'bureaucracy' or administra­ the Group for Information on Prisons (GIP), created by Foucault and Daniel tion, the lines ofwhich need to be at once analysed and crossed in tum. Central Defert, in 1971-73 - a creation itself that 'almost had the beauty of one of to this new rival and matching nexus of savoiris the problem of the brain. There Foucault's books' (Deleuze, 2006: 273). For Foucault the creation of the group is a sense in which, across a whole series of practices, we have become a society marked a shift away from the traditional arts ofwriting and painting with which obsessed not so much with language, as with our brains and their testable cogni­ he had been concerned, and as he remarks looking back in 1976, was an tive achievement skills, and the question of 'creativity' has shifted accordingly. attempt, through the group, to define a new 'function' for the political intellec­ Deleuze became increasingly preoccupied with this problem, giving it a key tual. It is the same sort of problem Deleuze would confront in his study of role in What is Philosophy? He thought that the sort of 'metaphysical' problems cinema, not simply with the sense of 'realism' in Neo-realism (a cinematic about mathematics and physics that matter to Bergson, might today be taken version of what GIP called 'the intolerable'), but more generally with his objec­ up instead in relation to our neuroscientific savoir, the source of new kinds of tion to Eisensteinian montage, as he later put it to Toni Negri: 'There's no 'interferences and resonances' with the arts. Already in his study of cinema, the longer any image of proletarians around of which it's just a matter of becoming post-war 'time-image' cinema that breaks free from the 'sensory-motor schema' conscious' (Deleuze, 1995: 173). discovers a new aesthetic aim, captured in the formula 'give me a body, give me Though deliberately short-lived, GIP was not simply like the interviews and a brain'. The game of 'dis-identification' with savoir was being played with writings in Foucault's 'experimental activity', where, in Deleuze's picture at neurology as well as with sociological consensus. The problem of artistic' crea­ least, he would try to 'cross the line' of the archival assignation to ask about the tion' is not something we might locate in the brain, identifying the relevant 'other' we are 'becoming'; GIP had also drawn up those lines in the first place, 84 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New \ A Portrait ofDeleuze-Foucault 85 in particular for Discipline and Punish, a book notable for its clarity and tight would having a rather 'de-solidarizing' effect for Foucault not simply in internal argumentation. While it was a political group, very interested in prison relation to the Socialist election in 1981, but also with Deleuze (or Deleuze­ riots, it was not a group with a fixed political 'line'; and the situation was not Guattari), with whom he quietly broke off contact, they remain interesting for improved with the publication of Discipline and Punish, itself accused for its defi­ the larger problem of the relation of the arts to 'administrative rationality', and ciency in 'normative standards' and related reform prescriptions. It was a group the ways groups break away from it. that mixed extremely local or 'specific' research into actual prison conditions, The creation of the GIP in the early 1970s thus formed part of a complex working with questionnaires allowing prisoners themselves to speak within mutation in the figure of ' Deleuze-Foucault' matching the dramatic change in another kind of space, where, as Deleuze argued, what they said could be actu­ scenery after '68. The questions, conjectures, unfinished projects from this ally heard, and in particular could lead to new conjectures and investigations. period are still with us today, even if transformed and posed in new ways and As Foucault put it the 'we' is not given, does not pre-exist the formulation of the circumstances. The setting has become increasingly 'globalized'; and the 'extra­ problem, the new questions it poses, the new kinds of talking, seeing and acting territorial' character of the groups (which Deleuze-Guattari associated with an to which it therefore leads. The 'information' collected by the group was not 'absolute de territorialization' as the condition of thought, art, and their rela­ for simple' communication', but to change the very way the 'disciplinary' func­ tions with one another) has become increasingly 'transnational'. But what then tion of prisons was understood; the group was thus the instrument through of the institutional question - the creation of new groups and activities them­ which 'research' and 'creativity' in seeing and saying where linked to one selves? What should we make of that today? We might look back at two lectures another. The problem was thus not the past Truth (announced by a Revolution­ Deleuze gave more than a decade later, after Foucault's death, in 1987; their ary or a Poet, to which one must remain 'faithful'), not yet as a Messianic future titles alone suggest a guise in which Deleuze-Foucault might re-emerge - 'What (even one paradoxically 'without a Messiah'); it was a matter of experimenta­ is a Creative Act?' and 'What is a Dispositifl' (2006: 312-24, 348-58). tion, in the present, with 'crossing the line', a kind of new pragmatism. Such was its new sort of political function, its new relation to truth as a material 'thing of this world'. Creativity The problem of 'research' - of his research - was thus linked, in a kind of internal spiral, to an attempt to displace the traditional distinctions between Foucault himself did not talk much about 'creativity'. Deleuze's more pragma­ State and Society, or and Science, in intellectuals' ('in the political tist, Nietzschean term 'experiment' suits him better, and is suggestive as well in sense') analysis of political regimes, with a picture of the relations between 'dis­ its historical intersections with the role of art-institutions as 'laboratories' for course' and 'power'. With the formation of GIP went a change in the very idea new ideas. Rather than in the speculative style Deleuze stressed in Whitehead, of political intervention, part of why Deleuze found it so new. How, through Foucault developed the problem of 'creating' new ways of seeing and speaking such 'local' or 'specific' groups, and with their 'transversal' connections, can in an historical frame to the point where, in Deleuze's words, he saw history the larger workings of the forms of 'political rationality' on which governments itself as 'the set of conditions, negative conditions almost, that make it possible rely be made visible, or how can those 'events' be created through which those to experience, experiment with, something beyond history' (1995: 106). Exper­ forms of rationality start to loose their self-evidence, causing the (hegemonic) imentation, in art as in thought, as forces 'outside' historical determination was 'apparatus' to break down? In what ways can such groups and their research then linked to the new intellectual function Deleuze called 'doing harm to stu­ serve to make those moments 'creative' of new ways of thinking, new 'ideas', pidity' (nuire a la betise) - including, in particular, Catholic aesthetic stupidities new coalitions or solidarities as well? It is unforeseen events that cause us (the relation of God and sex continued in the notion of 'transgression' and 'the to rethink our political habits, requiring the invention of new ways of thinking Law' or 'the flesh'). and seeing, a new experimentation that poses questions to politics, and There is nevertheless a place where Foucault talked about' creativity' directly. the forms of 'political rationality' on which it rests. The supposition of this 'an­ The occasion was a televised debate with Noam Chomsky, in 1971, not long archical' creative element in the relations between governments or states and after the 'creation' of GIP.l The exchange matters today in part because 'power', in particular, would lead Foucault to a new cluster of hypotheses, pur­ Chomsky's arguments about 'innateness' and linguistic universals have come to sued in his lecture-classes at the College de France, through which the traditional playa key role in a larger 'cognitivist' turn against 'culturalist' approaches distinctions between state and society would be displaced by those of 'govern­ (focused in 'nature' not 'nurture' to use Galton\ terms), which today is fuelled mentality' and 'bio-power', and linked to a diagnosis of a crisis in the post-war by the imperative to find genes for everything and the evolutionist efforts to European 'welfare-warfare' state form. While the pursuit of these researches explain our cognitive abilities by imagining pre-historical adaptation scenarios I 86 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New A Portrait ofDeleuze-Foucault 87 that then got fixed or 'wired' in our brains. The whole aesthetica-scientific and research, tied up with a different notion of time and possibility, in turn question of 'faciality' and its undoing (e.g. in portraits and self-portraits) devel­ requiring a long 'apprenticeship' of another experimental or non-methodical oped by Deleuze-Guattari, for example, is now at odds with a new cognitivist sort. The search and research for 'lost time' in Proust would indicate the sense focus on facial expression as expressing a universal identificatory affective in which thinking is never innate, always tied up instead with a kind of nature. Today postulations of 'universal cognitive nature' might be similarly 'un-common sense' (or 'non-normal creativity' in our talk and related rnondaniti read as a kind of 'obstacle' or 'critical transformation point' in a whole group or SOciability) given in our sensibilities, for which there pre-exists no universal of sciences (including, of course the sciences of the brain), suggesting an method. Thinking is neverjust innate, Deleuze declared, because it is generated 'evolutionism' of another kind, prior to the nature-nurture, nature-culture dis­ in us only through an encounter with something from the 'outside' such that tinctions, in turn allowing for of a kind of critical 'dis-identification' from 'ideas always come after' . For we really (or 'creatively') think only when forced cognitivist savoir: give me another brain please! to think - forced by something we cannot recognize, given through a violent Foucault's differend with Chomsky on Dutch television is thus instructive for aesthetic element, a sensory or affective contact with something that doesn't fit, the larger question of 'creativity' - for what it is to think, to have ideas, new which shakes up how we are accustomed to think. In the case of GIP, it was ideas, in the arts and in philosophy. Chomsky spoke of a 'normal creativity', Foucault's idea of the 'intolerable' (irreducible to prior Justice) which Deleuze which like Cartesian 'common sense', would be evenly distributed to all, sup­ found played this violent sensory condition for thinking; and he then went on to posed by the 'universal' or 'innate' capacity of all humans to learn a particular imagine how the idea had been aesthetically elaborated through the whole ques­ natural language, from relatively few actual clues. Foucault retorts that of all the tion of 'nea-realism' (so different from any naturalism) in cinema, or with the utterances such universal normal creativity in language makes possible, only a invention of new indeterminate spaces and new sensibilities, and new characters very few are actually uttered (spoken or written), and those fall in discernable who move through them or are affected by them, as if sensing something 'real' patterns of a time and place. He imagined that what we say is governed by rules for which there precisely pre-exists no determination or recollection - a realism, or 'regularities' that govern not simply the kinds of things talked about but also he would go on to show, that in turn upsets the fiction-documentary or fiction­ the roles and positions of those talking about them, and that such rules are nei­ ethnography distinctions in cinema or cinematic 'images'. Such is more generally ther 'innate' nor 'learned', but rather condition our minds across a whole series the violent sensory and affective conditions for' creativity' or 'experimentation', of practices, at once institutional and material. The whole problem of creativity for getting and having ideas; and Deleuze would go on to ask what must we sup­ shifts accordingly, and gives rise to a new question about 'non-normal' discur­ pose about the brain for there to exist the potential for such creativity in thinking sive novelty. How (and in what conditions) can one 'cross the line' of discursive or new ideas. Already with Proust's 'apprentice-hero', Deleuze had maintained 'regularities' governing our talk and say something 'new'? 'What does it mean to that to include this violence in thinking, we must free 'learning' from 'knowl­ break with the evidence of a seemingly universal 'common sense', exemplified edge' (apprendre from savoir), as if the whole Idealist picture of 'aesthetic in the universal popular appeal of Descartes' 'method', open to anyone without education' (Bildung) had undergone a violent conversion casting it outside the prior 'learning', and to start to think in conditions of the loss or 'problematiza­ State or the Nation, or the 'republic of spirits'. For the 'we' doesn't pre-exist the tion' of any determination of a 'common sense'? It is rather as if the universal question - the sort of question posed to politics, to the republic - a question for Cartesian Idiot were to throwaway his universal methodical compass to dis­ which there pre-exists no method, only experimentation, in art as in thinking. cover a peculiar 'ignorance' essential to thinking, itself taken as experimental Such in any case is the problem of experimentation or creativity peculiar to the activity prior to a fixed method. But who then is the 'we' that comes together figure I am calling Deleuze-Foucault. through the break with self-evidence or the creation of new ways of seeing and In particular it is this question of creativity that we encounter in the two lec­ speaking; and who is the 'people' to whom experimentation in thinking appeals tures Deleuze gave in 1987-88, the titles of which asked ''What is a Creative Act?' and to whom it is addressed? 'What, in other words, are the presuppositions, the and ''What is a Dipositif.' . Each came after the publication of Deleuze's two stud­ politics, even the aesthetics of the potential for and address of such non-normal ies, written in tandem, of cinema and of Foucault; and they converge on the novelty or 'creativity' in our ways of seeing and saying? question of 'control', first introduced in the study" of cinema, but defined With such questions, we approach Deleuze's long preoccupation with the in relation precisely to Foucault's dispositifs. They mark the moment when the 'creation of concepts' and related 'image of thought' developed in all his writ­ problem of control (and so of order-words and cliche-images fabricated by ings, and especially in his literary or artistic studies. Already in his attempts to the great 'machines of self-evidence' that confine what we see and say) becomes extract a new 'image of thought' from Proust, Deleuze had moved away from for Deleuze the name of that against which creativity must struggle in the new any idea of innateness in thinking towards another aesthetic notion of search world ofinformation and information-technologies and larger 'social machines' --~--- ._- ~--- ._------

I 88 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New A Portrait ofDeleuze-Foucault 89 and forms of knowledge they bring with them - the name, itself borrowed The problem of such dispositifs is then the topic of the second lecture, given from Burroughs, for the new atmosphere in which new games of' dis-identifica­ to philosophers on the occasion of a symposium following Foucault's death. tion', at once violent and playful, might be invented. What then is an act of Foucault had invented a new idea apparatus, machine, or dispositif, which creation, what is a dispositif, what does it then mean to fabricate the new (and to involved an original 'aesthetic' dimension, concerned with the conditions, the invent the spaces for its fabrication) in our 'societies of control'? constraints on seeing, saying and doing against which acts of creation arise. The first lecture, given to film-makers, later televised, was about what it is A given dispositifin Foucault is pictured by Deleuze as a 'multilinear' affair, as 'to have an idea' in cinema in relation with 'ideas' in philosophy as in other are the critical departures from it. But there is also a general sense in which practices, other arts, forming part of a larger transversal network or series of there is no 'act of creation' - especially in our 'societies of control' - which does 'relays'. As such it develops the larger theme, distinctive or new in Deleuze him­ not resist the self-evidence induced by the 'machines' that at once condition self, of the search for a new 'logic' of creative thinking. Not even in the case of and restrict what we see and think about what is happening to us, or try to 'cross Bergson's 'metaphysics' did Deleuze base this logic on an 'ontology' in the the line' it draws up. Foucault had a keen sense of the constraints, the condi­ manner of Heidegger, seeing it rather as a speculative matter, which might tions of new ways of seeing and saying; the whole question of 'function' (and today, be extended to brain research. It is the logic not the 'ontology' that is related notions of the 'technology of the self and 'practices of saying-true') is new in Deleuze. Already in his treatment of Stoicism, in contrast to Heidegger, tied up with this problem, already with what he called 'the author-function'. Deleuze was trying to invent a new logic, a new sense oflogic, capable of includ­ The very notions of 'technology' or 'machine' are expanded to include the ingwhat is 'creative' in thinking and thinking together; and, at the same time, possibility of a 'creative' element whose function is 'crossing the line'. The it was the related problem of 'collective creations' with respect to laws and insti­ 'creative' element in a dispositifis precisely the location of the problem of the tutions that interested him, before in the aftermath of '68, turning to politics, 'fabrication of the new' in Foucault, developed by Deleuze in this lecture. What in association with Foucault and Guattari. His picture of 'having ideas' in cin­ is new (or actuel in Foucault's own parlance) is not at all what(is in fashion, but ema in particular derives from his attempt to work out a new 'logic of cinema' , rather what we cannot yet see or say is happening to us, just because it is not itself shown in the search and research for new kinds of images and signs in cin­ already contained in the 'variable creativity' of given dispositifs that govern what ema: what it means to think in and with 'time-images' or 'movement-images', we can think. It is thus part of an 'actuality' or 'becoming-other', given through and how such thinking resonates and interferes with 'creative ideas' in other the exchanges, public debates, groups and larger constellations, of the sort domains, including in and with respect to politics. Similarly, the 'logic of sensa­ which accompanied Foucault's historical or archival research. For the 'actual' is tion' in Bacon was an attempt to work out the violent form of creative thinking a pragmatic experimental matter, something we must actually do for which with lines and colours that is painting itself, as a logic of 'possibilities' or'virtu­ there precedes no determination, no model, no 'we', not even anT. Without alities' in pictorial 'matters-of-fact'. To write about an artist was to work out the this active agon with self-evidence fabricated by the dispositifs of a given society peculiar 'logic' and image of thought in his work or 'materials of expression', (or its 'forms of power') in which we live and act, without the search and with its resonances and interferences with philosophical ideas. Thus, in his research for another affective, perceptive 'solidarity' at once within and with­ lecture to film-makers in 1987, in a climate of worry over the 'death of cinema', out, there is no real' creativity', no real experimentation and fabrication of the Deleuze spoke of the role of ideas in 'acts of creation' in cinema - why such new. Such is this problem of 'fabricating the new', which, in this lecture, Deleuze ideas are rare, why there pre-exists no method for having them, why they are tries to introduce into Foucault's great analyses of knowledge and power. worked out through an unlearned search and research, the sense in which they But this short portrait of Deleuze-Foucault for contemporary art is meant to only arise from inchoate necessity that forces one to think, why they appeal to suggest as well another way of continuing the 'work of un-mourning' that moti­ or call for a 'people-to-come' that does not pre-exist the act of creation. But, in vated Deleuze. It might be put in this way: in what forms, to what degree, not the case of such 'creativity' in cinema (shooting, framing, editing, projecting) simply in and with the arts, but also in and through art institutions, can we invent as 'mass industrial art' Deleuze thought we are confronted with problems with­ today spaces and groups for the kind of open search and research, interference out exact equivalent in painting or literature, produced through the peculiar and resonance, learning and unlearning, which formed part of the whole idea of relations cinema has not simply with knowledge and technology, but also the 'creativity' for Deleuze-Foucault? In what ways do' such practices and institutions 'masses' and the relation of 'thought' to them. We are not far from the problem set-up ways to research, groups and creativity, that exist prior to method, to savoir, of 'control' and of the nature of the cinematic apparatus or dispositif as a crea­ to government policies, as concrete or local conditions for new ways of talking, tive set-up or arrangement for our sensibility, at once spatial, sensory and seeing and acting on a 'transnational' or 'global' manner? In what ways in short political. can they thus help create today the spaces and times in which thinking lives? ~ ,

90 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Note

I See the enlarged edition of this debate in Foucault and Chomsky, 2006. I allude to Chapter 9 the problem in my Foreword to this debate and its aftermath in the two authors. The Production Bibliography of the New and the Care of the Self Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. M.Joughin. New York: Columbia Simon O'Sullivan University Press. Deleuze, G: (2006), Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, ed. D. Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. and Chomsky, N. (2006), The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature. New York: The New Press. In this essay I want to put forward less a single argument and more a series of theses and accompanying questions about the new in relation to art and subjec­ tivity. And I want to do all this through recourse to two of Deleuze's precursors (Bergson and Spinoza) and two of his fellow travellers (Foucault and Guattari). The essay ends with two case studies.

Theses on the new

Thesis 1: The new does not arrive from some 'other place' (transcendence), but is produced from the very matter of the world, after all what else is there? And where else can the new come from? The new then involves a recombina­ tion of already existing elements in and of the world (a new dice throw as Deleuze might say). The new would then be a repetition, but with difference. As such the new must be distinguished from fashion, which involves a repeti­ tion of the same, that is, does not really involve a radical recombination of elements. However, the new is not opposed to fashion, but rather accelerates certain of its operating logics, namely the production of difference. Mter all, there must be a certain amount of difference for fashion to be what it is. Fash­ ion in this sense is the near enemy of art. Here is my first question: is it enough to affirm a recombination of matter in order to produce something new? For example, a new art (or indeed a new subjectivity)? Would this not merely involve playing with that which is already here, already has reality as it were? Or, following De1euze, would not such a recombination involve playing with that which is 'possible', the latter being a mirror-image or isotope of the real, in fact being' the same, conceptually speak­ ing, only lackingreality. Or to phrase this question in a slightly different manner: is there really such a difference between the new in art and the new in fashion? And if there is such a difference, as I think there is, then what else is needed to produce the new? r-,I

I 92 Deleuze, Guattari and the Produdion of the New The Care of the Self 93

Thesis 2: A certain depth, or move beyond the horizontal plane of matter (the action, creation' (1988: 112). In each case - that of an individual and that of 'what-is'). Put simply, the new involves accessing something 'outside' the present a society - what is involved is an 'escape' from the fixed habits and impasses of plane of existence. This is a slippery area as it involves a return to the terrain, the present through recourse to a 'time' undetermined by that present, a pure we might call it the aesthetic, that was evacuated and critiqued within Marxism past which also, paradoxically, contains the possibility of determining a differ­ (ideology) and deconstruction (presence). That is to say my thesis so far affirms entfuture. something that is not immediately accessible or apparent to the human config­ uration in its usual, or typical state. My second question leads on from this: what is the nature of this 'deeper' Spinozism realm from which something new emerges? And how can we access it as it were? I want now to track through the articulation of this terrain - this topology of From Bergson's topology of the actual/virtual to Spinoza's topology of the sorts - in its specifically immanent formation. three kinds of knowledge. And to begin with some very brief revision of the Ethics. l The first kind of knowledge names our general condition of being in the world. We are constituted by the more or less random affects that are deter­ Bergsonism mined by the more or less random encounters of our life. Indeed, our bodies and minds are, in one sense, a history of these encounters. The second kind of For Bergson, in Matter and Memory, this other place is precisely on a temporal knowledge arises from the effort we make to understand and then organize axis, that is to say, is not another place as such, but rather another time (1991: these encounters. With the second kind of knowledge we seek to understand 133-77). In fact, a kind of time that is radically different to the world of matter. that which determines us, and thus why it is that we act in the way we do. Bergson calls it the pure-past, a virtual realm of pure potentiality. Such poten­ We start consciously arranging our life, reflecting on what makes a 'good' tial, Bergson argues, can only be actualized when a gap is opened between encounter and thus what increases our capacity to act in the world (with the stimulus and response, that is to say, a break in habit (a break in the sensory­ ultimate aim of not being subject to our passions, but, as Lacan might say, motor mechanism (with its attendant cliches of action and thought». The of becoming a cause of ourselves). human brain-body configuration produces this gap (the complexity of the nerv­ An ethical life thus involves an awareness/understanding, and the conscious ous system, which allows for a multiplicity of different pathways for stimulus­ recombination, of the elements oflife - one's encounters - in order to increase response, determines a hesitation in that response), but the latter can be further joy. In passing it is worth noting that advanced capitalism also organizes encoun­ opened through a general slowing down of the brain-body configuration, or ters so as to produce specifically sad affects, or paralysis, as well as promoting simply a halt (the opening of 'vacuoles of non-communication' as Deleuze calls a certain ignorance as regards what causes certain affects (for example the over them) (1995: 175). Freedom from the present plane of existence, or merely the whelming fear-anxiety affect of mass media 'news' programmes and the obses­ horizontal plane of matter, involves then an opening up to a certain verticality. sive advertising of commodities to make us 'feel better'). I will be returning to This is the celebrated 'cone' of Bergson that Deleuze also attend$ to in Bergson­ the relationship with capitalism in a moment. What we have with Spinoza is ism (Deleuze, 1988: 59-61; Bergson, 1991: 150-54). then a call to experiment following from a general ethology (a theory of bodies So, the new, here, is not about a simple recombination of matter, but involves as composed of relations of speed/slowness and capacities to affect and be a turning away from matter to a different realm (a realm that is different in affected). Put simply, we are offered a physics with which to think life. kind) and a drawing on this source before returning to the world and allowing To return to my thesis on the new, we might say that the production ofjoyful the journey to affect that world. In passing, we can note a quick caveat to this encounters through experimentation and through the production of 'common point: a recombination of matter might allow for this temporal flight. In fact, notions' attendant on the latter (that is the second kind of knowledge ) , involves this must be the case on some level, that is, the putting in place of the material a break with habit and a concomitant new mode of being. Indeed, it is this that conditions that allow for a slowing down. characterizes Deleuze's interest in Spinoza's Ethics; the latter is a blueprint for a The new might be rephrased here as freedom, freedom from habit and from genuinely creative life that is actively produced -through an understanding of the present plane of purely utilitarian interests. Elsewhere Bergson remarks that the causes of one's experience. It is in this sense that the production of a new this is the operating terrain of the mystic (he or she who orientates him/herself mode of being invariably involves following a programme of sorts. against 'organised religion' and the fixed rituals of society) (1935: 209-65). According to Spinoza, this understanding of causality ultimately involves a Deleuze also attends to this state in which there is 'superabundant activity, leap from the second to a third kind of knowledge and the 'arrival' in a place I 94 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New The Care ofthe Self 95 where everything agrees with oneself, which is to say, produces joy. The entire understanding, what Foucault calls truth, that is intimately tied to the state world affirms one's being/capacity to act (one becomes, as it were, the world, of the subject and to what he or she can become (Alain Badiou, of course, follows or, put differently, one becomes the cause of oneself). In a sense the second a very similar line of argument).6 Here, the new, in terms of a new subjectivity, kind of knowledge, the understanding of causes, operates as a launch platform a new way of being in the world, cannot Simply be read about, or directly for this other superhuman state. This place is different in kind from that which accessed (deconstruction here just demonstrates the obvious), but is produced characterizes the first and second. Indeed, this place is not to do with 'knowl­ through a certain orientation/ and through certain specific technolo­ edge' as such, or with the history of a specific body-mind (although it is the gies, or what we might call an ethico-aesthetic programme. Foucault makes the latter that allows for this journey, or leap). It is a place in which one experiences point that this has always been the tradition of a certain kind of pragmatic phi­ the eternal, which we might also characterize as Bergson's pure-past.2 It may losophy, for example that of Spinoza or Nietzsche (that is to say the "very same appear that this 'incredible speed' of Book Five of the Ethics - a certain 'speed philosophers of transformation that interested Deleuze) (1995: 28-30). In fact, of thought' - is fundamentally different from Bergson's stillness, but in fact both Foucault also mentions Marxism and psychoanalysis here. The point being that are forms of speed, albeit not necessarily forms of movement. As Deleuze and it is not enough just to read about a different state of being, one must become Guattari point out in the plateau on the War Machine in A Thousand Plateaus, involved in practices that actually allow this different state to emerge.7 Philoso­ there are 'spiritual voyages' that are 'effected without relative movement, but in phy in this sense, and at its best, can be a praxis, a way of life. intensity, in one place' (1988: 381). Here, absolute immobility is itself part of We might say then that the new has to involve practices that somehow trans­ the speed vector. form the very subject who is 'looking' for the new, looking to become something different. Such practices will necessarily have a subjective and possibly non­ scientific and introspective character ( that is, will not necessarily involve The 'care of the self' 'knowledge'). In fact, such practices will look very suspect indeed from the point of view of knowledge (science/the human sciences), involving as they do such a This question of a kind of knowledge, which is in fact not knowledge in the typi­ mutable subjective position. We might identify here one of the reasons that intro­ cal sense, is addressed in some detail in the late writings and lectures of spective technologies (such as meditation) are taken less seriously than those Foucault.3 Indeed, for Foucault, there is a form of knowing, what Foucault calls apparently more evidence based and, more prosaically, the reason why art prac­ truth, that breaks with the subject as he or she is typically produced. This truth, tice, especially in its most expanded - deterritorialized - form (performance, which cannot be communicated as it were, and which is primarily a concern installation and the like) is viewed so suspiciously by research funding bodies. of the self, necessarily involves a transformation of given subjectivity. Briefly, in this late work Foucault outlines what he calls the founding Carte­ sian moment in the sciences and humanities, where the subject as constituted Schizo analysis becomes the basis for the verification of 'facts' about the world. Here 'truth' is tied to proof and 'knowledge' becomes merely a question of evidence already We can look to Guattari's solo writings for another kind of understanding of the apparent to the subject. In this place the new - as it is figured in science, or causes of subjectivity as it is and for the possibilities, in fact specific technolo­ indeed, the humanities - is really just more of the same (more 'knowledge' as gies, for its transformation.8 Schizoanalysis involves a different cartography it were). Certainly in the Academy knowledge is increasingly figured as a kind of and for subjectivity, one not overdetermined by Oedipus (tied as this is to a of possession in this sense and subjectivity is seen as merely a vessel of sorts that certain regime of knowledge, and indeed to a certain organization of power). wants 'filling up'. It might well be argued that this has been the case since Guattari offers us an update of Foucault's care of the self not least in his careful Descartes, but certainly in what might be called the informationization of consideration of the role of new technologies in the production of contempo­ society this understanding of the role of the Academy is increasingly dominant.4 rary subjectivity. To think back for a moment to what I have already said about Such knowledge tends not to challenge a given subject but rather to reassure Spinoza, we can say that the new for Guattari most definitely involves a recom­ him or her of his or her identity as is.5 bination of sorts, the production of different encounters in and with the world Foucault compares this understanding of knowledge/truth with another (this, we might say, was the operating logic, as Guattari saw it, of the clinic at tradition - that of the 'care of the self' - where a certain kind of production La Borde, that is a realm of heterogeneous encounter). In fact, this will involve of subjectivity is the cause and the effect of truth, the latter understood here in different combinations of matter, but also a moving at different speeds (for a more experiential way. That is to say then, there is a kind of knowledge or example, a slowing down in a similar manner to that which we sawwith Bergson). 96 Deleuze, Guattari and the Produaion of the New The Care of the Self 97

Crucial here is also the opening up to an 'outside' however this is thought (oth­ freedom from the present plane of existence or from the numerous controls erwise the system is closed). There are always two faces to any given assemblage and classifications on and of the latter.9 Certainly when we get to this 'outside' in this sense (including, we might say, any given subjectivity), one looking we might well find Capital has always already arrived there ahead of us (or, at inwards, one looking outwards. A principle of cohesiveness and one of escape. least, 'appears' to have always already been there). An autopoiesis and an allopoiesis. To a certain extent Guattari's collaborations with Deleuze go some way to Guattari calls the relation/interpenetration of these two the 'diagram'. The addressing these problems and in that they move away from the diagram, in Guattari's terminology, articulates the relation between a non­ topolOgical models I have looked at so far and develop a different approach to discursive and asignifying virtual (what Guattari calls incorporeal universes/ the problem. Capitalism, in its advanced stage, produces a variety of types of existential territories) and a discursive and signifying actual (enunciative assem­ subjects.1o Indeed, capitalism operates through deterritorialization and decod­ blages/actualized discursive components) (1995: 58-59). An 'individual' is the ing, hence producing schizophrenics, but also potential revolutionaries (as relationship between these two. So, in each case, we need to ask: what are an well as, of course, other (Oedipalized) subjectivities). Which is to say, for individual subject's virtual capacities? Or, how much of the virtual is available to Deleuze and Guattari, today, there is not really a production of subjectivity that any given individual? (In fact, it is not an individual's virtual, but rather a specific operates 'outside' capitalism (although there might be the production of some­ 'individual' is a part of the virtual that has been actualized). This outside - or thing . . .).u What does this mean in terms of strategy for the production of virtual- is again the 'new' element that changes the system or subject. difference? Well, it might mean not 'resisting' capitalism in the usual sense, but Elsewhere Guattari writes well on how this is a specifically aesthetic process. rather accelerating it, following some of capitalism's lines of flight and pushing Looking to the writings of Mikhail Bahktin he alerts us to the importance of a these breakthroughs further. Working to unblock the blockages, the reterritori­ rupture or glitch, a break in a dominant regime that itself holds the possibility alizations on the flows. Such is the message of Anti-Oedipus. it is never a question of something new (the germ of a different world) (1996: 198-99). Something of withdrawal from the world market, but of moving in exactly the opposite happens - a molecular event, a point of indeterminacy - that knocks us off direction (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 239). course and on to another vector, producing a mutant line of desire. In passing For myself however this is only a kind of answer, in that it is not entirely clear it is worth remarking that a certain kind of disinterested subject is required for how such a deterritorialized subject might cohere and act in the world (put this operation to work, and further that the rupture itself needs to be followed simply the rupture or breakthrough can produce a general collapse of subjec­ by new refrains, new habits. tivity). Hence for Deleuze and Guattari too, I think, the move to the more cautious work of A Thousand Plateaus with its emphasis on 'dosages' and on the strategic relation between territory and deterritorialization.12 There is also in Digression: capitalism this latter work a more careful thinking through of what acceleration might actually involve. In fact, as I mentioned briefly above, it is not so much that At this point I want to bring up a problem, or a further question, that might there is a difference between an acceleration/disintegration of subjectivity equally be asked in relation to Foucault, and indeed to Bergson and to Spinoza. within capitalism's flows and then some kind of withdrawal from these flows, for Namely, are these practices that Guattari and Foucault map out, practices that with both a certain speed is at stake. An absolute speed of intensity rather than involve contact with - and the utilization of - a certain or 'outside' to extensity that is opposed to the relative movement of the state. It is the careful typical experience irreducible to capitalism? Or does capitalism in fact also and pragmatic rethinking of speed, and the constructive nature of A Thousand always involve a line to an outside like this? Certainly capitalism's modus operandi Plateaus - the models it offers us for new and different forms of organization/ is the colonization of new outsides (new sites of production, new markets). As subjectivation, paradigmatically with the war machine - that, for myself, makes such it would seem logical that this virtual potential if it is in anyway accessible it more useful (at least for the production of art or subjectivity) then Anti­ would be harnessed, and indeed it would seem to me that the chemical and Oedipus. In fact, I would argue that an emphasis on cohesiveness, on a biological industries for instance, as well as the mass media and military-politico consolidated territory, is needed before anything new can either be identified establishment, do indeed plug into this virtuality (with the patenting of genetic or utilized. This amounts to saying that a ruptur'e or acceleration on its own is material and the strategic use of pre-emptive political/military strategy we seem not enough and that the production of subjectivity is nothing if not a proces­ to be witnessing a colonization of the virtual of sorts, an 'ontological turn' of sual and constructive project. capitalism). At this point then I want to qualify my remarks above on Bergson The question then is not whether capitalism also colonizes the virtual/pro­ as it does not seem clear that contact with the virtual in and of itself produces duces the new - it most certainly does - but rather what types of relationship ,~~~-~ ~ ~- --~ -~-

I 98 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The Care of the Self 99

might there be with the virtual, with the new and so on. "Which are conducive to Also needing serious consideration is the time we spend with art, and indeed joy, as Spinoza might have it, and which are to do merely with increasing igno­ the other different temporalities caught up with art in general: the time it took rance, control, sadness and ultimately paralysis? And further, which types of to make, the time of day/the seasons when we encounter it (a whole atmos­ relationship might playa part in a more processual project of construction? pherics), and so forth. In opening up a plurality of temporalities something Another way of putting this is to ask what kinds of sustained relationships do, or happens to our own. We access different durations. In each of these cases it is our can, different kinds of individual subject have with 'their' outside, a question active participation with, and not our passive reception of, art that is crucial that invariably is one about actual practice. (again, this partiCipation might well involve a certain stillness). The crucial factor here is the production of something different, but also our encounter and engagement with this difference. Art practice and introspection Art then is a recombination of matter - a scenario/situation is set up, condi­ tions put in place - but art is also that which the recombination of elements "What then are the specific technologies available to existing subjectivities for allows. Ultimately such a recombination, and that which arises from this recom­ accessing an outside? I want to end this essay with a statement of intent: to bination, can never be totally planned but must always involve a contact with explore the actual lived-processes that allow for travel into the virtual, that pro­ chance, with an outside to conscious control, or simply an outside to typical duce the new. IS And as a beginning I want to offer up two here, each of which subjectivity. In a sense, art is the name for this technology of contact with an are involved in what Foucault might call the 'care of the self, especially when outside to our 'selves' as well as a name for the different kinds of assemblages the latter is updated by writers such as Guattari with his attention to the poten­ and constructions that follow from this contact. tialities of new technology and to the vicissitudes oflate capitalism. Introspection Art practice I think that any serious project of the production of subjectivity will also involve Invariably, an exploration of such transformative technologies will involve atten­ attention being given to various introspective techniques, for example, medita­ tion being given to the kind of art (understood in its widest possible sense), tion.IS This is to say that the production of the new does not just involve a new which, as I have suggested elsewhere, operates at this cusp between the virtual cartography of subjectivity, but also the acting on that cartography. Following and the actual.I4 Art can involve the actualization ofa specifically different set Bergson, Spinoza and Guattari above we might say that like art bodies are also of virtualities; the production of a different kind of world. This will involve a on the edge between the virtual and the actual. However, more often than not, reaching forth to the future; that is to say, the art produced in this manner will our selves are concerned specifically with the actual, or what we might call the not necessarily be readable or understandable. Such art is not necessarily about world of utility. Hence the importance of Bergson's gap between stimulus and 'knowledge', or for a subjectivity already in place (as Deleuze often remarks, response, the 'slowing down' that in and of itself allows for a creative response the people for true art are invariably missing), but to draw a new subjectivity to the world. We might note in passing that Deleuze's other precursor, Nietzsche, forth. Art has this strange prophetic function: it is made in the present, from likewise called for a practice of idleness in order to foster genuine thought.I6 In the materials at hand, but calls out to something else. This is its future both cases this is a kind of super-productivity arising from a specifically non­ orientation. productive (in capitalist terms) state. Stillness producing a certain 'speed', or We would also need to attend here to the importance of aesthetic processes intensity, of thought. In fact, in order to really maintain a gap between stimulus in general - those constructive ruptures - that are not necessarily held within and response, a certain tension, or alertness, is required. Another name for this art but that nevertheless effect a deterritorialization of subjectivity (Guattari's is samadhi meditation. We might say that meditation involves a sustained and molecular revolutions/mutant lines of desire, Deleuze and Guattari's stuttering conscious 'vacuole of non-communication', the cultivation of awareness of ones and stammering minorities, and so forth). It is these affective~vents and reactive self (as a preparation for further enquiry). Indeed, just by being aware moments of non-sense that connect us with the virtual, with 'our' outside. There of one's habitual reactions the latter are subtly altered (again, some space - are also the different technologies 'within' art, for example film. Such technol­ a gap - is opened up). Here meditation, or introspection, becomes a technology ogies, as Deleuze demonstrates in his Cinema books, carry on Bergson's intuitive of transformation. It allows us to move from a narrow or reactive mode of method - to think beyond the 'human' - outside philosophy. These technolo­ being to one that is more open and creative. I would argue that ultimately any gies give access to different space-times beyond our typical configuration. break in habit, any 'new' way of being in the world, must at some level involve 100 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The Care ofthe Self 101 a first moment of this awareness and indeed a moment of non-reaction, that is "before". Eternity is the time that comes before. It is indeed the power of ultimately to pleasure or pain (that is to say, a certain disinterestedness). accumulated life, of an irreversible and indestructible temporality; it is the com­ mon name of the being that is. Every kairos is installed in this eternity' (2003: 165). Such attention to the self also reveals a certain truth about subjectivity; that The contribution that Negri might make to my own discussion of the production the latter consists more or less solely of habit. This insight too involves a certain of the new would require a further essay. Suffice to say, Negri's kairos is an orienta­ practice of introspection another name for which is vipasana, or insight medita­ tion or intention of sorts - an oblique and restless line drawn away from linear tion. Meditation in this second sense is a pragmatic seeing into the ever-changing time. In fact, although Negri pitches kairos against the 'temporal flux' of an elan aggregates that make up ourselves. We might say vipasana meditation allows vital, the former has, it seems to me, much in common with Bergson's gap. access to that realm from which the 'I' is an extraction. In Bergsonian terms S In what follows I am drawing particularly on Foucault's lecture series at the College it allows us to travel into the virtual (and the brain-body apparatus that actual­ deFrance (Foucault, 1995). izes this virtual becomes altered in that very actualization). In Spinozist terms it 4 As Guattari remarks in his essay on 'The Ecosophic Object' and in relation involves a specifically different kind of knowledge (a knowledge that arises from to his new aesthetic paradigm: 'A systematic rejection of subjectivity in the contact with a certain reality, the ground of our being, which invariably involves name of mythical scientific objectivity continues to reign in the University' a change in understanding in whomsoever intuits it). A genuinely new kind of (1995: 133). 5 We can usefully compare this with what Deleuze says about recognition in Differ­ subject (or non-subject?) must involve some sense, some awareness, of this ence and Repetition, and about the 'genuine encounter' that always upsets the latter, ground, this Outside. Meditation is then not a withdrawal from 'reality' but a forcing us to thought (see especially p. 139). confrontation with the latter as it is incarnated in our selves and as it forms the 6 See for example Badiou, 2001, or for more detail Badiou, 2005. For Badiou a background to our selves. In a sense it takes the battle against a certain form of human becomes a subject by acting in accordance with an event that is irreconcil­ grasping, the 'debilitating consumerism' that Guattari refers to in Chaosrrwsis, able with the situation in which it occurs. Fidelity to the event then involves a right to its core (1995: 122). This is a confrontation with our essential craving, working against 'oneself, and specifically against one's self interest (or habits). but also a contact with a realm of potentiality that those habits invariably attempt The event is not to do with knowledge as such, but with that which is .irreducible to, to efface. we might even say that which produces a rupture in, knowledge. In passing it is What I have said here briefly in relation to art and meditation amoUIits to worth noting a key difference between Badiou and the late Foucault (or indeed suggesting that there is a creativity of practice (of being an active participant in Spinoza); for the former one cannot prepare for the unexpected event; for the one's life (and this might include the apparently paradoxical situation of an latter, preparation (that is, a programme; technologies of the self) is the very con­ dition of the event. active stillness (simply, awareness») and a creativity of mere spectatorship/ 7 That is not to say that reading, or writing, might not be just such a practice or consumption. The 'creativity' of commerce and commodities, of advertising indeed that a 'reader' might not put such writings into practice in unexpected and endless novelty that is just more of the same. In the latter there is no real ways. As Guattari remarks in 'The Ecosopic Object', and in relation to his own new invitation to participation, and as such no genuine production of difference. cartography of subjectivity: 'Conceptual tools open and close fields of the possi­ Whether this practice be in the studio, or in life in general, such a production ble, they catalyse Universes of virtuality. Their pragmatic fallout is often of difference will necessarily involve accessing a realm beyond that practice, unforeseeable, distant and different. Who knows what will be taken up by others, if only to return once more equipped with new perspectives, new tools. for other uses, or what bifurcations they will lead to!' (1995: 126). We need only add here that a new subjectivity also requires new habits to follow 8 In the following remarks on Guattari I am drawing on the key essay 'Schizoana­ from any rupture, new refrains that cohere an assemblage together in a differ­ lytic Metamodelisation' in his major text Chaosmosis (1995: 58-76). ent way. The production of the new, in this sense, is something that can only be 9 The case with Spinoza is perhaps more complex. The question here is whether 'decided' upon experientially - and, we might say, experimentally. The test as Spinoza's third kind of knowledge is irreducible to capitalism'S axiomatics, or, more scarily, whether it is compatible with them. Insofar as the former is to do to whether it is liberating or controlling, whether it produces joy or sadness, is with a kind of non-conceptual understanding (or awareness) it would seem that it the test of life. is indeed irreducible to the latter. Certainly the 'knowledge' one acquires here cannot be communicated and cannot be comm09ified. Nevertheless there might Notes be a sense in which capitalism can market a promise of this state (witness the mas­ sive 'self-help'/New Age market). In fact, I would argue that any genuine knowledge - in terms of understanding/demonstrating causes - is invariably 1 My brief synopsis generally follows Deleuze's reading (see Deleuze, 1988b). opposed to those subjectivating processes of capitalism that work to maintain 2 Antonio Negri articulates this Bergson-Spinoza resonance of the eternal with the past well in his essay on kairos. 'We will then give the name "eternal" to the time a certain ignorance (or simply sad affects). 1 I

I 102 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The Care of the Self 103

10 In fact, in Anti-Oedipus the production of a subject, or a series of subject-states, is Foucault, M. (1995), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France a side/after effect of the workings of capitalism, itself understood as a mode of 1981-82. London: Palgrave. desiring-production. To condense the complex argument of the third section of Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, a 'subject of enjoyment' is produced at different J. Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications. moments as a synthesis, or consummation of sorts (and also a residuum) between Guattari, F. (1996), 'Subjectivities: for better and for worse', in The Guattari Reader, the productivity of the desiring-machines (attraction), and the anti-production of ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 198-99. the Body without Organs (repulsion). The subject in this sense is always in pro­ Negri, A (2003), Time for Revolution, trans. M. Mandarini. London: Continuum. cess, but at any given moment is the result of a retroactive recognition, as Deleuze Nietzsche, F. (2001), The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge and Guattari say: 'So it's me!' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 20). See especially University Press. 16-22. O'Sullivan, S. (2006a), ' for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for 11 For a more thorough thinking through of this production see O'Sullivan, Probe-Heads' ,Journal for Cultural Research, 10.4, 311-22. 2006a. O'Sullivan, S. and Stahl, O. (2006b), 'Contours and Case Studies for a Dissenting 12 See especially the plateau 'November 28, 1947: How Do You Build Yourself a Subjectivity (or, How to Live Creatively in a Fearful World)', Angelaki, 11.1, Body Without Organs?' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 149-66). 147-56. 13 I also attend to some of these in O'Sullivan, 2006b. O'Sullivan, s. (2006c), Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond 14 See O'Sullivan, 2006c. Representation. London: Palgrave. 15 In mapping out his own framework for the production of subjectivity Guattari Spinoza, B. (1989), Ethics, trans. A Boyle. London: Everyman. himself dismisses meditation - at least 'transcendental meditation' - as simply 'a withdrawal into oneself and thus having no part to play in 'a genuine virtual ecology' (1995: 120). I would argue that on the contrary meditation can be precisely a means of accessing a virtual ecology; there is only an apparent withdrawal as it were. 16 See 'Leisure and Idleness', aphorism 329 in The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 2001: 18~4).

Bibliography

Badiou, A (2001), Ethics: An Essay On the Understanding ofEvil, trans. P. Hallward. London: Verso. Badiou, A (2005), Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham. London: Continuum. Bergson, H. (1935), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R A Audra, C. Brereton, with W. Horstall-Carter. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Bergson, H. (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1988a), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1988b), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. M.Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R Hurley, M. Seem and H. R Lane. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London: Athlone. ,t I

I Ways ofExpressing 'Becoming/Thinking' 105

children's books, called Books for Little Girls, are in fact the starting point of Deleuze's thinking about a logic of sense. There is, we are told, the immediate Chapter 10 pleasure of, among other things, logical and linguistic formalism and a pro­ found psychoanalytic content. Yet Carroll's books, particularly, Alice's Adventures Thirty-four (New) Ways of Expressing in Wonderland, are said to contain something that is 'over and above', all this. They contain 'a play of sense and non-sense' consummated in 'the marriage 'Becoming/Thinking' Through the Literary oflanguage and the unconscious' (Deleuze, 1990: xiii). Although the playful Work of Art and Sexuality language games of seem to be commensurate with a general Deleuzean framework, we might be surprised to find Deleuze engaging with psychoanalaysis. But if we follow the advice ofJean :Jacques Lecercle, let us not Dorothea Olkowski dismiss this too quickly, but follow it out to see what its implications might be (Lecercle, 102). That is, what is this consummated marriage oflanguage and the unconscious, sense and non-sense? In what manner do these terms form series and what is new about such series and systems? "Why literature? "Why sense? Series, as the author has written in a previous work, are constituted by the dif­ ferences between each of the terms that enters into them. Two or more series In his comprehensive book on Deleuze and language, Jean:Jacques Lecercle can generate a system when they communicate under the impetus of a force, makes note of Gilles Deleuze's opposition to linguistics as a system in equilib­ some differentiator that relates differences in the series to one another. Such rium, a simple machine like an incline or a pulley, an object of science whose relations are called couplings and can be derived from internal resonances and variations arise only in expression. By contrast, writers of literature know that oscillations between these series (Deleuze, 1994: 17; Olkowski, 1999: 186-88). language can be a system in perpetual imbalance, a system affected by forces On the surface of it, these explanations make a sort of sense. They utilize the moving it, so that literature is on par with or superior to linguistics, and that language we have come to expect from Deleuze. But the question remains, only literature and not linguistics is adequate to the needs of philosophers. 1 what is the system that calls for series and a logic of sense? What is the role of Much of Deleuze's critique oflinguistics is directed towards the imperialism of the thirty-four series? How can something be generated by the differences the signifier. The signifier is that part of the sign which refers to a state of between each of the terms that enters into them? And what is this something affairs, its qualities and real relations so that a word comes to be associated with that is generated? To make sense of sense, let us begin by investigating the Idea an image that ought to represent that state of affairs. It is against the notion of of difference and the differences that give rise to series in a logic of sense. As the signifier as a representation transcending that which it represents that has been well noted, in his previous work Deleuze articulates the Idea of differ­ Deleuze will propose a logic of sense. And it is against linguistics that Deleuze ence by utilizing some of the basic concepts inherent in differential calculus will propose not an alternative linguistics, but a logic of sense manifest in the (Deleuze, 1994: 170-74). 'The basic operation of differential calculus is the literary work of art and in sexuality. But what is a logic of sense? process known as differentiation [whose aim is] ... to obtain the rate of change Deleuze's book, The Logic of Sense, is a volume consisting of thirty-four series of some changing quantity. In order to do this, the "value" or "position" or plus appendices. The series in The Logic of Sense cover topics in language, logic "path" of that quantity has to be given by means of an appropriate formula' and psychoanalysis that are somewhat surprising in their range and seemingly (Devlin, 1994: 86). Newton and Leibniz developed the rules for differentiating unrelated from a common sense point of view. These topics include the nature complicated functions by starting from the formula for a curve and calculating of the linguistic , the relation between bodies and language, the the formula for the gradient (or steepness) of that curve by taking small differ­ logical categories of connection, conjunction and di~unction, nonsense, good ences in the x and y directions and computing the gradients of the resultant sense and common sense, the transcendental field, representation, event, time, straight lines - the gradient function is called the derivative of the original func­ sexuality, and thought itself. In his very brief preface, Deleuze says little to tion. 'The crucial step . . . was to shift attention from the essentially static inform his readers regarding the generation of series and the purpose of a logic situation concerning a gradient at a particular point P to the dynamic process of sense, revealing only that it stands in relation to a work of literature and a of successive approximation of the gradient [of the curve] by gradients of school of philosophy. Reversing the order of time, Deleuze titles the preface straight lines starting at P' (Devlin, 1994: 87-88, 90). Additionally, 'Leibniz had 'From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics', and at first it appears as if Carroll's famous shown that calculus ... expressed problems which could not hitherto be solved 106 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Ways ofExpressing 'Becoming/Thinking' 107 or, indeed, even posed (transcendent problems)', problems such as the com­ of a sign is the object itself, the idea is wholly subjective and the sense ... is plete determination of a species of curve or, problems characterized by the somewhere in between (Frege, 1960: 36-40). The difficulties encountered in paradox of Achilles and the tortoise (Deleuze, 1994: 177). But if we. wish to attempting to define and understand sense do not end by distinguishing it from make determinations beyond a single curve, is there a means to make 'a com­ reference. If one is satisfied with only the idea or thought, there is no need to plete determination with regard to the existence and distribution of ... [regular go beyond sense to reference. But, Frege asserts, we are not satisfied with merely and singular] points which depends upon a completely different instance', an the thought and the sense wherever we are concerned with truth value. Works instance characterized in terms of a field of vectors (Devlin, 1994: 44). The goal of art such as poetry and literature are of interest only with respect to the sense then is to explicitly link differential equations and vector fields. of their sentences and the images and feelings they give rise to. The difference A vector field is defined, by Deleuze, as the complete determination of a between sense and reference then, is a difference between aesthetic delight problem given in terms of the existence, number and distribution of points that and scientific investigation. Thus, 'we are driven into accepting the truth are its condition. The rules of association (connection), commutation (disjunc­ value of a sentence as constituting its reference' (Frege, 1960: 42). Every declar­ tion) and distribution (conjunction) define vector space without reference to ative sentence concerned with the reference of its words must be either true or magnitude or direction, thus they may be utilized in a variety of areas whose false insofar as the truth value of a sentence is its reference. All true sentences terms are not material or physical. This allows us to apply the principles of will then ultimately have the same reference as will all false sentences. In this mathematical vector fields to the sphere of language, to find in them a logic of way we can see that true and false obliterate anything and everything specific sense. The rules governing vector fields have their equivalents in logic where and that true and false propositions are often concerned with what is defmed association is an expression oflogical equivalence permitting the valid regroup­ as judgement, that is, with passing from the thought to the reference. ing of simple propositions; it governs the relations, that is, the connections Deleuze's own take on the proposition is instructive; he treats it as a trajec­ between subject and predicate. Commutation permits the valid re-ordering tory, a curve, where association, commutation and distribution immanently of inclusive, disjunctive (either/or) statements.2 In categorical propositions, determine the field within which propositions are generated as series. Deleuze distribution of a term is permitted if it refers to all members of a class (Devlin, begins with a restatement of the standard account of the nature of the proposi­ 1994: 86--87). In syllogistic logic, this would be expressed as conjunction or con­ tion as found, for example, in the work of . Using slightly nection. The rule of generation of a vector field is commutative. In logic, this different terminology than Frege, Russell argues that language has three pur­ means that statements may initially be combined in any order. If a vector field poses: to indicate facts, to express the state of the speaker and to alter the state such as language is generated by rules whose immanent, regulative functions of the hearer. Subjectively, every assertion is the expression of the speaker's are associative, commutative and distributive, each of these, as mathematicalor beliefs, and objectively, it indicates a fact, something that is true or false. True logical operations reflects a view of this field as the power of things to exist one and false sentences are taken to be equally significant but if a string of words by one without any possibility of them being gathered together bya transcend­ does not express the state of the speaker, meaning, her beliefs, then it is non­ ent unity.3 Instead, they are connected immanently through differential sense and will have no impact on the hearer.4 With respect to the first purpose, relations. Deleuze states that when the proposition relates to an external individuated With this, we begin to see how a logic of sense is formulated in terms of a state of affairs, we simply call this denotation (1990: 12). The denotating intui­ series of linguistic, spatial and temporal paradoxes, each of which is compara­ tion associates words with images that represent the state of affairs. The words ble to a curve. But making sense of sense requires a foray into language itself. that denote are not universals but pure designators or indexicals, thus context According to Gottlob Frege's famous account of sense and reference, it is natu­ dependent but in the following sense. True means the denotation is fulfilled by ral to think that for any given sign, such as a word, there is a reference. The the state of affairs, false, that it is not. With respect to Russell's second purpose, reference of the words 'evening star' is exactly the same as that for the words expressing the state of a speaker, Deleuze utilizes the concept of manifestation. 'morning star'. The sense, however, of each of these two signs is not the same. It refers either to the internal causality of an image with respect to an object or The best that Frege can say about sense is that opinions as to the sense of any state of affairs, the desire for that 0 bj ect, or to the external causality of a state of sign may vary and that terms such as, 'the celestial body furthest from earth' affairs, the belief in its existence (Deleuze, 1990:'13). Concerning the purpose may have a sense but certainly not reference. Moreover, the same sense is not of altering the state of the hearer, Deleuze is initially silent. Instead, he passes always connected, even for the same person, with the same associated idea, on to the notion of signification, Frege's judgement, passing from thought to which Frege defines as an internal image arising from memories of sensory referent by means of an inference that places the proposition under universal impressions which are often saturated with feeling. In short, the reference or general concepts. This, of course, requires, minimally, the conditional 108 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Ways ofExpressing 'Becoming/Thinking' 109 inference, called logical implication, which brings into play the rules of vector An Arendt ( ean) interlude fields. 'Implication involves some kind of causality', if p, then q where p is the condition under which a proposition q would be true (Devlin, 1994: 47). As In The Life of the Mind, One/Thinking, focuses on the thinking Russell noted, the proposition may be false ifit designates a nonexisting state of ego in relation to its sheer thinking activity. It is folly, she insists, to conclude affairs, thus signification raises the possibility of error, meaning, the causal rela­ from our experience of the activity of thought, that there are things-in-them­ tion, whether internal or external, may not hold. Within the domain of selves which exist in the intelligible sphere in the same manner as we exist in language, the language system, the realm of propositions without speakers or the world of appearances. Nevertheless, this semblance of reason persists. The listeners, subjects or objects, signification is, of course, primary. You might say, question then arises, is this semblance caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary without subjects or objects, only signification exists. Without signification, that assumptions that disappear on inspection or is it inherent in the paradoxical is, without universal or general concepts, Deleuze maintains, the causality of condition of a living being who is part of the world of appearance but possesses desire would evaporate into need and that of belief would evanesce into opin­ a mind that may withdraw from that world without being able to leave or tran­ ion, neither of which require a concept (Deleuze, 1990: 14-15). scend it? (Arendt, 1977: 43-45). The problem may be stated simply - thinking As necessary as inference may be, it leads to a 'delicate problem'. In logic, asso­ can seize every object except its own thoughts and this gives rise to doubts ciation is an expression oflogical equivalence permitting the valid regrouping of about the reality of the world, a reality we call appearance. Reality, she reasons, simple propositions; it governs the connections between subject and predicate. consists of a worldly context of perceptions and perceivers whose senses are Given a hypothetical statement, 'if p, then q', it consists of a relation between two working together.8 (Arendt, 1977: 50). This is, she notes, why art is not exactly propositions, 'p', and 'q' which can be reformulated using truth tables to arrive reality, that is, works of art transform sense objects into thought-things by tear­ at its logical equivalent, 'not p or q'.5 This valid, logical reformulation has remark­ ing them, first of all, out of their sensible context to de-realize them and prepare able consequences. It separates or tears apart the causal order of the inference, them for a new function, afunction related to Deleuze's logic ofsense. 9 (Arendt, making it possible to reorder the propositions, to disturb their causal linearity, trans­ 1977: 49). Is it not the case, she asks, that a pure thinking thing, an ego cogito, forming causality into di~unction. As Deleuze expresses this, the conclusion can without a body and sense would not even know that there is such a thing as be detached from the premises. The result is that implication does not actually reality and could not distinguish between various states in the realm of appear­ ground denotation, for there is circularity between ground and grounded.6 It is ance? Thus, the fact "that each object appears in a different perspective to this problem in particular that leads Deleuze to a new logic, the logic of sense, a each individual is not at all a barrier. It is, rather, a fundamental indication of fourth dimension of the proposition, sense as the expressed of the proposition. the similarities between sense-endowed perceivers that gives rise to the general He attributes it to the Stoics, to writers ofliterature , such as Lewis Carroll, who are sensation of reality, which Arendt refers to as the sixth sense or Ie bon sens not satisfied with words, things, images, and to a version of psychoanalysis (good sense).10 Unlike whatever is present to the senses, thought withdraws (Deleuze, 1990: 19-20). Sense is neither a logical nor a linguistic category, attrib­ from sensibles to think invisibles; thus intellectis in the world, immanent we may utable to neither a subject nor an object. It is, rather, the boundary between say, and grasps what is given to the senses, searching for the truth of that given, propositions and things, an expression of the paradoxes created by signification but only reason understands its meaningY (Arendt, 1977: 51-52, 57). The turning every 'if ... then', into'or ... or'. In other words, following the mathe­ ancient Greeks spoke of truths of reason, such as mathematical reasoning, matical model, the boundary determines what takes place on either side. This meaning, something necessary whose oppOSite is impossible. They differenti­ boundary condition is the paradoxical element, the affirmation of two opposing ated this from truths of fact, which are contingent and whose oppOSite is directions at once. Paradox is, as Hannah Arendt once noted, inherent in the possible. But insofar as a distinction can be made between truth and meaning, condition of a living being who is part of the world of appearance but simultane­ then there are no truths above factual truths that are scientifically verifiable, ously possessed of a mind that may withdraw from the world in order to think, and to expect truth to come from thinking is to confuse the need to think with even while remaining immanent to that world (Arendt, 1977: 45). And thinking, the urge to know. When thinking is employed by knowing, it is only as the hand­ it is clear, is language based, leading to the problem of how to have a system of maiden of science.12 language that is not linguistics, but that emerges as sense out of the literary work Of course thinking is as important as knowing. Without the need to think we of art and out ofsexuality. In order to get a better view of sense, to understand the would lose the capacity to produce 'thought-things', such as works ofvisual and paradox produced by the coincidence of appearance and thinking; let us step literary art, although in and of itself, thinking leaves nothing tangible in its aside for a moment and follow the model proposed by Lecercle to participate in wake. Still, the distinction formulated so carefully by Kant, between knowledge a philosophical interlude, an interlude suggested by Arendt's definition.7 that uses thinking and thinking that arises out of and only in relation to reason, r

\ 110 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Ways ofExpressing 'Becoming/Thinking' 111 was undermined by Kant's constant comparison of them. As Deleuze expresses activity of thought (Arendt, 1977: 122-23). It is this sheer activity that Deleuze this later, Kant allows the objects of undetermined Ideas to be determined by attempts to formulate with the logic of sense out of literature and sexuality, but analogy with objects of experience, but the T that thinks is not the ego that 'on the condition that meaning be nothing other than use, that it become a experiences time and is determined in time, and should not be confused frrm principle only if we have at our disposal immanent criteria capable of deter­ with it. The 'I think' should be forever split from the 'I am', and analogy, which mining the legitimate uses' (Deleuze, 1987: 109 (cited in Lecercle, 2002: 72». is to say, metaphor thereby disappears from thinking and from literature.13 Moreover, where truth, not meaning, is the ultimate criterion of mental activi­ ties, we may speak only of deception and illusion. In this, Kant 'is right only if Legitimate uses of sense reason, as the faculty of speculative thought does not move in the world of appearances' (Arendt, 1977: 64). In the world of thought, reason produces Stoicism is a poetic way of life. It asks us not to be unworthy of what happens sense and non-sense but never illusion and deception which belong only to com­ to us, to accept war, wounds and death, to long for death as an apotheosis of mon sense and sensation. Sense and non-sense belong to the realm of thinking the will. If thinking or sense is reason's need to actualize itself, it is just as much and thinking alone, by which we mean, that realm that has been pulled out of the will willing itself to will, it is pure activity. There must be an exchange of the the sensible and transformed into thought-things in the work of art. Thus we organic, physical will for the spiritual will - the event whose splendor and have the motivation for a logic of sense and non-sense. It is a logic that operates magnificence is sense (Arendt, 1977: 69; Deleuze, 1990: 148-49). But the solely in the realm of thinking, never in the realm of appearances. Given this, actualization of reason, will or judgement takes place, as we have noted, para­ what characteristics might we look for in a logic of sense? doxically, that is, in two opposed directions at once which then form a series as Such a question must be strongly correlated with another question. What they resonate in the vicinity of one another. Resonance is created by the con­ makes us think? The autonomy of mental activities implies that they are uncon­ structive interference of two waves which travel in opposite directions in a ditioned, that they exceed existential limits, that they are a pure activity that can medium. Sense is a system oriented, in one direction, towards appearance and be started and stopped at will, that mind is the master of its own activities and in the other, towards pure becoming, the pure activity of spiritual life. In one those of the passions. This is a theory, Arendt points out, that reached its climax direction, that which can be known, that which receives the action of the Idea, with the Stoics, who tended to equate soul with mind (Arendt, 1977: 72-73). and in the other, that which outruns it in its ceaseless spiritual activity. In one Yet, thinking always transcends what is given by transforming it into an experi­ direction, language fixes the limits by naming; in the other direction, unlimited ment of self with self. And so, insofar as thinking implies withdrawing from the becoming. The resonance of these two directions produces a remarkable result. world, it came to be associated with death.14 Thinking cannot come into being The system will undergo reversals everywhere: cause and effect, before and except by withdrawing from 'the world's being present to the senses', even after, more and less, resulting in the loss of the ability to give names to things, though the mind must retain an intuition, making present what is absent employing paradox everywhere to disrupt good sense with its arrow of time (Arendt, 1977: 75). This means that thinking de-senses; it transforms the visible and common sense, the fixing of identities, all to affirm becoming, the spiritual world into invisible images (Arendt, 1977: 75, 77). Valorizing thinking above all will. Of course, there are still bodies with their mixtures and states of affairs, else, the philosopher turns common sense upside-down, absenting even her causes of other bodies, but now there are also incorporeal entities, events with own body as well as spatial and temporal distinctions. Only logical reasoning, sense, that is, logical attributes, dividing or differentiating themselves, as we where the mind is in strict consistency with its own laws, produces a deductive have argued above, by transforming every causal relation, every if ... then into chain from a given premise and cuts all strings to living experience because the or ... or. It is in this manner that everything seems to happen at the boundary premise is supposed to be self-evident and not subject to examinatioR by between things and propositions, bodies and the incorporeal. thought. Nevertheless, from the perspective of thinking, life in its utter there­ Sense does not exist outside of the proposition which expresses it in the act of ness is meaningless while from the perspective of life and the senses, thinking denoting the thing or state of affairs (Deleuze, 1990: 22). Iflanguage is fixated is living death and the philosopher appears to embrace this death (Arendt, on denotation, manifestation or signification it remains in the realm of the true 1977: 80, 85-87). This is made more problematic by the limitations inherent in and the false. This will not be literary language,lthe language of spiritual life, the realm of the Ideas of reason. In the realm ofIdeas, no metaphors illuminate what are sometimes called pure flows. Literary language expresses ideal events, this activity because all metaphors are taken from the senses and are merely sets of singularities or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a cognitive; they exist for the sake of knowledge, they are instruments for dealing physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are with the world; they do not express the sheer activity of the mind, the sheer unique mathematical points in vector fields. Recall Deleuze's use of calculus, I 112 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Ways ofExpressing 'Becoming/Thinking' 113 the definition of a vector field as the complete determination of a problem field organized by the good object (the unification of whatever is disjoined), given in terms of the existence, number and distribution of points that are its which is lost and withdrawn into the 'heights' .15 In this field is generated the id­ condition. We can see that this is the sense of sense, the direction in which it ego-superego out of the good object's distribution of love or hate. Its effects takes us. The field precedes its actualizations. In this manner it is 'pre-individual, hold if either one or both of its elements hold, thus its power. And here one non-personal, and a-conceptual ... indifferent to the individual and the collec­ finds the strongest effects where the nonsense noise of the body (id) clashes tive, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general - and to with the voice that speaks the Idea (super-ego) on the surface of the ego where their oppositions' (Deleuze, 1990: 52). Here, we can say that it is entirely the language is born (the body without organs). This is the genesis of the event lan­ manner in which unlimited becoming is connected (associated), conjoined guage from the psychoanalytic field. (distributed) and disjoined (commuted) that determines whether it forms In both instances, the promise that sense fulfills is to be the meeting place of human subjects, works of art or social institutions. And, both literature and sex­ appearance and thinking, beings and pure becoming, but only through bring­ uality are generated and generate language in relation to the rules governing ing the symptoms of depth into the organization of the surface, generating the mathematics of singular points and a physics of intensive quantities. In the literature and language out of the paradoxes created in their clash. The loss of literature of Lewis Carroll, we find events formed in series whose sequence may intimate sensibility is, it seems, the price we must pay for the new. And yet, let be reversed or displaced, or oscillating between reality and dream, denotation us not forget Arendt's final words on this. In all appearance, the ground does and expression. Esoteric words are formed in a connective synthesis that con­ not appear, that is, our bodily organs, our neuro-physiology, our sensibilities. tracts the syllabic elements of a single proposition ('y'reince' for your royal All we sense are inner sensations whose relentless succession prevents them Highness); or in a conjunctive synthesis of two series of heterogeneous proposi­ from assuming a lasting, identifiable shape. An unbroken sensation or mood tions or through the denotative and expressive dimension of propositions (the would indicate grave disorder, depression or mania. In spite of the Kantian equivocality of the word 'it'); or in the synthesis of disjunction, connoting two claim that what appears must have grounds that do not appear, things-in-them­ series such as the denotable and the sense bearing (neither the series fuming + selves, the fundamental ground of the appearing world is not the sheer activity furious = fuming nor the series fuming + furious = furious, but only fuming + of thinking which is becoming, but our inner organs, our depths. A pure think­ furious = frumious as the disjunction between the first two series) (Deleuze, ing thing, without a body, would not know that there is a reality or distinctions 1990: 42-47). such as awake-asleep, to eat-to speak (Arendt, 1977: 38-40, 42, 48). Thinking is But prior to literary language, in the genesis of sexuality, the three syntheses without a natural relation to reality; in withdrawing from the realm of the sensi­ of vector fields first create language. Although it is a bit tricky to connect the ble, it withdraws from the feeling of realness. In short, the primacy of what is embodied depth of sexuality with its surface, nevertheless, Deleuze boldly produced by our sensibility and appears to us over what does not appear at all, declares that regardless of what is happening in the depths of bodies, their must be considered, for no one has ever succeeded in living in pure becoming symptoms are manifest on the surface in the serial form of sexuality, in bodies and there is no pure becoming without sensibility and appearance (Arendt, without organs (pure surface) or words without articulations (no depths). 1977: 26). Thus, while we may not wish to once again empower linguistics, we These blocs of becoming are organized as surface phenomena and different might also ask about the limits of the logic of sense, its longing for death, moments of sexuality correspond to different kinds of series on that surface: its rejection of sensibility. For a philosophy of the new might also, it seems, connective, conjunctive and di~unctive. Erogenous zones are first generated consider that without sensibility and the effects of sensibility, appearance, the through connective series in the pregenital vector field where objects of suck­ pure becoming of thought disappears once and for all. ing and images of the oral zone become coextensive to and explore the orifices of the surface. As connective, every erogenous element is homogeneous, con­ Notes tracted into a connective synthesis of succession. In other words, polymorphous perversity is all. But out of this emerges a second synthesis conjunctively sub­ 1 See LecercIe, 2002: 65, 78-79; Olkowski, 1999: 211-34, and especially 217-19. suming the first. Images like 'mother' 'father' that had merely been connected For example: A (B + C) = A B + A C. See Copi ansi Cohen, 1994: 698. are now conjoined as 'mother and fathe? The conjoined parental image emerges 3 See Deleuze, 1990: 266-67. Here Deleuze refers to Nature as the vector field but out of homogeneous succession and now, distributed everywhere, it converges language operates in exactly the same way. around the vector field circumscribed by the oedipal image of the phallus. 4 See Russell, 1940: 204, 171. Russell also identifies propositions with psychological Disjunctive synthesis, a logical inversion of ~onjunction, the formal power to occurrences (1940: 186). I have taken this up previously (see Olkowski, 1999: separate what had been conjoined, works on the conjoined images in the vector 217-27). \ 114 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Ways ofExpressing 'Becoming/Thinking' 115

5 If P then q = (not p) or q. See Devlin, 1994: 48. Olkowski, D. (2006), 'The Limits of Intensity and the Mechanics of Death' ,inDeleuze 6 See Deleuze, 1990: 16. Deleuze's formulation of this problem is here more and Philosophy, ed. C. V. Boundas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. indirect and leads to a sort of infinite regress of propositions. Olkowski, D. (2007), The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible). Edinburgh and 7 In this, I am following the pattern established by Lecercle, who uses literary New York: Edinburgh and Columbia University Presses. interludes to make sense of sense. Russell, B. (1940), An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth. London: Allen and Unwin. S Reality in the world of appearances is characterized by standing still and remain­ ing the same long enough to become an object for acknowledgment and recognition by a subject (Arendt, 1977: 49). 9 The similarity of this view to Deleuze's later notion that art consists of percepts and affects, blocs of becoming, is startling. 10 See Deleuze, 1994: 133-34. Later, Deleuze will pick up the theme of good sense and common sense which together yield recognition. 11 See Arendt, 1977: 60-61. Arendt cites 's notion of the epoche, the suspension of the feeling of realness of things as the foundation of phenomeno­ logical science. 12 We see this position reflected in Deleuze and Guattari's "What is Philosophy? 13 See Olkowski, 2007: 72-73. See also Deleuze, 1994: 168-69. On metaphor see Lecercle, 2002: 25-27. 14 See Olkowski, 2006: 160-174. 15 So, 'not (p AND q) = (not p OR not q)'. But also '(not p) OR q = p implies q' the hypothetical and the formal expression of causality. See Deleuze, 1990: 224-27.

Bibliography

Arendt, H. (1977), The Life of the Mind, One/Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Carroll, L. (2003), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Penguin Classics. Copi, L M. and Cohen, C. (1994), Introduction to Logic. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale and C. V. Boundas, ed. C. V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), Anti-Oedipus, trans. R Hurley, M. Seem and H. R Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), "What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Devlin, K (1994), Mathematics, The Science ofPatterns. New York: Scientific American Library. Frege, G. (1960), 'Sense and Reference', in Translations from the Philosophical Writing; of Gottlob Frege, trans. and ed. P. Geach and M. Black. Oxford: BlackwelL Lecercle, J:J. (2002), Deleuze and Language. London: Palgrave. Olkowski, D. (1999), GiUesDeleuze and the Ruin ofRepresentation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Readymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel 117

For Badiou, events entail acts made in fidelity to an event that affirm the uncounted in a situation, rupturing that situation and transforming the habit­ Chapter 11 ual human animal into a human subject. We might say that for Deleuze, events involve practices and encounters that are registered through a bodily transforma­ tion of sorts whereas for Badiou, the event involves an action or what we might Readymades, Lavender Mist call a presentation that transforms or breaks with a situation. and Mirror Travel: This difference can be further elucidated through a consideration of chance. Indeed, it is what is at stake in 'the throw of the dice' that Badiou highlights as Deleuze, Badiou and the Time of Art Practice marking out a key difference between the two philosophers (2000: 85-88). For Deleuze, the throw of the dice is the eternal return (the return of the same but David Burrows different), each throw affirming the potential of creativity. Badiou, in rejecting Deleuze's Nietzschean orientation, identifies with Mallarme and views chance as a rare encounter with something that has an undecidable status and that seizes the individual. Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou offer important and productive ideas It would be a wrong to characterize Deleuze as an advocate of passivity in rela­ concerning art, the most significant being the notion of art as event. But equally tion to Badiou the man of action. In an interview, when discussing the concept important are the perspectives that art practice can itself provide on the differ­ of a line offlight (leakages that escape from molar identities through molecular ing orientations of Deleuze and Badiou, for it might be claimed that the two becomings) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 203-05), Deleuze suggests, ' ... to flee philosophers view the latter through the lens of specific philosophical is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a line offlight' (Deleuze, problems; neither address art practice's breadth or complexity, particularly in 2006: 27). It is important then to understand the way the two philosophers dif­ relation to art as an expanded practice.1 My intention in this essay then is to ferentiate action in relation to the event. Discussing Foucault's portrayal of the approach the problem of art as event from the perspective of specific prac­ human as constituted by four folds (folds of the body, of forces, of truth in rela­ tices, so as to engender a conversation between art practice and the two tion to us, and of a line of the outside folded to make interiority), Deleuze philosophers. poses a question: how far can lines be unfolded and refolded without bringing There is a complication to this proposal, however. For whilst Deleuze and about a fall into chaos or 'the breathless void that is death'? (Deleuze, 1995: Badiou both emphasize subtraction from existing human affairs and advocate 112). It is this unfolding and refolding of the intensities oflife that underpins affirmation as a style of thought, they are nevertheless often pitched against Deleuze's notion of action and that is in marked contrast to Badiou's notion of each other, not least by Badiou himself. Before proceeding further then, a key the act of fidelity to an event and its potential for breaking with a situation. We difference between the two needs to be sketched out, namely their specific con­ could say that for Deleuze an event is registered as a transformation or disrup­ ceptualizations of the event. In doing so I would like to point towards something tion of the habits and hierarchies that order the intensities that traverse the that is perhaps more interesting, that both these conceptualizations, or philo­ body: for Deleuze, events are immanent to a body and its hierarchies. In comparison, sophical orientations, are often found within art practice. Indeed, it is important Badiou is concerned with encounters that disrupt ontology, that interrupt or to emphasize that the impurity of art practice differentiates it from philosophy suspend the activities of naming and counting within a situation. In fact, Badiou and the purity of abstract thought. states that the event is always a breaking of the count (Badiou, 2001: 134-35). For Deleuze elucidates the notion of the event through a number of concepts: Badiou then, the event is a break that is immanent to the thinking of a situation. as different kinds of becoming (becoming girl or animal), as an encounter Finally, this difference is specifically played out in relation to art. Deleuze with images and signs that register virtual forces or different temporalities (such views artworks as 'blocs of affects' that capture forces and intensities; counter­ as art or cinema), and as an encounter that registers non-human durations actualizations which open or unfold the body so as to register the virtual. Badiou (such as Bergson's intuition as method). These various processes have been has a very different approach. He views art as the formalization of an act of described as contemplative and contrast markedly with Badiou's mathematical subtraction and a presentation of something (an inconsistent multiplicity) system of thought.2 Badiou's utilization of set theory posits that a set (or situa­ uncounted in a situation. tion) consists of other named or counted elements, but that there is also an While I would contend that both philosophers have identified something uncountable, empty set (multiplicity) around which a situation is arranged. important for art practice through their conceptualizations of the event, it would I 118 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New &adymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel 119 be unwise to pose these two orientations as opposites and equally unwise to when his Cubist paintings, submitted for the Salon des Independents exhibition, attempt to synthesize them. At best, they can be explored as antinomies: the were omitted for their unorthodoxy, despite the Salon's democratic principles. event is immanent to the body/the event is a break immanent to a situation. This double encounter with the two Societies prompts Duchamp (with possibly Importantly though, these antinomies can be said to coexist in art practice. This a few friends in on the joke) to submit an inverted urinal under the name of is true of any practice that acknowledges art is a presentation as well as a process of R. Mutt. Fountain (as an inscription of a situated void) was a difficult object to exploration. It is not that art has two axes; rather art practice is always a movement count as art and some members of the committee insist it should not be exhib­ across antinomies; one could say art practice is an oscillation between the body's ited. The Readymade is placed behind a screen, rendering it invisible to the hierarchies and the registers of a situation. What is important here is that this exhibition's visitors, and Duchamp resigns in protest from the committee. But oscillation is singular and distinctive in different art practices which realize the the story does not end there. As the Rantian art theorist Theirry de Duve argues, potential of this fluctuation in different ways and to varying degrees. The rest of the Readymade is both a Joke and test': ajoke that can be dismissed or found this essay, by means of examples, will attempt to explore the way in which art amusing but that can also be considered a test of what art can be (1998: 378).3 practice works through the antinomies outlined above, with the intention of De Duve emphasizes that not only is Fountain the result of Duchamp's chance understanding how art practice complicates and extends the concepts ofDeleuze encounter with the two Societies, but that the 'test' Duchamp sets up involves and Badiou. This involves, borrowing an idea from Deleuze, the drawing of a further work. Duchamp does not just deliver the urinal to the exhibition venue line between Deleuze and Badiou that will travel through specific art practices, but, as Badiou would say, he exposes himself to a post-evental fidelity. Fountain and that will at times run smoothly and at other times stutter and jump, neces­ is 'retrieved' by Duchamp and taken to the studio of the influential photogra­ sarily reflecting the two contrasting styles of thought being explored. pher Alfred Stieglitz who photographs the object, thus lending his influence to the cause of the Readymade. Stieglitz's photograph then illustrates a text pub­ lished in the Blind Man m3.0crazine, published by Duchamp and friends, in which The readymade is a presentation and a line offlight an anonymous author argues for the validity of Mr. Mutt's Fountain as a work of art. The Fountain disappears and is 'remade' several times and in miniature for In many ways, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) is an exemplar of Badiou's Duchamp's edition, the Bozte-en-valise (1935-41). Fountain's influence grows event. The philosopher states that an event produces a subject oftruth, that is, an steadily, transforming the situation of art over time. In this sense then, Fountain event is 'something that only happens to you' (Badiou, 2001: 51). This is a process is an event that is a break immanent to the thinking of a situation. which involves a rare encounter that forces an individual to consider something There is another line that can be traced through this episode though, a line previously 'uncounted' in a situation. An event seizes an individual who then that draws Fountain as one of a series of 'artworks' or points on a line offlight. exposes herself or himself to a 'post-evental fidelity' (Badiou, 2001: 46). For This line unfolds the habits and hierarchies of the body to explore an 'indiffer­ Badiou, such an event has two faces: 'thought in its being ... an uncertainty, ence' that paradoxically embraces both a machine-like detachment and an a fluctuation of desire' and 'thought in its name', the act of fulelity (Badiou, erotic and affective that traverses the body: a 'rewiring' of the body's 2005: 139-40). 'Thought in its name' is an embracing of an encounter that only hierarchies that short-circuits the tastes of educated men.4 Calvin Tomkins, in has significance through an individual's recognition of the event's potential to relation to the problem of taste and the Readymades, notes that Duchamp break with a situation. In terms of art, 'thought in its name' could be under­ stated, 'My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew per­ stood as the processes of practice and presentation. Further to this Badiou fectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between "I" and "we"' states that there is always a point of resistance to a situation that he refers to as (1997: 159-60). 'the unnameable' (Badiou, 2004: 66), which is something that cannot be com­ Significantly, in relation to unfolding the hierarchies of the body, it is impor­ municated (Badiou, 2001: 51). Instead, what is required is the inscription of the tant not to forget that in challenging the privileging of the retinal in art, unnameable or what Badiou terms the 'situated void' (Badiou, 2001: 69). Duchamp's affective and erotic jokes are registered by the body and not just the Is this theory of the event not an elucidation of the most famous story in mod­ mind; literally, in the case of Trap (1917), a coat rack fixed to the floor. When em art that introduces the most scandalous ofall the Readymades, with Duchamp 'making' Readymades, Duchamp claimed to have consciously selected objects as the episode's subject of truth? The story is worth revisiting. In 1917 Duchamp, that neither aesthetically pleased or displeased him but Duchamp's 'conceptual­ who was already a notorious figure, was invited to co-organize an exhibition for ism', which is concerned with the pleasures of unfolding and refolding words, the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The Society boasted the slogan images, identities and functions of objects, does not forgo the body.5 Bicycle "Wheel 'no judges, no prizes'. The artist had come across such a Society before in Paris (1913), an assemblage of a stool and a wheel that can be turned by hand, was I 120 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New r R.eadymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel 121 I invented as an amusement and a 'distraction' to look at and play with, as might ! emphasize the plane of the canvas. The event that is a break immanent to the think­ Wzth a hidden noise (1916) have been, an assisted Readymade that makes an ing of a situation, which Pollock and Greenberg would see, in part, as a break unfathomable rattling sound when picked up and shaken; and Belle Haleine with Picasso and the box-like illusion of the easel picture, is also elucidated by (1921) is a bottle of perfume adorned with the image of Rrose Selavy Greenberg in his interview with T.]. Clark. Greenberg says that through drip­ (Duchamp's female alter-ego whose name is a play on the words, 'Eros, c'est la ping paint Pollock found he could make painterly gestures that did not' cut', vie'). Fountain is perhaps the crudest and most affective of the Readymade that did not break the plane of the canvas. We might figure this in Badiou's jokes and the inversion and signature applied to the urinal cannot erase the vocabulary: the all-over 'flatness' of Pollock's canvases present that which is odour of urine or the act of pissing evoked by the object that no doubt upset the uncounted in painting, a break immanent to the situation of painting. Society of Independent Artists. In this way, the Readymades are gestures or But Pollock's work, viewed from a different perspective or scale, amidst the enunciations that arrest habit and that play upon memory and embodied knowl­ day-t

Badiou's emphasis on the act of presentation in art is a valuable idea for thinking Smithson and the time of the artist about art practice. However, the term fidelity, which Badiou's acts of presenta­ tion are bound up with, does not sit well with all art practice. Iffidelity refers to For Deleuze then, practice is an unfolding and refolding of the body, matter the 'invention of content' at the point of minimal difference, the process in and thought, to see what combinations can be made. For Badiou, art, as an which 'thought in its being' becomes 'thought in its name', then fidelity can be event, involves a twofold process, as thought in its being and thought in its name ~ I \ 124 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Readymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel 125 which is a presentation of a self-overcoming that breaks with a situation. The two time - what Smithson refers to as the coexistence of the far past with the far orientations very roughly mirror the territories of autonomous modern art and future -which marks him out from many of his minimalist and post-minimalist avant-garde art which can be considered as two vanishing mediators of contem­ contemporaries. porary art practice. Many artists in the 1960s and 1970s sustained investigations Of his most famous work, SpiralJetty, Smithson writes that the play of scale has that drew upon both traditions, an important example being the expanded art a key role in producing uncertainty for a viewer (1996: 146-47). He suggests practice of Robert Smithson whose specific interest in produces a very that through such a play of scale a crack can become the Grand Canyon and singular oscillation between these antinomies, one where the line that pulses that,. 'To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it' (1996: 147). The between antinomies is both fast and fluid. spiral echoes not just the irregular horizon and landscape but the individual In the 1960s, contemporary to the critique of museums and commercial salt crystals that advance along the 'Spiral Jetty' 'in the manner of a screw' galleries, Smithson developed a line of thought that took him to the Yucatan (1996: 147). In such a way, Smithson contends, the spiral reverberates through Peninsula to make the Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969) and to the Great Salt space. The spiral is an unfolding of time which is an event immanent to the body. Lakes to make SpiralJetty (1970). Contemporary with the development of Land Indeed, Smithson writes that our blood is chemically analogous to the primor­ Art, Smithson produced a critique of art's increasing commodification through dial sea and that, 'following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to the idea of the time of the artist (Smithson, 1996: 110-13). Smithson argued that some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean' (1996: the artist had been estranged from her or his own time by a focus on the arte­ 148). He describes the red algae, which saturates the Great Lake, as bleeding fact. For Smithson, the mental processes of the artist are ignored in any streaks that merge with the crimson of the Sun burning through his closed eye circulation of the artwork as commodity or information, and also in any valua­ lids. His eyes became 'combustion chambers' and the image of Pollock's Eyes in tion or criticism of objects or exhibitions. In this sense, he writes, the time of the Heat (1946) enters his mind (1996: 148). Smithson is turned inside out. He the artist is considered 'timeless' or of 'no time at all' (1996: 110-13). The time declares, 'I was on a geological fault that groaned within me' (1996: 148). In the of the artist is explored by Smithson through the making of work composed of essay 'SpiralJetty' , Smithson portrays himself as captured by the unconsolidated facets or layers of time: oscillations explored by the many mirrored, baroque views that surround a work; Smithson is unfolded by the work of anti-vision assemblages and arrangements made for non-sites (controlled environments explored earlier in his Mirror Displacements. such as galleries) and sites (uncontrolled sites subject to change wrought by In Smithson's expanded practice there is then a staging of matter as an inten­ weather and entropy). These works threaten to overwhelm the viewer through sive encounter but also a production of photographs, diagrams, fIlms and opening up a mise-en-abyme between human and geological time if not eternity. writing as a presentation of the time ofthe artist. Smithson's multi-faceted and multi­ The earthworks and site works are extended through texts and documenta­ media artworks are a series of assemblages that 'bare' both bodily experience and tion that present Smithson's exploration of duration and the time of the artist, different durations but also the latter's crystallization in the form of documenta­ uncounted, as Badiou might say, by the art market and institutions. In 'Incidents tion and archived material. In the later works of Smithson, his material of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan' (1996: 119-33) he describes the unusual pro­ arrangements, performances and writing can then be seen as producing assem­ cedure of cantilevering twelve mirrors in the ground, an act that manifests the blages that inscribe or crystallize intensities and durations as 'content invented sky side by side with the earth. The resulting mirror images are described as at the point of minimal difference'. It is in this sense that the expanded practices both timeless and instantaneous and Smithson encounters an intense green produced by Smithson and a number of his contemporaries that have proved through one mirror displacement that devours light and induces a chromatic so influential on art today, not only allow us to move beyond the antinomy of sickness that infects the mirrors. Smithson writes of 'mirror travel' as a collapse autonomous modern art and the avant garde, but indeed beyond the very anti­ of vision and conceives of an anti-vision that registers unconsolidated views that nomy of the potential ofthe body and the situation of art. 8 surround a work. Tellingly, Smithson writes that his art practice is a de-creation which could be understood as a presentation of an unfolding of things. Smithson's works are therefore events immanent to the thinking of a Notes situation - the situation of art at that time, the situation of their specific place­ ment - but they are also events immanent to the body and its hierarchies. 1 The term 'expanded practice' refers to art practices that utilize approaches from Indeed, concerns with situations and the body spiral around each other in other fields and also those practices that developed minimalism's concern for the his work. Smithson's content invented at the point of minimal difference is a certain relation between object, body and site or environment. kind of disorientation of the body and mind, that is an unfolding of space and 2 See Hallward, 2006: 164. i 126 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Readymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel 127

3 In citing de Duve, it is also important to state that the notion of an affirmative art Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. practice contrasts with aesthetic judgement, promoted by de Duve, as an appeal Deleuze, G. (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic ofSensation, trans. D. Smith. London and to the sensus communis (the universal faculty of taste) or as a negotiation with a New York: Continuum. public. Judgements involving appeals and negotiations involve delay whereas Deleuze, G. (2006) Dialogues II, trans. E. Albert. New York, Columbia University affirmation rapidly leaves common sense behind. Press. 4 Duchamp was interested in diagrammatic and technical modes of drawing and Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London evoked the language of photography to refer to Readymades and The Large and New York: Continuum. Glass. Greenberg, C. and Clark, T.J. (1981) 'Greenberg on Pollock', A315-ModernArt and 5 Duchamp stated, 'Please note that there doesn't have to be a lot of the concep­ ModernismDVD. Milton Keynes: Open University. tual for me to like something. What I don't like is the completely nonconceptual, Guattari, F. (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton. London: which is purely retinal' (Cabanne, 1971: 77). Cabanne suggests that when Duch­ Athlone Press. amp uses the term 'retinal' he means 'painterly' (1971: 43). It should also be Hallward, P. (2006) Out of this World. London and New York, Verso. noted that Duchamp made several 'optical' works. Smithson, R (1996) &bert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed.]. Flan. Berkley: 6 See Deleuze, 2003: 63. University of California Press. Much art practice is engaged, on a daily basis, with not only inscribing something Tomkins, C. (1997) Duchamp: A Biography. London: Random House. habitually passed-over but with registering something beyond the synthesized world of perceptions. Art practice embraces chance through procedures that play with, among other things, speed, perspective and scale. It is the detail of art practice, at the 'molecular level', which is missing in Badiou's pronouncements on art. S In tracing a line between Badiou and Deleuze via Smithson, it becomes clear that to fully explore the artist's assemblages, future research would have to draw upon the work of Felix Guattari, who has been in the background of this essay all along, so as to illuminate the discursive and non-discursive facets of Smithson's assem­ blages. In The Three Ecologies, Guattari states that the apprehension of a physical fact is inseparable from the enunciation that engenders it, both as fact and expression (2000: 38). What is required is a 'pseudo-narrative detour', of ritual, myth or science, all of which aim at a discursive intelligibility (Guattari, 2000: 38). When discussing the relation of mathematical and intuitive understanding Guattari states that the two are entirely complimentary and that, 'Discourse, or any discursive chain, thus becomes the bearer of a non-discursivity which, like a stroboscopic trace, nullifies the play of distinctive oppositions at the level of both content and expression' (2000: 38).

Bibliography

Badiou, A (2000) Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans.]. Burchell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Badiou, A (2001) Ethics, trans. P. Hallward. London: Verso. Badiou, A (2004) Infinite Thought, trans. O. Feltham and]. Clemens. London and New York: Continuum. Badiou, A (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. A Toscano. California: Stanford University Press. Badiou, A (2007) The Century, trans. A Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cabanne, P. (1971) Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R Padgett. London: Thames and Hudson. de Duve, T. (1998) Kant after Duchamp. Massachusetts: MIT Press. r ! I Beauty as the Promise ofHappiness 129

which we mourn a (seemingly) lost harmony that is no longer possible - this might allow us to consider the form of art objects, not as expressions of an Chapter 12 actively self-forming human life, but as Ideas or 'idealities' through which we encounter relations beyond those of mind or man. I wish to examine two concepts from Deleuze and Guattari's and Deleuze's Beauty as the Promise of Happiness: philosophy, rather than their explicit comments on art. First is the concept of a Waste and the Present passive vitalism: in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari cite two traditions of vitalism, one that runs from Kant in which the vital 'acts but is not', and Claire Colebrook another that runs from Leibniz and is radically passive. The concept of beauty is central to this interpretation of vitalism, for (in Kantian aesthetics) it is the pure form of the beautiful work which animates our powers of perception. The other, radically passive, vitalism cited by Deleuze and Guattari considers Aesthetics and vitalism 'a force that is but does not act ... a pure internal awareness' (1994: 213). I would like to explore this passive vitalism through the concept of waste and From its 'aesthetics' has concerned the capacity for the work of art to destruction in art. Ifsubjective vitalism is the retreat from material systems to an enliven perception. In its Kantian, and dominant, form this means that when intimation of the life that animates but is always other than those systems (and we view art it is our transcendental capacity to synthesize, rather than any bodily would therefore focus on beauty as pure form or the sublime as the striving for feeling, that is aroused. From Romanticism to Modernism, then, art is defined form in relation to that which resists comprehension), then a passive vitalism through its power either to activate our potential as subjects to perceive that would consider that which refuses to be lived. Such a passive vitalism would at there is form (Romanticism) or to de-familiarize the form through which we live once reject the concept of beauty - reject the idea that art should be a medium our world, thus reawakening a sense offormation in general (Modernism). The for the exercise of our synthesizing powers - but would also reject the modern­ modernist text is one that can liberate us from our constitution through sys­ ist (and contemporary popular) refusal of beauty. There is, I would argue, a tems so that we might feel again the forces from which we are composed. contemporary rejection of beauty that is quite different from the art-critical Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, however, are clearly critical of the elevation rejection of the avant-garde. If one places a pile of bricks in a gallery, or calls a oflanguage or any single system as the set of relations through which 'we' live or urinal 'art', then this rejection takes place as a critique of the conventions of constitute the world. Rather than viewing the art experience as a 'shock of the institutional framing: the sense and force of the work is directed towards how new' that would de-form 'our' system of reference to give us a sense or intima­ beauty and value have been defined in humanist institutions, and it seeks to tion of the forces from which systems emerge, they insist both on regimes of draw those instituting conventions into question. Today, however, the refusal of signs (with language and the symbolic as an illegitimate overcoding of other beauty has a quite different sense. If beauty is the enlivening experience of pure networks of relations) and on the positivity of difference: all systems or sets of form, then art might refuse that purity and formalism in the name of singularity, . relations are the actualizations of potentials for difference, potentials that are in the name of that which exists and insists beyond the circulation and commu­ not exhausted by actualization. nicability of the formalized. Thus I would like to distinguish three gestures of In terms of contemporary aesthetics this would allow us to go beyond the lin­ refusal. The first is post-avant-garde or post-modernist: if art institutions have guistic and symbolic paradigm, which for all the current talk of 'affect' is still a classically aimed to present that which is universally human, then one might dominant, to consider the material, sonorous and inhuman singularities from refuse the myth of this pure humanity by the violent gesture of placing junk, which any system emerges.l This would entail re-considering the value and waste or banality in the frame of the art institution. The second sense is related, place of beauty, and this for two reasons. First, I would suggest that Deleuze and but distinct. In the general cynicism and loss of faith in a universal humanity Guattari allow us to think of a positive and nuanced relation to the beautiful there has been a popular appeal to the personal and immediate, which results that differs from an avant-gardist reactive destruction of beauty in favour of some in the refusal of beauty as an ideal. In these first and second senses (which are chaotic undifferentiated. Indeed, Deleuze's insistence on matter's positive 'pre-Deleuzian') beauty is rejected because it is an ideal, because ideality as such tending towards individuating form, allows us to consider the organicism of is seen to give the lie to the specificity of individual difference. The third sense beautiful objects as other than human, and yet prompting a relation from the of refusal, I would suggest, is Deleuzian, and is displayed in the current problem human. Second, ifbeauty has become a problematic experience - one through of the beautiful. Here, one does not refuse form and beauty in the name of y I i 130 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Beauty as the Promise ofHappiness 131 some prior and ineffable life, which might be gestured to as other than ideality. itself through art (no sensus communis) - to waste: for it is only in its dejected, Instead, one takes up the Deleuzian problem of insufficient abstraction: the intrusive, inert and worthless remaining that we can think of an art and life problem with focusing on signification is not that it is too abstract, but that it beyond that of the synthesizing organism of self-regard who views art only in is not abstract enough. Genuine abstraction would aim to be other than the order to re-view and revive himself. cliches and forms of given systems but would strive to present the sensible as such, It is in this respect that we can draw a distinction between an aesthetics ena­ affect as such, independent of its generalized and conventionalized formulae. bled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and the high modernist paradigms What Deleuze's idea of a passive vitalism allows us to consider is neither a from which they so often appear to draw. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and beauty that allows the subject to recognize his world-forming subjective powers Guattari explicitly mention the great modernist book that may have destroyed nora life that could be intimated as radically other than any formed actuality. the linear form of narrative, or expression from an authorial centre, but that Instead we can see the ways in which the matter of art stands alone and resists nevertheless reaffirms 'a cyclic unity of the sentence, text or knowledge' (1988: 6). human recognition and animation. In addition to the notion of a passive vital­ In VVhat is Philosophy? they refer approvingly to the 'ready-made' as indicating ism, the second idea I wish to draw upon is articulated in Deleuze's Difference art's opening gesture, but this is not the urinal placed in a gallery as an act of and Repetition. When considering what it is to think, Deleuze argues, we have refusal of art-system norms. On the contrary, their example is that of a bird always begun with the assumption of a good will, oriented towards common assembling the fragments that happen to be in proximity to produce a territory sense and recognition. Against this, Deleuze raises the possibility of considering (1994: 184): in this very example they redefine the possibility of waste in art that an original malevolence. Such an idea would allow us to extend the considera­ connects directly to the vital and the malevolent. If art is the assemblage of tion of aesthetics beyond an active vitalism, through which the subject retrieves waste, the creation of matter that has been torn apart and placed before us to its capacities for animation and synthesis against the history of progressive reifi­ dazzle or shock, this is not because waste is a meta-critical comment on the his­ cation. Deleuze's concepts of a passive vitalism and malevolence allow us to tory of galleries, framing and consecration but because of life and its passive think of waste and detritus more positively: far from regarding waste as dead relations. 'We' are not subjects who give form to a world, materializing our­ matter from which we can gesture to the framing and synthesizing gestures that selves through relations of lived consciousness; rather, encounters occur form art as art, we could see waste, debris, refuse and spent goods as - precisely between bodies and junk - junk being devoid of any intrinsic or proper rela­ because they lack all worth or potentiality for synthesis and recognition - an tion. From those encounters we experience 'formed matters'; we can either intimation of unactualized potentials. react negatively to all those lines of striation and formation that are not our This might yield a new concept of beauty: not that object that promises (in a own, or find a post-human beatitude in the experience of other durations. violent or illusory manner) a well formed and forming life. Ifwe begin from a Art holds within itself a critique of aesthetic consumption, where the simple malevolence rather than a life oriented transcendentally towards communica­ ingestion of too beautiful images can seduce us and deaden our lives. We can, bility, sympathy, self-feeling and actualization, then we might take the art object I would argue, tie that 'high-culture' rejection of beauty to the long-standing to be beautiful in its separation from the lived, thus intensifying life's incapacity and still-dominant (and not solely feminist) critique of the beauty industry. to be understood in terms of intrinsic and proper relations. Vitalism has, in its Here, supposedly, we suffer from the imposition of beautiful norms that are dominant mode, always been a theory of internal relations, and has therefore beyond personal potentiality; I can either refuse beauty in the name of my been tied to organicism: something is what it is only because of its relation to a proper inner qualities (i.e. those qualities I actively cultivate rather than simply living whole, and the living whole is just the equilibrium, system or set of rela­ receive) or I can re-configure myself as beautiful but do so not passively but with tions that grants each moment its individuation. On this picture, nothing could a sense of re-finding and respecting my true self. It is only by rethinking our be understood as having an or potentiality outside its definitive relation. relation to beauty - not as active synthesis, self-fashioning and life-forming but The artwork, in the Rantian sense, is beautiful in its formal relations, and the beauty as violently encountered waste - that we can overcome the of the experience of beauty is the experience of my own subjectivity responding:ill the discourse of modern aesthetics. manner that would be that of any other subject - yielding a sensus communis. But Deleuze's and Guattari's vitalist philosophy stresses that relations are extrinsic: nothing has a proper potential that it strives to actualize, for various encounters Guilty pleasure will redefme any singular potential, and once actualized - once realized as an organized body - singularities could always enter into other relations. This A term that has gained increasing currency in popular culture is that of the allows us to think directly from an assumption of malevolence - there is no 'guilty pleasure', an enjoyment that we know we ought not to have. How can good will, good sense or proper potentiality which expresses and recognizes guilt, which is a moral phenomenon, attach to these pleasures? We are not ~

[ i 132 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Beauty as the Promise ofHappiness 133 referring to prohibited, harmful, or unethical enjoyments, but to something of a theory, these too would be subject to the economy of effort and like aesthetic guilt, a guilt or shamefulness attached to the pleasure we feel in reward: we e~oy intellectual achievement when a task is finished, or when a certain forms. Guilty pleasures seem at one and the same time to conform to problem shows some sign of developing. If we enjoy crosswords or sudoku we Kantian models of beauty - formed in such a way that they seem predisposed to can probably think of such pleasures as in part intellectual, as they are directed the receptive faculties of the subject - and to give the lie to : far from to finding a solution, and in part pleasures of play - again subjected to an econ­ eliciting a sense of the life or forming power of our transcendental subjectivity, omy of need and desire. Play occurs as an interruption, delay or pause in effort, guilty pleasures are perhaps enervating rather than rousing. Formed to provide and is enjoyed precisely because it breaks with the end-oriented nature of life. minimum dissonance to given modes of reception, guilty pleasures neverthe­ As just such an interruption, though, play has its sense in relation to a broader less possess some sort of lure. There is a difference between bad taste (a liking economy of teleological activities; its 'end' is the delay or break from ends. for simply unworthy cultural objects where one clearly lacks the cqrrect powers If the work of art has been likened to play it is because it too provides both of recognition), (an enjoyment of tendencies that are good in good art a pause and contemplation within life, and because the work - insofar as it is but taken to excess in repeated cultural production) and guilty pleasures. Guilty art - has no end other than itself. But if art is play in this sense, and if beauty is pleasures are desires we ought to have grown out of. Presenting themselves as the experience of form or relations that are harmonious in themselves without once worthy of attention - the 'prog rock' of the 1980s regarded itself at the reference to any need or desire beyond the art object, then it would seem that time as progressive - guilty pleasures become too familiar. The guilt lies in the beauty might be that one pleasure not subjected to economy. Beauty would passivity and acquiescence of the consumer, and the flagrant and opportunistic require neither the economy of the market - for we often regard as beautiful marketability of nostalgia. Here, there is both a recognition of the object'S too just those experiences which are radically non-instrumental, and irreducible to simple answer to our aesthetic needs, along with a provisional acceptance of the measure - nor the economy of our bodies, for it is possible to imagine spending object as enjoyable for now. The concept of guilty pleasure is at once a critical a life reading Keats, viewing Picasso and listening to Bach without necessarily concept - involving enjoyment and disapproval - and a moral-aesthetic con­ requiring some work or pain to make the life worthwhile. To argue, as Keats cept: some forms of art ought not to be enjoyed, and therefore are not really art did, that 'a thing of beauty is a joy forever,' is to suggest that beauty resists the because they are too easily enjoyable. It is the 'feel good' factor that marks a guilty vagaries and economies of desire. Ajoy forever: as though the pleasure itself­ pleasure. or perhaps joy as a type of lasting, non-pathological pleasure - exceeded any The notion of the guilty pleasure signals a curious moral accusation at the particular experience. heart of the experience of beauty. Why do we feel an art object that is simply At the heart of the concept of beauty is a structure of intensive time. In its pleasing somehow signals our critical weakness, that we can both feel a liking Kantian sense the experience of pure form or harmony is not that of separate while at the same time recognizing that such a liking should elicit guilt? Beauty, terms that are brought into relation through time, but an experience of 'rela­ I would suggest, not only in its art-critical defmitions but also as a cultural expe­ tionality'; in its distinction from conceptualization and instrumentality, the rience seems to present itself as an accusation. beautiful would be suitable for ongoing synthesis and meaning but not yet so conceptualized. In post-Kantian aesthetics this intensity of beauty can be thought beyond the terms of the transcendental subject, towards a complicity Moral beauty between beauty and waste. Two possibilities are suggested by Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. The first is that we frod beautiful objects valuable because they are Pleasures of consumption, such as eating, drinking, smoking or drug-taking, so fleeting, always on the point of departure: fruit just about to fall, two lips have to be regulated by a bodily economy of need and desire; a certain delay and about to kiss, an 'unravished' bride (or, in the case of modern art, pure sensibil­ denial is intrinsic to their eventual effect. Pleasures of sexuality, if not consid­ ities before comprehension). But Keats' poem goes on to suggest that those ered in the same category as bodily consumable pleasures, are also exposed to pleasures become beautiful only when they are frozen in the work of art. If, the risk and contingency of other persons, so that with the joys oflove come the then, we find a sunset or the song of a skylark beautiful, it is perhaps because of pains ofjealousy, mourning, waning of affect and betrayal. Perhaps if love does their seeming eternity. Unlike the kiss, the ripened fruit or the bride, such become a lasting pleasure it is because it takes on the form of beauty - simply pleasures present themselves now, as they would be for all time. 'Time in its appreciating the beloved without striving for possession - rather than consum­ pure state' indicates a duration radically resistant to sense, command, the ing desire. And if there are such things as intellectual pleasures, which we would organism or our own syntheses: this aesthetic possibility has always been hinted distinguish from the beauty of a mathematical equation or the well-formed at alongside the Kantian domestication of that beauty as pure form. We can I 134 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Beauty as the Promise ofHappiness 135 consider beauty either as the feeling of our own synthesizing power that gives one of a series of scandalous works in which the consecration of the art industry order and time to the world - an order that would have to be repulsed if we felt was seen to be radically at odds with public standards of art and beauty. "What a righteous guilt in the face of the world's actual violence - or we can consider Emin's artwork refuses, I would suggest, is a critical relation to the aesthetic and beauty as just this apprehension of a potentiality for relations beyond our own historical and instead seeks to create a highly personalized reference to dam­ syntheses. aged life through the most sentimental of markers, as though the work's value This seems to suggest, though, that we cannot create a simple opposition lay in its refusal of idealization, formalization, impersonality and critical dis­ between fleeting and evanescent pleasures, and eternal beauties. The two exist tance. "What we are given is perhaps the opposite of the guilty pleasure of an in tension, if not dialectic. We fmd something beautiful because it seems to easily recognized - and therefore easily ironized - beauty, and are instead have captured, or intimates, in a permanent or timeless form just that which is invited to view the aftermath of a nervous breakdown. "What is destroyed, here, most intensively temporal, not located within time, but presenting itself as time is not the art historical ideal of beauty as a promise of happiness, but the destruc­ in its pure state: a quality or sensation that is absolutely of this moment while tion ofthat destruction. 'My Bed' refuses critical distance, quotation, idealization presenting something like the moment as such, 'momentous' we might say. Or and self-formation, striving to present an impossible intimacy. Such a gesture we could say that while our lives as embodied organisms are subjected to man­ can only occur as waste, and presents a fundamental malevolence - 'do not aging the world and tempering our desires in relation to ongoing time, beauty read me' - that is also a performative contradiction, for such refusal can would offer the image of that which is nothing other than itself. Beauty would only take place in its difference and distance from any sign, convention or somehow, then, have to be poised between the cold cruelty of inert lifelessness marker that would communicate or allow the willing sentiment to live on. It is and the lively dynamism of pure play or movement that is not yet movement only through the radically incommunicable that we might mark an affect. For towards some end. affect is not an emotion (or register of the body's feelings) so much as an encounter that has not fulfilled itself in action or realization. Ifwe return to the scene in "What is Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari approach the work of Contemporary beauty art as a ready-made we can see that the artwork is the gathering of contingent matters, producing a body adjacently through its haphazard territorialization: How might one respond to this shift from beauty as the distant promise of happiness, a beauty that seems to signal a life not one's own, to the twofold Every morning the Scenopoetes dentirotis, a bird of the Australian rain forests, attack on the false lure of beauty? Popular culture has responded by accusing cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the beauty of being inhuman, but can do so only because it presupposes that every paler, internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage image or ideal must apply to each and every self; it is not that beauty ideals have for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or a branch, become less realistic, but that we refuse to acknowledge that the self should be while fluffing out the feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it anything less than ideal. This leaves all of us in the position of guilty consumers, sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of at one and the same time desiring that image of beauty as our own, as the other birds that it imitates: it is a complete artist. This is not synesthesia in the proper image of the self we would have been had we not been deflected from a flesh but blocs of sensations in the territory - colors, postures, and sounds true love of self, and accusing the beauty industry of blinding us to our real, that sketch out a total work of art. (1994: 184) inner and beautiful selves. It is this problem - that beauty is at once lure, lie, accusation and inhuman imperative - that allows us to think our way through The second example I want to look at is the photography of Cindy Sherman, the post-Kantian aesthetics of contemporary art. The avant-garde destruction of whose work can - in its simplest moments - be read as a rather standard critique beauty and form was still Kantian in its reaction against the synthesizing and of the beauty industry. Like Emin's work, Sherman's photographs also focus on harmony-desiring faculties of the subject. In recent artwork, however, there is at loss, damage and highly personalized references to the detritus that surrounds once a return to the notion of the promise of beauty as desirable, a recognition ruptured lives. In her series 'Fairytale Disasters', Sherman combines images of of the guilty pleasure of sentiment and self-love, along with a critical and childhood innocence and seductive doll-like poses with trails of rubbish, used art-reflexive awareness of the impossibility of such gestures. and spent products and scarred or torn bodies. Sherman's strategy in all her I want to begin by looking at Tracey Emin's 'My Bed', an artwork which cre­ photographs is to combine a beauty ofform and expression with a highly destruc­ ated a high degree of public revulsion because of its perceived lack of beauty, tive content. The photographs at one and the same time present a lure and or its flagrant ugliness. Short-listed for the in 1999, 'My Bed' was sheen of material relations with an implied absent and secret human sentiment. 'I 136 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Beauty as the Promise ofHappiness 137

What both Emin and Shennan, in quite different ways, achieve is an overcoming classical aesthetics presents itself as the pure fonn through which the singular­ of the avant-garde critical destruction of beauty as faux sentimentality, and ity of matter can be rendered communicable, subjective and an object of sense. instead present selves not as absent and distant subjects who are known only The twentieth century witnesses a complex expulsion of that ideal. Beauty after the event in their pure act of presentation of the artwork, but as adjacent becomes no longer an ideal of contemplation and regard, an image of a to matters that stand alone. Shennan's photographs gather all the markers of harmony other than ourselves. With the turn to a politics of lifestyle choice and beauty, both at the level of fonn of expression and fonn of content to enable a self-fashioning, rather than the collective discussion of transcendent nonns, new concept of beauty and aesthetics. Instead of considering the matter of art each and every body demands that there be no ideal or fonn that cannot be its to be the vehicle through which fonnal relations are realized, with the appre­ own. We are, then, placed at one and the same time in a culture of guilty pleas­ hension of that fonn being the subject's experience of its higher powers, ures on the one hand, and waste on another. The guilty pleasure presents a Shennan, like Deleuze and Guattari, recognizes a fonn of expression and con­ readily consumed and harmonious fonn that, in its very ease and collectivity, is tent. This is not a simple binary, for what is enacted at an expressive level can all too consumable and ready-made - an infantile and effortless object of con­ become content. In the case of Shennan, the fonned matters she composes are sumption that ought to be abandoned for the sake of fonns and objectives that at once the highly worked bodies of those she photographs - heavily made-up, we encounter more actively. If the avant-garde reacted violently against public lavishly dressed, seated in stylized poses - and also the figures, cliches and ges­ consumption by presenting art as inassimilable waste, as resistant to synthesis, tures that she takes from the history of art and film. The fonn of expression is harmony, communicability and sense, the fonns of art that I have considered at once the high gloss and brightly lit resolution of her images and the new rela­ here are both refusals of beauty as a nonn of contemplation and evidence of the tions created through her strange and inharmonious couplings: dolls, innocently ways in which those expelled beautiful objects are offered as singular, inassimi­ gazing children, toys and primary colours are set alongside rubbish and fields lable and destructive content, precisely because of their malevolent resistance of distortion. Sherman, like Emin, does not frame, quote, parody or simply to active synthesis. destroy figures of beauty and sentiment. Instead, beauty appears as positive waste: bodies appear attached to, or a

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and Chapter 13 G. Burchell. New York: Columbia· University Press. Keats, J. (1973), John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. J. Barnard. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Contemporary Matisse Zizek, S. (2007), How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (Variations in Three, Two, One) 1

Eric Alliez

Three

'A contemporary art, yes, but contemporary of what?', Paul Vuilio asked on the threshold of his furious attack on those whom he calls the negationists of art. Leaving aside a pamphlet that does not flinch from associating German Expres­ sionism with the 'horror of concentration- laboratories', all the better to oppose it with impressionism as the ephemeral bulwark against (!), 2 we will propose that art, in the long wave of Modernity, will have started by becoming the contemporary of an Eye-Brain whose hallucinatory constructions make way, between Cezanne and Matisse, to the vital constructions of a Brain­ Eye (following the expression suggested by Michaux), fashioning an intense­ intensive Body from sensations that are directly borne on the nervous wave that it paints. At the end of this history, which is our prehistory, the question of the 'de­ definition', of the disidentification ofart through the radical interrogation of the Art-Form and the aesthetic criteria deposited by Tradition will mark the break with a romanticism whose deepest determination Hegel was able to convey, in the mode of a difference that still manages to save the essential. In Hegel's words: 'romantic art is the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself' (Hegel, 1975: 80). Hegel's verdict provides a negative index of the rationale behind the de­ definition of contemporary art, which is absolutely non-romantic: contemporary art is the displacement of art out of its proper domain, in the continuous destruction of the sensible Form of the Idea, which guaranteed the compara­ tive autonomization of each art (as a function of the 'formed' matter in which the Idea manifests itself) and the pure self-pres.ence of art itself. So we cannot grasp contemporary art's break with the romantic Incarnation of the Art-Form without making visible the specific relationship that this break entertains with a non-modernist Modem whose 'critical' and 'clinical' aspect it would accord­ ingly radicalize (for Greenberg; modernism is this 'tropism in the direction of \ 140 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Contemporary Matisse 141 aesthetic value' which identifies the proper of art with what is proper to each of We thereby confirm that post-modem thought is phenomenally adequate as the arts once they are freed from any relation to an outside). We could think long as it registers the extinction of the conditions of possibility of a romantic here of the 'photographic' desensitization that Manet experimented with ('the art - but philosophically and politically inadequate when it seeks a 'positive' way first in the decrepitude of [his] art', according to Baudelaire, who knew his out of the crisis on the side of an ultimate return to Kant. Lyotard's 'Kantian Delacroix well) to make one feel the insensible forces of modernity at work; or sublime': on reflection, no salvation outside of an Absolute capable of giving to Seurat's Eye-Machine, with his 'too grey', 'too mechanic' canvases (in the back the Thing that returns at the extreme edge of the Sacrifice of the sensible; eyes ofSignac, when it was a matter of cutting a path for the liberation of colour 's post-modem Kant 'in the name of art': after Duchamp, no on the basis ofImpressionism) from which he will know how to extract the most salvation outside of a 'liberal' avant-garde (which entrusts the spectator with gripping 'contrast' between the caricatural defection of the 'artistic' image the negotiation of the name of art). (reduced to the schemata of engineers) and the pictorial pulsa­ tion which animates the molecular structure of matter. There is also the 'truth Neither Hegel, nor Kant. So be it. in painting' of the differently 'ballsy' Cezanne of the fmal years (straightaway But who's the Third Man speaking here? covered over by the of Gasquet and the superior Impressionism of Merleau-Ponty), a truth so disturbing from the vantage point of the Painting­ Form that some could believe it was the doing of 'an artist specialized in other Two researches' (Maurice Denis) .3 But it is Matisse's fauvist chaosmosis which enacts the first sensational breach of the Contemporary into the history of modem art, Picasso-Braque (with their rebus/reject-collages of an everyday duly engineered to the extent that (we'll come back to this below) it is from the outset the all­ and in-formed: plastic caning and newspapers ...). Picabia-Duchamp (Mechani­ around expansion of a pictorial all-over in an environmental art which effects cal Expression seen through my own MechanicalExpression as a constructivist caption, a paradigmatic de-defmition of Art - that is, its de-pictorialization. for the first; strategic reduction of art anaesthetically projected into 'visual In its formalist-mediumistic.mode as well as in its teleological regime, Green­ indifference', for the second). But also, before these developments, Matisse. bergian modernism can be regarded as the last romantic representative of art These are the modern-contemporaries of a New World dis-covered by the aes­ as the self-overcoming ofart, but within the domain proper to each of the arts and in tlJ,e thetic 'crisis of foundations' . Aside from his chronological primacy, which sees form of the pure essence of art defined as pure self-presence. One should grasp here, as him open with fauvism the century of the avant-gardes, Matisse is not the least an after-effect of sorts, the singularly out-of-phase character of such a project with interesting among them when, in the most controversial passage of his 1908 respect to the machinic world of the real subsumption of Capital, which appro­ 'Notes ofa Painter' he sits the 'cerebral worker'in a 'good armchair' in order to priates and alienates the dialectical Odyssey of the Sprit embodying itself in sen­ administer him a pharmakon, whose 'soothing' effect has made it possible to for­ sible materiality by systematically disqualifying the matters of expression that it get that the very idea of painting as 'great art', the Painting-Form, was thereby puts to work. Modernism's claim to an autonomy that would subtract it under attack, and that its modernist purification was not spared. As Matisse will by abstraction from this process is the mark of its essentially idealist character. explain to Duthuit in 1929, a year marked by the publication ofTeriade's article It is not impertinent to measure by this standard Greenberg'S about-turn, as 'The Constancy of Fauvism': 'It's a question of channelling the mind of the he abandoned in the immediate post-war period the tangible presence of the spectator in such a way that it will rest on the painting but will be able to think medium and the physical status of paintings in favour of the transcendence of something entirely different than the particular object which we have chosen of mirage and the 'Byzantine parallels' of an opticality freed from all materiality to paint: to retain it without holding it [le retenir sans le tenir] .. .'; without absorb­ in the (supposed) abstraa impressionism (1) of Louis and Olitski's quasi­ ing it into an opticality, even a 'strictly pictorial' one (as Greenberg puts it monochromes ... Lyotard, for his part, will lend his hand to a phenomenology in 'Modernist Painting'). Aesthetics will be thus 'deported' outside the optical­ of art that exhausts itself in entertaining the most conventional dialectic of the visual framework of the World of Forms to produce a sensation that is intensive Visible and the Invisible to anoint art-forms that one. wants to believe bear and no longer qualitative: an aisthesis working towards the disparation of the witness to the sublime, to the ultimate presence of a Transcendence in Imma­ perceptual field ('making the walls recoil'), which will begin by allowing us to nence. Lyotard will thus explain that modem art finds its impetus, the logic of attain a subliminal 'calm' capable ofloosening the grip of the Spectacle of Art. the avant-gardes its axioms, and the revised post-modem its end and its According to the most widespread view, Duchamp would be the unique actor (re)commencement (immanent to the modem) in the aesthetics of the sub­ overseeing the irruption of the Contemporary into the field of Modernity. But lime, which demonstrates the unpresentable within presentation itself. there is much to object to this pre-packaged and readymade Duchamp, if we I 142 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Contemporary Matisse 143 undertake an attentive reading of his works - of the Notes that form their hyper­ 'architectural' and architectonic painting of the Barnes Foundation's TheDance) text and of the declarations which, truth be told, no one or almost no one to the great anarchitectonic cut-out gouaches, their forms (de) constructing them­ knows what to do with. Like the following, cunning as a fox (at the conclusion selves through the colour relations like a becoming-sign of forces. Just as, in of the fllmed interview with James Johnson Sweeney in 1955): 'I think that art effect, 'it is the difference in the quantity of colour that makes for its quality' is the only form of activity through which man as such manifests himself as a (this quantitative equation counts for Matisse as a 'technical' deflnition of the true individuaL Alone it can surpass the animal stage, because art is an outlet fauvist chaosmosis: to attain intensive quantities), the 'sign' is not constructible into regions where neither time nor space reign. '4 It is precisely this passage independently of the most material forces that it expresses in a total paradig­ that Felix Guattari quotes in Chaosrrwsis, reframing Duchamp's declaration matic experience that strips it of its formal quality as art. Art as Experience - on these regions without time or space because, he suggests (and it is clearly following the beacon-title of the philosopher , the American Guattari who is speaking here), 'the flnitude of the sensory material becomes intercessor of Matisse-out-of-France. This active conception of the 'decorative' the support for a production of affects and percepts that will increasingly tend will thus have led Matisse to realize an entirely experimental and environmental to decentre itself with respect to preformed frameworks and coordinates' . Twice art - an invitation to make art, rather than a mere object of experience (of the being better than once, he thus deflnitively puts 'out of the frame' the individu­ 'beautiful' spiritually purifled in the abstraction of sensible forms) or of judge­ alism laid claim to by a chess player not so prone to becoming-animal or to the ment (no longer of 'taste' but of the attribution of the name 'art', under certain chaosmic plunge into the matters of sensation (1992: 141).5 ... Make no mistake: procedural conditions, to any object whatever), into an experimental experi­ I am not objecting here to the new aesthetic paradigm advocated by Guattari - ence oflife, an experimentation ofwhich the photos of the places where Matisse in my view it is perhaps the 'strongest' ontological affirmation of contemporary pinned his cut-outs give an astounding vision, as an installation in situ open onto art (in the objective genitive: it directly partakes in it from the standpoint of a the forces of the outside. 'In agreement, as he announced, with the future'. Art politics of sensation) .6 I object to the attribution of this proto-aesthetic ontology to Marcel as Experience projected against Art as 'the beauty parlour ofcivilisation' (the formula Duchamp. Because his 'pictorial nominalism' is -literally - de-ontological as well is Dewey's). That is, against the expanded perpetuation of easel painting which as an-aesthesic. Because Duchamp is the bearer of a constructivism of the signifier the museums of the whole world present in the guise of 'gouache cut-outs' which will have begun by relaying cubism7 in order to have done with their com­ (framed and under glass), giving credit through this arrangement to a pictorial mon enemy: fauvist energetics such as it rises with Matisse to the identity of representation which has always served to repress the vitalist alteration of Art. Expression and Construction in what Matisse calls, in a new sense, Decoration. It is thus that History comes back to Duchamp through the liquidation of For Matissean Decoration implies the deterritorialization of (human, all too fauvism and of the Matisse-abstract machine,8 a liquidation which had opened human) expression in and by construction, which functions directly in a non­ the 'historical' regime of the avant-gardes in the name of a purism bitterly con­ fcmned intensive matter; but also the putting into variation of construction in tested between the two Manifestos of 1911/12 (Kandinsky's The Spiritual in Art; and by expression, which only retains tensors from it. Without this twofold oper­ Gleizes and Metzinger's On Cubism). Duchamp's 'strategic' radicalization con­ ation which is that of a constructivist vitalism (i.e. a decorative vitalism, in the sists in reducing language-games on art to the signifying iteration which cuts-out Matissean sense) that takes painting outside of itself, staging tbe destruction of its subject to turn the plasticity oflanguage against the so-called plastic arts (cosa the Painting-Form of art so as to exceed its closed world (its way of making a mentale, grey matter, art is what unknowingly realizes language); in so doing, spectacle of its Image, and within it of its pictoriality, which was rightly Duchamp signifles the ideal-machinic abolition of every sign-making of the denounced by Duchamp), the identity Expression = Construction is unrealized/ world's forces (the sign refers to another sign, ad infinitum), cutting expression unrealizable because it only prevails in its necessary opening to the most com­ off from construction, which is taken over by a literalized signifler (Phallus and mon experience of life conceivable, an experience that tends towards new Art come down to the Same from the Fountain to the Dart-Object, from the Bride becomings, new conflgurations of experience. To put it otherwise, the 'expan­ to Etant donnes. The phallus, as a signifled cut off from its referent, [mds itself sive' character of Matisse's works tends towards the most material Space of the erected, instituted to the position of virtual motor of the - auto-signifying - celi­ Outside because the diagrams offorces that they. experiment with issue from inside the bate machine of anaesthesized-literalized art). The cut (-out) of Painting by this works themselves. This is the forced condition of the permanent fauvism affirmed 'invisible colour' of the title-words is thus also negotiated in the register by Matisse (fauvism, he says as late as 1949, is 'the foundation of everything') - of a logic of the event that reduces art to the Celibate Machine of the 'floating' against all the temptations and attempts at restoring the Images of Painting. Signifler, whose 'expressions' no longer symbolize anything more than the From the fauve counter-paintings (of 1905-06) to the great decorative panels 'Tautology in acts' of construction 'with no resonance in the physical world:, as (The Dance of 1909), from the translation of painting into architecture (the Duchamp underlines: its ultimate Reality is exposed in the guise of its image 144 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Contemporary Matisse 145 fetishized as object (etant donnee, given the absence of givenness in the 'detoumed' by recasting the author-function in the deconstruction of the ques­ in-aesthetic state, art outside of art is what realizes its signifying-image). Hence tion of the 'signature')? Matisse resisting the Duchampian liquidation by laying Duchamp's unique place in contemporary thought he translates the impossi­ bare the 'combination of forces' implied in the constructivist machining of bility of romanticism into a nihilist irony that takes charge of the 'presentation expression, articulating all the bursts of deterritorialization of the painting­ of the unpresentable' - no longer the Invisible in/of [de/dans] the Image, but assemblage in order to pull art out of the theology of the image and out of the Signifying Image outside/of [de/hors] art as the in-aesthetic foundation of itself; Matisse resisting in Duchamp, beyond Duchamp, when Duchamp is rein­ post-modernity, which for the first time is demonstrated and deconstructed [dimontre vented by the alternative practices of art in/of life in the 1960s. Duchamp et demonte] as such (in the guise of the Possible, the 'hypophysics' of writing' has 'recuperated', annihilated in the without-art and without-work (in the 1990s' burnt any aesthetics'). fashion) where one would have to look for the indifferent, unlocalizable 'art' of We could thus think of Duchamp du sign~ with Lacan on the basis of the 'uri­ an entirely realized post-modernity, when every 'real' and every invention nary segregation' exposed in the image of the twin doors GENTLEMEN LADIES of new realities would be lacking, and nothing would be left - passive resistance (with their infra-thin separating line) which Lacan substitutes for the 'faulty' if there ever was one - than the 'becoming-banal of the banal' affirmed by the illustration of the tree (the word TREE dominates the twin doors) which is sup­ rightly named 'receiver' ... (Moineau, 2001: 68, 82). Far from the dialectical posed to express the Saussurean algorithm Sis (signifier/signified), in which games of a critique that only conceives of a 'resistance' to art (neither art nor signification (very classically) supports itself on the signified. For if the subject non-art), and on the hither side of any narrowly 'plastic' consideration, the founds itself at the 'point of lack' that the phallus 'indicates' within it, sexual Abstract Machine - Matisse restituted against the Celibate Machine - Duchamp Dissension must be submitted to the phallic signifying chain, as the equivalent serves this purpose: to reintroduce, in the guise of a vitalist constructivism, the of the (logical) copula of uneven and lacking. Thus, 'no language [is] able to say anachronism of the conflict over the sensorial question in this underlying move­ the truth about truth, since truth is grounded in the fact that truth speaks, and mentwhich takes the name of Post/modern (with the appropriate bar). Hence that it has no other means by which to become grounded' (Lacan, 737) than to the importance of Deleuze and Guattari's final attack on conceptual art and its '. . . convey [truth] . . . between-the-lines using nothing but the signifier' (Lacan, 'informative' enterprise of neutralization 'so that everything takes on a value of 421). Moreover, in Lacan's inimitable style: 'If linguistics enables us to see the sensation reproducible to infinity', depending on the 'simple "opinion" of a signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this spectator who determines whether or not to "materialise" the sensation, that is relationship by making holes in meaning the determinants of its discourse' (Lacan, to say, decides whether or not it is art' (1994: 198). 801). 'The point is not merely to silence the nominalist debate with a low Beyond Duchamp, it is thus Matisse-Thought which here stakes its claim by blow .. .' (Lacan, 417) - Lacan had forewarned the subject of this pure function reinscribing a vitalist/constructivist logic of sensation in the field of contempo­ of the signifier which he develops into the signifier of a lack in the Other as a pure rary art. gap between the signifier and itself, leading this 'Other' back to the 'pure subject of modern game strategy' (Lacan, 683, emphasis added). Explaining further: (Cut-out from a book by Paul Ardenne: 'The "everything is political" of the 'A case in point is game theory, better called strategy, which takes advantage of seventies was not so far from the stitching bag or scissors of the pattern painter' the thoroughly calcUlable character of a subject strictly reduced to the formula (Ardenne, 146).) for a matrix of signifying combinations' (Lacan, 730), as a set of procedures for the detournement of sense. Briefly, a game (jeu) instead of an I (je), insofar as desire is implicated word by word in the constructivist logic of the signifier which One speaks 'the emptiness of the verb "to be"' with the hole dug out by the letter when 'the machine directs the director himself' (Lacan, 432). I would now like to reproduce the back-cover text from the book I co-authored with Jean-Claude Bonne, La Pensee-Matisse (Matisse-Thought), adding to it some notes and remarks that will allow me to highlight its Deleuzean dynamic, while Celibate machine of the signifier and living abstract machine indicating (without being able fully to develop in this article)lO some of the Duchamp and Matisse, Matisse and Duchamp machine art ('unhooking' the operations that are thereby produced in the field of Deleuzean philosophy. painting). Duchamp against Matisse 'in the name of art', the signifier that "Why write one more book on Matisse? deterritorializes signs in the guise of a response to the question: what is an object (an in/sensible anti-thing destined to human commerce which may be To explore and stress his untimely relevance. ~

I I 146 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Contemporary Matisse 147

For it is decidedly time to have done with the Matisse of the diffuse religios­ Deleuze carried out by Badiou: Expression (of forces) without Construction ity of the essence and properties of painting (Modernism), as well as with (of assemblages) is blind. Deleuze against Badiou: a Construction without the Painter revered as the patron-saint of agreeable art (the Hedonism of Expression is empty (a pure formalism). So that the Deleuzean equation is: Matisse-in-France, as sung by Aragon). Q.E.D - it is this mirror-Image which CONSTRUCTION = EXPRESSION = BECOMINGS.14 holds his work between Modernism and Tradition, Hedonism and Formalism. Q.E.D - it is Matissean vitalism freed from the hedonism of This is to renew the stakes of art, to the extent that Matisse-Thought is immanent to a pure pictoriality as reformism, formalist reformulation of the voyeurism of art revolutionary practice which is irreducible to the so-called 'liberation of colour'. As the (a purely optical space) . Matisse-Thought thus becomes the vector for a far­ foundation ofeverything: according to Matisse, fauvism is a matter of the construction reaching problematization of the Painting-Form, aimed at forcing forms to ofcolours/signs in relations offorces whose expressive power is intrinsically vital, and not work as forces in a 'logic of sensation' which exceeds the frame of the paint­ simply pictorial. This energetics, in which 'difference of quantity of colour makes for its ing, encompassing aesthetics in an energetics (anaesthesics). This Portrait of quality: leads Matisse to a becoming-decorative which, against modernist formalism, the Artist as a Hyperfauve completes the dis-organization of painting, led by tends to eliminate any opposition between the interior and exterior of the work, so that it Bacon-Deleuze to the 'intensive fact of the body', in order to elevate to sensi­ may take 'posseSSion of space'. Art finds itself thrown into a singular experience of the ble intuition the 'powerful inorganic life' that haunts it. It would be difficult common: an environmental art against the cult of the Image. to overstress the importance, in Deleuze, of the abiding reference to Worringer, who introduces into the heart of his aesthetics, a 'decoration that Deleuze beyond a certain Deleuze who perhaps did not settle all his has become vital and deep'. (Deleuze, 1981: 34) accounts with the phenomenology of art and the modernist tradition, but in any case Deleuze and Guattari, who in "What is Philosophy? write: For the thinking that animates it concerns in a fundamental way the stakes of contemporary philosophy and art. Art begins not with the flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is A philosophical stake, to the extent that the works and writings ofMatisse ensure, in the the first of the arts .... But ... it still needs a vast plane of composition that long span ofthe twentieth century, the continuity of a vitalist thought, recognized through carries out a kind of deframingfollowing lines of flight that pass through the the mediation of Nietzsche, Bergson and later Dewey, in a time when in France vitalism territory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go from house-terri­ withdraws from the history ofphilosophy. Until Deleuze picks up the thread. tory to town-cosmos, and that now dissolve the identity of the place through variation of the earth, a town having not so much a place as vectors folding the abstract line of relief (1994: 18~7) Accordingly, the philosopher will say: 'everything I have written was vitalist, at least I hope so .. .' (Deleuze, 1990: 196). The Deleuzean resonance of Matisse-Thought finds its source in this hybrid genealogy oriented in the Experience is the 'American' name (treated as such by Deleuze in his Dialogues direction of creativity understood as the elan vital of difference as it passes into with Claire Pamet, by Deleuze and Guattari in Rhizome, by Guattari in Chaos­ the act (Bergson),n in the process of assembling heterogeneities enacted mosis) of this anarchitectural experimentation of the world which, via by the construction of a physiology of art based quantitatively on the forces of Matisse-Dewey, will have encountered a constructivist bir.raesthetic destined for the universe (Nietzsche),12 in order to extract from chaos, in a total experi­ a new people that can no longer make do with the host of dichotomies that ence of the intensification oflife (Dewey) ,13 the varieties ofa processual composition. structured the philosophy of museum-art (man/nature, body/soul, sensible/ That is why we can characterize, following Deleuze and Guattari, fauvist intelligible, matter/form, form/substance, subject!object, aesthetic/ cogni­ chaosmosis as a 'creative [or constructive/constructivist] involution'. 'Involu­ tive . . .). In accordance with this extreme vitalist path, which posits art as tion' is precisely the term employed by Matisse (in a 1919 interview) life's , it is evident that this people could not develop in a con­ to characterize his approach, against any 'primitivism' (or pure expression­ structive fashion without intensifying the somatic metabolism, so that ism), as the move from an 'objective vision' to an 'instinctual vision', but a sensation may body forth its modes of subjectivation by implicating in them cerebrally organized one capable of realizing the most experimental identity the whole social environment of our most common life, according to a simul­ between Expression and Construction. We touch here on the constituent taneously infra-personal and trans-individual process of creation generative function of art for Deleuzean philosophy and on the very alterity of this of collective heterogeneity and complexity. In this regard, art as experience vitalist thought in its irreducible constructivism, which raises Expression, implies experience as art in this expansive movement which 'enables us to for­ follOwing Spinoza, to the rank of a 'Problem'. Against the reduction of get ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world " 148 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Contemporary Matisse 149

about us' (Dewey, 104). An art whose characteristic 'is to be part of our life' 7 Whence the fact that our Duchampian quote (1955) irresistibly evokes some. (Matisse-in-America) as a 'fulcrum for processual rela1lllch' (Guattari) - so passages from the cubist manifesto of Gleizes and Metzinger (Du Cubisme, 1912) that 'everything heavy shall become light; so that every body may become a and Apollinaire's Peintres cubistes (1913). The critique of the 'retinal' is similarly dancer' (Nietzsche). With and perhaps beyond De1euze, Guattari proposes: borrowed from (and turned against) them. It served as a war machine against a a new proto-aesthetic paradigm- which is also, in its own 'transversalist' manner, fauvism that was perforce to be reduced - be it retrospectively - to an exaggerated a Post-aesthetics. Impressionism (this operation is co-managed with Kandinsky). So it is that Duchamp credits Braque - in the Catalogue de la 'Societe Anonyme' - with having Far from any romantic passion, to exceed, in brief, the supposed closure of art and known how to 'detach himself from ImpressiOnism and from fauvism's ephemeral philosophy, so as to put them outside of themselves. revolt'. 8 In the most precise sense conferred to this concept by Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 141-44 and 510-14. Translated by 9 Duchamp du signe (read in French as Du champ du signe, on the field of the sign) Alberto Toscano. is the title under which Duchamp's Bcrits are collected (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). 10 For this ongoing problematic, see my recent dialogue with Peter Osborne in Gest: Laboratory ofSynthesis (Vol. 1). Notes 11 This is Deleu::e's definitive formula in the 1956 article entitled 'Bergson, 1859-1941': 'Elan vital is difference to the extent that it passes into the act' I An earlier version of this article was published in 2003 under the title 'Reecrire la (Deleuze, 2004: 28). postmodernite (Notes)', in Tresors publics. 20 ans de creation dans les Fonds regionaux 12 The' domain so unexamined and so obscure ... of a physiology oj art appeared in d'art contemporain (Paris: Flammarion). The article anticipated the more 'contem­ Nietzsche in the third essay of the Genealogy ofMorals, § 8. In it quality is no longer porary' stakes of the book I co-authored in 2005 with Jean-Claude Bonne, La anything but the difference in quantity that corresponds to it within each force Pensee-Matisse. Portrait de l'artiste en hyperfauve (Paris, Le Passage) - a project which vis-a.-vis all other forces. See Deleuze, 1983: 42-44 ('Quantity and quality'); and imposed itself on me instead of another book on 'Deleuze and Art'. my article with Jean-Claude Bonne, 'Matisse-Thought and the Strict Quantitative 2 See Vlrilio, 2000. Ordering of Fauvism' (2007). 3 See Alliez (withJ-C. Martin), 2007. 13 The influence of the physiology of art developed by Dewey (1980) can be felt 4 Ten years earlier, Duchamp had declared, in another interview with Sweeney throughout the 'art' chapter ('Percept, Affect and Concept') of What is (1946): 'This is the direction that art must take: intellectual expression, rather Philosophy? than animal expression'. A memory of the fauves, the 'wild beasts'? In a lecture 14 See my 'Badiou. La Grace de l'Universel' (2001). presented in English on 13 May 1960, and entitled 'Must the Artist go to Univer­ sity?' , this 'intellectual expression' is developed in the direction ofthe 'para-religious mission' that the Artist must fulfil more than ever in our materialist times. 5 Against the ambient Bergsonism of the beginning of the century, Duchamp never Bibliography ceased declaring and manifesting that art 'has no biological excuse' .... The settling of accounts with Bergson (or Bergsonian vitalism) is played out between Alliez, E (2001), 'Badiou. La Grace de l'Universel', Multitudes, 6. (English transla­ the Nude Descending a Staircase and the 'nominal' invention of the ready-made. tion in Polygraph, 17,2005) In Bergsonian terms, this is equal to the tout fait against the illusion (which is Alliez, E. (2003), "'The Body without Organs" Condition, or, The Politics of always romantic, according to Duchamp) of the sejaisant, the in-tke-making. See Sensation', Biographien des Organlosen KOrpers, eds. E. Alliez and E. Samsonow; also the particularly transversal use - auratic and 'affective'! - that Guattari makes Vienna: Turia + Kant. of the Bottle &ck in the Cartographies schizoanalytiques, pp. 259-60. This will have Alliez, E. (in collaboration with Martin, J-L.) (2007), L'CEil-Cerveau. Nouvelles Histoi­ (been) nourished (by) the final detournement of the notion of ready-made in res de la peinture moderne. Paris: Vrin. A Thousand Plateaus (and then in What is Philosophy?): The ready-made - or more Alliez, E. and Bonne, J-C. (2007), 'Matisse-Thought and the Strict Quantitative precisely the expression 'ready-made' - is associated there with the sensibilia of a Ordering of Fauvism,' trans. R Mackay, Collapse:m, 207-29. bird constructing a scene-territory for itself ... Ardenne, P. (1997), Art. L'Age contemporain. Une histoire des arts plastiques a lafin du 6 For the analysis of the reality-conditions of the problematic within the Deleuzo­ XX< siecle. Paris: Ed. du Regard. Guattarian trajectory, see my article 'The "Body without Organs" Condition, or, Deleuze, G. (1981), Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris: Ed. de la The Politics of Sensation,' (2003). Difference. rI

150 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Deleuze, G. (1983), Nietzsche and Phiwsophy, trans. H. Tomlinson. London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1990), Pourparlers. 1972-1990, Paris: Minuit. . Chapter 14 Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, trans. M. Taonnma. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. Deleuze and the Production of the New London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Phiwsophy?, trans. G. Burchell and Daniel W. Smith H. Tomlinson. London: Verso. Dewey,j. (1980 (1934», Art as Experience, New York: Perigee Books. . Garnett, R and Hunt, A. (eds) (2008), Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis (Vol 1). London: Bookworks. What are the conditions for the production of the new that one fmds laid out in Guattari, F. (1989), Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris: Galilee. Gilles Deleuze's philosophy? Deleuze frequently said that this question was one Guattari, F. (1992), Chaosmose, Paris: Galilee. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975), Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: of the fundamental questions of contemporary thought. It entails a profound Clarendon. shift in philosophy away from the eternal to the new, that is, from the universal Lacan, j. (2006), Ecrits, trans. B. Fink, New York: W.W. N.orton. . . to the singular. For Deleuze, the conditions of the new can be found only in a Moineau,j.-C. (2001), L'art dans l'indiffrrence de l'art. Pans: PPTjEdluons. principle of difference- or more strongly, in a metaphysics of difference. Ifidentity Virilio, P. (2000), La Procedure silence. Paris: Galilee. (A is A) were the primary principle, that is, if identities were already pre­ given, then there would in principle be no production of the new (no new differences) . Yet the question of the new is a surprisingly complex problem. On the one hand, the 'new' seems to be one of the most obvious phenomena in the world: every dawn brings forth a new day, and every day brings with it new experiences, new events, new encounters. If the new means 'what did not exist earlier' then everything is new. On the other hand, one can say with almost equal assurance, and with the writer of Ecclesiastes (1: 9-10), that there is nothing new under the sun: the dawn oftodaywasjustlike the dawn of yesterday, and simply brings with it more of the same. The new seems to come in well-worn and predictable patterns, and talk of the new immediately threatens to be pulled back into talk of the old. The concept of the new in Deleuze, which resists this threat, attempts to layout the conditions under which novelty itself would become a fundamental ontological concept (Being = Difference = the New). The properly Deleuzian question would therefore be: What are the ontologi­ cal conditions under which something new can appear in the world? But this raises a second set of issues: what exactly does it mean to speak of the conditions of the new? From this viewpoint, one could perhaps distinguish between three types of conditions with which philosophers have tended to concern them­ selves: (1) the conditions that demarcate what is logically possible; (2) the conditions that determine the limits of possible' experience (Kant); and (3) the conditions of real experience. For Deleuze, the problem of the new is coexten­ sive with the attempt to determine the conditions of real experience (since the real is the new). But what does it mean to speak of the conditions of real experience? I 152 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Deleuze and the Production of the New 153

Already in 1789, Salomon Maimon aimed two ftmdamental criticisms against field of all resemblance' (1990b: 123). What this means, in part, is this: in tradi­ Kant. First, Kant assumes that there are a priori 'facts' of reason (the 'fact' of tional philosophy, the relationship between the possible and the real is one of knowledge in the Critique ofPure Reason, the 'fact' of morality in the Critique of resemblance. We think of the possible as a field of possible options, only one of Practical Reason), and then seeks the '' of these facts in which can be 'realised' in the real, with all the other possibilities being thwarted the transcendental. Maimon argues that Kant cannot simply assume these sup­ and not passing into existence. Two principles govern this relation: the real posed 'facts' but has to show how they were engendered immanently from reason resembles the possible, and the real is a limitation of the possible. This is why alone as the necessary modes of its manifestation. A method of genesis has to Deleuze will substitute for the possible-real opposition what he calls virtual­ replace the simple method of conditioning. Second, to accomplish this task, the actual complementarity: the virtual is constituted through and through by genetic method would require the positing of a principle of difference. Whereas difference (and not identity); and when it is actualized, it therefore differs from identity is the condition of possibility of thought in general, he claimed, it is dif­ itself, such that every process of actualization is, by its very nature, the produc­ ference that constitutes the genetic condition ofreal thought. These two exigencies laid tion of the new, that is, the production of a new difference. This is why Deleuze down by Maimon - the search for the genetic elements of real experience (and not can say that the transcendental must be conceived of as a field in which 'the dif­ merely the conditions of possible experience), and the positing of a principle ferent is related to the different through difference itself' (1994: 299, translation of difference as the fulfilment of this condition - reappear like a leitmotif in modified). almost every one of Deleuze's books up through 1969, even ifMaimon's name Third, to be a condition of real experience, the condition can be no broader is not always explicitly mentioned. Indeed, one might say that these are the than what it conditions - otherwise it would not be a condition of real experi­ two primary components of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism. 'Without this ence, capable of accounting for the genesis of the real. This is why there can be [Maimonian] reversal', Deleuze writes, 'the Copernican Revolution amounts to no categories (at least in the Aristotelian or Kantian sense) in Deleuze's philos­ nothing' (1994: 162). ophy, since, the categories cast a net so wide that they let all the fish (i.e. the Thus, in speaking about conditions, we can trace out a tr'!:iectory from what real) swim through it - or as De1euze puts it at one point, they are like baggy constitutes the logically possible (determined by logical principles), what cons9.­ clothes that are much too big (1990a: 44). But this requirement - that condi­ tutes possible experience (determined by the categories), and our current problem: tions not be broader than the conditioned - means that the conditions must be what constitutes the genetic and differential conditions of real experience? Inso­ determined along with what they condition, and thus must change as the condi­ far as Deleuze's project constitutes a search for conditions (or a search for tioned changes. In other words, the conditions themselves must be plastic and sufficient reason), Deleuze's philosophy can be said to be a transcendental phi­ mobile, 'no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than of consti­ losophy. But 'the question of knowing how to determine the transcendental tuting them temporarily' (Deleuze, 1994: 38). field', Deleuze notes, 'is very complex', and throughout his work, Deleuze Fourth, in order to remain faithful to these exigencies, Deleuze continues, explores the various requirements that must be met in determining the condi­ 'we must have something unconditioned' that would be capable of'determin­ tions of real experience (1990b: 105). Five of them seem particularly relevant ing both the condition and the conditioned' (1990b: 122, 123), and which alone to our concerns (though they by no means exhaust the ways of approaching the would be capable of ensuring a real genesis (1990b: 19). It is the nature of this problem). unconditioned element that lies at the basis of Deleuze's dispute with the gen­ First, as we have already seen, for a condition to be a condition of real experi­ eral movement of the post-Kantian tradition. Is this unconditioned the 'whole', ence, and not merely possible experience, it must form 'an intrinsic genesis, a completed series (Kant, Hegel), which necessarily appeals to a principle of not an extrinsic conditioning' (Deleuze, 1994: 154). The genetic method means identity (the subject), or is it 'differential' (which is Deleuze's position, modify­ that the conditions of real experience must be able to account for novelty or ing a position hinted at by Leibniz)? the new - which means that the future must become the ftmdamental dimen­ This is why Deleuze aligns himself with the work of Spinoza and Leibniz, the sion of time, not the past. arch-rationalists, despite his own self-description as an empiricist. Indeed, Second, the condition cannot be in the image of the conditioned, that is, the Deleuze's appeal to the interrelated concepts of the foundation (fondation], the structures of the transcendental field cannot simply be traced off the empirical. ground (fond, fondement], and the ungrounded '[ sans10ndJ reflect his complex This was one of the ftmdamental critiques that the post-Kantians addressed to relation to the traditions of pre- and post-Kantianism. Both Spinoza and Kant. Kant had simply conceived of the transcendental in the image of the Leibniz, in their shared anti-Cartesian reaction, complained that Descartes had empirical. But as Deleuze writes, 'the task of a philosophy that does not wish to not gone far enough in his attempt to secure a foundation for knowledge. Erect­ fall into the traps of consciousness and the cogito is to purge the transcendental ing a foundation is a futile enterprise if the ground itself is not firm and secure. 154 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Deleuze and the Production of the New 155

Before laying the foundation, in other words, one must prepare the ground; mathematics. But the particular branch of mathematics privileged by philoso­ that is, one must inquire into the sufficient reason of the foundation. Indeed, phers often says much about the nature of their philosophy. Since the late Deleuze describes Difference and Repetition in its entirety as an inquiry into suffi­ nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, philosophers have cient reason, but with this additional caveat: in following the path of sufficient tended to focus on axiomatic set theory, since they were preoccupied with reason, Deleuze argues, one always reaches a 'bend' or 'twist' in sufficient the question of the foundations of mathematics, with its twin programs of for­ reason, which 'relates what it grounds to that which is truly groundless', the malization and discretization. , by contrast, famously appealed to Euclidean unconditioned (1994: 154). It is like a catastrophe or an earthquake thatfunda­ geometry as a model for Ideas because it defined forms (or essences) that were mentally alters the ground, and destroys the foundations that are set in it. All static, unchanging and self-identical. Deleuze could be said to appeal to calcu­ three of these aspects - foundation, ground and the ungrounded - are essential lus for the exact opposite reason: it is calculus that provides him with a to Deleuze's project. 'Sufficient reason or the ground,' he writes, 'is strangely mathematical model of a principle of difference. Calculus is the primary math­ bent: on the one hand, it leans towards what it grounds, towards the forms of ematical tool we have at our disposal to explore the nature of reality, the nature representation; on the other hand, it turns and plunges into a groundlessness of the real- the conditions ofthe reaL When physicists want to examine the nature beyond the ground which resists all forms and cannot be represented' (1994: of a physical system, or an engineer wants to analyse the pressure on a weight­ 274-75). For instance, in Deleuze's theory of repetition (temporal synthesis), bearing load, they model the system using the of the calculus. What the present plays the role of the foundation, the pure past is the ground, but the spawned the 'scientific revolution' of the last three centuries was what Ian future the ungrounded or unconditioned, that is, the condition of the new. Stewart called 'the differential equation paradigm': the way to understand Fifth, and finally, the nature of the genesis that is at play here must therefore Nature is through differential equations (1989: 32-33). As Bertrand Russell put be understood as what Deleuze calls a static genesis (i.e. a genesis that takes it in An Outline of Philosophy, 'scientific laws [or laws of nature] can only be place between the virtual and its actualization), and not a dynamic genesis (i.e. expressed in differential equations' (cited in Bunge, 1979: 74-75, emphasis a historical or developmental genesis that takes place between actual terms, added). In this sense, one might say that the calculus is in mathe­ moving from one actual term to another). matics, 'a kind of union of mathematics and the existent' (Deleuze, 1980a). These five themes recur in almost all of Deleuze's early writings as elabora­ This is why Leibniz remains such an important figure for Deleuze. In the his­ tions of the two post-Rantian demands that Deleuze appropriates from Salomon tory of philosophy, he suggests, there were two great attempts to elucidate the Maimon (the search for the genetic elements of real experience and the positing of a conditions of the real, albeit in two different directions: Hegel (the infmitely principle of difference as the fulfilment of this demand). However, it is one thing large) and Leibniz (the infinitely small) (1994: 42-50). Deleuze's strategy, with to layout a general project like this; it is another thing to find a 'method' , so to regard to the history of philosophy, seems to have been to take up Maimon's speak, capable of providing a way of thinking these conditions of the real. Iflogi­ critiques of Rant and to resolve them, not in the manner of the post-Rantians, cal principles determine the conditions of the possible, and the categories such as Fichte and Hegel, but rather by following Maimon's own suggestions determine the conditions of possible experience, where can one go to search and returning to the pre-Rantian thought of Hume, Spinoza and Leibniz. Of for the conditions of real experience (i.e. the conditions for novelty itself)? these three, it is Leibniz - who invented the calculus, along with Newton - that Deleuze in fact appeals to several non-philosophical models in his work. One plays a decisive role, at least with regard to the question of the real that con­ obvious model is artistic creation, and in a sense Deleuze's transcendental cerns us here. Leibniz already had an implicit response to the two post-Rantian empiricism can be read in large part as a reworking of Rant's transcendental demands formulated by Maimon. 'All the elements to create a genesis as aesthetic. Another is molecular biology, which defines individual terms of a demanded by the post-Rantians', Deleuze noted in one of his seminars, 'all the genetic structure that constitutes the real conditions of its external and visible elements are there virtually in Leibniz' (l980b). properties and thus constitutes a profound break with the traditional approach Calculus takes us into a heavily-mined territory, with its own complex history. 1 of 'natural history'. But the model I would like to focus on here is the mathe­ Moreover, calculus is not the only mathematical domain to which Deleuze matical model of the differential calculus. Many of the concepts that Deleuze appeals: group theory, topology and non-Euclidean geometry, among others, develops in Difference and Repetition to define the conditions of the real - the also make frequent appearances throughout Deleuze's texts. It is not that differential relation, singularities, multiplicities or manifolds, the virtual, the Deleuze is setting out to develop a philosophy of mathematics, nor even to con­ problematic and so on - are derived from the calculus. struct a metaphysics of calculus. Deleuze appeals to calculus primarily to develop There are a number of reasons why Deleuze would turn to the model of the a philosophical concept of difference, to propose a concept of difference-in-itself calculus. Philosophy, of course, has always had a complex relationship with for pure thought. 'We tried to constitute a philosophical concept from the I 156 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Deleuze and the Production of the New 157 mathematical function of differentiation,' Deleuze wrote in the preface to in my kettle is a multipliCity, and a Singularity in the system is one that occurs Difference and Repetition. "We are well aware, unfortunately, that we have spoken when the water boils (or freezes), thereby changing the nature of the physical about science in a manner which was not scientific' (1994: xvi, xxi). In what multiplicity (changing its phase space). Similarly, the point where someone follows, then, I would briefly like to explicate, in a schematic manner, a number breaks down in tears, or boils over in anger, is a singular point in someone's of the concepts that Deleuze extracts from calculus for his philosophical pur­ psychic multiplicity, surrounded by a swarm of ordinary points. Every determi­ poses: the differential relation, singularities, multiplicities, problematics and nate thing is a combination of the singular and the ordinary, a multiplicity that the virtual. is constantly changing, in perpetual flux. First, the differential relation can be said to be a pure relation, insofar as it One can see here that, at the very least, Deleuze is breaking with a long is a relation that persists even when its terms disappear: it thus provides him tradition which defined things in terms of an essence or a substance - that is, in with an example ofwhat he calls the concept of' difference-in-itself' . Difference terms of an identity. Deleuze replaces the traditional concept of substance is a relation, and normally - that is to say, empirically - it is a relation between with the concept of multiplicity, and replaces the concept of essence with the two things with a prior identity ('x is different from y'). With the notion of concept of the event.2 The nature of a thing cannot be determined simply by the the differential relation, Deleuze takes the notion of difference to a properly Socratic question 'What is ...?' (the question of essence, which in Deleuze's transcendental level. The differential relation is not only external to its terms view set philosophy on the wrong track from the start), but only through such (Bertrand Russell's empiricist dictum), but it also determines its terms. Differ­ questions such as 'How?' 'Where?' 'When?' 'Howmany?' 'From what viewpoint?' ence here becomes constitutive of identity, that is, it becomes productive and and so on - precisely the questions Plato rejected as inadequate responses to genetic, thus fulfilling Maimon's demand: a genetic philosophy finding its the question of essence. For Deleuze, the question 'What is singular and what is ground in a principle of difference. In a certain sense, one could say that this ordinary?' is one of the fundamental questions posed in Deleuze's ontology, principle of difference is the starting point of Deleuze's philosophy, from which since, in a general sense, one could say that' everything is ordinary!' as much as he will deduce a number of related concepts that constitute the conditions of one can say that 'everything is singular!' In a psychic multiplicity, a new-found real experience. friend might suddenly boil over in anger at me, and I would ask myself what When a differential relation reciprocally determines two (or more) virtual I could possibly have done to provoke such a singularity; but then someone elements, it produces what is called a singularity, a singular point. This is the might lean over to me and say, 'Don't worry, he does this all the time, it's noth­ first concept Deleuze deduces from the differential relation. In logic, the notion ing singular, it has nothing to do with you, it's the most ordinary thing in the of the 'singular' has long been understood in relation to the 'universal'. In world, we're all used to it.' Assessing what is singular and what is ordinary in any mathematics, however, the term is used in a different manner: a singular point given multipliCity is a complex task. It is why Nietzsche could characterize the (or singularity) is distinguished from ordinary or regular points, particularly philosopher as kind of physician, who assesses phenomena as if they were symp­ when speaking about points on a determinate figure. A square, for instance, has toms that reflected a deeper interrelation of forces within the multiplicity at four singular points, its four extreme comers and an infinite number of ordi­ hand, whether that multiplicity was a person, or a culture, or a metaphysical nary points that compose each side of the square. Similarly, a cube is determined system - or a perception. by eight singular points. Simple curves, like the arc of a circle, are determined With perception we return, in our deduction of concepts, to two final notions: by singularities that are no longer extrema, but maximum or minimum points the problematic and the virtual. These concepts c()rrespond to the question: (this led to what Leibniz called the calculus of maxima and minima). The sin­ 'What is the status of the multipliCity constituted by these minute and uncon­ gularities of complex curves are far more complex. They constitute those points scious perceptions?' Deleuze will say that they are objects ofIdeas in a modified in the neighbourhood of which the differential relation changes sign, and the Rantian sense, because even though they are not given directly in phenomenal curve bifurcates, and either increases or decreases. experience, they can nonetheless be thought as its conditions. They are, as it Such an assemblage of ordinary and singular points constitutes what Deleuze were, the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. To move from conditions to calls a multiplicity - a third concept. One could say of any determination in gen­ the conditioned is to move from a problem to its solution o~, what amounts to the . eral- that is, of any individual- that it is a combination of the singular and the same thing, from the virtual to the actuaL It remaiils for us to examine the paral­ ordinary, of the remarkable and the regular. The singularities are precisely lel structure of these two remaining concepts. those points where something 'happens' within the multiplicity (an event), or We sometimes think of philosophy as a search for solutions to perennial in relation to another multiplicity, causing it to change nature and produce problems, and the terms 'true' and 'false' are used to qualify these solutions. something new. For instance, to take the example of a physical system, the water But in fact the effort of the greatest philosophers was directed at the nature of I 158 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Deleuze and the Production of the New 159 the problems themselves, and the attempt to determine what a tlUe problem In the late 1800s, Henri Poincare worked out a way to study such equations. was as opposed to a false one. In the 'Transcendental Dialectic' of the first Cri­ Even though an exact solution was not attainable, Poincare discovered that he tique, for instance, Kant tells that the concept of the World (or the universe, the could recognize the general patterns the solutions would have to take for the totality of what is) is an illusion, because it is generated from a false problem, equations he was working with - such centres, foci, saddle points and nodes or derived from the category of causality. The problem of causality stems from the knots. Today, through the use of computers, much more complicated solution fact that an event A causes event B, B causes C, C causes D and so on, and that patterns have been discovered, such as the well-known Lorenz attractor. Put this causal network stretches indefinitely in all directions. If we could grasp the simply, the solution to the equation will be found in one of the points in the totality of these series, we would have the World. But in fact, we cannot grasp this attractor, but one cannot say in advance which point it will be since the series infinite totality. The tlUe object of the Idea of the world is precisely this problem, defined by the equation diverge. This is why we cannot predict the weather this causal nexus. When, rather than grasping it as a problem, we instead think more accurately - not because we do not have all the variables, but because the ofit as an object (the World), and start posing questions about this object ('Is it weather system itself is objectively problematic. At every moment in its actuality, it bounded or endless?' 'Is it eternal or did it have a beginning?'), we are in the is objectively unassignable which trajectory of the attractor the weather system domain of a transcendental illusion, prey to a false problem. This is why Kant will follow, since its problematic stlUcture is constituted positively by an infinite said that Ideas such as the Soul, the World and God are objectively problematic set of divergent series, which is nonetheless entirely determined by the attractor stlUctures. The object of the Idea is a problem, it is the objective existence of a itself. problem that is separated from its solutions, and it is, as Kant said, a problem This brings us, finally, to the concept of the virtual, which is one of Deleuze's incapable of solution. most well-known concepts. The concept has little to do with the popular notion Deleuze has something similar (though not identical) in mind when he says of 'virtual reality'; rather, it concerns the modal status of such problematic stlUc­ that the conditions of real experience have an objectively problematic stlUcture. tures. On this score we might be tempted to say that they are the locus of What does it mean to speak of a problem that has an objective existence (and is possibilities waiting to be realized. But in fact Deleuze is strongly critical of the not simply a subjective obstacle to be overcome on the path to knowledge)? concept of possibility in this context, since it is unable to think the new or to Here again, calculus can help us. It is not by chance that it was calculus itself make us understand anything of the mechanism of differentiation. The reason that (soon after its invention) seemed to lend credence to the classical view of is this: We tend to think of the possible as somehow 'pre-existing' the real, like , that is, a clockwork universe without any novelty, in which the the infmite set of possible worlds that exist in God's understanding before the future was completely determined by the past. Differential equations allowed act of creation (Leibniz, 1966). The process of realization, Deleuze suggests, is mathematicians to predict, for instance, the exact dates of the return of Halley's subject to two rules: a rule of resemblance and a rule of limitation. On the one Comet (Lalande), or the next solar eclipse, or the fact that there was another hand, the real is supposed to resemble the possible that it realizes, which means planet perturbing the orbit of the planet Neptune, which led to the discovery that everything is already given in the identity of the concept, and simply has of Pluto (Le Verrier). The success in solving such astronomical problems led to existence or reality added to it when it is 'realised'. On the other hand, since extravagant claims like those of Laplace: eventually every future event will be not every possible is realized, the process of realization involves a limitation or explainable by the use of differential equations. exclusion by which some possibilities are thwarted, while others 'pass' into the Today, this belief in determinism, as supported by calculus, has been under­ real. With the concept of pOSSibility, in short, everything is already given; every­ mined. The reason is simple: setting up differential equations is one thing, thing has already been conceived, if only in the mind of God (the theological solving them is quite another. Until the development of computers, the equa­ presuppositions of the concept of possibility are not difficult to discern) . Instead tions that could be solved tended to be linear equations, with convergent series, of grasping existence in its novelty, Deleuze writes, 'the whole of existence is equations that 'describe simple, idealized situations where causes are propor­ here related to a pre-formed element, from which everything is supposed to tional to effects, and forces are proportional to responses' (Strogatz, 2003: emerge by a simple "realisation"' (1990a: 20). 181). Thus, early on in the , as Ian Stewart has written, This is why Deleuze proposes that in describing the modal status of problem­ 'a process of self-selection set in, whereby equations that could not be solved atic multiplicities we should replace the concept of the possible with the concept were automatically ofless interest than those that could' (Stewart, 1989: 73-74). of the virtual, and substitute the virtual-actual relation for the possible-real The equations that could not be solved tended to be non-linear equations, relation. This is much more than a matter of words or semantics. The virtual, which described fields whose infinite series diverge- and most differential equa­ as Deleuze formulates it, is not subject to a process of realization, but rather tions have turned out to be non-linear equations. a process of actualization, and the rules of actualization are not resemblance 160 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New I Deleuze and the Production ofthe New 161 and limitation, but rather difference (the differential relation) or divergence 2 Miguel de Beistegui, in his magisterial Truth and Genesis: Philosophy andDifferential (divergent series) - in other words, creation and novelty. 'Problematic' and Ontology (2004), has analysed in detail the shift from substance to multiplicity 'virtuality' are strictly correlative concepts in Deleuze's work: a problem has an brought about by Deleuze's differential ontology. objectively determined structure (a virtuality), that exists apart from its solu­ tions (which are actual). At every moment, my existence (like that of a weather system) is objectively problematic, which means that it has the structure of a prob­ Bibliography lem, constituted by divergent series, and the exact trajectory that 'I' will follow is not predictable in advance. This is why Deleuze would say that every actuality Beistegui,. M. de (2004)., Truth. and .Genesis: PhilOSophy and Differential Ontology. Bloommgton and IndianapOlIs: Indiana University Press. is always surrounded by a halo of virtualities, which are not mere logical possi­ Bunge, M. (1979), Causality and Modern Science, 3d rev. edn. New York: Dover bilities, but physical realities (even if they remain virtual), precisely because Books. they are what constitute the problematic structure of my existence. In a moment Deleuze, G. (1980a), Seminar of 22 April 1980, , Vincennes­ from now, I will have actualized certain of those virtualities: I will have spoken St. Denis, online at www.webdeleuze.com. no pagination (accessed on 12 May in a certain manner, or gestured in a certain manner. In doing so, I will not have 2008). realized a possibility (in which the real resembles an already-conceptualized Deleuze, G. (1980b), Seminar of 20 May 1980, University of Paris, Vincennes­ possibility), but will have actualized a virtuality - that is, I will have produced a St. Denis, online at www.webdeleuze.com. no pagination (accessed on 12 May difference. In other words, when the virtual is actualized, it differentiates itself, it 2008). produces the new (the actual does not resemble the virtual in the way that the Deleuze, G. (1990a), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. real resembles the possible). Moreover, when I actualize a virtuality, or resolve a problem, that does not mean that the problematic structure has disappeared. Deleuze, G. (1990b), Logic ofSense, trans. M. Lester, with C. Stivale and C. V. Boundas ed. C.V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. ' The next moment, so to speak, still has a problematic structure, but one that is Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia now modified by the actualization that has just taken place. This is what Deleuze University Press. means when he says that conditions and the conditioned are determined at one Leibniz: G. W. (1966), Justification of the Infinitesimal Calculus by That of and the same time, and that conditions can never be larger than what they con­ Ordinary Algebra', Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd. edn, ed. L. E. Loemker. dition - thus fulfilling the Maimonian demands for the conditions of real Chicago: University of Chicago Press. experience. It is precisely for this reason that we can say, even speaking of our­ Smith, D. W. (2003), 'Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and selves, that every event is new, even though the new is never produced ex nihilo Badiou Revisited', Southern Journal ofPhilosophy, 41.3, Fall 2003. and always seems to fit into a pattern (this pattern is precisely what we call, in Stewart, L (1989), Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, 2d edn. psychic systems, our 'character'). London: Blackwell. For Deleuze, Being itself always presents itself under a problematic form, Strogatz, S. (2003), Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. New York: Hyperion Books. . which means that it is constituted, in its actuality, by constantly diverging series, that is, by the production of the new. The resuscitation of a positive conception of divergent series, following the advent of non-Euclidian geometries and the new algebras, itself represents a kind of Copernican revolution in contempo­ rary mathematics. Deleuze's philosophy of difference - in part derived from these mathematical advances - represents a Copernican revolution ofits own in philosophy, insofar as it makes the problem of the new (difference) not simply a question to be addressed in a remote region of metaphysics, but rather the primary determination of Being itself.

Notes

I For a discussion of this history, with regard to Deleuze's use of calculus, see Smith, 2003. II Sonic and Cultural Noise 163 In this chapter, I will argue that this was by no means an ironic gesture but rather a different interpretation ofcontemporary aesthetics that while bearing Chapter 15 some resemblances to the post-modem regime in other respects radically departed from it, not least because of its rejection of the above narrative of exhaustion. This claim that something new was still possible in music and by Sonic and Cultural Noise implication in other spheres is a paradoxical one, especially when many of these as Production of the New: groups operated precisely through the recombination of found materials, of the sonic detritus of modernity, in innovative technological practices that would The Industrial Music Media Ecology subsequently be taken up in digital practices of sampling. Nevertheless, this of Throbbing Gristle recycling of the past was in no way an empty repetition but rather provided the building blocks for the emergence of radically new sonic forms, new forms of Michael Goddard distribution and assemblages of ideas that were able to assume an aesthetic and affective charge, approaching that of the avant-garde itself. In this respect there is a considerable resonance between the aesthetic practices associated with Industrial music and the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which similarly rejects the historical distancing of modem aesthetic practices and claims that the pro­ Producing the new duction of the new is always possible whether in art, philosophy or science. While Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of art in What is Philosophy? is mostly It is a truism that modem and contemporary art from the beginning of the oriented towards visual arts and literature, music plays a key role since even twentieth century has concerned itself with the production of the new; new when dealing with painting, they understand both figures and the plane of styles, new forms, new deformations of existing styles - the shock of the new. It composition itself as dynamic and rhythmic assemblages of sensations rather is also well known that from the 1970s this production of the new was pro­ than static forms. Updating the concept of the refrain from A Thousand foundly problematized if not exhausted and that the ascendancy of the Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe aesthetic figures as blocs of sensation, post-modem both in all fields of aesthetic practice and in aesthetic discourse, affects and percepts, distinct from lived experience, opinions and perception coupled with art-historical re- of modernity that called into question itself, in that they operate on a virtual level prior to any of these actualizations the avant-garde's originality in the first place, had reduced the modem concept (1994: 166 and passim). The question is not one of how art is able to represent of the new to a dated element of early twentieth century artistic discourse. This life but to distil from the world sensations and passages oflife, or in other words was not so much a rejection of modernism and its claims of novelty as its exhaus­ new rhythms, and maintain them in a virtual form. It is on the virtual level of tion through incorporating its procedures in a web of intertextuality and sensation that the production of the new is an operative concept in Deleuze pastiche that rendered every expression, including the ones labelled as mod­ and Guattari and this is also what this chapter will show in relation to the Indus­ ernist or avant-garde as already a quotation of other works in a chain of inf"lllite trial music practices of Throbbing Gristle (hereafter referred to as TG).Just how reference. Popular forms such as cinema and popular music did not escape this this was able to happen in the seemingly unlikely sphere of popular music, can post-modem orbit, in fact they epitomized it through their rapid transforma­ be brought out by looking at the trajectory of this group whose passage from tions from classical forms, whether of Hollywood cinema in the 1940s, or rock transgressive performance art to Industrial music is expressive of both the and pop music of the 1960s, to post-modem assemblages of pastiche perhaps potentials and limitations of this tendency in (un)popular music. The chapter finding an ultimate expression in the MTV music video genre of the 1980s. will then conclude with an examination of noise as a form of cultural anomaly "What then are we to make of the form of music known as Industrial music, per­ that maintains its potential for reactivation today. haps not popular but circulating in the sphere of popular music that not only explicitly positioned itself as a radical production of the new but even as an absolute break with the past of rock and pop music? Was this just an ironic post­ Industrial introduction modem gesture, a reading that seems to be backed up by the anachronistic reference to the industrial, just as Western societies were definitively leaving Industrial Music for Industrial Peopze. - this slogan, coined by in behind industrial modes of production in favour of the post-industrial? the late 1970s today conjures up images of identically dressed (in black and/or 164 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Sonic and Cultural Noise 165 combat clothing) and pierced fans at a Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson The content of the subsequent recordings varied greatly, and it would be a concert, in an era where Industrial music has come to mean just one musical mistake to associate Industrial Music with a specific aesthetic style such as the genre amongst others, frequently little more than heavy rock plus electronics. generic notion of the industrial as necessarily involving found or synthetic This chapter will attempt to present a different vision of Industrial music as it recordings of industrial noise. The use of this kind of material in the construc­ was pioneered by TG, claiming that this group was not primarily concerned tion of music is a twentieth century obsession that begins with both Italian and with developing new forms of music, even if they were undoubtedly influential Russian Futurisms. Even Industrial groups that are based initially around the on the future developments of everything from avant-garde electronic music, to synthesis of industrial sound such as Einsturzende Neubauten, through striking noise experiments to techno and house music. Instead, what this group was pri­ large metal objects and the use of industrial machinery as musical instruments, marily engaged in was an experimentation with forms of communication, in rarely limit themselves to this narrow definition of the industrial. In TG's case many ways anticipating subsequent developments of both media systems and the word industrial was meant ironically with an untimely awareness of the forms of politics in the direction of the biopolitical and network models that decline and collapse of the industrial age - if the industrial world of factorv are familiar to us today. labour and Fordist production was at an end, the least we could do was t~ update popular music to this passing era, rather than remaining stuck in the Throbbing Gristle: entertainment through pain blues-derived form of rock music, with its roots in the agrarian slave economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a sense all recordings are indus­ TG was the intervention into recorded sound by the members of the perform­ trial as they involve the industrial replication and replay of real-time sonorous ance art group Coum Transmissions; Genesis P-Orridge, and events. It is principally this sense of the industrial that was evoked by TG, to at Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson plus one more - electronics wizard Chris Carter, least bring contemporary music up to date with the industrial revolution and its without whom the subsequent experimentation in electronic music and indus­ own nature as an industry.3 As such Industrial Music can be seen as a reflexive trial noise would have been technically much more limited if not impossible. moment in the history of recorded sound. Even when the aesthetics of TG and There had already been similar experiments in composing music out of non­ the groups it influenced appear far removed from the narrow definition of the musical elements in the Futurist's orchestra of noises, the activities of John industrial and in proximity to other musical styles such as techno or the classi­ Cage, various unorthodox uses of tape recording technologies such as in cal avant-garde, it is still industrial in the conceptual sense of an exploration of Musique Concrete. There had also been limited uses of electronic instrumenta­ the potentials of industrialized recording technologies. tion in the context of popular music as in German 'Krautrock' bands of the Instead of merely replicating the modernist obsession with industrial sound, 1970s such as Kraftwerk, which nevertheless tended to maintain a classical pro­ TG acted as a simulated corporate entity, exploring the possibilities of recorded fessionalism or inhuman mechanicism in their approach to musical composition. sound, challenging the limited use it had been put to so far, and importantly Nevertheless, the two spheres of popular and experimental music had remained attempting to make highly deviant and provocative material available to a wider fairly separated. With the appearance in the mid-1970s of TG and a host of audience. This was in the hope that this would encourage formerly passive other bands, many of which gained an impetus from the emergence of the recipients of the entertainment industry to engage in their own forms of experi­ Punk phenomenon, suddenly, recorded music was emerging that was self­ mentation. This concept of simulation is crucial to the strategies employed by financed, highly innovative, and operating at a considerable distance from the TG. Essentially it involved taking on a particular form or style of imagery in per­ art establishment: the phenomenon that became known as Industrial music. formances, clothing, recordings and covers without identifying with it, The term Industrial music came about when TG wanted to release their work in order to confuse and disorient cultural perceptions. By a clever manipula­ to a wider audience than the narrow performance art milieu. From the start, it tion ofimages and information TGwere able to appear in the guise of survivalists, was a project that was critically engaged with the entertainment industry, rather Nazis, or as a religious cult, without ever being fIxed to any single identity or than the art world, and operated via black humour, simulation and parody: point of view. Simulation as employed by TG, was not Baudrillard's process of the replication of the model of the Same, but a process of becoming in which TG. themselves decided to call the label LIMITED. difference was able to appear via a series of maskS. This is very close to Deleuze's It was a case of stripping down the camouflage of a music industry and an defInition of simulacra as being based on the internalization of difference (see, industrial society and naming the essence [ ... ] Music was an industry, Records Deleuze, 1990: 257-58). meant files and research documents, a library. Limited meant a confronta­ Many of the techniques employed can be seen as an extension and elabora­ tion of business, and limited areas ofinterest. (Ford, 1999: 7.17)2 tion of the cut-up theories of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. 4 P-Orridge I 166 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Sonic and Cultural Noise 167 met Burroughs in the 1970s and was already employing cut-up techniques in (Ford, 10.9). A more sinister use of sound as a weapon was against some many of the statements accompanying Coum's performances. In TG, these theo­ unwanted (by TG at any rate) arrivals in the area of their Beck road headquar­ ries could be applied not only to verbal language but also to recorded sound ters. At this time they were exploring such themes as survivalism, the training of and images, as Burroughs himself had done in the 1960s in the films he made attack dogs and camouflage, and deliberately cultivating the image of TG as with the collaboration of Brion Gysin and Anthony Balch. Put simply, for TG, something between a paramilitary organization and a religious cult (that would aesthetic activitywas a form of social ritual that could have real effects on future continue in Psychic TV). When a group of Gypsies occupied the common park events. The frequent use ofvoice and sound cut-ups, thematic engagement with at the back of Beck road, apparently threatening and stealing from the resi­ ideas of control, and particular interest in ways that technology operates as an dents, this was a chance for TG to put its paramilitary ideas into practice: instrument of control/persuasion, was all part of an investigation into the magi­ cal operations of mediated technologies. Whereas Burroughs and Gysin were 'We buried the Pizo horns secretly in the brickwork of the crumbling back more interested in the operations of writing and painting respectively, TG wall [ ...J They pointed at the tinker nest and were camouflaged with moss, focused on recorded sound. Nevertheless, in both cases the results of experi­ bricks and protected by barbed wire.' The wires were run beneath the garden mental practice revealed a magical or demonic dimension by which both written and connected to the signal generator and amplifier in the boarded up room. language and recorded sound operate to 'possess' the bodies they encounter. When working the operators found it necessary to wear heavy duty industrial This interest in the demonic explains the fascination with the voices of aberrant ear protectors. (Ford, 1999: 9.19) and persuasive figures such as Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Nazi Propaganda and right wing fundamentalist Christianity (especially religious television) all of This sonic assault, coupled with the more mundane practices of slashing tyres which use the demonic powers of sound/language to exert influence over their and smashing windscreens, resulted in the evacuation of the tinkers and in followers. By simulating these cult phenomena, TG were able to examine the P-Orridge's words 'a miraculously viable situation for a practical investigation of demonic mechanisms by which individuals are subjugated and turned into a the theories they were conceptually considering', (Ford, 9.21) including of pliable mass by organizations of sound and language, with a view to reversing course some of the least savoury ones, as confirmed by the TG song 'Subhu­ these processes into a process of de conditiOning. As such, TG's recourse to the man' with its deliberate Third Reich associations, which was the direct result of demonic was not the invocation of an other, transcendent realm but made ref­ this sonic campaign. erence to entirely immanent processes of desubjectification and subjectivation, As already stated, TG's idea of the industrial was by no means an aesthetic highly resonant with Deleuze and Guattari's equally demonic account of becom­ style; this would be much more applicable to other industrial groups and prac­ ings in A Thousand Plateaus. tices such as the use of mass media cut-ups in Cabaret or the use of To make this activity more concrete, it is worth examining a few examples of industrial found objects by Einstilrzende Neubauten. TG's music was rather a proc­ TG's work to bring out how their concept ofIndustrial music had a strong rela­ ess of synthetic invention, that rather than representing contemporary culture tion to contemporary art procedures and constituted a genuine production of by means of an industrial aesthetic, expressed and embodied it by means of a new sensations, affects and percepts in the sphere of popular culture. The focus constructivism; they literally constructed their experimentation out of the of Coum on the body and its limits was continued in TG but transformed from excluded detritus of a crumbling industrial society. As P-Orridge said about the exhibitionist display of corporeal processes to experimentation on : psychic and somatic effects of recorded sound. These possibilities, already imagined by Burroughs and experimented with by the US army in Vietnam, When we finished that first record, we went outside and we suddenly heard were expressed by TG not only through deafeningly loud performances, featur­ trains going past, and little workshops under the railway arches, and the ing the band's notorious track 'Walls of Sound', whose title is self-explanatory, lathes going and electric saws, and we suddenly thought, 'We haven't actually but also through performances such as that at Oundle School where they were created anything at all, we've just taken it in subconsciously and re-created it.' invited by a young fan who convinced his teachers that they were an artistic (Juno and Vale, 1983: 11) musical group follOwing the work of John Cage. According to reports, the kids (aged between 8 and 16) were 'swept into a Dionysian fren:ry. During This is the reason that Jon Savage and other critics saw TG as a mirror to con­ the climactic wall of sound they went really crazy trying to touch P-Orridge and temporary British culture at the time; often a very unpleasant and irritating scream through the microphone. [ ...J A riot was only averted by the conclu­ one, but a reflection and even an anticipation of social processes, precisely sion of the gig and the playing of a Martin Denny easy listening tape' because by bringing to light and presenting sonically in the arena of popular I 168 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New r Sonic and Cultural Noise 169 music all the anomalous elements that were being discarded and repressed they and place them in an affectively enchanting other place. It is a kind of psychic were a direct expression of the cultural Wlconscious or, in more Deleuzian possession that takes place on a subliminal level: the society of muzak. terms, the virtual of British post-industrial society. For TG, the aim was not so much to destroy or deconstruct music, which is as TG therefore embodied the virtual forces, desires and fears of the larger nonsensical as destroying language, but to analyse and interfere with its work­ culture at this particular time. Songs dealing with all manner of extreme phe­ ings, taking certain elements on in one experiment, and then attacking them in nomena from suicide cults and serial killers to burn victims could be expressed the next, mixing musical elements with elements oflanguage, with recorded and through sOWld, lyrics and imagery that while maybe less visceral than a Coum synthetic sOWlds, in order to then connect up these elements with deviant desires performance on one level, was able to disseminate a dystopian view of contem­ and ideas. TG operated by decoding the magical or demonic operations of lan­ porary culture to a much wider and more susceptible audience. A track that guage, sound and music, andreinscribing them in new and disturbing assemblages illustrates this very well is one ofTG's most well-known songs 'Hamburger Lady' in order to be distributed in the very arena where they were originally produced: from their 1978 DoA/Third and Final Report album. The lyrics to this track were the recording industry itself. This was an attempt to create a media ecology that simply the text of a letter from one of Genesis's mail art friends AI Ackerman could short-circuit the entertainment industry and its superficial mass-produced about a severe burn victim: pleasures, via the paradoxical notion of entertainment through pain. This 'revo­ lution' did not perhaps actually take place in the sense of a definitive victory By far the worst is the hamburger lady, and because of the shortage right now against these controlling forces, the improbability of which was acknowledged of qualified technicians, e.g. technicians who can work with her and keep from the beginning. However, the activities ofTG did lead to a revolution in the their last meal down, Screwloose Lauritzen and I have been alternating nights aesthetics and politics of sOWld production, the dimensions of which were far with her, Wlrelievedly. If you put a 250 Ib meatloaf in the oven and then reaching and whose reverberations are still being heard today. burned it and followed that by propping it up on a potty chair to greet you at This brings us back to the question of virtual sensation, since by engaging 11 pm each night, you would have some description of these past two weeks. with anomaly, TG were operating on the level of the virtual, that is the extreme (Ford, 1999: 8.25-8.26) potentials that are made possible by contemporary post-industrial society but then pushed to the margins. It is precisely through engagement with these vir­ This already gruesome text in cut-up form is made much more powerful by tual potentials that TG was able to produce a qualitatively new type of music. its sonic expression in the TG track based on it, where it becomes a mysterious The music of TG was neither a mere effect of the technologies they were using, and disturbing meditation on destroyed organic life. a representation of the surroWlding post-industrial environment, nor a repre­ TG also saw their experimentation not as primarily concerned with music but sentation of the anomalous phenomena that populate their music such as serial with cultural de conditioning and interference with control processes. As already killers, occultists, freaks or bum victims. To merely represent these phenom­ stated this showed the huge influence of Burroughs' ideas on their work, ideas ena, particularly the latter would be a too rapid actualization of the forces they that would later influence the by now widely accepted characterization of con­ embody and express and therefore would result in little more than superficial temporary neo-liberal capitalist states as post-industrial control societies from shock value. This was indeed the case with some industrial groups such as "White­ Deleuze's celebrated 'Postscript on Control Societies' onwards. In this sense, house, whose aesthetics TG completely rejected despite the apparent similarities TG saw themselves, not as primarily engaged in aesthetic activity, but as taking of their subject matter. This is not to say that there was no use of shock tactics part in an information war, a war that they claimed is secretly taking place in all in TG but precisely to emphasize that shock was used in a tactical way, not to areas of cultural production. As they state in the recording Heathen Earth: 'The immediately actualize anomalous phenomena by representing them but to tap reasons that determine everything you do, should be as well thought out as a in to their Wlactualized virtual forces my maintaining them in their virtuality. government coup. It's a campaign. It has nothing to do with art' (TG, Heathen This is why TG could not be identified with a particular sOWld or musical form; Earth). As in other parts of this recording there is a clear reference to whereas in one context the most shocking thing might be to produce a wall of Burroughs, whose Revised Boy Scout's Manua~ essentially a guide to the poten­ sOWld at the painful limits of human auditory tolerance, at another it might be tials of media terrorism, anticipated many ofTG's experiments and tactics.5 By producing an Abba-inspired electro-pop love sdng like 'United', precisely to maintaining a flow of media products that serve to produce normalized and cOWlter any coding of the group according to previous expectations. All of this sedated subjects, societies of control are able to maintain their power, and pac­ was about following a logic of cultural and musical anomaly, which in other ify any subversive elements. In the domain of music, this is done via harmonics, words means precisely remaining at the virtual level of Wlactualized sensations, melodies, stable rhythms and conventional structures, which soothe listeners of blocs of percepts and affects that are yet to be codified in terms of specific ~ I

I 170 .Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Sonic and Cultural Noise 171 meanings or modes of representation. In other words, what was new about TG manufacturers who took former military hardware and other machinery and was less their sonic experimentation or their engagement with extreme phe­ organic materials and re-used them as the basis for spectacular and dangerous nomena than their refusal to represent themselves according to a pre-existing performances, and Sordide Sentimentale, a group of post-situationist theorists format, which on the contrary was a commitment to maintaining a high degree who also released records by both J&y Division and TG. Even in the more straight­ of disturbing ambiguity and anomaly in everything that they produced. forwardly musical sections of the book, there is a surprising emphasis on the This resonates with the ways TG operated as a media ecology. One way to reading material of the different groups and individuals involved which ranges approach this question would be to examine how TG pushed the usually super­ from survivalist manuals and books on the Third Reich to contemporary phi­ ficial idea of independent music to new levels, not only by starting up their own losophy to various forms of esoterica; and the record collections are no less , Industrial Records, effectively comprising of the most important heterogeneous. What emerges from this handbook is a project of cultural het­ recordings of a whole new genre of musical production, but also through the erogeneity with a strong emphasiS on the anomalous and the extreme, as a key setting up of their own distribution networks, enabling through limited edition to understanding and more importantly creating something out of contempo­ mail order cassette releases new possibilities for documentation such as the rary culture. The array of serial killers, cult leaders, psychopaths and esotericists, 24 hours of live TG series. More than this, TG was particularly interested in the not to mention artistes maudites that populate this volume, are not just so many power of music and other media to produce subjectivity, its operation as a cult attempts to shock normative tastes or to indulge in transgression, even if some­ phenomenon, capable of affecting minds and bodies through processes of dis­ times this did indeed take over. Rather what these groups were insisting on was cipline and persuasion. This led TG to take an interest in forms of social the importance of anomalous and barely understood cultural phenomena as organization, that is the setting up of a kind of 'anti-cult' that was eventually essential to current cultural mutation. manifested in relation to Psychic TVby the associated ritual network, The Temple In fact the engagement with cultural anomaly can be seen as the equivalent ofPsychick Youth. This interest in the capacity of cultural production to produce in the realm of culture to the deployment of noise in relation to classical forms subjectivity effects is vital to the way TG functioned as a media ecology; it was of music. Anomalies are noise in the literal sense of unassimilated and in some not merely the case of pursuing more rigorously than most punk entrepreneurs cases inassimilable sensations yet to be labelled or ordered under a coherent the ideals of independence, which effectively amounts to little more than doing category of understanding. As Paul Hegarty puts it: A and R for major record labels, but rather producing new and anomalous modes of experience that go well beyond the production, distribution and Industrial music makes noise explicit, acting as cultural noise at many levels, consumption of music, which was instead used as a tool for an anomalous and making sure these layer collide in collage [... J to challenge not only pre­ refashioning of subjectivity beyond its usual normative parameters. vailing aesthetics but the notion of aesthetics being its own domain, and also the notions of what is normal, rational, desirable, or true. (Hegarty, 2007: 116)

Conclusion: Anomalous cultural research, If many of these anomalous phenomena have since been commodified in prac­ noise and the production of the new tices from neo-tribalism to music styles ranging from global esoterica to Techno, to the proliferation and extension of cut-up techniques into almost every sphere The San Francisco-based magazine Re/Search, that in its transformation from of cultural production, the anomalous impulse that animated these groups is its earlier punk title Search and Destroy clearly expressed a shift towards the aes­ still of significance for contemporary artistic and social practices today. The thetics and ideas ofIndustrial music, was instrumental in the dissemination of challenge is to fmd the anomalies that can be confronted and engaged with Industrial music in an extremely interesting way. Rather than being a mere today, to produce new forms of cultural noise and new sensations in an era music fanzine presenting interviews and biographies of musical groups, it when it is perhaps much more difficult to do so than in the 1970s, now that the aligned itself with the idea of anomalous trans-media cultural research, by for retro-processing of sonic and other forms that groups such as TG pioneered example having an issue dealing with TG, William S. Burroughs and visual art­ has become the dominant and standardized technique of sampling as a mode ist Brion S. Gysin. In its very influential issue featuring Industrial music and of cultural production. Rather than fetishizing'this past artistic experimenta­ entitled Industrial Culture HandlJook, only some of the groups and individuals tion by freezing it in a genre that betrays this impulse towards the anomalous, presented could be seen as primarily involved with music (in addition to as in most of what passes today for Industrial music, it challenges us to construct TG, Cabaret Voltaire, NON/B&yd Rice, Z'ev, SPK and Rhythm and Noise). There are a plane of composition capable of assembling the 'noise' of our contemporary also sections on Survival Research Laboratories, a group of amateur robotics post-industrial environment and expressing its new and anomalous sensations. 172 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Notes

! Attributed by P-Orridge to Cazazza in Re/Search 6/7,10-11. The work of Monte Chapter 16 Cazazza is presented in the same volume, 68-81. 2 This statement appeared on the cover of The Industrial Records Story 1976- 1981, and although attributed to Terry Gold was in fact written by P-Orridge The Aesthetic Paradigm himself. Maurizio Lazzarato 3 See Juno and Vale (eds) (1983), Re/Search 6/7for multiple accounts of 'Industrial Culture'. 4 Industrial Records released an album of Burroughs' tape recorder experiments, Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, which are perhaps the seminal influence on Industrial Music. The new assemblage of being-against (the dispositives of power) and of being­ 5 A part of this manual was reprinted in the issue of Re/Search devoted to together (the process of political auto-emancipation) has yet to be defmed. It is Burroughs, Gysin and TG (see Juno and Vale (eds) , 1982: 5-12). an object of experimentation, as is the case of the Coordination des Intermittents et Precaires d'1le de France, but this assemblage has yet to find the 'war machine' Bibliography which might express this situation, let alone the words or declarations which might sustain it.! The political system, with its dispositives, its procedures, its Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic Of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. C. V. representatives and the represented, both in its 'revolutionary' and its 'demo­ Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. cratic' form, constitutes a part of the problem more than its solution. Both the Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. 'revolutionary' and the 'democratic' manifestations of political action no longer Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. succeed in mobilizing beliefs and desires, they no longer provide a favourable Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), VVhat is Philosophy, trans. G. Burchell and space for the expression and construction of the processes of subjectivation. H. Tomlinson. London and New York: Verso. Political action has even entirely lost its power of disruption in the face of the Ford, S. (1999), Wrecker.s of Civilisation: The Story of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing dispositives of power constituting the neo-liberal societies of security. That such Gristle: London: Black Dog. forms of organization such as the Coordination des Intermittents et des Precaires Hegarty, P. (2007), Noise/Music: A History. London: Continuum. Juno, A. and Vale, V. (eds) (1982), Re/Search 4/5: William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin might be able to continue to function depends on establishing conditions in and Throbbing Gristle. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications. which a politics of problematization and experimentation is possible, which Juno, A. and Vale V. (eds) (1983), Re/Search 6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook. San would also and most of all concern the modalities of being-together, precisely Francisco: Re/Search Publications. because it is on the basis of this function that self-awareness, that is, the produc­ tion of subjectivity operates. We can call upon a long and well-established tradition in both theoretical and Discography practical matters concerning the organization of being-against and the respec­ Burroughs, W. S. (1981), Nothing Here Now but the Recordings (1959-1980). London: tive modelling of subjectivity. However with being-together, we are immediately Industrial Records (IR0016). confronted with a paucity of ways of conceptualizing it, especially concerning Throbbing Gristle (1977), Second Annual Report. London: Industrial Records the relationship that the 'constitution of the self' is to maintain with the contes­ (IR0002). tation of the dispositives of power. Throbbing Gristle (1978), DoA: The Third and Final Report. London: Industrial Records We are forced to improvise with what we have got: on the one hand the politi­ (IR0004). cal experience gathered in groups such as the Coordination and on the other Throbbing Gristle (1980), Heathen Earth. London: Industrial Records (IR0009). hand the bits and pieces of theories such as Felix'Guattari's 'ethico-aesthetics', Throbbing Gristle (1980), Subhuman/Something Came Over Me. London: Industrial which continues along the lines of Foucault's research into the 'relationship to Records (IR0013). Various Artists (1984), The Industrial Records Story (1976-1981). London: llluminated the self'. The former has been recharacterized as a 'schizo-analysis' with an Records (JAMS39). abundance of neologisms characteristic of Guattari's work, and among which one frequently runs the risk of getting lost: 'processual subjectivity, subjectivity 174 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The Aesthetic Paradigm 175 which is auto-foundational of its own coordinates, auto-consistent subjectivity, themselves incapable of: transforming life, staging a revolution, defining a new auto-referential, auto-poetic, etc'. form of criticism, or a new form of politics and so on. Art is not cut out to play Guattari's paradigm presents us with notable innovations with respect to a hegemonic role, but its forces could be joined together with other dispositives Foucault's notion of subjectivation because neither religious practices and tech­ (economic, social, political) and other techniques both for the worse (creating niques, nor philosophical traditions are cited as models, but rather artistic a market, becoming a tourist, consumer and communicator of subjectivity and techniques and practices. The ethico-aesthetic paradigm calls upon these artistic thus contributing to its uniformization) or for the better in making bifurcations techniques and practices as 'technologies of the self' because, according to and experimentation of subjectivity possible. For Guattari, if artistic techniques Guattari, they are the most adequate means of responding to the twofold chal­ appear to playa more and more important role in the processes of subjugation, lenge which our era is confronted with: 'subjectivity itself has become the most they must also be mobilized for the processes of subjectivation. important objective in capitalist societies' but at the same time this 'subjective Instead of now entering into a series of 'political' discussions about art, as mutation' is not primarily discursive. It affects the non-discursive, affective, exis­ well-established as they are unproductive, I would like to look more closely at tential basis of subjectivity, that is to say that capitalism attacks these modes of Guattari's proposition: not to take art as an institution as our point of depar­ existence and forms ofliving. . ture, but rather to utilize its techniques, its processes of creation and its practices In capitalism, subjectivity is submitted to a schizophrenic tension that causes in order to let them evolve into other domains, in order to make use of them it to tend towards modes of living that are both futuristic and archaic. On the outside of, at the limits of or transversally within the space designated by the one hand, it is sustained by a deterritorialization which undermines' existential institution of art. As Guattari suggests, the political force of aesthetics cannot be territories' (a way of living which would assure professional and social security, made evident unless it is used as a 'tool box [ ...J made up of concepts and ethnic and national identification, languages, values and cultures solidified in affects, in different kinds of public spheres, making use of them as it best suits time etc.) and on the other hand, it is caught up in a neo-archaic reterritorializa­ them'.3 tion (nationalism, Lepenism, a return to traditional values - work, family, ...). In order to avoid any misunderstandings, it might be better to speak of a Guattari's insights remain of fundamental importance in this context as it is 'proto-aesthetic paradigm, to emphasize that we are not referring to institution­ essential to being able to conceive of a way of escaping these simultaneously alized art, to its works manifested in the social field, but to a dimension of reactionary and hyper-modernist 'reconversions' of subjectivity. creation in a nascent state, perpetually in advance of itself, a force of emer­ But one must immediately note that the 'aesthetic paradigm' does not express gence' (1995: 101-02). And what is more, the propagation of this new paradigm any appeal to and aestheticization of the political. Nor does it have much to do 'involves overthrowing current forms of art as much as those of social life' with the avant-garde programmes of the first half of the twentieth century. It (1995: 134). involves, on the contrary, an appreciable shift with respect to this discussion What forms the basis of this new paradigm 'is a force for seizing the creative and could draw more upon Marcel Duchamp's work, especially in the sense potential [ ... J - 'before' it is applied itself to works, philosophical concepts, that 'being an artist' is not to be considered as a specialization but rather is to scientific functions, and mental or social objects' (1995: 112). The ethico­ become the 'human factor in everybody's life'. aesthetic paradigm purports to locate art's 'creative potential' transversal to Referring here to artistic techniques and practices and not to art itself is impor­ every domain, characterizing and traversing 'political' experience. It neither tant because art and culture are entirely integrated into the logic of the consists of a specialized body of knowledge, nor any kind of virtuosity. 'Art is not dispositives of subjugation and control in contemporary capitalism.2 Or, to put just the activity of established artists but of a whole subjective creativity' which it differently, one should not have any illusions concerning this situation: Art traverses the most diverse domains and milieus, 'the generations and oppressed and culture are neither more nor less integrated into the societies of security peoples, ghettoes, minorities' (1995: 91). than any other activity, and they have the same 'potential and ambiguities' as It is in order to activate and work with this creative potential that Guattari any other activity. In contemporary societies of security, art is foremost a dispos­ calls upon artistic practices as techniques of 'rupturing' and of 'suturing', of itive of the production of specific relationships (artist/public/institution) with taking leave from and taking control of the real and of subjectivity. But why specific techniques, an economy and specific processes of subjugation which consider an appeal to such techniques as a model for the processes of subjec­ are linked to the full range of instruments at the disposal of the governance of tivation?; because, the conditions of 'rupture' and of composition in societies norms. of security have completely changed from those of disciplinary societies. In addition, it seems excessive to demand of art, as the avant-garde all too On the one hand, this is because the production of subjectivity takes place in frequently did, that it fulfill objectives that politics, labour and so on were a 'common world' modelled by signs, opinions, languages, slogans and the T

I \ 176 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New I The Aesthetic Paradigm 177 dispositives of power in societies of security. In this 'common world' the 'out­ semIOtlcs (verbal, affective, mechanical etc.). In emphasizing the process of side' is not yet here. It remains to be invented, to be constructed and interjected the constitution of the individual and collective subject, Guattari dispenses by means of techniques that are comprised of both subtraction and new pro­ with the primacy of the signifiers (the primacy of the statement and notably duction. On the other hand, these 'ruptures' and 'sutures' should no longer be of the political statement which makes declarations and which represents), uniquely based on the different political practices that have been handed down instead developing an asignifying, non-verbal and affective semiotics. to us through the Western tradition (the practice of conferring rights, the prac­ With Guattari as our point of departure, we are able to distinguish a symme­ tice of distinguishing between friend and enemy in war, taking power, creating try between the procedures and the techniques of the constitution of the good government and a community etc.). The integration of the relationship 'individual' subject and the constitution of the 'collective' subject. For these to the self, the integration of the production and transformation of subjectivity two dispositives, the relationship to the real must necessarily pass through into the political sphere has noticeably transformed the meaning and function mediation, in the sense that without 'signification' and without 'representa­ of politics. It is amidst this new situation, which began to crystallize around tion' (in both the political and the linguistic sense of the word) it is impossible 1968, that Guattari makes reference to art as a paradigm that highlights three to access the real. kinds of problems. These refer directly to the problems of the construction of The operations of 'social subjugation' on certain identities and established 'being-together' and the modes of political subjectivation which would con­ roles function by means of subordinating the multiplicity and the heterogene­ verge in this new situation: first, the polyphony of the political statement, that ity of pre-signified (or corporal) semiotics and machines to language and its is, the active consideration of the heterogeneity of voices and semiotic systems functions of representation and signification, whereas corporal semiotics (any which constitute subjectivation; second, processual creativity, the continual call­ means of pre-verbal expression, corporal, iconic which might bring about artis­ ing into question of the identity of the political subject and object; and finally tic practices - dance, mimicry, music) like those of the machinic do not depend autopoiesis, auto-production, that is, the ability of these dispositives of subjec­ on either language as a signifier or consciousness. They do not introduce a speaker tivation to produce their own norms and coordinates. and a listener who are discernable from each other, as is the case in the com­ What is implicitly affirmed in Foucault's last repositioning is at the heart of municational and linguistic model, and the parole does not occupy a position of Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm: subjectivity and the processes of the trans­ foremost significance. These kinds of semiotics are animated by affects and formation of the self are always the results of a collective assemblage. But affections and bring about relationships that are difficult to ascribe to a subject, Guattari's use of the notion of the 'collective' refers to a multiplicity which is as to an Ego or individual. They go beyond the limits maintained by individual much beyond the individual, with respect to the great social, linguistic and persons and identities, their roles and social functions to which language technological machines, as it is contiguous with the individual, with respect to reduces them and within which they are then trapped. The 'message' is not pre-verbal and pre-individual intensities derived from a logic of affects. The col­ passed on by means of a linguistic series, but rather through the body, postures, lective is not the result of the interaction between individuals. From the outset, noises and images, gestures, intensities, movements, rhythms and so on. the constitution of subjectivity transpires trans-individually. It is important to insist again on the fact that this multiplicity of a-signifying This non-human and pre-personal part of subjectivity that is at once machinic and non-verbal semiotics is also a part of the enunciation or the machinic proto­ and affective, beyond and contiguous with the individual is essential because it enunciation of which non-human figures of expression make use (images, is from this position that its transformation, that is, its 'heterogenesis' is possi­ sound, numbers, equations in science, computer languages etc.). The machines ble. In order to follow the construction of a collective 'assemblage' and in order are a non-human 'for-itself' about which 'one cannot say that they actually to grasp the nature and dynamics of this production of subjectivity, it is neces­ speak, and yet, they do say something, even if they do not say it with words, with sary to expand the concept of the statement, which in no case should be limited signifiers'. The image, sounds, numbers and so on are, especially in media­ to the confines of linguistics. The popular conception of being political con­ based societies, powerful vectors of subjectivation in the same manner as spoken ceived as the being oflanguage (Ranciere, Virno, Butler etc.) is radically called language. These semiotics are different materials of expression which have into question by Guattari's critique of the imperialism of semiotics based on respective modalities of composition and which assure specific (non-verbal) signification. modes of semiotization, constituting modes of'subjectivation which art had The ethico-aesthetic paradigm shifts the emphasis from what is said to the never ceased to explore or produce. act of speaking, from the enonce to the enonciation, leading us to consider the Collective assemblages thus produce enunciations with 'multiple heads', latter as 'polyphony' in the twofold sense of the assemblage of a multiplicity of verbal and non-verbal, human and non-human, where subjectivity or proto­ voices (social and pre-individual), but also of an assemblage of a multiplicity of subjectivity (machinic, affective) largely goes beyond the subject (individual 178 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New The Aesthetic Paradigm 179 and collective). They introduce a myriad of qualities beyond mere speech acts: tried to deal with throughout his work. In political constructivism it is therefore ethological, multiple semiotic components, aesthetic, corporal, phantasma­ a question of problematizing the di~unction between the molar and molecular goric, irreducible to semiology or to any abstract system of language. The dimension, in both the sense of being-against as well as being-together. assemblages of enunciation make semiotic, material and social flows enter into When I say that we are in the process of reliving a 'restoration' of old 'revolu­ an interaction with the repetitions of a distinct language. . tionary' techniques and when I identify a nostalgia for the disciplinary age, I am In capitalist societies, the capacity to act within such semiotics is linked to the not only thinking about the political dispositives proposed by Ranciere and logic of 'representation' and 'signification' that neutralize and suppress every Badiou, but rather about all of the theories which neglect to consider the rela­ other function of language and signs. Guattari's affinnation of a kind of tionship between the molar and the molecular in the process of political 'semiotic ', the appeal to a 'democratization' of the components of subjectivation, as these misconstrue the conditions of the constitution of con­ enunciation and subjectivation has a profoundly political significance. The ori­ temporary subjectivities. gin and legitimacy of this affinnation can be found in the movements beginning The heterogeneous levels which constitute the territories of micro- and in the 1960s and 1970s that used speech techniques and procedures of repre­ macro-political subjectivation are reduced to the sole level of 'politics' which sentation as both revolutionary and institutional political dispositives. It can appears to have its own independent life, demanding nothing other than its also be viewed parallel to the affirmation of these same movements, the 'multi­ own affinnation where taking power over signifying semiotics and a sole mode ple centers' of semiotic production and the utilization of 'polyvocal materials of of subjectivation are the dominant force. There is a close relationship between expression' which release a heterogeneity of processes of subjectivation, expos­ the concept of a politics which 'has need of nothing but itself' for constituting ing the vulnerability of the model based on the subordination of the individual the political meaning and the conception of language as an autonomous to the m<90rity in both capitalism and socialism. system of production of linguistic Signification. These materials of expression and these modalities of expressions are at once The 'constructivism' which I am referring to cannot proclaim the noble uni­ those of 'minorities' (women, children, the insane, the sick, as well as sexual, versality and homogeneity of a political model, because the constructivist linguistic and social minorities) and those of 'artists'. The criticism and strug­ method is always that of singularity, a specific assemblage, an 'artisan' attentive­ gles that began in the 1960s opened the possibility of a 'massification' of artistic ness to the construction of different levels which fit into one' organization', one practices. The infatuation with artistic practices that is at the origin of the sud­ situation or process of subjectivation. That is the limitation of any understand­ den explosion in the number of temporary workers is an infatuation with other ing of the political that prejudges modes of expression based on a 'universal' processes of subjectivation which evade the domination of signification and model of subjectivation. In this way one would merely presuppose what has yet representation and which fmd in art the techniques of 'rupture' and 'suture' to be understood and what has yet to be done: design a cartography of a mode for constructing these processes. of political 'desubjectivation' and 'subjectivation' posing the question of how it Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm does not preach the devalorization of might be possible to link, or prolong a singularity in another singularity. the statement, nor does it underestimate its representative and cognitive func­ Under the conditions of contemporary subjectivation, the formalism of a uni­ tions. It invites us to shift our point of view, moving it to the widening interval versal politics does not serve anything but to hide a kind of impotence behind a between the pathic and the discursive, between a molar and molecular system judgemental attitude that ignores what is actually going on. This formalism makes of signs. it impossible to comprehend the enormous difficulties which societies are con­ It is in this way that one can comprehend the creative, productive and consti­ fronted with when power is configured as the 'administration of differences'. The tutive function which each of these components play in 'political' production. question remains of how one can elude this differential governmentability and But at the same time one might analyse the functions and effects of power and how one can reconstruct these singular and heterogeneous conflicts differently. of subjugation which political production brings about. The modalities of non­ What is important in Felix Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm is the way he verbal semiotization converge in the construction of the 'relation to the self' poses the problem of expanding the concept of enunciation through under­ that occurs by means of affects without employing the linguistic dichotomy of standing it to be immediately political, because, contrary to those schools of the speaker/listener or the modalities of verbal semiotization which circulate thought which base their political existence on language, Guattari's paradigm by means of the signifiers, the parole and the distinction between the transmit­ investigates the di~unction between, on the one hand, the world and discourse ter/receiver. In every collective, and most notably in a political collective, this and, on the other hand, the world of non-discursive complexity, allowing the single enunciation made by many people is presented but is never problema­ concept of the subject and the certainties of the process of political subjectiva­ tized as such. It is rather repressed or denied. Precisely this issue is what Guattari tion to continually fluctuate. 180 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New T The Aesthetic Paradigm 181 The possibility of making declarations and working with the discontinuity love or a machine of fear engages, it is not due to the effects of discursive, betw"een the molecular and the molar had long been neutralized by language cognitive or deductive phrases. It is already given. And this machine will pro­ as it had come to take control of power, through representation, the significa­ gressively develop different means of expression. (1993: 94) tion ofother modes ofsemiotization and determining processes ofsubjectivation centred around a 'subject' and 'representation' which are specific to moder­ The statement thus has a tw"ofold function: to signify, to communicate, and nity. Guattari's approach has an immense political force because it recognized 'politically' declare, but also and above all to 'produce assemblages of enuncia­ that the processes of semiotics based on signification taking control over non­ tion capable of capturing the points of singularity of a situation' which is both discursive semiotization corresponds to the techniques of taking power through political and existential and which is able to give consistency and persistence to political 'representation'. modes of living (1995: 128). But the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, as Guattari continued to note, does not The existential function is an affective and intensive force which registers limit itself to 'democratizing' the process of'subjectivation' by allowing 'molec­ what occurs to us and which singularizes 'the order of things', expressions and ular populations' and machinic or affective proto-subjectivities to enter into it. continuities. The existential function makes, singularizes and differentiates The new paradigm is not simply an affirmation of semiotic pluralism or of a what happens to us by making the event into something material and into an pluralism of subjects of expression. The ethico-aesthetic paradigm is based on ethical occasion, a kind of 'matter with the option of subjectivity' because it the apprehension of a force that expresses a change in the manner of feeling, presents us with a world and the 'production of self' as it opens up other proc­ in the affects, in existence, before this becomes expressed in knowledge and esses. It plays the essential supporting role in subjectivity in action, whether language. individual or collective. This affective force of the 'auto-positional existential', of the construction The existential affirmation, the existential auto-positioning is not an affect and formation of existential territories is translated in Guattari's works into the which one can consider as 'brute energetic matter: it is "hyper-complex",' as construction of a new enunciative function, the 'existential function' which Guattari postulated, because it is full of 'all of the fIelds of potentiality which it establishes itself before and next to 'denotation and signification'. This subse­ is capable of opening up' . Just as the affect oflove is not limited to the 'expecta­ quent expansion of the concept of enunciation is the condition sine qua non for tion of a "libidinal discharge'" but rather is 'animated by unknown worlds a new practice. situated at the crossroads which it brings us', the affect of revolt, of indignation, The aesthetic paradigm in effect proposes to construct dispositives where one of dissent is not resolved in expressing these passions, but rather it encloses makes use of and one experiments with linguistic, political, economic, literary these possible worlds along with the subjective junctions which are to be and artistic techniques, not only through defIning or signifying something, not employed. only for producing cognitive developments, but rather for constructing politi­ It is in this sense that it is possible to defIne these acts as emergences, as cal mobilizations and resistance, for producing works of art, but also and most potentialities which are to be worked out and deployed in tw"o directions which of all, for 'bringing to light the universe of expression' for 'releasing an existen­ are relatively heterogeneous: the conflicts staged by the Coordination des Intermit­ tial function, for making possible a certain way of living' (1987: 63). tents et des Precaires represent both the struggle for certain rights and equality The ethico-aesthetic paradigm does not consider the expanded concept of and a struggle for the intensification and differentiation of dispositives of the the enunciation in terms of the production of discourse or the production of production of subjectivity, the struggle for difference. The production of sub­ art and so forth but rather as the 'mutant centers of production of subjectivity'. jectivity in the Coordination is a process of construction and differentiation of a At the base of the enunciation, there is no linguistic competence, bur rather an complex 'affect' which is at the same time political and existential, of which existential apprehension of the world and it is based on this existential and its unfolding depends on a multiplicity of favourable conditions which must affective understanding that discourse, knowledge, writing, works and so on, be constructed, and a multiplicity of unfavourable conditions which must be continue to be possible. destroyed, avoided or neutralized. According to Guattari we live in a paradoxical situation which becomes a ­ The politics of fIghting for new social rights are the 'material' conditions, as damental political issue at stake in societies of security: a Marxist would say, for the production of subjectivity. But in their own way, the intensive forces which express themselves in existential functions singularize We fInd ourselves thrown into discursive systems, and, at the same time, we are and tranversalize socio-economic politics, giving to them a polemic consistency confronted with the challenge of creating points of convergence of existential and persistence. They activate a kind of conflictual 'production of existence' in affirmation, which, themselves, are not discursive [ ...J. When a machine of opposition to the social politics marked by the dominant universe of values and ~ I

I 182 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production o/the New The Aesthetic Paradigm 183

existential affects (those of 'human capital', of the subjugation to neo-liberal order to produce a situation, in order to organize as resistance, in order to judgement etc.). conduct a class, in order to produce a collective assemblage of subjectivity and Whatever the case, the process of the production of subjectivity cannot return so on. In reality, it is not really a question of making one's life into a work of art, to a simple 'becoming conscious of something' because one cannot become for which the late Foucault has often been criticized, but rather of experi­ aware of something that is not already there. The subjective mutation, the new menting with and instigating different techniques of transversalization and existential territories that are constructed at the limits of different dispositives singularization, and at the same time of synthesis and differentiation on a larger of power are not realities of which one can become conscious because they scale, in the social, economic and political dimension. have yet to be developed and constructed. Translated by David Quigley The emergence of political defiance, of an existential insubordination is pre­ .cisely the non-discursive element which must be addressed and worked upon because this is the point of rupture, the 'unnamable' point which contains Notes more than it articulates, and that is going to generate statements and action,

. giving consistency to the production of subjectivity. The consolidation of the I The Coordination des Intermittents et Precaires began on 27 June 2003 as a reaction process of subjectivation is not possible unless it succeeds in transversalizing by workers in the live performance sectors and freelancers from other cultural and reconfiguring politics, the economy and the social. And it has been pre­ areas to the signing of an agreement by trade union members that changed their cisely this dynamic of transversalization that has been blocked by the different unemployment insurance status. The coordination seeks to defend the system dispositives of power. of intermittent employment and the freedom that this form of labour entails It is here that, according to Guattari, the techniques of artistic composition while at the same time fighting to secure social rights in the face of increasingly and suture can be called upon not in place of political, social and so on, tech­ precarious living conditions. 'Coordination' is a form of political organization that emphasizes expressive mechanisms and strategies of transformation that are niques, but rather together with them, because they do not only aim at a simple able to respond to the unstable dynamics of post-identitarian politics. See, recomposition or unity, but rather work for a disjunctive synthesis (differentia­ Maurizio Lazzarato (2004), 'The Political Form of Coordination', available at: tion and transversalization, composition by means of differentiation). http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0707/lazzarato/ en (Translator's note). This 'labor' must be understood as a process, a construction and a processual 'Let us say that contemporary art remains enframed. There is a universe of refer­ transformation of subjectivity. When one refers to the production of subjectivity, ence, a universe of valorization, including economic valorization, which enframes it is the process of creation and not the work that emerges as the paradigm. It is the work, qualifying it as such, capturing it in a social field. There is an institu­ 'being in the process of making itself' and the 'how' of this process which should tional cutting-out' (Guattari, 1994: 56). become the focus of our interest, not the products or results. Taking into account 3 'What matters is not to furnish aesthetic objects a clef but rather conceptual, 'how' these processes function means valorizing the collective assemblage as aesthetic and social instruments with which sequences of enunciations such as com­ 'autopoietic', as the capacity of auto-production of subjectivity, as the capacity to puter materials, telecommunications or video graphics become reappropriated, continually generate its own organization, its own references and limits. which could just as well be infantile images or ones from other cultures: in summa­ tion, any means of communication which change SOciety' (Guattari, 2000: 36). The 'existential function' is the point of junction that engenders processes of singularization as generative, processual and irreversible temporalities. Approaching the production of subjectivity by means of its processuality implies Bibliography reconquering the present as 'generative' temporality, as a non-chronological time that engenders, that is to say, which itself creates. Time ceases to be sub­ Guattari, F. (1987), 'Cracks in the Street (Balthus : Ie passage du commerce Saint- missive and rather becomes a driving force, the object of qualitative mutations. Andre),' Chimeres, 3, Autumn 1987. This is an 'ethical' temporality which makes it possible to position oneself and Guattari, F. (1993), 'A propos des machine', Chimeres, 19, Spring 1993. to understand subjectivity as a 'crossroads of praxis, and thus as a choice: "what Guattari, F. (1994), 'L'an 01 des machines abstraites', Chirr0es, 23, Summer 1994. is it that I am doing there? What am I at this point now? Am I responsible for Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Baines and what I am right now but also responsible for what might happen as a result of J. Pefanis. Sydney: Power publications. Guattari, F. (2000), 'Vertige de !'immanence', Chimeres, 38, Spring 2000. this?'" (Guattari, 2000: 32). Lazzarato, Maurizio (2004), 'The Political Form of Coordination', onIlne at http:// Thus with the aesthetic paradigm it is not a question of producing works of eipcp.net!transversal/0707/lazzarato/en (accessed on 12 May 2008). art, shows, or plays but rather of using the techniques of 'rupture and suture' in ~ I I I Painting Time with Light 185 distinct and new forms of sublime cinema. Deleuze's analysis of these early forms of sublime cinema demonstrates their considerable compositional and affective Chapter 17 resources for contemporary art filmmakers, and I will conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of one of the contemporary fme art exponents of them, Anthony McCall. McCall's sublime solid light films are one example of Painting Time with Light how contemporary filmmakers are able to rediscover formal experiments from cinema's own history as conceptualized and analysed by Deleuze, pursue them Darren Ambrose to their logical extreme, and so renew the language of cinema itself.

Bergson, duration and the production of the new Whilst the problem of creating new images in cinema is an important matter, understanding the complexity associated with the evolution of cinematic gram­ Deleuze conceives cinema as an experimental mechanism for producing sen­ mar is perhaps amongst the most urgent of its aspects. The German filmmaker sory forms that both affect the body in new ways and elaborate new images of Werner Herzog, creator of mesmerizing cinematic works, is famously obsessed thought. His cinema books systematically examine the historical production of with capturing new images in film, wrenching ideas out of dreams and recreat­ this new body-brain through a taxonomy that articulates an original account ing them on the screen. For Herzog cinema is a battleground between dreams of cinema and its historical evolution. Deleuze situates his work on cinema and 'reality' , where a struggle is undertaken with the cliches of everyday imagery in relation to 's key notions of temporality and movement. to give us startling new images, to awaken us from our bovine obsessions Bergson argues that 'real' movement cannot be adequately thought through with the normative images of 'entertainment'. However, as Herzog himself is representation, an idea Deleuze develops in relation to its contemporaneous only too aware, there exists a far more pressing, albeit related problem of new instantiation - cinema. Has cinema not, Deleuze asks, developed subtle and cinematic form and the need to evolve the very principles offilmic language. It complex ways of successfully representing the real movement of time? Bergson is precisely the connection between the historical evolution of cinematic form argues that previous philosophical attempts to represent movement through and grammar and the production of new cinematic images which lies at the the normative categories of space and time merely translate movement into heart of Deleuze's philosophical work on cinema. abstract and reified coordinates, and think movement as a sequential numeri­ Deleuze provides a startlingly original and suggestive examination of cine­ cal passage appearing as a continuous line connecting these instantiated matic form, showing how cinema remains at a merely germinal stage in terms points. Reason therefore represents movement as a difference of degree of its investigation of its own resources for capturing and rendering visible between abstract points that in themselves remain the same, and simply equates certain relationships of time in moving images. There are, Deleuze suggests, movement with measurement. However, for Bergson, Zeno's ancient para­ new and yet unexplored powers for capturing the 'invisible forces of time', doxes already show the impossibility of thinking movement adequately in this together with considerable resources which already exist in the form of cine­ way, and in doing so reveals its fundamental difference from numerated and ma's historical experiments with new ways of configuring moving images. His represented movement. The error of thought vis-a.-vis movement rests on its profound philosophical meditation on cinema attempts to produce a vital failure to understand the difference between two sorts of time, a determinate symbiosis between cinematic and philosophical modes of thought whereby and measurable present that is continually and repetitively coming to pass, the capacity for philosophy to become vitally charged by the experiments and and the duration (duree) of all time coexisting with the present. The condition innovations in the history of cinema is established. Whilst the impact of his con­ of all our normative experience of movement, Bergson argues, is to be found ceptual innovations vis-a.-vis cinema have been considered in relation to the in the virtual coexisting dimension of duree. The virtual dimension of duree, ongoing evolution of contemporary philosophy, a relatively unexplored question despite not being actualized, is nevertheless real, and produces the movements remains, namely to what extent do Deleuze's reflections on cinema constitute an we normally perceive and subsequently represent. Duree is a past that can no important resource for contemporary filmmakers interested in reinvigorating longer be understood as a numerated line leading backwards from the present cinematic form? In this chapter, I will answer this question affirmatively by moment; it is an immanent totality, the open-whole of time in its continual examining his account of two experimental forms of historical montage, French interaction that constructs the repetitive becoming of the present. Duree is the Impressionism and German Expressionism, which Deleuze argues produce two immanent, virtual and ontogenetic life of becoming, of which the present --,..---- I I

186 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Painting Time with Light 187 moment is its actual realized expression. Bergson writes: 'Duree means inven­ but these vibrations keep everything 'open somewhere by the frnest thread tion, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new' which attaches it to the rest of the universe' (Deleuze, 1986: lO; see also (Bergson, 1944: 14). Bergson, 1944: 14). Echoing Bergson's closing lines in Matter and Memory, Duree is neither contained nor represented in space or time, simply because it Deleuze argues that this 'spiritual' movement is imparted through the percep­ is the vital becoming of space and time. Deleuze, argues that duree is perhaps best tual process of intuitive thought - the process of the cinema-brain - that returns understood as an open-whole, where the virtual dimension is both expressed to things their living becoming. As a 'mystical' movement Bergson's 'spirit' pro­ and constructed anew in each manifest movement. Deleuze contrasts this with vides an immanent vitalism to life. It is a type of thought which is materialist, but the idea of the closed set of abstract represented movement, or what he terms that takes us beyond the rational limits of the human. This vital life, Deleuze 'immobile sections'. As Deleuze shows, for Bergson the infinite movement of , is the spirit that cinema has consistently displayed itself capable of dis­ duree and the finite movements of represented images are not different in kind, covering as the principle and movement that animates its own moving images. since the latter are actual expressions of the former once they have passed Spirit is the immanent and non-organic life of duree, which is expressed in the through the brain. Crucially for Deleuze the cinema fuIlctions in precisely this perceptive mechanism of the brain as it constructs and produces the new. The way, like a type of brain, which constructs actual moving-images as becomings challenge for Deleuze is to show precisely how the cinema-brain counter-effects capable of expressing their real and immanent conditions in duree. For Deleuze natural perception and 'ascends' to its immanent virtual plane of dureewithout the history of cinema is the history of the attempt to express, through moving­ transcending or subordinating its actual moving images. He begins this difficult images, manifest changes in duree or in the whole. task by outlining two broad yet distinct historical manifestations which he terms This is precisely where Deleuze departs from Bergson, since for Bergson Movement- and Time-Image. The Movement-Image of the early twentieth cen­ when images are understood as representations of objects moving in space and tury expresses the open-whole of duree as its immanent cause, but indirectly, time they are only capable of providing 'a snapshot view of a transition'. These through already given conditions of possibility of moving images. Modern cin­ snapshots cancel the genetic movement of duree, and only give a frozen image ema, by contrast, breaks with these established conditions and establishes an of what ultimately escapes them. As Bergson insists, 'what is real is the continual entirely new set of formal compositional techniques for linking images into a change ofform' (1944: 328). According to Deleuze, and despite Bergson's appar­ moving series capable of directly expressing dureein a Time-Image. Rather than ent antipathy towards cinema, Bergson's thesis is the philosophical elaboration focus on Deleuze's treatment of modern cinema, I would like to return to his of cinema's great discovery - the real moving image of duree. By opposing the remarks on much earlier cinematic manifestations of the indirect presentation idea of cinema as consisting of mere abstract photographic snapshots and con­ of time, in order to show how these offer original, strange and powerful creative centrating on its capacity for representing and expressing movement, Deleuze resources for contemporary filmmakers. One of the most significant productive embarks upon a search for the attainment of a real image of duree in cinema's experiments in ~arly cinema, according to Deleuze's analysis, was concerned history. The attainment of such an image requires an extraordinarily complex with sublime affectivity. Deleuze develops a fascinating account of the power symbiosis between cinema's moving-image and new perceptual and conceptual that the early cinema developed to produce a sublime shock to thought in its mechanisms. By providing a rich philosophical treatment of that symbiosis, efforts to indirectly present the vital force of time. Writing of this early cine­ Deleuze effectively rehabilitates the form of cinematic movement-image within matic power he says: 'It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the Bergson's philosophy, and shifts our perceptual mechanism from the film movement-image, you can't escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you' projector and its projection of mere abstract photographic snapshots to the (1989: 156). screen. On the emergent 'brain-screen' of cinema new images, perceptions and For Deleuze there is a shocking violence to thought associated with the thoughts - a new form of cine-intuition - emerge. experimentation and evolution of the movement-image. He identifies this This affIrmation of a form of cine-intuition as the mechanism of a new cin­ power of the movement-image as 'a sublime conception of cinema', and pro­ ema-brain takes us beyond, through a process of counter-effectuation, the ceeds to develop the Kantian insight that what constitutes the sublime is the human condition and its wholly inadequate and limited mode of rationality, in shock undergone by the imagination when it is pushed to its limit. But this order to reveal 'the inhuman and superhuman' conditions of cinema and shock is produced by the new moving images produced by cinema as opposed thought - real duree. Deleuze goes on to refer to the acentric inhuman dimen­ to natural spectacles of overwhelming power and infinite grandeur. We are con­ sion of duree- following Bergson - as a 'spiritual reality' (Deleuze, 1986: 11).1 fronted in these early cinematic forms by fundamental challenges to our For Deleuze, as indeed it had been for Bergson, the spiritual reality of duree is normative perceptual apparatus - our natural powers of recognition, associa­ both atheist and mystical, since it exists as entirely material 'cerebral vibrations', tion, knowledge and habits of thought. ---,.--­ I

188 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production ofthe New Painting Time with Light 189

The cinematic sublime in early French interval of the variable present as 'a numerical unity that produces in the image and German montage: a maximum quantity of movement in relation to other determinate factors, and that varies from one image to another according to the variation of the the abstract spiritual form of the future factors themselves' (1986: 44). The interval in liquid montage functions as a unit of measure for constructing a new type of movement-machine, each hav­ Each of the early forms of montage discussed by Deleuze present a different ing its own units of motion and standards of measure. There is also, Deleuze expression of duree; the organic montage of American cinema, the dialectical claims, an absolute maximum quantity of movement at the level of the open­ montage of Soviet cinema, the quantitative or extensive montage of French whole of duree, similar to the Kantian notion of the mathematical sublime. The Impressionist cinema, and the intensive montage of German Expressionistic cin­ quantitative numerical units of early French montage, the intervals of its varia­ ema. Here I propose to focus on developing an understanding of the latter two ble present, express this infInite whole in a cinema of the sublime, here: as two distinct forms of the sublime. the imagination devotes itself to apprehending relative movements, and in doing so quickly exhausts its forces in converting the units of measurement. (i) French Impressionist cinema: the sublimity of quantitative montage But thought must attain that which surpasses all imagination, that is, the set The early French approach to montage, evident in fIlmmakers such as Gance, of movements as whole, absolute maximum of movement, absolute move­ Epstein, Clair, Renoir, Deluc and Vigo, break with organic modes of composi­ ment which is in itself identical to the incommensurable or the measureless, tion in favour of 'a kind of Cartesianism' characterized by its interest in 'the the gigantic, the immense: canopy of the heavens or limitless sea. This is the quantity of movement, and in the metrical relations that allow one to defIne it'. second aspect of time: it is no longer the interval as variable present, but the Such an approach manifests 'a vast mechanical composition of movement­ fundamentally open whole as the immensity offuture and past. It is no longer images' (Deleuze, 1986: 41). In the French cinema of the 1920s and 1930s there time as succession of movement, and of their units, but time as simultaneism is an evident obsession with mechanism and automata, which, Deleuze argues, and simultaneity (for simultaneity, no less than succession, belongs to time; it it utilizes in two ways to attain a certain mechanical mode of movement-image is time as whole). (1986: 46) composition: There exists a dualism of matter and spirit in early French montage, hence its apparent Cartesianism, which consists of the relative mechanical movements of A fIrst type of machine is the automaton, a simple machine or clock mecha­ material elements coexisting with the absolute movement of a conceptual, men­ nism, a geometrical confIguration of parts which combine, superimpose or tal whole. The ideal toward which relative quantitative movement tends is that transform movements in homogenous space, according to the relationships of a simultaneous co-presence of temporal movements, an infInity comprised of through which they pass.... The other type of machine is the engine which superimposed successive moments grasped simultaneously as a whole. Deleuze runs on steam and fIre, the powerful energy machine which produces move­ sees in Gance's use of superimpositions and the triple screen in Napoleon, for ment out of something else, the inside and the outside, the engineer and the example, the logical end point towards which early French montage's quantita­ force - in a process of internal resonance or amplifying communication. tive tendency aspires. In Gance's remarkable fIlm something is presented that (1986: 42) goes beyond the normal senses, 'an image as absolute movement of the whole that changes' (1986: 48). The open-whole is conceived as a 'great spiritual From this machinic compositional strategy emerged an entirely abstract art in helix', a geometric fIgure of multiple movements grasped as simultaneously co­ which pure forms of movement were extracted, and a new form of cinematic present to one another in a single mental reality. There is here the production kinetics was subsequently produced. This emerging machinic kinetics leads of a new cinematic presentation of time through the dualism of material numer­ eventually to a fascination with water that, Deleuze notes, enabled 'better con­ ical units and infInite spiritual simultaneities. ditions to pass from the concrete to the abstract, a greater possibility of communicating an irreversible duration to movements, independently of their (li) German Expressionist cinema: the sublimity of intensive montage fIgurative characters, a more certain power of extracting movement from the thing moved' (1986: 43). This fluid mechanics of 'liquid perception' provided Having established the mathematical sublime expressed by early French mon­ a more effective strategy whereby the new abstract cinematic art communicated tage techniques Deleuze elaborates the different form ofmontage within German the movement of duree in images, and led to an entirely new conception of the Expressionism which constitutes a Kantian principle of dynamic sublimity. l I 190 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New I Painting Time with Light 191 He establishes a fundamental difference by focusing upon their respective meet in the centre at a point of maximum intensity - which Goethe says is a understandings of the relationship between movement and light. Byacknowl­ reddish-purple. He observes that as yellow and blue become more intense they edging the now familiar characteristics of German Expressionist cinema - sharp are imbued with a reddish reflection or shimmer, where the ultimate result of red­ contrasts of light and shadow, dramatic chiaroscuro, unstable and improbable purple is 'the incandescent' - 'flash, brilliance, the turbulence of fire, which compositions of diagonals, oblique angles and contorted surfaces, as well as is the very excess of the visible' (Escoubas, 1982: 241). These effects of fiery themes of madness, hallucination, violence, possession, the supernatural and brilliance - scintillation, glistening, sparkling, fluorescence, phosphorescence, the diabolic - he attempts to show that these themes, the atmospheres and for­ shimmers, auras, halos - are manifestations of the terrible, burning fue of red­ mal elements all arise from a conception of movement and light that brings purple light, and Deleuze finds such effects manifest throughout German together Worringer's notion of the Gothic line of non-organic life and Goethe's Expressionist f:tlm; in the circle of flames in The Golem and in Faust, the phos­ theory of colour.2 Movement and light are understood as forms of intensity, phorescent demon's head in The Golem, the blazing head of Mabuse and of affective quantities that extend into space to varying degrees and that ultimately Mephisto, the silhouetted figure of Nosferatu as he emerges from a depthless generate a dynamic cinematic sublime of apocalyptic power. luminous space. It is as if, Deleuze argues, a 'flnite intensity had now, at the Deleuze argues that in German expressionism too there is a fundamental summit of its own intensification, regained a flash of the inflnite from which it break. from organic modes of composition, but that it is achieved through the had parted' (1986: 53). Such effects express an inflnite inorganic force animat­ introduction of a Gothic non-organic vitalism as outlined by Worringer, 'a pre­ ing the natural world, and the images of burning incandescence directly present organic germinality, common to the animate and the inanimate, to a matter the light of inflnite intensification as 'the spirit of evil that burns Nature in its that raises itself to the point of life and to a life that spreads itself throughout all entirety' (Deleuze, 1986: 53). Such a terrible, burning light is an instance of matter' (Deleuze, 1986: 51). Deleuze perceives in German Expressionist cine­ Kant's 'dynamic sublime', generated not through mathematical number but ma's use of aberrant and autonomous movement a vital non-organic force. In through overwhelming force: contrast to the French configuration of montage, which operates through a mechanical geometry of measure and metrical quantity, German Expressionist In the dynamic sublime, it is intensity which is raised to such a power that it montage shapes its images through a geometry of 'prolongation and accumula­ dazzles or annihilates our organic being, strikes terror into it, but arouses a tion' of kinetic lines, surfaces and volumes that prolong movements beyond thinking faculty by which we feel superior to that which annihilates us, to dis­ their fIxed limits and bring these vectors together in a wild and dynamic geom­ cover in us a supra-organic spirit which dominates the whole inorganic life of etry of intensive forces connected in a network of changing and developing things: then we lose our fear, knowing that our spiritual 'destination' is truly relations which 'can claim kinship with a pure kinetics' (Deleuze, 1986: 51). invincible. (Deleuze, 1986: 53) Of particular interest to Deleuze is the different Expressionistic handlings of The fiery light of expressionist cinema is an apocalyptic force functioning light, each of which signals the sublime presence of a vital non-organic force - as the spirit of evil or of darkness, but at rare moments this terrible, burning light was treated as 'a potent movement of intensity, intensive movement par light reaches a threshold - the sublime - beyond which it illuminates a 'non­ excellence' (1986: 51). Here a Goethean conception prevails, according to which psychological life of the spirit which belongs neither to nature nor to our light and shadows are separate, inflnite forces in perpetual conflict, the visible organic individuality, which is the divine part in us, the spiritual relation in emerging only through light's encounter with the realm of shadows, as in Expres­ which we are alone with God as light' (Deleuze, 1986: 54). This is the essence sionist illm where light and shadow are treated like two separate conflicting of the Expressionist dynamic sublime, it entities. Every shade is a degree of intensity in relation to shadow, an intensive quantity that takes its value in relation to a degree zero of black. Each temporal keeps on painting the world red on red, the one harking back to the frightful unit of configuration, the moment of the variable present, is an intensive degree non-organic life of things, the other to the sublime, non-psychological life of expressing the relation between light and shadow. However, as Deleuze notes, the spirit. . . Expressionism attains the cry. . . which marks the horror of each specific configuration also expresses the whole of duree as an intensive degree non-organic life as much as the opening up of a spiritual universe which may raised to a higher power, and dureeappears in Expressionist effects of light. be illusory. (Deleuze, 1986: 54) , For Goethe black and white represent the minimum and maximum oflight's visiblity. Ifwhite and black are the extreme left and right end points of a contin­ The forces of shadow and light, when raised to an infinite degree of intensity, uum, the colour yellow is created in a left-to-right movement towards black, and become apocalyptic burning fue and supernatural spirituallight, and it is in this blue in a right-to-Ieft movement towards white; and if the two movements inflnity of intensive fue/light we find expressionism's configuration of the open I 192 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Painting Time with Light 193 whole of duree - 'the blazing has become the supernatural and the supra­ develop these formal ideas of solid light forms in increasingly sophisticated and sensible' (Deleuze, 1986: 54). complex ways (e.g. multiple permutated film projections and increasingly com­ In the open-whole of French montage the mechanistic movements of indi­ plex geometrical forms unfolded in time and space). His fUm. work consistently vidual configurations of elements are subsumed within a single, infinite presents us with a simple, and pure aesthetic meditation upon the complex dimension of simultaneous movements. In expressionism's open-whole, how­ nature of duree, change and becoming, forcing us to become engaged with con­ ever, the time of individual movements is not so much subsumed within an tinuous, overlapping and multiple durations that have the capacity to affect and infmite totality as it is destroyed entirely. Light and shadow become dynamic alter us physiologically and articulate and instantiate a new form of spiritual forces, which when raised to the infinite, becomes an absolutely explosive cine-intuition. dynamic power - a destructive fire or creative light that ceases to have norma­ At the heart of McCall's filmwork is the counter-effecting capacity of cinematic tive temporal coordinates. The open whole of duree becomes an infinite intuition vis-a.-vis natural perception. His work struggles against the illusion of intensification of force, a concentrated power that draws time into a single time generated by conventional normative representations by attempting to shrinking point, and if there is time at all in this infinitely contracting and ris­ rethink the aesthetics of movement and the complexities of 'real' temporality ing point, it is that which 'passes through the fire' and emerges when the whole and duration. For him, as for Bergson and Deleuze, the illusory nature of tem­ is able 'to break its sensible attachments to the material, the organic, and the porality emerges from subordinating time to spatial concepts. The problem human, to detach itself from all states of the past and thus discover the abstract addressed by his work is how to rethink temporality on the basis of movement, spiritual Form of the future' (Deleuze, 1986: 53-54). qualitative change, modulated becoming and coexisting qualitative durations. For Bergson, Deleuze and McCall the passage of time is more than the mere suc­ cession of states inscribed within discrete and even intervals. Our experience of The sublime film work of Anthony McCall time is that of duree, of a dynamic continuation of a past into a present and towards a future. Each present moment interpenetrates the next, with each new Anthony McCall's contemporary fIlm work is concerned with realizing an present functioning as a qualitatively different moment pushing into the next implicit cinematic logic of the sublime which to date remains relatively unex­ in a single movement of becoming. With each moment something new comes plored. His work effectively harnesses the formal innovations of Impressionist into existence, something unpredictable emerges which then forms with the and Expressionist filmmakers in juxtaposing discrete intervals and the open subsequent moments a qualitatively distinct ensemble or assemblage of time. whole of time to create images of sublime affectivity. Most of his experimental Duree is fundamentally indeterminate; the future is truly open and unforeseeable. film work consists of prOjected solid-light forms (such as circles, lines and other Time is creation, invention and becoming. Time makes a difference since each more complex geometrical shapes) in gallery spaces that are filled with vapor­ moment brings forth something qualitatively new. Time in McCall's films is not ous mist. The effect achieved by these simple light projections is one where the homogenous but heterogeneous. mutating light form describes a seemingly solid geometrical shape composed of McCall's movement-images of solid light display the coexistence of distinct light in space; the projected light describes an essentially insubstantial sculp­ durations, levels, or strata of duration whereby a single 'event' can belong to tural form so that it comes to inhabit the empty space of the room itself for the several qualitatively different temporal levels. His work precisely encompasses duration of the fIlm. With this work there is a formal concentration upon what this temporal multiplicity through its presentation of permutated and modu­ he calls 'the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a lated temporal rhythms in the projected work itself (e.g. Long Film for Four mere carrier of coded information' (McCall in Baker, 2004). He is concerned Projectors, the undulating modulation of two lines in Doubling Back and Turn), primarily with examining the language of cinematic form in its bare essence as and then also through the introduction of the qualitatively different concrete projected moving light in space, and its affective potential. In his early work durations of different spectators into the complex assemblage of duration Line Describing a Circle ('the first film to exist in real, three dimensional space') already present within the work. There is a kind of ongoing confrontation a projected point of light slowly describes the form of a circle onto a screen between the different concrete durations of work and spectator in the creation (shone through an opaque atmosphere) and becomes a remarkably tactile and of a complex assemblage or coexistence of different durations. It is in this way textural solid form in space. The film proceeds from a single point oflight shone that McCall's fllm works draw upon the machinic compositional strategies across the vaporous space of the gallery, and slowly becomes a full circle. As it associated with the early French cinema, McCall's films explore the logic of describes a circle on the screen a remarkable solid cone of light is progressively repetition, permutation, virtual stasis and imperceptible modulation, which built in the space of the room. McCall's subsequent film work has continued to paradoxically succeed in rendering the strange qualitative nature of time as ~ I

I 194 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Painting Time with Light 195 something sublimely sensible. Our imagination becomes oveIWhelmed by the Notes quantitative simultaneism so carefully executed by these films and we literally become 'lost' and 'enveloped' within these works. This is particularly evident J Bergson discusses this 'spiritual life' in 1944: 292-95. For a particularly useful discus­ with his Long Film for Four Projectors from 1970 which consists of a long permu­ sion of the notion of 'spirit' derived from Bergson, and how it contributes to tated series of repeated and multiple planes oflight projected through vaporous understanding Deleuze's thought as mystic- see Zepke, 2005, esp. chapter 3. mist that describe the entire volume of a surrounding space. The film is run This work has been particularly important in developing my overall understand­ simultaneously through four different projectors, with each section of the film ing of Deleuze's relation to Bergson in the Cinema books provided in the first being built from repetitions of one movement of a tilted plane (line) travelling part of this chapter. through the frame. Homogenous clock-time dissipates as we become subject to 2 Deleuze bases his understanding of Goethe's colour theory on E. Escoubas, 1982. the complex coexistence of multiple rhythms of duration. As in the French quantitative sublime montage the open whole of duree is conceived within McCall's work as a 'great spiritual helix', a geometric figure of multiple move­ Bibliography ments grasped as simultaneously co-present to one another in a single mental reality. As Deleuze notes: 'It is no longer the relative domain of the variable Baker, G. (2004), 'Film Beyond its Limits', Anthony McCall: Film Installations. interval, of kinetic acceieration or deceleration in the content, but the absolute Warwick: Mead Gallery. domain of luminous simultaneity, of light in extension, of the whole which Bergson, H. (1944), Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell New York: Random changes and is Spirit' (1986: 48). House. In addition to mobilizing the quantitative logic of the cinematic sublime, Bergson, H. (1998), Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. McCall's work often draws upon the strategies more associated with the inten­ Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1, The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and sive sublimity of Expressionism. An intensive plane of immanence becomes R Galeta. MinneapoliS: University of Minnesota Press. manifested by these films, whose movement-images of light forms become time Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2, The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. itself, a real movement of genesis in space, or the form of time as change. Time MinneapOlis: University of Minnesota Press. is associated here with the perspective of universal variation, of an ever changing Escoubas, E. (1982), 'L'oeil (du) teinturier', Critique, 418 (March 1982), 231-42. whole without horizons, centres or points of anchorage. Deleuze himself Zepke, S. (2005), Art as Abstract Machine, Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and claims that the plane of immanence is made up entirely of light, where the Guattari. New York: Routledge. luminosity of matter in movement is not that of the physical and human eye organized in relation to bodies human or otherwise, but rather that of the prop­ agation of energy throughout the entire universe. An aberrant energetics of intense light emerges from McCall's solid light experiments, whose frenetic movements through space seem to express the Gothic dynamism Deleuze associates with the intensive cinematic sublime. Redundant presentations of temporality states thus discover the abstract spiritual form of the future which so energizes the present, that returns to things their living becoming in duree. It is this ongoing capacity for producing new images and for reinvigorating its own compositional grammar that remains vital. For Deleuze, as for McCall, the cinema (the cinematic form) is still at a germinal stage in terms of its investiga­ tion ofits own resources for' capturing' and rendering visible certain relationships of time in an image, of painting time with light. There are new and barely explored powers for capturing the 'invisible forces of time', and it is these powers of cinema that Deleuze's philosophy and McCall's film works evoke, it is these powers that can once again serve to challenge our conventional modes of thought, that provide a 'shock to thought' that demand the invention and production of new ways oflooking at, and relating to 'our' world. T i Jazz Improvisation 197

their home territories. A certain species of bird will sing a song to claim its territory; another species will pluck leaves from the trees in its milieu, and place them face down in a circle on the earth to demarcate its territory. Chapter 18 Features of bird physiology and of the landscape when incorporated into a refrain become expressive of territory. Milieu-components on which the bird may rely in a narrowly physiological sense - those leaves may come from a tree Jazz Improvisation: that harbours the insects the bird relies on for nourishment, for instance - these Music of the People-to-Come milieu-components take on a kind of surplus-value in being transformed from life-support requirements into expressive features of the territory through their Eugene Holland incorporation into a refrain - whether behavioural or melodic or both. Such surplus-value is inherent in and characteristic of life, on Deleuze and Guattari's understanding. The sun showers the earth with practically unlimited amounts of solar energy; life harnesses part of that energy in an explosive pro­ One of the truly remarkable things about Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of liferation of living beings and, more important, of different forms of life. Life music is the way they consider it in relation to nature, and as one of the most differentiates itself constantly, by means of both genetic mutation and genetic creative parts of nature.l Following the lead of the twentieth-century French drift - a kind of surplus-value of the genetic code that enables life to continually composer Olivier Messiaen, who based some of his musical compositions on the create a plethora of various new forms oflife. The evolution of life for Deleuze melodies of song-birds, Deleuze and Guattari derive much of their analysis of and Guattari is not about the survival of the fittest through cut-throat competi­ music from birdsongs.2 More precisely, they analyse music in terms of the way tion in conditions of ecological scarcity, but about self-differentiating life it 'deterritorializes refrains' (ritournelles), (1987: 302 and passim) and refrains overflowing with experimental self-organizing life-forms, forms that survive or are - for one thing - a means that birds use to establish territory. But refrains, thrive just as long as they are sufficiently fit for the milieux they occupy. And in especially for Deleuze and Guattari, are many other things as well. So any under­ this explosion of life-forms, birds and other animals became musicians and per­ standing of how music deterritorializes refrains must take as its point of forming artists long before the forward-most, intake portion of the human departure their understanding of refrains themselves. digestive tract took on the expressive functions of voice, long before human Deleuze and Guattari's use of the concept of refrains in A Thousand Plateaus language or song deterritorialized the eating mouth, as Deleuze and Guattari has two main sources. In some respects, the term 'refrain' serves as a relay for put it. 'Art does not wait for human beings to begin' (1987: 320). Deleuze's earlier concept of habit (itself drawn from the works of Spinoza and But we can go farther. We can agree that bird songs express territorialization, Hume). For Deleuze, contracting habits - perceptual as well as behavioural and we tend to think of this as natural: each species of bird has a particular song· habits - was a way of creating order out of chaos, a way of introducing stability its members sing in order to mark or claim their territory. But in fact, such through repetition so as to be able to make one's way in the world. This con­ songs are cultural as much as they are natural: for even within a given species, ception of habit has two important features. First of all, habits are constitutive the territory-song of one group of birds can differ slightly but noticeably from of the subject, not expressions of it (and thus habits are said to be based on pas­ that of another group, even when the groups - of sparrows, in this case -live as sive syntheses): one contracts the habit of saying I, and it is habits that define close to one another as from one end of New York's Central Park to the other. subjectivity rather than the other way around. The other thing to be said at this Conversely, there are many examples of human refrains or musical genres - the point is that habits in Deleuze's view necessarily become stale, a matter of bare ancient Greek modes, Hindu der;i-talas, and Indian ragas, for example - which or mechanical repetition of the same, so that living a truly human life involves are (or were) associated with a specific geographical territory in the same way constantly overcoming habit, moving beyond mechanical repetition to creative that those sparrows' songs were associated with their geographical territory. repetition - that is to say, repetition with a difference. And even if the geographical territorialization of music tends to wane in the Now the other source reference for the concept of the refrain is ornithology face of recording technologies and globalization, there is nonetheless still a or avian ethology, the study of birds and their behaviour. Some birds use distinc­ very active cultural territorialization in music that marks or demarcates a tive songs and ritualized behaviours to establish territories in which to live country-western audience from a jazz audience, let's say, or serial music from and/ or breed. They are the first artists and musicians, for they transform romantic or baroque music, or rockabilly from doom-metal fans, to reference certain components of the milieux in which they live into expressive features of more specific territorialities. My point here is that even in modern music, even T I

198 Deleuze, Guattari and the Produaion of the New Jazz Improvis~tion 199 in the most avant-garde, formally de territorializing modern music (such as that a tune .... One launches forth, hazards an improvisation, [and] to improvise is of Messiaen himself), social territorialization still plays an important role - even to join with the World ...' (1987: 311). The refrain here is directly linked to if it's a socia-cultural rather than strictly geographical mode of territorializa­ worldly, practical activity - both to establishing a home territory, as we'll see in tion. We will return to the issue of formal versus social territorialization later. a minute, and - more significantly for my purposes - to leaving that territory But first we have to work our way back to the Deleuze-Guattari formulation 'on the thread ofa tune'. from which we started - according to which music was supposed to deterritori­ Let's back up again, and start at the beginning: the very first words of the alize, not territorialize. 'refrain' plateau are these: The easy solution is simply to say that it does both - which is true enough. A better solution would be to acknowledge that musical forms or genres can be A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his powerfully territorializing forces even though (from a modernist perspective at breath. He walks and halts [in step with] his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or ori­ least) the vocation of music itself is to deterritorialize. This is in fact Deleuze and ents himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch Guattari's gambit: On one hand, they discuss the 'fascist' thrust of some music, of a calming and stabilizing [... ] center in the heart of chaos. (1987: 311) notably military marches, and the way music sometimes 'lapses back into a refrain [ ... as when] on 1V and radio the music of a great compose~ [gets] The next step is to consolidate the stabilizing centre by means of a protective used as a signature tune' (1987: 302). And on the other hand, they present a enclosure: quite conventional periodization of modern Western music - , Romanticism, Modernism - that bears out the modernist/avant-gardist view of [T] 0 draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a music's 'true' vocation. But, in order to sustain this view, they end up treating limited space. Many, very diverse components have a part in this, landmarks music in precisely the way they say their own book should not be treated: in iso­ and marks of all kinds. [ ...] The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as lation, as the product of discrete genius-composers, and more or less completely possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill segregated from its audience and the outside world - instead of treating it rhi­ or a deed to do. [ ...] Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a zomatically as one element in an assemblage connected with other social wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it. A child hums to movements and practices. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with the view summon the strength for the homework she has to hand in. A housewife of Western music they present - indeed, they make a convincing case for the sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of ability of modernist music to mobilize sonic materials more directly than ever her work. (1987: 311) before, a case that is in many ways parallel to what Deleuze says about percepts in the paintings of Francis Bacon in The Lo~c of Sensation and about Michel The last step: Tournier's novel, Vendredi in the appendix to Lo~ of Sense. But the problem is, this view does not conform to the recommendations they make about the best Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls use of their work as a whole. So I propose an additional, alternative set of con­ someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not nections for music as. de territorialization - connections with Deleuze and on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another Guattari's own nomadology plateau, and with Jacques Attali's study of Western region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own music as a fully social assemblage embedded in the outside world. For what gets to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. [... ] In lost in the narrow focus Deleuze and Guattari adopt in their discussion of West­ order to join with the forces of the future [ ...] one launches forth, hazards ern music - and what I think it is very important to restore - is the fuller sense an improvisation [... ] to improvise is to join with the World. [. ..] One ven­ of the refrain with which they started: the sense of refrain that includes habits tures forth on the thread ofa tune. (1987: 311) of behaviour and perception in the world at large as well as the performance of song, or of art music like that of Messiaen. As a repeated pattern of sensory-motor or vocal activity or a combination of So let us turn back to the sense of refrain as habit, behavioural and percep­ both, the refrain establishes something like a protective comfort zone from tual habit, and start again, in order to repeat with a difference - repeating with which one is then able to launch forth and improvise in the outside world. The a difference being one of the defining features of improvisational jazz. Improvi­ examples of the child and the housewife clearly suggest the family home as one sation in fact appears as a key theme from the very flISt page of the 'refrain' territory or 'safe haven' from which' one launches forth to join with the World', plateau, where we read these words: 'One ventures from home on the thread of but refrains constitute territories of many different kinds, both physical and T

200 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Jazz Improvisation 201 cultural: one's dorm, fraternity or academic major; one's office, department, accommodate these affects and contextual rhythms to his own body reper­ disciplinary affiliation or professional association; one's neighborhood, reli­ toire. Indeed, the game of fortida progresses until the body itself can be fully gious denomination or sports team. The question then becomes how societies inserted into its circulation of intensities. [You will recall that the child later use the territorializing and deterritorializing forces of refrains and music to plays the game in front of a mirror, chanting fortlda while making his own organize and manage these various territories ... self-image appear and disappear.... ] 'One ventures from home on the thread Before considering this question, let's back up once again - this time to a pas­ of a tune' [Seigworth quotes Deleuze and Guattari here] 'along sonorous, sage that occurs towards the end of the plateau preceding the one on the gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child'. Ultimately, refrain, where we read: 'A child comforts itself in the dark or claps its hands or fortlda is a child's act of creative involution, a beautifully improvised song. invents a way of walking adapt[ed] to the cracks in the sidewalk, or chants (2003: 96) "Fort-Da'" (1987: 299). Forti da is, of course, the phrase made famous by Freud in his accounts of his grandson's early vocalizations. Deleuze and Guattari go The theoretical stakes of the two versions could not be clearer: repetition is on to say this: 'psychoanalysts deal with the Fort-Da very poorly when they treat either conservative or it is creative. Repetition is in one case a reparative reac­ it as a phonological opposition or a symbolic component of the language­ tion to trauma, a compulsive repetition of the same - what Deleuze would call unconscious, when it is in fact a refrain. Tra la la' (1987: 299). bare or mechanical repetition - while in the other case repetition is a creative What's the difference? Why insist on calling the 'Fort/Da' phrase a refrain? response to some of life's little complexities, the chance to hazard an improvisa­ The standard psychoanalytic interpretation sees trauma at the heart of the tion -what Deleuze would call creative repetition or repetition with a difference. matter: in response to the trauma of the mother's absence, the child feels com­ Ultimately, it's a matter of proportion: life lived in the anxious clutches of death pelled - by the repetition compulsion - to recite 'Fort/Da' over and over again would be constrained to repeat compulsively, with little or no capacity for dif­ in a desperate attempt to master the trauma. The Lacanian interpretation ferentiation or differential repetition; this would be life constrained by base freights the child's vocalization with even more weight - the negation of nega­ instinct, by crippling neurosis, by stale habit, by social convention and obedi­ tion, the overcoming of absence, the phonemic binarization of the voice, the ence to the norm - life as a hideously monotonous refrain. A creative life, by loss of Being with a capital B and entry into the Symbolic order. But as Greg contrast, would maximize the proportion of difference over monotony or same­ Seigworth has pointed out in a brilliant re-reading of the entire episode, the ness within repetition; this would be life lived to the fullest, life lived on the child says only 0-0-0-0-0 and Da: the binary fort/da is in fact an interpretation edge: the persistent deterritorialization of one's refrains by music, always ready imposed by Freud and his daughter, and it is this supplementary interpretation to hazard an improvisation, perpetually leaving 'home' (homes of many kinds) that emphasizes - if it does not indeed introduce - the idea of absence, and on the thread of a tune. hence perhaps of trauma. (Fort means 'gone' in German; Da means 'there'.) This schizoanalytic account of the psycho-dynamics of repetition is crucial for What if the infant's' 0-0-01da' vocalization was instead an expression of joy, or understanding the significance of improvisational jazz, which maximizes the affrrmation, or satisfaction? Who says the mother's absence must be traumatic? proportion of difference over reproduction in repetition. Whereas classical What's if it's a relief? Or at least something the child learns to accommodate musicians merely reproduce the parts written for their particular instruments without the necessity of trauma or compulsion? Seigworth sums up beautifully by the composer, and play them, moreover, at the tempo dictated by a conduc­ the difference between the psychoanalytic approach and the schizoanalytic tor, a jazz musician is free to vary the notes, the tempo, even the key in which approach: she is playing. Indeed, the imperative ofjazz improvisation is always to 'make it new' - not just once (i.e. at the moment of composition), but every time you Putting the spool of thread into Deleuze and Guattari's hands,fortjda becomes play. John Coltrane will take a familiar tune - 'My Favorite Things' from Mary a [refrain] that, rather than the negation of anything (or the stand-in for an Poppins, for example - and put it to flight: adding (and subtracting) notes, absence), serves as a means for negotiating with and then learning to affirm changing the melody and tempo; and the resulting improvisation will be differ­ the entire process of comings and goings. [ ...] Not an act ofnegation,Jort-da ent every time he plays it. Improvisational jazz thus epitomizes what Deleuze serves as an assemblage of the rhythms and affects that coincide with the and Guattari call 'free action' (1987: 395-403, esp. p. 397) - action not pro­ occurrence of uneasy departures and anticipated returns. Through the repet­ grammed in advance, not devoted to any ulterior aim other than maximizing itive and increasingly sophisticated games of appearance-disappearance, creative difference in repetition. Freud's grandson - like other children, no doubt - has found the means to In free action, order arises immanently and immediately from the activity affrrm the entire unbroken act of coming-and-going and to progressively itself, rather than being reproduced from the past (the pre-written score) and 202 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Jazz Improvisation 203 imposed from the top down (by the composer and conductor). Classical music which is defmed as performing in order to reproduce a program written down abhors contingency; jazz improvisation thrives on it. If a saxophone suddenly in advance - and written by someone else. His analysis of the evolution of squawks in the middle of a symphony, it's a mistake; if a saxophone squawks in musico-social relations traverses four stages, of which the latter two are most the course of a jazz performance, that can become part of the performance, crucial here. In the first stage (pre-modem society), music accompanies ritual part of the improvisation. If improvising musicians are really in the groove, sacrifice, and its social function is to make people forget - to make them forget there is no such thing as a 'wrong note': even 'accidents' get incorporated into the violence entailed in structuring differences to found and maintain social the creative process and become part of the improvisation. Dave Brubeck's bass order. In the second stage (early modem society), which Attali calls the age of player reports playing an E in a piece that was being played in a key for which it representation, music's social function is not to make people forget, but to was totally unexpected; but the famous pianist subsequently picked up on it, make them believe - to make them believe in the intrinsic harmony of a social repeated it and then used it to actually transpose the piece into a different key order composed of specialists performing under the unifying command of a altogether, while performing it. In a classical performance, by contrast, an unex­ transcendent leader. In the third stage (capitalist society), music functions not pected note is simply a wrong note - and a horror to be avoided at all costs. to make people forget or believe, but to silence them, and to make them listen Rather than merely reproduce a pre-existing score, jazz musicians follow a proc­ silently and endlessly to music designed to distract their attention or stimulate ess of creation that they are part of, yet do not entirely control: jazz is thus a their appetites. In this third stage, which Attali calls the era of repetition, music process of itineration - it traces a path than can be followed but not predicted - has been commodified, and now appears in the forms of elevator and grocery­ rather than iteration orreproduction, to recall crucial terms from the nomadology store music manufactured by Musak, top-40 hit-parades, and the recording plateau (1987: 372 and passim). industry in general. But also note how the reproductive technologies of the era The socio-dynamics ofjazz arejust as important as the psycho-dynamics. (For of repetition enable a certain geographical deterritorialization of musical gen­ the sake of the argument, we take jazz to refer to group rather than solo improv­ res or territories: in the age of representation, you had to be able to actually isation). What Deleuze and Guattari say about science - that 'the manner in which attend the concert to hear the music; you had to live within the territorial a science, or a conception ofscience, contributes to the organization ofthe social field, and bounds of the concert hall (however loosely those bounds might be defined), in particular [the way in which it] induces a certain division oflabour [e.g. intellectual/ and you had to have enough social clout or enough money to get invited or buy manual or social/technical] forms an intrinsic part of that science itself' (1987: a ticket. With the advent of sound recording, broadcasting and a music indus­ 368-69) - is equally true of music. Just as the formal order ofajazz improvisa­ try, the production and consumption or reception of music get separated tion arises immanently from the free activity of playing rather than being in space as well as time: musical territories become more cultural than geo­ programmed in advance by a written score, so too does the social organisation graphic - they become 'virtual territories', if you will, in the conventional sense of jazz improvisation arise immanently from the group activity, rather than that we speak of virtual communities existing on the web. So, you can be an being imposed from the top down by a composer or band leader. The classical American metal fan living in California, for example, and really dig the Celtic symphony orchestra requires a transcendent instance of command in the fig­ metal sound of Mago de Oz without ever having heard them in concert in their ure of the conductor to guarantee coordination, which is to say that classical native Spain. music entails a social division oflabour whereby some - the musicians - merely Attali calls the fourth stage in his survey 'composition', perhaps intended in execute discrete parts of what others - composers and conductors - conceive the etymological sense of com-positio - positioned together, as in an assemblage and command. But there is no need for a conductor to control the creative conforming to the logic of the 'and ... and ... and ... ' that for Deleuze char­ process of jazz. Even when working from a chord-chart (which is sometimes acterizes multiplicities. For one of the distinctive features of this new stage used to provide musicians with a common structure within which to improvise), according to Attali is that it involves a re-appropriation of music by ordinary jazz improvisation is far more itinerative than iterative: solos vary in length, people, and a novel merging of the roles of producer and consumer: rather there is no set order as to who takes one when, a clever soloist can change keys than slavishly reproduce a composer's music from a score, or passively listen to or tempo unexpectedly and challenge the others to follow his or her lead and reproductions of it in silence, people in the era of composition will themselves so on. This is the sense in which Howard Brubeck suggested thatjazz improvisa­ participate actively in the production and enjoyillent of their own music. Mes­ tion is a form of democracy in action. sage and code are henceforth to be invented and performed simultaneously in It is also in this sense that Attali considers jazz (and particularly the Free Jazz a process of continual creation where the process itself counts for more than movement in the post-World War II United States (1985: 137-40» to represent the fmished product - a kind of permanent musical deterritorialization of the the end of what he calls 'social alienation' in music (1985: 134-35 and passim), refrain, as it were, whichjazz improvisation epitomizes. T

204 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Jazz Improvisation 205 But here the question arises - as it must for any modernist or avant-garde Notes practice - of the relation between formal innovation and social innovation. Does the formal innovation characteristic of jazz improvisation generate (or I Deleuze and Guattari insist that the function of philosophy is not to represent the even 'herald', as Attali suggests it might (1985: 5 and passim» similarly creative world, but to highlight certain aspects of it that are 'Interesting, Remarkable, or innovation in social practices themselves? Does deterritorializing musical Important' (1994: 82). refrains also deterritorialize social refrains? In one sense, for better or for worse, See in particular the 'Becoming-Music' section of the becoming-intense/becom­ it must be said jazz music has its own territory just as much as any other genre ing-animal plateau, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 299-309) and the entire refrain of music, including the avant-garde music favoured by Deleuze and Guattari: plateau. (1987: 310-50). that is, each has a specific 'virtual community' of listeners, forming an assem­ blage with specific radio stations, magazines, record labels, concert venues and Bibliography so on. There is nothing deterritorializing about jazz in this sense. But in another sense, deterritorializing music is precisely what jazz and jazz alone is known for: a Attali,]. (1985), Noise, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota jazz band will take a well-known 'standard' tune and put it to flight through Press. improvisation, deterritorializing it so that what was familiar to the point of being Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. stale becomes new, and perhaps even nearly unrecognizable. The standard tune Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press. in jazz becomes the point of departure for a collective line of flight that involves Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and musicians and audience alike in a creative endeavour that aims at making the G. Burchell. New York: Columbia. old tune into something totally unheard of, while still making musical sense. Seigworth, G. (2003), 'Fashioning a Stave, or, Singing Life', Animations oJDeleuze and Thus, ifwe move beyond a narrow focus on the composer and include in our Guattari, ed. Slack,]. D. New York: Peter Lang. analyses 'the organization of the entire social field' (as Deleuze and Guattari insist that we do in the case of nomad science) - a field which here consists of the listening audience as well as the performing musicians - then it becomes clear that, in the jazz assemblage, participation and creativity are widely dis­ persed and shared, whereas in the classical assemblage they are very narrowly restricted to the composer, with just a small margin of creative leeway granted to the conductor, even less to the musicians themselves, and nothing at all to the audience except for rapt and silent appreciation. So if music can for Deleuze and Guattari express the self-differentiating creativity of nature through its deterritorialization of the refrain, it seems to me that the collective creativity of jazz improvisation can in tum epitomize the deterritorializing force of music itself. But the ultimate question remains: if on one hand jazz is the epitome of crea­ tive deterritorialization in music, and if on the other hand to live human life to the fullest is to always venture forth on the thread of an improvised tune, then what social institutions are open - or can be opened - to improvisational ventures of this kind? What social practices operate - or can be transformed so as to operate - according to the principles of social organization embodied in improvisational jazz? Inasmuch as social life is composed of refrains of various kinds, in other words, the political challenge is to organize social relations so that as we launch forth on the thread of a tune, we hazard an improvisation that joins us with the World and a people to come, rather than endlessly and mechanically repeating fixed refrains, or spinning alone into the void. I Novelty and Double Causality 207

Of course, there are precursors for Whitehead's and Deleuze's valuation of novelty. Deleuze explicitly invokes Nietzsche's call for a 'revaluation of all values' Chapter 19 and for the continual 'creation of new values' (Deleuze, 1994: 136). And White~ head and Deleuze alike are inspired by Bergson's insistence that 'life ... is Novelty and Double Causality in Kant, invention, is unceasing creation' (Bergson, 2005: 27). But the real turning-point comes a century before Bergson and Nietzsche, in Kant's 'Copernican revolu­ Whitehead and Deleuze tion' in philosophy. Kant himself does not expliCitly value the New, but he makes such a valuation (or revaluation) thinkable for the first time. He does Steven Shaviro this by shifting the focus of philosophy from questions of essence ('what is it?') to questions of manner ('how is it possible?'). Kant rejects the quest for an absolute determination of being: this is an unfulfillable, and indeed a meaning­ less, task. Instead, he seeks to define the necessary conditions - or what today and Gilles Deleuze both place creativity, novelty, inno­ we would call the structural presuppositions - for the existence of whatever is, vation and the New at the centre of metaphysical speculation. These concepts in all its variety and mutability. That is to say, Kant warns us that we cannot think (or at least these words) are so familiar to us today - familiar, perhaps, to the beyond the conditions, or limits of thought, that he establishes. But he also tells point of nausea - that it is difficult to grasp how radical a rupture they mark in us that, once these conditions are given, the contents of appearance cannot be the history of Western thought. In fact, the valorization of change and novelty, any further prescribed. The ways in which things appear are limited, but appear­ which we so take for granted today, is itself a novelty of relatively recent origin. ances themselves are not. They cannot be known in advance, but must be Philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is largely oriented towards anamnesis encountered in the course of experience. This means that experience is always (reminiscence) and aletheia (unforgetting), towards origins and foundations, able to surprise us. Our categories are never definitive or all-inclusive. Kant's towards the past rather than the future. Whitehead breaks with this tradition, argument against metaphysical dogmatism, which both Whitehead and Deleuze when he designates the 'production of novelty' as an 'ultimate notion', or 'ulti­ endorse, means that being always remains open. 'The whole is neither given mate metaphysical principle' (Whitehead, 1978: 21). This means that the New nor give able ... because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change con­ is one of those fundamental concepts that 'are incapable of analysis in terms of stantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure' (Deleuze, 1986: 9). factors more far-reaching than themselves' (Whitehead, 1968: 1). Deleuze simi­ 'Creative advance into novelty' (Whitehead, 1978: 222) is always possible, always larly insists that the New is a value in itself: 'the new, with its power of beginning about to happen. and beginning again, remains forever new' (Deleuze, 1994: 136). There is Whitehead -like Nietzsche and Bergson before him - denounces the way that, 'a difference ... both formal and in kind' between the genuinely new, and that in traditional European philosophy, 'changeless order is conceived as the final which is customary and established (1994: 136). Deleuze and Guattari there­ perfection, with the result that the historic universe is degraded to a status of par­ fore say that 'the object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new' tial reality, issuing into the notion of mere appearance' (Whitehead, 1968: 80). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 5). Philosophical concepts are not for all time; Kant would seem to be included within the scope of this criticism, insofar as he they are not given in advance and they 'are not waiting for us ready-made, like divides 'things in themselves' from things as they appear to us. But although heavenly bodies' (1994: 5). Instead, they must always be 'invented, fabricated, Kant does not quite abandon the old dualism of reality and appearance, at the or rather created' afresh; 'philosophers must distrust ... those concepts they very least he radically revalues it. For in the Critique ofPure Reason, the changeless did not create themselves' (1994: 5-6). For both Whitehead and Deleuze, nov­ real is dismissed as unattainable and unknowable, and therefore not a proper elty is the highest criterion for thought; even truth depends upon novelty and object of metaphysical speculation. In removing the noumenal realm from any creativity, rather than the reverse. As for creativity itself, it appears possibility of cognition, Kant in effect endorses a version of Whitehead's 'onto­ logical principle', which asserts that 'there is nothing that floats into the world that Whitehead actually coined the term - our term, still the preferred cur­ fro~ nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity' rency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts ... a term that (WhItehead, 1978: 244). In Kantian terms, this means that phenomena can only quickly became so popular, so omnipresent, that its invention within living be referred to other phenomena - and not to noumena as (supposed) underly­ memory, and by Alfred North Whitehead of all people, quickly became ing causes. Everything that affects us, everything that matters to us, falls within occluded. (Meyer, 2005: 2-3) the realm of mutable appearances. In this way, even if he does not fully realize T I

., 208 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Novelty and Double Causality 209 it, Kant makes it possible to think change, becoming and the emergence of the But Kant resists this universalization of experience. As Whitehead puts it, the New, rather than subordinating them to 'changeless order' or 'static forms'. problem is that, 'according to [Kant's] form of the subjectivist doctrine, in the Kant undermines the privilege of 'changeless order' by introducing a new Critique ofPure Reason, no element in the temporal world [can] itself be an expe­ notion of time, one that reverses philosophical tradition. Before Kant, time was rient' - only the transcendental subject can be one (1968: 190). This means that regarded as merely an external measurement of the relations among objects Kant fails, by not pushing his Copernican revolution far enough. For if the phe­ that did not fundamentally depend upon it. But with Kant, as Deleuze puts it, nomenal world is entirely temporal, and entirely a world of experience, then we instead of time being the measure of movement, and thereby being 'subordinate should no longer say that it is 'merely experienced'. And if 'transition' is indeed to movement ... it is now movement which is subordinate to time' (1984: vii). universal, then duration, or primordial temporality, is the inner dimension of all It is only when time is not a mere measurement, but an inner principle of exist­ entities in the universe - and not just of human subjects. Whitehead, like Kant, ence, that becoming is liberated from static being, and the New can be privileged rejects 'the Newtonian 'absolute' theory of space-time' (Whitehead, 1978: 70), over the Eternal. It is only when time is no longer a mere quantitative measure­ according to which time would be 'self.subsistent ... something that without ment that it can take on the intensive form of what Bergson calls duration. there being an actual object would yet be actual' (Kant, 1996: 87). Time is never Bergson tends to be highly critical of Kant; but Deleuze points out that, in fact, given; it needs to be effectively produced, or constructed. Whitehead thus 'Bergson is much closer to Kant than he himself thinks: Kant defined time as accepts Kant's assertion that time is a function of the subject, and that it is sub­ the form of interiority, in the sense that we are internal to time' (1989: 82). jectivity that finds itself in time. But he radicalizes Kant's doctrine, by saying that That is to say, when Kant defines time as the inner form of sensible intuition, he every entity is a subject in this sense - and not just human beings or rational is not really saying that time is within us, or that time is something that we minds. Whitehead thereby replaces Kant's 'excess of subjectivity' (Whitehead, impose upon the world. He is saying, rather, that we are within time, and that 1978: 15) with what he calls the reformed subjectivist principle: 'the way in which our subjectivity can only be articulated in and through time. Once interiority one actual entity is qualified by other actual entities is the "experience" of the has been temporalized, it cannot retain the static form of the Cartesian cogito. actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject ... [T]he whole universe Kant thus unhinges time, or pulls it out of joint (Deleuze, 1984: vii). For a consists of elements dIsclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects' time that actively articulates movement, rather than merely measuring it, (1978: 166). Time is produced in and through experience; and experience, in cannot be divided into 'durationless instants' (Whitehead, 1968: 146) or'instan­ tum, is embedded within time. But this circularity does not only apply to us. taneous immobile sections' (Deleuze, 1986: 3). It is no longer possible, after Taken in this expanded sense, Kant's Copernican revolution no longer puts Kant, to maintain the Newtonian fiction of 'the full reality of nature at an human subjectivity at the centre of everything. Rather - in better accord with the instant, in abstraction from any temporal duration and characterized as to its actual achievement of Copernicus - it decentres that subject. For subjectivity, in interrelations solely by the instantaneous distribution of matter in space' the first place, is not an exclusively human privilege. In the second place, it is a (Whitehead, 1968: 145). With his Copernican revolution, therefore, Kant starts manner or formal principle, rather than anything substantial. And finally, sub­ down the path that culminates in the post-Newtownian physics of the twentieth jectivity is decentred because it is itself subject to the very phenomenon that it century, for which, as Whitehead puts it: produces: the inner passage of time. Kantian temporality, therefore, divides the self from itself. As Deleuze puts it, process, activity, and change are the matter offact. At an instant there is noth­ we must distinguish the I (je] 'as an act which continually carries out a synthesis ing ... Thus since there are no instants, conceived as simple primary entities, of time', from the Ego [moi] as a 'constantly changing' entity within time (1984: there is no nature at an instant. Thus all the interrelations of matters of fact viii). These two dimensions of the subject are 'separated by the line of time must involve transition in their essence. (1968: 146) which relates them to each other, but under the condition of a fundamental difference' (1984: viii). In the First Critique, subjectivity therefore has a double Of course, Kant's radical reconceptualization of time is compromised, to the aspect. On the one hand, there is theTas an active process of determination; extent that he still privileges human subjectivity. His account of temporality only on the other hand, there is the 'Ego' as something that is determined, from concerns the human or rational '1': the self that encounters, but keeps itself moment to moment, by this process. On one side, time is generated in the activ­ apart from, the phenomenal world. As Whitehead points out, Kant's 'subjectivist ity of the subject; on the other side, subjectivity is generated in and through the position' is that 'the temporal world [i]s merely experienced' (1968: 190). This passage of time. The gap between these two sides is what makes novelty possi­ is in fact the basis for Whitehead's own 'rational scheme of in which ble; or, to put the point more strongly, this gap necessitates creativity, by making a final reality is identified with acts of experience' (Whitehead, 1968: 143). it impossible for things to remain the same. T !

210 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Novelty and Double Causality 211

The doubling of the je and the moi is recapitulated, in the Critique ofPractical natural law, may coexist with this 'pathological' determination, but cannot Reason, in the form of a doubling between the subject as a rational being, whose suspend it. This is why Kant incessantly qualifies his affirmations of freedom, will takes on the determining form of universal law, and the empirical subject, reminding us that 'there is no intuition and hence no schema that can be laid whose will is determined extrinsically and contingently. The 'autonomy of at its basis for the sake of an application in concreto', (2002: 91) and that it is the will' is opposed to the 'heteronomy of the power of choice' (Kant, 2002: an 'empty' concept theoretically speaking, that can be justified 'for the sake not 48). This opposition leads directly to the determination of moral laws as 'prin­ of the theoretical but merely of the practical use ofreaso~' (2002: 75). ciples that contain the determining basis of the will not by their matter but In the Third Critique, purposive (teleological) causality has a similarly ghostly, merely by their form' (Kant, 2002: 40). If the moral law had any positive con­ supplemental status. Kant says that 'we do not actually observe purposes in tent, if it were anything more than 'the pure form of universality', then it would nature as intentional ones, but merely add this concept [to nature's products] be contingent rather than categorical, determined by its object rather than in our thought, as a guide for judgment in reflecting on these products' (1987: actively determining (Deleuze, 1984: x). Deleuze therefore says that 'the law as 282). Purpose, like freedom, is 'a universal regulative principle' for coping with empty form in the Critique ofPractical Reason corresponds to time as pure form the universe (Kant, 1987: 287); but we cannot apply it constitutively. The idea in the ' (1984: x). In both Critiques, the determinate, of 'natural purpose' is only 'a principle of reason for the power of judgment, empirical subject is separated from, and yet subjected to, a higher principle not for the understanding' (Kant, 1987: 289). That is to say, when we regard a (a pure or empty form) that determines it. Kant attributes spontaneity or auton­ given being as something that is alive, as an organism, we are rightly judging it omy to this principle, thereby characterizing it as a (non-empirical) subject. But to be an effectively purposive unity; but we do not thereby actually understand in both Critiques this principle corresponds to what, today, we would more likely what impels it, or how it came to be. The understanding has to do with a one­ regard as an impersonal, asubjective process of subjectification. way, 'descending series' of 'efficient causes', or 'real causes' (Kant, 1987: 251). Kant poses a similar Antinomy in the 'Critique of TeleologicalJudgment' , the But judgement in terms of purposes invokes a non-linear (both ascending and second half of the Third Critique. On the one hand, we must assume that the descending) series of 'final causes', or 'ideal causes' (Kant, 1987: 251-52). The complex organization of living beings is 'produced through the mere mecha­ idea of purpose, or of final cause, involves a circular relation between parts and nism of nature'; indeed, no other explanation is possible (Kant, 1987: 269). whole. The whole precedes the parts, in the sense that 'the possibility of And yet, on the other hand, mechanistic determinism 'cannot provide our cog­ [a thing's] parts (as concerns both their existence and their form) must depend nitive power with a basis on which we could explain the production of organized on their relation to the whole' (Kant, 1987: 252). But the parts also precede and beings' (Kant, 1987: 269). When we try to establish such a basis, we are com­ produce the whole, insofar as they mutually determine, and adapt to, one pelled 'to think a causality distinct from mechanism - viz., the causality of an another: 'the parts of the thing combine into the unity of a whole because they (intelligent) world cause that acts according to purposes' (Kant, 1987: 269). are reciprocally cause and effect of their form' (Kant, 1987: 252). An organism For 'we cannot even think [living things] as organized beings without also must therefore be regarded as 'both an organized and a self-organizing being' thinking that they were produced intentionally' (Kant, 1987: 281). We are una­ (Kant, 1987: 253). It is both the passive effect of preceding, external causes, and ble to avoid the idea of purposive design, even though 'we make no claim that something that is actively, immanently self-caused and self-generating. Only in this idea has reality' (Kant, 1987: 269). this way can 'the connection of efficient causes ... at the same time be judged In both the Second and the Third Critiques, then, Kant insists that linear, mech­ to be a causation through final causes' (Kant, 1987: 253). anistic causality is universally valid for all phenomena. But at the same time, he Deleuze takes up his own version of 'double causality' in The Logic of Sense also proposes a second kind of causality, one that is purposive and freely willed. (1990: 94-99 and passim). Rather than referring directly to Kant, Deleuze This second causality does not negate the first, and does not offer any excep­ reverts to what he describes as the ancient Stoics' 'cleavage of the causal rela­ tions to it. Rather, 'freedom' and 'purpose' exist alongside 'natural mechanism': tion' (1990: 6). On the one hand, there is real, or physical, causality: causes they are what Derrida would call supplements to it. According to the Second relate to other causes in the depths of matter. This is the materialist realm of Critique, 'nothing corresponding to [the morally good] can be found in any 'bodies penetrating other bodies ... of passions-bodies and of the infernal mix­ sensible intuition' (2002: 90); this is precisely why the moral law, or 'causality as tures which they organize or submit to' (DeleliZe, 1990: 131). On the other freedom', can only be a pure, empty form. The content of an action is always hand, there is the idealized, or transcendental, 'quasi-causality' of effects 'pathological' or empirically determined, 'dependen[t] on the natural law of relating solely to other effects, on the surfaces of bodies or of things (Deleuze, following some impulse or inclination' (Kant, 2002: 49). The second sort of 1990: 6). This quasi-causality is 'incorporeal ... ideational or "fictive"', rather causality, a free determination that operates according to moral law rather than than actual and effective; it works, not to constrain things to a predetermined 212 Deleuze, Goottari and the Production oj the New Novelty and Doub"; Causality 213 destiny, but to 'assur[ e] the full autonomy of the effect' (Deleuze, 1990: 94-95). precisely event B mimics event A, B will be different from A simply due to the And this autonomy, this splitting of the causal relation, 'preserve [s]' or 'grounds 'stubborn fact' that A has already taken place. The pastness of A - or what freedom', liberating events from the destiny that weighs down upon them Whitehead calls its 'objectification', (1978: 50) or 'objective immortality' (1978: (Deleuze, 1990: 6). An act is free, even though it is also causally determined, to 32) - is a constitutive feature of B's world, a crucial part of the context in which the extent that the actor is able 'to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to B occurs. Thus, by the very fact that B repeats A, B's circumstances must be dif­ double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a ferent from A's. 'Time is cumulative as well as reproductive, and the cumulation distance' (Deleuze, 1990: 161). That is to say, Deleuze's counter-actualizing of the many is not their reproduction as many' (Whitehead, 1978: 238). The 'dancer', like the Kantian moral agent - and, as I will discuss shortly, like the effect is subtly different from the cause whose impulsion it inherits, precisely to Whiteheadian living occasion - makes a decision that supplements causal effi­ the extent that the effect prehends (or recognizes) the cause as an additional cacy and remains irreducible to it, without actually violating it. This is what it factor in the universe. Whitehead thus extends Leibniz's Principle ofIndiscern­ means to preserve 'the truth of the event', in its inexhaustible potentiality, from ibles. Not only can no two occasions ever be identical, but also 'no two occasions the catastrophe of 'its inevitable actualization' (Deleuze, 1990: 161). can have identical actual worlds' (Whitehead, 1978: 210). It is, however, Whitehead's treatment of the Antinomy of double causality that In the second place, the causal reproduction of the past in the present is most directly addresses the problem of the New. Whitehead, no less than Kant, imperfect, because no inheritance, and no feeling, is entirely neutral. The 'sub­ distinguishes between, and seeks to reconcile, efficient and final causes. These jective form', as an element in the process of reception, differentially evaluates two modes of causality can be correlated, to a certain extent, with the two modes the data it receives, and thereby selects among these data (Whitehead, 1978: of perception recognized by Whitehead: causal efficacy and presentational imme­ 23). Every prehension, every causal connection, involves a 'valuation' on the diacy. They can also be aligned with what Whitehead calls the 'physical' and part of the receiving entity: a valuation that does not just take the transmitted 'mental' poles of any entity (1978: 239). Efficient causality refers to the naturalis­ data as given, but 'values [them] up or down' (Whitehead, 1978: 241). As a tic chain of causes and effects, or the way that an entity inherits conditions and result, 'the actual world [is] selectively appropriated' (Whitehead, 1978: 233), orientations from 'the immortal past' (Whitehead, 1978: 210). On this level, according to the 'qualities of joy and distaste, of adversion and of aversion, the causal dependency of a given entity upon its predecessors - its status as an which attach integrally' to every experience (Whitehead, 1978: 234). This affec­ effect - cannot be distinguished from that entity's prehension (its reception, or tive response, with its selective and gradated 'conceptual prehension' of the non-conscious perception) of those predecessors. 'The problems of efficient cau­ qualities (eternal objects) implicit in the data, constitutes the mental pole of sation and of knowledge receive a common explanation' (Whitehead, 1978: 190). the affected entity, its potential for change or novelty. An entity feels its precursors, and is thereby both affected and caused by them: Whitehead insists that every entity is 'essentially dipolar, with its physical and mental poles; and even the physical world cannot be properly understood with­ All our physical relationships are made up of such simple physical feelings ... out reference to its other side, which is the complex of mental operations' the subjective form of a physical feeling is re-enaction of the subjective form (1978: 239). Every entity's simple physical feelings are supplemented by its con­ of the feeling felt. Thus the cause passes on its feeling to be reproduced by the ceptual feelings. Of course, these 'mental operations', or conceptual feelings, new subject as its own, and yet as inseparable from the cause ... the cause is 'do not necessarily involve consciousness'; indeed, most of the time, consci­ objectively in the constitution of the effect. (Whitehead, 1978: 237) ousness is entirely absent (Whitehead, 1978: 85). But in every occasion of experience, both physical and mental poles are present. This means that every­ Efficient causality is a passage, a transmission (Whitehead, 1978: 210), an influ­ thing happens according to a double causality. A final (or teleological) cause is ence or a contagion. This objective inheritance constitutes the physical pole of always at work, alongside the efficient (mechanistic) cause. If 'transition [from the affected entity, its embodiment in a material universe. the past] is the vehicle of the efficient cause', then concrescence, or the actual However, as this process of causality-as-repetition unfolds, 'the re-enaction is becoming of the entity - its orientation towards the future - 'moves toward its not perfect' (Whitehead, 1978: 237). There's always a glitch in the course of the final cause' (Whitehead, 1978: 210). As with Kant, so too for Whitehead: the 'vector transmission' of energy and affect from past to present, or from cause to final cause does not suspend or interrupt the action of the efficient cause, but effect. There are at least two reasons for this. In the first place, nothing can ever supervenes upon it, accompanies it, demands to be recognized alongside it. purely and simply recur, because of the 'cumulative character of time', its 'irre­ And once again, Whitehead radicalizes Kant by extending the scope of his 'sub­ versibility' (Whitehead, 1978: 237). Every event, once it has taken place, adds jectivist' arguments: they now apply, not just to human or rational beings, but itself to the past that weighs upon all subsequent events. No matter how to all entities in the universe. 214 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Novelty and Double Causality 215

For Whitehead, the final cause is the 'decision' (1978: 43) by means of which to efficient causality; but at the same time 'there is always a remainder for the an actual entity becomes what it is. 'However far the sphere of efficient causa­ decision of the subject-superject' (Whitehead, 1978: 27-28). But rather than tion be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence. . . being noumenal or eternal, this decision, or final cause, is evanescent, 'perpet­ bevond the determination of these components there always remains the final ually perishing' (Whitehead, 1978: 29). It fades away before it can be caught re~ction of the self-creative unity of the universe' (Whitehead, 1978: 47). This within the chains of deterministic causality. Or more precisely, its so being 'final reaction' is the way that 'the many become one, and are increased by one' caught is precisely the event of its 'satisfaction' and passing-away. Thus: in every new existence (Whitehead, 1978: 21). The point is 'that "decided" con­ ditions are never such as to banish freedom. They only qualify it. There is always [A]ctual entities 'perpetually perish' subjectively, but are immortal objec­ a contingency left open for immediate decision' (Whitehead, 1978: 284). This tively. Actuality in perishing acquires objectivity, while it loses subjective contingency, this opening, is the point of every entity's self-determining activity: immediacy. It loses the final causation which is its internal principle of unrest, its creative self-actualization or 'self-production' (Whitehead, 1978: 224). And and it acquires efficient causation whereby it is a ground of obligation char­ this is how novelty enters the universe. The decision is always a singular one, acterizing the creativity. (Whitehead, 1978: 29) unique to the entity whose 'subjective aim' it is. It cannot be categorized or clas­ sified: for that would mean returning the decision to the already-decided, to Freedom, or the 'internal principle of unrest', is superseded by causal necessity, the efficient causes at the point of whose conjunction it arose. or the external conformity of the present to the past (Whitehead, 1978: 29). Such is Whitehead's version of double causality. He reminds us again and The initiative that created something new in the moment of decision subsists again that we never simply transcend efficient causality. Every experience 'is afterwards as an 'obligation' of 'stubborn fact', conditioning and limiting the concerned with the givenness of the actual world, considered as the stubborn next exercise of freedom. fact which at once limits and provides opportunity for the actual occasion . . . Whitehead's conversion, or phenomenalization, of Kant leads him into We are governed by stubborn fact' (Whitehead, 1978: 129). We are impelled by the realm of the potential, of a futurity that already haunts the present. This is the accumulation of the past, and by the deterministic processes arising out of what Deleuze will later call the virtual. For,just as the past remains active within that past. But at the same time, these deterministic processes themselves open the present by means of the 'vector transmission' of efficient causality, so the up an ever-widening zone of indetermination. In this way: future is already latent within the present, thanks to the 'multiplicity of pure potentiality' (Whitehead, 1978: 164) that can be taken up by the living actual [E]fficient causation expresses the transition from actual entity to actual occasion. 'The past is a nexus of actualities' (Whitehead, 1978: 214); it is still entity; and final causation expresses the internal process whereby the actual actual, still a force in the present, because it is reproduced as a 'datum', entity becomes itself. There is the becoming of the datum, which is to be physically prehended by each new actual occasion. On the other hand, the found in the past of the world; and there is the becoming of the immediate future is available, without having yet been actually determined: it takes the self from the datum ... An actual entity is at once the product of the efficient form of eternal objects, or 'pure potentials', that may be conceptually past, and is also, in Spinoza's phrase, causa sui. (Whitehead, 1978: 150) prehended (or not) by each new actual occasion. Whitehead says, therefore, that 'the future is merely real, without being actual' (1978: 214). Strikingly, this Whitehead thus repeats Kant's assertion that a final cause ('causality as is the same formula that Deleuze (borrowing from Proust) uses to describe the freedom') subsists alongside (or supplements) the efficient cause ('causality as virtual. Where Deleuze describes novelty or invention as the actualization of the natural mechanism'). But Whitehead attempts to naturalize Kant's distinction, virtual, Whitehead says that 'reality becomes actual' (1978: 214) in the present, to make it entirely immanent and phenomenal, without thereby effacing it. or in the decision of each living occasion. The process of actualization is This is a tricky move. For once the subject has been absorbed back into the the hinge, or the interstice, not only between past and future, but also between phenomenal realm, there is no longer any Archimedean point for the exercise the two forms of causality. of freedom. How can a subject that is entirely determined by material causes also be said to freely determine itself? Whitehead's answer is to replace Kant's noumenal subject with a 'subject-superject' that is both a producer and a bearer Bibliography of novelty, and that expires in the very movement by which it comes into being. Creativity, or the Category of the Ultimate (Whitehead, 1978: 21) replaces the Bergson, H. (2005), Creative Evolution. New York: Cosimo Classics. categorical imperative as the inner principle of freedom. It remains the case, Deleuze, G. (1984), Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. under this principle, that 'whatever is determinable is determined' according Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. T

216 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeIeuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R Galeta. Chapter 20 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale and C. V. Boundas, ed. C. V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Resistance and Creation: Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia An Introduction to Guattari's University Press. . Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What Is Philosctphy?, trans. H. TomlInson and 'Consciousness and Subjectivity' G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Kant, I. (1987), Critique ojJudgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. David Reggio Kant,!' (1996), Critique ojPureReason, trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kant,!. (2002), CritiqueojPracticalReason, trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Meyer, S. (2005), 'Introduction: Whitehead now', Configurations, 13.1, 1-33. Whitehead, A. N. (1968), Modes oj Thought. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978), Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. Institutional Psychotherapy works with a difficult terrain, one in which creation and resistance go hand-in-hand as they negotiate the inter-human relations, the mediation oflanguage and the social practices which produce the 'subject-of­ the-unconscious'. But what is it to resist? And what is resisted? Horace Torrubia tells us that:

In all cases, the more science develops, the more it colonises, the more its paradigm becomes the colonial, the more the concept of objectivity occupies the most axial of places ... within the objectivity of psychiatric 'observation' ... the question is thus to not let oneself be colonised, nor to colonise. (1994: 17)

Indeed, Torrubia, as with Fran<;:ois Tosquelles andJean Oury, is a name which hallmarks the history of and the evolution ofInstitutional Psy­ chotherapy; and thereby a personage who made a long lasting impression on Guattari's own thought and sentiment, comparable only to that of Jacques Schotte's instrumental presence and fraternal camaraderie in the evolution of Lacan's work. If we wanted to faithfully trace the evolution of Guattari's philosophy and institutional activities, we would have to begin with the inter-disciplinary fusion at the clinic of Saint-Alban during the German Occupation, where there was, in Oury's words, a 'group of theoretical effervescence' (1998: 36), where the lan­ guages of psychoanalysis, sociotherapy, biology, neurology and economics unified under a common concern for spaces 'of human . And thus a young Guattari immersed in the encount~rs and dialogues of the 'collective', 'groups' and the 'polydimensional diagnostic' of La Borde, where the likes of Tosquelles, Oury, Schotte and Torrubia sought to surpass 'classifications inexo­ rably oriented towards a bureaucratisation' (Tosquelles, 1986: 76), one day T

" 218 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Resistance and Creation 219 comes to write of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, declaring his lineage and the develop a richer pathology of mind, Guattari's text develops the groundwork constant weight to his pen. and rationale for a cartography of psychical assemblages evading the categori­ It was already in 1948 that Tosquelles warned of the impending dangers of a zations of psychiatric diagnosis. As Maldiney writes, psychiatric observation 'bureaucratisation of Thought' (1986: xii) just as Oury, would later warn of the 'administrative and bureaucratic formulae' (2004: 82) defming an age of fixes the patient as the epithet of the illness [where J it is orientated, even at alienation, 'hyper-segregation' and more precisely a 'Technocratic Simplism' the level of clinical observation, by the pressure of establishing a diagnostic limiting access to creative fields of the 'possible'. The task as evidenced by the [... J of situating the expressions of the patient upon a horizon of possible activities and writings of the clinics of Saint-Alban and La Borde, spanning preconditions and nosological categories. (1973: 209) over fifty years, is that of removing a prioris, prejudgements, readily formed ideas, the already seen, the already known, that are just as much obstacles and Guattari's description of the opera singer's 'work of mourning' would very blockades as they are a resistance to emergence and singular discourse, 'flat­ much read unwelcomingly on a psychiatric report, yet it is indicative of a cer­ tened by the normative discourse of social codes' (Torrubia, 1994: 25). More tain approach and most importantly, a certain respect and appreciation of the precisely, deciphering the concepts that articulate and organize the elements 'phenomenal field'. . of everyday existence, such as transference, the unconscious, the fundamental Let us take, for example, Oury's clinical reflections presented in the form of notions of the phantasm, identification and interpretation, contributes to a a brief narrative entitled 'L'AimableJayet' (2004: 15). The encounterwithJayet, framework which supports what Oury calls 'action in the direction of a perma­ which came one year after Bonnafe's call for a psychiatry of disalienation, sees nent disalienation' (2004: 115) - a concept first introduced by Lucien Bonnafe Oury describe a patient who is 'within a vast, endless desert within which we can in 1946, (1991: 97) and one which is not only at the heart ofOury's legacy, but lose ourselves ... a desert where Jayet is space, and his presence is sensible ... correspondingly that of Guattari and his hopes for an ethical-aesthetic para­ where we have to drop the weapons in order to continue along the path, and digm of a 'post-media era' (1989: 53-65). Throughout all of Guattari's writing, abandon nosographic auspices' (2004: 15). Here, clinical description is not we see a constant engagement with the problematic of desire and madness, restricted to the empirically 'isolated' symptoms qualifying schizophrenia and communicated through a personal vocabulary of experiences at La Borde, edi­ comportmental syndromes, but is sooner said of the particular way of being that fying a concern for a new materialism which seeks to sweep aside systems of is characteristic of the schizophrenic personality. When, therefore, Guattari hierarchy and causality in the name of conceptual proliferation and poetic reminds us that we have to be wary of 'introducing new symptoms by way of invention. Hence, the 'machinic', which is a notion developed in the 'molar' "well blended" etiological schemes', he is, like Maldiney, urging us to look and 'molecular' speculation of the unconscious, gains important currency beyond the tableaux of clinical indices, into the deeper 'expressions of the psy­ with the prioritization of 'functors' (phylum, flux, territories, universes) ena­ chotic' (2000: 7). Oury's account, like that of Guattari's, avoids the reduction of bling practical cartographies in the domain of the therapeutic cure, the psychoses and neuroses to isolatable troubles and disorders, and on a greater community project and so on. This human and community-based context of scale, such descriptions represent the ineluctable responsibility to free the Guattari's work grows out of the permanent and collective analysis of institu­ explanation and understanding of lived human experience from mechanical tional 'factors', where the preoccupation is to ensure what is known as the concepts. 'imaginary space of reference', close to Winnicott's 'potential space', and We also see the same linguistically and theoretically expressive tendencies at more precisely, 'the liberty of speech' as a 'field of transformation with innu­ work with Tosquelles, who, inspired by the writings of Ibn Arabi and the sym­ merable parameters' (Oury, 2004). bolic cosmology of wrote of 'the invisible forms of the Universe as the 'Consciousness and Subjectivity', is an excerpt from Guattari's magnum opus, object of diverse theorisations' (1994: 417). Likewise, Guattari asserts other Cartographies Schizoana1:ytiques. Published in 1989 - the same year as Oury's 'universes of constellations' which fall outside of the 'etiological scheme', and Saint-Anne lectures on Alienation appeared with Galilee - it explores how when he writes of 'mystical ruptures with the world' where consciential phe­ a schizoanalytic approach can increasingly relate to the logic of aesthetic nomena evade the diagnostic and prognostic nosological categories ofpsychiatry disciplines whilst resisting the spirit of 'scientism', 'simplism' and the mass (which we can trace back to the seventeenth-century botanical models of Tho­ 'standardisation' proliferating within the domains of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, mas Sydenham), he is addressing both the need and possibility for understanding psychology and the human arena. In much the same way as the work ofSchotte consciousness and subjectivity in a far richer framework, encompassing the cos­ and Henri Maldiney equates human contact with aesthetic experience to mological, the mythical, the folkloric, the analogical, and as he openly declares, i 220 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Resistance and Creation 221 even the magical: 'For me, I have no hostility whatsoever towards magic. I would Oury, J., Novello, M. and Reggio, D. (2004), 'The Hospital is TIl: An Interview with even say that in many cases it constitutes an extremely interesting cartography Jean Oury', (May 2007, 143). of psychical Assemblages' (1989: 47). Such is another description by Oury Torrubia, H. (1994), 'La Psychotherapie In~titutionelle Par Gros Temps', Actualite de of a patient waking after a hypoglycaemic coma induced by variable insulin la Psychotherapie Institutionelle. Vigneux: Editions Matrice. measure: Tosquelles, F. (1986), La Wcu de la Fin du Monde dans la Folie. Nantes: Editions de l'Arefppi. I am persuaded that it is an initiation, which in practice replaces tradition. This is to say that with the dances of possession or the traditional cures of Algeria, these forms of provoked coma [... J it is an entrance into another dimension, a syncretic world where we enter into the space of psychoses ... an altogether different dimension. (1998: 128)

But what are these 'syncretic' domains? From the Latin form syncrentismus (a union of communities), we can understand as referring to the union of diversity, a union of heterogeneous elements - the 'X' reaction we have come to know in biology, where the body is not on one side, and the mind on the other. It is the fields of the possible which elude not just the 'psychoanalytic programme' but most pedagogic structures of educational and psychiatric assessment. The notion of the new is consequently placed in this paradigm at once ethical and aesthetic, where the very real human need to disalienate (Bonnafe) and de-segregate (Oury) carries the imperative for continual analy­ sis, so as not to radically reduce the originality of ~xperience and the possibility of creation and emergence. The 'processual choiCe' is not to restrict the world to isolated processes in the same way as objective psychology reduced the phe­ nomenal environment to mere stimulus-response, nor to emulate the descriptive generalizations resulting from scientific observation and the 'objectively' observable and measurable, but rather, in the words of Oury, to work with 'a field [... J a dimension ... as an extremely original construction of existence' (1998: 157). It is this original construction that evades a 'psycho-normality' or more precisely, a 'normo-pathy', which for Oury, is the most dangerous and incurable illness of all.

Bibliography

Bonnafe, L. (1991), 'Le Personage du Psychaitre II' (1946 seminar with chaired contributions by and Eugene Minkowski), republished in Bonnafe, L., Desaliiner. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires Du Mirail. Guattari, F. (1989), Cartographies Schizoanalytiques. Paris: Editions Galilee. Maldiney, H. (1973), Regard, Parole, Espace. Lausanne: Editions L'Age D'Homme. Maldiney, H. (2000), Penser L'Homme et laFolie. Grenoble: Editions Jerome Millon. Oury,J. (1998), flDonc. Vigneux: Editions Matrice. Oury,J. (2004), Prifaces. Orleans: Editions Le Plio Consciousness and Subjectivity 223

That is why in seeking to remedy the analyses of the Unconscious we believe it important to be economic with notions such as subjectivity, consciousness Chapter 21 and signification, because these transcendental entities are impermeable to concrete situations. Given that the most radically incorporeal abstract refer­ ences are implicated in the Real, crossing the most contingent Fluxes and Consciousness and Subjectivity Territories, means that nothing can protect them from historical alterations and cosmogenetic mutations. And we can easily see that Lacan progressively Felix Guattari substituted the concept of the signifier with the libido because the signifying sttucture did not transcend it! In certain contexts sense is significantly opposed to material and descriptive Fluxes that are created by passive modes, in others it is qualified through a 'machinic' of fluctuations surpassing strata and even In considering the consequences of the 'separation' of consciousness and sub­ homeostasis itself. jectivity, I fIrst thought it necessary to differentiate two things: What pushes me to challenge fixed cartographies and invariants in the domain of subjectivity is precisely the processual option; these refusals of a an absolute unconscious at a molecular level radically evading all represen­ generalized economy of equivalence, this choice of 'clinamen' singularizing tation and where only asignifying forms are found;l repetition. We therefore consider situations as intersections of Assemblages a relative unconscious at a molar level organized as relatively stable which secrete their own coordinates of meta-modelization, and although an representations. intersection imposes connections of its own it does not necessarily constitute a With this, I was wary of being sttuck by the topical fear of those psychical neatly fixed constraint; it can be twisting and its connective power can diminish instances that led Freud to separating the Conscious and Unconscious into oppos­ when certain of its components loose their consistency. ing entities, or elsewhere the Id and the Ego (with its annexes), and Lacan to Let us try to illustrate this point a bit better. An opera singer loses her mother, establishing the Symbolic Order as framework of the Real and the Imaginary. and the following week she loses two octaves in her vocal range with all inter­ Although this defInition of the molecular unconscious is initially rather weak, it pretive ability fading. Let us say that her voice was constituted by diverse is an Assemblage that easily adapts to consciential components [composantes con­ Assemblages, certain of which surpassed the frame of her personality, and the scientielles]. For example, we know that a hallucinatory or delirious assemblage component of enunciation which had grafted itself onto the relation with her composed of asignifying material2 contains idiosyncratic consciential modes, and mother bore the brunt of the ordeal-which is not synonymous with the disap­ that the molecular processes at work in hysterical neurosis or obsessional pearance of her voice. The component's non-present aspect (which is in fact neurosis are inseparable from a specific type of consciousness or even a hyper­ the irrecoverable past) takes an erratic and vaguely menacing representation of consciousness, especially in terms of obsessional neurosis. Indeed, nothing much her mother as a possible opening. Consequently, the image of death, rooted in can be gained if we allot the same consciential essence to these Assemblages a suffering reality, carries the power of fear where the subject, as Freud writes, because we progressively fInd 'limit-consciousnesses' not only in cases of trance 'clings' to the lost object and the sole consequence of a semiotic 'contraction' experience and mystical ruptures with the world, but also with catatonia and its is localized on the vocal feature of musical activity (Freud, 1952: 192-94; see unlocalizable organic tensions and comas of varying profundity. It is here in fact, also Abraham, 1965: 99-113). that we have the question of intensity, proportion and scope, where an absolute But is my description entirely necessary? Nothing is certain because we must Consciousness coincides with an absolute Unconscious belonging to a non-theti­ always be wary of introducing new symptoms encountered through transference cal presence, one which escapes all worldly reference and alterity. This said, there and interpretation (whether the 'well blended' tones of an etiological scheme or is only consciousness and unconsciousness relative to Assemblages which enable symptoms presented by the su~ect). In this case, it is a question of addressing compound assemblages, superposing, sliding and disjunctions. the significant factors belonging to that Freudian 'work of mourning' which For me, it is important to avoid resorting to typical oppositions such as the hampers the libido in its search for objects of substitution. Now, a description Freudian 'primary process-secondary elaboration'. If they do occur, as in Freud's based on objects alone rather than Assemblages of enunciation proves problem­ second topic where the relation between the Id, Ego and Super-Ego corresponds atic because it obscures possible fIelds eluding the psychoanalytic programme. to ruptures in the modes of differentiation (chaos in the fIrst instance, structur­ Freud merely envisaged two options here - the gradual, melancholic dissolution ing in the second) it is not because a digitized, binarized approach to the of the libido invested in the lost object, and in extreme cases, a 'hallucinatory molecular unconscious has thrown us into an entropic abyss of disorder! psychosis of desire' (1952: 430 and 1957: 231, 244).3 We, on the other hand, T

224 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Consciousness and Subjectivity 225 propose reorganizations of Assemblages which escape the misfortunes of pri­ Self and the unity of the person. The idea of a totalizing consciousness, totali­ mary identification and the relation of 'oral incorporation'. This was exactly tarian even ('I am master of myself and the universe'), belongs to the founding what happened with the opera singer who, if I may say, 'took a beating' and myth of capitalistic subjectivity. In truth, there are only diversified consciential acquired several new degrees of liberty by dealing with her Superego in a more processes resulting from the deterritorialization of entwined multiple existen­ accommodating way. No doubt a more detailed examination would reveal fur­ tial Territories. These different mechanisms catalyse a for-itself and the modes ther telling occurrences: Certain facial traits are released from the visage of the which singularize relations to other worlds of the in-itself and alter-egos, but mother and detached from the coordinates of the Superego to work of their they only acquire the consistency of an existential monad, just about managing own accord along other possible lines, in other Universes of Constellations to affirm a second dimension of de territorialization, which I call energetic dis­ where the scrutinizing frowns which paralyse the extreme sections of the musical cursiveness (Figure 21.1). scale transform into a sacrificial altar of harmless offerings. My deSCription is no The four functors RT..U deploy four domains on the basis of their recipro­ doubt closer to the order of myths and fables than to the scientific schemas of cal presuppositions and their compositional relation. These are: psychology and psychoanalysis, it is far from the celebrated 'pharyngeal lump' in the throat; the fluctuation of Kleinian objects; the ruptures of consecutive iden­ 1. Material and descriptive Fluxes tification and melancholic introjection, or even the disintrication of the death 2. Existential Territories drive. But then again why cannot we have such descriptions? 3. Abstract machinic Phyla What we learn from this singer, is that the loss of a component's consistency 4. Incorporeal Universes (understood as consciential). is not accompanied by progressive inhibition and that an asignifying sign - the restriction of her vocal performance - marks both an end and a beginning. But we must remember that the end is not foreseeable! So what is best? We have to take time and care with our reply because she Machinic Propositional discursiveness Consciential Phyla probably did not even know the answer! Certain paths have been forming over r------____ • Universes time where singing and the moralizing overcoding of the mother have under­ «I> U. gone a pragmatic transformation. Do these facts belong to that passive logic of lack and deficits? Nothing is certain but then again nothing is at stake! Even the most subtle and elusive transferential induction behind these symptomatic manifestations, allowing us to suppose an existence rooted in Oedipal culpabil­ 0 \J .£ (3 CD \J ity, would have devastating effects. At best we would end up with that' depressive' () g (3 CD () en tableau 'normally' antiCipated by the psychoanalyst. Is it not better to investi­ C/l < CD C C/l CD C/l .£ 9- 0 C/l CD gate this component of expression in terms of the material qualities that have 0 n- o. :::J 9- <. CD a. allowed it to avoid further damage because, when a 'luxury' component such as Iii CD CD m- :::J m singing falls into disuse, is it not a preventative measure indicated by a bifurca­ m- :::J !!! ::::l. C tion of the Assemblage? And what vegetates in the form of inhibition can be ~ m 8" :::J ~ X () (ii. "0 ~ transformed into a process of singularization. That is, without the existence of CD (ii' ~ El- C/l 0 singing, other things could have occurred and maybe this patient would have o· C/l Sl> 2- :::J o· ""0 lost different kinds of octaves in other registers! But, I repeat, nothing is guar­ :::J :::J anteed in this domain because we always have the threshold of consistency and its overall effect to consider. F. Economy of Fluxes (Libido, Energetic discursiveness , capital, the T. The functors of de territorialization signifier, Existential work ...) ------. Territories The category of de territorialization allows us to separate the problematic of consciousness - and the unconscious - from that of the representation of the FIGURE 21.1 Discursiveness and deterritorialization 226 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Consciousness and S~bjectivity 227

The two axes of coordinates can help develop a cartography of subjective configurations where we have the energy of the drive, the diverse modalities of U. discourse and consciousness. This is performed without resorting to the age-old categories of the somatic, the instinctual, the deterministic (founded on need and lack) and the behavioural. Rather, the entities qualified through the four domains have no fixed identity and only maintain interrelated configurations. Because they will change their state and status in terms of their Assemblage of enunciation, these entities will have no reference to a structural topic and their systems of transformation will 'oversee' their modelization. In order to navigate the diverse orders which classical Thought had separated, the four functors rely F. T. on the compositional laws of the actual and the virtual, or the possible and the real (as illustrated in Figure 21.2). The relations between inter-entity presuppositions, hereby inscribed accord­ ing to the coordinates of objective and subjective de territorialization, do not hold the Fluxes and Territories of the Real on an equal footing with Phyla and FIGURE 21.3 Integration of the four categories the Universe of the possible. The latter envelops and subsumes the former, where the possible-real [reel du possible] prevails over the real-possible [possible du reel]. As a result, Phyla constitute the 'integrals' of Fluxes, and the Universe approach to psychism essentially reductive, it nevertheless edilied the new the 'integrals' of Territories (Figure 21.3). interpretations of hysteria, dreams, verbal slips, mental utterances and so on. Because it is always such a delicate task to advance on the terrain of Freudian And it is by no means a small paradox that mechanicist presuppositions could relations, and given that for over flfty years the m'!:iority of psychoanalysts have be found with Freud's approach,5 directly inspired by the psychophysics of allotted a revelatory quality to Freud's work, it may prove worthwhile to re­ Fechner, the '' of Helmholtz and Briicke, or an exploration of establish the unconscious through the de territorialization it inscribes and 'depth' only equalled by Dadaism and Surrealism.6 Indeed, things seemed to demarcates. have developed with Freud using the fashionable schemas of scientism to allow his creative imagination to flow freely. Whatever the case may be, we have to The Unconscious versus the libido admit that his discovery of the unconscious processes of singularization - the celebrated 'primary process' - was not so easily accepted in a rigidly association­ ist world, which had developed in the wake of his 1895 work, Project for a Scientific Freud's first concern was to give a scientiflc base to psychology by introducing Psychology (Freud, 1967: 439). With his initial neuronal models, Freud did not abstract quantities.4 This led him to contesting the 'categories of the soul' which completely break free from these epochal moorings.7 For example, in the had hallmarked classical theories, and to anticipate a deterritorialization of the definitive edition of the Traumdeutung (1929) Freud professes his faith in the psyche within the unconscious 'scene' that could not be localized through the reflexs and as a consequence he positions the Unconscious between perception ordinary coordinates of phenomenology. But in as much as we consider this and motility (1967: 459). A series of reterritorializations came as a response to various advances in the deterritorialization of the psyche, through Freud incessantly straddling between Virtual Actual an unrepentant scientism and a lyrical invention reminiscent of Romanticism. The libido and the Unconscious are two concepts which epitomize this episode. Possible cI». : Phyla of the actual- U.: Universe of the virtual- possible possible The libido can be seen as having two roles, that of a processual energy steering dynamic relations far from their point of equilibritlm, and that of a static energy Real F. : Flux of the actual- T.: Territories of the stratifying psychical formations. Freud, however, never managed to clearlyartic­ real Virtual-real ulate these roles, even if he did postulate the existence of an object libido and a FIGURE 21.2 Matrix of the four interpenetrating categories libido of the Self (Moz). Our direction is different, because these roles no longer 228 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Consciousness and Subjectivity 229 refer to the uncertainties of the libidinal economic balance, but to fundamental (l'objet pulsionnef) from its personalogical frame to become a 'partial' object. micro-political choices. The libido becomes 'de-natured', a deterritorialized This was ample opportunity for a door to open onto other human, animal, abstract material of the possible. Consequently, the generic choice is between: a vegetal, cosmic, abstract-machinic becomings, yet it remained firmly closed in deterritorialized schizo analytic option where a lihido-phylum (the left axis of every possible way! The partial objects in question were drawn up as an exhaus­ figures 21.1 and 21.3) represents the integral of transformational fluxes of desire tive list, used as normal indicators for the 'assault course' which forced all (material and descriptive); or a Freudian reterritorialized option of a libido-flux subjectivity to reach the supreme stages of 'oblative genitality'. From the 'bad constituted by the somatic aspect of the drives, organized into psychogenetic objects' to the 'good objects,' from the 'object relation' and 'transitional stages, and finally trapped in a perpetual stand-off against entropic death (the objects' to the object 'a', successive generations of Freudians ended up with a Eros-Thanatos opposition). generic function devoid of any singularity. As for the Unconscious, the option is: to be either composed as a Universe of There was once even a place for alterity: Freud introduced it as a demand for reference belonging to the ensemble of lines of alterity, as a virtual possible and truth in the most barricaded psychopathological schemes, and it was reterrito­ as a new and novel becoming (the right axis of figures 21.1 and 21.3); or as a ref­ rialized through personalogical relations (to the point of being barred from uge-Territory of the repressed, censored by the Conscious-Preconscious system of entering the supposedly fusional pre-Oedpial scene), structuralized as an initia­ Freud's first topic, and the Ego-Superego system of the second. tion of symbolic castration under the watchful eye of the analytical Sphinx. From very early on, Freud left this terrain to theoreticians such as Jung who To sum up, the 'optional choice' for the Libido-Unconscious scheme can be in turn failed to fully build upon it.9 As a concerted response, Freud never illustrated in the follOwing way: stopped seeking to reterritorialize the unconscious in diverse ways such as: - on a spiritual landscape, where, by Circumscribing the unconscious through Deterritorialised option a topical instance, he divested it of all substance and reduced it to an undif­ ferentiated chaos;10 Process of - on a temporal landscape with his hypothesis of psychogenetic stages which Abstract ~ Incorporeal machinic .. universes should have literally damaged his discovery of infantile sexuality. Freud allot­ phylum Singu larisation ted a paradoxically historical dimension to this previously undiscovered continent with his theory of a phantasmic 'after-effect' (destined to thwart the realist implications of early formulations such as precocious seduction / \ and its traumatisms). What Freud didn't realise from the outset was that the Libido Unconscious unconscious evades any ordinary concept of time! 11 In the era of the Traumdeutung, Freud presented himself in a manner both \ Stratified Splitting of Refuge / ambiguous and rich. As with Proust's Albertine, the 'goddess with numerous fluxes / the self / territories of heads' (and probably numerous sexes), Freud to this day still manages to partly the repressed evade binary and phallic capitalistic logics. Let us take Irma for instance, who I from the inaugural dream of the Traumdeutungis described as a 'collective per­ FIGURE 21.4 Optional choice of the Libido-Unconscious scheme son'. She is represented bya 'generic image' uniting: (1) the patient in question; (2) a woman who Freud could possibly have cured; (3) his own daughter; (4) a child undergoing hospital treatment; (5) another woman; (6) Mrs Freud her­ Translated by David Reggio self (Freud, 1967: 254), given that elsewhere it is the 'localities themselves which are often treated as persons' (Freud, 1967: 276). The object thus functions as a 'knot' of over-determination (Freud, 1967: 246), the 'naval' of the dream, the Notes 'central point, as it were, connecting it with the unknown' (Freud, 1967: 446), a point from which indefinite lines of singularization proliferate. Deterritoriali­ 1 This particular formula of the unconscious can be attributed to the 'primary zation was further marked when Klein removed the object of the drive process' envisaged by Freud at the time of the Traumdeutung. 'the work of the 230 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Consciousness and SubJectivity 231 dream neither thinks nor calculates. In a general sense it doesn't judge but is 11 'Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing is past or forgot­ content to transform' (1967: 432). ten' (Freud, 1967: 491). 'The Id knows no concept of time and its passing' (Freud, 2 It is the early Freud of the Traumdeutungwho admirably grasped the nature of 1968: 104). this treatment by 'misunderstanding' the significations of the dream: 'The dream-speech thus has the structure of breccia, in which the larger pieces of various material are held together by a solidified cohesive medium' (1967: 358). Bibliography 'Everything in dreams which occurs as the apparent functioning of the critical faculty is to be regarded, not as the intellectual performance of the dream-work, Abraham, K (1965), Complete Works, Vol. L Paris: Payot. but as belonging to the substance of the dream-thoughts, and it has found its way Freud, S. (1924), Collected papers. Vol. 1, Early papers; On the History of the Psycho­ from these, as a completed structure, into the manifest dream-content' (1967: Analytic Movement. London: International Psycho-analytical Press. 379). This micro-politic of'misconstrusion' is not the unique of psychi­ Freud, S. (1946), 'Halluzinatorische Wunschpsychose,' Gesammelte Werke, vol. cal life alone because we also find it with artistic creation. Here I'm thinking of X S. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Georges Aperghis and his 'gestural music' where semantic contents are retained Freud, S. (1952), 'Mourning and Melancholy,' Metapsychology. Paris: Gallimard. only in terms of a-signifying arrangements. Freud, S. (1957), 'Hallucinatory wishful psychosis,' Standard Edition, vol. XIV. 3 For Freud 'hallucinatory wishful psychosis' is identical to hallucinatory confusion London: Hogarth Press. and to Meynart's 'amentia'. Freud, S. (1967), The Interpretation ofDreams, Paris: PDF. 4 'I am gripped by two ambitions: firstly, to ascertain what happens to the theory of Freud, S. (1968), New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. Paris: PDF. mental functioning when the notion of quantity is introduced, that is, an econ­ Freud, S. (1979), 'Letter to Fliess, 25th May 1895,' The Birth of Psychoanalysis, omy of nervous forces; secondly, to see how certain aspects of psychopathology Letters to WilhelmFliess, notes and drafts, 1887-1902, Paris: PDF. can enrich normal psychology' (Freud, 1979: 10). jung, G. (1927), lv!etamorphoses and Symbols of the Libido. Paris: Montaigne. 5 One example among others: ' ... a physical sexual tension surpassing a certain Lacan,]. (1960), Ecrits. Paris: Le Seuil. degree, arouses the psychical libido which in tum prepares for coitus' (Freud, 1979: 83). 6 For instance, consider the following: 'I insist, therefore, that in the analysis of a dream one must emancipate oneself from the whole scale of standards of reliabil­ ity; and if there is the slightest possibility that this or that may have occurred in the dream, it should be treated as an absolute certainty. Until one has decided to reject all respect for appearances in tracing the dream-elements, the analysis will remain at a standstill' (Freud, 1967: 439). 7 It was Lacan who openly recognized this, which was a rare thing for an analyst claiming Freudian heritage (1960: 857). 8 'The reflex remains the model of all psychical production' (Freud, 1967: 456). 9 jung, far from asserting the actively processual forces of singularization in the collective unconscious, submits them to a uniform and reductivist de­ totalization: 'Individuals are separated by the contents of their consciousness yet related in terms of their unconscious psychology. Every psychoanalyst eagerly awaits the day when he can decidedly declare the typical complexes of the unconscious to be uniform' Gung, 1927: 170). We do nevertheless find interesting moments in jung's method. For instance, his idea of subliminal combinations enabling an opening onto the future, his refusal of the myth of 'analytic neutrality'; his practice of 'historical amplification', and his technique of interpreting dreams through an oneiroide context rather than by a simple association. 10 'It is through the drives that the unconscious obtains its energy, without recourse to any organisation or general will, and only in satisfying the needs of the drive by confirming to the pleasure principle' (Freud, 1968: 57). Index

2001: A Space Odyssey 16 Clement Greenberg, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, A Thousand Plateaus 5,7,34,94,97, jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, Wilhelm . 131, 148n.5, 163, 166, 196 Worringer aboriginal art 76 affect 2,3,4, 19,21,30,34-43,48, absolute deterritorialisation 8 540.4, 58, 68-78, 87, 93-4, 117, abstract expressionism 51,121-3 128, 130, 134, 142, 163, 166, 169, abstract machine 74,144,145,225,228 174,176-8,180,181,185,193, abstraction 123, 130, 140 212 acceleration 8, 9, 29, 97 affective event 98, Ackerman, AI 168 affective semiotics 177 The Act oj Creation 66 affective vector 68, 72, 75, 76 advertising 3,9,57,93,100 bloc of affect 117 aesthetics 14,33,68-78,128-37,218 logic of affect 176 aesthetic consumption 131 Agamben, Giorgio 61,137n.1 aesthetic guilt 132 see also, Infancy and History aesthetic judgement 20 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 105 aesthetic paradigm 3, 4, 29-36, 38, alienation 22,23,24 43,71,77,78,142,148,173-83, AIliez, Eric 48, 148n.2 218 see also, La Pensee Matisse bio-aesthetics 41, 147 alterity 22, 23, 24, 42, 222, 228, 229 contemporary aesthetics 128, 163 An Outline ojPhilosophy 155 ethico-aesthetics 9, 95, 173 anaesthesia 36, 38, 143 Kantian aesthetics 128-31 analytical philosophy 36 modem aesthetics 131 40,72 post-aesthetics 148 animal 36, 48, 61 post-Kantian aesthetics 133, 134 animal expression 35 relational aesthetics 40 Anti-Oedipus 23,32,77,97, 102n.10 schizo-aesthetics 9 Aperghis, Georges 230n.2 transcendental aesthetic 14, 154 aphasia/59, 61, 62, 64, 65 see also, Eric AIliez,jean-Claude apocalypse 16, 17, 18 Bonne, Benjamin Buchloh, T. J. architecture 142-3 Clark,john Dewey, Thierry de Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 70,74 Duve,johann Wolfgang Goethe, Arendt, Hannah 108-11,113,1140.11 I i

234 Index Index 235

Arendt, Hannah (Cont'rI) de Vanguardia, Eva Hesse,jasper Bartuwy 62,64,65,120 Brubeck, Dave 202 see also, The Life of the Mind, One/ johns, Wassily Kandinsky, Alan Basaglia, Franco 68 Briicke, Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von 227 Thinking Kaprow, William de Kooning, Baudelaire, Charles 140 Buchloh, Benjamin 43n.4 Aristotle 153 joseph Kosuth, j ean:J acques Baudrillard,jean 22,33,165 Burdon, Chris 46 art 91,95,104-13,116-25,173-83,197 Lebel, Morris Louis, Edouard beauty 21, 128--37 Burroughs, William 47,88,165-6,168, abstract expressionism 51,121-3 Manet, Henri Matisse, Roberto beauty industry 131 170, 172n.5 abstraction 123 Matta,jean Metzinger, Helio contemporary beauty 134-7 see also, Revised Boy Scout's Manual art education 46 Oiticica,jules Olitski, Francis moral beauty 132-4 Butler,judith 137n.l, 176 art-event 75, 76, 116 Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Adrian Beckett, Samuel 64, 65 art institutions 85 Piper,jackson Pollock, Robert becoming 11, 13, 29, 35, 42, 54n.4, 66, Cabanne, Pierre 120 art practice 95,98--9, 117 Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Anri 104, Ill, 112, 113, 116, 165, 166, Cabaret Voltaire 167, 170 avant-garde 124, 125, 128, 129, 134, Sala,jayce Salloum, Kurt 185-7,193,194,208,228 Cage,john 53, 164, 166 136,137,140,141,143,162,163, Schwitters, Georges Seurat, becoming-animal 142 capitalism 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 22, 30, 36, 41, 174,204 Cindy Sherman, Paul Signac, molecular becoming 117 56-67,69,71,93,96--8, 101n.9, conceptual art 6, 33, 36, 123, 145 Robert Smithson, Alfred being-against 173, 179 140,174,177,203 contemporary art 33, 80, 89, 134, Stieglitz,jean Tinguely, being-together 173, 176, 179 advanced capitalism 97 142, 145, 162, 166, 183n.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Constantine Benjamin, Walter 34, 61 capitalist subjectivity 225 Cubism 142 Zikos Bergson, Henri 82, 88, 91, 92-3, 94, 95, cognitive capitalism 2, 59 Dada 227 Art as Experience 143 96,99,146, 148n.5, 185--8, contemporary capitalism 174 electronic art 51,52,164 Artaud, Antonin 64-5 195n.l, 207--8 creative capitalism 58 environmental art 143 Attali,jacques 198,202-4 on duration 116,185--8,208 late capitalism 38, 98 expanded practice 95, 116 autonomous movement 25 see also, Bergsonism, Matter and Memory semio-capitalism 30,34,36 Fauvism 6, 140, 141, 143, 148n.l autopoeisis 3, 4, 8, 34, 35, 39, 68, 74, - Bergsonism 92 Carroll, Lewis 104,108,112 Futurism 164, 165 96,173,176,182,183 Beyond 11 see also, Alice's Adventures in Wonder­ Impressionism 140 avan~garde 124, 125, 128, 129, 134, biliurcation 30,41,42 land, Books for Little Girls installation art 95, 143 136, 137, 140, 141, 143, 162, 163, biopolitics 22, 36, 38, 164 Carter, Chris 164 Institutional Critique 40, 129 174,204 bio-power 84 Cartographies Schizoanalytique 9,218, LandArt 124 avant-garde music 198, 204 birds 196-7 148n.5 Minimalism 125, 125n.1 neo-avant-garde 33 birdsong 196-7 catalysis 41-2,71 modem art 124, 125 pos~avant-garde 129 The Blurring ofArt and Life 51 causality 93,157,210-15 non-art 51-2,53 Ayer, A J. 43n.3 body without organs 67, 102n.l0, 112, Cazazza, Monte 163 op art 6 113 Cezanne, Paul 139,140 performance art 95, 163, 164 Bach,johann Sebastian 133 Bonnafe, Lucien 218,219,220 chance 98,117, 126n.7 Pop art 123 Bacon, Francis 52,62,63,70,88, 121, Bonne,jean-Claude 145,148n.l chaoid 27, 28, 29 post-conceptual art 81 198 see also, La Pensee Matisse chaos 7,8,24,25,26,27,28,29,47, Situationist International 47 logic of sensation 88, 198 Books for Little Girls 105 49,117,120,121-2,146,196, Society of Independent Artists 118 Badiou, Alain 95, 101n.6, 116-25, 146, Bourgeois, Louis 76 199,228 studio practice 122 179 brain 82-3, 87, 88, 185-6, 187 chaosmosis 7,8,25,27,140,143 Surrealism 227 and Deleuze 116-25 brain-body 92, 100 Chaosmosis; an Ethico-Aesthetic see also, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, on fidelity 101n.6, 117-19, 122-3 brain-eye 139 Paradigm 28,29,30,32,77,100, Francis Bacon, Louis Bourgeois, on presentation 118, 122 brain-screen 186 142, 146 Georges Braque, Chris Burdon, on the situation 116,117,123-4 cinema-brain 186-7 Chekh~v, Anton 81 PaulCezanne,Eugene on subtraction 116,117 eye-brain 139 Chomsky, Noam 59, 60, 61 Delacroix, Marcel Duchamp, on the void 117,118 Braque, Georges 141,149n.7 and the debate with Michel Tracey Emin, Albert Gleizes, Bakhtin, Mikhail 34, 96 Brisset,jean-Pierre 64 Foucault 59-61, 85-6 George Grosz, Grupo de Artistas Balch, Anthony 166 Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus jan 48 see also, Language and Mind 236 Index Index 237 chronos 11 expression and construction 2, 39, on the war machine 5 Duchamp, Marcel 33, 34, 35, 36, cinema 6,82,83,87-8,116,162, 142,143,144,146-7,173,186 and Whitehead 206-15 38, 43n.l, 118-19, 122, 126nA, 184-94 contemporary art 33, 80, 89, 134, 142, see also, Bergsonism, Dialogues, 126n.5, 141-5, 148n.l, 148n.5, cinema-brain 186 145, 162, 166, 183n.2 Difference and Repetition, Essays 174 French impressionism 184, 188-9 Coordination des Intermittents et Precaires Critical and Clinica~ Foucault, Belle Haliene (1921) 120 German expressionism 184, 189-92, d'1le de France 173, 181, 183n.l The Logic of Sense, The Logic of Bicycle "Wheel (1913) 119 194 Copernican revolution 207 Sensation Bofte-en-valise (1935-41) 119 intensive montage 189-92 Coppe, Abiezer 49 Deleuze and Guattari Bottle Rack (1913) 33,34,36, modem cinema 187 corporeality 29, 53 on music 196-204 148n.5 movement-image 88, 186-94 cosmos 15, 27, 28, 29, 39 on Peirce 74 'The Creative Act' 43n.l Neo-realism 83, 87 Coum Transmissions 164,166,168 on the people yet to come 4, 38, 39, Dart-Object (1951) 143 quantitative montage 188-9 counter-actualization 117, 212 88, 196 Etant donnes (1946-68) 143 sublime cinema 185-94 creation 56,58,217-20 on psychoanalysis 200-1 Fountain (1917) 35, 118-20, 143 time-image 82, 88, 187 creativity 3,4,56-67,74,82,83,85-9, on the virtual 29 WithHiddenNoise (1916) 120 see also 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close 117,176,206-15 on the war machine 5 The Large Glass (1915-23) 119, 143, Encounters of the Third Kind, Faust, Critique ofjudgment 20,210-11 see also, A Thousand Plateaus, 126nA Abel Gance, The Golem, Werner Critique ofPractical Reason 152,210 Anti-Oedipus, "What Is Philosophy? Nude Descending a Staircase Herzog, Anthony McCall, Jonas Critique ofPure Reason 14,152,207, democracy 15, 36, 202 (1912) 148n.5 Mekas, Mephisto, Napoleon, 209,210 Denny, Martin 166 Society ofIndependentArtists 118 NosJeratu,Jean Renoir, Solaris, Cromwell, Oliver 49 denotation 107, 112, 180 Trap (1917) 119 Jean Vigo, Walt Disney Cubism 142 depression 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, duration 116,124,193,194,208, Clark, T.J. 120-1 culture industry 3 32,113 209 cliche 5,62,63,87,92,130,136,184 Derrida,Jacques 210 de Duve, Thierry 119,121, 126n.3, Close Encounters of the Third Kind 19 Dada 227 Descartes, Rene 86,94,153 141 Coltrane, John 201 death 69,110-11,113,117,201, desire 22, 23, 24, 30, 32,56, 77, 121, dyslexia 66 commercial art 9 228 218,223 commodity 3, 8, 9, 38, 56, 93, 100, 224 desiring movement 22, 23 ecology 48, 49 203 deconstruction 92, 95 determinism 158 Einstilrzende Neubauten 165, 167 common-notions 93 decoration 142-3 deterritorialization 38,39,40, 122, 174, electronic art 51,52 common sense 11, 14, 16, 20, 86, 104, decorative vitalism 142 198,201,203,224-7 emergence 25,29 110, Ill, 130 Defert, Daniel 83 Dewey,John 143, 146, 149n.13 Emin, Tracey 74, 134-6 communication 2,8,27,29,56-67, Delacroix, Eugene 140 see also, Art as Experience My Bed (1998) 134-5 82, 164 Deleuze . diagram 74,80,96,121 emotion 3, 30 collective communication 70 and Badiou 116-25 dialectical negation 38 entertainment industry 169 interactive communication 73 and Bergson 185-7 Dialogues 147 entropy 30, 32, 228 compositionist 24,25, 32n.l on cinema 82-3, 184-94 dtiference 1,91,100,105,121,128, Essays Critical and Clinical 59,62,63, computer science 57 on commercial art 9 151-60, 165, 181, 196 65 concept 19,21,48,57,58,59,86 on difference 1, 105, 121 dtiferential calculus 105, 154-60 eternal return 1,2,6, 117 conceptual art 6, 33, 36, 123, 144, and Foucault 5,8,80-9 dtiferentiation 105, 156, 182 eternity 101n.2 43nA and the future of philosophy 11-21 principle of dtiference 154-6 ethico-aesthetics 9, 95, 173 consciousness 222-9 and Kant 14-15,152-60,206-15 Difference and Repetition 16, 18, 63, Ethics 93-4 construction 2,4,38,40,58,63,97-8, and Leibniz 104-5, 155-6, 158-60 101n.5, 130, 154, 156 ethology 93, 178 139,181,187,209,220 and linguistics 104-13 discipline 22 Euclidean geometry 155 constructivism 8,18,20,142,146, and Negri 5, 83 disciplinary societies 175 event 2,8,11,13,59,64,83,84,96, 167,179 on the new 1, 151-60 Discipline and Punish 84 104, 111-13, 116, 121, 123, constructivist vitalism 142 and Spinoza 47 doxa 62,66 156-7,193,212 238 Index Index 239 event (Cont'd) on techniques of the self 81 Guattari, Felix ( Cont'd) individuation 13, 130 affective event 98 on technologies of the self 174 on the aesthetic paradigm 3, 4, industrial music 5, 162-71 art-event 75, 76, 116 on the visual arts 81 29-36,38,43,71,77,78, 101nA, Industrial Records 170 trauma-event 69 see also, Discipline and Punish, 142,148,173-83,218 Infancy and History 61 existential function 180-1 Language and Mind, Rayrrwnd on chaosmosis 7-8 infinity 26,60,61,66 expanded practice (art) 116 Rnussel 'Consciousness and information 35,36,37,42,57,82,87 experience 208-15 Franzen,jonathan 30 Subjectivity' 217-20 information war 168 conditions of possible free action 201-2 and Deleuze 97 info sphere 29,30 experience 151-4 Freejazz 8 and La Borde 217, 218 inhuman 128, 176 real experience 151-2,154,156,158 Frege, Gottiob 106-7 on metamodelisation 42,71-3, inorganiclife 2, 146, 187, 190-1 experimentation 84, 85, 87, 89 Freud, Sigmund 200, 222-9, 229n.1, 75,223 installation art 95, 143 expression 2,3,38,112,140,146,177, 230n.3 on the post-media age 75, 218 Institutional Critique 40, 129, 217-20 179,181,185,197,224 see also, Project for a Scientific Psychology, on the readymade 33-6 Institutional Psychotherapy 217 animal expression 35 Traumdeutung on schizoanalysis 25,29,30,32,42, instrumentalisation 7,33 expression and construction 2, 39, friendship 27, 28 95-6 internet 73 142,143,144,146-7,173 future 2,11-21,35,39,40,43,68,71, on the unconscious 217-29 introspection 99-100 form of expression 136 98, 143, 152, 154, 158, 192, 199, see also, Cartographies Schizoanalytique, Islamic fundamentalism 28 matters of expression 35,39,88, 213, 215, 230n.9 Chaosrrwsis; an Ethico-Aesthetic 177-8 Paradigm, Psychoanalise et jakobson, Roman 62 Gance, Abel 188-9 tranversaliti jazz 196-204 fabulation 12 see also, Napoleon Gysin, Brion 165, 170 Free jazz 202 faciality 86 The Gay Science 17 jazz improvisation 196-204 Fanni Tutti, Cosi 164 Genosko, Gary 73 habit 92, 96, 100, 196, 198, 201 johns,jasper 123 fashion 91 Gleizes, Albert 143,148n.1 hallucination 6, 139, 190, 222, 223, joke 120-1 Faust 191 see also, On Cubism 230n.3 jones,jim 166 Fauvism 6, 140, 141, 143, 148n.1 globalization 197 Hallward, Peter 2,57-8 joyce,james 27 Fechner, Gustav 227 God 15,17,18,52,85,157,159, happiness 128, 135 jung, Gustav 228, 219n.9, 230n.9 feminism 72, 131 191 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 22, on the collective Fichte,johann Gottlieb 155 death of God 17 23,58,139,141,153,155 unconscious 230n.9 fidelity 117-19, 122-3 Goethe, johann Wolfgang 190-1, Hegelian dialectic 24 figural 121 195n.2 Heidegger, Martin 88, 206 Kafka, Franz 17 fold 117 The Golem 191 Helmholtz, Hermann von 227 Kandinsky, Wassily 143, 148n.1 force 22,105,116,121,128,142-3, good sense 11,104,109, Ill, 131 Herzog, Werner 184 see also, On the Spiritual in Art 143 146, 149n.12, 180, 181, 191, governmentality 84 Hesse, Eva 123 Kant, Immanuel 5, 14, 15, 20, 21, 199 Gramsci, Antonio 68 heterogenesis 34, 176 109-10,113,119,128-37,141, virtual force 116 Greenberg, Clement 120-2, 139, 140, historical materialism 59 152-5,187,189,191,206-15 Fortune 500 66 141 Hume, David 155, 196 on the categories 153, 154, 207 FoucauU 8, 17, 80 'Modernist Painting' 141 humour 119 on causality 210-11 Foucault, Michel 8, 17, 22, 59, 60, Grosz, George 51 Husserl, Edmund 114n.ll on the conditions of possible 80-9,91,94-5,96,98,117, Group for Information on Prisons experience 61, 151, 154 173-4,176,183 (GIF) 83-5,87 icon 6, 68-78 on the Copernican revolution 207 on the care of the self 94-5, 98 Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia 36-8, 40, Idea 110::"'11, 113 'Criti~lue of Teleological and the debate with Noam 41 image of thought 86 judgment' 210 Chomsky 59-61, 85-6 Guattari, Felix 7-8, 32n.1, 33-6, imagination 20,21,173 on the dynamic sublime 20-1,189,191 on disciplinary societies 175 42, 71-3, 91, 95-9, 101nA, immaterial labour 60 on the imagination 187,189 on governmentality 84 101n.7, 126n.8, 142, 147, 148n.5, Impressionism 140 Kantian aesthetics 128-31 on the politics of truth 81,94 173-83,217-20 improvisation 8,39,184 on the mathematical sublime 189 240 Index Index 241

Kant, Immanuel (Cont'd) linguistics 104-13, 176 mass media 9 music 162-71, 196-204,223-4, Sensus communis 130 liquid perception 188-9 material vitalism 2 230n.2 on the sublime 5,18-21,129,140, literature 104-13 Matisse, Henri 6, 43n.2, 139-48 avant-garde music 198,204 185-94 see also, , Charles The Dance (1919) 142 birdsong 196-7 on time 208-11 Baudelaire, , 'Notes on a Painter' 141 classical music 201-2 on the transcendental aesthetic 14, William Burroughs, Lewis mathematics 116, 154-60 electronic music 164 154 Carroll, Anton Chekhov, Brion differential calculus 129, 154-60 Freejazz 8 'Transcendental Dialectic' 157 Gysin, ,john Keats, Euclidean geometry 155 improvisation 196-204 on the transcendental subject 133, 209 Stephane Mallarme, Herman set theory 116, 155 jazz 196-204 see also, Critique ofJudgment, Critique of Melville, Henri Michaux, Marcel Matta, Roberto 71 and nature 196 Practical Reason, Critique ofPure Proust, , Gary Matter and Memory 92, 186 noise 163 Reason Snyder, Michel Tournier, Maturana, Humberto 68 opera 223-4 Kaprow, Alan 51-4 Wolfson, Louis media ecology 45-6,162-71 popular music 162 see also, The Blurring ofArt and Life logic 88,106,156 media terrorism 168 punk 164 Keats,john 133 of affects 176 meditation 95,99-100, 102n.15 rock music 162, 165 kitsch 132 of cinema 88 Samadhi meditation 99 sampling 163 Klein, Melanie 224, 228 logical possibility 151-2 Vipasana meditation 100 serial music 197 on the partial object 228-9 of sensation 88,145,146 Mekas,jonas 76 techno 164, 165, 171 Koestler, Arthur 66 of sense 104-13 Melville, Herman 5, 62, 64, 65, 120 see also, Georges Aperghis, johann see also, The Act of Creation The Logic of Sensation 198 see also, Bartleby Sebastian Bach, Dave Brubeck, de Kooning, William 53 The Logic of Sense 104-13,198,211-12 Mephisto 191 Cabaret Thltaire,john Cage,john Kosuth,joseph 43n.3 Lorenz attractor 159 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 140 Coltrane, Coum Transmissions, Kraftwerk 164 Louis, Morris 140 Messiaen, Oliver 196,198 Martin Denny, Einsturzende love 29,47,50,77,113,132,181 metamodelisation 42,71-3,75, Neubauten, Kraftwerk, Marilyn Lacan,jacques 93, 144,200,217, Lyotard,jean-Fran<;ois 22,70,140-1 223 Manson, Oliver Messiaen, Nine 222-3, 230 n.7 Metzinger,jean 143 Inch Nails, Genesis P-Orridge, on the imaginary 222 McCall, Anthony 6, 185-94 see also, On Cubism Psychic TV; Sonic Youth, SPK, The on the real 222 Doubling Back 193 Michaux, Henri 139 Temple ofPsychick Youth, Throbbing on the symbolic 128,200,222 Line Describing a Circle 192 Microsoft 23 Gristle LandArt 124 Long Film for Four Projectors 193-4 mimetics 49-50 mysticism 92, 186, 187, 219, 222 language 59-67,82,86,104-13,128, Turn 193 Minimalism 125,125n.1 137n.l, 176-80 magic 219-20 Modernism 38, 128, 131, Napoleon 189 language games 105,143 Maimon, Solomon 152-6, 160 139-48,162,.163,179, Naranjo, Ruben 37 philosophy oflanguage 62 on the conditions of real 198,204 nationalism 28,174 Language and Mind 60 experience 151-2, 154, 156, modem art 124, 125 nature 196 Lebel,jean:Jacques 43n.4,71 160 modem cinema 187 Negri, Antonio 5, 83, 100n.2 Lecercle,jean:Jacq\les 104-5, 108 Maldiney, Henri 218-19 modem music 197-8 neo-avant-garde 33 Leibniz, Gottfried W. 105,129, Mallarme, Stephane 117 modulation 14 Neo-realism 83, 87 153-6,213 Manet, Edouard 81,140 molecular biology 154 neoteny 59,61 and differential calculus 129, 154-60 Manson, Charles 166 montage 188-94 neuroscience 82-3 Levi-Strauss, Claude 43n.3 Marazzi, Christian 66 intensive montage 189-92 Newton, Isaac 155,208-9 libido 9,223,225-9, 230n.5 Margulis, Grigory 47 quantitative montage 188-9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2,6,8,11,15,17, libidinal energy 30 Marilyn Manson 164 movement-image 88, 186-94 19,47,62,85,95,99,117,146, The Life of the Mind, One/Thinking 109 marketing 3,9,56,57,59,62 multiplicity 116, 117, 123, 154, 147, 149n.12, 157,207 line offlight 117,118,119,120,147, Marx, Karl 38 156-7,176,177,203,215 and the eternal return 1,2,6,117 204 Marxism 5, 92, 95 museum 40 on the untimely 11 Index 243 242 Index post-Kantian aesthetics 133, 134 readymade 6,33-43,116,118-20,123, Nietzsche, Friedrich ( Cont'rJ) plane of composition 39, 163, 171 pos~Kantians 152-5 126n.4, 135, 137, 148n.5 see also, Beyond Good andEvil, The Gay plane of immanence 7,11,25,38,40, post-media 75, 218 reason 15,21,109, Ill, 152 Science, Genealogy of Morals 194 post-Modernism 54n.2, 71, 129, 141, recognition 1,14,83,130 Nine Inch Nails 164 Plato 155, 206 145, 162, 163 refrain 8,28-30,33-43,96,122,163, noise 163 Platonism 18 post-Structuralism 22 196-204 non-art 51-2,53 play 75,133 precarious labour 28 relational aesthetics 40 nonsense 98,105,110 PLO 5 presentation 118, 122 Renoir,Jean 188 Nosjeratu 191 poetry 107 Prigogine, llya 68 repetition 1,14,91,122,154,196,200, novelty 206-15 Poincare, Henri 48, 159 politics 173-83, 203-4 problem 106, 112, 157-8, 160 201,203,212,223 problematic 154, 156-60 creative repetition 196,201 Oedipus 8, 95, 224 democracy 15, 36, 202 Project for a Scientific Psychology 227 mechanical repetition 196 Oiticica, Helio 39-41 political representation 180 proletariat 37 obsessive repetition 30 Tropicalia (1967) 39 see also, anarchism, autonomous Proust, Marcel 86, 215, 228 repetition compulsion 200 old age 26, 27 movement, being-against, Psychic TV 167, 170 representation 13,15, 16, 18,20,21, Alzheimers' disease 30 being-together, biopolitics, Psychoanalise et tranversalite 25 104,177-80,203,222 senility 30 bio-power, capitalism, commod­ psychoanalysis 9,25,68,93,95,105, in cinema 185-7 Olitski,Jules 140 ity, Coordination des Intermittents 108,113,144,200-1,217-29 in music 203 On Cubism 143, 148n.1 etPrecaires d'lle deFrance, democ­ desire 22,23,24,30,32,56,77, 121, political representation 180 On the Spiritual in Art 143 racy, disciplinary societies, 218,223 Re/Search 170 op art 6 feminism, globalization, Freud, Sigmund 200,222-9, 229n.1, resistance 3, 4, 6, 10, 33, 59, 62, 66, opinion 27,62,108,145,163 Group for Information on 230n.3 217-20 order word 87 Prisons (GIF) , immaterial imaginary 222 reterritorialization 38 other 30 labour, Institutional Critique, Jung, Gustav 228, 219n.9, 230n.9 Revised Boy Scout's Manual 168 otherness 23 Islamic fundamentalism, media Klein, Melanie 228 revolution 4, 7, 10, 37, 43, 49, 77, 169, Oury,Jean 217-20 terrorism, people yet to come, 175,178 outside 63-6,83,85,87,96-7,98,99, PLO, political representation, Lacan,Jacques 93,144,200,217, 222-223, 230n.7 revolt 29 100,117,142,143,175 post-Fordism, precarious labour, proletariat, racism, libido 9,223,225-9, 230n.5 rhythm 121, 163 Oedipus 8, 95, 224 rock music 70, 162, 165 P-Orridge, Genesis 164-71 resistance, revolution, society partial object 228-29 Romanticism 38, 128, 139-41, 144 panic 26, 27, 30, 32 of control, societies of security, phallus 112,143,144 Roussel, Raymond 64 paradox 106, III surplus-value, utopia, War psychosis 24,64,219-20,223, Russell, Bertrand 107-8,155-6 paranoia 67 machine 230n.3 see also, An Outline ofPhilosophy partial object 228-9 Pollock, Jackson 120-3 passivity 57, 99, 117, 129-30 Eyes in the Heat (1946) 125 real 222 symbolic 128, 137n.l, 200, 222 Sala, Anri 76 La Pensee Matisse 145, 148n.1 Lavender Mist (1950) 116, 122 transference 218, 223 Salloum,Jayce 76 people yet to come 4, 38, 39, 88, 196, polymorphous perversity 112 unconscious 9, 23, 105, 217-29, sampling 163 204 polyphony 176 229n.l,231n.11 Sartre,Jean-Paul 68 percept 4,48,68,142,163,166,169, Pop art 123 psychosis 24,64,219-20,223, 230n.3 Savage, Jon 167 198 popular culture 46,166-71 schizoanalysis 25, 29, 30, 32, 42, 95-6, performance art 95,163,164 possible 13, 14, 16 Rabinow, Paul 47 173,200-1,218,228 phallus 112, 143, 144 conditions of possibility 61,154,187 racism 41 schizopp.renia 7-8, 64, 65, 219 phase space 157 logical possibility 151-2 Ranciere,Jacques 176,179 schizo-aesthetics 9 Picabia, Francis 141 possible experience 151-2 rap music 70 schizo-capital 9 Picasso, Pablo 121, 133 post-aesthetics 148 Rauschenberg, Robert 123 Schlanger, Judith 66 Pierce, Charles, S. 71,74,77 post-conceptual art 81 Ray, Man 71 Schotte,Jacques 214,217,218 Piper, Adrian 40-3 post-Fordism 59, 61 Raymond Roussel 81 Schwitters, Kurt 71 Catalysis 1V (1970) 41 post-industrial 162,168, 169 244 Index Index 245 science 202, 217 smooth space 6 technology 166-71 untimely 11 science fiction 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19 Snyder, Gary 54 reproduction technology 203 utopia 15 Seigworth, Greg 200-1 societies of security 174-6, 180 The Temple ofPsychick Youth 170 dystopia 15 semiotics 176-7 society of control 4, 59, 88, 89, 168 territory 122, 196-7 affective semiotics 177 Society of Independent Artists 118 aesthetic territory 122 Varela, Francisco 68 sensation 3,6,20,26,48,49,50,54,57, Solaris 16 existential territory 40,225 variables 48 63, 110, 113, 122, 135, 139, 141, Sonic Youth 78n.2 theology 18 variations 48, 49 145,147,163,166,169,171 soul 22,30,158,226 57 universal variation 194 blocs of sensation 163 speed 7,94,97,99 Throbbing Gristle 5, 162-71 varieties 48 logic of sensation 88, 145, 146 acceleration 8,9,29,97 and Industrial Records 170 vector 68-78,96,190 virtual sensation 169 stillness 9,99 DoA/Third and Final Report 168 vector field 70,76,106,108, sense 5,21,28,32,104-13,133 Spinoza, Baruch 47,91,93-4,95,96, 'Hamburger Lady' 168 111-12,113n.3 common sense 11, 14, 16, 20, 86, 97,98,99, 101n.9, 146, 153, 155, Heathen Earth (1980) 168 vibration 49 104,110, 111 196,214 Second Annual Report (1977) 167 Vigo,Jean 188 good sense 11,104,109, Ill, 131 on common-notions 93 'Subhuman' 167 da Vinci, Leonardo 70 logic of sense 104-13 and ethology 93 'United' 169 Virilio, Paul 139 non-sense 98,105, 110 see also, Ethics 'Walls of Sound' 166 Virno, Paolo 59-62, 64, 176 sensibility 29, 30, 113 spirit 187-92, 194 time 11,12,14,206-15 virtual 40,92-4,96,97-8,99, 100, 153, sensitivity 27,30 spiritual automaton 62 time-image 82, 88 154, 156, 159-60, 163, 168, 169, sensory-motor mechanism 92 SPK 170 Tinguely,Jean 71,74 185-6,215,226,228 series 105, 112, 159-60 Stengers, Isabelle 68 Tomkins, Calvin 119 virtual force 116 set theory 116, 155 Stewert, Ian 155, 158 Torrubia, Horace 217 virtual sensation 169 Seurat, Georges 140 Stieglitz, Alfred ll9 Tosquelles, Fran«;ois 217-18,219 vitalism 128-37, 139-48, 148n.5, 187, sex 85 stillness 9, 99 Tournier, Michel 198 190 sexuality 104, 108, 132 Stoicism 104,108, 1l0-1l, 211 Vendredi 198 constructivist vitalism 142 shame 6, 57, 62 Structuralism 36 transcendent Ideas 15 decorative vitalism 142 sharing 29,30 stuttering 9,65 transcendental empiricism 21, 152, 154 passive vitalism 129-30 Sherman, Cindy 135-36 subjectivation 8,9,27,29, 32n.1, transcendental field 104, 152 subjective vitalism 129 sign 3,4,6 34,41,46,68-78,147,166, transcendental philosophy 152 void 117,118,204 Signac, Paul 140 173-83, transcendental subject 133, 209 signification 177--S3, 223 subjectivity 3, 4, 9, 22, 23, 25, 27, 65, transference 218, 223 Wall,Jeff 43nA signified 144 68-78,91-100,130,136,170, transversal 69, 71, 75, 76, 78n.1, 84, 88, Walt Disney 23 signifier 42,71,74,77,142,143,144, 174-83,196,208-15, 148, 182-3 war machine 5,6-7,93,97,173 177--S,223, 225 219-29 trauma 200-4 waste 5, 128-31, 137 simulacra 165 sublime 5, 18-21, 129, 140, 185-94 Traumdeutung 227-8, 230n.2 Weisman, Eyal 6 simulation 165 dynamic sublime 20-1 truth 14,109-10,111,206 What Is Philosophy? 18,19,26,30,32, singularity 34,69,76, Ill, 128, 129, sublime cinema 185-94 Tucuman Arde 37-8 47-8,51,56,58,82,129,135, 151,154,156-7,179,181 substance 17, 18, 21, 157 Turing machine 68, 69 148n.5,163 singularization 13, 29, 73, 75, 183, subtraction 57,116,117,175 Whitehead, Alfred North 5, 85, 224,227,230n.9 sufficient reason 152, 154 UFO 19 206-15 situation ll6, ll7, 123-4 surplus-value 197 unconscious 9, 23, 105, 217-29, on causality 212-15 Situationist International 47 Surrealism 227 229n.1,231n.ll Wolfson, Louis 64 Smithson, Robert 43n.3, 123-5, Survival Research Laboratories 170-1 collective unconscious 230n.9 Worringer, Wilhelm 146, 190 126n.8 Sweeney,JamesJohnson 35,142, molecular unconscious 222 Yucatan Mirror Displacements 148n.4 universal 151, 156 Zen 53 (1969) 124 symbolic 128, 137n.1, 200, 222 universal variation 194 Zikos, Constantine 76 SpiralJetty (1979) 124-5 syntax 9,64 univocal being 63 Zizek, Slavoj 137n.l