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Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner the Graduate Program in Literature

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Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner the Graduate Program in Literature The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner The Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kenneth Surin, Co-Chair ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-Chair ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano ___________________________ Frederick Moten ___________________________ Michael Hardt Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 i v iv ABSTRACT The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner The Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kenneth Surin, Co-Chair ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-Chair ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano ___________________________ Frederick Moten ___________________________ Michael Hardt An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Michelle Renae Koerner 2010 Abstract “The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome” puts four writers – Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Jackson and William S. Burroughs – in conjunction with four concepts – becoming-democratic, belief in the world, the line of flight, and finally, control societies. The aim of this study is to elaborate and expand on Gilles Deleuze’s extensive use of American literature and to examine possible conjunctions of his philosophy with contemporary American literary criticism and American Studies. I argue that Deleuze’s interest in American writing not only productively complicates recent historical accounts of “French Theory’s” incursion into American academia, but also provides a compelling way think about the relationship between literature and history, language and experience, and the categories of minor and major that organize national literary traditions. Beginning with the concept of the “American rhizome” this dissertation approaches the question of rhizomatic thought as a constructivist methodology for engaging the relationship between literary texts and broader social movements. Following an introduction laying out the basic coordinates of such an approach, and their historical relevance with respect to the reception of “French Theory” in the United States, the subsequent chapters each take an experimental approach with respest to a single American writer invoked in Deleuze’s work and a concept that resonantes with the literary text under consideration. In foregrounding the question of the use of literature this dissertation explores the ways literature has been appropriated, set to work, or dismissed in various historical and institutional arrangements, but also seeks to suggest the possibility of creating conditions in which literature can be said to take on a life of its own. iv Contents Abstract..........................................................................................................................................iv 1. Introduction: American Rhizome............................................................................................. 1 2. Becoming-Democratic: Whitman’s Specimen Days .......................................................... 29 2.1 Another Deleuzian Century? ........................................................................................ 29 2.2 Becoming-Democratic .................................................................................................... 35 2.3 American Classics........................................................................................................... 46 2.4 A Few Specimen Days (and, of course, far more unrecorded) ................................ 55 2.4.1 “Convulsiveness” ...................................................................................................... 55 2.4.2 “Open Air” ................................................................................................................. 69 2.4.3 “Refrain” ..................................................................................................................... 75 2.5 Deleuze’s “Whitman” (1993)......................................................................................... 81 2.5.1 …and…and…and….................................................................................................. 91 3. Belief in the World: Melville’s Confidence-Man .................................................................. 93 3.1 Melvillian Psychiatry ..................................................................................................... 93 3.2 The Age of Capital.......................................................................................................... 98 3.3 (Something further may follow of this masquerade…) .......................................... 102 3.3.1 Against Interpretation............................................................................................. 102 3.3.2 Divergent Stories and the Inconsistencies of Life ............................................... 110 3.3.3 But is it true?............................................................................................................. 125 3.4 Belief In the World........................................................................................................ 128 3.5 Quite an Original .......................................................................................................... 131 4. Lines of Escape: George Jackson’s Soledad Brother..................................................... 136 4.1 Jackson and the Prison Information Group .............................................................. 136 v 4.2 Writing Absolute Speed............................................................................................... 156 4.3 A New Kind of Revolution.......................................................................................... 176 4.3.1 A Revolutionary War Machine.............................................................................. 183 4.3.2 Minorities Rather Than Classes............................................................................. 191 4.3.3 Line of Escape........................................................................................................... 200 5. From Controlled Substances to Societies of Control....................................................... 203 5.1 Money is like Junk ........................................................................................................ 203 5.2 The Burroughs Effect.................................................................................................... 213 5.2.1 Revelations................................................................................................................ 213 5.2.2. Cut-Up or Cut-In?................................................................................................... 219 5.2.3 The Burroughs Experiment.................................................................................... 227 5.2.4 The Drugged Body ................................................................................................. 231 5.2.5 The Kick .................................................................................................................... 241 5.2.6 Waiting for the Man - The Meet Café ................................................................... 248 5.2.7 Recording Instrument ............................................................................................. 252 5.3 Conclusion: Creation Against Control ...................................................................... 257 Bibliography............................................................................................................................... 271 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 277 vi 1. Introduction: American Rhizome In November 1975 Gilles Deleuze traveled to New York to participate in the Schizo-Culture conference organized by Semiotext(e) Press at Columbia University. Accompanied by Félix Guattari (co-writer of L'Anti-Œdipe (1972; 1977) and Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure, which was published that same year), and the philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, Deleuze’s acceptance of the invitation to contribute to the conference occasioned his first and only visit the United States. In a certain respect Schizo-Culture might first be understood as part of a response to the brutal imposition of “law and order” that characterized 1970s America and the presidency of Richard Nixon in the wake of the new social movements of the previous decade. The themes of the conference – prisons and madness – focused on the increasing incarceration of political activists and people of color, and sought to question, from a political standpoint, the category of “mental illness.” These were issues all four French thinkers were deeply engaged with at the time in their own country – both through their writing and their political affiliations. Foucault, along with his partner Daniel Defert, had for instance recently created the Groupe d’information sur les prisons to investigate conditions in French prisons and the title
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