School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts Department of Communication and Cultural Studies To Believe in the World Again: Thought Becoming Imperceptible Anne-Marie Newton This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University June 2013 To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgement has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any other university. Signature ............................................... Date ............................................... CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i ABSTRACT ii ABBREVIATIONS iii INTRODUCTION 1 PART 1: THOUGHT CONSTRAINED Problem 1: Disciplined thought—the problem of the dogmatic image 35 Problem 2: Control—thought, information, the digital 73 PART 2: ENTERING A THOUGHT THAT MOVES— SOME LINES OF FLIGHT 111 Line of flight 1: Affects, concepts, micropolitics 114 Line of flight 2: Thinking through art 145 Line of flight 3: Thought in an aesthetic paradigm 181 LATE THOUGHTS: In lieu of a conclusion 219 ENDNOTES 226 WORKS CITED 232 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to Ron Blaber for his guidance, patience, and for giving me the space to follow thought as and where it took me. Thanks also to my friends Margaret MacIntyre and Rosie Keely: Margaret, for her faith and invaluable encouragement, and Rosie, for her enduring support all the way through, from first word to last. Above all I thank my family, to whom my gratitude is beyond words: Eve and Coen, who are my inspiration, and Matt, who makes everything possible. i ABSTRACT This thesis draws upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to, firstly, diagnose some of the restrictions contemporary life places upon a Deleuzian “thought without an image,” and secondly, to offer some means through which we might enter this more creative, life enhancing thought. As such, the thesis comprises a project of Nietzschean ethics, to the extent that it mounts a critique of today’s dominant thought forms, but exercises this critique as a preparatory move before turning to thought as a more active and affirmative force of/for life. The thesis argues that the dominant images of thought operating in our current milieu are of two primary modes: representation and information. Limitative representational thought structures, such as identity, resemblance and opposition, have, according to Deleuze and Guattari, defined what it means to think since classical times, prevailing through philosophy’s Platonic, Cartesian and Kantian phases, and into the present day. Proceeding by way of a series of actual examples, the thesis examines the contemporary functioning of this image of thought, focusing on such representational axes as individualism, science, gender/ sexuality and race. In addition to this classical mode, though, the thesis also problematises our current informational milieu, proposing that it is, in fact, engendering a supplementary image of thought, one that also regulates what thought can do. This image includes the mediatisation of thought, its channelling through networks of control, and its confinement by the requirements of the digital. Cutting across both the representational and informational images, however, is the potent axiomatic of capital, which further and perhaps most powerfully delimits how thought today can function. In resistance to these restrictions, the thesis proposes a thought without an image, whereby thought is nothing less than creation: the bringing into the world of the radically new, of difference-in-itself. This thought is materially embedded, traverses such spheres as philosophy, nonphilosophy, politics, micropolitics and aesthetics, and is interlinked with Bergsonian duration, Spinozian affects, and, above all, with the Deleuze-Guattarian virtual— the full reality of all that can be. Again by way of a range of actual examples relevant during the writing of this thesis, its second part maps this more potentialising thought along three lines of flight: though “ordinary” affects and the concepts and events to which they relate, through the strange sensations that art makes perceptible, and through the creation of change that Guattari’s aesthetic approach to the “post-media” era enables. Through each of these realms the thesis conceives of life in machinic, ethological terms, expressing an ontology of becoming that bespeaks the interrelatedness of all aspects of the cosmos. In this approach, no one element is privileged (including the human), and thought is conceptualised as an intensive, connective force that produces and affirms unconstrained, unregulated difference. ii ABBREVIATIONS Works by Gilles Deleuze B Bergsonism C1 Cinema 1: The Movement Image C2 Cinema 2: The Time Image DI Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 DR Difference and Repetition D Dialogues II (co-authored with Claire Parnet) ES Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature ECC Essays Critical and Clinical EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza FL The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque F Foucault FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation GF Gérard Fromanger: Photogenic Painting (co-authored with Michel Foucault) ABC Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer LS The Logic of Sense N Negotiations: 1972-1990 NP Nietzsche and Philosophy “NT” “Nomad Thought.” PS Proust and Signs: The Complete Text PI Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life “S” “Spinoza: Cours Vincennes – 24/01/1978.” SPP Spinoza: Practical Philosophy TRM Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975—1995 Works by Félix Guattari C Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm GR The Guattari Reader MR Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics SS Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985 TE The Three Ecologies “TE” “The Three Ecologies” “V” “The Vertigo of Immanence” Works by Deleuze and Guattari (D+G) AO Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia K Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature ATP A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia WP What Is Philosophy? iii INTRODUCTION [There is an] immense crisis sweeping the planet—chronic unemployment, ecological devastation, deregularisation of modes of valorisation, uniquely based on profit … . Guattari, Chaosmosis 132 It is not a question of worrying or of hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons. Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies" 178 Project of/for Deleuze-Guattarian thought This is a project of and for a Deleuze-Guattarian image of thought, or thought without an image, in response to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari see as the serious limitations placed upon contemporary life by dominant ways of thinking under advanced capitalism. Working at the end of the 20th century, these philosophers/activists take a utopian approach to philosophy, in the sense that, for them, the word utopia denotes the “conjunction of philosophy … with the present milieu” (WP 100). Thought and life, therefore, are indivisible, which means that anywhere that thought is restrained, so too is life. The keystone of Deleuze’s philosophy (which Guattari also endorses) is that “[l]ife is difference, the power to think differently, to become different and to create differences” (Colebrook, Gilles 13). Hence, when the power to think is confined by a particular image of thought, as well as by a capital- oriented, market-constituted world, the diversity that is life’s ethical potential is severely curtailed. At the same time, however, because “thought is creation” itself (D+G, WP 54), a real commitment to thinking otherwise—thinking in ways that resist dominant paradigms—can lead to new, more life-enhancing ways of living. This project comprises an attempt to, firstly, apprehend some of the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari (hereafter D+G1) see that thought is constituted and restricted in this current milieu, and, secondly, to propose some pathways by which conceiving of and engaging in thought differently can move us beyond these restrictions. As such, this is a broad-based, ethically oriented project, where ethics is understood from the post-structuralist viewpoint—as a sensitivity to openness and difference (Popke 298). To conceive of thought in this more ethically productive way is to subscribe to what Deleuze calls “thought without an image” (DR 132, 167). Deleuze, whose "noology" studies the historicity of images of thought, claims that each period of philosophy has produced a particular model for thought—which is to say a “system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think and to ‘orient oneself in thought’” (ATP 376; N 148). The representational image of thought, for example—for a long time our most dominant image—is a "dogmatic, orthodox or moral" one, predicated upon the supposition that "thought has an affinity with the true; it formally possesses the true and materially wants the true" (Deleuze, 1 DR 131). Thought without an image, on the other hand, beginning with “a radical critique” of dogmatism, effectively frees thought from all traditional “presuppositions” about how it must proceed (Deleuze, DR 132). For Deleuze (and Guattari), it is only when thought is released from any delimiting image that it can actually “begin to think” (DR 132). Since this project strives towards constructing some Deleuze-Guattarian ways in which we might “begin to think,” in response to contemporary constraints upon thought, the first part of this introduction concerns some initial aspects of what such “beginning to think” might mean. In other