Professional Documents
Culture Documents
of Life
Nathan Eckstrand
Duquesne University
Abstract
I begin with Deleuzes criticism of the Darwinian concept of
difference as leading to the inaccurate assumption that difference
occurs within individuals and species. Deleuze radicalises Darwins
theory by disrupting the ontological stability of species and extant
individualities. I examine how Deleuzes project relates to punctuated
equilibrium and the discovery of the amount of variation within the
human genome, showing that these recent developments make Deleuzes
critique less applicable by showing that Darwinian classification schemes
should include a greater openness to difference. A complete alignment
between evolutionary biology and Deleuze may be impossible given the
limitations of evolutionary biology, but evolutionary biology can rethink
the ontological permanence it gives to species and individuals.
Keywords: Deleuze, evolutionary biology,
classification, species, punctuated equilibrium
Darwin,
difference,
I. Introduction
In the years following his trip on HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin
challenged the meaning of variation within living things, formulating
his theory of evolution by natural selection to explain the diversity
of characteristics living things possess. Since that time, evolutionary
biology has incorporated Mendelian inheritance and the relatively new
field of genetics to offer better explanations for the origins of new
Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 415444
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0164
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls
V. Conclusion
In closing, it is worth taking note of what is at stake in this discussion of
the relationships between evolutionary biology and Deleuzian ontology.
Notes
1. Deleuze articulates this philosophy in several ways throughout his oeuvre. For
the sake of consistency, this paper works primarily from the formulation it
receives in Difference and Repetition.
2. See iek 2012: 1920 and Badiou 2000: 69. iek claims there are two
versions of Deleuzes philosophy, and that only the first version frames ontology
in this way.
3. Manuel DeLanda opposes this interpretation, saying that there is no major
break between early and late Deleuzian ontology, but rather that the terminological distinctions and conceptual differences between works are slightly
displaced relative to one another but retain enough overlaps that they can be
meshed together as a heterogenous assemblage (DeLanda 2002: 202). This
reading of Deleuzes work ignores the importance of contemplation Deleuze
gives in Difference and Repetition to the constitution of the self, such as when
he says There is a self wherever furtive contemplation has been established,
whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing together a difference from
repetition functions somewhere (Deleuze 1994: 789). There is no corollary
to such contemplation in the equivalent concept that DeLanda identifies in
A Thousand Plateaus; rather, such constitutions occur apart from subjective
contemplation, as constitutions of intensities that occur within materiality
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 329).
4. Historically, it is worth noting that Darwin did not have a concrete definition
of species in his published works, and in fact commented on the problems of
defining the term on several occasions (including in On the Origin of Species and
The Descent of Man). His working definition for species was a classificatory
term provisionally given to a group for the purposes of convenience and which
emphasizes resemblance, but which does not differ substantially from variation
(Darwin 1909: 68).
5. It may even be more accurate to say that science, or at the very least a scientific
orientation, is part of what constitutes the entities in the world. This would
make Difference and Repetition more akin to the later Deleuze, but it is
debatable whether or not the system of Difference and Repetition can sustain
that interpretation.
6. Material, for Deleuze, has three fundamental characteristics: it is molecularised,
it has a relation to forces to be harnessed, and it is defined by the operations
of consistency applied to it (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 345). There is no such
thing as base substantiality, as material for Deleuze has relations, trajectories
and speeds. It thus cannot be defined according to perfunctory, automatic rules.
7. Importantly, Deleuze is joined in this view by numerous evolutionary biologists
who also see knowledge of DNA and the genome being used to apply determination inappropriately, leading to reductionism. For a good example, of this
view, see Lewontin 1991.
8. Several scientific discoveries support this critique of mechanistic conceptions of
life. Francis Jacobs The Logic of Life describes the irreducible role of difference
and disparity in transcriptions of genetic codes vital to the functioning of
evolution (Jacobs 1974: 2902), while Shostak describes research that shows
the possibility of conceiving of life as plural and open rather than singular and
determined (Shostak 1999: 151).
References
Ansell-Pearson, Keith (1999) Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of
Deleuze, New York and London: Routledge.
Aristotle (1984) Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: Volume 2, ed.
Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Badiou, Alain (2000) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bamshad, Michael, Stephen Wooding, Benjamin Salisbury and J. Claiborne Stephens
(2004) Deconstructing the Relationship between Genetics and Race, Nature
Reviews: Genetics, 5, pp. 598609.
Coyne, Jerry A. (2009) Why Evolution is True, New York: Viking.
Darwin, Charles (1909) On the Origin of Species, ed. Charles Elliot, New York: P.
F. Collier and Son.
DeLanda, Manuel (2002) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, New York:
Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Bergsonism, New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Bergsons Conception of Difference, in Desert Islands and
Other Texts 19531974, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1991) What Is Philosophy?, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Eldridge, Niles and Stephen Jay Gould (1972) Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative
to Phyletic Gradualism, in T. J. M. Schopf (ed.) Models in Paleobiology, San
Francisco: Freeman Cooper.
Gould, Stephen Jay (1978) Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, New
York: Burnett Books.
Grosz, Elizabeth (2007) Deleuze, Bergson, and the Concept of Life, Revue
internationale de philosophie, 61:3, pp. 287300.
Jacobs, Francis (1974) The Logic of Life, New York: Pantheon.
Lewontin, Richard (1991) Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, New York:
Harper-Perennial.
Livingstone, Frank and Theodosius Dobzhansky (1962) On the Non-Existence of
Human Races, Current Anthropology, 3:3, pp. 27981.
Parra, Esteban (2007) Human Pigmentation Variation: Evolution, Genetic Basis,
and Implications for Public Health, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 50, pp.
85105.
Royal, Charmaine and Georgia Dunston (2004) Changing the Paradigm from Race
to Human Genome Variation, Nature Genetics Supplement, 36:11, pp. S5S7.
Shostak, Stanley (1999) Evolution of Sameness and Difference: Perspectives on the
Human Genome Project. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Simondon, Gilbert (1992) The Genesis of the Individual, in Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, Brooklyn: Zone Books.
Tishkoff, Sara and Kenneth Kidd (2004) Implications of Biogeography of Human
Populations for Race and Medicine, Nature Genetics Supplement, 36:11,
pp. S21S27.
Tishkoff, Sara, Floyd A. Reed, Franoise R. Friedlaender, Christopher Ehret, Alessia
Ranciaro, Alain Froment, Jibril B. Hirbo, Agnes A. Awomoyi, Jean-Marie Bodo,
Ogobara Doumbo, Muntaser Ibrahim, Abdalla T. Juma, Maritha J. Kotze,
Godfrey Lema, Jason H. Moore, Holly Mortensen, Thomas B. Nyambo, Sabah
Charles Mayell
Abstract
Deleuze adopts Nietzsches manifesto for an overturning of Platonism.
However, the consensus view is that Deleuzes project is best understood
as a revision not a repudiation of Platonism. Deleuzes engagement
with Platonism centres on The Sophist. Out of Platos concept of
phantasm, Deleuze fashions a new concept: simulacrum. In Difference
and Repetition, simulacra are invited to rise and affirm their rights; and
yet Deleuze later abandons the concept entirely. Why? Although suitable
for the purposes of critique, it became otiose in wider applications. More
generally, and against the consensus view, I argue that the trajectory of
the concept of the simulacrum is emblematic of Deleuzes anti-Platonism.
Keywords: Plato, Sophist, Aristotle, image, simulacrum, multiplicity
447
Stepping beyond the model and the copy, Deleuze now, therefore,
defines Platonism by reference to:
[the] more profound distinction . . . between the copy itself and the phantasm.
It is clear that Plato distinguishes, and even opposes, models and copies only
in order to obtain a selective criterion with which to separate copies and
simulacra, the former founded upon their relation to the model while the
latter are disqualified because they fail both the test of the copy and the
requirements of the model. (Deleuze 2001: 265)
449
name, copy, to cover them all (Plato 1997: 260; 240a). Stanley Rosen
also notices that the initial distinction between icons and fantasms is
blurred at crucial points (Rosen 1983: 151). For Vernant, Platos aim is
only to establish an opposition between demiurgic activity, on the one
hand, and mimetic [imitative] activity on the other (Vernant 1991: 170).
Divine demiurges have populated the natural world with plants and
animals and so forth. Human craftsmen lack true knowledge of the Idea
but by virtue of what Plato, in the Republic, calls right opinion, make
beds that one can actually sleep on and houses that one can actually live
in (Plato 1997: 1206; 601e). By contrast, Imitation is far removed from
the truth, for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part that is
itself only an image (1202; 598b).
So in Vernants analysis, the general lesson given in the Republic
applies with equal force to the distinction made in the Sophist:
The painters bed, whether it is a faithful copy (eikon)
. . . or whether it
is a simulacrum (phantasma) intended to produce an effect of trompeloeil . . . is . . . in both cases an imitation of a visible bed produced by the
artisan; it is not an imitation of . . . the idea . . . of the bed. (Vernant 1991:
169)
451
light of day, to track it down the way Plato tracks down the Sophist
(Deleuze 2003: 253).3 So, if reverse is the right word to use, it may be
because the reversal which is at stake is what we might now call reverse
engineering: taking an existing product or application apart and finding
how it works, reducing it to formula, tracking it back to the machine
code, as it were. Hence, Deleuze takes yet another step in search of the
motive power of Platonism. Before following, let us notice that if Deleuze
finds no sympathy with Platos motives, then reversing Platonism is a
repudiation of it.
According to Deleuze,
The motive of the theory of Ideas must be sought in a will to select and
to choose. It is a question of making a difference, of distinguishing the
thing itself from its images, the original from the copy, the model from the
simulacrum . . . The Platonic project comes to light only when we turn back
to the method of division. (Deleuze 2003: 253)
I still feel in need of an answer. Why does division deserve this status?
Deleuze does not provide an answer until his final summing up:
In [Platos] case . . . a moral motivation in all its purity is avowed: the will to
eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral.
What is condemned in the figure of the simulacra is the state of free, oceanic
differences. (Deleuze 2001: 265)
Williams goes on to concede: That this is only a parallel and not an exact
correspondence can be explained through Deleuzes main criticism of
Plato. For Deleuze, ideas do not have an identity they are multiplicities
of pure differences (Williams 2003: 82). What strikes me about the
above elements is how stratospherically far they take us from Plato:
it is not Platos name that resonates in the background but Nietzsche
(affirmation, eternal return and dramatisation), Spinoza (expression),
Bergson (multiplicities) and Kant (ideas and problems).
What is more, the four figures of the Platonic dialectic are only that
because Deleuze told us that they were in the first place. Contrast it, for
example, with what has come to be called Platos method of hypothesis:
First, it consists of the process of identifying a hypothesis such that its truth
is necessary and sufficient for a determinate answer to the question under
consideration . . . The second process is to determine whether the hypothesis
in question is true. (Benson 2009: 88)
453
455
These people seem to have nothing to do with one another. The Platonic
process seems to have produced a muddle but, according to Deleuze, this
is because we are thinking too much like Aristotle. According to Deleuze,
the method of division has nothing to do with species: The meaning and
the goal of the method of division is [not the analysis of species among
457
a larger genus but] the selection among rivals, the testing of claimants
(Deleuze 2001: 60).
What is germane for my general purposes, and has special relevance
in the context of the selection of difference, is that, even if Deleuze
has rescued Plato from Aristotles objection, it is not so as to give
Platonism a stake in the modern philosophy of difference. Platos
vertically orientated branching structure is an example of what Deleuze
and Guattari will come to describe as arborescent: Arborescent systems
are hierarchical systems . . . [in which] an individual has only one
active neighbour, his or her hierarchical superior . . . The channels of
transmission are preestablished (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 16). Far
from it being the case that, despite wide differences in philosophical
content, there are, nonetheless, structural affinities between Deleuze
and Plato, the iconic Platonic structure, the tree, is entirely inimical to
Deleuzes project: Were tired of trees . . . Theyve made us suffer too
much (15). The authors place their modern schema in sharp opposition:
Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for
what they are . . . An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of
a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.
There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a
structure, tree, or root. (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 8)
Deleuze remains loyal to the doctrine of the eternal return and yet
abandons the concept of the simulacrum. This presents a problem
because Deleuze explicitly connects the eternal return with the concept
of the simulacrum: What . . . is the content of this third time . . . What is
this content which is affected . . . by the eternal return? . . . it is a question
of simulacra, and simulacra alone (Deleuze 2001: 299). In his book on
Deleuzes philosophy of time, Williams has no doubt that The content
of eternal return is series and simulacra (Williams 2011: 127). I am
arguing that Deleuze abandons the concept of the simulacrum because
it becomes otiose. However, if the concept of the simulacrum includes
a component of novelty, without which we cannot drive the eternal
return, my argument is stopped dead in its tracks. In a seminal article
Smith asks: What are the conditions of the new that one finds laid
out in Gilles Deleuzes philosophy? (Smith 2007: 1). The concept of
the simulacrum finds no place in his reply. Instead we find: When the
virtual is actualised, it differentiates itself, it produces the new (17). I,
therefore, agree with Smith, who concludes, in the wake of Deleuzes
abandonment of the concept of the simulacrum, that The process of
simulation is more properly characterized as the process of actualization
(or even more precisely, the complex process of different/ciation)
459
(Smith 2006a: 116). If this is all the conceptual machinery we need for
radical novelty, I may now take up again Deleuzes critique of Plato.
We have seen that Deleuze claims to detect in the dialogues of
division a repeated four-fold pattern, the third element of which is the
invocation of a myth. However, this scheme is immediately threatened
(and this explains the earlier mentioned shift to the Statesman): It will
be objected that . . . the Sophist, presents no such myth (Deleuze 2001:
61).4 Deleuze replies that this is because in this text, by a paradoxical
utilization of the method, a counter-utilization, Plato proposes to isolate
the false claimant par excellence, the one who lays claim to everything,
without any right: the sophist. Smith notes how
Deleuze distinguishes between two spatial dimensions in Platos thought. The
dialogues of the Phaedrus and the Statesman move upward toward the true
lover or the true statesman, which are legitimated by their resemblance to
the pure model . . . Platonic irony is, in this sense, a technique of ascent. (Smith
2006a: 98)
461
lack . . . ) (Deleuze 2001: 62). Williams is the first to admit that, having
established such a foundation, Deleuze and Plato part company forever:
For Deleuze, ideas do not have an identity they are multiplicities of
pure differences . . . Deleuze and Plato cannot be reconciled on this issue
(Williams 2003: 82).
So far, I have characterised simulacral as being the nature of images
without resemblance, as images built on difference. In fact, Deleuzes
definition of the concept is much denser: These differential systems with
their disparate and resonating series, their dark precursor and forced
movements, are what we call simulacra (Deleuze 2001: 126). Indeed,
it conforms to Deleuze and Guattaris stricture that Every concept has
components that may, in turn, be grasped as concepts (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 19). Let us take just one of those components, namely,
the concept of series. Does it have a Platonic parallel? I raise this
question here because one might seek such a parallel in the seminal
Platonic doctrine of participation. The Idea of Justice, for example,
possesses justice in first place: What possesses in first place is the
ground itself . . . As for those whom we call just, they possess the quality
of being just in second, third or fourth place . . . or in simulacral fashion
(Deleuze 2001: 62). However, the instances of justice do not form a
series. To be a series entails a connection between the members of the
series, whereas here the only connection is back to the Idea, albeit at
varying levels of participation. What is more, for Plato, to the extent that
the actual diverse instances of justice participate in the Idea, at whatever
remove, they are, by definition, not simulacra.
However, perhaps a more obvious place to look for a Platonic parallel
might be in reading the Platonic concept to mean copies of copies. But
this is the very interpretation that Deleuze denies:
If we say of the simulacrum that it is a copy of a copy, an infinitely degraded
icon, an infinitely loose resemblance, we then miss the essential, that is, the
difference in nature between simulacrum and copy . . . If the simulacrum still
has a model, it is . . . a model of the Other. (Deleuze 2003: 2578)
In other words, there is, on the basis of Deleuzes own reading of Plato,
only the false image and the Idea of dissemblance which it internalises:
there is no series. As we have seen, the concept of series is but one
of a number of necessary components of Deleuzes larger concept of
simulacrum, and yet it is already a component that finds no Platonic
parallel. My interim conclusion is that the point of contact between
Deleuzes dense concept of simulacrum and Platos phantasm is, at best,
skin-deep. Although well adapted for the purposes of Deleuzes critique
463
The argument is akin to that which begins The Logic of Sense. Here,
the text at stake is the famous passage in Alice in Wonderland when Alice
changes size. Why should this be seen as problematic in any fundamental
sense? Williams, in his book on Deleuzes philosophy of time, translates
the relevant passage: It is at the same time, in the same play, that
one becomes bigger than one was, and that one renders oneself smaller
than one becomes (Williams 2011: 139). One might object that this
is obfuscation on Deleuzes part because Alice is never both larger and
smaller in the same instant of time. However, as Williams goes on to
explain, Deleuze is not referring to instants but to plays, to a process
like a move in a game (139). This is to say, not unreasonably, that
the implications of the current move, in a game of chess for example,
reverberate through all the previous moves, as well as the moves yet to
come, but not within any conventional measurable stretch of time. It is,
instead, part of a process, and Deleuzes general point, as Williams puts
it, is that all processes of becoming take place together (139).
But what has it got to do with Plato? According to Deleuze, Plato
invites us to distinguish between two dimensions: (1) that of limited
and measured things . . . and (2) a pure becoming without measure
(Deleuze 2003: 1). The allusion is to the following passage from
Philebus:
Socrates: Check first in the case of the hotter and the colder whether you can
conceive of a limit, or whether the more and less do not rather reside in these
kinds, and . . . do not permit the attainment of any end . . . [Protarchus agrees
strongly]. You . . . remind me rightly with your pronouncement of strongly
that it and equally its counterpart gently are of the same caliber as the
more and less. Wherever they apply, they prevent everything from adopting a
definite quantity. (Plato 1997: 41112; 24ac)
465
Agreed, but this sits unhappily with the same authors claim that
Deleuzianism can be seen as a completion of Platonism.
I have to some extent already anticipated the starkest challenge to
the redundancy of the concept of the simulacrum, which comes from
Williams: The concept of the simulacrum is crucial to understanding
the relation between times and between the actual and virtual in
Deleuzes thought (Williams 2011: 190; n. 5). If this is right, then
I am wrong, but then again, so, apparently, is Deleuze. However, in
the same endnote, Williams offers only reservations about approaches
that leave it [simulacra] out, citing Miguel de Beisteguis Truth and
Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (2004). Earlier Williams
stresses the parallels between [Beisteguis] process account of genesis
and Deleuzes process account of time (Williams 2011: 190; n. 2). But
Williams goes on to claim that Beistegui is forced to introduce a Kantian
and phenomenological vocabulary of noumenon and phenomenon
which remains abstract in terms of actual processes and ties Deleuze
too closely to phenomenology (190; n.5).6 To my mind, Beisteguis
explicit denial of such a charge remains fully Deleuzian in vocabulary
and structure:
If there is anything like a phenomenological reduction in Deleuzes
thought . . . it lies . . . not in the reduction of . . . [the] phenomenon to the
transcendent sphere of consciousness . . . but in the reduction of the
phenomenal to its . . . pre-individual and genetic horizon . . . In other words,
If Beistegui really does leave the simulacrum out whilst remaining fully
Deleuzian, he must, on the face of it, be an ally to any thesis concerning
the redundancy of the concept of the simulacrum. In fact, things do not
turn out that way. Deep in the endnotes we find: In a way . . . the entirety
of Deleuzes thought . . . can be seen as a meditation on the simulacrum
(Beistegui 2004: 3712; n. 56). And in plain sight:
Phenomena are not so much constituted or given as they are generated
or produced, not by external causes and first principles . . . but by a preindividual differential complex that is entirely immanent to the system in
which it explicates itself, a set of conditions that are far more impersonal
than phenomenology will have ever allowed. This . . . is what allows Deleuze
to speak of the phenomenal as illusory . . . and . . . brings Deleuze in great
proximity to Plato. (Beistegui 2004: 311)
Does this mean that the phenomenal world of actual things is, in
some way, not real? Williams plays this question through Deleuzes
philosophy of time which is not quite the same thing, and yet he is
prepared to go as far as to say that It would be a mistake to speak of
the real time of objects, because when viewed in relation to the processes
giving rise to them, the objects are not real (Williams 2011: 129).
Yet, if we take the longer view, we cannot seriously doubt Deleuzes
commitment to the reality of the world: It may be that believing in
467
this world . . . becomes our most difficult task . . . This is the empiricist
conversion . . . we have lost the world (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 75).
In the longer run too, and despite his own testimony, in what sense can
Deleuze really be said to have abandoned the concept of the simulacrum?
The answer is not purely a matter of conjecture. We know that, for
Deleuze, a philosophical concept is not the same as the name of that
concept: Although concepts are . . . baptized, they have their own way
of not dying while remaining subject to constraints of renewal (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 8). Concepts are, instead, multiplicities: There are
no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by
them (15). Accordingly, as we have seen, the concept of the simulacrum
contains the components of series, dark precursor and more; one can,
however, find very little parallel for this inner conceptual machinery
in Deleuzes critique of Plato. Looking at Deleuzes philosophy as a
whole, it is clear that he does not abandon the concept of series, for
example, when he abandons the concept of simulacrum. All he realises
he has thrown overboard, I suggest, is the name of the concept and with
it the Platonic ballast that was never really an important part of his
system and which muddles us more than it enlightens us. Deleuze knows
that Concepts are not eternal; they are born and die in response to
our problems, to our history, and above all, to our becomings (27).
In what sense, therefore, had the problem or history changed? Not
because difference had been rescued but, possibly, because Plato had
been overthrown.
Notes
1. Patton, for example, argues that both senses [overturning and reversing] are
involved in Deleuzes version of the escape from philosophys Platonic past
(Patton 1994: 143).
2. Much of Stanley Rosens commentary is devoted to refuting the so-called
predicationalists (e.g., G. E. L. Owen) for whom Platos metaphysics is a
gradually ripening episode in the ancestral saga of Fregean analysis . . . Owens
assertion that the paradigm-copy model does not appear in Platos later
dialogues . . . is . . . indefensible (Rosen 1983: 196).
3. Typographical error corrected: the English text reads reserve instead of
reverse.
4. In fact the Sophist does contain a myth: the Visitor tells the story of the Battle
of the Giants (Plato 1997: 267; 246a). We must conclude that, for Deleuze, it is
the wrong kind of myth.
5. There is also the, breathtakingly brief, late essay, Plato, the Greeks (Deleuze
1997: 1367).
6. Williams reference to Beistegui 2004: 227 is incorrect. Perhaps p. 277 was
intended; also see p. 311.
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trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve; Philebus, trans. Dorothea Frede,
Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett.
Roffe, Jonathan (2005) Simulacrum, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 2501.
Rosen, Stanley (1983) Platos Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image, Indiana:
Saint Augustines Press.
Smith, Daniel W. (2006a) The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the
Overturning of Platonism, Continental Philosophy Review, 38, pp. 89123.
Smith, Daniel W. (2006b) Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas, in
Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, pp. 4361.
Smith, Daniel W. (2007) The Conditions of the New, Deleuze Studies, 1:1,
pp. 121.
Vernant, Jeanne-Pierre (1991) The Birth of Image, in Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.),
Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, pp. 16485.
469
Widder, Nathan (2001) The Rights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the Univocity of
Being, Continental Philosophy Review, 34, pp. 43753.
Williams, James (2003) Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition: A Critical
Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Williams, James (2011) Gilles Deleuzes Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction
and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ronald Bogue
University of Georgia
Abstract
The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussottis Five Piano Pieces for David
Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as
a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work
as a whole. It functions as the books musical score, guiding readers
in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cages graphism and
aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own aserial new music, one
that celebrated passion and Bussottis open homosexuality. The visual
elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard
piano score, a diagram of the compositions abstract machine, and a
drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano
Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with
details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The
superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of
the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality
and the refrain, in a single artefact.
Keywords: Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, David Tudor, graphism, art and
music
During the last decade, I have taught a semester-long seminar on A
Thousand Plateaus five times, and last fall I thought I was well prepared
for the fifth iteration. But at the end of my lecture on the books first
section, a student who had been an aspiring opera soprano in a previous
life asked, What do you have to say about the musical score on the
opening page? and all I really had to say was, Ive never given it
Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 470490
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0166
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls
The chance Cage advocated, then, was for Bussotti a mere vehicle
for creating improvisatory music-theatre. Yet if Bussotti responded
favourably to Cages experiments with chance, he was even more deeply
affected by Cages explorations of the graphic dimension of musical
scores. A number of Cages scores from the 1950s departed radically
from standard notational practices. Many consisted solely of graphic,
non-musical elements, as in Variations 1 (for any instrument), Aria (for
solo voice) and Fontana Mix (electronic score), all produced in 1958.
Variations I consists of a prefatory page of instructions and six plastic
transparencies, the first of which bears twenty-seven dots of various
sizes, the following five of which have five randomly drawn lines each.
The performer(s) is (are) to superimpose the lines on the dots in any
way, using the dots as notes and the lines as trajectories of five sonic
elements. Aria is a twenty-page setting of words and word fragments in
Armenian, Russian, Italian, French and English. The vocal lines, Cage
explains, are drawn in black, with or without parallel dotted lines,
or in one or more of 8 colors. These differences represent 10 styles of
singing. Any 10 styles may be used and any correspondence between
color and style maybe established (Cage 1960: preface). Near each
squiggle are snippets of text that the soloist is to render in song. Fontana
Mix includes ten pages with six curved lines each, ten transparencies
with randomly placed points, and a transparency with a rectangular,
ruler-like grid of small squares, 100 squares long, 20 squares wide. The
performer generates the score by placing a transparency of points on a
sheet of lines, and then superimposing the grid at any chosen angle. Once
assembled, the given complex of points, lines and grid are translated into
electronic sounds according to Cages general instructions for utilising
the graphic elements to generate the tone, colour and pitch of sonic
events.
The influence of Cages treatment of the score as visual artefact is
immediately evident in the Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor, especially
in Piece Four, and throughout much of his career, Bussotti continued to
Figure 1. Piece Four, Sylvano Bussottis Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor.
1959 Ricordi, Milano. (Reproduced with permission of the publisher.)
has its refrains, and in Bussottis score, sonic and visual landscapes
and refrains enter a zone of indiscernibility that opens onto a plane
of consistency composed of speeds and intensities within an unformed
matter.
And now to the score of Piano Piece Four (Figure 1). The composition
title is preceded by the Roman numeral XIV, indicating that this is part
fourteen of the virtual global cycle from which it has been extracted.
(That global cycle, consisting of fourteen sections, was published in 1960
as Pices de chair II.) The other four piano pieces for David Tudor are
labelled in accordance with their positions within Pices de chair II, as
V b), VIII, d) and I a). The basic unit of a traditional piano score
consists of a two-stave system, the top stave most often registering notes
for the right hand and marked with a treble clef, the bottom, bass clef
stave bearing notes for the left hand. Lines two and three of the score
have the traditional treble and bass clefs, but the five lines of the bass
stave zigzag wildly across the other four staves (Figure 2). Lines one,
four and five have C-clefs, the line bisecting the capital-B-like shape
representing middle C. The C-clef on line one is conventionally referred
to as a tenor clef, line four a soprano clef and line five an alto clef.
C-clefs have specialised uses for certain instruments, and are virtually
unheard of in piano music, as are piano scores with five staves (designed
for five-handed pianists, perhaps?). And as we shall see, only line fives
C-clef actually designates a specific musical note.
Hence, when graphic marks touch the top stave, the performer is to
reach into the piano, pluck the strings (pizzicato), dampen the strings
with the hands (muted), and sound the strings prepared with paper
and other materials, either by striking the corresponding keys of the
keyboard or by sounding the strings directly (plucking, striking). (The
use of the prepared piano was one frequently employed by David Tudor
in compositions he performed, and hence an appropriate component of
a score dedicated to him.)
Unit Two designates the two fundamental operations of all piano
playing: striking strings and muting them. But Bussotti extends these
spiral motion. Unit Five is Bussottis little joke. The scores drawing
touches the fifth stave only at one small point atop the stave. That point,
if read as a musical note on the alto clef, is A above middle C. Fives
parenthesis notates the same pitch with the more common treble clef, as
if to remind the performer how to read the unusual alto clef, lest he or
she forget how to do so.
Unit Seven, atop the score, says see note, in other words, see
the prefatory sentence indicating that the score was originally a 1947
disegno that was pianistically adapted on 27 March 1959. With
some laborious graphics editing, you can expose the original drawing,
which, to my eye, is a thoroughly rhizomatic design (Figure 4). The
clear horizontal axis of the drawing delineates the plane of some
undetermined rhizomatic growth suspended in space, such that the
elements below the horizontal axis are as rootless as the elements that
rise above the axis. The drawings forms are non-representational, but
decidedly organic rather than geometrical. Amid the drawing, one finds
shapes resembling a tendril and fruit, a spider-like creature suspended
from a thread, a column of shapes resembling plant cells or rock
crystals.
Tubers, polyps, leaves, stamens, pistils, shoots and stems may be
discerned in the thicket of forms (Figure 5).
The composition has a vertical axis, and if one wishes to formulate
an analysis correlative to that which Deleuze conducts in Francis Bacon
(1981), one might situate the drawings generative locus of chaos, which
Bacon calls the graph (diagram in the French translation), in the zero
point of the XY axes (Figure 6). From that site one can imagine the
form emerging. But any one of the lines of flight so designated could
be an initiating line of involution, from which the acentred rhizomatic
design emerges.
My hypothesis, however, is that the point on the bottom stave, the A
above middle C, is the generative source of the composition (Figure 7).
It is Paul Klees grey point, a nowhere-existent something or
somewhere-existent nothing (cited in Bogue 2004: 80), a fundamental
point of chaos that leaps out of itself, tracing a line that may eventually
delineate all forms and volumes. Deleuze and Guattari invoke Klees
originary point of chaos at the inception of the Refrain plateau,
providing a visual analogue of musics generation of refrains from a
sonic point of chaos. In Bussottis A above middle C, then, the sonic
and visual meet. That point may be read as a musical symbol and as a
drawing component. There the realms of sound and sight converge in a
point of undecidability, which generates the soundscape and landscape
inscribed on the ink-covered paper of the score.
If music and art are envisioned as planes of consistency, the musical
score exists on one plane, the drawing on the other (Figure 8). The
A above middle C, the point common to the two planes, fixes the
line of intersection of the two planes. If the planes are then rotated
toward one another, they merge in a single plane, a plane of consistency
common to the drawing and the sound score, and that plane is
embodied in the score itself, a sheet of paper diagraming an abstract
machine.
faciality (Figure 10), regimes of signs (Figure 11), smooth and striated
spaces. Bussottis score tells us how to perform the book to follow
and enact its variations in intensity; to explore the varying duration
of tempos of reading; to savour the timbres of tones, voices and
vocabularies; to discover the works varying frequencies and resonances;
and to sample its component textual passages in sequences separated by
varying distances, or to perform components in simultaneities assembled
in the virtual memory space of coexisting sheets of the past. In engaging
these five elements, we activate the diagram of A Thousand Plateaus
abstract machine, a realm of pure speeds (duration, frequency, sequence)
and affects (intensities, timbral qualities).
Figure 11. Regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus and spiral arrow in Piece
Four.
Notes
1. Besides playing a key role in the development of the New York Schools
early piano music, Tudor was also an influential force in the dissemination of
American new music in Europe. As Beal shows, Over a brief but fertile period
of unprecedented international exchange, Tudor operated as an ambassador of
[American new music], and his diplomatic presence at key new music venues
in West Germanyespecially at the Internationale Ferienkurse fr Neue Musik
(International Holiday Courses for New Music) in Darmstadt between 1956
and 1961established American experimentations controversial yet ultimately
stimulating presence in conversations about new music (Beal 2007: 78).
2. Similar objections to the improvisatory nature of the composition arose during
performances of Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor in other venues. Cope
records that Bussottis Five Pieces was performed in Los Angeles three times
in one concert, by three different performers. More conservative members
of the audience, obviously appalled by the lack of recognizable similarities
among the performances in structure, length, instrumentation, or motive,
reacted antagonistically to both performers and work. . . . In reference to these
performances Halsey Stevens has pointed out that : . . . if Mr. Bussotti had
wandered into the hall and didnt know what was going on, he would not have
had the remotest idea that those three performances, or any one of them, might
have been his own piece. They were so totally different in every respect that
the only thing he could lay claim to was having designed the score, not to have
composed the piece. Aleatory music, it seems to me, as it is frequently pursued,
is an amusing parlor game . . . (Cope 1989: 165).
3. Other readings of the score, of course, are possible. Erik Ulman, in personal
correspondence, argues that the numbered elements (save number seven) are to
be performed in sequence. No doubt his alternative is but one of several other
possibilities, all of which may be justified by Bussottis prefatory remark that the
execution of the score rests in the hands of the pianist.
4. Bussottis email message of 18 October 2012, written in French, reads as follows:
Les trois lettres en question signifient: P = pizzicato M = muted (estomper la
sonorit) et S = sordina avec tous le moyens de transformer directement les sons;
introductions de papier entre les cordes, applications de morceaux diffrents
entre les mmes.
References
Attinello, Paul (2007) Postmodern or Modern: A Different Approach to Darmstadt,
Contemporary Music Review, 26:1, pp. 2537.
Barthes, Roland (1995) Oeuvres compltes, ed. ric Marty, Paris: Seuil.
Beal, Amy C. (2007) David Tudor in Darmstadt, Contemporary Music Review,
26:1, pp. 7788.
Bogue, Ronald (2004) Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York:
Routledge.
Bonta, Mark and John Protevi (2004) Deleuze and Geophilosophy, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Boulez, Pierre (1968) Notes on an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock, New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Cage, John (1960) Aria: Voice (Any Range), New York: Henmar Press.
Cage, John (1961) Silence. Lectures and Writings, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Erik Bordeleau
Abstract
When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuzes thought,
Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a redemptive gesture,
and Rancire describes Deleuzes history of cinema as a history of
redemption. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break
out of this world and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt
to reduce Deleuze to be a mere spiritual thinker, simply renewing
that Oriental intuition which Hegel found at work in Spinozas
philosophy (Hallward 2006: 6). But is it all that simple? How should
we envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics
and passivity in Deleuzes work? And in what way does that concern
Deleuzes philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China?
Keywords: spirituality,
dramatisation, politics
China,
subjectivity,
Peter
Hallward,
A Redemptive Deleuze?
493
I think that, for the sake of this article at least, Deleuzian milieus and the
intense affective commerce they generate are consisting and distinctive
enough to be envisaged not only as academic circles, but as potential
forms of the kind of spiritual or ethopoietic groups Foucault alludes to.
A Redemptive Deleuze?
495
Opposed to that logic of the singular we find what Hallward calls the
specific, a mode of apprehending the real that takes into account the
actual constraints of the material and historical world. The specific is
A Redemptive Deleuze?
497
A Redemptive Deleuze?
499
This first reference, through Henry Millers work (it is a quote from
his Hamlet), is quite unaccommodating, seemingly giving way to
an unrestricted orientalism. But A Thousand Plateaus is not exactly
concerned with questions about adequate or politically correct crosscultural representation or of how to talk properly of the cultural other.
A Redemptive Deleuze?
501
Deleuze and Guattari insist repeatedly on the active nature of the line
of flight, which is never a flight into passivity or imagination. If that was
the case, it would immediately lose its political dimension, as Hallward
misguidedly suggests. The theme of the line, which runs through all of A
Thousand Plateaus, ties together art, politics, ethics and the cosmic. And
it is precisely in this passage from ethics to the cosmic that we find the
third reference to China. In the chapter Becoming-intense, Becominganimal, Becoming-imperceptible, the work on oneself and the cosmic
dimension it involves are summed up in the idea of becoming like
everybody else. First, the properly ethical challenges are brought forth:
If it is so difficult to be like everybody else, it is because it is an affair of
becoming. Not everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le monde
trans.], makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires much
asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, an
English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the toomuch-to-be-perceived. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 279)
A Redemptive Deleuze?
503
After this close reading of the emerging of the idea of becomingimperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus, a question remains: does
the micropolitical horizon of thought, culminating in the idea of
becoming-imperceptible, really lead to any actual production of political
subjectivities? Do we not find in it the seed of a form of life exclusively
concerned with existential flexibility and ways of adapting to all
circumstances, in brief, a perfect guide for survival in the era of
neoliberal productivism and globalisation of precariousness? Rancire,
for example, is categorical: indirectly criticising Deleuze among others
and disqualifying any focus put on metamorphosis and becomings, he
unambiguously states: There is no such thing as Dionysian politics
(Rancire 1998: 200).
The becoming-imperceptible and the becoming-line involve a dramatic
experience of stifling or of ethopoietical claustrophobia, as Wittgenstein
would put it. There lies the politics of contraction that innerves all
of Deleuzes work: choked passages where one experiences oneself as
stuck, plunges into chaos from which no one comes back unscathed.
A Thousand Plateaus reference to Henri Michaux is crucial here, with
his evocation of major ordeals of the mind and other miserable
miracles, accelerated linearity experienced in the flesh and moments of
schizophrenia that tear down the sphere that we normally are and in
A Redemptive Deleuze?
505
Notes
1. Nevertheless, we believe that when these problems attain their proper degree
of positivity, and when difference becomes the object of a corresponding
affirmation, they release a power of aggression and selection which destroys
the beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and breaking its good will
(Deleuze 1994: xx; original emphasis).
2. Hallward would probably reject this rapprochement altogether, since he
disagrees in the first place with ieks idea that religious revelation is the
unavowed paradigm of his [Badious] notion of the Truth-Event (iek 2000:
183), arguing instead that the model for Badious fidelity is not religious faith
but mathematical deduction pure and simple (Hallward 2003: 149).
3. Perhaps due to the excitement of having found yet another religious reference
in Deleuzes writing, Hallward symptomatically misreads a reference to Zen
Buddhism in What Is Philosophy? (Hallward 2001: 11), missing the yet simple
fact that in this passage, Deleuze and Guattari establish a correspondence
between Zen Buddhism and Wittgensteinian silence of logic, not with their own
philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140). For a more conclusive reference
to Zen Buddhism in Deleuzes philosophy, Hallward should have looked, for
instance, at the passages in Logic of Sense where he discusses the wise (stoic)
mans humoristic stance and the ethics of the mime.
4. Hallwards demeaning use of the word creationism should therefore be
radically contrasted with Guattaris axiological creationism. The (Guattarian)
creationist perspective celebrates the existence of every given type of being
that specifically poses the question of what counts for its mode of life.
Axiological creationism concerns the production of existence for everything for
which existence implies a gamble, a risk, the creation of a point of view
about what, from then on, will become a milieu (Stengers 2010: 37). Note that
Guattaris notion of creationism involves a radical implication in the world and
the production of a highly specific mode of existence.
5. For an interesting discussion of the partly missed encounter between Deleuze
and Process Theology, see Isabelle Stengers, Beyond Conversation. The Risks of
Peace (2002).
6. This section is a condensed and revised version of La Chine et la ligne. Une
tude de la rfrence chinoise dans Mille Plateaux (Bordeleau 2009).
7. In Deleuzes later books, there are at least three other significant references to
the East, each of them being irreducible to Hallwards simplistic theophanic
schema. In his Foucault, the Far East is associated with a culture of annihilation
(Deleuze 1988: 106); in The Fold, with what he calls the Eastern line as opposed
to the full Baroque line. Then, in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze discusses his
notion of the plane of immanence in contrast with Franois Julliens idea of an
absolutisation of immanence found in antic Chinese thinking (Deleuze 1994:
74). From the perspective of the production of subjectivities, it is certainly
the passage in Foucault that is most interesting. In the chapter Foldings, or
the Inside of Thought, a certain Orient is opposed to the Western subjective
folding: The appearance of a folding of the outside can seem unique to Western
development. Perhaps the Orient does not present such a phenomenon, and the
line of the outside continues to flow across a stifling hollowness: in that case
asceticism would be a culture of annihilation or an effort to breathe in such a
void, without any particular production of subjectivity (Deleuze 1988: 106). For
a more detailed discussion of this passage in relation with the Chinese-Buddhist
idea of inferno, see Bordeleau 2013.
A Redemptive Deleuze?
507
References
Agamben, Giorgio (2005) The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Bordeleau, Erik (2009) La Chine et la ligne. Une tude de la rfrence chinoise
dans Mille plateaux, in Dalie Giroux, Ren Lemieux and Pierre-Luc Chnier (eds),
Contrhommage pour Gilles Deleuze, Quebec: Presses de lUniversit Laval.
(wu jian dao): Deleuze and the Way Without
Bordeleau, Erik (2013)
Interstices, 2012
: International Deleuze
Conference Symposium, Kaifeng: Henan University Press.
Cheng, Franois (1996) Lcriture potique chinoise, Paris: Seuil.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault, trans. Sen Hand, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Desert Islands and Other Texts 19531974, trans. Michael
Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
Foucault, Michel (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Hallward, Peter (1997) Gilles Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest, Radical
Philosophy, N.81, pp. 621.
Hallward, Peter (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial, New York: Manchester University
Press.
Hallward, Peter (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,
New York: Verso.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1967) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B.
Baillie, available at < https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/
ph/phc2cc.htm > (accessed 18 July 2014).
Michaux, Henri [1956] (2002) Miserable Miracle, trans. Louise Varese, New
York: NYRB Classics, available at < http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/
miserablemiracle/miserablemiracle.html > (accessed 18 July 2014).
Rancire, Jacques (1998) La Chair des mots: Politiques de lcriture, Paris: Galile.
Rancire, Jacques (2001) La Fable cinmatographique, Paris: Seuil.
Smith, Daniel (2001) The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuzes Ontology of
Immanence, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, London: Routledge.
Stengers, Isabelle (2002) Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace, in Catherine
Keller and Anne Daniell (eds), Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and
Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, Albany: State of New York Press, pp. 23555.
David H. Fleming
Abstract
By creatively expanding Deleuzes concept of the time-image crystal,
I productively fold together and engineer an encounter between two
comparable cinematic movements otherwise separated by huge vistas
of time and space. Here, I work to plicate the post-war Italian
neorealist movement which Deleuze saw inaugurating the modern
cinema, with a postsocialist mainland Chinese movement that I
playfully call (si)neo-realism. The films of both historical moments
formulate comparable break-away cinemas which are often considered
moral or socially responsible art cinemas best approached through
Andr Bazins ontological film philosophy lens. By using Deleuze,
however, I hope to move beyond these realist discussions to explore
how both movements are also fruitfully thought in terms of introducing
distinct yet analogous mental relations into the image during historical
junctures defined by radically transforming psycho-geographies. Like
Deleuzes discussions of neorealism, (si)neo-realism is considered a
loose impulse or mode that collectively bears witness to confusing
and bewildering mental experiences from within a turbulent period
of cultural, ideological and historical upheaval: which demands new
ways of perceiving, thinking and acting. Without wanting to fall into
a problematic auteur paradigm, I necessarily employ the films of Wang
Xiaoshuai as emblematic examples of the wider impulse or trend.
Indeed, Wangs films perfectly reify a new ethico-aesthetic form of
Chinese cinema marked by a proliferation of new spaces, characters,
Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 509541
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0168
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I. Introduction
Since the 1990s, mainland Chinas biggest contender for an alternative
or break-away cinema has been pinned to a loose band of maverick
directors hailing from what has variously been called the Postsocialist,
Post-Wave, Newborn-, Sixth-, Post-Sixth-, or Urban-Generation of
filmmakers. This mixed grab bag of directors boasts state-school
graduates from the Fifth-, Sixth- and D-Generations respectively,
alongside a wider cohort of amateur and non-professionals.2 The films
are usually assembled on account of a perceived predilection for an
unpolished style, raw gritty realism, Art film ethico-aesthetics, or for
unflinchingly focusing upon social problems affecting the cultures nonofficial underbelly. Over the past twenty years the impulse has often
been branded an underground, avant-garde or if one buys into the
self-aggrandising myths illegal cinema.3 If we uncritically accept the
Banned in Beijing branding many of these films receive, we also
necessarily confront one of film historys most glaring ironies. For
these films are deemed inappropriate on account of exposing issues
of class inequality, powerlessness and systemic corruption confronting
individuals (and groups) under an insidious system of capitalism and
foreign influence (globalisation): which is to say, exactly the sort of
stories previously sought by the ruling Party to propagandise and
extol the virtues of communism. Beyond this historical repetition (or
Nietzschean return) in the form of political farce, any opprobrium
or unfavourable domestic reception must be linked to the filmmakers
adoption of a warts-and-all docu-style that seditiously records Chinas
profoundly uneven and unprecedentedly rapid process of modernisation
and globalisation.
The new impulse crystallised in Wang Xiaoshuais The Days (1993)
and Zhang Yuans Beijing Bastards (1994), with both being observed
511
513
515
517
(1970) and Breaking with Old Ideas (1975) being produced. Around
1978 the BFA reopened for business amidst the implementation of
Post-Mao reform programmes. As China began to reshape and adapt
to this New-Era, a new wave of Fourth Generation graduates began
producing a series of scar dramas that obliquely explored the traumatic
aftermath of these turbulent times. This New-Era is broadly outlined
in terms of gradual incremental reforms in Chinas agricultural and
service sectors, and as bearing witness to the emergence of an embryonic
mass consumer culture within key urban centres.9 By 1986 ongoing
systemic reforms witnessed Chinas film industry come under the control
of a new State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT),
which immediately began tightening up control measures. The Fifth
Generations rise to prominence during this era thus schizophrenically
coincided with Chinas ever-tightening domestic control on filmmaking
practice and a period of international opening up heralded as the
march into the world (Zhen 2007: 3).
Facing stricter domestic control, many young directors began
embracing overseas investment to produce personal projects, or utilising
foreign locations for the editing and post-production of festival films that
would be deemed politically unsanitary. Accordingly many produced
films that tackled controversial subject matter or employed avantgarde aesthetics. Directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige famously
began entering their films into international festivals without submitting
them to SARFT for permission to release. Their politically charged
films helped the Fifth Generation gain international prizes and prestige,
but domestic bans on films like Chens Farewell my Concubine
(1994) and the temporary blacklisting of filmmakers helped tame the
Fifth Generations subversive side (see Zhu 2003: 143). The government
also began closing the bureaucratic loopholes which allowed films to
escape the scrutiny of censorship bodies, and in 1996 a law was passed
making it illegal to produce any film outside the state-owned studio
system (Berry 2007: 129).
As the Fifth Generation predominantly worked within the state studio
system, Zhang Zhen and Xiaping Lin argue their subsequent waves
of lavish historical melodramas and cultural allegories (Zhang Zhen
2007: 23) became main melody films (Lin 2009: 93), that helped reestablish a predominantly fictional national cinema within China. For
many it was to be the nonstate or so-called Sixth Generation, working
in an independent or underground context, which would finally
challenge Chinas monolithic national cinema models. Filmmakers like
Wang and Zhang began making no- or low-budget films (latterly with
519
521
523
This stressed point highlights another significant parallel with (si)neorealist films, which also appear to grasp for and privilege a new
non-official perspective on Chinas changing and transforming reality,
without upholding any illusion.20 Wangs characters appear particularly
emblematic of the wider trend in this regard, formulating disempowered
outsiders, underclass migrant workers, deported illegal refugees, river
workers and bewildered adult-children. Much like the Italian cohort of
characters, these men are often left unable to act or react to a range
of overwhelming situations surrounding them, and in this sense find yet
more parallels with Deleuzes understanding of the mental disruption
underpinning the neorealist films.
Deleuze ultimately identified five distinct tropes or characteristics
that distinguished neorealism as a break-away cinema. As already
discussed, he understood the modern cinema to be partially defined by
its (postmodern) awareness of clichs. But neorealism was also discussed
in terms of its embrace of dispersive situations; the emergence of
deliberately weak links; harnessing andante ballade or stroll structures;
525
and the denunciation of conspiracy (for more on this see Kelso 2004: 4).
Deleuze linked all of these to an essential or contextual situation
appearing around and within the films. For after the war, Italy, like
most of Europe, found itself materially and ideologically shattered. As
the majority of early neorealist stories took place within derelict and
rubbled cities, Deleuze strongly identified these spaces as key factors
linked to the emergence of the new characteristics, and the newer forms
of perception and thought. Indeed, Deleuze thought neorealist films were
collectively marked by an increase in the number of situations characters
no longer knew how to act or react to, in spaces we no longer knew
how to describe (Deleuze 2005b: xi). These were any-space-whatevers
(espaces quelconques), deserted but inhabited waste grounds, disused
warehouses and rubbled lots within cities undergoing ongoing processes
of demolition and reconstruction. Between the two Cinema books, these
spaces are described not only as providing the neorealist films with a
loaded and load bearing mise-en-scne, but as also serving to nurture a
new race of character, a stirring mutant rendered unsure of how to move,
act or react to what was around them. As we will see below, similar
factors can also be identified at work within and across the (si)neo-realist
spaces.
527
529
531
533
Notes
1. An abridged version this paper was delivered at the 2012 International Deleuze
Conference at Henan University in Kaifeng, PRC and appears as part of the
collected conference papers (see Fleming 2013).
2. Since the early 1990s a variety of new terms have been tried or applied to this
new impulse beyond Sixth-, Post-Sixth- or Newborn-Generation labels. Amongst
others, Chinese and foreign critics have discussed the films in terms of belonging
to a Post-wave (Zhu 2003: 143), Postsocialist (McGrath 2007; Zhang Zhen
2007), or post-sixth-generation (Pickowicz 2006) of filmmakers. Many settle
for the more popular and inclusive label of Urban Generation or Urban
Cinema, as a kind of catch-all for many of the aesthetic and stylistic features (see
Zhang Zhen 2007; Berry 2007; Braester 2012). As part of an attempt to expand
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
535
the category even further, though, and move beyond previous discussions by
using Deleuze, I opt to drop the urban realism label too and create a new
concept of (si)neo-realism. In the first place, this allows me to account for and
include films like Wangs Drifters, which is clearly also part of the same impulse
and style but does not focus upon specifically urban characters or issues and to
allow for a wider range of directors and influences not typically considered part
of the Urban movement.
Amongst others, Paul Pickowicz, Ying Zhu, Jason McGrath and Shohini
Chaudhuri describe a complex and ever-changing relationship between Chinese
censorship bodies and the so-called illegal filmmakers. Pickowicz outlines this
in terms of a complicated and dangerous dance which Western critics typically
misunderstand. He offers a velvet prison model comparable to that encountered
by Czechoslovakian New Wave filmmakers in the late 1960s. Although many
of the films are often considered illegal or banned by foreign and domestic
audiences, in matter of fact, neither the films nor the filmmakers are actually
considered real political dissidents as such (see Chaudhuri 2005: pp. 989;
Pickowicz 2006; McGrath 2007). Rather, films that are not directly critical of
the ruling Party are tolerated as an acceptable or allowable form of political or
artistic venting. What is more, both authorities and filmmakers are aware that
in a global context of international film festivals, being perceived as an illegal
Chinese filmmaker, or having your film banned in Beijing can be seen as a
benefit, or tantamount to a good marketing: After all, a government ban would
guarantee international attention (Zhu 2003: 166) or else offer the filmmaker
the required pedigree to get attention abroad (Pickowicz 2006: 12). On account
of this, Yomi Braester and Zhu argue that in a global context these filmmakers
increasingly became self-packaged dissidents who came to exploit or exercise
a marketing strategy of wilful self-marginalisation to promote their products
globally (Zhu 2003: 166; Braester 2012: 357).
For an exhaustive list of films we can rhizomatically link to this movement see
Cheng 2006: 20944.
David H. Fleming, Deleuze and the (si)neorealist break?, Paper delivered at
Deleuze, Guattari and China, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 23 May
2012; Fleming 2014.
I have coined my own neologistic term here as part of a wider strategy to at once
forge nomenclatural links to the Italian neorealist movement whilst at the same
time tying the concept to a specifically sino-cinematic break or context. Besides
employing this to erect links with a familiar historical movement and ethicoaesthetics, I also hope to introduce a new dimension of sin related to illicit
images of sex, drugs and deviant behaviour that was typically lacking from both
the earlier Italian movement and previous waves of national Chinese cinema.
This of course also relates to filmmakers trying to covet official opprobrium
and entice international curators and audiences.
There remained certain exceptions which prove the rule, with some musical
opera films from regional studios producing films in different traditional
dialects or provincial languages (for more on this see Zhu 2003: 168; Zhang
Zhen 2007: 20). It should also be noted that more genres appeared in Chinese
cinema under CCP rule than ever before, and after the Cultural Revolution
films about the Chinese ethnic minorities became popular. For a more detailed
account of the complex history of Socialist cinema in China see Zhang Yingjin
2004, 2012; Clark 2012.
Zhang Yingjin notes that before the BFA there was a Beijing Film School
which had been operating since 1951. Of interest to this paper, educationrelated projects saw the introduction of Italian neorealist films as early as
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
537
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A. N. Whitehead1
A. N. Whitehead 543
A. N. Whitehead (18611947) has a rather peculiar place in the
history of modern Western philosophy. His books on mathematics
and theoretical physics are still read by specialists in those fields,
but his philosophical work has never really become part of the
mainstream curriculum of the subject in Anglo-Saxon countries. Indeed
analytic philosophers have sometimes regarded him as slightly loopy
and not entirely to be taken seriously.2 It is mostly theologians and
educationalists who have been attracted by his metaphysical ideas and
have sometimes responded to him as a kind of cult figure. The situation is
definitely better with regard to Francophone philosophy, where there has
been a small but steady current of interest in his thought, starting with
the seminal work by Jean Wahl, Vers Le Concret, where the treatment
of Whitehead is remarkable, given the fact that it was published as
early as 1932, that is only three years after the publication of Process
and Reality.3 The problem with Francophone philosophers is that they
have had a tendency, at least until fairly recently, to subtly elide
Whiteheads ideas with those of Bergson and Husserl. Of course, there
are real affinities between the work of the three philosophers, all of
whom started as mathematicians, and Whitehead does refer positively
to Bergson, but there are also real differences. This is important, not
only for the history of ideas, but also for precision of thought in any
creative philosophy that draws on the work of any or all of these three
thinkers.
Bergson, Husserl and Whitehead all started off as mathematicians, but
the first two moved on to philosophy very quickly, whereas Whitehead
was still producing works on mathematics and theoretical physics in
his fifties. This is the key to understanding the difference between
Whitehead and the other two thinkers. Both Bergson and Husserl tried
to establish an autonomous, well-grounded mode of thought which was
an alternative to positivist science. In Bergson, this mode of thought is
intuition, and the contrast between it and science is unequivocal, but
Husserls mode of thought is ambiguous: he was trying to establish
a type of science that did not depend upon objective fact external to
consciousness. In later phenomenology, this became a primordial prescientific mode of thought, upon which scientific or logical modes of
thought were necessarily based, but there were also tinges of anti-science.
One can see why Bergsons ideas had such an enormous impact on the
arts, while those of Husserl were immensely important for the social
and human sciences.4 By contrast, Whitehead continued to think like a
mathematician throughout his career, and he never lost faith in science,
which he greatly stretched from the empirical towards the speculative by
A. N. Whitehead 545
self-reflection. The latter is deep and not infrequently troubled this
unproblematic subject is not a shallow one but this trouble is never
all-engulfing and can always be assuaged in a way that is spritually
profound but not invested with excessive angst. Perception is direct,
observation acute, nature is felt on a delicate scale, and language is
transparent and simple. Of course, all this artlessness comes from very
complex art, as is made explicit in the fairly short Advertisement to the
original edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which became a greatly expanded
Preface in the later editions. Tintern Abbey demonstrates very clearly
the combination of a gentle but complex emotional chiaroscuro with a
smooth movement across the boundaries of the body and mind within
the subject, subject and nature, past, present and future of the subject
and subject and other related subject, in this case Wordsworths sister.
The lines: And I have felt/ A presence that disturbs me with the joy/
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply
interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns/ And the round
ocean and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,/
A motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all
thought,/ And rolls through all things shows the scumbled blurring of
what could have been broken down into its discrete parts by a more
rigourous, problematising analysis. This kind of intuitional, holistic
empiricism will be very important for Whitehead.10
Yet there is a complexity in what Tintern Abbey omits: one would
never know from the poem that the Wye valley had been an important
metallurgical centre since the sixteenth century and played an important
role in the early Industrial Revolution. There is a real element of
denial here, which will lead to Leavis diagnosis of the marginalisation
and decline of poetry in the course of the nineteenth century. There
is an interesting contrast with a slightly later, major French writer,
Nerval. Four works from the end of his life, that is from the early
1850s, involve quasi-autobiographical journeys to the north of Paris,
where the author had partly grown up: Anglique, Les Nuits doctobre,
Sylvie and Promenades et souvenirs. They epitomise a problematic,
disjunctive, fragmented subject, at times ironic, at times overwhelmed
by intense emotions, at times on the edge of hallucination. All four
works, especially Sylvie, contain impressive descriptions of nature and
local customs Nerval is much more self-projective or immersed in
these descriptions than Wordsworth but there are also references to
the railways that had only recently been built to the north of Paris in
three of the works and to social changes that resulted from the railways
in Sylvie.11
A. N. Whitehead 547
subjectobject relations is evident, but one could say that Heidegger
never really succeeds in overcoming them, in spite of all his efforts to do
so. Whitehead was not insensitive to language: indeed he is always a very
precise and not infrequently a downright elegant writer, but he thought
like a mathematician or geometrician, not in the narrow, reductive sense
of the isolating of variables and finding a function to link them, in
order to establish a numerical essence for reality, but in the infinitely
expanding sense of continuously reframing mathematical problems in
novel and illuminating ways. One is reminded of Emerson:
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another
can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep
a lower deep opens. (Emerson 2003: 225)14
A. N. Whitehead 549
very thought-provoking. This is true of the most interesting divergence
from the classic model in The Principle of Relativity:
The possibility of other such laws [of gravitation], expressed in sets of
differential equations other than Einsteins, arises from the fact that on my
theory there is a relevant fact of nature which is absent on Einsteins theory.
This fact is the whole bundle of alternative time stratifications arising from
the uniform significance of events. (85)
A. N. Whitehead 551
between their two books Stengers Thinking with Whitehead19 and
Debaises Un Empirisme spculatif even if the two works are rather
different in scope. Stengers is a distinguished doyenne of the philosophy
of science, and her book is her magnum opus, in which she exhaustively
explores all of Whiteheads metaphysical work in relation to her own
richly matured thoughts on science and ontology, while Debaise is
a talented younger colleague and former student of hers who has
produced an excellent but relatively limited study of a single text, Process
and Reality. Nevertheless, there are a number of shared elements in
the approaches of the two authors. First, an important problem in
Whitehead scholarship is the degree to which there is a radical break
or continuity between The Concept of Nature and the later metaphysics.
Both Stengers and Debaise opt for nuanced continuity, with extensive
passages in Thinking with Whitehead being devoted to Science and
the Modern World and Religion in the Making, two understudied
transitional works between The Concept of Nature and Process and
Reality. Second, both authors also try to rectify the subtle assimilation of
Whiteheads ideas to those of Bergson or phenomenology in Continental
philosophy, while simultaneously establishing affinities with William
James. There are excellent passages doing one or the other in both
Stengers and Debaise, although hers are more extensive, as hers is by
far the longer book. Third, Whitehead has a very distinctive, rather
creative and not un-Deleuzian relationship with the philosophers from
Descartes to Kant, even if, as Stengers says, he tends to treat them as
other mathematicians, appropriating individual ideas and transforming
them, whereas Deleuze is more in the mould of Gueroult, a radical but
scholarly re-interpreter of the thought as a whole of significant figures
from the philosophical past. There are many excellent passages detailing
Whiteheads treatment of individual concepts in Descartes, Leibniz,
Locke or Hume in both Stengers and Debaise, and the former comes
very close indeed to cracking one of the key problems in Whitehead:
how he scrambles the history of the philosophy of perception in the
West and ontology in an interlocking and reflecting but complexly
asymmetrical way.20 Fourth, both authors mention Deleuze, but Stengers
does not always clearly distinguish between the ideas of Whitehead and
those of solo Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari, while Debaise has a
very interesting section in which he explores the differences between
individuation in Whitehead and in Deleuze and Simondon. This contrast
probably stems from the fact that Stengers is often discussing her
own ideas with reference to other philosophers or thinkers who have
influenced her at the same time as she is maintaining an ongoing dialogue
A. N. Whitehead 553
is a great deal of validity in her approach but that by eschewing the
divided subject, she is forgoing the opportunities it gives as an operation
for collapsing the subject from within and turning it into drives, which
can be linked to external forces. For example, in Arnolds problem
of whether the perimeter of a rectangle is increased by a sequence of
folding and unfolding, one can relate the pattern of the folding and
unfolding to the actions that have caused them and see the perimeter as
something responding to continuities that cross it rather than the result
of something within it.21 The divided subject is probably associated
with the types of thought that Stengers seems to be attacking in an
oblique way throughout the whole of Thinking with Whitehead. It is
difficult to be sure about what she is attacking critical epistemology,
something like Marxist critique and Rorty are alluded to en passant but
one assumes that deconstruction and poststructuralism would be part
of what she is rejecting in favour of her very subtle but still rather
traditional belief in the efficacy of empirical science. Again, she is not
wrong, but as with Heidegger, there are aspects of Derrida and Lyotard
that could be cross-phased in a fruitful and complementary way with
Whiteheads philosophy.
However much one might disagree with certain aspects of the
direction in which Stengers takes Whiteheads ideas, there is no doubt
that her exegesis of his work is superb and that it benefits enormously
from her being a creative philosopher in her own right. She begins
with The Concept of Nature, concentrating on its metaphysical side
and ignoring the extensive discussions of geometry, as is normal in
Whitehead studies. This section of Stengers book seems longer than it
is: it takes up seven of the main twenty-five chapters, but these chapters
are quite short, and there is quite a lot of quotation from Whitehead.
Nevertheless, she distils the essence of The Concept of Nature: with mind
as ultimate, it circumvents the bifurcation of nature. Everything the
glow of the sunset and the molecules and electric waves is in the same
boat. With due attention, one can extend ones perceptual capacity,
so that one is not seeing a reality behind appearance but a further
dimension of a reality that always remains undivided. A sort of
engrenage or complementarity is proposed between respondent and
world: there seems to be enough of a fit between what one can perceive
and what is out there that one can in general rely on ones perceptions
as a basis for knowledge and survival. Mind is still ultimate here, so
that is why interlocking is closer to what is happening than fusion.
Stengers introduces the image of the mountaineer climbing the mountain
as a means of conveying what this relationship is like, and it turns
A. N. Whitehead 555
difficult ontology is, how difficult it is to understand the relationship
between permanence and transience, how easy formulae or positions will
not work and how the problem is perhaps insoluble but always open to
fresh attempts at a deeper understanding by heuristic reframings.
God is replaced as ultimate by creativity in Processs and Reality, but
he is still there in another very important role. How Whitehead uses
God is a third key problem in the philosophers work, and Stengers
handles it very impressively. She does not simply block at the word
God and the religious vocabulary associated with him: she gets behind
this to see what problem Whitehead is trying to solve and how he is
using God as a concept in relation to it.23 This is in fact an approach one
could use with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers that
were so important to Whitehead, and it is not surprising that Stengers is
particularly good at the difference between his notion of God and that
of Leibniz. For the Whiteheadian, what is best for that impasse seems
initially quite close to the Leibnizian best of all possible worlds, and both
conceptions are trying to get hold of the fact that the universe somehow
seems to work, but one involves omniscient divine foresight from the
outside, while the other has God as a kind of operator within actuality
inducing a certain overall positive directionality. Divine eternity becomes
more about conserving what is transient by allowing it to somehow
be incorporated into what is to come, rather than some permanent
ground beyond or within the transient. Stengers chapter twenty-four,
God and the World, is a long, intellectually very disciplined and
extremely beautiful exploration of the relationship between God, the
world, creativity and actuality.
What one could call the other side of the intellectual coin of what
is best for that impasse is the trick of evil. This is when the progress
of actuality is forced, when something comes before its time, and
it is undoubtedly an important Whiteheadian concept, but Stengers
also emphasises it for her own reasons. Her resistence to types of
thought such as critical epistemology and Rortys philosophy is not
unconnected with her antipathy to what one could call vanguard
radicalism. By and large, one is happy to eschew along with her the
Im so left-wing, I wouldnt even suck milk from my mothers right
breast tendency, and Whitehead himself was probably a consensual
progressive, as Stengers seems to be, but the very methodical nature
of his system means that there is potentially much more room for
spontaneity than she seems to allow. Indeed it is possible that she never
quite succeeds in bringing together and defining properly the parallel
leaps in speculative empiricism and in the movement from eternal objects
A. N. Whitehead 557
permitting slides between self and other, and higher density, solidifying,
connecting them, but this could not happen if the material was not
in some way a response to the text or the directors interpretation of
it, however intuitive a leap it might be. The author played the older
of two male characters in a shortish piece by Dostoyevsky (Another
Mans Wife or The Husband Under The Bed), where the director
(Anatoli Vasiliev) wanted to explore the bullying of the older generation
by the younger one and a certain collapse of shared Enlightenment
values in post-Soviet Russia. The author happens to be male to female
transgendered, but has not had a sex change, and drew on an episode in
what one would now call her female (or transgendered)25 experience for
a certain section. This choice was primarily triggered by a scene from a
production of Lermontovs Masquarade by Vasiliev which he showed
in rehearsal, where the bullied character was female. This element of
clivage in the preparation was the basis for a complex effect during
a monologue in the section in question, where the authors character
talked about his feelings as if he were someone else in the distance
looking at the scene. The distance between the character and his double
was felt, but the two points were brought together, while the emotional
moment was extended, mainly by controlling the muscles of the face.
One seems very close here to the contraction of space and dilation of time
that one finds in the theory of relativity and that underpin Whiteheads
beautiful descriptions of the event, simultaneity and temporal thickness
in The Concept of Nature.26
Stengers first degree was in chemistry, and she is a distinguished
philosopher of science, so she tends to turn to the natural sciences when
she wants to explore her own ideas as a response to and development
of Whiteheads thought. This happens throughout Thinking with
Whitehead, but the roughly 140-page section of chapters nineteen to
twenty-three does this in an especially concentrated way. Each of these
five chapters uses exegeses of short passages from Process and Reality
or Modes of Thought as a springboard for an extended discussion of
a particular area. Chapter twenty-three, Modes of Existence, Modes
of Thought, which moves from a relatively reductive but important
biochemical model of life to a more holistic ethological one, is especially
impressive, but chapter nineteen, Justifying Life?, in which the subtle
Whiteheadian notion of a society is explored, and chapter twenty,
The Adventure of the Senses, which involves a very sophisticated
discussion of the problem of sensa, are also both extremely stimulating.
Quantum physics is perhaps less successfully examined in chapter
twenty-one, Actuality between Physics and the Divine: the connections
A. N. Whitehead 559
level of fear and inner turmoil to be mastered in the self and much
more radical and surprising transformations of the world, times when
new heaven, new earth and new self all emerge together. Heideggerian
authenticity and prophecy can be fused in a complementary way with
Whiteheadian mathematics and cosmology, thus avoiding the perils of
either going off the rails or simply going with the flow. There is also a
real parallel between Whiteheads very Shakespearean sense of time and
the event and Heideggers use of kairos, an early Greek concept that was
also very important in the Renaissance.27 One could go even further and
factor in poststructuralist or deconstructive techniques from Deleuze,
Derrida and Lyotard, all of which enable desire to pick out latent strands
from dominant ones and resculpt reality as a painter employs the strokes
of his or her brush to pull and push colours into different shapes and
textures.
The 1834 workers uprising in Lyons was the second of two such
uprisings in that city after the regime change that took place in France
in 1830. The first one, which happened in 1831, had been more of a
general workers uprising, but the 1834 event was distinctly political,
that is republican. By then, a large number of regular troops had been
stationed in the city, and the insurrection was put down with great
brutality and destruction. It was much closer to civil war or what is
happening in Homs or Aleppo today than to large-scale urban rioting.
Was it a trick of evil in the Whiteheadian sense, an action at the wrong
time which led to nothing but bloodshed and chaos? It is very difficult
to be sure about what was a trick of evil in the extremely fluid and
conflictive politics of nineteenth-century France, out of which, however,
a very serviceable democratic model did emerge. Which trick of evil
led to which component of that model? Was the monarchie de Juillet
progressive in the way that it allowed the bourgeoisie to establish
its political power, or did it continue to betray the real ideals of the
Revolution? Were the insurgs lyonnais simply trouble-makers harking
back to a Revolution that was in itself a trick of evil, or were they
asserting a right to take to the streets that their non-white French
descendants could take up? The modern French state inherits from both
sides in 1834, in that the bourgeoisie will never be in work camps, but
barricades will always be a possibility.28
A major poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (17861859) was in
Lyons throughout the 1834 uprising. She was working as an actress at
the Grand Thtre, but she also had three children with her who were
still quite young: they had all been born in the first half of the 1820s. She
wrote a number of poems in connection with the uprising, but two stand
A. N. Whitehead 561
repeated Jtais l! (Desbordes-Valmore 1983: 124) can mean both
I was in Lyons during the uprising and I was out there when it
was happening. But now the extraordinary concrete, compacted, slam
dunk imagery makes Desbordes-Valmore one of Heideggers poets that
feel the traces of the departed gods in the abyss at the centre of the night
of the worlds misery. Lines such as Tuant jusqu lenfant qui regardait
sans voir,/ Et rougissant le lait encore chaud dans sa bouche . . . (124)
and Et cousant au linceul sa livide moiti,/ Ecrase au galop de la guerre
civile!/ Savez-vous que cest froid le linceul dune ville! (125) could be
Trakl, and one can see why Nerval read Desbordes-Valmore, who does
indeed feel the traces of the gods in the Whiteheadian event that fuses her
fear as a vulnerable mother with her defiant empathy for the brutalised
citizens of Lyons. One can still read her and hope for Homs and Aleppo,
that their suffering is not in vain.29
One cannot really do this with a poem one could compare with A
Monsieur A.L. and Dans La Rue: Shelleys The Mask of Anarchy
written in 1819 in response to the Peterloo Massacre, which was of
course a relatively minor incident compared with the Lyons uprising
of 1834. Nevertheless, the authorities still behaved in a violent and
repressive way. Shelleys poem is intellectually complex: it uses the
double meaning of mask as masquerade and false disguise to explore
how the government and not the people are the real perpetrators of
anarchy. This analysis of the ruses of power is astute, and it is achieved
through subtle poetic means, but one does not really have the same
sense of a swelling towards the future that one has in DesbordesValmore, even though parliamentary reform was eventually achieved,
and over half of the poem is an address by Hope to the men of
England. Shelley is in Italy, far away from what is happening which he
does acknowledge but he increases that distance by his very rhetorical
language, however strong some of the ideas and images may be.30
Desbordes-Valmore is physically with the insurgents, and she is pushing
language to express her emotional journey of fear, compassion and
defiance. She is also on a more novel trajectory as a poet, emerging as
a very distinctive female voice. She had already published the utterly
sweet but rather thoughful Le Coucher dun petit garon in 1830, and
she was to compose the heartbreaking and profound durcharbeitung
of Rve intermittent dune nuit triste, one of the most powerful of
all poems in French, in 1846. In 1834, Lyons saw the cross-phasing
of two emerging entities, intersecting like waves from two sources
in a ripple tank, but this image is not enough. It gives a good idea
of a Whiteheadian network, but it does not fully explore tapping
Notes
1. The ideas in this review have benefited from enormously stimulating and
generous exchanges with James Williams.
2. A random example of this is Kneale 1949: 723, where the author adopts a
distinctly patronising tone in his discussion of Whiteheads arguments against
the unrestricted universality of natural laws.
3. See Wahl 2004. There are three studies in this book: one on William James,
which is based on a reading of his letters; another on the speculative philosophy
of Whitehead; and a third on Marcels Journal mtaphysique. The Whitehead
study is remarkably scholarly: Wahl uses all of the solo works published by the
philosopher up to 1929 and refers to innumerable reviews, books and articles
that respond to them. The essay is quite balanced in the weight it gives to
Whitehead as contributor to the theory of relativity, philosopher of science and
metaphysician. There are also some interesting comparisons between his ideas
and those of Heidegger.
4. Bergson deals most extensively with intuition as such in La Pense et le
mouvant, which has been re-edited with an extensive dossier critique by Presses
Universitaires de France as part of its superb critical edition of all of Bergsons
work: see Bergson [1938] 2009. There is an English translation of this text with
the title The Creative Mind: see Bergson 1992. For Husserls final, posthumously
published statement on his phenomenology the Krisis see Husserl 1970. It is
illuminating to compare what Husserl is trying to do in the famous appendix to
this work, The Origin of Geometry, with Whiteheads extensive use of geometry
in The Concept of Nature. Husserl considers geometry only in the context of
the relationship between a specifically human consciousness and the world,
and he seeks a primal, hidden geometry underneath or within the history of
geometry, that is an imminent universal for any lived particular. Whitehead
discusses geometry in a number of different ways, but he mainly develops it
as a required spatial framework, embedded in the moment and not timeless,
for exploring the implications of knowledge as ultimate, with nature not being
bifurcated in relation to mind, that is an enabling structure permitting subject
and object to be fused in a perceptual event without being abstracted from the
infinite continuum. Of course, these two approaches do not have to be mutually
exclusive. Merleau-Ponty was influenced by both Husserl, especially by his late
work, and Whitehead. For the latters influence on him, see Robert 2011 and the
exceptionally rich and scholarly Hamrick and Van der Veken 2011.
A. N. Whitehead 563
5. For Whitehead and quantum physics, see Lacoste Lareymondie 2006. For a
good recent book on evolutionary development biology, see Carroll 2006. The
key idea in Evo Devo is that all the organs and appendages in all animals have
evolved from a very limited number of basic genes, which means that fins, wings,
arms and legs all come from the same primordial gene, for example. It would be
interesting to connect this with the relationship between eternal ideas and the
ongoing capacity for new singularites in actual entities in Whitehead. Of couse,
the Deleuze who co-wrote A Thousand Plateaus, in which ethology is absolutely
central, had already been deeply influenced by Whitehead.
6. See Leavis 2008.
7. Whitehead 1964: 29. It is worth noting that the choice of this example
for exploring the bifurcation of nature almost certainly reflects the central
importance of electromagnetic waves and the speed of light in the earlier special
theory of relativity.
8. In particular, his lectures at Harvard were sprinkled with references to his
favourite poets, Wordsworth and Shelley. Notes taken from Whiteheads
lectures are being transcribed and made accessible online by the Whitehead
Research Project at < http://www.whiteheadresearch.org > . Look under
Research and then Whitehead Lecture Notes.
9. Obviously, the literature on poetry and other art forms in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in French- and German-speaking countries is vast, but
see Richard 1955 for a very beautiful, now classic, phenomenological study of
nineteenth-century French poetry, with essays on Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine
and Rimbaud, and see Raitt 1981 and 1986 for excellent scholarship on Villiers
de lIsle-Adam, a very important figure in French symbolism. For Husserl and
Freud, see Trincia 2008. Trincia is an Italian philosopher who has produced
valuable work on the area between Husserl, Heidegger and Freud; he also
publishes in English.
10. For a recent edition of the Lyrical Ballads, see Wordsworth and Coleridge 2006.
For extremely perceptive remarks on Wordsworth within a number of different,
fruitful contexts, see Man 1984, in particular the chapter on his poetry and that
of Hlderlin (1984: 4765).
11. There is an enormous amount of excellent criticism devoted to Nerval, but
Chambers 1969: 168219, 23868, 30742 and 1993: 83117 are especially
illuminating for the four works in question. See also Kofman 1979 and
Kristeva 1992: 13972 for extremely stimulating philosophical/psychoanalytic
treatments of Nerval.
12. A certain amount of clarity is required in citing the English translations of
Heideggers works on poetry, as they did not initially correspond to the original
German publications, as the French translations did. More recently, though,
they have done so: Heidegger 2000 translates all of Erlauterungen zu Hlderlins
Dichtung, while Heidegger 2002 does the same for Holzwege. Heidegger 1982
did translate all bar one of the essays in Unterwegs zur Sprache the piece
on Trakl is in this volume but Heidegger 1975 includes the essay omitted
from Heidegger 1982 and various essays from Heideggers other German
publications, including three pieces from Vortrge und Aufstze and two from
Holzwege. The introduction to Heidegger 1975 by the translator is short but
excellent. Heidegger 1977 includes two essays from Holzwege and two from
Vortrge und Aufstze, one of which is The Question Concerning Technology.
Heidegger also gave three lecture series on hymns by Hlderlin, which have been
published as volumes 39 (on Germanien and Der Rhein), 52 (on Andenken)
and 53 (on Der Ister) in the Gesamtausgabe. Only the series on Der Ister has
been translated into English: see Heidegger 1996. For recent high-quality work
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
on Heidegger and poetry, see Lacoue-Labarthe 2007 and Stephens 2007, while
Thomson 2011 is a valuable book that deals primarily with Heidegger and the
visual arts.
For Leibniz and Descartes, see the very scholarly Belaval 1960, and for Leibniz
and Locke, see the equally impressive Jolley 1986.
This quotation is from the end of the first paragraph of Circles, which is
the tenth essay in First Essays. Emerson was a close friend of William James
father: James is the contemporary philosopher with whom Whitehead almost
certainly had the greatest affinity. For Emerson and the James family, see James
2008: xvxxxiv. For an important book of contributions by various authors on
perspective in Leibniz, Whitehead and Deleuze, see Timmermans 2006.
It is mainly Badiou, originally trained as a mathematician, who has criticised
Deleuze for not being genuinely mathematical: see in particular Badiou 2000.
See Hallward 2003 for an excellent work on Badiou as philosopher and
mathematician. Of course, Badiou deals with the philosophy of the subject and
the event in a way that is quite different from Deleuze and is not especially
Whiteheadian, although it would be interesting to explore Badious Platonic side
in relation to the residual traces of Platonism in Whitehead.
It is not surprising that Whitehead had a sustained interest in Berkeley.
The latter had anti-Cartesian and anti-Newtonian positions with regard to
mathematics, motion, abstraction and scientific method. There has been an
immense amount of excellent work on him in the last thirty or forty years.
For his ideas on mathematics, see Jesseph 1993, and for two important general
interpretations, see Winkler 1994 and Pappas 2000. Andr Breton was also
interested in Berkeley, and Gueroult wrote on him: as with his beautiful work
on Malebranche, he manages to combine an impeccable historical sense with the
capacity to make the ideas as fresh as if they had been written yesterday. It would
be interesting to compare Whiteheads, Gueroults and Deleuzes treatment of
late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Western philosophy.
See Whitehead 1964: 967, 1769, 192. One cannot emphasise enough that
an understanding of Whitehead and the philosophy of the event can be greatly
enhanced by some serious reading on concepts of space and time in modern
physics. Four books, none of which requires difficult mathematics, initially stand
out. Born 1965 is a revision of the authors text first published in German
in 1920 and is a deep but accessible work by a brilliant physicist, Davies
1977 is over thirty years old but is still fine for the classic model and is
exceptionally clear, Sklar 1992 is a now classic work that combines physics and
philosophy, while the more recent Ryckman 2005 does the same, but his book
takes a different approach from that of Sklar: he focuses on what he sees as a
transcendental idealist tendency early on in the theory of relativity as opposed to
the logical empiricist one which eventually became dominant. Whitehead does
not really fit into either of these categories: he was not Kantian and Husserlian
in the way that Weyl was Weyl was a major figure in the first tendency but
he was clearly not a logical empiricist. Reichenbach, a key influence on
Sklar, is the main theorist for this second tendency, which is explicitly
anti-metaphysical.
For Wozu Dichter?, see What Are Poets For? in Heidegger 1975: 91142 or
Why Poets in Heidegger 2002: 20041; for Heidegger on Trakl, see Language
in Heidegger 1975: 189210 and Language in the Poem in Heidegger 1982:
15998 these are different essays; and for Heidegger on Van Gogh, see The
Origin of the Work of Art in either Heidegger 1975: 1787 or Heidegger 2002:
156. For a recent discussion of Heidegger and Van Gogh, see Thomson 2011,
especially ch. 3, Heideggers Postmodern Understanding of Art, pp. 65120.
A. N. Whitehead 565
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
For a valuable study on poetry and language that deals extensively with
Heidegger, see Allen 2008. For an important work on time combining physics
and philosophy, see Reichenbach 1999. For Cassirers approach to the theory
of relativity, see Cassirer 1953. For a book on tensor calculus and the theory of
relativity that begins at a reasonably simple level mathematically, see Lowden
2002.
For the original French edition, see Stengers 2002. The English translation
is excellent: it was done by Michael Chase, who has an Australian masters
degree and a French doctorate in the history of philosophy, specialising in neoPlatonism. He has also translated at least five books by Pierre Hadot.
A second reading of Stengers very long and dense book might show that she has
in fact succeeded in doing this.
For the rumpled dollar problem, see Arnold 2005.
Arnold 2005 is a beautiful book by a great mathematician that exemplifies this
approach, which does not of course have to be limited to mathematics. For
example, the idea in Barthes that there can be multiple readings of a text comes
to mind: see especially Barthes 1991.
Her exploration of how Whitehead uses God in various ways as a concept
in Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality is enriched by her
discussion of Religion in the Making, a neglected work by Whitehead that comes
between the other two works. Both Science and the Modern World and Religion
in the Making have recently been re-issued by Cambridge University Press.
Again, a second reading of her book might show that she does do this.
The present author lives full-time as female, but she used to do male roles in
the theatre: hence the radical split in her experience she could draw on in this
production. She no longer plays male roles, so the process would be different,
although something similar would clearly be possible.
See Whitehead 1964, in particular pp. 526. The great twentieth-century
Russian theatre practitioner/theorists treat performance problems in a way that
brings them very close indeed to philosophical problems, such as identity,
self and other, intention, agency, emotion, actions and events, even if the
material is obviously not presented as philosophy. One has more substantial
writings, occasional pieces, transcriptions of teaching and reported remarks.
For Stanislavski, one is well served in English, and Michael Chekhov ended
up in America, so the material connected with him was in English from the
start. With Meyerhold, Tairov and Vakhtangov, one is better off in French, in
which LAge dHomme has published complete editions of all three directors
writings. Meyerholds ideas on actions and emotions are remarkably close to
those of William James in The Principles of Psychology. Vasiliev (or Vassiliev
when transliterated into French) has worked a great deal in France, so there is
a great deal of material connected with him in French. He initially trained as a
chemical engineer before moving on to study theatre. One should also not forget
Lee Strasberg, who was American but is important, and Grotowski, who was
Polish but trained in Russia.
See Sipiora and Baumlin 2002 for a volume of excellent essays on kairos at
different periods in history and Dosse 2010 for an extremely wide-ranging
discussion of the concept of the event in modern thought.
For the classic work on the Lyons uprisings, see Rude 2007, which was first
published in 1982. The 2007 re-edition has a valuable postface by Ludovic
Frobert. It is important to remember there were ex-combattants from the
Napoleonic Wars amongst the insurgents, which meant that they were tactically
aware. In 1834, they used a very successful combination of defensive barricades
and attacking columns, while in 1834, they could be said to have founded
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Book Review
570 Review
whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to geography, they are
orientations, directions, entries and exits (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 2).
In his provocative new book, Craig Lundy subjects Deleuze and
Guattaris uncharacteristic binary tendencies in reducing history to
historicism to a form of immanent critique, in effect putting the
and back in the equation to create a hybrid, composite form that
is neither pure history nor pure becoming, thereby folding the virtual
into the actual and vice versa. Thus Lundy attempts to show that
historical reality is always more than the actual through its productive,
transmuting relationship with the virtual and incorporeal (and by
extension the two different forms of Stoic temporality that of Chronos
and of Aion). The result is a history irreducible to both historicism and
pure becoming an in-between composite that Lundy variously calls
history/becoming or historiophilosophy. This entails the construction
of a model of history that can be explained in five different ways
(corresponding to Lundys five different chapters), namely, the abyss
of the intensive-depth (focusing largely on the corporeal intensities of
Difference and Repetition); the dynamic surface (via the incorporeal
event of The Logic of Sense); the nomadic of A Thousand Plateaus;
the universal-contingent; and finally historiophilosophy itself through a
detailed look at the use of conceptual personae in Deleuze and Guattaris
What Is Philosophy?
In the final chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze sees
creativity as a relation of depth and surface to the movement between
them, a trial run perhaps for the subsequent transverse relation of
chaoids to chaos in What Is Philosophy? Thus, as Lundy, echoing
Deleuzes position, argues,
all extensive reality is the product of an intensive process that comes from the
depths and emerges at the surface. While the creative movement from depth
to surface is referred to as a becoming, history concerns the retrospective
identification and representation of this productive process. Or does it? (10)
Review 571
In contrast, in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari cite Pguy
on the same lines but in terms of philosophy, not history:
[T]here are two ways of considering the event. One consists in going over the
course of the event, in recording its effectuation in history, its conditioning
and deterioration in history. But the other consists in reassembling the event,
installing oneself in it as in a becoming, becoming young again and aging in
it, both at the same time, going through all its components or singularities.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 111)
572 Review
A way out of this double bind is to show that history is itself constitutive.
Taking his lead from far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics which
evades a radical finalism Lundy attempts to show that intensive
productivity can remain open and contingent, producing differentiated
histories that can no longer be taken for granted: History becomes
constitutive at precisely that point where the future becomes open [. . . ]
Thus to allow for the contingency of the event is to affirm the historical
processes of production, not to deny them (20).
It Is here that Lundy turns to Bergsons heterogeneous multiplicity of
duration an indivisible movement irreducible to a shared homogeneous
space (epitomised by the race between Achilles and the tortoise, where
each participant is placed on their own indivisible duration, thereby
allowing Achilles to ultimately overtake his slower opponent) in order
to make history compatible with depth. Situating ourselves within the
intensive depths entails placing ourselves within the past as it moves
towards the present in order to make a composite of the two as
duration. Braudel ties this process directly to a history for life: Just
like life itself, history seems to us to be a fleeting spectacle, always in
movement, made up of a web of problems meshed inextricably together,
and able to assume a hundred different and contradictory aspects in turn
(Braudel 1980: 10). Lundy argues that each form of history needs an
appropriate explication of the different durations involved of men and
women, of societies, of worlds. Thus there can be no unilateral history,
whether dubbed economic, racial or technological.
However,
Whereas depth for Bergson, Braudel and Pguy is in many respects an
historical depth that is intensively productive in relation to the present and
future, for Deleuze depth is a realm of becoming that is in turn overlaid by
historical extensities. How then are we to explain this discrepancy? (27)
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power is the play of difference, the eternal return is the being of that
difference it is that which is said of difference (32). Nietzsches history
is untimely, it acts counter to our time [. . . ] for the benefit of a time
to come (Nietzsche 1983: 60, cited in Lundy 2012: 35). Significantly,
when Deleuze quotes this line he omits the first half of the phrase because
of his vested interest in pitting the future against the past, contrasting
becoming to history. Conversely, Nietzsche stresses the importance of
both philology and history for life, for becoming is instrumental in
creating that very history it must be made experimental as a history
for the future. In this regard Nietzsche is perfectly Deleuzian he also
attacks historicism but in the name of history.
Shifting his attention to Deleuzes The Logic of Sense, Lundy extends
this argument from a focus on the intensive depths to the incorporeal
surface in an attempt to make this surface-becoming compatible with
nomadology and the different chaoid planes of What Is Philosophy?
Obviously, surface becoming is different than that of the depths and
requires a different model: it is organised like a chessboard with
a given plan. It has a logical organisation (the chaoid planes of
immanence, organisation and composition) which is given all at once
and stretches to infinite limits, in a constant state of renewal. This
dynamic process of creation also spills beyond each level of systematicity
as the dynamic process works transversally across and between planes
and their different levels. As Lundy points out,
The historical process that Deleuze describes and employs in the latter series
of The Logic of Sense will thus lie somewhere between these two extremes
of pure becoming and historicism. It will also lie between the depths of
corporeal bodies and the incorporeal surface, insofar as it is what generates
the movement from the former to the latter through a process of historical
creativity. (401)
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extracted from an aggregate of images or Nietzsches creation requires a
modicum of limitation via forgetting and turning away from the abyss
of becoming. In other words, static genesis requires a dynamic genesis to
complement it, which for Lundy means that the logic of surfaces requires
a history of surfaces, in effect a history of developmental becoming.
True becoming can only unravel through the continually shifting relation
between two different realms: the corporeal/incorporeal; states of
affairs/pure events. They remain different despite their transmutations,
which allows them to collude in the task of creation. As Lundy argues,
The significance of developmental becoming thus lies in its unfinished
and dynamically progressive nature, as opposed to the already delimited
infinitives of various surface becomings (48). Developmental becoming
must not be equalised; it must be far-from-equilibrium a history open
to the future.
Lundys main metaphor here is the Herculean form, the mythic figure
who moves effortlessly between the surface and the depths, as well as to
the heights of the heavens: It is no longer a question of Dionysus down
below, or of Apollo up above, notes Deleuze, but of Hercules of the
surface, in his dual battle against both depth and height: reorientation
of the entire thought and a new geography (Deleuze 1990: 1312).
With Hercules, it is more a question of his return to the surface from
elsewhere with his plunder so that the surface is capable of refashioning
height and depth into an immanent monism or productive composite.
In other words, the surface is no longer just an enveloper, but it also
moves in a dynamic way between dualisms deep bodies and lofty
ideals. This allows Lundy to overcome the opposition between history
and becoming whereby the between is able to bring them together
through an ontology of historical creativity. This move also takes
Lundy to a new threshold and a harnessing of history to a new form
of geography nomadology and the key equation of multiplicity. To
avoid regression into an initial capturing dualism, we need to progress
to a nomadic history whereby PLURALISM = MONISM.
As we noted above, the Treatise on Nomadology The War Machine
in A Thousand Plateaus completely dismisses history as counter to
nomadology. Indeed, if nomadology opposes history, it is due to
its concern with space territory, topology rather than time. It is
geographical, aligned with becoming. The question for Lundy then
becomes: how can we excavate a Deleuzian philosophy of history
from within nomadology, the very thing that seems to most malign
it? The answer partially lies in nomadologys tendency towards
metamorphosis and deterritorialisation rather than confining itself to
Review 575
strict binary oppositions. Thus the apparent distinctions between the
smooth and the striated, the war machine and State machine (and,
by extension, pure becoming and pure history) are always mutually
implicated, often by a mediating third term that breaks the dialectic.
For example, the nomad/State dualism is split by a third element: the
machinic phylum the subterranean flow of pure becoming (Nietzsche)
or universal aggregate of action/reaction (Bergson) that flows between
them and on which they depend. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the
great phylum is what selects through the intermediary of assemblages
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 398).
The same is true for the smooth and the striated, for their key
mechanism is the transmutation of form and how one part of the dualism
migrates to the other not just how transmutations occur between fixed
entities of smooth and striated, but how they themselves metamorphose
(that is, how the relation can differ from itself). Thus the nuclear
submarine does not convert the smooth space of the ocean into a striated
space but harnesses it for State control:
the smooth is employed by the State as smooth for the purposes of striation.
The smooth characteristics of the sea are thus maintained, but they are
redirected by State powers to achieve a level of control that the State on its
own would be incapable of. (79)
One thus can become the other while also remaining the same. Never
believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us, warn Deleuze and
Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 500).
While revolutionary becomings can spawn micro-fascisms, conversely
histories can be intensified as history for smoothing processes: the nomad
and the State can be brought back together through a shared immanence:
The smooth and the striated, in other words, are expressions of a
machinic phylum that gives itself to both (416).
While this might sound at first like a pragmatic compromise, one
should note that it is not uncharacteristic, for Deleuze and Guattari
invariably move towards a middle ethic of the between, for this is where
everything happens between pure being and pure becoming tempered
by prudence and caution.
This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with
the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential
movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them,
produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities
segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a
meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight,
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causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous
intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue . . . (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 161)
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capitalism haunts all previous forms of society as their terrifying nightmare,
[. . . ] the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes. (122)
Thus planes pass into and out of existence in time, so that the logic
of planes needs a history of planes. This does not necessarily have to
be linear, for every plane is not only interleaved but holed, letting
578 Review
through the fogs that surround it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 51).
Consequently, a singular feature cannot be isolated from the plane
that gives it voice the breath that suffuses the different/separate parts.
Lundy concludes by calling for a historical version of what Deleuze and
Guattari call stratigraphic time, where before and after indicate
only an order of superimpositions (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 58).
In this respect, far from being an apparatus of capture in opposition
to becoming, philosophy necessarily becomes indistinguishable from its
own history (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 95; original emphasis), albeit
holey rather than linear.
Colin Gardner
University of California, Santa Barbara
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0170
References
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