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An [Un]Likely Alliance:
Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari
Edited by
Bernd Herzogenrath
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Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Bernd Herzogenrath
The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century...... 280
Paul Lewis
The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Félix Guattari.......... 297
Georgina Banita
Contributors............................................................................................. 363
INTRODUCTION
BERND HERZOGENRATH
In her seminal study Bodies that Matter Judith Butler stated that
"some have argued that a rethinking of 'nature' as a set of dynamic
interrelations suits both feminist and ecological aims (and has for some
produced an otherwise unlikely alliance with the work of Gilles Deleuze"
(4). While the Deleuze-Feminism Connection has already been focused
on,1 a likewise response to the second one—the alliance Deleuze and
ecology—is as yet still underdeveloped.2 As the essays in this collection
will show, the alliance is not unlikely at all— provided that one term in
the equation—the term ecology—will be re-interpreted and taken away
from the hold of both more 'traditional' [essentialist] perspectives, as well
as from the grip of the kind of social|linguistic constructivism that Butler
herself is aligned with. A Deleuzian|Guattarian version of ecology does
not see nature as distinct from, but coexistent with nature, and agency
here is not restricted to one side—the human|cultural side—of the
equation. 'Nature' rather is an open and dynamic whole that does not
follow—as the term ecology might suggest—one logic (or even: logos); it
might thus be more fitting, as Hanjo Berressem has recently suggested, to
speak of "ecologics" instead (57).
Although motivated differently, Butler's statement links with Luc
Ferry's critique in The New Ecological Order (1993), in which he accuses
French philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres of an 'anti-
humanist' stance which, according to Ferry, amounts to nothing less than
a thinly-disguised 'new fascism.' For a neo-liberal humanist like himself,
"it is insane to treat animals, beings of nature and not of freedom, as legal
subjects. We consider it self-evident that only the latter are, so to speak,
'worthy of trial" (xvi). Privileging the question of 'legal status,' Ferry
bypasses the more pressing problematics of what it means to be 'human'
and 'free' if these categories cannot anymore be grounded in an
essentialist and clear-cut separation of nature and culture, nature and
'man,' human and non-human, as Deleuze and Guattari—in both their
individual and collective works—suggest:
2 Introduction
a body surpasses the restriction of essences (what it is) and enters the
realm of assemblages (what it can do in its entanglements with other
bodies). Away from the replacement of a visual perspective of space by a
sonic one, this paper explores rhythm as a relational tension between body
and milieu, a mode 'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology
addresses the virtuality of unfinished and unnatural bodies to
conceptualise an ecological becoming that stretches beyond our
knowledge of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for
ecology, Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualisation of an
altogether new nature.
from a certain engagement with Nature's telluric space, its air, its wind, its
landscape of flora and fauna, and its movement of waters. Any
understanding of these concepts without taking account of the ecological
grounding is an incomplete one. But one should not however expect an
amicable relation between Nature and thought in A Thousand Plateaus. As
Irving Goh, in his essay on "'Strange Ecology' in Deleuze|Guattari's A
Thousand Plateaus" argues, there is a violent economy between Nature
and philosophy there. Philosophy strikes out at Nature. But Nature never
remains as a passive victim. In A Thousand Plateaus, it strikes back.
Nature bears a violent force here. It is a movement of pure
deterritorialization that sweeps up any grounded habitation [this
understanding of Nature is certainly traceable to Bataille's ecology, where
the life of the planet is endowed by the passage of a cosmic or solar line of
luxurious energy expenditure]. And yet this "strange ecology" in A
Thousand Plateaus, to use Deleuze's term in a dialogue with Claire Parnet,
does not end in a nihilistic nothingness for either or both of these entities.
In fact, through the combat between Nature and philosophy, each will
realize that each equally needs the violence of the other not only to sustain
itself but also to carry it to another level, to engender a creative line within
itself.
Plants, animals, and the milieu of life have all been special themes in
art for many thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic.
Recently, however, artists have begun to assume a more assertive and
radical position in this entangled history of life, nature and art. For the past
ten years, a few artists have been presenting sophisticated genetic and
biological experiments as works of art. Some works are commissioned,
while others are the product of research and production undertaken by the
artists themselves. In any case, as Paul Lewis argues in his essay "The
Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century," the living
organism, plant and animal tissue, the cell, the genome—all these have
entered as raw materials into the practice of art.
16 Introduction
In his essay "c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
Contingency, Ecology and World-History," Jorge Camacho follows up on
Deleuze and Guattari's marginal but recurrent concern with the problem of
finding a historical explanation for the development of capitalism in
Europe vis-à-vis its non-development in China. Its relevance is two-fold.
On the one hand, this problem—and the way it was treated in historical
research between Marx or Dobb and Braudel or Chaunu—serves Deleuze
and Guattari as a concrete example of a first principle that allows them to
revisit and reframe the old topic of Universal History. Such principle,
which they enigmatically relate to Marx's thought, entails that history
ought to be conceived as the work of pure contingency. Implicit here is, of
course, a particular reading and critique of a German tradition (perhaps
Kant or Herder, but certainly Hegel) that stressed the role of necessity,
rationality and teleology. For Deleuze and Guattari, the historical course in
general and, in particular, the sequence leading to the emergence of
capitalism, is a concatenation of contingent events: it could have happened
differently, elsewhere, in another moment in history or not happened at all.
Moreover, their universal history is retrospective from the point of view of
capitalism. For them, capitalism is a potential that has haunted all forms of
society and it is from this virtual position that it has shaped—negatively,
as a nightmare to be warded-off—all the social machines that have
emerged in this planet. This being so, what is perplexing for them is
nothing but precisely its singularity, the fact that it fully developed only
once and in 'one place,' thus Camacho asks with them: why in Europe?
Why not in China?
On the other hand, the problem is relevant in the context of this
collection because it prompts Deleuze and Guattari to invoke ecological
determinations for the course of world history. In the rather sweeping and
marginal explanation proposed in the Treatise on Nomadology, they
follow Annales-school historians like Braudel in locating the first 'deep
cause' in the rather different ecological geographies of Europe and China,
and the concomitant agro-technological infrastructures associated with
wheat and rice cultivation. Arguably, beyond any form of determinism,
Deleuze and Guattari's interest for such geohistorical explanation is
precisely the role it grants to concrete contingency in detriment of abstract
rationality.
In this way, the objective of Camacho's essay is to revisit and
disentangle this problem drawing from historical research that has put an
emphasis on its ecological dimension. Most importantly, traveling along
these lines it will be possible to extricate the fundamentally ecological
Bernd Herzogenrath 19
The body of animals, more specifically insects, are media in their own
kind. For Jussi Parikka, this means expanding the familiar notions of
"media" towards a Deleuzian framework where the term resonates with an
ecological understanding of bodies. Bodies are vibrations and foldings
with their environments, a theme that was developed in ethological
research and then adopted to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
Parikka's essay "Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies" shows
how this theme is useful in a reconceptualization of media as an
environment of interactions, translations and foldings between
heterogeneous bodies. In this context, animal bodies mediate and contract
not only the rhythms of nature, but are mediated as part of the construction
of modern media as well, as conceptual figures but also through the
measures of biopower inherent for instance in physiological research.
By excavating a certain archaeology of Deleuze's ideas, especially
Bergson's notions regarding "insects technics" as elaborated recently by
Elizabeth Grosz, Parikka attempts to think through some of the
consequences of what a more environmental, ecological and
biophilosophical understanding of "media" could entail. In this context,
media is considered somewhat parallel to a Deleuzian understanding of a
body: it is a force field, a potentiality, an intersection point where forces of
the cosmos contract to form certain potentials for affects and percepts.
Thus, as Rosi Braidotti explains, the "Deleuzian body is in fact an
ecological unit." Bodies/media work only through relatedness where "this
environmentally-bound intensive subject is a collective entity; it is an
embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and
transforms energies and forces."
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari explain how the world
contracts different vibrations and how different natural entities act as
condensations of the cosmos. The way a plant forms and senses itself is
through contracting light, salts, carbon. Through this contracting or folding
"it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its
composition: it is sensation itself." Brains are not found only in the heads
of humans and animals, but microbrains inhabit the inorganic world as
well. The world is media, in a manner of sensation and contracting, even
though Deleuze and Guattari constantly avoided using that specific term as
for them it applies only to mass media of communications. Still, it is
possible to continue from their philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards
20 Introduction
Notes
1
Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook,
Edinburgh UP 2000, can be read as a fit answer to the first 'unlikely alliance' in
Butler's claim.
2
See however Chisholm, and Herzogenrath.
3
… and what in the English translation curiously goes as "steady state" (41).
Works Cited
Berressem, Hanjo. "Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and a
Deleuzian Ecologics." Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. Ed. Bernd
Herzogenrath (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008): 57-101.
Buchanan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook (Eds.) Deleuze and Feminist Theory
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2000).
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
(New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
Chisholm, Dianne. (Ed.) "Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy."
rhizomes 15 (winter 2007), see www.rhizomes.net/issue15/index.html
(last accessed August 31, 2008).
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. M. Joughin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul
Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995).
—. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Gary Genosko (London: Athlone Press,
2000).
Herzogenrath, Bernd. (Ed.) Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2008).
22 Introduction
Introduction
Deleuze on Naturalism
Deleuze's support for a naturalistic ontology can be seen as a strategy to
counteract the anti-naturalistic tendencies of the Platonic tradition
informing much of Western thought. As described in The Logic of Sense,
Deleuze proposes a "reversal" of Platonism, by which he means "the
abolition of the world of essences and the world of appearances" (253).In
other words, Deleuze desires to eliminate the dualism that postulates a
realm of metaphysical essences separate form and more real than the
natural world itself, which is consigned to the status of mere appearance.
Deleuze's work is replete with analyses of the negative consequences that
he sees as resulting from the legacy of Platonic representationalism. One
of the most troublesome results has been the designation of an
unconditioned Absolute, a pure transcendent Being, which circumscribes
and rules the natural world of becoming and diversity. Yet as Deleuze sees
it, one of the basic advantages of naturalism is to conjoin the diversity of
the natural world with its real conditions of material difference and
processes of becoming (see Logic of Sense 261-3).'Reversing' Platonism
can thus be regarded as a naturalistic strategy aimed at eliminating the
dualism of essence and appearance while affirming the continuous
becoming of a fully natural reality that is in no way indebted to or derived
from any form of hidden, metaphysical transcendence. One of the
resources that Deleuze draws upon in constituting his vision of the
naturalist tradition is the Epicureanism of Lucretius. Deleuze writes that
Lucretius formulated the following basic principles of naturalism as an
anti-Platonic philosophy: "the positivity of Nature; Naturalism as the
philosophy of affirmation; pluralism linked with multiple affirmation;
sensualism connected with the joy of the diverse; and the practical critique
of all mystifications" (279).
In the essay 'Lucretius and the Simulacrum', Deleuze proposes that a
naturalism based on the changing conditions of real experience, and not a
representationalism which withdraws from the empirical into a realm of
formal structures, is the goal of philosophy. In this case, naturalism is
26 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
by joy resulting from the diversity of its elements. Myths and illusions rest
upon the belief in gods and eternal souls, on divine entities and
transcendent forms which mysteriously escape natural existence. Such
myths are themselves scornful of the material, sensuous, and temporal
existence accepted by naturalism, and serve to transpose divine will into a
human will (or spirit) set over and against nature. In contrast, Deleuze
asserts, the naturalist "speaks about nature, rather than speaking about the
gods" (278).
The speculative and practical objects of naturalism coincide on this
point: the enterprise of demystification through philosophical, scientific,
and ethical activity intended to free humans from the illusions of onto-
theological transcendence.5 It is important to notice that this position does
not oppose nature to social convention, custom, and invention tout court.
Instead, it is opposed to those social forces which depend upon myth and
illusion in order to consolidate their poser by negating the multiplicity and
diversity of nature and society, sowing sadness rather than reaping joy.
The negative spirit of transcendence is that which brands the sensible as
nothing more than mere secondary appearance and links the intelligible to
the absolute realm of timeless essence. What appears with Lucretius's
naturalism, according to Deleuze, is a critique of Platonism's anti-
naturalistic repression of the multiplicity of life and the diversity of nature,
along with an affirmation of the flux of natural reality:
One of the most profound constants of Naturalism is to denounce
everything that is sadness, everything that is the cause of sadness, and
everything that needs sadness to exercise its power. From Lucretius to
Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of
thought and sensibility an affirmation. It directs its attack against the
prestige of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its power; it refuses
to the spirit of the negative the right to speak in the name of philosophy. . .
. The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just as the diverse as
diverse is the object of joy. (279)
A similar naturalistic emphasis in Spinoza's philosophy is embraced by
Deleuze. As with Lucretius, nature is characterized by Spinoza as a
positive and productive power. Whereas Cartesian metaphysics devalued
nature by depriving it of its immanent power, making it the creation of a
transcendent God, and placed the thinking subject outside of nature,
Spinoza's positive naturalism insists that it is within infinite nature that all
finite things exist as a plurality of modes: "This naturalism provides the
true thrust of the Anticartesian reaction. ... [it] is a matter of re-establishing
the claims of a Nature endowed with forces or power" (Deleuze,
Expressionism 227-8). For Spinoza, nature is its own dynamic source of
28 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
creation which expresses itself through immanent and actual powers that,
in acting, are parts of nature (see 228). The notion of an expressive nature
thereby "forms the basis of a new naturalism" (232). One of the most
important factors making Spinoza's naturalism 'new' is that while he finds
nature to be dynamic (expressive), he denies that it is teleological. Nature
is a complex process without any predetermined end, and naturalism need
not account for its movement by postulating the existence of some more
fundamental realm which explains this process. There is no ultimate
foundation outside of nature, but powers, relations, and bodily
compositions constitutive of nature itself.
This position follows from Spinoza's theory of immanent causality.
Immanent causality "refuses the intervention of a transcendent God" (109)
no less than it does the hierarchy of emanative causality. Instead, the
existence of nature as a productive causality is inseparable from its
immanent essence, which is constituted by the very effects belonging to it,
namely, the attributes and modes. In this way natura naturans (naturing
nature) and natura naturata (natured nature) are interconnected by a
mutual immanence. What is essential here is the univocity of nature: the
uniquely differentiated modifications of infinite substance are expressions
of formally (qualitatively) distinct but ontologically equal attributes. All
things are in some way different; yet they are generated equally from a
creative nature, thereby, making it possible to speak of the equality of
differences without resorting to an ordering hierarchy or a reduction to
sameness. Instead what are important are the relations between different
modes, insofar as finite modes are dynamic compositions within immanent
nature. Spinoza's naturalism fully emerges from the connection of
immanent causality with univocity; "Naturalism in this case is what
satisfies the three forms of univocity; the univocity of attributes ... the
univocity of the cause ... and the univocity of modality" (Deleuze, Spinoza
92-3). These forms present us with a conception, akin to that found in
Lucretius, of a nature that is the infinite sum of multiple relational
compositions. Nature is multiple, but the multiple forms an open-ended
unity because it is constituted by ever changing combinations.
In Spinoza's naturalism the 'encounters' between complex bodies are
also evaluated in ethical terms. As Deleuze suggests, those encounters that
agree with the natures of each body are 'good' and help to form other
relations between them, which allow for mutual flourishing and
preservation. Other encounters that disagree with the natures of the bodies
concerned are 'bad' and contribute to the destruction and decomposition of
the relations that support their ability to persevere in existence. Spinoza's
notion of ethical goodness lies in striving to maximize mutually
Patrick Hayden 29
Another way that Deleuze develops his naturalism is by arguing for the
inclusion of ethology in his description of philosophical practice. Ethology
32 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
refers both to the study of animal behaviour and to the study of the
formation and evolution of human ethos. While ethology has taken may
divergent forms, from vitalism to behavioralism and sociobiology,
Deleuze uses the term in several of his works in order to emphasize the
nondualistic continuity of human and nonhuman life forms and their
complex symbiotic interrelationships, as well as to propose an overlap
between the physical, biological and chemical, and the social, ethical and
political. For instance, Deleuze draws from Spinoza the conception of a
"common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all
individuals are situated" (Spinoza 122).9 This 'one Nature' is common to
all things because it is here that different ways of living are simultaneously
constituted. Life is understood according to its relations of movement and
rest, and each body, whether human or nonhuman, by its capacity for
affecting and being affected by others (see 124). The dynamic capacities
of each living thing to act and be acted upon intersect at various points
with those of others: some affects are shared, some are not. Each thing is
different or singular; yet all are situated in the affective realm of nature, a
common environment "which applies equally," Deleuze writes, "to the
inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural"
(Deleuze|Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In other words, nature is that
which is common to all different human and nonhuman entities, implying
as extensive spectrum of encounters between all bodies (taken broadly)
together with the consequences or effects of such encounters:
Ethology is first of all the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of
the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing.
For each thing these relations and capacities have amplitude, thresholds
(maximum and minimum). And variations or transformations that are
peculiar to them. And they select, in the world or in Nature, that which
corresponds to the thing; that is, they select what affects or is affected by
the thing, what moves or is moved by it. For example, given an animal,
what is this animal unaffected by the infinite world? What does it react to
positively or negatively? What are its nutrients and its poisons? What does
it 'take' in its world? Every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the
rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never separable from
its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the
exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms,
perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular
individual in the world. ... Further, there is also the way in which these
relations of speed and slowness re realized according to circumstances, and
the way in which these capacities for being affected are filled. For they
always are, but in different ways, depending on whether the present affect
Patrick Hayden 33
threatens the thing ... or strengthen, accelerate, and increase it. (Deleuze,
Spinoza 125-6)
knowledge, and experiences, implying the active creation of, not simple
return to, modes of existence that exemplify appropriate, sustainable, and
beneficial relationships between human and nonhuman beings and their
environments.
A micropolitical approach to such issues has both similarities with and
differences from some contemporary ecological or Green movements.
Social ecology and deep ecology are perhaps the most visible examples
today. Social ecology, pioneered by Murray Bookchin, is oriented
primarily toward the examination of the relationship he sees between
environmental degradation and social structure. More specifically,
Bookchin argues that the human domination of nature follows from the
domination of human by human as found in certain kinds of hierarchical
and oppressive social arrangements. He writes that "ecological degradation
is, in great part, a product of the degradation of human beings by hunger,
material insecurity, class rule, hierarchical domination, patriarchy, ethnic
discrimination, and competition" (Which Way for the Ecology Movement?
17). Social ecology is thus premised of the view that "the basic problems
which pit society against nature emerge from within social development
itself" (Remaking Society 32) and that "human domination of human gave
rise to the very idea of domination nature" (44). According to Bookchin,
this assumption is particularly evident in the technical-economic system of
constant and aggressive expansion characteristic of modern capitalism.
Referring to himself as an avowed naturalist with an aversion to
"spiritualism" and "mystical" approaches to ecological problems,
Bookchin argues that radical cultural, political, and economic changes in
the current social order, as well as the development of a new "ecological
sensibility," constitute the appropriate responses to a precarious ecological
situation.
Consequently, Bookchin contends that a society oriented by the "grow-
or-die" attitude toward humans and nonhumans alike is destined to
confront insurmountable natural limits. Only fundamental changes in
capitalistic modes of production and consumption can avert ecological
catastrophe. These changes are centred around such notions as the
decentralization of communities, a complex evolutionism rooted in
mutualism or symbiosis, the necessity of cultural and biophysical
diversity, bioregional federalism, and the development of ecologically
appropriate alternative technologies.11 The general outlook of social
ecology presented so far seems to find some strong points of agreement
with the naturalistic and micropolitical aspects of Deleuze's thought.
Deleuze has consistently criticized the destructive effects of a 'universal
capitalism,' the totalizing functions of State apparatuses, the oppression of
Patrick Hayden 37
While the struggles and aims of each ecology are different, their
common aim is to "organize new micropolitical and micro-social
practices. New solidarities, a new gentleness or kindness, conjoined with
42 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
Notes
1
Published discussions of the poststructuralist critique of essentialism and
determinism are too numerous to list here. However, an accessible survey of these
topics may be found in (Best and Kellner).
2
For a concise presentation of Deleuze's views here, see (Deleuze and Parnet). For
Deleuze, philosophy should not ask after the 'essence' of a thing, but rather ought
to look into how something functions or lives, how it relates to other things, and
into what kinds of effects it has or inspires. This theme is discussed by Deleuze in
his (Nietzsche and Philosophy).
3
Deleuze has characterized his philosophy as a type of pluralistic empiricism
inspired by Anglo-American thought. See (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues vii-viii).
4
General accounts of philosophical naturalism can be found in (Danto),
(Kirkorian), and especially (Ryder).
Patrick Hayden 43
5
For more on the 'illusions of transcendence,' see (Deleuze|Guattari What is
Philosophy? 49 and 73).
6
Oikos can mean house, household, family, milieu, vicinity, habitat, or
environment.
7
For more on the notion of nonparallel or aparallel evolution, see (Deleuze and
Parnet, Dialogues 2-10).
8
Michel Serres has made symbioses a central aspect of his call for a "natural
contract" that is dedicated to the renewal of our relationship to the Earth. He argues
that humans have maintained a "parasitical" rather than "symbiotic" relationship
with the natural world, and that a global ecological revolution requires an
awareness of the Earth as our "symbiont" (see Serres 35-44).
9
I refer here to the final chapter which is also published separately as "Ethology,
Spinoza and Us," in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New
York: Zone Publications, 1992). There are quite a few references to ethology
scattered throughout Deleuze's writings and it is unnecessary to refer to them all in
this context. However, the reader is urged to consult especially plateaus 10 and 11
of A Thousand Plateaus, entitled respectively "1730: Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ..." and "1837: Of the Refrain."
10
Nietzsche asks: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our
minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin
to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed
nature?" (The Gay Science 168-9). Significant discussions of Nietzsche's
naturalism can be found in (Schatzki) and (Lampert).
11
These ideas can be found throughout the works cited above, and especially in
(Toward an Ecological Society).
12
See, for example, the introductory chapter to (Remaking Society).
13
Michel Foucault clarifies that critically examining the notion of an inviolate,
inherently non-oppressive rationality is not by itself evidence of irrationalism: "I
think that the blackmail that has very often been at work in every critique of reason
or every critical inquiry into the history of rationality (either you accept rationality
or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality
were impossible" (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 27). The point made by Foucault
is that there are different possible forms of rationality that may or may not be
useful or beneficial.
Works Cited
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991).
Bookchin, Murray. Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal and Buffalo:
Black Rose Books, 1980).
—. The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982).
—. Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End
Press, 1990).
44 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
ELIZABETH GROSZ
thinking regarding Deleuze and Guattari's relevance for thinking the place
of the animal in art. It is Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion, above all in
'Of the Refrain' in A Thousand Plateaus that art is entirely involved in and
dependent on the animal.2
These eight theses outline, in as brief a way as possible, how Deleuze and
Guattari, inflected through Darwin's own texts on sexual selection and its
productive extravagances, may provide us wit h a way of linking nature to
art, not through imitation or mimesis but directly. Art is nature attenuated
to attract and allure; or equally, nature is art undeveloped and requiring
intensification and framing. Art is the elaboration and foregrounding of
properties, the qualities—sonorous, visual, tactile, and so on—that nature
provides through their deterritorialization, their framing and movement
elsewhere. The animal is that world in which everything human about the
human is born, accommodates and intensifies itself, and dies. Animal
origin and animal destination. A human trajectory enabled and limited
through the animal. Darwin opens up this trajectory, Nietzsche ironizes it,
and Deleuze and Guattari celebrate it.
Elizabeth Grosz 51
Notes
1
Since this anthology is focused on Deleuze and Guattari's relations to ecological
thinking, I am reluctant to place my own work within a 'traditional' ecological or
eco-feminist position. I have already specified my differences from eco-feminism
in chapter one of Time Travels. To briefly recap here: I have carefully avoided any
understanding of nature, the world, or the cosmos as a single unified entity in all of
my work. Generally ecological perspectives are holistic, and they imply a concept
of the world as a unified totality, a cohesive and potentially unified entity that has
been primarily subjected to division through human intervention. In my
understanding of the Darwinian tradition, on which I rely so strongly in this text,
Darwin's understanding of nature is bifurcated, linked to divergence and the
elaboration of difference, rather than being directed to the attainment of unity or
cohesiveness. My concern, if it is to be in any way defined by the eco-logical, is to
separate the logos from bios, to understand them as two externally linked relations:
the eco has no logos, or its logos is that of the proliferation of destruction. My
concern here, as elsewhere, is to complicate and elaborate differences, to insist on
the impossibility of a larger term that could encompass differences, to affirm
incommensurability. And equally, it is to problematize the place of human agency
in either the destruction or the reconstitution of a unified and cohesive world.
Ecological accounts have positioned the human as the agent of the destruction of
this unity; and as the agent who, armed with a new politics, or new insights, may
be the one who can repair or overcome mankind's previous acts of destruction.
This is to accord man, once more, the privilege of dominion, or its more modest
companion, stewardship, over all living things and over the earth as a whole.
2
This more or less recaps some of the work I have undertaken on art and the
animal in Chaos, Territory, Art.
Works Cited
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
—. The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the
Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
—. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 2005).
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans G. Gill and C. Burke
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994).
'THE INSTRUCTED THIRD':
PROCESSING ECOLOGY WITH DELEUZE
LEYLA HAFERKAMP
In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze reads Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of monadology in terms of the model of the fold,
according to which the world is considered an infinite continuum of folds
and foldings, an origami world of utmost pliability; a "plastic habitat" in
perpetual process, constantly "folding, unfolding, refolding" (137).
"[W]hat has changed now," Deleuze writes, "is the organization of the
home and its nature" (137). The two-floored edifice of the Baroque house
is transformed into the 'new habitat,' situated as the new oikos beyond the
dualistic distinctions of inside/outside, subject/object, public/private.
Within this context, Deleuze ends his reading of The Monadology with a
plea for nomadology, calling for a mode of subjectivity that is always 'in
process.'
Deleuze's reading of Leibniz provides, as Tom Conley has noted,
powerful insights for rethinking the positio humana within the 'ecological
fold:'
The Fold and What Is Philosophy?, published shortly afterwards and co-
authored with Félix Guattari,
[…] And since they beg reaction of this kind, these works can also be said
to orient philosophy into the future of the planet in ways that pragmatic
means have yet to conceptualize.(xiv) 1
the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans
themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of
pragmatism. It will not in the long run pat to 'sell' the plans by superficial
ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.
(513)
Leyla Haferkamp 55
'gotten beyond' the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of
law and objects of science – without observing that these entities had been
56 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
shaped, profiled, and sculpted in such a way that they had gradually
become incompatible. (3, emphasis added)
[the event] is itself inseparable from the state of affairs, bodies, and lived
reality in which it is actualized or brought about. But we can also say the
converse: the state of affairs is no more separable from the event that
nonetheless goes beyond its actualization in every respect. (159)
This reconciliation of the external world with the individual via the
concept, often corresponding to the triad "scenographies-definitions-points
of view," makes possible what Serres has called Leibniz's "ichnographic
chart of the Universe" (161n11), made up of the network of bidirectional
relations between multiplicity and unity. For Deleuze, this new and, as I
have tried to show, ecological relation is the most important consequence
of the fold-in: "Always a unity of the multiple, in the objective sense, the
one must also have a multiplicity 'of' one and a unity 'of ' the multiple, but
now in a subjective sense" (126).
Apart from referring to the complex interrelations between organisms
and the multiplicity of environmental components surrounding them (and
even those living within them as integral 'parts'), the term 'ecology' has
also come to denote any 'intricate system or complex.' All ecological crises
require prompt action and a decisive attitude, but they also necessitate the
insight, know-how and flexibility to deal with them as complex systems.
"Organism plus environment" is, as Bateson remarked, no longer ecology's
sole unit of survival; it now has a double: "the unit of evolutionary survival
turns out to be identical with the unit of mind" (491). Ecology, then, is not
only the science concerned with the overall bio-physical system and its
constitutive parts, but also "the study of the interaction and survival of
ideas and programs […] in circuits" (491). On the level of the mental, the
"many catastrophic dangers which have grown out of the Occidental errors
of epistemology" (495), which Bateson had warned against nearly four
decades ago, not only still present a major challenge today, they do so on
an amplified scale. The epistemological fallacies that posit the primacy of
transcendence over immanence and/or regard immanence as immanent to
'Some Thing' other than itself, the belief in "an overall mind separate from
the body, separate from the society, and separate from nature" (493) and
the more banal modes of superstition and 'psychocentrism' that prevail in
contemporary culture contribute immensely to the 'ecological threat.'
The propagation of transcendence refutes the fact that the human agent
is fully included in the decentered network of the dispersed and the
interconnected, without the privilege of the hierarchical superposition of
an impartial observer [n+1]; that "[w]e are not outside the ecology for
62 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more
important: the ecologization of the subject. The true point-of-perspective
of 'processing ecology with Deleuze' lies in the processualizing and
singularization of the subject, in its immersion within the horizontal
planomenon of flattened hierarchies and within the overall 'mentality' –
and mental ecology – of the haecceities that make up the plane of
immanence. Ultimately, 'processing ecology with Deleuze' means never to
forget that, in our origami world, "the eco-mental system called Lake Erie
is part of your wider eco-mental system – and that if Lake Erie is driven
insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and
experience" (Bateson 492).
Notes
1
The explicitly environmental perspective is presented in Félix Guattari’s
programmatically ecological writings that directly combine ecological categories
with political activism. See esp. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul
Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). Guattari draws on Bateson's ecological
views for developing a politically relevant ecosophy. See Verena Andermatt
Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London:
Routledge, 1997), 91-107.
2
Deleuze sees Leibniz's genius in his metaconceptual innovation: "It is also widely
held that Leibniz brings a new conception of the concept that transforms
philosophy" (Fold 42).
3
See, for example, Eugene P. Odum, "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development,"
Science 164 (April 1969): 262-70.
4
http://www.ecostudies.org/definition_ecology.html
5
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was rewarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2007 for the final proof of global warming and the assessment of its
drastic consequences for the biosphere. This achievement emerged from a new
form of science organization and related policies. To observe the climate system,
the cooperation of hundreds of scientists all over the world is necessary.
http://www.ipcc.ch (Apr 29. 2008).
6
"What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two
systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses […].
Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream"
(Whitehead, The Concept of Nature 30).
7
At first sight, 'immanence and transcendence,' 'the virtual and the actual,' 'the
smooth and the striated,' 'deterritorialization and reterritorilization,' etc. are all
conceptual pairs of seeming binary polarity. An Anti-Hegelian, Deleuze never
posits them within a dialectic of sublation that blends conflicting poles into a
unifying fusion. Instead, Deleuzian philosophy treats such pairs as the limits
demarcating a zone of indiscernibility, i.e., the very zone of their continuous
intermediation.
64 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
8
"[A]ccording to emergentist materialism the appearance and refinement of
cognitive abilities, be it in the individual or in the species, far from being
mysterious, is an aspect of the development or the evolution of the brain
interacting with the rest of the body as well as with its natural and social
environment" (Bunge 105).
9
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between two planes
conceptualized as "the plane of immanence" and "the plane of transcendence." The
function of the latter is restricted to the 'organized' development of forms and the
formation of subjects (267-68); it accommodates the dimensionality of hierarchic
developments and organizations. The plane of transcendence/organization
corresponds to the planomenon's noetic facet (see What Is Philosophy? 38).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. "Absolute Immanence." Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 220-39.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2000).
Bunge, Mario. Scientific Materialism (London: D. Reidel Publishing
Company, 1981).
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
http://www.ecostudies.org/definition_ecology.html (Apr. 27 2008)
Conley, Tom. "Translator's Foreword." Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1993), ix-xix.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2000).
—. "Immanence: A Life." Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Trans. Anne
Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25-33.
—. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
—. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004).
—. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Trans.
Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2006).
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003).
—. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson
(London: Verso, 1994).
Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22-
27.
Leyla Haferkamp 65
MICHAEL MIKULAK
Naturecultures
The purpose of most environmentalist discourse is to account for the
material, epistemological, spiritual, political, and economic conditions that
have resulted in the current environmental crisis. The discourse is thus
70 The Rhizomatics of Domination
Like anyone trying to theorize the link between nature and culture,
Darwin was faced with the problem of producing "objective knowledge"
Michael Mikulak 71
while being embedded within the very system he was observing. Gillian
Boer addresses precisely this problem when she analyzes the disjuncture
between language and content within Darwin's project, which she
identifies as the decentering of humanity in the kinship chain of Nature, an
effort that resonates well with ecocriticism's attempt to challenge the logic
of anthropocentrism and move towards a sustainable, biocentric
worldview. Donald Worster agrees, stating that "the figure of Darwin must
remain the most imposing and persuasive force behind the biocentric
movement" (187).
However, if language is inherently anthropocentric, and we are
linguistic creatures, how can we ever hope to understand a world outside
of ourselves and respect the goals of non-human nature? Is biocentrism
even a tenable position? Should we perhaps be seeking a stronger
distinction between humans and the world, rather than collapsing the two?
Or is this perceived separation simply a linguistic artifact? How can we
speak of/within Nature if language predisposes us towards all sorts of
humanistic biases? Does this even matter? Gillian Beer asks: "If the
material world is not anthropocentric but language is so, the mind cannot
be held to truly encompass and analyze the properties of the world that lie
about it" (Darwin's Plots 45). Darwin seems very aware of this, frequently
bringing attention to the linguistic limitation of his own theories. In The
Origin of Species, he states that "I use the term Struggle for Existence in a
large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on
another" (62). Donna Haraway argues that "biology is also not a culture-
free universal discourse, for all that it has considerable cultural, economic,
and technical power to establish what will count as nature throughout the
planet Earth" (Vampires 323). Darwin seems painfully aware of this, and
perhaps for this reason, avoids mentioning humanity in the Origin of
Species. However, precisely because Darwin is trying to explain
something that exceeds the anthropocentric focus of language, the
discourse of evolution can easily be manipulated to serve various political
ends.
Moreover, because the act of description and observation necessarily
results in the transformation of the thing being observed, any theory of
nature that does not take into account its production as a human discourse
is dangerous and hugely problematic. Thus, even if one is seeking a non-
anthropocentric theory, to avoid the human is to obfuscate the ideological,
economic, and political conditions of emergence that necessarily shape
any theory of nature or culture. It is irresponsible and naive at best, and
incredibly dangerous and fascistic at worse. For example, Earth First!ers
tend to look at human beings ecologically, or as one more "natural
72 The Rhizomatics of Domination
population" that has exceeded the carrying capacity of its range; hence,
like rabbits, algae, deer, or locusts in similar circumstances, there must be
a catastrophic crash or mass die-off to re-equilibrate networks of
ecological exchange. The most famous and problematic incarnation of this
position was an article in the Earth First! journal that argued that AIDS
was a good thing because it would reduce the pressures of human
population on the earth, and consequently, governments should do nothing
to help African countries with the epidemic. Although this statement was
later retracted, the Earth First! tendency to take a virulently anti-humanist
stance has problematic ramifications for the ethico-political communities
of kinship they imagine. Although they embrace a profoundly ecological
view that equates all life, they tend to exclude humans from many of their
accounts, and thus cannot address issues of environmental justice and the
role of hierarchical and exploitative social and political ecologies that
produce the conditions of environmental degradation. Chim Blea, a
pseudonym for a member of Earth First!, argues that: "We as Deep
Ecologists recognize the transcendence of the community over any
individual, we should deal with all individuals—animal, plant, mineral,
etc. – with whom we come into contact with compassion and bonhomie"
(Ecocritique 23). The (eco)fascistic tendencies emerge in the complete
subsumption of the individual to an imagined community, without a
framework being established for adjudicating how, what, and where one
organism should live, and another die. If everyone is truly equal, then what
does it matter if nature dies in order for humanity to survive? In a strange
way, any biocentric theory must take a detour through anthropocentrism.
And in this sense, Darwin is a key figure. He was instrumental in
shattering the Arcadian view of nature based on a Romantic concept of
pastoral harmony. His focus on struggle and violence unsettled people's
notion of a benevolent creator and creation in place for humankind.
Popular kinship imaginaries now had to contend with a natural world that
was decidedly inhumane and violent, denuded of a benevolent original
mover that provided all life with the means to survive, and the divine right
for human domination. What emerged, according to Donald Worster, was
a "dismal science" of nature red in tooth and claw, even though Darwin
himself placed a high degree of emphasis on mutual aide and cooperation.
This had the effect of decentring humanity and thus providing the
necessary first steps towards a biocentric environmental ethic of
rhizomatic interconnectivity. However, it also tended to provide the
ideological naturalization of violence, competition, and hiearchalized
human superiority. The same act of decentring had profoundly antithetical
consequences in terms of humbling and aggrandizing humanity within the
Michael Mikulak 73
networks of worldly kinship, making humans on the one hand, just one
member of the great chain of being, and on the other, the rightful
conquerors and creators of an earthly garden of Eden (cf Merchant). Thus,
"to dwell on the violence and suffering in Nature was, from the mid-
nineteenth century on, to be 'realistic'" (Nature's Economy 128).
While Worster is correct in identifying Darwin's role in the scientific
disenchantment of the Arcadian view of nature, and the shift from an
economic model based on harmony, divine providence, and abundance, to
an economy of competition, violence, and suffering, a careful attention to
Darwin's language reveals a much more complex interaction between
competition and cooperation, one that is more in line with a rhizomatic
conception of nature, than an arboreal one. For example, In Descent of
Man, Darwin is very biocentric, arguing that "nature appears as a world
essentially held together by lines of 'mutual love and sympathy'" (182).
This was very typical of Darwin's work, and he would often seek to
simultaneously affirm and deny the struggle for existence as violent and
competitive, attempting the delicate balance of holding mutualism and
competition in a dynamic flux. For example, he argues that "a plant on the
edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though
more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture" (Origin
62). The notion of arboreal hierarchy often ascribed to Darwin ignores
these frequent appeals to rhizomatic solidarity, and his careful attention to
the way language frames our understanding of kinship networks. In one
form or another, Darwin often stated: "all survival is socially determined,"
and nature is a "web of complex relations," in which "no individual
organism or species can live independently of that web" (Nature's
Economy 156). Especially if we consider Darwin's debt to Lyell, post-
Darwinian concepts of nature were rooted/routed through a continual flux
and migration of all life. Unlike the Linnaean notion of a divine order
where every organism was given a place in nature that did not change,
Darwin introduced a rhizomatic motion to nature that understood it as an
infinitely dynamic economy in a constant state of flux. No organism was
divinely appointed to a specific niche, and no environment was immune to
change. By shattering the notion of a divine mover and static creation,
Darwin's so-called tree of life begins to resemble a rhizome. There is no
such thing as balance and harmony: Nature is no longer static, it is a
rhizomatic structure of proliferating lines of flight that multiply endlessly
in perpetual de and reterritorialization between beings.
So how do we read the Origin of Species? Is its appeal to an
arborescent origin, or is it a prototype for rhizomatic thought? The notion
of origins and order is arborescent, but the principles of evolution are
74 The Rhizomatics of Domination
Arborescent Darwinism
Rockefeller: “The Growth of a large business is merely the survival of the
fittest”
—Darwin 487.
internally related to others and to nature, however, they tend to see life in
terms of bounty, not scarcity, and in terms of cooperation, not aggressive
competition. (242)
insects in the world, as a case where "mutual aid has entirely taken the
place of mutual struggle" (526).
The emphasis on struggle, even in Darwin, was likely the result of the
fact that Darwin relied on Malthus almost religiously, and thus failed to
theorize fertility itself as a product of natural selection, and as such, the
ratio between sexual productivity and food production remained dismal
and thus favored a view of nature based on competition. However, the
Malthusian ratio only applies under conditions of ecological disturbance
(Nature's Economy 155), and does not adequately account for species
differentiation as a force counter to competition. Thus, instead of
competing for the same food source, a species can differentiate and find a
new source. It can proceed rhizomatically rather than arboreally,
proliferating new shoots and lines of flight. Divergence allows organisms
to create new places in nature's economy without resorting to competition:
"Diversity was nature's way of getting round the fiercely competitive
struggle for limited resources" (Nature's Economy 161).
equivalence that GMO foods are not labeled in Canada and the US. By
shifting our understanding of the origins of the tree of life towards a
rhizomatic model, a new set of kinship imaginaries emerges, with
competing vectors of biopower emerging from the very same argument.
Once again, Darwin's own struggles are illustrative. For example, a
biocentric worldview was fostered by Darwin's removal of God from the
cosmic equation, since the Genesis invocation towards domination, and
the special place of man in the scala naturae was challenged (cf Merchant,
Lynn White Jr). However, as God was replaced as Nature's original
mover, and creation was seen as "replete with errors, weaknesses,
imperfections, and misfits" (Nature's Economy 175), the human place
within the order became much more amenable to a Baconian concept of
absolute domination. As such, "Man must proclaim himself Nature's
engineer and must then see about creating his own paradise on earth"
(Nature's Economy 176). This is very much the kind of discourse within
biotechnological circles, which refer to lateral gene transfer as nature's
genetic engineering, and thus justify their own socially, politically, and
economically mediated practice as somehow entirely natural (Trees and
Seas 348). Although the idea is not new, the rhizomatic flow of Archaea
provides a new mode of justification and framework for Man the
(bio)engineer, one that draws on rhizomatic and ostensibly ecological
kinship networks to justify unscrupulous economic, political, and
biological practices.
Thus, while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that rhizomes never allow
themselves to be overcoded (9), we can read biotechnological uses of
rhizomatic horizontal gene transfer (as a technique and as a discourse), as
precisely this kind of overcoding, whereby the organism is taken over by a
practice of signification and subjectification, in this case by the expansion
of capital into the interior space of cells and genes through patents. The
celebration of rhizomatic lines of flight fails to account for the rhizomatics
of domination present in the biopolitical over and re-coding of genetic
information through the patenting of life forms (IPRs), biopiracy, and
biotechnological research that seeks to colonize the very interior of life
itself (cf Shiva, Haraway). In a sense, the rhizome provides new inroads
for corporations to claim ownership on life by setting a precedent for
bioengineering in the very heart of evolution, and thereby naturalizing a
deeply colonial and parasitic relationship in a manner that echoes what
happened to Darwin's theories.
Stephen Helmreich explores this further by examining the potential
restructuring of kinship imaginaries in new scientific research on Archaea.
He argues that "the taxonomic untidiness such microbes have introduced
80 The Rhizomatics of Domination
through their lateral gene transfer reaches beyond issues in phylogeny and
molecular systematics into arenas adjacent to kinship concerns and
biopolitics" (341). By potentially shifting the meaning of bios in the
biopolitical equation, these microbes may usher in a revolution of
biotechnological discourse akin to Darwin's, realigning the vectors of
biopower within new constellations of violence in the name of social good.
The common argument launched by companies like Monsanto who claim
that GMO crops, like Golden Rice, are the only way to feed the worlds
hungry masses, exploit rhizomatic concepts of evolution in order to
incorporate genetic codes into the informational economy. Thus, while
discourses of kinship, race and origins have moved away from talk of
miscegenation, this new rhizomatic openness is being greeted with a
concurrent closure of the genetic commons as corporations manipulate
new kinship imaginaries in order to patent life itself. This is especially the
case with the thermophyllic microbe Archaea, whose main commercial use
promises to increase the speed and efficiency of genetic engineering by
providing new viral vectors capable of transferring genetic information at
higher temperatures. Moreover, the "natural genetic engineering" (Trees
and Seas 348) of these microbes is being used as a justification for human
engineering, which is interpreted as natural and safe. However, as
Vandana Shiva points out, this reductionist view of nature, with
conveniently shifting discourses of artifice and nature used to
simultaneously justify the safety of "naturally" engineered organisms, and
the appeal to scientific creation and novelty for the purposes of patenting,
ends with Nature being declared as "dead, inert, and valueless" (24).
Corporations are thus able to recode biodiversity as a genetic investment
strategy (Vampires 351), and use the flexibility of rhizomatic kinship in
the same opportunistic and selective way that Darwin's contemporaries
took up the struggle for existence as a justification for fierce capitalistic
competition. Thus, while on the surface the conceptual untidiness of
rhizomatic, lateral gene transfer has the potential to strangle "the roots of
the infamous tree" (A Thousand Plateaus xiii) and provide new kinship
imaginaries capable of dealing with a messy and interdependent world, it
is fundamentally important that we ask "how a genetically shuffled bios
might be inscribed into new biopolitics" (Trees and Seas 342).
In the rhizomatics of domination characteristic of corporate funded
genetic engineering and biopiracy, the benefits of rhizomatic kinship are
subsumed by the hierarchical accumulation of capital, while the dangers of
biological contamination, the development of super-viruses and weeds,
and the devaluing of traditional forms of knowledge are felt horizontally
by the entire biocultural network of organisms. Taxonomy is shifting from
Michael Mikulak 81
kind to Brand, from Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer to Man™
and Woman™ (Vampires 350). So while these marine organisms
challenge the genealogical origins of species and open up the possibility
for the kinds of kinship connections Haraway valorizes in Cyborgs and
Vampires, a radically open concept of kinship also leaves us prone to a
rhizomatics of domination. We can take a lesson from the ways in which
Darwinism became a justification for forms of biopower he no doubt
would have found egregious. There is much in rhizomatic theory that
makes it invaluable for theorizing new forms of kinship necessary for
addressing the unhealthy relationships humans have with the planet in the
age of ecological crisis. However, in the same way that Darwinism
became used to justify fascistic and nationalistic forms of power,
rhizomatic theory is very amenable to reconfigurations of bios within
biotechnological discourses of life. By using Darwin as a kind of test case,
we can resist the rhizomatics of domination from choking the roots of a
very different kind of plant, one which, if we are careful, has the potential
to knit a network of kinship capable of addressing the messy and
complicated environmental crisis we now face.
Notes
1
This essay was first published in Rhizomes 15 (Winter 2007)
2
Kinship imaginaries are discourses about the relationship between nature and
culture that focus on the ways in which humans relate to the world and ultimately
each other.
3
I am specifically thinking about the way that systems of networks and
information, while liberating us from certain older forms of oppression and
domination, open up whole new systems of power that may be more difficult to
locate and resist.
Works Cited
Appleman, Philip (Ed.) Darwin (New York: Norton & Company, 1970).
Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd Edition (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000).
Behnke, Elizabeth. "From Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Nature to an Inter-
Species Practice of Peace." Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and
Animal Life. Ed. Peter Steves (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Capra, Fritjof. "Systems Theory and the New Paradigm." Key Concepts in
Critical Theory: Ecology. Ed Carolyn Merchant (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1994).
82 The Rhizomatics of Domination
ANTHONY LARSON
ideas that one initially has concerning the text are corrected and appended
in such a manner that new ideas are formed that allow one to read and act
in entirely novel ways. Naess says that to approach thought in such a
manner "implies acts of understanding performed with the maximum
perspective possible" (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
translator's introduction iii). One might once again object that such talk of
thought, understanding and action has little to do with ecology or the
environment. This would again be a mis-reading for what occurs with this
particular Deleuzian approach to thought and to that most everyday of
actions which is reading and the interpretation of signs around us is a
transformation of neutral terms such as "environment" or "individual." The
text transmits affects but the affects are nothing without the "plane of
consistency," "environment," or "individual" in which those affects act.
The environment or the individual are not simple categories that require
mapping and understanding in a passive manner (asking what the
environment is, for example) but fields of forces, the actions of which we
strive to experience. What can we experience when we read? What
happens to us when we walk in the forest or on the ocean shore? What
happens to the shore or the forest when we walk in it? In each of these
questions, the framework of the environment changes in perhaps a
superficial manner but the more profound question of understanding how
such an environment acts does not. To say that "everything is the
environment" would be rather reckless, but this extension of the way one
thinks the environment to places such as the text and reading is important.
It allows one to go beyond sophisticated repetitions of an already ancient
cleavage in which the "environment" comes into existence as an
epistemological object of the philosophical subject. Indeed, extending the
environment outward in this manner is extremely Deleuzian in the same
manner that his thought is an attempt to excavate the plane of immanence
in all instances of transcendence. Perhaps the most radical "Deleuzian
environmentalism" would be one in which the term "environment"
disappeared and left its place to "thinking." This move is far from
convincing and it is thus necessary to put this theory to the test.
Practically speaking it is through an encounter with perhaps one of the
greatest classics of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet
Letter, that one might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake.
For it is in this masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of
living open before the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an
interpretation in which the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which
it so often appears, so that a pre-existing judgment may be confirmed,
mirroring the critical reading of the Puritan protagonists. On the other
Anthony Larson 87
hand, signs are often not what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious
and vital energy that upon closer examination escapes the pre-determined
judgment of the reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscernibility that
escapes definitive interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by
Hawthorne's famous "bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a
textual process has several consequences. First, moving through the two
levels of reading, one discovers how the text is structured by different
zones of intensity which then feed into a second and more important
encounter between the reader and the text, opening one up to a larger
textual process that goes beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger
process, in its nature un-foreseeable and incalculable in advance, tends
toward what Deleuze would call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the
intensities of the reader and the text become something that is neither
textual nor "human." That this should occur in a text that so
fundamentally confronts the desire to master and read in nature the "signs
of man" brings this study back full circle to the overt and radical attack on
the human subject that is Deleuzian thought.
As many critics have noted one of the reasons Hawthorne's novel
remains so powerful and attractive today is because it dares the reader to
undertake a strategy of reading based on judgment in which one overlays
one's own prejudices or worldviews in order to better "see through" the
text and decipher its lessons. That is, the plot is propelled forward by the
thinly hidden but nonetheless extra-textual affair between the Reverend
Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne for which Hester suffers and pays
her debt of the scarlet letter while Dimmesdale apparently escapes his
judgment but suffers another more debilitating and fateful punishment in
the end. In such a plot, the reader often very willingly goes along with
Hester's Puritan judges and ministers and is also only too happy to follow
the investigations of Roger Chillingworth, Hester's "lost" husband who has
returned to the Puritan colony to exact his revenge on Dimmesdale.
Indeed, it is in this judicial equation of a debt of pain for a sin committed
that Henry James finds the novel at its most interesting:
The story goes on, for the most part, between the lover and the husband—
the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own
lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends
itself to the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his
guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to the
misery of atonement—between this more wretched and pitiable culprit, to
whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, the
older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has
suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with
88 How to Become a Reader
his wronger, living with him, living upon him; and while he pretends to
minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his
unsuspected knowledge of these things, and stimulates them by malignant
arts. (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed. 232)
From this critical position, it is only a small step to the next one in
which the abundance of tropes in Hawthorne's novel invites the
investigative and judgmental reader to fill in the textual gap and draw the
pastor's secret out in the daylight, in a manner that mirrors Chillingworth's
own investigation. It is just this danger that James famously finds to be the
text's weakness taking as an example the remarkable scene from the
twelfth chapter when Dimmesdale is drawn to the pillory in the middle of
the night and calls a passing Hester and Pearl to join him:
But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and
wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those
meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to
waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its
radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt
the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense
lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects
by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories
and quaint gable-peaks; the door-steps and thresholds, with the early grass
springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth;
the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with
green on either side; -- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that
seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than
they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with this hand
over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering
on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link
between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets and the daybreak
that shall unite all who belong to one another. (101-102)
For James, all the subtlety and poetry of this passage is lost when
Hawthorne says, "…the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld
there the appearance of an immense letter—the letter A—marked out in
lines of dull red light" (102) since the appearance of the central symbol in
the novel is "mechanical" and "grazes triviality" (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed.
233). In other words, James is wary of the way the text invites the reader
to close the tropic and allegorical gap a little too quickly and to see in the
night's "unaccustomed light" a "moral interpretation" that simply draws
out the secret at the heart of the novel's plot. There is a certain amount of
Anthony Larson 89
pleasure in this type of approach to the text in that it permits the reader to
close in on the extra-textual mystery of the text, to determine who has
done what and perhaps even to participate vicariously in Dimmesdale's
punishment.
"Seeing through" the text in this manner is also another way of
mastering signs, and in this particular example, signs of nature. In a
manner similar to that of the vicarious judgment that one feels when
reading Hawthorne's text, the reader closes the textual gap offered her/him
in the dichotomy set up between the Puritan civilization and the sinful
wilderness into which Hester is cast. Thus, on a walk through the woods
shared by Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl, Hawthorne offers a textual trap
similar to the one mentioned above in that he dares the reader to read in
nature's signs the mirror-image of sins, secrets and sufferings of his
protagonists:
Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the
reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but
soon lost all traces of it amide the bewilderment of tree-trunks and
underbrush, and here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens.
All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a
mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its
never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tale out of the heart of the old
forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a
pool. (120)
Once again, the reader is dared into decoding the reasons that Hester
and Pearl find themselves banished to the "wilderness" of the young
colony and it is the process of this decoding itself, in that it requires the
reader to set up a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and
meaning, that sets up the structuring dichotomy between Puritan
civilization and "sinful" wilderness. As Hawthorne reminds his reader,
"Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less
regularity than the rise and set of the sun and moon, as so many
revelations from a supernatural source" (102). Seeing through Hawthorne's
symbols is to reveal things based on this supernatural and transcendent
position where positions of judgment and dichotomies between Puritan
civilization and wilderness are founded.
Of course reading in this manner is inappropriate and the objection that
James raises to Hawthorne's text is really about how it allows itself to be
read by hasty and careless readers and not about the text itself. As any
reader looking to get to the literal heart of Dimmesdale's suffering knows,
90 How to Become a Reader
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy
minister, a SCARLET LETTER—the very semblance of that worn by
Hester Prynne—imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there were
various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural.
Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when
Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of
penance, -- which afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out, --
by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma
had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger
Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear,
through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again—and
those best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the
wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body,—whispered their belief,
that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse,
gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's
dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. (162-3)
Instead of closing the critical gap, the scarlet letter (both the symbol
and the text itself) holds off any final and deciding interpretation,
reminding us that "The reader may choose among these theories" (163).
The scarlet letter is everything but the unadulterated symbol that the hasty
reader hopes to find in order to fix his/her judgment once and for all. This
play of words on the scarlet letter's "A" (which is anything but original
and, one suspects, almost desired by Hawthorne) is the linchpin of a poor
reading of the text and the desire to see through its tropes, for judgment
always depends on a transcendent (or one might say, unadulterated)
position outside of the text in order to make a final decision. What James
sees as "mechanical" or "trivial" is the transcendent tribunal that
Hawthorne's symbols (the scarlet letter itself, Hester's illegitimate
daughter, Pearl, the rose that opens the first chapter of the novel, the
engraved shield on the tombstone that closes the novel, Hester's exile in
the wilderness, the babbling and secretive brook, etc.) tend to set in motion
in the careless or poor reader. That is, where James detects what he calls a
slipping from moral tragedy to physical comedy, there is the erection of a
tribunal of judgment in the reader's mind in which the symbol's fluidity is
reduced and narrowed to a logic of one-to-one correspondence. The logic
Anthony Larson 91
bodies can and cannot do and not by morality (which is, of course, the way
a swimming pool is most often presented: "Forbidden and off limits!").
Once again, Deleuze explains this vision of a world beyond good and evil
in exemplary terms:
Hence good and bad have thus a primary, objective meaning, but one that
is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature does not agree
with it. And consequently, good and bad have a secondary meaning, which
is subjective and modal, qualifying two types, two modes of man's
existence. That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or
strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to
join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with
relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power.
For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power and the composition of
powers. That individual will be called bad or servile, or weak, or foolish
who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his
encounters, but wails and accuses every time effect undergone does not
agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in
this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that
with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself,
how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one
keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment,
spreading one's own powerlessness and enslavement everywhere, one's
own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to
encounter oneself. (Spinoza 22-3)
After this long detour through Deleuze's Spinoza, morality and ethics,
we are at last capable of returning to our central questions concerning
literature. It should be clear by now that correct or empowering readings
of literature and the encounter with the text should be seen in Spinozist
terms. Literature is an empowering experience and the best texts awaken
abilities in us that we did not know existed. The unprepared or careless
reader is quick to try to fill the critical gap between Hawthorne's symbols
(especially that most central one, the scarlet letter itself) and a judging and
measuring eye but if he/she is open enough and capable enough, the
frustration he/she experiences in attempting to make that very judgment, to
limit the scarlet letter to a simple and unadulterated truth, opens him/her
up to something else. This something else is what Deleuze, unsurprisingly,
calls literature's affair of health:
Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would
necessarily be in good health […] but he possesses an irresistible and
delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard things too big
for him, too strong for him, suffocating things, whose passage exhausts
Anthony Larson 95
When the minister gazes at the sky from the scaffold during his night
vigil, he does not see the scarlet letter but an immense letter and it is this
impersonal but highly singular and powerful letter/text that speaks to the
empowered reader of Hawthorne's novel. As one moves from the desire to
judge, to personalize the stakes of the text to this larger, stuttering (the
many options that the reader is left to choose at the end of Hawthorne's
text) and impersonal reading, one moves through two different "fields" or
deployments in life—one weaker and servile and another stronger and
freer in life. Furthermore, moving through these readings, through this
passage of Life, is also something from which one never "recovers." One
of the authors Deleuze is fond of citing is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in
particular, his autobiographical text, The Crack-Up in which the author
chronicles his fall into alcoholism. It is easy to see why such a text
attracted Deleuze, especially in Fitzgerald's description of "molecular"
changes that break down one's "molar" structure (another way of putting
this passage of Life in literature):
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the
dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to
come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in
96 How to Become a Reader
moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at
once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't
feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality
that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of
breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without
your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (69)
Notes
1
This is an illustration of the Spinozist theory of parallelism: there is no hierarchy
between mind and body and (much like Nietzsche and Freud) Spinoza believes that
it is often through the body that the mind can discover unedited powers. Deleuze
explains, "There are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness
than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So it is by one and the
same movement that we shall manage, if possible, to capture the power of the body
beyond the given conditions of our knowledge and seize the power of the mind
beyond the given conditions of our consciousness. One seeks to acquire a
knowledge of the power of the body in order to discover, in a parallel fashion, the
powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to compare these
powers. In short, the model of the body according to Spinoza does not imply any
devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important, a
Anthony Larson 97
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition Trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
—. Essays Critical and Clinical Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
—. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Light Books, 1988).
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Crack-Up ed. Edmund Wilson (New York:
New Directions, 1993).
James, Henry. "Critical Essay." The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E.
Hudson Long (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962).
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland
Person (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
A SILENT DANCE:
ECO-POLITICAL COMPOSITIONS
AFTER UEXKÜLL'S UMWELT BIOLOGY
TOM GREAVES
only be a question of the where and how of the composition, but of the
type of composition and of what transpires in the performance. In "A stroll
through the worlds of animals and men" Uexküll describes a sequence that
rolls forward in such a way that, "The effector cue or meaning
extinguishes the receptor cue or meaning" (324). Now if each meaningful
cue or "tone" were utterly extinguished as it is followed by the next then
the musical composition would never hold together. Is it not the case that a
meaningful cue in nature "hangs" like a musical note, whilst being
transformed by the following tone? The theory of "Nature as Music"
which Deleuze and Guattari refer to when they cite this text in plateau 11
of A Thousand Plateaus, is perhaps better exemplified in Uexküll's
somewhat later text "Theory of Meaning."1 There each of the "meaning
receptors" of the tick is set out in a table over and against the "meaning
carriers" of the mammal. The first are said to be points and the latter
counterpoints (Uexküll, Bedeutungslehre 146). Just as the wasp and the
orchid that Deleuze and Guattari describe form an assemblage, the tick and
mammal are also in concert. We are thus presented with a theory of
composition in nature, which Uexküll thinks can be utilised in
understanding both what he calls the "mechanics of nature," which
includes ontogeny and ethology, and the "technics of nature," or
phylogeny.
Later in "Theory of Meaning" Uexküll describes two experiences
which led him to develop the idea of parallels between biology and music.
The first was at a Mahler concert in Amsterdam. During the concert he
was sitting next to a young man who was studiously reading the score
throughout. Uexküll, "musically uneducated" as he puts it, asked what can
be gained from reading the score which cannot be immediately gained
from hearing the piece played. The young man passionately replied that
only those who can follow the score can see how each particular
instrument and voice form a point and counterpoint, so that they then melt
together into a higher form. This led Uexküll to ask himself whether it is
not the task of biology to "write the score of nature" (154). Of course, this
does not mean that a score is to be written for nature to follow. Uexküll is
clear that the idea of a "compositional theory of nature" should not lead us
to the mistaken belief that there are general rules of composition that
nature itself can teach. The score that is to be written is a score composed
from nature, like the musical poems of Messiaen, taken from the song of
birds. Neither straightforward reproduction nor a set of general principles
of composition, such a biology would allow us to find coherence in a
multitude of voices, without liquidising their multiplicity.
102 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology
The second musical event which inspired Uexküll to think about the
idea of biological composition was a performance of the Matthew Passion
played in Hamburg. The song moved forwards with a real destiny, but one
which was totally unlike the progress that the "fantasies of researchers"
see in the processes of nature:
Why should the violent drama of nature, that has rolled on since the
appearance of life on earth, in its highs and lows, not be, like the Passion,
one single composition?
Was the highly prized progress, that is supposed to lead living beings from
incomplete beginnings to an ever greater completeness, at ground simply a
petty bourgeois speculation concerning the increasing profit of business?
(164)
It is easy to see the power that such a fantasy still exercises. Despite
the ever increasing clamor of resistance to any thought which displays the
slightest hint of finalism, there is still a strong tendency to view the history
of life more or less as a progression. Even if it is no longer thought as a
progression from incompleteness to completeness, the complexity of
living systems is still imagined to increase in a more or less linear
trajectory, interrupted by the occasional catastrophe. What is thereby
misunderstood is that the complexity of a composition is not to be
measured by the actual diversity of is elements at any one time. It may be
that we need to rethink not only the history of life but our attitude towards
the conservation or cultivation of biological diversity with an ear for the
overall coherence of the composition.
It is that coherence, rather than any latent finalism, that Uexküll is
thinking of when he continually refers to the plan of nature. He is careful
not only to distinguish the idea of a plan from that of a goal, but to insist
that the "will-o'-the-wisp" of a goal must be extinguished from our
contemplation of Umwelten. This can only be effectively done by drawing
attention towards the over-all plan, into which it is possible that certain
teleological actions may be dovetailed (Uexküll, Stroll 352-3). The plan is
therefore not a plan of action, nor even a fixed ground plan, but the plane
of consistency where Umwelten are composed. The history of life is seen
as a single composition, but this does not imply the presence of a
composer other than the biologist who composes from nature and not for
it. Uexküll already goes a long way towards the destratification of this
plane by insisting that every Umwelt is as "complete" as another and also
that, as Deleuze and Guattari put it: "Above all, there is no lesser, no
higher or lower, organization" (Deleuze and Guattari, 77).
Tom Greaves 103
But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species
independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of
another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with
its milieus. Territorialisation is precisely such a factor that lodges on the
margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate
representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is
because there is a disjunction between the territory and the code that the
territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever territoriality appears,
it establishes an intraspecific critical distance between members of the
same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction in relation to specific
differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means of differentiation.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 355)
and the earth. The Ur-refrain of the earth beats out a rhythm which strikes
against all territorial and milieu refrains:
The little tune, the bird refrain, has changed: it is no longer the beginning
of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the earth. It is no longer
made of two consonant parts that seek and answer one another; it addresses
itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also strikes against it and
sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is indissolubly
constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth that arises to
drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the
Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the
assemblages of the bird, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal
breathing of the earth. (Deleuze and Guattari, 374)
The rhythm of the earth takes in all of the territorial expressions but
also harnesses and overwhelms them. The earth carries each territorial
refrain before it and they in turn can be deterritorialised by it, although
they remain under its sway. The earth founds territories, but it does not
leave them behind, it forces them into continuous variation.
The dissonance to be heard in the creation of specific difference, on the
other hand, is not that of a pulsing earth that carries all along with it, but of
the lag of those who cannot keep pace. It was Bergson who identified this
rhythm of speciation. He complained that radical finalism conceives
evolution on the model of, "a musical concert, wherein the seeming
discords are really meant to bring out a fundamental harmony" (128).
Nothing of the kind is to be found in the evolution of life. However, the
mistake lies not in the musical metaphor but in the failure to hear a basic
rhythmic difference:
Life is always lagging behind itself. That is not because of some failure
to keep time, but because the very mobility which creates a path for itself
must of necessity lay down a road which it is reluctant to leave behind.
Rather than the deep pulse of the earth sounding behind each refrain we
hear the plodding lag of living beings whose very way of life has forced
them into a niche. None of this is to say that territory and niche are to be
absolutely distinguished in terms of this rhythmic difference. Once more,
territory and niche are each marked out rhythmically, but there is nothing
to say that the marking of a distance might not also create a difference.
108 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology
The woodworm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is
encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means
together with this encircling ring of its own, finds itself in turn within the
ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And this
woodpecker finds itself in all this within the encircling ring of the squirrel
which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness within the
rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized
Tom Greaves 111
The gulf that Heidegger insists upon here is often taken as evidence
that he cannot adequately think the proximity of Dasein to animality or
anything like becoming-animal. But upon closer inspection it becomes
clear that although our imagination can often fail us, ecological thought is
not fundamentally an exercise of any special imaginative capacity. The
very movement through the worlds of woodworm and woodpecker and
squirrel is that of Dasein that finds itself in the midst of these encircling
rings. It is not that Dasein stands somewhere outside of this ecological
interplay or tries to imagine itself in the midst of these intersecting circles.
The manifestation takes place in the "going-along-with" the worm which
at the same time is the traversal of the whole composition of encircling
rings. "World-forming" has nothing to do with the moulding of unformed
matter. It is the traversal and translation of the chaos of forms that intersect
in this ecological dimension. There is an echo of the Chaosmos here. Each
encircling ring persisting in what is its own, threatened by the surrounding
chaos, but also in itself engulfed by the others, shot through by lines of
flight from which its very own milieu is composed.
In the final analysis, we may find that the boundaries that Heidegger is
constantly marking and remarking are themselves composed from
movements and traversals that constitute an ecological dimension without
underlying unity. There is a despeciation on the ecological plane which
runs alongside and intersects with deterritorialization. It is only in the
intersections, the movements of traversal, that the "its own" of each
specific ring is composed. That is why Heidegger too, like Deleuze and
Guattari, questions the idea of a linear evolution, a straightforward
unfolding of differentiation from an undifferentiated primordial slime,
which does not take account of the way that differentiation is repeatedly
marked out and as such open to despeciation. The contextual ring in which
an animal lives out its life is not marked out for it before it begins to live.
The genetic code itself, together with the all important margin of decoded
code, is one of the materials taken up in the composition of what is
specific to that life. Its specific meaning is produced in the movement it
composes along with others. As such the specific tones which each living
being can produce and become attuned to only gain their specificity as part
of the whole composition.
112 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology
It is true enough that even though the different voices are heard
simultaneously, their tones and rhythms never coincide, and hence they are
absolutely to be distinguished from one another. But this very absoluteness
makes the differences between them problematic. Not only does everything
go back to a unified, identical basic material, so that distinctions collapse
into sameness; but also the all-inclusive nature of the distinguishing
principle turns everything into one single thing. Differences are eroded into
complimentaries; the antithetical nature of counterpoint, the representative
of freedom, is submerged in synthesis without retaining its identity. (139-
40)
learn to listen. Not just to the great silence from which every mus-
ecological composition is born, the silence which penetrates the whole but
which can also induce a thirst for annihilation. We need to learn to listen
to the smaller but equally powerful silences which sustain the
composition. "The animal is," Merleau-Ponty writes, "like a quiet force"
(177). It emerges from the physiochemical conditions, but not as their
effect. The whole interpenetration of strata on the plane of consistency
makes up, according to Deleuze and Guattari, "a silent dance" (77).
Furthermore, the very creations which can be locked-down or turn bad in
annihilation arrive in silence:
Notes
1
Ronald Bogue also points to the significance of this later text for gaining a full
understanding of Uexküll's theory. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and
the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003) 58-62. It has been published both in
German and in French translation in a single volume together with "A stroll
through worlds of animals and men."
2
Gary Genosko has explored Deleuze and Guattari's confrontation with Lorenz in
some detail in his, "'A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression: Poster fish, bower
birds, and spiny lobsters," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24 no.3
(1997): 529-42.
3
The significance of this "ontological value of species" and the central importance
of Uexküll's "melodic" theory of animality for Merleau-Ponty's understanding of it
has been carefully explored by Mauro Carbone in his The Thinking of the Sensible:
Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004),
Chapter 2 "Nature: Variation on a Theme." For our purposes the question would be
whether Merleau-Ponty does not remain too "painterly" in his understanding of the
problem. Does he not lock the ontological value of species into the reciprocity of
vision? Does he not need to distinguish "two movements of creation" as Deleuze
and Guattari do, the painterly moving from the soma to the germen and the musical
moving form the germen to the soma? cf. (Deleuze and Guattari ,383-4).
Tom Greaves 115
4
Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and Windus,
2005) 108-11.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. "The Function of Counterpoint in the New Music."
Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Standford
University Press, 1999).
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of
Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999).
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York:
Dover, 1998).
Bogue, Ronald Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York:
Routledge, 2003).
Carbone, Mauro The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-
Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004).
Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey. Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and
Windus, 2005).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian
Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004).
Genosko, Gary. "'A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression:' Poster fish,
bower birds, and spiny lobsters." Canadian Review of Comparative
Literature 24:3 (1997): 529-42.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
Hutchinson, G.E.. "Concluding Remarks." Cold Spring Harbour Symposia
on Quantitative Biology 22:2 (1957): 415-27.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de
France. Trans. Robert Vallier (Evaston: Northwestern University
Press, 2003).
von Uexküll, Jakob. "A stroll through the worlds of animals and man: A
picture book of invisible worlds." Semiotica 89:4 (1992): 319-91.
— Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen/
Bedeutungslehre (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1970).
DELEUZE AND DEEP ECOLOGY
ALISTAIR WELCHMAN
I
Deep ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first is to
the intrinsic value of nature.1 Surface ecology, by contrast, legitimates
various broadly ecological concerns with non-human nature on the basis of
their value as means for some human end. Deep ecology might for
instance argue in favor of restricting or forbidding pollution on the ground
that the pollution causes harm in nature; a surface ecologist might be able
to support exactly the same conclusion, but only because the same
pollution will cause harm to human beings. In this sense deep ecology is
an ethics of nature, the denial of the axiological version of humanism, i.e.
the denial of the view, exemplified by Kant, that human beings either
themselves constitute the only values or else are the only source for
values.2 Deep ecology can therefore be correctly described as a kind of
(axiological) anti-humanism, provided it is clear that the "anti" does not
negate human beings as such, but merely negates the view that human
beings are the sole sources of value.
From its initial formulations, deep ecology has always been bound up
with a second central commitment, the metaphysical claim that human
beings are nothing other than natural entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical
naturalism.3 In this sense, deep ecology is the denial of the metaphysical
version of humanism, i.e. a denial of the view, exemplified by Descartes,
that human beings are metaphysically distinct from natural beings.
Accordingly, deep ecology can also be understood as a kind of
(metaphysical) anti-humanism, with a suitably modified version of the
above proviso.
Deep ecologists manifest an obvious affinity for naturalistic
philosophical systems that assert the continuity of human beings with non-
human nature and therefore give naturalistic accounts of human beings
themselves. Naess alludes with some frequency to the work of Spinoza
(e.g. "Spinoza and Ecology"). And more recently connections have been
made with Nietzsche and Deleuze,4 who, not coincidentally, himself
Alistair Welchman 117
II
I think the transpersonal or transformative aspect of deep ecology is best
interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have
distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to
undo or reverse those processes. Thought of in this way, transpersonal
ecology has also called upon some philosophical heavyweights, just as the
metaphysical naturalism aspect did. Indeed, what have become the
standard axes of ideological distortion can be deployed in this new field.
Thus, Marxists may argue that our understanding of nature has been
distorted by commodification, in which the non-human world comes to be
understood primarily as an economic resource; similarly feminists (eco-
feminists) may argue that our understanding of nature has been distorted
by a patriarchal system that sustains itself by aligning women with nature
as a way of legitimating male domination.8
On a more clearly philosophical plane, thinkers as diverse as
Heidegger9 and Adorno,10 whose sophistication makes the term
Ideologiekritiker seem rather a bad fit, nevertheless have analyses
predicated on the presence of a deep distortion of nature in our experience
of the world. These thinkers are doubtless difficult to interpret. But what
makes them so difficult is, I think, their analysis of just how deep
ideological distortion goes. In the case of Heidegger the distortion
("technology") is the only way in which Being has, historically, ever in
fact been revealed to us.11 In the case of Adorno the distortion is bound up
with reason itself (in the form of instrumental rationality).12 As a result,
there is a certain pathos of the negative about both these writers that
centers around the sheer intellectual (and even more than intellectual)
difficulty of thinking beyond Western Metaphysics or Western
Rationality. But at the same time their projects would make no (or at least
less) sense if it were absolutely impossible to free oneself from the
"ideological" distortions. However provisional it may ultimately be, there
is a clear contrast in for instance Heidegger's "Question Concerning
Technology" between the understanding of the Rhine made manifest in a
hydroelectric plant and that manifest in Hölderlin's visionary poetry.13
Despite the variety of thinkers who can be positioned in place of a
psychological sense of personal transformation, there is nevertheless
considerable agreement on the centrality of Descartes in the construction
of the false conception of nature. Descartes breaks with the medieval idea
of the continuity of beings (and, a fortiori, of the continuity of human
beings with nature) that had dominated Western thought since Aristotle by
introducing a radical separation between human beings and what he now
Alistair Welchman 119
it. It should be noted however that the upshot of this position is a kind of
idealism about nature. The very fact that we are able to break through the
seamless interweaving of fact and value already demonstrates the
contingency of this conception of nature and suggests that the seamless
weave is not the real nature as it is in itself.
The last option is that nature itself is, in some sense, valuative, and that
this is what supports both the existence and importance of non-human
values and the valuation of human beings, understood as a part of nature.
This is a delicate matter, for how can it be distinguished from a selective
appeal to the authority of nature adopted as legitimation for a social
project? One way is to appropriate the Kantian insight offered by the
above analysis comparing Heidegger and Macintyre, but to prolong it in
precisely the opposite direction. Rather than retreating to nature as
phenomenon, the thought of nature can be expanded beyond the
phenomenal scope where it is restricted by properly scientific
considerations, transforming nature this time not in relation to a synthesis
of human interests, but by going beneath the phenomena, retrieving but
renewing a classical sense of the metaphysical. This, I take it, is the
attraction of thinkers like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze for (deep)
ecology.
III
Deleuze's conception of nature goes to unusual lengths to establish
continuity between the cultural, biological and even inorganic domains.
Deleuze's early assertion of a primary monism is articulated in his later
(collaborative) works in terms of an analytical vocabulary that is deployed
freely across all domains.24 Thus, in a Plateau on ethology, territorial
animal behavior (especially birdsong) is explained in terms derived from
human cultural production (of musical styles) and vice versa with such
suppleness that the twin objections of naturalizing the cultural and
aestheticizing nature are simultaneously undermined. It is humanistic
chauvinism not to attribute aesthetic ability to birds just as it is to deny
that high art is not also nature (see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, Plateau 11).
In collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze defends this view by
developing a thought of abstraction that is understood not as conceptual
generality but as interconnection across heterogeneous domains. This
difference can itself be understood using the crucial distinction between a
tree and a rhizome. Tree-like or arborescent structures are organized
according to a strict hierarchical principle, the most visible of which today
Alistair Welchman 123
is probably the organization chart. These charts (in which the arborescent
structure is upside down) start with a single trunk (the boss) who is the
superior of everybody. Everyone else in the organization either reports to
the boss, or reports to someone else who reports (ultimately) to the boss.
The significant feature of such structures for Deleuze is that
communication on one level is always mediated by someone on a higher
level. Until recently, the biosphere was itself understood as a tree (the tree
of life) in which present-day life forms were related by filiation through a
common ancestor somewhere higher up the tree. Deleuze and Guattari
were among the first philosophers to take note of the general import of the
revision to this model that has now become the standard for redrawing the
diagram of life, that is, the fact that genetic relatedness can also be
established by direct lateral connection between life forms. When Deleuze
and Guattari were writing, the only significant examples of this were
viruses. But now it is widely recognized that most life forms can be
assigned only a statistically approximate filiation because of the
dominance of inter-"specific" genetic exchange in bacteria. This idea of
lateral connectivity or networking is what Deleuze and Guattari call a
rhizome.25
There are even rhizomatic and arborescent conceptions of abstraction
itself. Conceptual classifications have, since Aristotle, followed the tree of
life quite directly: higher order concepts contain or encompass lower order
ones, traveling up to the most abstract concept (God, Being) and down to
ever more minutely distinguished aspects of reality.26 Abstraction here
carries its standard but arborescent connotation of lacking (specific)
content. But Deleuze and Guattari treat abstraction rhizomatically as the
possession of a greater ability to connect laterally or transversally. The
more connections to the more heterogeneous elements, the more abstract.27
Abstraction therefore knits together disparate domains at the same time
as it radicalizes the notion of multiple realizability by isolating "machinic"
fragments that can be effectuated in disparate domains. This is what
enables Deleuze and Guattari to avoid reductionism in either direction: it
is not that Deleuze and Guattari are projecting or anthropomorphizing
when they say that in the development of courtship and other rituals in
birds, "expressive matters" or "motifs" become "autonomous" and form a
"style" – even when this autonomy of the motif is immediately explicated
using the example of the Wagnerian musical motif wandering away, in the
score, from its assigned dramatic character on the stage (1980: 319). Nor
are they (the converse) giving a reductive account of human aesthetic
capacities, as if the latter were "just the same as" birdsong. Rather, the
same "abstract machine" is differentially effectuated in both cases.
124 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
Here Deleuze and Guattari insistently reject the idea that such inter-
domain assemblages result from a comparison or an analogy, a procedure
that would result in the privilege of one domain over another (see Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition 129ff). An affinity group is not rhizomatic
because it "compares itself" with couch grass or bacteria, but because all
three effectuate the same abstract machine.
The relative under-theorization of ecology in comparison with
evolutionary biology is exactly the victory of tree over rhizome since
ecology is the study of the systemic properties of the lateral connectivity
(alliance) between leaf nodes in the evolutionary tree of descent (filiation).
Nevertheless, despite Deleuze and Guattari's deep-seated metaphysical
naturalism, implacable hostility to the humanist perspective of
transcendence and detailed methodological commitment to the use of a
conceptual apparatus that resists anthropocentrism, there is still an only
uneasy juxtaposition between their work and (deep) ecology.
It should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari would fiercely resist
Warwick Fox's peon to the tree (Fox 253-4) even while acknowledging the
pernicious force of arborescent formations in biohistory. But the problem
is surely more general than this. Organicist interpretations of ecosystemic
relations have been rife in (deep) ecology, culminating in Lovelock's Gaia
hypothesis. They are probably on the wane now, but their replacement by
more vague terms like "interconnectedness" (e.g. Fox 245f) looks less than
half-hearted in comparison with Deleuze and Guattari's onslaught against
the (notion of the) organism as such in Anti-Oedipus, one of whose central
theoretical terms is the body without organs. Similarly, Deleuze and
Guattari strenuously resist any concept of holism: the whole, far from
having any priority over the parts (either valuative or ontological) is
simply a part produced alongside other parts. And, despite some
similarities of their work to a kind of general systems theory, they distance
themselves from this through a refusal of even the idea of effective
functioning.28
Perhaps most basic of all, is the singular importance in Deleuze and
Guattari's work from 1972 onwards of the term "machine." Of course, as
Halsey carefully notes, Deleuze and Guattari's machines, especially their
desiring-machines, are not "purely mechanical" (40).29
Is this disjunction between Deleuze and (deep) ecology a merely
superficial or terminological one, or is there a substantive disagreement?
To answer this question will require something of a detour, starting out
from the observation that it was already true for Descartes that machines
were not purely mechanical.
Alistair Welchman 125
such valuations in e.g. the case of predator-prey relations suggests that the
values one system posits may precisely be the abjection of another system.
There are possible answers to such questions, in for instance the –
sometimes now quite intricate – naturalistic ethics of evolutionary biology.
Such naturalistic approaches are no longer socially Darwinist: since the
1930s, work on inclusive fitness has shown how it is possible to develop
biologically based valuations that extend beyond the individual organism
to those that (may) share its genes. Still these fall short of even the
inclusion of all human beings, and so also fall short even of axiological
humanism (see Callicot).
Those deep ecologists like Callicot, who use this approach therefore
still need to appeal for a transformation of consciousness that will get us to
identify with not only non-kin but also non-human nature. Perhaps this can
be done. But the question remains: why should we engage in such a
process of identification? It cannot be just on the basis of the values
posited by life (the interest of a functional system is continuing to
function) since those values opened up the original gap that now needs to
be closed by identification. In other words: some extra valuation is also
required to motivate identification.
My hypothesis is that this further move can indeed be explained on the
basis of metaphysical naturalism, but only of a very specific kind.
Naturalizing the extrinsic Cartesian finality of machines through the
intrinsic finality of a living system yields a possible calculus of valuative
interests, but nothing more. What could motivate a transformative
identification with nature is not the mere fact that humans are a part of
nature, but the further claim that humans are, in some way, genuinely
metaphysically identical with (the rest of) nature.
An example of such a metaphysical naturalism is Schopenhauer's view
that individuated things (including organisms, and hence human beings)
possess, in addition to their material properties, a second, phenomenally
inaccessible, aspect: they are also will. For Schopenhauer individuation
itself is inapplicable to the will (this is his famous and highly original
interpretation of the familiar doctrine of the freedom of the will: the will is
free not because it is capable of free choice, but because it is free of the
form of individuation, the principium individuationis). It follows from this
that the will in itself is neither singular nor plural. For Schopenhauer
therefore it is false to say that each of us has a will. Rather each of us (and
every separate entity in non-human nature too) is at the same time the
same non-singular, non-plural, non-individuated will.
Schopenhauer characterizes the will as endless striving: striving
because it is willing; endless because if it had an end or aim or purpose,
128 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
Notes
1
In Arne Naess and George Sessions' canonical "Platform Principles of the Deep
Ecology Movement," the first principle reads: "The well-being and flourishing of
human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic
value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the
nonhuman world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Naess in
particular has tried to distance himself from any theory of intrinsic values in the
style of analytic philosophy, and has instead emphasized a kind of "ordinary
language" use of the term. See (Naess "Intrinsic Value" and Fox's discussion
(221f). In some ways the distinction seems misplaced because many analytic
philosophers use the terms "value" and "right" precisely to express the distinction
between value in general (axiology) and specifically moral rightness.
2
Kant's position is that only rational beings possess intrinsic value, because they
have (possibly) good wills. Strictly speaking this includes rational aliens and
rational supernatural beings like angels or god. I shall ignore these possibilities in
what follows. See Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).
3
Naess claims that "The ecosophies will, I suppose, be absorbed in the general
traditions of philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie)" (Ecology, Community and
Lifestyle 210).
4
See the pieces by Acampora, Hallman and Halsey as well as Patrick
Hayden's essay in this present volume. Bennett also makes use of Deleuze in her
attempt to establish a kind of "active" theory of matter. Her references to ecology
though are largely limited to its systems theoretic aspect rather than its "deep"
aspect.
5
In The New Ecological Order, Ferry locates Descartes' metaphysical
discontinuity between human beings and nature at the origin of the axiological
discontinuity constitutive of humanism that he rightly associates with Kant and
Sartre (see e.g. 3ff).
6
Naess' analysis of such a transformation in his conception of "identification"
("Spinoza and Ecology" 36ff). Fox's Towards and Transpersonal Ecology is a
book-length attempt to orient deep ecology in terms derived from the then-
fashionable transpersonal psychological analysis of Abraham Maslow. See
especially pages 225ff for a wealth of evidence that this transformative approach is
widespread among deep ecologists.
7
Fox claims that there are three grounds for identification with wider nature:
personal contact, ontological and cosmological (249ff). The last of these involves
an acknowledgement of the claim that we are all "aspects of a single unfolding
reality" (252).
8
It is of course also standard for Ideologiekritiker to argue that the concept of
"nature" is often deployed itself for ideological reasons, i.e. to present social
choices as inevitable. Indeed this may be the basic formula for all ideology. I will
132 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
address this issue below, but here the point is that such distorted conceptions of
nature presuppose the at least possible accessibility of an undistorted conception of
nature.
9
Heidegger has been repeatedly appropriated as an ecological thinker. See, for
instance, Zimmerman ("Toward a Heideggerian Ethos"). Zimmerman regards
Heidegger as a robust realist ("What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to
Environmentalism?" 217), citing Glazebrook. While not personally endorsing this
interpretation of Heidegger, it does have the merit of making it clear that
Heidegger wants to correct a distortion in our understanding of nature. Other, more
canonical, interpreters of Heidegger have also given him an environmental gloss,
see Wood (2001) who coins the term "ecopheneomenology."
10
Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is already a proto-
ecological tract in that their critique of the Enlightenment and its self-destructive
obsession with the "mastery of nature" (xvi) creates a "disenchantment" (3) of
nature, i.e. a false (ideological) conception of nature (and our relation to it) that can
be, in principle, subject to Ideologiekritik and corrected.
11
In his "Letter on Humanism" from 1947, Heidegger writes "As a form of truth
technology [Technics] is grounded in the history of metaphysics, … which is itself
a distinctive and up to now the only perceptible phase of the history of Being"
(220).
12
One can see how far this goes for Horkheimer and Adorno in the theme of the
second essay of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Odysseus, or Myth and
Enlightenment" (43-80). Although their constant allusions to the Weberian notion
of disenchantment suggest that they agree with Weber that it was Descartes who
radically instrumentalized modern culture, they nevertheless argue that the
deployment of myth in Homer's Odysseus is already instrumental in conception.
Thus to find a model for a non-instrumental relation to nature, one would already
have to go back beyond the muthos / logos distinction.
13
Heidegger writes: "In order that we may even remotely consider the
monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is
spoken by the two titles: 'The Rhine,' as dammed up into the power works, and
'The Rhine,' as uttered by the art work, in Hölderlin's hymn by that name' (297).
14
Descartes' theory of perception involves both a mental component and a physical
component: stimulation of nerve sites causes information to be transferred to the
brain where (at some point) it is converted into something of which we are
conscious, a "sensing," of which he writes "But this [sensing] precisely so taken, is
nothing other than thinking" (Meditations 29). In Meditation 6 he describes
sensations e.g. of hunger or thirst as "nothing but confused modes of thinking"
(81).
15
This is the upshot of the famous 2nd Meditation (Meditations 23-34) in which
Descartes shows that there are two substances in the universe, and that human
beings are (essentially) one substance (thinking substance) and everything else
(including the human body) is extended substance or matter.
16
In Meditation 6 Descartes claims that there are indeed "differences
corresponding to the different perceptions" of secondary qualities like colour, but
that these differences "do not resemble" our perceptions of them (Meditations 81).
Alistair Welchman 133
17
Heidegger writes that "Dasein's characters of Being are defined in terms of
existeniality, we call them 'existentialia'. These are to be sharply distinguished
from what we call 'categories'—characteristics of Being for entities whose
character is not that of Dasein" (Being and Time §9, 44).
18
Kant's critique of Descartes' conception of the self as a thinking thing takes place
in the "Paralogisms" section of the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason
(A348ff/B413ff). In §10 of Being and Time, Heidegger also mentions the
"reification" (46) of the subject in Descartes and goes on to give an analysis of
Max Scheler's (Kantian) attempt to distinguish persons from things (47-8) in which
he is clearly approving, while at the same time maintaining that the various
positive characterizations of the Being of persons (Dasein, in his terminology), e.g.
"soul" or "spirit" or even "subject," have all been flawed. Later he makes it clear
why: "Even if one rejects the 'soul substance' and the thinghood of consciousness,
or denies that a person is an object [i.e. one takes Kant's critique on board],
ontologically one is still positing something whose Being retains the meaning of
present-at-hand, whether it does so explicitly or not" (§25, 114). In other words:
Kant's critique does not go far enough in undoing the reification of Dasein, even
terms like 'subject' are thought on the basis of the categories, that is, on the basis of
the kind of being that entities unlike Dasein have.
19
Ferry is quite clear about this, defining the humanist era in Kantian terms, as
involving a conception of human beings able to set aside their whole natural being:
as he terms it "Antinatural Man" (3ff).
20
The term "metaphysical" is highly freighted in Heideggerian thought: it is the
nexus of philosophical concepts characteristic of the West, which Heidegger wants
to overturn or reinvigorate, but increasingly finds this task impossible, perhaps
necessarily so. My use of the term is simply to distinguish prima facie non-
axiological from axiological claims and I do not want to enter this complex
Heideggerian debate on either side.
21
In the interview "Truth and Power," Foucault distinguishes between sciences
with a "low" and a "high epistemological profile" and confines his project to the
former (109).
22
Sarkar describes, for instance, the classification of stochastic models of
population growth as "a striking exemplar of the social determination of science."
23
See MacIntryre's "disquieting suggestion" at the beginning (1f) of his After
Virtue that the social conditions required for even the perception of virtues have
been eradicated and compare with Heidegger's claim that after Descartes scission
of the world into extended and thinking things, we try to bridge the gap using
"value-predicates" – but "Adding on value-predicates cannot tell us anything at all
new about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods have
pure presence-at-hand as their kind of Being" (Being and Time §20, 99).
24
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues, following Duns Scotus, that Being
is "univocal" (35). In A Thousand Plateaus he infers a pluralism from this monism
according to the equation "PLURALISM = MONISM" (20).
25
For all this see A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 1. Deleuze and Guattari use the
biological model of arborescence (10, complicated by viruses) and contrast
134 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
38
An analysis of Nietzsche’s relation to Schopenhauer (independent of Deleuze's
appropriation of it) is beyond the scope of this paper. It is worth noting however
that even by 1872 in The Birth of Tragedy's analysis of epic (§§3-4) Nietzsche is,
in the notion of a Greek optimism based on a profound sensitivity to pain,
contesting Schopenhauer's valuations even while still accepting its metaphysical
outlook.
39
This interpretation is laid out in detail in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition,
Chapter 5.
40
Deleuze and Guattari's implicit critique of Anti-Oedipus is given primarily in A
Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 6, where they claim that "you don't reach the BwO
[body without organs] … by wildly destratifying … the worst that can happen is if
you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse" (160-1).
41
"Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that
deterritorializes it … we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the
distinction we would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine
is like the set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage
undergoing deterritorialization and draw variations and mutations of it" (A
Thousand Plateaus 333).
Works Cited
Acampora, Ralph. "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental
Ethics." Environmental Ethics 16 (1994): 187-84.
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Trans. John Cummings (London: Verso 1979).
Bennett, Jane. "The Force of Things: Steps towards and Ecology of
Matter." Political Theory 32:3 (June 2004): 347-72.
Callicot, J. Baird. "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." A
Companion to A Sand County Almanac Interpretive and Critical
Essays. Ed. J. Baird Callicot (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin
Press 1987): 186-214.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Gallimard 1961).
Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Carolyn
R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone
Books 1991).
—. "Machine and Organism." Incorporations. Eds. S. Kwinter & J. Crary
(New York: Zone Books, 1992).
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1965).
—. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
—. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press 1994).
136 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
EDWARD P. BUTLER
Alcmaeon says that humans die for this reason, that they cannot join the
beginning [archê] to the end [telos].
—pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 17. 3. 916a33
[C]onsider bodies agreeing less and less, or bodies opposed to one another:
their constitutive relations can no longer be directly combined, but present
such differences that any resemblance between the bodies appears to be
excluded. There is still however a similarity or community of composition,
but this from a more and more general viewpoint which, in the limit,
brings Nature as a whole into play … As all relations are combined in
Nature as a whole, Nature presents a similarity of composition that may be
seen in all bodies from the most general viewpoint. (Expressionism 275)
[E]ven in the case of a body that does not agree with our own, and affects
us with sadness, we can form an idea of what is common to that body and
our own; the common notion will simply be very universal, implying a
much more general viewpoint than that of the two bodies confronting each
other. It has nonetheless a practical function: it makes us understand why
these two bodies in particular do not agree from their own viewpoint.
(285f)
Notice that Naess's recognition of the intrinsic value of the plant does
not force him to stop treading on them. As he states elsewhere, "We might
agree upon rules such as will imply different behaviour towards different
kinds of living beings without negating that there is a value inherent in
living beings which is the same value for all" (Naess 168). The recognition
that beings having the same value will not be valued the same is thus the
threshold of an ethical maturity. The anthropocentric hypothesis that the
plant only has value insofar as it serves some human purpose, whether
material or aesthetic, obscures the moment of valuation by presenting it,
not as an existential choice, but as something given by virtue of a reified
human essence. Thus Luc Ferry, in attempting to articulate his own
anthropocentric environmental ethic in opposition to deep ecology, calls
upon us to create "a phenomenology of human signs in nature … to obtain
a clear awareness of that which can and must be valued in it" (143).The
actual moment of valuing nature has here been reduced to finding signs in
nature of a reified human essence. The role of thought itself is thus
devalued inasmuch as it is reduced to the anthropomorphic representation
of humanity instead of its production, the labor of the spirit which was
Edward P. Butler 145
order, like every other order of being, is not composed of static essences
but of multiple planes of immanence proving themselves; hence there is an
ethics of symbolic production which encompasses not only religious and
artistic symbols but also, e.g., mathematics.
part possess only analogous humanity, since we are animals as well. Ferry
makes humanity in the ethical sense merely a property of our species
rather than a problem posed to the individual. To be human is a mere
status for Ferry. But humanity is an indefinite essence, not because we are
exempt from nature, but because the essence of the human is inseparable
from the project of humanity, which transcends any particular species,
including our own, but is nevertheless a project at once natural,
metaphysical and historical. Heidegger says, with Ferry's approval, "The
stone is without world, the animal is poor in world, man is creator of
world" (55), but a "world" is a trivial thing indeed if only humans have
one. The stone has created our world, as has the animal, in a different
sense. Nothing is without world.6 The geological world, the biological
world, the mathematical world—nothing has given philosophers license to
hold themselves aloof from acknowledging them, nor would there be
anything "humanistic" in doing so.
Again, Ferry quotes with approval Philip Elder's ironic remark that it is
anthropocentric to presume that objects such as mountains are opposed to
the development from which ecologists would seek to preserve them, and
argues that since "[a]ll valorization, including that of nature, is the deed of
man … consequently, all normative ethic is in some sense humanist and
anthropocentrist" (131)—but in what sense? Is it merely a question of
attempting to find any sense at all in which ecology, in aspiring to
transcend anthropocentrism, could be said to be anthropocentric in spite of
itself? Beyond this rhetorical tactic, is it Ferry's claim that the humans who
oppose the development of the mountain—or even simply those who do
not stand to benefit financially from it and thus passively fail to support
it—no longer human? Are their values a performative contradiction?
It is reasonable to say that a mountain, taken purely as stone—that is,
as the very raw materials on account of which it is being targeted for
development—is not "opposed" to development, but it is irrational to
suppose that the animals who would lose their habitat would favor it, or
that the continued existence of the mountain as a cultural asset is
compatible with such development; and so it is unclear where the
contradiction is supposed to lie. Rather, it is Ferry who seems caught in a
fundamental contradiction when he attempts to determine the "subjective
moment" in valuation as an objectively human moment, a moment, that is,
in the natural history of the human species, and to deduce from the fact
that ethical discourse is a human activity that the outcome of all ethical
decisions must benefit, above all, any human asserting even the most
trivial claim, lest the deliberation undermine its own conditions of
possibility. Just as the deep ecology thesis of intrinsic value sets a
152 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
Do the bodies which fill it possess enough unity, do their mixtures possess
enough justice and perfection, in order for the present to avail a principle
of an immanent measure? Perhaps it does, at the level of the cosmic Zeus.
But is this the case for bodies at random and for each partial mixture?
(163)
is always situated relative to the three realms of the infernal abyss, the
celestial height and the surface of the earth … He always ascends or
descends to the surface in every conceivable manner … It is no longer a
question of Dionysus down below, or of Apollo up above, but of Hercules
of the surface, in his dual battle against both depth and height:
reorientation of the entire thought and a new geography. (131f)
Notes
1
On the plane of immanence, see especially Deleuze and Guattari (What is
Philosophy? 35-60).
2
Deleuze's ethics are to be discerned chiefly through his readings of Spinoza,
Nietzsche, and the Epicureans. In the following account, I accord a certain primacy
to Deleuze's Spinozist ethical thought, because there he speaks in a more
conventionally normative language of good and evil, rather than in hedonic terms
of joy and sadness. Another reason to accord primacy to the Spinozist side of
Deleuze's ethics is that it shall be seen from the following that it is possible from
within this ethical framework to motivate Deleuze's adoption of an ontology
synthesized from the Epicureans and from Hume—i.e., from two different varieties
of atomism.
3
Note that the sense of "composition" in Deleuze's readings of Spinoza is
completely distinct from the sense of "composition" as it applies to art (the "plane
of composition").
4
Cf. "Prohibitions on Transformation," 379-83 in Canetti.
5
Compare the Deleuzian "body without organs" as discussed in the Coda of the
present essay. The universal in question expresses the complementarity of the first
two kinds of universal in Simplicius's commentary on the Categories, 82. 35–83.
20, in contrast to the third; see the discussion in Lloyd, 67; see also Moyle's
remarks on the problem of conceiving the commonality between humans and other
animals as a generic "first nature" to which the specific difference of "second
nature", or reason, is added in humans.
6
It should be noted that theorists of deep ecology have their own readings of
Heidegger; see in particular Zimmerman 1983, though there is more
incompatibility to be found between Heidegger and deep ecology in Zimmerman
1993.
7
See Chap. 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-
Imperceptible…," in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (232-309).
Edward P. Butler 157
8
For the characteristics of abstract machines, see A Thousand Plateaus (141ff).
9
My thanks to Tim Matts for bringing this issue to my attention.
10
"For two branches do not spring from his back, he has no feet, no swift knees, no
organs of reproduction, but is equal to himself in every direction, without any
beginning or end, a rounded sphere, rejoicing in encircling stillness," (frag. 22,
trans. Wright); "For he is not equipped with a human head on a body, he has no
feet, no swift knees, no shaggy genitals, but he is mind alone, holy and
inexpressible, darting through the whole cosmos with swift thoughts," (frag. 97).
11
In point of fact, Deleuze confuses here the fate of Dionysus, dismembered and
consumed by the Titans but for his heart, preserved by Athena, with that of
Orpheus, the "prophet" of Dionysus, dismembered by the Maenads while his
oracular head was preserved.
12
That is, the Stoics and the Cynics. Deleuze does not discuss the Epicureans here,
but would obviously regard them as capable of being assimilated to the other
Hellenistic schools in the salient respects upon his own reading of them.
Works Cited
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973).
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosopy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1988).
—. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
—. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester w/Charles Stivale, ed.
Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).
Devall, Bill and Sessions, George. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature
Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985).
Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Halliwell, Martin and Mousley, Andy. Critical Humanisms:
Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2003).
Hayden, Patrick. Multiplicity and Becoming (New York: Peter Lang,
1998).
Lloyd, A. C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990).
158 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
ELENI IKONIADOU
Introduction
Score for a Hole in the Ground is a sonic sculpture by Jem Finer,
positioned in a forest at Kent's countryside. Part music score part art
installation, it consists of a deep shaft next to a lake in which resonant
metallic objects, of different sizes and tunings, are buried. Drips of water
from the lake strike the objects ringing them like bells, while a giant brass
horn pipes the sounds seven metres above ground. This project was
inspired by the Japanese suikinkutsu, a type of music device and garden
ornament in the country's tradition, originating from the middle of the Edo
period (1603-1867). The suikinkutsu is an acoustic water chamber of
subtle and minimal music, composed by the sounds of the environment.
As such, it is "a literal manifestation" of the fact that "in Japan rhythm was
traditionally conceived of as obeying the unpredictable qualities of nature"
(Finer 41). Contra Western music's metric fixity and definiteness, Finer's
installation wants to evoke an indeterminate environmental soundscape. In
other words, to present an "eco dub system" that relies on environmental
harmonics as its sources of energy: climatic forces, gravity, water and
wind (41). According to Finer, this is a post-digital return to a prehistoric
music, in which the reverberation of nature becomes the space of
composition. As such this sonic sculpture needs no human intervention
(other than set up) and is independent from any energy source or
technology. The idea is that it becomes part of the environment that it
penetrates, providing an alternative model to the computational paradigm
of sound design. Its compositional value rests on the formation of potential
connections between landscape, metal, and weather, as they continuously
contaminate and affect each other.
Score for a Hole in the Ground, for this essay, poses a conceptual
aesthetic challenge to the common dichotomies between nature and
culture, the biological and the artificial. These oppositions are nothing
160 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
new. Fundamental assumptions about the given natural world, at the heart
of mainstream Western thought, reflect an inherent Cartesianism that
philosophy and science have often been unable to shake. Within this
tradition the attempt to understand a body's experience of space has relied
primarily on the latter's ocularcentric conception, linking its experience to
human subjectivity. Yet the rearrangement of hierarchies in sensory
perception, in order to substitute visual predominance by aural experience
(as in the work of Walter Ong and McLuhan) presents us with further
limitations. First, that it remains confined in the dualism between perceiver
and perceived as two distinct elements in communication, and, second,
that it relies on the first in order to determine the latter. At the same time, a
predetermined world implies that we can only ever represent it, by
acquiring insight into fully formed identities and essences.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, identity, analogy, resemblance, and
opposition become problematic categories in constructing assemblages of
the real rather than merely representing it. In the theory of assemblages a
body is produced by process: its differences and relations with other
bodies, within a system whose potential is never exhausted in actuality (4).
A body is not defined by symmetrical parts that form a whole but by
tensions, forces and speeds that melt the boundaries between internal and
external worlds topologically. Topology, according to Massumi, is "the
science of self-varying deformation" (Parables for the Virtual 134).
Considered topologically bodies surpass the restriction of essences (what
they are) and enter the realm of assemblages (what they can do in their
entanglements). Following Deleuze and Guattari this essay asks, how can
we account for the relationship between body and environment beyond the
limits of subjective experience? Current architectural theory,
neurophysiological case studies and bio-technological experimentation,
provide promising fields in which to rethink a body away from
essentialism. Drawing on particular instances we will argue that real and
virtual, living and nonliving, natural and artificial, are vibratory milieus
tied together by the concept of 'rhythmic topology.' Away from the
replacement of a visual perspective of space by a sonic one, this essay
explores rhythm as a relational tension between nature and culture, a mode
'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology, then, addresses the
virtuality of unfinished bodies (human, animal, technological) to
conceptualise a becoming of nature that stretches beyond our knowledge
of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for ecology,
Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualization of an altogether
'new' nature. In particular, this essay analyses the rhythmic topology of a
body in three different levels: the aesthetic level of digital architecture as
Eleni Ikoniadou 161
Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which
grows naturally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from
plant to animal, from animal to humankind, yet without this series
constituting a progression. (Deleuze and Guattari 313)
As such rhythm is not the beat of coordination but the difference that
creates linkages in-between different milieus, during which one becomes
the basis for the other. Following Deleuze and Guattari's concept of
rhythm, we can rethink the relation between nature and culture away from
hitherto dualities. This move to collapse the distance between either/or and
between subject and object, involves plugging them into the abstract
machine of topology.1 A topological body is not unitary but collective: a
162 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
Blob Bodies
The coming together of heterogeneous realities beyond the limits of
possibility and the concreteness of actuality is better expressed by the
concept of potential relationality. A philosophy of potential relationality
crucially argues that an opposition between nature and culture reduces the
world to a function of human understanding. Soil, air, metal object and
sound molecule feed into each other in a variety of ways, as their abstract
formations reveal a multiple nature that we problematically reduce to the
domain of the living. In architecture, contemporary practices are also
164 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
Rhythmic hallucinations
Neurological studies in progressive nerve deafness, argue for a direct
relation between sensorial deafness and autogenerated auditory
hallucinations. Neurologist Oliver Sacks argues that audio hallucinations
are often not psychotic, as in schizophrenic patients, but neurological (52).
Deprived of any sensory input, a body autogenerates spontaneous activity
in the form of 'release' hallucinations, ranging from loud tinnitus to entire
musical symphonies. This seemingly abnormal brain activity has been
described by patients as 'a circuit in the head' and the hallucinating part of
their body an alien autogenerating mechanism (Sacks 55 & 62). Such
analogies between the hallucinations and technology refer to the fact that
in every sufferer the sound initially appears to arrive from an external
source (coming from a radio, television, record-player or a noisy
machine). It is only when such external sources are excluded that the
patient becomes aware of the noise being generated autonomously, by
their own bodies. However, the relationship between biology and
technology in a hallucinatory body is not exhausted in analogy. Rather, the
complexity of the relationship is expressed in the fact that these
hallucinations are not an organic disease of the brain, nor a subjective
phenomenon, but the non-living backflow of a virtual activity. The
phenomenon thus points to the actualization of a dynamic generator of
rhythmic forces as it emerges from a body in the form of a seizure.
These hallucinations are not restricted to nerve deafness and the
deprivation of sensorial input, but can be caused during seizures or
strokes. However, in every case, they appear as 'strange yet familiar'
Eleni Ikoniadou 167
"that lie outside or below the level of conscious experience" and have a
life of their own (Sacks 232). Defect pointing to affect.
Before matter is organized in metric time and space, it lives and feels
within its own potential energy. The autogenerative rhythms of a body
emerge when this turbulent energy coincides with a body's capacity (or
power) in the doubling of its consciousness. The topological nature of this
doubling, or coupling, means that levels which hitherto seemed distant and
unrelated become superimposed. "It is only in that superposition that the
unity of the figure can be grasped as such, in one stroke. That one stroke is
the virtual image center of the figure" (Massumi 134). For Massumi, the
differentiated vagueness of the virtual is best approached topologically,
through the infoldings and unfoldings of self-referential transformation,
more suitable to imagination or intuition. Intuition is a thinking feeling that
does not refer to anything outside it, "the mutual envelopment of thought
and sensation as they arrive together" (134). For Michel Serres, intuition is
also influenced by topology, the science of nearness and rifts, enabling us
to conceptualise a crumpling, multiple and foldable spatiotemporal
diversity (Serres 59-60). Far from a mere theory of numbers, topological
thinking, according to Serres, is consistent with our crumpled experience
of spacetime before we simplify and reduce it to measurement.
In certain contemporary psychoanalytic studies, the concept of
intuition is shifting from hitherto associations with narcissistic meanings,
to a mode of felt thought integrated in coenesthetic experience.
Coensesthetic experience (particularly dominant during the first six
months of life) is largely visceral, strangely vague and marked by tensions,
temperatures, vibrations, rhythms, durations and pitches. During this time,
somatic and psychic perceptions are not yet differentiated and perception
takes place on the level of sensibility. Intuition is an archaic mode of
thought that is nonverbal, nondirected, and in which impressions of form
become undifferentiated. It is in this sense an 'amodal mode of experience'
during which a body cannot separate between the senses, the intellect, the
conscious and the unconscious, express them in language or follow a
single line of thought (Piha 37). An intuitive body is a polyrhythmic
structure of superimposed strands that occur without a point of reference
and "with the suddenness of a revelation" (24). Intuition exposes a body's
qualitative transformations in experiencing space, comprised of an
immeasurable number of heterogeneous but overlapping and
interpenetrating subspaces. Behind the learned schemata, intuition is a rare
sensitivity in bodies that can grasp the rhythmic movement of spaces "as
sound streams that cannot be described in static form" (Piha 37). In
Eleni Ikoniadou 169
Cellular Vibrations
'Sonocytology' is the study of cellular vibrations that, in the future,
could arguably offer a closer understanding of the body and its tendency
for disease. Discovered by nanoscientist James Gimzewski, sonocytology
reveals that cells produce numerous miniscule vibrations per second. The
breakthrough was further enabled by Gimzewski's invention of the Atomic
Force Microscope (AFM), an ultra-sensitive high-resolution motion
detector that uses tactile sensing to detect motion at the molecular scale.
When these vibrations were amplified, the state of the cells (presence or
lack of movement) was found to be directly linked to their rhythmic
properties. Whether living or dead a cell continues to pulsate, although its
pitch changes accordingly, due to the tiny molecular motors inside it,
moving things around. Using computer software, Gimzewski and his team
amplified the cellular rhythms collected by the AFM to create audible
sound. The interrhythmicity of the cell is affected by changes in
temperature and perhaps also by contact with the needle of the AFM that
acts as en extra-sensitive micro record player. Unlike optical microscopes,
the AFM touches and scans the surfaces of cells recording their
topography; it thus feels the rhythms of cellular vibration as an electrical
signal in a liquid environment. As scientists are 'blind' at the nanoscale, the
AFM's tiny 'finger' senses oscillations that occur at the membrane of a cell.
"On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and
probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and
approximate interpretations" (Gimzewski & Vesna The Nanomeme
syndrome). According to the authors, molecular techno-science is
ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality, from a culture based
on vision to one of sensing and connectivity.
At the molecular level matter conveys incredible complexity,
concealed by the apparent simplicity of ecological equilibrium. Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers argue that in the case of cellular
functioning we encounter a remarkable convergence of biology and
physics, through the investigation of 'complex' system at the microscopic
level (Prigogine and Stengers 154). Molecular biology, in particular, has
the capacity to provide the microscopic basis for the instabilities that occur
in dynamic, non-linear physical systems. A living system is a complex
machine of chemical transformations, space-time organizations and
nonuniformity in the distribution of its biochemical material. In other
170 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
Conclusion
According to Deleuze and Guattari, there is no vital matter specific to
the organic stratum as matter is the same across the machinic assemblage
(45). Thus a body is not defined by its form, function or substance, but
rather by its potential to enter in relations with other bodies. At the molar
level, a body is organized to acquire a specificity, that is, to be considered
as organic, or technological, as a natural or artificial whole. For Massumi
the molar level is an effect: the apparent settling of movement at the
macroscale and a relative concreteness that does not reveal anything about
the 'swarming micromovements of matter" (203). Beneath this molar
stability, we have attempted to unfold the rhythmic spreading of matter
across the different layers of a body and between heterogeneous bodies.
Thinking matter topologically pushes the concept of nature beyond unity
and totality, away from similarity and identity, in favor of degrees of
development, speeds and differential relations.
Following a continuum of rhythmic intensities between nature and
culture, we engaged with rhythmic topology at the aesthetic level of blob
tectonics, on the edge between architecture and art, between theory and
172 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
Notes
1
"An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is
semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the
artificial and the natural either)" (Deleuze and Guattari 141, emphasis in the
original).
2
The NANO exhibit was a collaboration between LACMALab and a UCLA team
of nanoscience, media arts, and humanities experts, lead by Jim Gimzewski and
Victoria Vesna in 2004. Nanoculture, Implications of the New Technoscience.
(UK: Intellect Books, 2004) is a collection of essays, edited by Katherine Hayles,
that complements the exhibit as well as explore the relationship between
174 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
Works Cited
DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London &
New York: Continuum, 2002).
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London & New
York: Continuum, 2004).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London & New York: Continuum, 2002).
Finer, Jem. "Score for a Hole in the Ground." Autumn Leaves: Sound and
the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double
Entendre, 2007).
Gimzewski, Jim, and Victoria Vesna. "The Nanomeme Syndrome:
Blurring of Fact & Fiction in the Construction of a New Science."
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/publications/publications/0203/JV_nano/JV_nan
o_artF5VG.htm, last accessed April 08, 2008.
Goodman, Steve. "Sonic Anarchitecture." Autumn Leaves: Sound and the
Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double
Entendre, 2007).
Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (USA: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
Lynn, Greg. Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays (Belgium: La Lettre
Volée, 1998).
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (USA: Duke University Press,
2002).
—. "Introduction: Like a thought." A Shock to Though: Expression after
Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002),
xiii-xxxix.
Eleni Ikoniadou 175
ERICK HEROUX
Let us begin at the end, to see where we will have been going, and then
retrace our steps to see how we got there, or rather here, with the last
words of Félix Guattari in his final essay:
In sum, these are the three ecologies: nature, society, and psyche. Their
interactive interdependence forms a triplex discourse and material effects,
in sickness and in health. Also, here Guattari firmly turns to face toward
the future, toward creative change, and toward new forms of solidarity. By
now this is a common attitude, if still wistfully emerging and vaguely
articulated, about what needs to be done. So why Guattari now? What does
he offer as prospective tools for the unprecedented challenges of the
twenty-first century?
A few weeks after submitting this testament for publication, Guattari
suddenly died in 1992 about three years before the death of his more
famous colleague, Deleuze, in 1995. Then and now, he is widely assumed
Erick Heroux 177
with Negri and with Deleuze, and then defined our era of late capitalist
globalization in terms of its ecological degradation a full decade before the
fall of the Berlin Wall. He was not a junior partner, but rather an
inspirational cowriter and a veritable fountain of new ways to do both
theory and praxis. His fairly successful transformation of a 100-bed
psychiatric hospital over several decades is an under appreciated example
of that praxis.4
Meanwhile, here my primary aim is to provide a critique of Guattari's
explicit turn toward ecology vis-à-vis the theoretical biology of Bateson,
Maturana, Varela and of "complexity science" in general, and thence his
enlargement of ecology, an ecology of the postindustrial mass-mediated
globe by way of a political economy and psychology, resulting in
something quite different for theory. We have already suggested where he
winds up. The main texts in my discussion will be Guattari's booklet, The
Three Ecologies, but also his passages on this topic in a later book,
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm and scattered elsewhere in his
occasional writings. Hence, now that we have reviewed "why Guattari?",
the next question about the terms in my title should be: "What was
ecology?"
The identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival
is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical. (460)
With the fading antagonisms of the Cold War, we enter a period when
serious threats, posed by our productivist society to the human species,
appear more distinctly. Our survival on this planet is not only threatened
by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social
184 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
us that we have a serious problem and that the world is going to hell in a
handbasket, like all too many writers have done. Instead he delves into the
microlevel sources of change and the institutional, psychic, and
ideological blockages that prevent change. Readers of this essay collection
know that he moved through and beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis and in
postmarxist circles for much of his career. During the last phase of his
career, these too were enfolded and extrapolated into an increasingly
layered theory coming out of the theoretical biology previously
introduced. The complexity of Guattari's theoretical work is a consequence
of his dialogue with complexity science, and at times this dialogue was
literal, as in the case of a formal discussion with leading scientists, Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers.8 Just as he had already been doing with
Lacanism, Marxism, and semiotics, Guattari critically worked through and
against complexity science, theorizing what he variously called ecosophy
and chaosmosis. Prigogine is one of several founders of the new science of
complexity, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on
thermodynamic flows, showing the emergence of order in physical states
far from equilibrium. Guattari often alludes to Prigogine and his cowriter,
Isabelle Stengers. An essential book by them, one of the most important
for both its philosophy of science and its contribution to a new science, is
Order Out of Chaos (1984). This explains the "new science of complexity"
in detail for a general reader, or at least in its thermodynamics aspect. The
book makes a surprising number of enormous claims for the historical
shift to a different science as it argues for the irreversibility of time, the
uncertainty of prediction, a new perspective on entropy, the emergence of
order from chaotic fluctuations, the priority of becoming over being, active
matter, etc. Guattari reappropriated this for his psycho-socio theories,
especially the emphasis on how non-equilibrium dynamic systems in
chaotic flux form new self-organizing processes. He used this to correct
the older cybernetic systems view he had learned from Bateson, a view
which tended to emphasize a more static equilibrium or homeostasis. One
can immediately guess that his dislike of Freud's deep reliance on
biological homeostasis, for instance in the theory of a death drive, is
paralleled in all such conservative tropes that then get reapplied as
ideological containment at the social level. Now the tables were turned,
and the new science of complexity was showing that while stasis is
ultimately entropy, that chaos leads to the emergence of self-organization,
that process and becoming are more fundamental in nature than being.
Does all this borrowing from natural science make Guattari a neo-
materialist who would return psychology and sociology to their
evolutionary and physical ground? Is he a kind of crypto-sociobiologist in
Erick Heroux 187
its own, and there may even be "antinomies between the ecosophical
levels" (54).
First, for the psyche, the principle is that it faces the world and selects
the significant environmental factors through "a pre-objectal and pre-
personal logic that Freud has described as being a 'primary process'" (54).
I believe that Guattari had in mind his previous work on "partial objects"
and "partial enunciators" that are closely related to transitional objects
(between self and other, neither/nor but both/and) in psychoanalysis and
the objet petit a in Lacan. But Guattari is now re-articulating this already
subtle psychological point with the cognitive biology of Varela and
Maturana, who argue that every organism "brings forth a world" with its
own unique set of senses and interactions with particular environmental
signals, energies, meanings, while it ignores or cannot perceive some other
environmental signals that are the "world" for a different type of organism.
One way to see the simultaneous links and separations between the psyche
and its environment is through this version of a partial object somewhere
in the middle between subject and object, both/and yet neither/nor. The
organism brings forth its own objects, selected from the buzzing chaos as a
difference that makes a difference. Thus these objects are partly
subjective, and specific only to that particular umwelt.
Second, the ecological principle specific to the social domain has to do
of course not just with objects but rather other subjects, always already in
relationships, from parents and family to larger and larger social groups
out to the mysterious entity called society that seems to demand things
from us and to both meet and frustrate desire. The ecology of society is
informed by these entangled emotional and libidinal investments, yet also
including "pragmatic cathexis" (60), or the practical internalization of
social norms and habits. As this psychoanalytic description suggests, an
interlocking overlap with the previous psychic ecology is everywhere
apparent in Guattari's description of the social domain. He further divides
the socius into two basic types of relational identification. To simplify, I
might serviceably rephrase these as bad (unconsciously) versus good
(autopoetically), if only we understand that Guattari does not take
seriously any such binary oppositions, and that throughout his work there
are no guarantees that any political ontology is inherently always "good".
Readers of Deleuze and Guattari together inevitably find this caveat, that
is, if they make it to the end of each chapter: deterritorialization is not
always the right thing at the right time, and neither is reterritorialization
always wrong; "smooth spaces" are not necessarily liberatory; lines of
flight can be a danger to self and others; the "rhizome" is both "good and
bad"; the "body without organs" can be an "overdose" or also "fascist"
Erick Heroux 189
• A nascent subjectivity
• A constantly mutating socius
• A natural environment in the process of being reinvented
feminist, and thereby misses too much that could be read in Guattari's
machinic assemblages; and she refers not at all to his Chaosmosis. I will
mention one other appreciative reading of his ecosophy in passing, that in
an essay for the Research on Anarchism website titled, "The Possibility of
an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism" in which the author reliably if rapidly
summarizes Deleuze and Guattari on the rhizome and also Guattari's Three
Ecologies and largely defends the implications of these against the
opposing view of the more humanist social ecology of Murray Bookchin.
The essay is sketchy but makes a number of sharp distinctions along the
way and in general argues that Guattari is useful.
Very little has been said about his ecosophy to date, and even less has
been done with it. So, does the study of Guattari repay the effort? Or are
other ecologies of theory better formed and more effective? After all, it
has become a commonplace among the mainstream intelligentsia that this
style of theory fails to pay sufficient returns for the efforts invested. But
the same class of readers said the same thing about a novel titled Ulysses
when it was first published. Guattari will never become a Joyce, but I hope
to have shown how his ecosophy comes out of a study of the most
philosophical biology and complexity science available to date, and how
Guattari adumbrated the next step ahead for human ecology from there,
the first and last step with which this essay began: the remaking of social
practices by increasing the disequilibrium of the current deadly
organization that is frozen in a repetition-compulsion of destructive
behavior, a new fostering of bifurcations toward new singularities, new
subjective formations of "agencement" and new transversal interactive
networks simultaneously, the very process of autopoetic self-organization
out of dynamic flux.
Notes
1
See the interviews with the two in Chaosophy (Guattari 1995) for instances of
Guattari's input and Deleuze's reticence.
2
Many of his earlier solo articles are translated in Molecular Revolution:
Psychiatry and Politics, trans., Rosemary Sheed (Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1984). This selects from two previous books: Psychoanalyse et transversalité
(1972) and La Révolution moléculaire (1977). But even the dates of those books
misrepresent the dates of composition or deliverance of many of the conference
papers and articles collected here. An introduction by David Cooper notes that
items taken from the first book date back to 1955 through 1970, long before and
during the start of his collaboration with Deleuze. Much of the terminology here
shows up later in his collaboration with Deleuze on the two volumes of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia.
Erick Heroux 193
3
The leading Guattarist in the anglophone world is Gary Genosko. His booklength
monograph, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, is the first major study of
Guattari in English, and one done so thoroughly, including archival research, that it
is a benchmark for any later effort. If any single book could begin to correct what
Genosko calls "the problem of the reception of Deleuze's work as a way of erasing
Guattari", then this is it. Here, I do not intend to turn the tables and claim that
Deleuze was the junior partner, and in fact that would miss the point of their
creative co-operation; instead, I intend to counter the odd erasure of Guattari
coupled with the general apotheosis of Deleuze. In order to be for Deleuze, one
need not suppress Guattari; and vice-versa of course.
4
See the almost autobiographical essay in Chaosophy about his psychoanalytic
theory/praxis: "La Borde: A Clinic Like No Other" (Guattari 187-208) and also
Genosko's description of the La Borde experiences ("The Life and Work of Felix
Guattari" 133-139 in Guattari, Three Ecologies, 2000). This shows clearly how
Guattari was more engaged in a praxis as a theoretical psychoanalyst who wanted
to make the closed and disciplinary institutions in which he worked more open to
participation and creativity by the staff and patients at every level. He worked in
and on and through this clinic from 1955 until his death. "Empowerment" was the
cliché during that era, but instead Guattari always spoke of "desiring", "molecular
revolutions", "transversal" connections, and "machinic assemblages" and
"singularization". What impresses me now is how successful Guattari was in
transforming that clinic, which was the same size and of the same sort as a
psychiatric hospital that I worked in as an aide for three years in California during
the 1980s. Where I was left with a frustrating sense of hopelessness, Guattari
energetically and brilliantly intervened in his institution, deftly avoiding the dead
end traps of Lacanianism, romantic anti-psychiatry, Maoism, etc., while deploying
his keen analytic skills on the practical transformation of the institution toward a
space of participation, openness, flexibility, community, and the production of
singularities by channeling desire.
5
I was first alerted to this debate about the systems view among contemporary
ecologists by the ecocritic Dana Phillips' chapter on the historical shifts within the
discipline, "Ecology Then and Now" in his scathing (and too often erroneous)
critique of the emerging field of ecocriticism in the humanities: The Truth of
Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford University Press,
2003), 42-82.
6
Like every emergent specialization, biosemiotics is both very new yet
paradoxically has a minor prehistory dating back decades. Key figures include
Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Guenther Witzany, Marcello Barbieri, and Thomas
Sebeok. The field now has an international organization, a journal, and conference
proceedings. See website at http://www.biosemiotics.org/ The field is
interdisciplinary yet would appear for now to be the biologist's version of a
Deleuzoguattarian resurrection of Gregory Bateson, but minus the micro-
revolution.
7
See especially Vandana Shiva's Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on
Biodiversity and Biotechnology (1993) and her recent Earth Democracy: Justice,
Sustainability, and Peace (2005).
194 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
8
This round-table dialogue with the scientists is reprinted with the title "Openness"
in the valuable collection of materials about Guattari in Deleuze and Guattari:
Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Vol 2. ed. Gary Genosko (London:
Routledge, 2001), 774-794.
9
To give credit, I believe that Genosko also made this observation about Lacan's
anti-biology effect and connected this to Guattari, but for now I cannot locate the
exact source.
10
On our recent passage into the new geological epoch, see Robert Roy Britt,
"Humans Force Earth Into New Geologic Epoch" LiveScience 27 Jan 2008, n.p.
www.livescience.com/environment/080127-new-epoch.html. Three separate
sources for this proposal are cited, and several other scientists are quoted. Relevant
excerpts include: "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant
change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene—
currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change—as a new
geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion,'
Zalasiewicz's team writes. The paper calls on the International Commission on
Stratigraphy to officially mark the shift . . . . In a separate paper last month in the
journal Soil Science, researchers focused on soil infertility alone as a reason to dub
this the Anthropocene Age. 'In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human
impact is clear, large, and growing,' Alley told ScienceNow, an online publication
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'A geologist from
the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new
name, where and when our impacts show up.'" We have deterritorialized and
reterritorialized a new segmentation at the geological level.
Works Cited
Bateson, Gregory. "Form, Substance, and Difference." Steps to An
Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 448-68.
—. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam Books,
1979).
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in
Poststructrualist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1987).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. "On the Line." On the Line. Trans.
John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 69-114.
—. Dialogues II (London: Continuum, 2002).
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004).
Genosko, Gary. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London:
Continuum, 2002).
Erick Heroux 195
IRVING GOH
Introduction
What this paper is interested in is the image of Nature, and the relation
between Nature and thought in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand
Plateaus. It could be said at the outset here that Nature in A Thousand
Plateaus does not take on an image that is of an exploited, victimized, or
powerless passivity. Instead, Nature takes on a violent image. It is an
image of a violent force, an image of mutation, furor, and even of violence
turned against itself and everything that dwells within it. Consequently, the
relation between Nature and thought cannot be a benign one either. In A
Thousand Plateaus, it will be shown that thought seeks a violent economy
with Nature—and vice versa. Thought feeds and builds on the violence of
Nature. But Nature likewise feeds on the violence of thought. This rather
anomalous image of Nature and the peculiar relation between Nature and
thought in A Thousand Plateaus are what this paper would like to
explicate. It will also argue that the radical philosophical edge of A
Thousand Plateaus is possible not only by recognizing the violence of
Nature but also by striking out against Nature, by being almost anti-
Nature, contre nature. In return, Nature, in order to sustain itself, likewise
calls for a thought as radical as Deleuze and Guattari's, a call that is no less
forceful, as it will be shown, that involves a violent abstraction of
philosophy. Once again therefore, one must not expect in Deleuze and
Guattari the passive, benign Nature that one is so inclined to safeguard and
embrace, an image that most ecocriticisms or environmental movements
are quick to conjure. With Deleuze and Guattari, one is in the realm of a
whole other Nature, "an entirely different nature" (Thousand Plateaus 11)
if not a "strange ecology" as Deleuze would say (Deleuze and Parnet,
Dialogues 75).
In a sense, this project shares the premise of Verena Conley's
Ecopolitics, where she argues that "1968 thinkers," of which Deleuze and
Irving Goh 197
Guattari are certainly part of, develop radical philosophies that "produce
commanding changes in the way we think the world" by having an
"ecological consciousness" (Conley 1). That point, for me, is especially
undeniable in Deleuze and Guattari, whose concepts are ineluctable from
the natural environment. I will just list a few of those concepts here in
brisk fashion: becoming-animal (I will discuss this concept further on in
this paper), which brings the human outside of its anthropocentric and
anthropomorphic confines via a correspondence not only with animals, but
also with plants, and which leads towards a cosmic line that traces the
earth's surface; the refrain, which is ineluctable from the ground of the
earth since it constructs a territory around itself; and nomadology, which
traverses spaces or rather makes deserts of spaces, and therefore is always
already engaged with a movement across environmental spaces. In other
words, any thinking of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts without a
sensitivity to the natural environment can only be an incomplete grasp of
their philosophy. One could say that philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari,
is perhaps first eco-logy—in the sense of a thinking that is never detached
from the earth, the sea, the sky, the climate, the cosmos that surrounds our
planetary space, and all the natural elements and entities that dwell in all
these spaces, including bacteria and viruses—before it is ethology or
nomadology. One could say that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is
always already eco-etho-philosophy.1
Where I will depart, however, from Conley's book, is the perspective
on "ecological consciousness." As suggested in the opening paragraph
here, if there is an "ecological consciousness" in Deleuze and Guattari, it
will also take into account a consciousness of the violence of the
ecological environment itself, a consciousness of the violence unleashed
by Nature itself. This paper, as such, therefore also departs from
conventional ecocriticisms, which generally tend to call for interventions
that seek to preserve, conserve, sustain, and protect Nature, as if there is an
original state of Nature with definable horizons or constant limits. In
Ecocritique, Timothy W Luke has sharply pointed out that most of the
times such ecocriticisms amount to "justifying anthropocentric
guardianship over terrestrial processes." (Luke 198). In other words,
making Nature a subject of discourse becomes just another opportunity for
human subjectivity to assert its control and mastery. More recently, in
Deleuze and Environmental Damage, Mark Halsey argues that the
problem of ecocriticsm is that it is touching on (to) Nature too much.
Taking issue with deep ecology, which seeks to re-link people back to the
environment, he notes that it shares its methodology with capitalism—that
force that has always been charged (rightly so) with direct and indirect
198 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
seem to as if uproot trees. In the chase for the animal, in other words in the
midst of the trajectory of becoming-animal philosophy, Nature is cut
down. And there is no pity: "not pity, but participation against nature."3
In this tale of the philosopher-sorcerer traversing through Nature, what
is immediately striking is the apparent betrayal of Nature by the thought of
Deleuze and Guattari, since it has been noted previously that their
philosophy bears an "ecological consciousness." If one is at this point
rudely shocked by the apparent ecological insensitivity at the end of
deleuzoguattarian philosophy, let one be assured that Nature will take its
revenge, and so let it be said here that the philosopher-sorcerer will not be
the ultimate vanquisher in his or her interactivity with Nature. There will
in fact be no clear-cut winner in the contest between philosophy and
Nature. I will come back in a while to the end of this equivocal
philosophy-Nature negotiation. But at this moment, I would like to
explicate further the engagements with Nature during the flight of
Deleuze-Guattari's philosopher-sorcerer and the undeniable sense of
betraying Nature as philosophy proceeds, across a forest or field, in pursuit
of an animal.
In a way, something of a betrayal ought to be expected in Deleuze and
Guattari, since it is always an inherent mechanism in their philosophy.4 In
fact, this is especially the case for any thinking of an alliance. Alliance in
Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is linked to becoming-animal.
"Becoming […] concerns alliance" (Thousand Plateaus 238), as they say.
Now, alliance in becoming-animal also proceeds by a following of what
Deleuze and Guattari calls the "Anomal" or "the anomalous," an animal
that strays at the edge of the animal pack, ambiguous in its role in relation
to the pack as to whether it still belongs to it or is already a foot
somewhere outside it. This "Anomal" will also be for Deleuze and
Guattari the border that any becoming-animal must cross. In other words,
any body desiring a becoming-animal will follow this "Anomal," forming
an alliance with it. But forming this alliance is still not yet becoming-
animal per se. It is but a step towards becoming-animal. To complete the
process of becoming-animal, one would ultimately need to strike at this
"Anomal" according to Deleuze and Guattari. This is the stroke of betrayal
in becoming-animal, in alliance. To become-animal, one must form a
friendship with a particular animal, and then undo this friendship. As
Deleuze and Guattari will write, "becomings-animal are there from the
start, on the treason side" (Thousand Plateaus 241). So if one is to think
about the alliance between Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy and the
environment, as one is called to do so here, then a betrayal of the latter
Irving Goh 201
must somehow show up, and hence the violent image of philosopher-
sorcerers striking out at Nature in its flight of philosophy.
But one must also ask to what ends the instances of philosophical
violence against nature serve. In the elaboration of a philosophy of
becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari borrow images that depict
violence against Nature. The best example perhaps would be the reference
to Melville's Moby Dick, where Ahab's quest to hunt down the white whale
is expressed in a most fascinating or alluring and yet at the same time
violent style. In Deleuze and Guattari's reading, this hunt for the whale is
first not a quest for subjective revenge by Ahab, who had lost a leg to the
whale during a previous expedition: there is "no revenge to take"
(Thousand Plateaus 245). What is desired instead is a reaching towards
more nature, towards more than a singular Moby Dick, towards a pack of
whales. In this perspective, Moby Dick is but a boundary, the "Anomal" as
mentioned above, a frontier to be crossed in order to reach towards a more
multitudinous animal space. In other words, if there is a violence or
betrayal against an element of Nature, it is only but to reach towards more
of those elements. It is to go further in the experiment or experience of
becoming-animal by engaging with a multiplicity of animals in the pack
this time round, or to intensify further the immersion or engagement with
Nature. To attain the latter then, a certain violence against Nature becomes
necessary. As Deleuze and Guattari read Ahab reading the whale, "he is
the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to
reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it" (Thousand Plateaus 245).
It should be noted here in fact that the violence implicated in a
becoming-animal produces more nature not only at the end of its
trajectory. As Deleuze and Guattari will argue, Nature is served in the
middle of becoming. Becoming is not just only the interactivity of two
entities. In the midst of becoming, something else of nature can be
replicated, remembered, if not created. As the rhetoric of Deleuze and
Guattari goes, even a stream forms in the midst of this becoming,
emerging from or in-between the bi-directional flow of molecules between
the two entities. In becoming, there is "a transversal movement that
sweeps one and the other away, a stream [my italics] without beginning or
end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle"
(Thousand Plateaus 25).
202 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
it is always possible to have the good fortune to avoid them. Case by case,
we can tell whether the line is consistent, in other words, whether the
heterogeneities effectively function in a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether
the multiplicities are effectively transformed through the becomings of
passage. […] So experiment. (Thousand Plateaus 250-1)
It should be noted too that the violent force of nature acts not only
against humans. It acts against itself too. There is even a sacrificial logic to
the ecological thought of Deleuze and Guattari. In the interactivity
between philosophy and Nature, that is to say the flight-path of the
philosopher-sorcerer through the forest or field, it had been noted that this
trajectory is largely predicated on the moving cartography of rhizomes.
Not only do the rhizomes underlie the zigzag or haphazard flight-path, but
they also motivate the series of becomings that the philosopher-sorcerer
experiences in his or her encounter or engagement with Nature. But given
this predication on rhizomes, such that rhizomes can disseminate and
engage in a multiplicity of heterogeneous becomings with other plants,
animals, rocks, the wind, rivers, and humans, structures of vertical trees
have to be cut down, as Deleuze and Guattari doubtlessly suggest. To put
it in ecologically terrifying terms, they have to be deforested. One notes
that this takes place at the level of rhetoric, and yet the force of violence,
this time nature against nature, is still notable nonetheless. Rhizomes are
favored in place of trees in A Thousand Plateaus. Rhizomes look towards
"abandon[ning] the old model of the tree" (Thousand Plateaus 10). And a
Irving Goh 205
little later, the image of uprooting trees is again invoked to underscore the
free movement of rhizomes in contrast to the structured organization of the
tree-roots-branches system: "a line of flight [enables] one to blow apart
strata, cut roots [my italics], and make new connections" (Thousand
Plateaus 15). In all, there is therefore also a war between rhizomes and
trees in A Thousand Plateaus, "the rhizome as opposed to arborescence"
(Thousand Plateaus 296), and the trees have to be defeated. Beyond the
strife between rhizomes and trees, there is another recognizable scene of
violence involving elements of Nature. At the beginning, we have looked
at the violent mechanism of betrayal in the event of becoming-animal. For
Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is not restricted to a human-and-animal
interactivity. Instead, animal and animal, or animal and plant, or plant and
plant may fold one another in a series of becomings. And as long as there
is becoming, there is the "Anomal", and there is the alliance, and therefore
within Nature (even in the absence of anthropomorphic Man), there will be
instances of treacherous violence of Nature against itself too. Given the
events of becoming in Nature, "combinations are neither genetic nor
structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations" (Thousand
Plateaus 242), and therefore "Nature operates—against itself" (Thousand
Plateaus 242).
definite operations: the final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the
movement that animates terrestrial energy" (22).
his denial does not alter the global movement of energy in the least: the
latter cannot accumulate limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually,
like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us. (23)
one can speak of pressure in this sense only if, by some means, the
available space is increased ; this space will be immediately occupied in
the same way as the adjoining space. Moreover, the same is true every time
life is destroyed at some point on the globe, by a forest fire, by a volcanic
phenomenon or by the hand of man. The most familiar example is that of a
path that a gardener clears and maintains. Once abandoned, the pressure of
the surrounding life soon covers it over again with weeds and bushes
swarming with animal life. (30)
Irving Goh 209
Cache, gives to the experience of the singularity of the space, which is not
only constituted by the ground of the space itself but also by the
multiplicity of perspectival forces or trajectories (for example, the
mountains nearby, the sea at the horizon, etc.) that this space is related to.
Deleuze and Guattari will indeed celebrate such an art of framing that
keeps the notion of singularity open. But they will also supplement
Cache's project by suggesting that framing is not enough. Rather, one must
constantly de-frame and create another frame elsewhere. Instead of just
calling for cadre (or framing), Deleuze and Guattari will go for a more
radical de-framing or décadrage, which traces an absolute movement of
deterritorialization in relation to a cosmic line:
that thought could be like the movement, the athleticism, l'élan of a surfer
riding a wave. But what if the surf becomes an uncontrollable, destructive
tsunami, which would certainly threaten to hurl the surfer towards an
almost assured painful end, and which would also strike or destructively
clear away other natural entities (trees, plants, bushes, animals, etc.)
beyond the shorelines? What contour or dimension would thought take
from such a wave? What would have transformed in thought when it
changes from being a surfer's wave to a tsunami? What kind of thought
would it be now?
The violence of Nature has often generated exceptional modes of
thought, gestures, actions, policies, etc. They are often in excess of their
manifestations in everyday life. In response to natural catastrophe at a
particular place, for example Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Asian tsunami
disaster, the world has witnessed people there and around the world
responding with a force equally if not more overwhelming than the force
of Nature, a human force that overflows the limits, norms, and conditions
of quotidian ethics, politics, and economy. It is indeed usually in the wake,
in the aftermath of a natural disaster that a sense of an "international
community" beyond race, nation, culture, political ideology, market
frontiers, can be glimpsed at or can be thought of as a possibility. Genial,
generous, giving, and hospitable as they are, there nonetheless remain
many challenges to these after-thoughts, these after-actions that can be
regarded as aftershocks in their own ways. The first is that what may seem
to be unconditional at that time may have been predicated on an
expectation of a prospective return when everyday life returns to normal.
This is especially the case when a State enters the scene to aid another in
crisis, one which normally does not have amicable relations with the
former in ordinary times. The question here would be how to sustain these
thoughts and actions as unconditional, in other words, how to maintain if
not guarantee them as veritable ethics, opening oneself to another without
calculating, without expecting any future returns, without counting on
these present thoughts and acts and to use them for future bargaining chips
in political or economic negotiations or even in interpersonal relations?
Certainly, there is the potentiality for the transformation of thought, or
the emergence of a new thought of the unconditional derived from the
violent force of Nature.7 But there is yet another aspect to this. There is the
question, and this is of greatest imperative perhaps, of how to sustain and
develop these after-thoughts or after-actions without waiting for another
natural shock to hit humanity. In other words, how to finally learn what
thoughts or actions can be derived from the violent force of Nature. To be
sure, such a thought is not that which predicates itself on a future natural
Irving Goh 213
Notes
1
One notices that nomadology seems to have disappeared in the formulation of
Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy as eco-etho-philosophy. But nomadology is not
really absent in this term. If ethology is to be understood (in Mille Plateaux and in
Deleuze's Spinoza: philosophie pratique) as the philosophical science and ethics
which involves a going-outside of oneself in order to engage with a plural
gathering of heterogeneous entities through mutual desires, and which also
therefore undoes structured, hierarchized organizations of relations (through
mostly homogeneous genetic filiations), then this would also already included the
sense of nomadology, which always resists structurations and stasis.
2
See especially the "Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-
imperceptible" section in A Thousand Plateaus, especially pp. 239-52 for this
image of the philosopher-sorcerer.
3
This is my translation. Massumi's goes as such: "not pity, but unnatural
participation" (Thousand Plateaus 240). The French original reads « non pas pitié,
mais participation contre nature » (Mille plateaux. Paris : Minuit, 1980, 293). The
French construction "contre nature" certainly can be read as "unnatural." But
"contre" is also "against," and I would like to keep this notion of an "against" here,
since I am eliciting the sense of an undeniable violence against nature in Deleuze-
Guattari here.
4
As mentioned earlier under the nomenclature of nomadology, deleuzoguattarian
philosophy involves an active experiment with absolute movement, with a certain
line of flight as Deleuze and Guattari would say. But as Deleuze would say in the
interview with Claire Parnet, "There is always betrayal in a line of flight," and that
"the experimenter is a traitor" (Dialogues 40/41).
5
In the original French text, it reads "Vers quel néant le balai des sorcières les
entraîne-t-il?" (304). Evidently, I would prefer to read the French "néant" directly
as "nothingness" rather than "void" as Massumi suggests.
6
And just as Bataille's Nature is indifferent to effects of human disruptions, that of
Deleuze and Guattari's takes a similar approach to the latter. Even if the air or
water is polluted, deleuzoguattarian becoming somehow will adapt to these
mutations in Nature and use them to its benefits, i.e. Nature will improvise on its
imposed destruction so as to transform the defect into an element that supports the
214 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. La part maudite. [1949] (Paris: Minuit, 1967).
—. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1:
Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991).
Blühdorn, Ingolfur. Post-ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the
Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000).
Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Trans. Anne
Boyman. Ed. Michael Speaks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in
Poststructuralist Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Deleuze, Gilles, et Claire Parnet. Dialogues (Paris : Flammarion, 1977).
—. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New
York : Columbia University Press, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles, et Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux (Paris : Minuit, 1980).
—. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis :
University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
—. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? (Paris : Minuit, 1991).
Irving Goh 215
JAMES WILTGEN
This essay will put the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour in a
certain proximity in order to assess commonalities as well as possible
divergences, most especially regarding a thinking of the earth as well as
the idea of political ecology. Both might be argued to have theorized a
sophisticated type of politics: while Latour seems to profess a certain
"progressive" stance, Deleuze often veers more toward what might be
called a "subversive" politics, one more difficult to decipher. Among those
themes both thinkers address can be counted the following: the "death" of
God, man, and perhaps nature, and the dangers embedded in these deaths;
how to think time, most particularly via its constitutive split and
"unending" dynamic; the power of the subject/object binary and its
hierarchies and ordering power; the energy and force of becoming;
composition and connectivity as fundamental modes of action; the impetus
as well as the demands of questioning; the materiality of humans and
nonhumans and the parameters of their interactions; and the "people(s) to
come" or the contours of the collectives. Clearly, there will be only time to
briefly outline the issues involved, but they raise questions and problems
that have the possibility of becoming more and more pressing as the planet
moves farther into the 21st century. The continued staggering growth of the
human population, the speeds of technology, and the consumption of the
planet's resources have intensified many dangers, and the threats to the
world seem to have mutated from the perils of "total annihilation" during
the Cold War; yet for vast populations these threats seem, at certain levels,
as pernicious as ever.
The argument here will be that while both theorists combine certain
elements of dualism and monism, Deleuze will press more forcefully the
James Wiltgen 217
and morality in all their guises; the necessity of a densely articulated series
of positions for those who produce knowledge, not just for science but as
an amalgamation of artists, philosophers, and scientists, at the very least;
finally, the tension between the construction of a cosmos and that of a
chaosmos. How these questions are posed, who asks them, and how they
are answered will be essential in addressing themes of political decision
and ecology change.
Crystalline Vibrations
To begin an assessment of the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as his
writings with Félix Guattari, for an analysis of ecology and the political,
one of the most important points of entry would be the "primacy" of the
concept of difference. This formative concept of difference subtends
elements of a certain strand of poststructuralist theory, and produces a
constitutive split as the fundamental movement of thought.2 In a very
succinct formulation of this approach Deleuze will argue that "(i)n the
beginning, at the origin, there is the difference between active and reactive
forces"; more expansively, "if there were an undifferentiated qualitative
state of the world or a position of equilibrium for the stars, then this would
be reason never to leave it."3 The universe maintains itself in perpetual
tension, in an ongoing and insistent dis-equilibrium, always riven. In an
elaborate chart in his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze presents a typology of
these forces at work, where he meticulously lays out the tension in a type
of tetragon, with active and reactive forces in continual tension with the
power of affirmation and negation.4 This chart of forces produces a
schema for, among other things, the "triumph of reactive forces;"
published in 1964, this book still offers a provocative way in which to read
a vast panoply of issues, including, for example, the foreign and
environmental policy of the United States at this moment in history.
Difference perpetually splits, marking two asymmetries, not in any sense a
pair of binaries but as speeds, rhythms and the interruptions of energy:
various figures of this split will emerge, most tellingly as the eternal
recurrence and the will to power per Nietzsche, and as the virtual and the
actual in the work of Henri Bergson.5
Difference, thought in this manner, produces a radical sense of time,
and Deleuze will address this crucial force via a number art forms, but for
purposes of this essay the focus will be on cinema: in the "Preface to the
English edition" of Cinema 2: The Time-Image he will argue that a
revolution occurred in philosophy from the Greeks to Kant as "the
subordination of time to movement was reversed, time…increasingly
James Wiltgen 219
and that boundaries form the key to an operative and creative approach to
thinking.9 This border-thought, then, produces an incessant "discordant
harmony," a tension of forces, the continual incommensurability between
terms, such that any fundamental reconciliation becomes the continuing
attempt to think the unthought—in a word, to think difference without the
concept of identity.10 Difference, qua splitting, subtends time, and
produces unending questioning.
While there will not be sufficient time to deal with all the myriad
ramifications of the concept of becoming, it has been unleashed as a force,
at least for a powerful tradition of thought, by the aforementioned "death"
of God and of man. One of Deleuze's principle critiques of Kant concerns
the fact that the latter, in attempting to be done with theology, sought to
replace it with a type of anthropology: in other words, "by putting man in
God's place" Kant utterly failed at breaking the grip of reactive forces and
the attendant will to nothingness. With Nietzsche, an entirely different
sense of energy has been set into motion, one capable of ungrounding
traditional categories and concepts, and challenging, among other
precepts, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Further, "(b)ecoming is
involutionary, involution is creative:" with involution "form is constantly
being dissolved, freeing times and speeds," providing a critique of any
positivist evolution in favor of "(a) strange machine that is simultaneously
a machine of war, music, and contagion-proliferation-involution" (A
Thousand Plateaus, 267-269; as an example, see Blek le raton). This
machinic formation operates on the borders, boundaries, interstices, and
gaps of existence. In another register, The Logic of Sense begins with the
"First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming," where regarding the past
and the future the definition of becoming will be "to move and pull in both
directions at once"—in other words, both descent and ascent
simultaneously (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 1). As has been already
addressed, the crucial facet for a genealogical analysis will be to determine
which forces dominate and in what ways they function. In a well-know
section of A Thousand Plateaus, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-
Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…" the authors, utilizing a "worldwide
intensity map," point toward the various strata of "becoming-other"
including that of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and finally
224 Political Ecology and Bio Art
Brut Art
“Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other”
—Elizabeth Grosz Chaos, Territory, Art 23
How, then, might these analyses impact aesthetics and artistic production,
crucial elements in conceptualizing the issues involved in the construction
of the world? In What is Philosophy? Deleuze will argue that in creating
affects via their métier artists, responding to the ungrounding power of
becoming, create zones where "living beings whirl about," where "we no
longer know which is animal and which is human" (What is Philosophy?
73). Art confronts the forces outside the domain of the "human," where
James Wiltgen 225
be better suited to create the conditions for an earth linked to the forces of
chaos and the emergence of an abstract and recombinant humanity—not a
former people, nor the masses, and certainly not the Volk, but a new
mixture of different elements of the human, the inhuman, the subhuman,
and perhaps even the superhuman. New groups and groupings who will
enjoy more freedom and autonomy from the vast repressive apparatus now
in place, and who have challenged the received wisdom, tradition, and
contemporary structures; not simply as total rejection but in the powerful
crucible of composition. Call it quasi-topian thinking.
How does Deleuze think the concept of nature as it has been constructed
by a certain reading of modernity? Beginning with at least Anti-Oedipus,
one could raise doubts about the integrity of the concept, as the focus in
this book will be on germinal flows, a molecular unconscious, and forces
from the outside. Nature, then, will be understood "as a process of
production," that "everything is production;" further, the authors argue "we
make no distinction between man and nature."17 Then, in one of the most
sustained examinations of the concept, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
analyzes "Lucretius And The Simulacrum," where "(n)ature will be
thought of as the principle of the diverse and its production," as both
plenitude and void, "not collective, but rather distributive"; it is, most
particularly, "power." It will resist any attempt at being conceptualized as
"Being, the One, the Whole" (The Logic of Sense 266-267). In both these
works former boundaries and borders have been subjected to a serious
process of questioning as a means of displacing clichés and methods of
power and control. In other words, at the very least the analysis will seek
to undermine a pervasive sense of the term nature, generated in part by the
forces of capitalism qua utility, one that defined it as passive and inert, and
as the ultimate receptacle/object/repository for the colonization of the life-
world by the forces of discipline and control. In response to the epigraph
above, the task for critical thought, for art, and for science will be to "go
beyond information"; how, certainly, becomes of primary importance
(Cinema-2 269).
For Deleuze a crucial respond to the threat posed above will be via
issues of connection, of the ways in which links can be constructed using
new protocols of creativity and affirmation—in many ways from the mode
James Wiltgen 227
Techno-crats
“The sublime or higher man subdues monsters, poses riddles, but knows
nothing of the riddle and monster that he himself is”
—Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 100
At least two major crises drive the recent work of Bruno Latour, and not
surprisingly they intertwine in what might be termed a type of spiral. The
first involves the dramatic increase in the number of hybrids, monsters,
and new actants about in the world; the specific problem concerns the fact
that "if we can no longer separate the work of proliferation from the work
of purification" how do we control this continuing explosion of new forms
(Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 67)? In other words,
228 Political Ecology and Bio Art
purification has been the mode of "judging" for many centuries, judging
with a hard and remarkably consistent type of exclusion; perhaps,
however, the reign of this conceptual apparatus nears its end. Science,
charged as one of the key arbiters in these matters of judging and
exclusion, now faces severe problems in evaluating and controlling new
petitioners, as the appeal to the former modes of true and false has been
put into serious question. Indeed, the very formation of what Latour terms
Science functions as a crucial element of the expanding problems:
"Science…make(s) public life impotent by bringing to bear on it the threat
of salvation by an already unified nature" (Bruno Latour, The Politics of
Nature, 245). More tellingly in terms of a certain approach to politics,
especially regarding previous categories of thought as well as notions of
"radical democratic" processes "(t)he new hybrid remains a nonhuman, but
not only has it lost its material and objective character, it has acquired
properties of citizenship" (249). New petitioners have emerged
demanding different approaches and challenging the political and aesthetic
structures that have ruled for a very long time.
The other crisis, which forms arguably the central issue of Latour's
book Politics of Nature, would be the crisis of objectivity, or the increasing
difficulties, or perhaps the irrelevance, of that very endemic and seemingly
pervasive subject-object divide (20). Succinctly, the subject-object divide
proscribes exchange and prevents the processes of intensified mixing; it
also controls the borders and boundaries, producing a certain type of
proliferation, but only as a means of increasing power and saturation.
Latour rehearses here crucial elements of a type of poststructuralist
analysis: the necessity of humanity to exit the Cave and dissolve a certain
Platonic approach that founds everything on the basis of a fundamental,
and at this point ossified binary logic; by a critique of representation based
on the premise that it has been organized by this mode of binary thought;
and a detailed interrogation of the basic principles underpinning this type
of thinking (We Have Never Been Modern 67). The subject-object divide,
generating the overarching structures of subjectivity & objectivity, rests
upon the most polemic and rigid of positions, utilizing a conceptualization
of nature as that of an "unjustified process of unification of public life,"
propelled by a system of control with very aggressive categories, based on
two distinct and separated realms, and designed to compel "the human
assemblage to submit to a permanent threat of salvation by Science" (The
Politics of Nature 245, 45, & 57). This "nature," formed in the Cave and
property of what Latour calls the Old Regime, rests upon a singular
dimension manifest in a powerful ordering, which produces not a
collective but a "bicarmelism," a duality comprised of the "Heaven of
James Wiltgen 229
Ideas" on one hand and "the prison of the social sphere on the other"
(238). However, this insistence on a type of immanence can be very
dangerous, as it creates a variety of paths that could lead toward totalizing
formations. For example, in championing political ecology as the solution
to the problems of the world, and as a powerful critique of any attempt to
"totalize the hierarchy of beings" Latour will argue for the necessity of
convoking "a single collective whose role is precisely to debate the said
hierarchy"; and again, "(p)olitical ecology proposes to move the role of
unifier of the respective ranks of all beings out of the dual arena of nature
and politics and into the single arena of the collective" (29-30). For
whatever salutary reasons the dissolving of this dualism might be
proposed, the necessity of "a single collective," a type of totalizing
gesture, would seem premature at best; as a question of emphasis this
appears like an unjustified unification, an undue simplification. Too much
work needs to be done, and thought, before a single anything should be
proclaimed.
Latour argues that the concept of nature, at least how it has been
thought and enforced for a very long time, particularly in the West, should
be jettisoned from political and pragmatic thinking. In other words:
Thank God nature is going to die. Yes, the great Pan is dead. After the
death of God and the death of man, nature, too, had to give up the ghost. It
was time: we were about to be unable to engage in politics any more at all.
(25-26)
This does not mean some type of "disappearance" of the world outside and
within humans into a kind of absolute relativism: like so much of the more
sophisticated critical work at this time, a careful attention to context and
nuance will provide the sense in which this rather dramatic assertion
functions. In a word, the ‘"nature" Latour seeks to question, and to
dissipate, involves the stark imposition of "the hierarchy of beings in a
single ordered series;" the assemblage driven by a subject/object logic
which create the conditions for a rampant intrumentalization (25). Here,
modernism and the moderns will be equated with this conceptual lattice,
and as "discovering an indisputable and atemporal nature;" a central
problem, then, concerns what it means, in modern terms, "to naturalize"
(25). What engenders such a destructive stance toward the world from this
cultural and political complex, which seems capable of "unduly extending
the reign of Science to other domains," as well as "paralyzing politics"
(192 & 245). At some level the stakes of this debate involve the
organization of the world, as well as the possibility of politics as Latour
would define it. This "end of nature," then, would also be the "end of a
230 Political Ecology and Bio Art
We can start from nature, not in order to move toward the human element,
but—by making a ninety-degree turn—to move toward the multiplicity of
nature, redistributed by the sciences—something that might be called the
pluriverse…to mark the distinction between the notion of external reality
and the properly political work of unification…instead of going back and
forth between nature and the human, between realism and constructivism,
we can now go from the multiplicity that no collective yet collects, the
pluriverse, to the collective which up to now was gathering that
multiplicity under the combined names of politics and nature. (40)
An Age of Aquarius?
In seeking these seemingly vast changes how can those potential dangers
be addressed? Once again, a high degree of ambiguity obtains, mortal
threats might exist yet they seem to be dissipated as the dangerous
appellants gain admission to the collective. Certainly, in this emerging
James Wiltgen 233
world there would be "no peace nor the absence of war" (226). At the
very least the set of dangers involve the shift away from an assemblage
controlled by a quasi-incontestable transcendence, a singularized nature, a
powerfully articulated separation between the subject and the object, the
drive to purification, lethal border patrols, and the intensification of
current societal and genetic patterns. Added to these dangers would be the
difficulty in the articulation of a new position capable of focusing on the
problems generated by the Old Regime, which has produced the current,
very de-formed societal configuration. In one of his strongest political
analyses, Latour links modernity and imperialism, arguing that those who
followed these practices "declared they depended on no one; indebted to
the entire universe, they thought they were free of any liaison" (192). This
(anti)assemblage, then, has short-circuited politics, neutralized radical
democracy and prevented, most importantly, efforts at composing a
collective which welcomes the nonhuman into the process of creating a
common world, indeed a cosmos. As again, Latour calls for the
abandonment of a certain type of dualism based on this thinking, of
discarding the two house structure created therein via a dramatic shift in
the use of language and classification: "the name of the game is…to avoid
using the subject-object distinction at all in order to talk about the folding
of humans and nonhumans."21 Yet, as has been argued, this devolves far
too easily into a type of immanence that may well not have the sustaining
power to resist forces of totalization, and of an unjust, unjustified
unification. Here a competent schizoanalysis seems warranted.
Ambiguities, not paradoxes, multiply: on the one hand, when the
concept of mononaturalism is jettisoned "political ecology…is only
beginning to understand what wars it has to fight and what enemies it has
to learn to designate" (The Politics of Nature 219). In another of his more
trenchant political critiques Latour laments the rise of a globalization
which he equates with the "disappearance of everything external to the
human world;" and, linked to a certain type of totalitarianism which
exhibits a similar methodology, they both have ruthlessly "reduced the
number of concerned parties" by eliminating species, land, and other
elements of the planet in the name of an unjustified simplification, of a
seemingly unchecked rapaciousness.22 These constitute the effective
dangers existent as "a threat of pacification worse than the evil it was
fighting;" we have never left the Hobbesian state of war.23 Yet, he
maintains an interestingly confident stance with regards to the possible
contours of these dangers: there will be no "brutal rupture" nor big
conversion, no violent shift. At another point he seems clear on the
dangers of the war of the worlds, but also, in the next paragraph, fairly
234 Political Ecology and Bio Art
and if the goal would be the full integration of all those entities demanding
admission to the collective. One might hope that the process would be,
indeed, unendlichkeit, unending.
Cosmos v. Chaosmos
One last shift, and it might well be back to a certain reading of the Greeks,
their sense of a "cosmos," and the argument that "all collectives, like
Frankenstein's creature, are born deformed," and "only the trajectory of the
experiment gives them a civil form" (198). In seeking to uncouple the
connection between nature and politics, Latour will argue that "(n)ever,
since the Greeks' earliest discussions on the excellence of public life, have
people spoken about politics without speaking of nature" (28). He will use
the definition of Isabelle Stengers, as well as the Greeks, for cosmos: as a
"'harmony,'" a certain equilibrium that heralds the possibility of a "good
common world" (237-238). The forces propelling the composition of the
life-world would not be elements of chaos, which would have vast
elements that defy control, or even conceptualization.26 The "progressive
composition of the cosmos," would be based on an aesthetic of proportion
and form, on an internalization of the external appellants, of a studied
equilibrium--and once more the analysis offers a perplexing ambiguity:
these institutions would not be constructed "once and for all," yet the
principles for the construction of these institutions will be found, "at the
end of the process" (Politics of Nature 90). Foundations do exist, we must
be patient and they will ultimately materialize in the composition of the
cosmos.
Deleuze would seem to understand the Greeks in a different manner:
rather than the construction of the cosmos as the operative idea, a
confrontation with the forces of chaos will demand of art, philosophy and
science their primary efforts. In other words, "what would thinking be if it
did not constantly confront chaos?;" and decision "slices the chaos" (What
is Philosophy? 208 & 160). This chaos will not be seen as a threat but as
"most positive," as "infinite speeds of birth and disappearance" from
which our plane of consistency will be composed. By cutting, folding, and
slicing, the various activities of art, philosophy, and science compose
chaos, producing what Deleuze will call the "Chaosmos."27 For him
thought continually vibrates, from chaos to cosmos and back; for Latour, it
seems that the cosmos will be created by the move from the pluriverse to
the collective, or better the collective slowing, and gradually internalizing,
the new exteriority. These approaches obviously have important
James Wiltgen 237
implications for thinking and for creativity, and will be explored briefly
below in the form of an intriguing set of artistic practices.
Transgenic Aesthetic
“The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic”
—A Thousand Plateaus 280
So, two positions, two types of political composition. In both Deleuze and
Latour these elements are present, but the question will be that of
emphasis. The position of this essay has been that far too much work
needs to be done before a new constitution can be proposed, before a type
of due process can be put into place. Too many clichés, too much bad
opinion, too many micro-complicities. For artists, and philosophers, and
scientists no return to the Greeks can happen: they can certainly infuse and
provoke debate, but we are on our own in a profound sense. The theme of
radical democracy, especially as it applies to the current relationship
between humans and the earth remains crucial, but the stress should be on
the "radical." For artists, as for thinkers, one might argue for an
uncompromising approach in their work, for the primacy of an encounter
with the forces of chaos and difference. The following artists have been
probing some of the issues raised by both Deleuze and Latour; the key will
be to glean the most forceful and subversive elements from both theorists,
and to put them into a complex loop between artistic practice and the
thinking of aesthetics.
The world abounds with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), as
global corporations and the US military, predominately, conduct
increasingly complex experiments on reordering and augmenting the
materiality of the planet. Biodata from every corner of the globe has been
subjected to processes of privatization and patenting; borders seem to
proliferate and become more porous, while a powerful counter-tendency
seeks to police those borders and boundaries with more invasive and
controlling procedures. Commodification and relentless instrumentalization,
driven by competition and profit, control many of these forces. The very
molecular substratum of life and matter has been subjected to continual
probing, surveillance, and manipulation, in what seems to be a very
destructive, and even monomaniacal manner. These groups, abetted by
powerful Nation-States which have been rapidly morphing into Market-
States, fund the labs, set the rules, and determine the composition,
238 Political Ecology and Bio Art
natural, or at least that the individual and social representation of the body
defines it as entirely cultural and technical, we can deconstruct and
reconstruct the body endlessly" (67). There exist a number of problems
with his approach, which cannot be addressed here: however, his use of
Francisco Varela's work and his questioning of the issues involved in
humanity's experiments on "shaping our bodies according to our wishes"
raise some of the most complex and probing trends now unfolding, as does
his sense that there will be no end to these processes. As another sign of
the sweeping changes on the horizon, in May of 2008 the British
Parliament "voted to allow the creation of hybrid embryos, which have a
combination of human and animal DNA" (www.guardian.co.uk).
Louis Bec, in Signs of Life, discusses the shift to "life art," and to the
"fashioning" of "new forms, new species and new behaviors" ("Life Art"
84). An expert on his self-titled specialty "Technozoosemiotics," a
discipline at the crossroads of "semiotics, ethology, cognitive science,
technology, computer science, and artistic practice," his question will be
"(w)hat conditions are necessary for technological objects of the almost-
living to become part of our reality," a stark yet elegant formulation of
many of the themes being discussed in this essay (87 & 91). A "basic
hypothesis" of this hybrid practice will be that "all living beings are social
beings and that they have to solve a characteristic set of communication
problems that fit into a panoply of stimuli and common or approximate
response" (87). Bec will put forward a "biocryptographic aesthetics,"
based upon a sense of the "transgenic" and transgenic art which provides
"a dimension of endogenous abnormality, a hidden dimension that
divulges the underling pressure of degrading and impure procedures that
engendered it" (86). The operative words here—abnormality, degrading
and impure—signal a range of questions/problems, all of which probe the
"cultural foundations" of the world, the human, and the other-than-
human.31 As example of this, Bec points to a project headed by the
scientist Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi, entitled "Half Fish/Half Robot," a
"strange hybrid creature with a mechanical body controlled by the brain of
a fish;" what does one make of this, a type of "technofacturing," fusing
"living matter and machine" and compressing over 350 million years of
"evolution" into a contemporary transgenic hybrid ("Life Art" 87 & 91)?
Via the "art of manipulating processes" defined as "transgression,
exploration, and auto-transformation" Bec means to provoke and
produce discussion and argumentation, "a truly democratic debate about
technological culture and biotechnology" (84).
Artists have joined the debates about the fundamental relations between
the human and the nonhuman, as well as the materiality of the planet, in
240 Political Ecology and Bio Art
Notes
1
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 225. After Watergate, the chief analysis produced by the
government was the Church Committee; after five years of investigation, the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of the US Congress released, on 6.05.08,
its report on the ways the US administration repeatedly overstated the threats to the
US from Iraq: it was chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. For lack
of time, this essay will conjoin the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari at pivotal
moments—the separation of their thought would require a different study.
2
Splitting has a number of current uses: the Chinese continue to refer to the Dalai
Lama as a "splittist" for his supposed desire to remove Tibet from Chinese rule;
Newsweek magazine recently had a cover story about divorce, entitled
"Splitsville;" and the Large Hadron Collider, situated on the French-Swiss border,
will soon begin operations, attempting to split subatomic particles at nearly the
speed of light (a type of "time-machine" close to where Nietzsche first had the
flash of the “eternal recurrence" at Sils-Maria). Political, sociological, and
technological splitting in other words: this essay concerns what might be called a
"post-ontotheological" splitting. Finally, see Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art, where
she combined the work of Deleuze and Guattari with that of Luce Irigaray.
3
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 55. Also, ibid. 46-47 for Nietzsche's fidelity to Heraclitus, but with a
twist.
4
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 146. Another possible tetragon would be a
crystal (anorganic)/seed (organic) dyad folded into a series of "differences" and
“repetitions."
5
Other workings of this asymmetry will be chaos and cosmos, and nonsense and
sense. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 64. Here might be offered, in the face of
the ungrouding power of difference, a paraphrase of the authors take on Bergson:
"difference (instead of duration) needs a runner" (quotation altered). In other
words, following the work of Gilbert Simondon, difference, chaos, etc., all
James Wiltgen 241
17
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 4. See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother
Was a Computer, where she problematizes the notion of nature by "alluding to the
displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer" (3).
19
Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature, 180-183. The title of this section is "The
Common Dwelling, the Oikos"—even though Latour says that Heraclitus is a surer
guide than Heidegger, this section has a number of echoes of Heidegger.
20
Ibid. 219 & Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 128. The implications here
are for the crucial importance of connectivity.
21
Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
1999), 193-194 It is worth noting that this book is dedicated to, among others,
Donna Haraway.
22
Latour, The Politics of Nature, 58 & 220; "this stark reduction of accepted
categories"—this relentless elimination of species around the planet, which seems
to be accelerating: how far will the human species go with this?
23
Ibid. 224. Latour will single out Carl Schmitt as someone who "makes the error
of completely forgetting nonhumans" (282). Latour also says that the exterior is
not a nature, but an otherness—as has already been argued, this is not a
conceptualization Deleuze uses.
24
Latour, The Politics of Nature, 191; and "we don't know what an environment
can do," an interesting reference to Spinoza's notion that we don't know what a
body can do, 197.
25
Ibid. 193-194 & 192. See also Deleuze, Cinema 1, where he cites Buñuel's work
as privileging repetition over entropy (133).
26
www.nytimes.com, 6.04.08, the section of "Science Times" with the headline
"Dark, Perhaps Forever," about the possibility that certain elements of the universe
will never be known.
27
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (299). Chaosmos will be the composition of
chaos, the basis of philosophy, art, and science. All this takes place via the "will to
power"—this term, for Deleuze, does not mean to master or control, but signifies
creativity, and folding. The dyad will to power and the eternal recurrence, per
Deleuze's reading of Heidegger, does not signal the culmination of metaphysics,
but a profound subversion of it.
28
Vilém Flusser, "On Science," in Eduardo Kac, ed., Signs of Life (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 371. Flusser does seem to spend too much time on a
type of Disney mentality: "who will be the Disney of the future…maybe a
molecular biologist."
30
Kac, Signs of Life, 3-4. Kac will cite the importance of Lynn Margulis and her
notion of the dynamics of "symbiosis and cooperation" in evolution, as much as
"mutation and selection."
31
There are a number of films that deal with elements of these issues: see The
Intruder and Trouble Every Day, by Claire Denis; The Planet of the Apes, where
there was a whiff of interspecies coupling in the kiss between Taylor and Zira; and
in The Island of Dr. Moreau, where the interspecies relations would seem
definitely possible, especially between Montgomery and Fox Lady, although not
without problems of power.
James Wiltgen 243
Works Cited
Bennett, Jane. "In Parliament With Things" in Radical Democracy:
Between Abundance and Lack, Ed. Lasse Thomassen (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005).
Cohen, Sande. Passive Nihilism: Historiography and the Rhetorics of
Scholarship (New York: St.Martin's, 1998).
—. "Reading Science Studies Writing," The Science Studies Reader, Ed.
Mario Biagioli (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
—. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
—. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990).
—. Cinema 2, The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
—. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael
Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
—. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
—. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988).
—. "Review of Simondon (1966)." Pli, The Warwick Journal of
Philosophy, Volume 12, “What is Materialism?" 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
—. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian
Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
—. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008).
Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and
Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays. Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993).
244 Political Ecology and Bio Art
Websites:
Seed Magazine. http://seedmagazine.com/
Tissue Culture & Art Project. http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/
Stelarc._http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
GlobalCropDiversity.http://www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=21
Louise Bec. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/prolegomena/ (Bec)
CRI, Xinhua News Agency. 10.04.
http://www.china.org.cn/archive/2004-10/20/content_1109829.htm
Blek. %20the%20Raton.%20blekmyvibe.free.fr/
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI:
THE ANIMAL QUESTION
KATHERINE E. YOUNG
It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child that cease to be subjects to
become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season,
an atmosphere, an air, a life. The street enters into composition with the
horse, just as the dying rat enters into composition with the air, ad the beast
and the full moon enter into composition with each other… Climate, wind,
season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people
that populate them, follow them and awaken with them… The becoming-
evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o'clock is this
animal! The animal is this place! (263)
lack, but as the condition of possibility for human life. More specifically,
Deleuze and Guattari envision all life on a plane of consistency, in a
continuous and temporal state of becoming, so that there is no distinction
between humans and animals. Certainly this superficial re-figuration allows
animals to take form in the most unexpected ways, potentially disrupting
our molar understandings of animal nature (for example, as food,
companions, scientific experiments). Yet, as the meatpacking district
exemplifies, becoming-animal may have unforeseen consequences for
animals, begging the question: how we can negotiate the actual (animal
body) and the virtual (becoming-animal) within the context of Deleuze and
Guattari. In other words, when they write, "anyone who likes cats or dogs is
a fool" (Thousand Plateaus 240, their emphasis) do we take this as a
symbolic rejection of Oedipal desire or something else—perhaps a narrow
reading of the animal body that reduces it to a manifestation of repressed
desire? Moreover, if unbridled desire is an ontological truth in their work,
does this imply that animals embodying "repressed will" must be
"destroyed" in the wake of this totalizing desire? Any potential alliance of
Deleuze and Guattari with animal advocacy or a larger project of
environmentalism demands consideration of not only their intended use of
the animal (as the figurative possibility for life) but also their underlying
image of the animal body as juridical limit to be consumed in the path of
self-generating subjects of desire.5
Becoming-Animal
How does one become-animal? To create this line of flight, this
movement of becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari create a loose
hierarchy of animals in A Thousand Plateaus—Oedipal, State and
demonic, in which the first two types point to the (egoist) regression and
(heroic) mystification of the subject, respectively, and the third incites the
assemblage of the Body without Organs. All center on ideas of animality,
which either reify the deprivation of desire (lack) or provoke its plentitude
and excess. In terms of the sorts of animals represented by each type, the
categories are not reserved for any particular kind of animal—any animal
considered "my little beast" becomes Oedipal and "even the dog" becomes
demonic when constituting a continuously transforming population (241).
Overall, the authors privilege demonic-becomings; in particular, although
all becomings-animal run the risk of becoming mystifications, it is the
demonic or diabolical idea of animality—wild, multiplying and
transforming—that is the figurative possibility for escaping humanist
classifications:
Katherine E. Young 249
What does this mean for the animal body? Deleuze and Guattari take
care to explain the difference between molar (well-defined) and molecular
(dynamic) conceptions of the body and their affects on becoming-animal.
The former refers to what we clearly recognize as the body, or the "real"
animal trapped in its molar form and endowed with certain organs and
functions (and in the case of the human molar form, assigned as a subject)
(Thousand Plateaus 275). The latter are the particles or molecules emitted
by an organism that come into proximity with other particles within the
context of an event. Becoming-animal, as with any becoming, flows
between these molar and molecular poles. For example, the disintegration
of forms, the unstable haecceities of one and the pack that occurs with
becoming-wolf is a line of flight toward a molecular assemblage, whereas
the becoming-dog associated with Oedipal and state animals (for example,
the companion or breed) moves toward a molar form: "No one can say
where the line of flight will pass: Will it let itself get bogged down and fall
back to the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to
another danger, for example, turning into a line of abolition, annihilation,
self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab…?" (Thousand Plateaus 250).
The relations of movement and speed that transpire in the vacillation to
and from molar and molecular are the process of desire: "becoming is the
process of desire" (Thousand Plateaus 272). It is a pack or swarm of
molecules that spreads and multiplies via contagion. As Claire Colebrook
explains in her book Gilles Deleuze , becoming-animal describes the
positive multiplicity of this movement of desire. Citing a child's encounter
with a wolf, she notes: "the child's fascination for the wolf is not for what
the wolf represents but for the wolf's entirely different mode of becoming:
wolves travel in packs, at night, wandering" (134, her emphasis). In other
words, the child desires not the single form of the wolf or what it
represents, but the multiplicity of its potential actions (134). And within
that moment, the child too trades ipseity for singularity. It is important to
note that within this fluid composition of one and many, Deleuze and
Guattari do not distinguish between humans and animals. Instead, we are
all molecular bodies, more or less, passively or actively, inhabiting molar
forms on a plane of consistency—the surface on which all events
(becomings) happen (Thousand Plateaus 267).
250 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
But there is not simply one plane. Deleuze and Guattari use the image
of the plane as the space of becoming, both in its molar and molecular
capacities. In this sense, the plane of organization is the molar counterpart
to the plane of consistency, in that it organizes molecules into a subjective
form: "the plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of
consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the
movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them,
reconstitute forms and subjects in dimension of depth" (270). We can
think of the planes of consistency and organization much like the tables of
the earth and sky on which the Nietzschean dice-throw takes place: "But
these two tables are not worlds. They are two hours of a single world, the
two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the hour when the
dice are thrown and the hour when the dice fall back" (Deleuze, Nietzsche
and Philosophy 25). As Deleuze explains in Nietzsche & Philosophy, the
dice throw is the eternal return of life. The two moments, in which the dice
are thrown (earth) and the dice fall back (sky), symbolize the accident of
life and the becoming of life, respectively. In other words, life enters the
world on the plane of organization marked by its molar form. As bodies,
we have been selected and organized by those in power: we are the dice.
And collectively we (humans) are bad players because we want to repeat
the combination of the first throw and reaffirm our subjectivity; that is,
bring order to chaos through dialectical resolution. It is embracing the
second throw, however, that allows us to overreach the dialectic and
transvalue inherited values. In this sense, to be free is to embrace the
contingency of history and becoming (Colebrook 129).
If we overlay the Nietzschean dice throw with becoming-animal, it is
apparent that animals are open to assembling themselves with the world
around them, to chance encounters. For example, dogs love to follow a
scent, wherever it may lead (trash, a dead animal, another dog, etc.)
creating assemblages that rupture their categorization as polite "pets." At
the crass event when it sniffs a rotting bird carcass, the dog enters into an
assemblage (dog-carcass-maggot) that ruptures our Oedipal configuration
of "the dog." However, in order to perceive this difference, the dog must
necessarily break (Oedipal) or reinforce (evolutionary) identities as "a
dog." In other words, the pack delimits the condition of possibility for the
animal, since animals are rendered in groups, which then defines their
being (Lippit, Electric Animal 131). As Deleuze and Guattari explain in A
Thousand Plateaus, individuals or species are only symbolic entities of the
pack.6 More specifically, what is important for Deleuze and Guattari is the
anomalous borderline of the pack. In this sense, an animal may demarcate
difference as the leader of the pack, or redouble into the pack so that each
Katherine E. Young 251
and every animal occupies this position (Thousand Plateaus 245). This
rereading of the group or pack in terms of the borderline allows the
authors to transvalue humanist conceptions of animals. "It is now even
possible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding the
pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective
stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they
bring into play)" (Thousand Plateaus 245).
This is not to say that the pack cannot be cut by planes of organization
in a way that they fall back into state or Oedipal forms (Thousand
Plateaus 246, 260). Indeed, this is how animals are inscribed and read by
humans; for example, a toy dog dressed up to be the object of one's
affection. As Steve Baker discerns in Picturing the Beast, culture allows
us access to received rather than unmediated understandings of animals.
For this reason, he argues, we must realize that symbolic and rhetorical
uses of the animal carry as much conceptual weight as the "real" animal
(10). For Baker, the challenge to re-picturing animals is rendering animal
bodies "abstract, conceptual, arbitrary, unstable, and not as the site of the
fixed 'real'" by amalgamating them with images of the human body (223).
Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we reread and transvalue the
animal form inherited from evolutionary classifications with a multiple
and amorphous animality. From this transvaluation we can infer
becoming-animal as the common denominator of life, or the will to power,
that animates the eternal return of the Nietzschean dice throw.
Colebrook explains this rereading of the animal in terms of the
transversal quality of becoming-animal; that is, the mutation or variance
that occurs with each molecular event or encounter. "For Deleuze,
transversal becomings are key to the openness of life. Life is not
composed of pre-given forms that simply evolve to becoming what they
are, as though becoming could be attributed to the coming of some
being… What it is depends on the life it encounters" (133, her emphasis).
The animal, reread as the borderline, becomes the figure for embracing
tragic gaiety. As humans we do not know what a body can do, and
"lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk" (Deleuze, Spinoza 17-8).
More specifically, our bodies are stolen from us in order to "fabricate
opposable organisms" (Thousand Plateaus 276). In this sense, the
becoming-animal of the human is recognition of the body as inscribed by a
relation of multiple discursive forces that separate the body from what it
can do. In terms of the cache of this animal metaphoricity, however, we
must concede that there remains the ever-present danger of destroying
"real" animal bodies for the (human) body without organs (a point to
which we will return shortly).
252 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible
For Deleuze, the actual world is the combination of virtual
tendencies: what we perceive as actual or real is, in fact, one among many
possible actualizations. In this sense, pure difference or becoming
precedes our ontological understandings of the world. If we return to the
anomalous border, it is the perception of the border that delineates an
event and that contracts the flow of becoming (Colebrook 126-7). The
plane of consistency is the flow of molecules that stretches from human to
animal to molecular to particles, all the way to the imperceptible so that
"Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines
constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization" (Thousand Plateaus
249). What this means is that becoming-animal necessarily depends on the
breakdown of our timely conceptions of animality; that is, it takes the
categories of the present and makes them suspect. Freedom, in the sense of
becoming-animal, is not aligned with a particular line of flight or end:
there is no original or stable moral vantage point from which to judge
actions. Rather, freedom is possibility itself: "the virtual opens up new and
possible worlds for actualization, but such openings will not automatically
lead in the direction of freedom. This is nonetheless what the virtual does:
it opens possibilities for new experiences, for new encounters, for new
steps to be taken" (Rushton 227).
More specifically, ethics replaces morality for Deleuze (Spinoza 41).
Morality takes the active range of possibilities and presents it reactively,
"as already determined through a system of immutable values—this is
evil" (Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze 130, her emphasis). Ethics, on the other
hand, recognizes: "In reality, we are never judged except by ourselves and
according to our states" (Spinoza 40). Working from Spinoza and
Nietzsche, Deleuze conceives of the body as constituted out of a relation
of active and reactive forces; the former combining and overreaching
humanist categorizations and the latter separating active forces from this
creative potential (Nietzsche & Philosophy 57). Ethics is the active reading
of the body with regard to these forces. Accordingly, judgment is centered
on a body's affective power, so that "badness" signals the decomposition
or destruction of the capacity to be affected or the domination of the body
by reactive forces (Spinoza 41, Nietzsche & Philosophy 57). According to
Deleuze and Guattari, we can judge what a body can do only when it
enters into relations with affects of another body: "We know nothing about
a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are,
how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the
affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it,
Katherine E. Young 253
What this passage suggests is that the situation or event that brings to
bear the threshold of the horse does so by revealing the forces that produce
and animate its actions. As a beast of burden, the horse's body is the
product of forces that load its back, similar to Nietzsche's camel or the
self-loading ass discussed by Deleuze in Nietzsche & Philosophy (1962).
In this sense, the horse is a passive body: it is a figure of passive nihilism,
a body that affirms nothing but the reactive forces which dominate it. Of
course, when Nietzsche and Deleuze talk of beasts of burden, they intend
to symbolize human action: the horse or camel or ass is the enlightened
modern man who loads his own moral baggage via the displacement of
religious or state values as his own power (Nietzsche 26-7, Nietzsche &
Philsophy 181). We are unaware of our own passive nihilism as humans.
Yet in witnessing the event of the horse being whipped, its consequences
254 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
are no longer separated from its productive forces. More specifically, there
is recognition (which the psychoanalyst misses) of the affects or forces
themselves—the animal is the production and limit in the relation of these
forces (Thousand Plateaus 257-259).
Animals always already occupy this (passive) position in relation to
humans. Animals lack language: they have no origin story and are not
aware of the values that mark them. Cruelty, as defined by Deleuze and
Guattari in Anti-Oedipus "is the movement of culture that is realized in
bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them" (145). And language is
what allows for this inscription of signs into the "naked flesh" that codes
flows and invests organs as part of the social machine (Anti-Oedipus 145).
For this reason, humans are the sole purveyors of cruelty because it is only
human values that inscribe and mark the body. Becoming-animal, for this
reason, is a human-centered event that attempts to recoup the Body
without Organs—the body before it is organized and dissected into
Oedipal and scientific codes. Deleuze discusses this cruel transmutation in
terms of animal nature in Coldness and Cruelty:
It has been said that the senses become "theoreticians" and that the eye, for
example, becomes a human eye when its object itself has been transformed
into a human or cultural object, fashioned by and intended solely for man.
Animal nature is profoundly hurt when this transmutation of its organs
from the animal to the human takes place, and it is the experience of this
painful process that the art of Masoch aims to represent. (69)
that when Deleuze asserts the infinity of pure becoming as the virtuality
that encompasses every actualization, he is again secretly Hegelian" (69).
With this secreted raison d'être comes a concomitant renunciation of
animal bodies, sustained via language. Deleuzian freedom, in this Zizekian
sense, is the minimal power to accept or reject being affected in a certain
way: "'Freedom' is thus inherently retroactive. At its most elementary, it is
not simply a free act that, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but
rather a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities
will determine me" (112). Accordingly, when he argues that language
feeds difference by allowing humans to move beyond acts of mere animal
survival to perceive autonomous "partial moments" of desire, Zizek
imagines language as both the limit and condition of possibility for
(human) freedom (143). Non-human organisms, too, have an innate power
to produce rules, map relationships and limit their actions to a series of
affects, but they are driven solely by their primal desires. Humans, of
course, attach values to these desires via language, which allows them to
take hold of the world around them. Indeed, Zizek reads this
"humanization" as paradoxical, since subsequent symbolic castration
works to limit human freedom (as opposed to sustaining it). Although
Zizek is not explicit on this point, if we accept his reading of Deleuze, this
means that becoming-animal is an attempt to break free of the fetishization
of pleasure by embracing the (animal) open.10
Here it useful to discuss, if only briefly, Heidegger's implication of
animals, which parallels this arrest of animal abandon. For Heidegger,
animals are defined by their affects: they are poor-in-the-world. In short,
animals are open to other beings, but only in an instinctive way. More
specifically, animals are held captive by the world because they only relate
to it as an extension of themselves—no space or gap exists between the
other and the animal. And because they have no conception of others as
beings-as-such, this also means that they cannot take any position over and
against that to which they are instinctually drawn (Calarco 23-5). Within
Heidegger's framework, animals exist in the world only in a space of
exclusion (Lippit, "Afterthoughts on the Animal World" 792). Lacking
language, they do not divide the world or their bodies via concepts.
Humans, on the other hand, lend order and meaning to their world via their
choices; that is, only humans are world forming. And because the
linguistic "subject" believes it is affected by encounters with autonomous
"objects" (animals, or others generally), it lives in isolation to the world.
What this means is that this objective liaison is simply a veiled
relationship to us, one that works to ban our worldly (and distinctly
human) experience as well as close down human freedom. Granting this
258 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
schema, animals become amalgams of the forces to which they are drawn
because they only sense affects as extensions of themselves; that is, they
are bodies without organs. Here we can see the parallel of Heidegger and
Deleuze.11 As Zizek senses, language grants us a paradoxical sense of
freedom. Becoming-animal is recognition of this paradox, the embrace of
animal openness, which is sensed through the recoded assemblages of
human bodies and their worlds. Yet as Zizek discerns, this is a distinctly
human endeavor, since animals simply live in the open, but cannot take
hold of it. In fact, careful reading of Deleuze and Guattari reveals they too
concede becoming-animal as an anthropocentric event:
Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the
vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities
between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed
and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are werewolves
and vampires, we say this with all our heart; but do not look for a
resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in
action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the 'real' animal is
trapped in its molar form and subjectivity). (Thousand Plateaus 275)
And this is precisely Giorgio Agamben's point in his book The Open,
wherein he uses Heidegger's principle to cast animality and humanity as
one and the same, "two sides of a single fracture" (36)—similar to the way
that Zizek portrays the actual and virtual as two sides of same Moebius
strip.12 For Agamben, to "let the animal be" would mean realizing this
relationship for what it is—the creative force of human life. In this sense,
Deleuze's becoming-animal falls back on the dialectical and paradoxical
logic of politics that Agamben delineates, and Zizek gathers in terms of
psychoanalytic theory: to exceed the limits imposed upon us by
language—to live in the Deleuzian sense—is contingent upon our
possession of language. As such, animals serve as the constitutive outside
of the human world, excluded via their lack of language but included as
figures that affect our human existence; that is, the animal is the
borderline, receding or emitting from the pack, breaking or reifying
molarity. Becoming-animal is contingent upon the over-reaching
(exclusion) of molar animal forms, by destroying and taking them to their
bodily limits. For the masochist, as we have seen, cruelty is recoded via
the physical re-inscription of human flesh. Yet, as described above, the
masochistic fantasy is a self-reflective and anthropocentric event preceded
by the literal breakdown of animal bodies. Here we can return to Deleuze
and Guattari's description of Little Hans's (as well as the masochist's)
fascination with the various horse-producing assemblages (draft-horse-
Katherine E. Young 259
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Extinct
A provocative example of the danger of becoming-animal for animals
is illustrated in Akira Lippit's book Electric Animal. Here Lippit takes
becoming-animal to its farthest limit—extinction. For Lippit, animals
serve as the imaginary position in human speech, as metaphors that exist
outside the realm of ontology (26). More specifically, animals are pure
medium, pure text, pure ideas, and "fleshy photographs" that are able to
disrupt the flow of figurative human speech. How do they do this,
according to Lippit? Lacking language, animals are incapable of
determining or regulating the discourse that they transmit (21).
Consequently, animals serve as living metaphors. To arrive at this
position, Lippit expands Derrida's claim that animals function as absolute
limits of language, since within language they can only appear as another
expression—metaphor (166). More specifically, sacrificing molar animal
imagery via becoming-animal allows us access to the space proscribed by
reason and language, while concurrently releasing us from the realm of
morality (181). In this sense, becoming-animal entails the destruction of
260 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
animal, with its apparent refusal to draw the line even at bestiality or
butchery" (Postmodern Animal 174). For Baker, becoming-animal is
imaginative thought that challenges the complacency and consensus
thinking of contemporary politics (18-9). It is postmodern art's serious
engagement with animals—its willingness to represent animals in new and
dangerous ways—that marks its promise in terms of becoming-animal.
Whether or not this leads to a better future for animals, or more or less
humane priorities in our relationships with animals is only secondary to the
type of freedom that it promises (25).
A quick read of Deleuze and Guattari can certainly point to this line of
flight. But to work on the surface in this way is to slip back into a
complacency that is, at its roots, anti-Deleuzian. Deleuze and Guattari are
clear on this point: rhizomes emerge within the plateaus of our inherited
molar concepts, and freedom is contingent on rupturing or cutting across
molarity: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will
start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid
of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and
again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of
segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized,
signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which
it constantly flees" (Thousand Plateaus 9). As this passage demonstrates,
animals awkwardly populate these plateaus. Contemporary animal rights
projects surely push the limits of traditional political discourse. Yet, if we
assemble animal rights within a politics of becoming, it is clear that in
accepting our juridical system as given, they do not go far enough. In other
words, Deleuze and Guattari may lend a much-needed sense of openness
and possibility to these projects by forcing them to take on the value of their
political values. And at the same time, scratching beneath the surface of
becoming-animal reveals its destructive impulses with regard to animals, as
we have seen. Without these kinds of negotiations, it is easy, all too easy, to
think that we can fully escape our complicity with a larger structure of
domination. Becoming-animal opens a multitude of virtual possibilities for
animal-human relationships, an entire (minoritarian) politics of becoming-
animal, which challenges our rote knowledge of animals—not to escape it,
but in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, to put it to "strange new uses"
(15).
262 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
Notes
1
See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation.
2
Note that Guattari directly engages the link between human subjectivity and
environmental issues. See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies.
3
Here we are reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand
Plateaus of Ahab’s pursuit of the whale, as a manifestation of becoming-animal, in
Melville’s novel, Moby Dick.
4
See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat.
5
Here I am playing off Judith Butler's argument in Subjects of Desire that Deleuze,
following the Hegelian tradition, figures desire as the central feature of human
ontology, one that is liberated when it is free of the constraints of prohibitive law
(206).
6
Here we can observe a certain affinity with Derrida's work on the animal
question. In a similar way, Derrida observes in "The Animal That Therefore I Am"
that the "heterogeneous multiplicity of the living" is reduced to a concept of "the
animal" that allows for an "original" human subjectivity (124-5). When Derrida
comments, "I would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular. There
is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible
limit. We have to envisage the existence of 'living creatures' whose plurality cannot
be assembled within the single figure of animality that is simply opposed to
humanity" his retort may be comparable to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of
becoming-animal in A Thousand Plateaus (125). Although he points to the
reduction of "the animal" in language, Derrida reserves a strong critique for
Heidegger (and Lacan's) use of "the animal" arguably lending his work a different
trajectory than that of Deleuze and Guattari (see also "And Say the Animal
Responded" and "Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject" for a more
comprehensive discussion of "the animal" in Derrida's work).
7
Here we can think of Deleuze and Guattari's reference in Anti-Oedipus to the
continual material flow, or relations of production, that drive the pure and empty
space of desire or becoming (as they later describe in A Thousand Plateaus).
8
In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze notes that Masoch's dream of Venus at the
beginning of Venus in Furs was inspired by "Bachofen, as much as Hegel," in
terms of the progressive disintegration of the feminine principle (the Aphroditic
era) to the degenerate Dionysian form with respect to the three feminine ideals
(52). In this sense, Hegel's "beautiful soul," or the suspension of the negative that
digresses into madness, is represented in the oral mother of the masochist fantasy
[for a more complete treatment of the beautiful soul, see Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit (383-409)].
9
Note that Deleuze does critically examine the Hegelian conception of the
“beautiful soul” in Difference and Repetition.
10
Specifically, this is a reference to Giorgio Agamben's text, The Open, which will
be discussed in greater detail shortly. For now, we can turn to Zizek's comment on
the human fetishization of desire in Organs without Bodies: "In short, the zero-
degree of 'humanization' is not a further 'mediation' of animal activity, its
reinscription of a subordinated moment of higher totality (say, we eat and
Katherine E. Young 263
procreate to develop higher spiritual potentials) but the radical narrowing of focus,
the elevation of a minor activity into an end-in-itself" (141-2).
11
Matthew Calarco, in a subsection (aptly titled "Body without Organs") of his
essay "Heidegger's Zoontology," reveals this link between Deleuze and Heidegger.
Note that Calarco does not reference Deleuze in the text. Although 'body without
organs' certainly and literally refers to Heidegger's consideration of the bee whose
stomach has literally been removed, the reference to Deleuze seems obvious.
Specifically, he cites Heidegger's appraisal of an experiment, in which the
abdomen of a bee was removed to test whether the animal would continue to feed
on honey unimpeded. Not only did the bee fail to recognize the presence of too
much honey, it failed to notice the loss of its abdomen, leading Heidegger to
conclude that the bee was held captive by its food (25). The bee was literally the
body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari describe.
12
Note that Zizek does comment on biopolitics and the homo sacer, briefly
referencing Agamben, in his article "From Politics to Biopolitics… and Back."
13
Also see page 8 of this essay for the full quotation from A Thousand Plateaus.
14
In "Nietzsche and Animals" Alphonso Lingis describes the Nietzschean account
of evolution as an eternal return of "ancient instincts and pleasures that produces
new excellences" (13). More specifically, the atavaristic survival of animal
instincts (whose evolutionary goals have diminished to the point of being
imperceptible in human bodies) manifests as "gratuitous expenditures of energy"
or re-bridled desire in Deleuzian terms (13).
15
More specifically, I am working from the two broad theoretical approaches
outlined in Elizabeth Grosz's book Space, Time and Perversion: the inscriptive
approach (the likes of Foucault, Deleuze, Nietzsche) which views the body as a
surface on which values are inscribed; and, the lived body approach, which refers
to the lived experience of bodies, always already in terms of their social coding
(33-7).
Works Cited
Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 2000).
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
—. The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Calarco, Matthew. "Heidegger's Zoontology." Animal Philosophy: Ethics
and Identity. Ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London:
Continuum, 2004), 18-30.
Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002).
264 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
VINCENT J. GUIHAN
beings, as human beings, have greater inherent moral worth than other
species and that they in particular and the environment as a whole exist for
human use. Second, it provides us with a basis to at least trouble if not
actually think or work outside of the human/animal/nature dichotomies
that a number of ethicists have insisted that we must begin to trouble.
Becoming animal provides us with a way of comprehending ourselves as
human beings within a broader framework if environmental
interdependency—not just in terms of our political will and rational
reflection or in terms of how to we might manage and police nature better
as a superspecies—but as a ways of reimagining ourselves as beings
dependent on the ecosystem (a condition that, although obviously true, has
been denied to the point of becoming debatable, as the debate around
global warming currently evinces). Finally, becoming animal in particular
and the rhizomatic in general provides us with a way to think outside of
biopower, to use Foucault's term, as the primary way of ordering the
relationship between human and non-human animals and the environment.
But, first, what does "becoming animal" mean in terms of Deleuze and
Guattari's thought and what is at stake in it?
Deleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of becoming animal with a
reading of the film Willard, a film that depicts the protagonist's life with
his mother and the rats with whom they share their home. Deleuze and
Guattari describe the film as a typical bildungsroman, a story of coming to
age for Willard as he transitions from a friendship with the rats,
particularly Ben, to a friendship with a young woman. "Willard tried to
drive [Ben] away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he
then is lured into the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is
waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing"
(Thousand Plateaus 233). The film juxtaposes the bourgeois comedy,
which typically ends in marriage, with a more gothic tale, in which nature
returns to devour the Subject. From the film, Deleuze and Guattari draw
out the Animal as a figure that affirms or denies the Oedipal. "(Are there
Oedipal animals with which one can 'play Oedipus," play family, my little
dog, my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an
irresistible becoming?'" (233). The rats, in their multiplicity and ferocity
represent animals that are clearly not Oedipal, which leaves us with a
question as to how we should understand them in semiotic terms; how do
we read them and what do they mean?
Moving from the film, Deleuze and Guattari put forward a theoretical
outline of as to who animals as representations function in imaginative
work. They argue that:
family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own pretty history,
'my' cat, 'my' dog. These animals invite us to regress into a narcissistic
contemplation. [...] And then there is a second kind: animals with
characteristics or attributes: genus, classification or State animals; animals
as they are treated in the great divine myths in such a way as to extract
from them series or structures, archetypes or models [...] Finally, there are
more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a
becoming, a population, a tale ... Or once again, cannot any animal be
treated in all three ways? (241)
That is, becoming-animal applies to even those beings that would not
normally have a signified in nature, and even to those beings we may not
normally consider animals. The result is that becoming-animal is entirely a
discursive construct. Furthermore, "becoming can and should be qualified
as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the
animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if
the denial the human being becomes is not" (238). That is, even in the
absence of a stable signifier that we would understand as an animal, the
process of becoming-animal may still describe it. In general, however, for
Deleuze and Guattari, the idea of species difference is not a matter of the
real relationship between human beings and animals, but primarily
discursively constructed understandings of our relationship to one another
as human beings, with the Animal as a figure propping up that
understanding. Discussing totemism, they argue that "when analyzing the
institution of the totem, we do not say that this group of people identifies
Vincent J. Guihan 269
with that animal species. We say that what group A is to group B, species
A is to species B" (236). Furthermore, in their view, this is always a more
complicated analogy than what simple metaphor allows. They argue that
"a man can never say: 'I am a bull, a wolf...' But he can say: I am to a
woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to
the sheep" (237). The relationship between human beings and animals is
invariably a discursive one that more frequently reflects a relationship
between human beings. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this is a
rationalizing process tied to structuralism and modernism (237).
In that sense, becoming animal in cultural representation bears a
certain resemblance to traditional kinds of anthropomorphism, but it is a
resemblance only; becoming undoes stable categories of being; becoming
animal undoes the human-animal boundary in a way that cannot be
stabilized easily by traditional metaphoric and metonymic
understandings of animals in semiotic terms. Taken too literally, Deleuze
and Guattari's understanding of becoming animal functions as a kind of
anthropomorphism, but it is not just any kind of anthropomorphic gesture.
What difference does this make? Whether or not literature functions as a
counter-hegemonic practice in Gramsci's sense or a reverse discourse in
Foucault's sense, is, of course, a matter determined at the location of the
production of meaning: that is, with the nominal reader. But some cultural
representations obviously require greater work then others to understand
and account for the meaning. Some resist stabilized and stabilizing
readings more than others. Becoming animal, as a representational tactic, I
would suggest, troubles the boundary between human beings and animals
more substantially than just indexical representations of animals as mute
sufferers or the humans in animal drag in more anthropomorphic texts and
genres. Becomings-animal as a representational tactic summons the reader
to engage in a dialogic relationship with the animal as an Other that cannot
be easily rendered internally homologous. This provides ecocritical
readers with a new way of thinking outside the traditional mimetic vs.
anthropomorphic representational dichotomy on which traditional thematic
cultural criticism relies.
Working from Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of becoming
animal, it becomes clear that some that while all anthropomorphic
(mis)representations of animals may be problematic, some are more
problematic than others. Why is anthropomorphism problematic in
general? There is, of course, a wealth of criticism on how particular
Animals function as metaphor and symbols in particular texts, but there is
no extensive theoretical literature on how the Animal functions as a sign
within purely imaginative narratives. Most ecocritics have frowned on
270 Becoming Animal
abject, the Animal is what is excluded from the sphere of the human
Subject: ferocious wild animals, meat – the Animal represented as
multiplicity. In contrast to objectification, abjection attempts to naturalize
an ontological position on the boundary of discourse, as merely the body,
or perhaps more appropriately, as merely the carcass. Understandably,
then, the Animal serves as a perfect synecdoche for the abject, whether
human, animal or ecological. Becoming animal as a theory helps us to
understand this mythologization as a process, and in particular, how some
representations of animals and nature may resist it.
The most extensive theorization of the Animal in imaginative work
comes from the work of ecofeminist and literary theorist Carol Adams.
Her Sexual Politics of Meat is the only extant and extensive theoretical
treatment of the politics of animal representation in literature. Drawing on
Lacan's work, Carol Adams argues that anthropomorphism renders the
Animal as a sign more open to metaphorical interpretation and
appropriation. In particular, she suggests that the Animal as a sign
functions frequently as a metaphor and as an absent referent, through
which animals "become metaphors for describing people's experiences"
(42). At the same time, however, as a metaphor, the animal body as absent
referent "is there through inference but its meaningfulness reflects only
upon what it refers to because the originating, literal experience that
contributes the meaning is not there" (42). For Adams, this rendering into
metaphor effectively erases animals from literary texts in the same way
that 'meat' erases the Animal body from the dinner plate. For Adams, the
Animal as a sign, within both literary and social narratives, functions as a
primarily as a metaphor. Moreover, the erasure through metaphor of the
animal body within social narratives into 'meat' recapitulates and is
recapitulated by the metaphorical erasure of the animal body within
literary criticism. In place of this criticism, she calls upon her readers to
reinstantiate the animal body where possible within Western narrative.
While certainly an insightful critique of the bulk of literary criticism,
Adams' argument as a whole is not without its problems.
In spite (and because) of how useful Adams' argument is, there are
some obvious objections and complications. First, her argument
occasionally lapses into over-generalizations—for example: "People with
power have always eaten meat" (26), a clear accident fallacy with its
oversimplication. Second, her notion of a text assumes the
"unchangeability of the text's meaning so that through repetition the same
meaning recurs" (14). Following the work of Kristeva,1 Butler,2 Bhabha,3
Foucault, 4 and so on, it is hard to imagine what text (other than a
phonebook) that this definition of textuality would describe. Second, her
272 Becoming Animal
the synecdoche remains political in the sense that the 'hand' that represents
the 'body' must represent itself in doing so. Deployed anthropomorphically
as a synecdoche, the Animal can articulate and challenge the suffering of
the Abject, and as a part of that whole, its own suffering as well, without,
of necessity, erasing the difference between specific animals or between
species.
The problem of anthropomorphism lies in the strategic erasure of both
the similarities and the differences between human and non-human
animals. In a sense, this is as problematic in Deleuze and Guattari's
thought as it is in any other kind of anthropomorphism. In fact, this strange
double movement is requisite to render a human being abject as though he
or she were an animal. On one hand, the Animal must function as an
ontological category that bears as little similarity as possible to the human
Subject in order to permit the utter abjection of the Animal. On the other,
the ontological difference between the human Subject and the Animal
must be erased in order for human Subjects to be constructed as 'animals'.
The threat posed by the erasure of the ontological differences between
human beings and animals through strategically anthropomorphic
representations of the latter is what makes anthropomorphism so
dangerous to both. The problem posed by erasure of their ontological
similarities, however, is what allows to Adorno to lament that "Auschwitz
begins whenever someone looks at the slaughterhouse and says: they're
only animals" (qtd in Patterson 53). Together, instrumental reason and
binary opposition provide what is necessary to produce a clear cut 'us' and
'them' as the basis for an abjection of 'them'. It is this structure and process
that informs both the production and reception of anthropomorphism, not
anthropomorphism as such, that maintains the nature/culture divide. If a
tactically anthropomorphic representation of animals maintains the
difference between the animals represented while calling into question the
gulf between human and non-human animals, then it is not only full
justified ethically, it takes on the character of a literary ethics. In its own,
equally strange double movement, tactical anthropomorphisms can effect a
defense of both the human Subject and the Animal. This is the important
understanding to which becoming animal leads us.
Finally, as an ecocritical tool, becoming as a whole stands in
contrast to the modern epistemic processes of knowledge that Foucault
describes in Society Must be Defended. He argues that "one of the basic
phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power's
hold over life" (241). For Foucault, this reflects a shift from disciplinary
power to biopower. Over the nineteenth century,
'producing.' (239)
Notes
1
Following and expanding upon Bakhtin's work, Kristeva suggests "any text is
constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absoption and transformation
of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and
poetic language is read as at least double" (Kristeva 37).
2
Butler argues that "construction [of sex/gender/sexuality as a set of signs] is
Vincent J. Guihan 279
neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a
set of fixed effects. Rather, construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a
temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both
produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration" (Butler 10).
3
In a paraphrase of Marx, Bhabha suggests that "if colonialism takes power in the
name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce"
(Bhabha 85). This repetition with its inevitable differences produces mimicry, "one
of the most and elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge"
(85), "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference
that is almost the same, but not quite" (86).
4
For Foucault, discourse, including literary texts, is what "transmits and produces
power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile"
(Sexuality 101).
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1990), 1-42.
Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today." Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers
(London: Paladin, 1973), 109-59.
Bhabha, Homi K. "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial
discourse." The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-
93.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: an Introduction (New York:
Vintage Books, 1978).
—. Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 1997).
Kristeva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue and Language". The Kristeva Reader.
Ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986, 34-61.
Lorenz, Konrad. King Solomon's Ring (London and New York: Routledge,
1952).
Midgley, Mary. "The Concept of Beastliness." Animal Rights and Human
Obligations. Ed. Peter Singer and Tom Regan (New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, 1976), 94-123.
Oliver, Kelly. "Animal Body Mother." Family Values: Subjects Between
Nature and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 53-80.
THE EDGE EFFECT:
ART, SCIENCE, AND ECOLOGY
IN A DELEUZIAN CENTURY
PAUL LEWIS
If the law above enunciated be true, it follows that the natural series of
affinities will also represent the order in which the several species came
into existence, each one having had for its immediate antitype a closely
allied species existing at the time of its origin. It is evidently possible that
two or three distinct species may have had a common antitype, and that
each of these may again have become the antitypes from which other
closely allied species were created. The effect of this would be, that so
long as each species has had but one new species formed on its model, the
line of affinities will be simple, and may be represented by placing the
several species in direct succession in a straight line. But if two or more
species have been independently formed on the plan of a common antitype,
then the series of affinities will be compound, and can only be represented
by a forked or many-branched line.
Paul Lewis 283
Plants, animals, and the milieux of life have all been special themes in
art for thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic. As to the
real "function" of early cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and
elsewhere, which are dominated by depictions of animals, we are not
entitled to assert much beyond wonder and speculation. In many of these
speculations, however, great significance is attached to hunting, and the
paintings are thought to have recorded a gesture of primitive sympathetic
magic intended to secure some advantage over the hunter's quarry. But
scenes of animal mating and parturition are also widespread in the cave
paintings, which suggests a more general sense of awe toward animal life
itself. It is as if the Paleolithic artists were expressing a relation to nature
that centered on beauty, vitality, birth and predation in the animal world.
In recent years, however, artists have asserted a more direct and radical
responsibility—beyond representation—for this ensemble of life and
nature. Over the past decade, a few artists have been exhibiting their own
quite sophisticated genetic and biological experiments as works of art.
Some are completed by outside laboratories commissioned to do the wet
biological work, while others are the product of research and production
undertaken by the artists themselves, who have one way or another
acquired the requisite scientific skills and equipment. In any case, we can
say that the living organism, plant and animal tissues, the cell, the
genome—these have now entered into the practice of art as raw materials.
Laura Cinti has exhibited genetically altered cactus plants that express
human hair. Oron Catts and the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A)
have created sculptures of disembodied tissue grown in vitro, including
several pairs of pig wings and a ¼ scale human ear. Catts and TC&A even
gilded some of the pig's wings with gold, knowingly or unknowingly
putting flesh and blood into Yeats' oracular promise to "wake a drowsy
286 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
Let's step back a moment, this welcome moment of stillness in the eye of the
breaking storm above an increasingly media-hyped art field. As biology's
ascent to the status of hottest physical science has been accompanied by the
massive use of biological metaphors in the Humanities, this has also generated
a wide range of biotech procedures that are providing artists simultaneously
with the topics and new expressive media: transgenics, cell and tissue culture,
plant and animal selection and breeding, homografts, synthesis of artificial
DNA sequences, neurophysiology, synthetic biology, visualization techniques
borrowed from molecular biology and biomedical research. Artists are in the
labs.
The very last sentence, because of its simple declarative force, is the most
potent moment in Hauser's restrained celebration. Artists are in the labs—
how shall we punctuate that? And what impact will these artists have upon
the various networks of life at the edge of the natural and the artificial?
Now more than ever the movement "from here to there" in biological
history would seem to follow a nonlinear path, where the initial conditions
include artists in the labs working with cells, tissues, recombinant DNA,
and other living materials.
Still more emblematic of this post-medium condition, to use Rosalind
Krauss' clever phrase, is the recent work of Jennifer Willet and Shawn
Bailey entitled "Teratological Prototypes." Adopting the corporate identity
BIOTEKNICA, Willet and Bailey collaborated with Oron Catts and Ionat
Zurr of TC&A to produce and exhibit tissue cultures "seeded with the P19
mouse teratoma cell line." Teratomas are cancerous growths of chaotically
differentiated tissue: lumps of muscle riddled with hair, teeth, gut, bone,
and so on. These extraordinary tumors, which can appear naturally and
Paul Lewis 287
in art have until recently had very little to do with criteria for fraudulence
in science. So even if the hairy cactus is genuine—that is, even if the
human hair expressed is indeed the result of genetic engineering—why
should we still call this hair human? Doesn't it belong now to the cactus
and not in a trivial sense either? Or better still, doesn't it become just a
standard biological part, to use a revealing phrase from the biological
engineering laboratory at MIT? In this case, as in so many others, what
makes it standard is not its elemental composition but its technical
transmissibility: the apotheosis of Fordism put into service as an
organizing principle for life?3
Human hair or cactus hair—the taut disjunctions asserted, especially in
transgenic organisms, "do not involve any exclusions," as Deleuze and
Guattari explained in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia," since
exclusions can arise only as a function of inhibiters and repressers that
eventually determine the support and firmly define a specific, personal
subject" (38-39). It is precisely these inhibitors and repressors that are
giving way, just as species-properties will gradually lose their dependent
relationship to the species, a relationship that the long course of natural
history proves to be spurious in any case. This decoupling and general
circulation of biological parts and traits from their once specific owners is
unfolding even as the very concepts of the species, the taxon, and the
phenotype are becoming more unstable. Theodosius Dobzhansky
summarized this development in a well known essay of 1973, "Nothing in
Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." Molecular
biology, he explained, had "made possible an approach to exact
measurements of degrees of biochemical similarities and differences
among organisms." Reviewing the variance of amino acid sequences in
proteins shared by different species, for example, Dobzhansky made the
following observation:
Partial objects are what make up the parts of the desiring machines; partial
objects define the working machine or the working parts, but in a state of
dispersion such that one part is continually referring to a part from an
entirely different machine, like the red clover and the bumble bee, the wasp
and the orchid, the bicycle horn and the dead rat's ass. (323)
Endy has undertaken the work of elevating this practice, which has been
little more than an art so far, into a real science. Endy's discontent is
quoted in "Synthetic Life," an article for Scientific American by W. Wayt
Gibbs:
The recent emergence of genetic and biological art is both a widening and
a deepening of the extensive system of artificial habitat for semi-
biological, pseudo-biological, and trans-biological organisms. This cannot
easily be discounted as fashionable nonsense, I believe, nor is it even a
metaphor. No longer restricted to the field of meaning and affect, art has
become an ecological niche, literally. It is rather, the surplus of an older
and more extensive field of biological productions operating under the
auspices of science, medicine, and agriculture. As Deleuze and Guattari
proclaim at the very beginning of Anti-Oedipus: "Hence we are all
handymen: each with his little machines" (1).
The future of these experiments in art will undoubtedly deepen our
ongoing historical confrontation with the most fundamental questions of
ecology. What is an organism? What is a niche or a habitat? What is
natural? What is a nonhuman environment? Such questions appear now,
more than ever, to be embroiled in a deterritorialized struggle among
social forces over a biological domain that has itself become
deterritorialized. In art, specifically, the raw ontological struggle over
discontinuities in nature will not be mitigated by the pragmatism and
cultural authority that accompany science in the public imagination. This
will widen the range of ontological habitat between life and non-life, a
range populated by the pseudo-animate, the semi-living, the ontic, and the
ontoid, tracing an edge between art, science, and ecology in what may (or
may not) carry us toward a Deleuzian century after all.
Paul Lewis 295
Notes
1
There is a great deal of natural biological hacking and genetic recombination
through bacterial conjugation in the wild—outside the laboratory, that is. In "The
Invisible Enemy," Steve Silberman reported the emergence of a highly drug-
resistant and occasionally lethal bacterium in American emergency medical
facilities established along an Iraq evacuation chain: "When a team of geneticists
unlocked the secret of the bug's rapid evolution in 2005, they found that one strain
of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii carries the largest collection of
genetic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism. Out of its 52 genes
dedicated to defeating antibiotics, radiation, and other weapons of mass bacterial
destruction, nearly all have been bootlegged from other bad bugs like Salmonella,
Pseudomonas, and Escherichia coli."
2
The genome itself, by translation and transcription, is neurotic and repeats
without remembering. Contra Dawkins it is not a selfish but a selfless replicator!
3
The Computational and Systems Biology Initiative at MIT maintains a Registry
of Standard Biological Parts in order to supply a universal platform or catalog to
the emerging field of synthetic biology.
4
See Paul Rabinow's Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. This ethnographic
study of the invention and ascent of the polymerase chain reaction "shows how a
contingently assembled practice emerged composed of distinctive subjects, the site
in which they worked, and the object they invented" (2).
Works Cited
Aristotle. "Physics." A New Aristotle Reader. Ed. J. L. Ackrill (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Dobzhansky, Theodosius. "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the
Light of Evolution."
http://people.delphiforums.com/lordorman/light.htm, last accessed
April 08, 2008.
Gibbs, W. W. "Synthetic Life." Scientific American 290:5 (May 2004).
Hauser, Jens. "Curator's Statement: Still, Living."
www.beap.org/v8/docs/bp_symb.pdf, last accessed April 08, 2008.
Jackson, David A. "Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA
Methodology." The Recombinant DNA Debate. Ed. David A. Jackson
and Stephen P. Stich (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1979).
Rabinow, Paul. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
296 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
GEORGIANA BANITA
The title of this essay raises the issue of the interconnectedness between
modern conceptualizations of deep ecology on the one hand and
definitions of love as shaped by but quite separate from current theories of
pleasure, desire, and need in the context of environmentalist ethics on the
other hand. In her ecofeminist study Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking
the Desire for Nature (1999), Chaia Heller distinguishes between an
ecology of need, related to production, consumption and reproduction, and
an ecology of desire—subjective and qualitative—which foregrounds the
sensual aspects of interpersonal and ecological relations. The sum of these
desires, also referred to as the eco-erotic, is continuous with Deleuze and
Guattari's discourse on desire in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1972), but also with the trispherical ecosophy principle
formulated in Guattari's The Three Ecologies (1989). Part of Guattari's
thesis, inspired by Gregory Bateson's proto-ecosophic study Steps
Towards the Ecology of Mind (1972), is that mental ecology and the
structures of human subjectivity to which it refers is under threat of
extinction through the propagation of epistemological fallacies that
reinforce ecological hierarchies. Guattari's transversalist, polyphonic
conception of ecological subjectivity, informed by the author's
psychoanalytical training and his continuing interest in works of art and
literature, will be tested here as a heuristic for the interpretation of a
literary text that shares its engagement with eco-ethical and eco-erotic
paradigms.
Annie Dillard's novel The Maytrees (2007), the author's merely second
novel over an otherwise long and prolific literary career, gives a subdued
account of acts of love that are both sacred and mundane.1 Taken in the
context of Dillard's literary work, the novel clearly marks a perspective
shift from the life of nature described in Dillard's earlier eco-theological
writings—such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
298 The Ecology of Love
(1974)—to the life of the mind best showcased in this untypical narrative
about a marriage and family union that does not follow the prescribed
norms of moral convention (fidelity, possessiveness, self-righteousness)
but takes the path of ethical values that are as starkly individual as they are
selfless. Dillard's engagement with the crisis of romantic life and its
'ecological' resolution, I argue, is in keeping with Félix Guattari's
transition from a natural to a personal ecosophy, as reflected in the gradual
evolution of this concept in his work. While it shares with traditional
ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere, ecosophy also
acknowledges that 'incorporeal species' and 'mental ecology' are equally
endangered and in crisis: "how do we change mentalities," Guattari asks in
Chaosmosis, "how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to
humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility not only for its own
survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and
vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts,
cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling
of fusion at the heart of the Cosmos?" (119-20).
My purpose in this chapter is to encourage an ecologically oriented
reading of the erotic themes in Dillard's The Maytrees. This reading,
escaping from the esoteric abstractness and mystic focus (see e.g. Dunn
1978; Keller 1983) that afflicts much criticism of Dillard's work, seizes
opportunities offered by ecocriticism and ecosophy—which instigate
discussion of the linkages between natural and cultural processes—to
make good on literature's ethical investment and reaffirm its social
responsibility. I will outline the essential features of such a reading by first
assessing the connections between eroticism and ecological thinking in
The Maytrees. My aim is to reveal how the novel builds on its explicit
environmental premises to develop an ecology of love relations and their
impact on the characters' awareness of themselves, their natural and
mental environment, as well as their complex rapport with time, both
interior and exterior, subjective and concrete, psychological and
narratological. Not only, then, is an explication of the love-ecology
relation long overdue, but such an explication needs to be placed in the
context of its artistic realizations, where extended deployment of the two
concepts becomes less and less stable and acquires a formal malleability
very much in the spirit of postmodern and poststructuralist thought.
In doing this, I align myself with Félix Guattari's tripartite ecological
approach as it is espoused in his essay The Three Ecologies, where he
famously proclaims that "it is quite wrong to make a distinction between
action on the psyche, the socius and the environment" (41). Specifically,
Guattari proposes a shift from a purely technocratic perspective in
Georgiana Banita 299
naming her book Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution, but eventually
caved in to her publishers, who did not fall for the joke. Light, however,
acts as the environment for all of the novel's human and biological goings-
on, just as it works, on a much larger scale, as the currency of life and the
universe, considered by Thomas Berry (and others, see Lovelock 1987,
Dowd 1991) as "the primary sacred community" (Berry 16). "If there were
such a thing as cosmic realism," Marilynne Robinson warmly quips in her
review of the book, "The Maytrees would be a classic of the genre"
(Robinson).3
This unflagging attention to simple natural surroundings not only acts
as a counterweight to Dillard's philosophical impulses but is the main
pivot around which her juxtaposition of sophisticated meditation and
ordinary action revolves. The grand scales of nature, Dillard suggests, do
not diffuse but reinforce the intimate and momentary sense of life
unfolding before them. When she uses the term 'albedo' in reference to the
look of sand by night (the albedo of an object is the extent to which it
diffusely reflects light from the sun; the term has its origins in the Latin
'albus' meaning 'white'), Dillard points to the subdued relation between
ordinary human experience and a vast universe that seems coeval with its
concrete physical incarnations in stone and sand, living and dead particle.
It is a universe that appears compassionate and generous, like the
characters themselves, yet free from sentimentality. By the end of the
novel, we realize that the people we have watched reeling from the blows
of their fortune reassume their initial posture—and resume their
interrupted love—in the manner of grass springing up after a gust of wind
has passed: without memory to retain the damage, or any lasting
impression beyond a momentary shudder and the thrilling awareness of
inevitable change, the thrill of animals' homecoming at the end of their
seasonal migration: "The novel proposes that there is an involuntary, even
unconscious shaping of character, individual and social, that comes with
weathering, and that, in yielding to a wisdom no one could earn or choose
and for which they have no language, people conform themselves in ways
something like the accommodations landscape makes to weather and time"
(Robinson). Already in 1980, David L. Lavery spotted Dillard's interest in
and ability to notice the smallest natural details, her alertness to what he
calls "major weather" (Lavery 257). The ebb and flow of love corresponds
to the changing tides of nature.
Even more, when she wishes to mark the passing of Toby's second
wife Deary, Dillard deviates from the human perspective, otherwise
eddying among Lou, Toby, and their son Pete, regarding the view through
the slow eyes of a reptile who is and is not a witness to the transcendence
302 The Ecology of Love
As Guattari reminds us, the etymology of 'eco' is the Greek word oïkos,
meaning 'home,' so by extrapolation, ecological balance can be said to
entail a delicate symbiosis between ourselves and our homely
surroundings. It is impossible to conceive of the self outside of its natural
habitat, and vice-versa. In The Maytrees, Dillard not only provides a
hospitable reading of this concept of ecology, but supplies the aptest
testament to date of her commitment to what an early critic called her
"literary ecology" (McFadden-Gerber 5), which she understood as devoted
more to natural speculation than self-exploration. Literary ecology, I
believe, in fact requires both in equal measure.
If some have (unfairly) regarded Dillard's first nonfiction book as the
"meteorological journal of an egomaniac" (Slovic 66-67), The Maytrees
could be labeled 'the cosmic Kinsey report of two erotomaniacs.'
Throughout the novel, the conceptualization of love—its attendant
circumspection, caution, and ceremonial formality—remains central and
continuous. It is, however, not without its tangles, knots, sea changes,
weak points, and intersections, which in the end only make it more
interesting. The Maytrees often dissolves (the word "solvent" comes up
quite often) into a study of its characters' unconscious emotionality, of
their minds' maneuverings in and out of love. The key signposts along the
way are initial infatuation, marital sexuality, separation, and final reunion,
whereby the novel lets the protagonists reclaim each other without
sentimentality. The early, heady days of romance contain scenes of rapture
and a certain innocence as to the workings of sentiment, Lou wondering
about books' failure to have anticipated her current feelings.5 The
protagonists’ impassioned life as a couple becomes even richer after the
birth of their son Petie, but plunges dramatically after Toby takes up with
the bohemian Deary, a crisis followed by a period of calm for Lou and
guilt-ridden torment for her estranged husband, who decides to stay with
304 The Ecology of Love
Deary long after his passion subsides, in an attempt to reclaim his moral
high ground while mulling over love's stages in his confessional
notebooks.6
Her earlier disclaimer notwithstanding—"I don't write at all about
ethics. [...] The kind of art I write is shockingly uncommitted" (Yancy
960)—Dillard clearly embarks here on a form of terrestrial ethics of lived
rather than ideal love, culminating in an emotional atheism, an acceptance
of human and erotic mortality that corresponds to Guattari's "atheist
awareness of finitude, of the mortality of the species, the planet and the
entire universe, and not an illusory belief in immortality, which is only a
misplaced contempt for life" (Pindar and Sutton 16). At an earlier point in
her writing life, Dillard had lamented Western society's move from
"pantheism to panatheism" (Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk 76), but The
Maytrees recuperates a sense of the sacred from its very theological
abstinence. The quest for meaning, Dillard concludes, has limits imposed
by an unbridgeable gap between human beings' idea of the world and the
reality of nature, one that we cannot grasp: "The boundaries of sense are
actually quite clear," she observes, "we commonly (if tacitly) agree that
the human world has human meaning which we can discover, and the
natural world does not" (Living By Fiction 138).
This limitation manifests itself in various forms of evasiveness.
Foremost among these is an intriguing defacement of personal identity in
the novel. What Suzanne Clark notes in relation to Dillard's subdued
authorial voice also applies to the Maytrees, who seem not so much the
subject of the novel's complex consciousness but subjected to it: "when we
read Annie Dillard, we don't know who is writing. There is a silence in the
place where there might be an image of the social self—of personality,
character, or ego" (Clark 107). The novel's genealogy confirms this
astringency. Eight years in the making, The Maytrees originally stretched
over 1,200 pages, citing much historical and natural detail, before Dillard
decided that the skeletal love story would be stifled by such richness. The
217 pages that remain occasionally do read like a best-of sammelsurium—
as the exact terms of the plot often remain obscure and the sentences seem
to have been clipped from other contexts and strung together, gem-like.
The novel seems to shrink not only in size but also in intensity. Rather
than understanding nature, love, and their interconnections by learning
more, Dillard seems to say, we need to unlearn, un-know, and rely more
on momentary vision in the guise of epiphany or heightened unself-
consciousness.
The investigation of awareness and self-consciousness are, in fact, a
significant and constant feature of Dillard's work, which displays both a
Georgiana Banita 305
The novel's micropolitics of desire (in Guattari's sense)11 runs in sync with
ecological practices, allowing emotional betrayal to function as vector of
'dissent' in Guattari's understanding of the term. According to Guattari,
ecological praxes "generally seek something that runs counter to the
'normal' order of things, a counter-repetition, an intense given which
invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations" (The
Three Ecologies 45). To use Guattari's theoretically inflected vocabulary,
the deterritorialization—also literally, as Maytree relocates to Maine—
enables the assemblage of connubial desire to evolve in a constructive,
Georgiana Banita 307
Notes
1
Dillard's first novel, The Living, was published in 1992.
2
"Decades' reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love
identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed
only—but it was something—that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but
not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote
something down. An unfair sample" (119).
3
Consider for example this magnificent passage: "The planet rolled into its
shadow. On the high dune, sky ran down to his ankles. Everything he saw was
lower than his socks. Across a long horizon, parabolic dunes cut sky as rogue
waves do. The silence of permanence lay on the scene. He found a Cambrian calm
as if the world had not yet come; he found a posthumous hush as if humans had
gone" (33).
4
For a detailed analysis of ocular metaphors in Dillard's works see Fritzell 1990
and Legler 2000.
5
"Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it.
Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not
have recognized it. Time to read everything again." (31)
6
Here are some of the most striking erotic contentions: "Falling in love, like
having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death.
That is the joy of them" (2); "There in her garden under a locust, Reevadare told
Lou her favorite part of marriage:—It's a marvelous way to get to know someone!"
(26); "Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable
men by its very awfulness" (117-18).
7
Before the publication of this novel, critics could safely assert that humans made
only "cameo appearances" in Dillard's work (see Smith 1995).
8
Guattari has repeatedly stressed this processual conception of society and
subjectivity, perhaps most eloquently in the following statement: "(The) idea of
process if fundamental. It assumes that one has discarded the idea that one must
absolutely master an object or a subject—and that [...] analytical research is given
a dimension of finitude, singularity, existential delimitation, precariousness in
relation to time and values [...] There are neither ends nor means; only processes;
processes auto-constructing life, auto-constructing the world, with mutant,
unforeseen, unheard-of affects" (Soft Subversions 277).
9
See also the section "Of the Refrain" in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus 310-350.
10
Pilgrim 80.
Georgiana Banita 311
11
"Desire is everything that exists before the opposition between subject and
object, before representation and production. It's everything whereby the world and
affects constitute us outside of ourselves, in spite of ourselves." (Guattari, "A
Liberation of Desire" 205)
12
"Wishing and doing, within the realm of the possible, was willing; love was an
act of will. Not forced obeisance, but—what? The obvious course of decency?
Innate knowledge of goodness? Was it reasonable to love the good and good to
love the reasonable?" (187)
13
Instead of a unity or series of coherent structures, Deleuze and Guattari see the
world as a system in which "everything escapes, everything creates" (A Thousand
Plateaus 142), where the social "is something that never stops slipping away"
(Deleuze, "Codes" 271, cited in Halsey 39). In this world "there is always
something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance
apparatus, and the overcoding machine" (A Thousand Plateaus 216).
14
One sentence in The Maytrees reads almost like an intentional reply to this, or
wiser continuation: "The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not
that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions.
We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock" (34).
Works Cited
Becker, John E. "Science and the Sacred: From Walden to Tinker Creek."
Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas 62 (1987): 400-413.
Berry, Thomas, and Thomas Clarke. Befriending the Earth: A Theology of
Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth (Mystic, Conn.:
Twenty-Third Publications, 1991).
Cheney, Jim. "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional
Narrative." Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117-34.
Clark, Suzanne. "Annie Dillard: The Woman in Nature and the Subject of
Nonfiction." in Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Ed.
Chris Anderson (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1989).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Dillard, Annie. "To Fashion a Text." in Inventing the Truth: The Art and
Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1987): 53-76.
—. Living By Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).
—. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
—. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York:
Harper & Row 1982).
—. The Living (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
312 The Ecology of Love
JORGE CAMACHO
It is only an inference from the history of the World, that its development
has been a rational process; that the history in question has constituted the
rational necessary course of the World-Spirit. (Philosophy of History 54)
stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land is wanting to the
splendid political edifices of Asiatic State, although they themselves border
on the sea—as, for example, China. (Philosophy of History 147)
History and further eliminations are required: northern and eastern regions
that perpetuate the connection with Asia, as well as the Southern regions
or, indeed, the whole of Catholic Europe (were development was fettered
by religious subjugation and conflict) are discarded by Hegel. Finally,
even England (and perhaps the Netherlands, we could say), was no match
for the Hegelian ideal for it was there that "particular Rights and particular
privileges" (566) contravened most forcefully the development of common
Right or Objective Freedom—the Spiritual achievement of the German
monarchy.
From a present point of view, it is obvious that the inclination towards
'particular rights and privileges' that Hegel found in the England of his
time corresponded with the development of a concrete political and
economic process that would acquire significance well beyond Hegel's
consideration. Isn't it possible to argue that capitalism—and the world-
historical import of its development—remained something of a blind spot
in Hegel's teleology? Or, more precisely, that it was the historical
emergence of capitalism first and foremost, more than any philosophical
quarrel, what had already disproved Hegel's World History—in its
substantive content if not in its form—and fundamentally transformed the
conditions for the conceptualization of an alternative version?
An early but clear exposition of the philosophical alternative followed
by Deleuze and Guattari, the one proposed by Marx, appears in The
German Ideology. The possibility of World History is now predicated on
the basis of an empirically established (and thus, contingent, we are to
think) premise: the world-wide intercourse of otherwise local people made
possible by the development of the capitalist world market. As Marx and
Engels write:
For the most part, however, the study of those natural conditions
remained extrinsic to historical materialism as a science of social
formations. A passage from political economy to political ecology was still
wanting.1
What is certain is that, from Marx onwards, the possibility of a World
History (at least of the modern period) cannot but be predicated upon an
account of the origins and development of a capitalist economy—in itself,
an empirically established and thus contingent fact entirely dependent of
natural history. Interestingly enough, a certain consensus exists about
Marx's failure to produce a coherent explanation of the historical process
that produced and brought together the elements of a capitalist economy:
monetary wealth and 'free' labourers/means of production. According to
Jean Baechler, for example, Marx explanation oscillates between two
poles: either the elements "can crop up only within the framework of the
capitalist system," and thus what is offered is really a theoretically closed
tautology;
Or, they are mutually independent but have been completed by being
joined to each other; in this case, the birth of capitalism is the result of pure
chance, a conjunction of several series of causes, a conjunction that, in
other respects, is altogether highly improbable. (21)
The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic
structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the
elements of the former. (Capital 1:875)
Certainly, in this argument they were closely following not only the
much-disputed thesis of Karl Wittfogel but also Braudel's work. The latter
writes regarding rice cultivation:
supervised from above. This implies a stable society, state authority and
constant large-scale works. (Structures Everyday 149)
we can for a moment imagine what would have been the result of a
possible spread of Chinese junks towards the Cape of Good Hope, or better
still to Cape Agulhas which served as a southern gateway between the
Indian and Atlantic Oceans. (Structures Everyday 407)
on one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked,
having to sell his labour capacity; and, on the other, decoded money that
has become capital and is capable of buying it. (Anti-Oedipus 245)
During this period, the development of the market and the changing
ratio between land and labour began to push transformations in the
economic relations: even if the "customs of the manor," acting as
sedimented structures,
Jorge Camacho 329
reduced the speed of the transition, the lords and serfs … were increasingly
willing to commute labour dues to money payments on an annual basis,
and the lords to rent out their demesnes. (North and Thomas 22)
economic cycles that marked the period: severe winters in the fourteenth
and early fifteenth century, corresponding to economic recession, mild
winters between the later fifteenth and middle sixteenth century,
corresponding to economic expansion, and severe winters again in the late
seventeenth century. And while Wallerstein follows other historians like
Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in expressing doubt about
the explanatory primacy of climatic change over other factors, more recent
research has insisted upon the important role played by climatic cycles in
the crisis precipitated at the end of the Middle Ages.
"The year 1315," writes Hubert Lamb,
when the grain failed to ripen all across Europe, was probably the worst of
the evil sequence which followed. The cumulative effect produced famine
in many parts of the continent so dire that there where deaths from hunger
and disease on a very great scale, and incidents of cannibalism were
reported even in the countries of western Europe ... Thereafter the
fourteenth century seems to have brought wild, and rather long-lasting
variations of weather in western and central Europe. (195)
Walking alone the same lines, Neville Brown has developed an even
more interesting account of the "bad weather crisis of 1314-22 in Northern
Europe," a period he calls "the Dantean anomaly" (251).3 Following
Lamb, he locates the origin of this climatic anomaly in a ridge displacing
southwards a polar front that, recurring during this period, sustained
"quasi-continuously a wide cyclonic circulation of moist and unstable air,
polar in origin" (251-2). Most significantly, Brown argues that a climate-
driven "downturn from 1275 or thereabouts undoubtedly played a part in
the economic turndown or levelling out of Europe in the late thirteenth
century" (256). Stepping once more into those counterfactual hypothesis
that serve only to highlight the contingency and precariousness of the
Jorge Camacho 331
As it may be clear now, the historical 'plateau' to which the title of this
piece makes reference includes the "medieval prelude" to the assembling
of the capitalist machine: an historical conjuncture in which the complex
network of factors differentiating Europe from China and other world-
civilizations proved decisive. According to Braudel, Wallerstein (67-8)
and others, as we move into the long sixteenth century, c. 1450-1640, it is
possible to witness already the progressive actualisation of a capitalist
world-economy and thus to start thinking about something like such
'victory of the West over the Orient' that most intrigued Deleuze and
Guattari. At this point, however, and despite the fact that it is during this
period that the proper history of the capitalist conjunction begins, our
historical account must give way to some theoretical or philosophical
conclusions.
Perhaps noticeably, we have constructed the account of the process
almost in a regressive and upside-down fashion in order to highlight the
intervening variables that may allow us to conceive the historical sequence
as a thoroughly socio-ecological process. Despite the fact that Deleuze and
Guattari only partially hinted upon this dimension, a mutually enhancing
relationship can be established between their philosophy and an
ecologically informed historical perspective.
Immediately following their brief discussion of the agro-ecologies of
wheat and rice as determinants for the rather different development and
organization of the State-form in Europe and China, Deleuze and Guattari
propound a singular conclusion: "States are made up not only of people
but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities" (Thousand
Plateaus 385). By relating the political form, development and organization
of Chinese and European civilizations to a complex of components that
includes much more than just human individuals, Deleuze and Guattari
point to what cannot but be conceived as a veritable political ecology
where the natural (and technical) ecologies that subtend, surround or, more
precisely, intermingle with humans in social formations may be said to be
not only politically shaped but also politically shaping. Moreover, while
such ecologically oriented perspective remained for the most part marginal
within their Universal History and their theory of social formations, it may
be seen as an underdeveloped but entirely consistent extension to political
theory of their general ontology of assemblages.
332 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal,
and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the
stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies. (Thousand
Plateaus 89)
To these, many others could be added: the heavy plough, the harness
and the horseshoe; the biogeographic components of the European
continent, especially those found in the North, with its forests and wetter
soils; the articulated coastline that allowed for the expansion of trade;
perhaps even the mild winds that according to Utterström allowed for all
the growth in the medieval period; all these should be considered
components of the machinic assemblage under question.
Jorge Camacho 333
Indeed, if there is one feature that most clearly expresses the ecological
character of Deleuze's ontology as well as Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy in general—revealed in their constant references to transversal
relations across natures, like the famous image of the wasp and the
orchid—is precisely the importance given to heterogeneity and
heterogeneous relations.4 As one ecologist recently argued:
the crucial analytic move made by actor-network writers [is] the suggestion
that the social is nothing other than patterned networks of heterogeneous
materials. This is a radical claim because it says that these networks are
composed not only of people, but also of machines, animals, texts, money,
architectures—any material that you care to mention. (Law, Notes Theory
2)
Did not Deleuze and Guattari glimpsed the same problems later
developed by actor-network theory when they wrote, once more, "States
334 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
are made up not only of people ... " or when they delineate the machinic
and material aspect of social assemblages? In a recent exposition of their
theoretical framework, Bruno Latour proposes a series of conditions to
recognize the work explicitly belonging to the ANT framework or that
could be implicitly associated with it. The main one is precisely the
recognition of nonhumans as proper actors within the social world, that is,
components capable of bringing about a difference within the association
or assemblage in question (Latour 10-1, 46-7, 67-72). This may be taken
as the second principle of the political ecology advocated above: not only
are social assemblages heterogeneous, that is, composed of human and
nonhuman components, but according to the particular configuration, these
latter may play a determinative role. In the framework of actor-network
theory, this recognition requires the adoption of what Law calls the
'principle of generalized symmetry.' "Depending, of course, on the
contingent circumstances, the natural world and artefacts may enter the
account as an explanans" (Law, Technology Heterogeneous Engineering
130-1).
The decision to include nonhuman actors in an account of social
formations emerged, for actor-network theorists, out of the intuition that
human social relations alone are not sufficient to sustain the patterns that
we may call a social order. As Latour explains: "It's the power exerted
through entities that don't sleep and associations that don't break down that
allow power to last longer and expand further" (70, see also Law, Notes
Theory 2). Deleuze and Guattari's reference to a complex field of human
and nonhuman components to account for the more rigid, stratified, and
territorialized power of the Chinese Empire is largely concurrent with such
perspective. Most importantly, the role of nonhuman material components
(natural and technical) may not be only to territorialize or reterritorialize
political assemblages but, according to the contingent configuration, to
drive them towards processes of deterritorialization. This is clearly
illustrated in Law's analysis of the Portuguese maritime expansion that
coincided with the medieval prelude to the capitalist conjunction.
According to such analysis, the nonhuman components that were involved
in the "heterogeneous engineering" of the Portuguese deterritorialization
included: the sailing ship in its fourteenth and early fifteenth century
design as well as the caravel used later, the then recently available
magnetic compass and even the winds and currents between Portugal and
the Canary Islands (Technology Heterogeneous Engineering 118-9).
It is possible to revisit, from this perspective, the problem of the
dissolution of feudalism. What were, according to the account proposed
above, the material components driving vectors of deterritorialization
Jorge Camacho 335
At this point it seems that we have, for the most part, superseded the
postulates of an old philosophy of history represented by Kant, Hegel,
perhaps even by Marx himself. As Deleuze and Guattari argued,
geography—be it ecological or natural, human, social, mental:
wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility
of contingency. It wrest it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the
power of a 'milieu.' (What is Philosophy? 96)
This piece has made use of Deleuze and Guattari's work in order to
argue for a re-visiting and re-conception of the philosophy of world
history that integrates the insights coming out from ecological or
environmental history. As it has been pointed out, the outcome would be a
vision that highlights material contingency (as opposed to rational
necessity) and the heterogeneous associations between human and
nonhuman nature. Moreover, a concern for heterogeneous relations
understood in the widest possible sense—which is well in place in Deleuze
and Guattari's philosophy—was proposed as the particular trait of all
proper ecological thinking. Given that the emphasis has been on the role of
nonhuman nature as an efficient (although never sufficient) cause within
human history, the effect has been to invert the usual direction of
ecological concerns, which most often and appropriately focus on the
much more urgent problem of human action as determinant for the 'fate' of
nonhuman nature. It should go without saying that these two aspects, the
natural future of humanity and the human future of nature, are one within
an immanent plane that was rediscovered for philosophy by Deleuze and
Guattari. It is precisely such plane what must constitute the measure for
any properly contemporary thought.
Notes
1
Some work has been recently devoted either to rediscover the ecological
dimension of Marx’s thought in general or to specifically integrate ecological
considerations within a Marxist theory of capitalist development. See, for example:
Foster’s Marx’s Ecology and O’Connor’s Natural Causes.
2
Braudel’s qualification is important: Deleuze and Guattari, following a certain
Marxist orthodoxy, restrict historically the definition of capitalism to refer to a
later stage where it constituted a proper industrial mode of production: Around the
sixteenth or seventeenth century? Perhaps even as late as the eighteenth century,
given their reference to industrialism. In the same movement, they extend it
ontologically to cover the whole social field: as a “full social body” (Anti-Oedipus
246). For Braudel, as is well known, capitalism in the past—but always in
principle—was not a ‘system’ extending over or below the whole of society
(Wheels Commerce 238) Thus, he finds it much earlier in history—already
between the thirteenth century (in the Italian city-states) and the sixteenth century,
a period where it was more ‘at home’ in commerce—while restricting it
ontologically: for him, capitalism proper appears only at the ‘commanding heights’
of the economy, both in exchange and production, “as the realm of investment and
of a high rate of capital formation.” (232; see also Braudel, Perspective World 57)
3
The Florentine poet Dante Alighieri died in 1321.
4
In DeLanda’s version of this ontology of assemblages, heterogeneity is not “a
constant property of assemblages but ... a variable that may take different values”
Jorge Camacho 337
Works Cited
Baechler, Jean. The Origins of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1975).
Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and
Capitalism: 15th-18th Century Vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1981).
—. The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century Vol. 2 (London: Collins, 1982).
—. The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century Vol. 3 (London: Collins, 1984).
Brown, Neville. History and Climate Change: A Eurocentric Perspective
(London: Routledge, 2001).
Cosandey, David. Le Secret De L'Occident: Du Miracle Passe Au
Marasme Presente (Paris: Arlea, 1997).
Delanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and
Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988).
—. What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994).
—. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum,
2004).
Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London:
Routledge, 1963).
Foster, John Bellamy. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
Hall, John. "States and Societies: The Miracle in Comparative
Perspective," in Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, ed. Jean Baechler,
John Hall and Michael Mann (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 20-38.
Hegel, G. W. F.. Philosophy of History (New York: P. F. Collier & Son,
1902).
—. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Lamb, Hubert. Climate, History and the Modern World (London:
Routledge, 1995).
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-
338 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
JUSSI PARIKKA
[…] cultural and technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup,
for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The
industrial age defined as the age of insects … .
—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 69
"it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its
composition: it is sensation itself" (What Is Philosophy? 212). Brains are
not found only in the heads of humans and animals, but microbrains
inhabit the inorganic world as well. The world is media, in a manner of
sensation and contracting, even though Deleuze and Guattari constantly
avoided using the specific term of "media" as for them it applies only to
mass media of communications. Still, it is possible to continue from their
philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards directions of a natural philosophy
of media where the term starts to encompass the recording of time in
rocks, the capacities of transmission in plants and animals, and the weird
sensations of insects that perceive not only through eyes and ears, but
through chemicals as well.
In fact, recent years of technological innovation have embraced exactly
insects and the like as perfect models for media design. In the 1980s, the
cyborg became a pre-eminent symbol of the late-modern conflation of
biology and technology. This all too familiar figure was, however, always
weighed down by a degree of anthropomorphic baggage, largely due to the
widely distributed idea of Man and his prosthesis being the characteristic
mode of conjoining biology and technology. Yet, since early cybernetics, a
panorama of other biological examples was also discussed in a
technological context, from viruses to flies and rats to insects. Indeed, at
the same time as the man-machine boom was approaching its peak years,
other ideas of non-human models of organization and perception were
emerging both in media design and consequently in media theory as well.
In this context, the epigraph above from A Thousand Plateaus becomes
clear: insects, germs, bacteria and particles do not just denote biological
categories of knowledge, but can simultaneously be seen as carriers of
intensities and potentials. What defines an insect? Its structure, its
evolutionary path, its position in the ecology? Deleuze rejects in Henri
Bergson's vein any such spatializing modes of understanding entities of
nature and culture and opts for a more ethological brand of analysis:
natural, cultural and technological bodies are defined by their potentials
for interaction and enaction, the potentials of what they can do instead of
what they are. However, the insect/technology-coupling can be found
already from the nineteenth century onward.
In entomological research and popular cultural discourses of the
nineteenth century, insects suddenly emerged not only as interesting
examples of the animal world, God's tiny creations, but also as entities that
expressed alien forms of perception, sensation and organization. Books on
entomology can be read as curiosity cabinets: they are filled with
descriptions and tales about different ways of perceiving the world,
Jussi Parikka 341
Insect Technics
The modern entomological discourse offered since the early nineteenth
century a curious view into microworlds of animals. In this context,
insects were often grasped through their weird capacities for perception
and interaction. However, a much more ontologically interesting take that
tried to dispense with the long tradition of theological and teleological
thought was introduced in Bergson's Creative Evolution in 1907. For
Bergson, the insect offered an immanent form of original technics, with
the body of the insect acting as an instrument in its own right. Instead of
limiting the concept of technology to the work of intelligence only,
Bergson proposed that there exists several potential ways for engaging
with the materiality of the world. This exhibits the dynamic creativity of
nature—hence the notion of "creative evolution." Bergson thought that
intelligence (as with humans) expressed perhaps the ability to create
instruments as flexible tools for the control of nature, but instinct2 (as with
insects) was an altogether different mode of connecting with the
environment; turning oneself into a tool by folding with the immanent
milieu. As Bergson illustrates, the insect is less a haphazard biological
curiosity than an important figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
for opening up questions of ontology, materiality and technology that are
still relevant in the context of contemporary culture of technical media.
Darwin had given the original impetus to think of nature as a force of
"perfection" in his Origin of Species (1859). For him, natural selection was
a kind of immanent process that allowed structures to evolve into
perfected forms. This evolution was a continuous and continuing process,
implying nature as a perfection machine.3 Nonetheless, Bergson suggested
that we could differentiate the diverse modes of organisms and tools to
shed light on the problem of evolution, offering a vocabulary of technics
to help with the ontology of dynamic nature. Bergson was a diligent critic
of certain modes of Darwinism that were too keen on imposing passivity
and habituation with the environment as the goals of organisms and
evolution. Instead, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, for Bergson, life has no goal
or telos. It is a mode of differentiation whose future forms we are unable
to decipher. This approach implies a radical openness to a variety of forms
of life beyond our perceptual world or even carbon-based life as we know
it (Grosz, The Nick of Time, 215-6). Here Grosz points towards Bergson's
philosophy as a precursor to contemporary artificial life scientists and the
quest for potential forms of life. In fact, Bergson seems to occupy a key
position in the realization that more primitive forms of life could be
integrated into a novel understanding of life, artifice and matter. Deleuze
Jussi Parikka 343
function, does at once, when required, what it is called upon to do, without
difficulty and with a perfection that is wonderful. (140)
Origins of Technics
Throughout the nineteenth century insects spread from biology to various
other cultural discourses. Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes how the Victorian
enthusiasm for entomology and insect worlds is related to a general
discourse of natural history that as a genre defined the century. Through
the themes of "exploration" and "taxonomy" Lecercle claims that Alice in
Wonderland can be read as a key novel of the era in its evaluation and
classification of various life worlds beyond the human. Like Alice in the
1865 novel, new landscapes and exotic species are offered as an armchair
exploration of worlds not merely extensive but also opened up by an
intensive gaze into microcosms that endlessly vary in size and shape.
Jussi Parikka 345
And it is part of a craze for discovering and classifying new species. Its
advantage over natural history is that it can invent those species (like the
Snap-dragon-fly) in the imaginative sense, whereas natural history can
invent them only in the archaeological sense, that is discover what already
exists. Nonsense is the entomologist's dream come true, or the Linnaean
classification gone mad, because gone creative … . (Lecercle 204)
For Alice, the feeling of not being herself and "being so many different
sizes in a day is very confusing" (Carroll 42),5 which of course is
something incomprehensible to the Caterpillar she encounters. It is not
queer for the Caterpillar whose mode of being is defined by
metamorphosis and the various perception/action-modulations that
transformation brings about. It is only the suddenness of the becoming-
insect of Alice that dizzies her. The insect body suggests here an
alternative composition of forces and capacities. Whereas Alice is used to
being defined by a certain stability of her human body, the continuous
metamorphoses in the novel gesture towards worlds more familiar to
insects, like the caterpillar.
As precursors of ethology, such natural historical quests (whether
archaeological, entomological or imaginative) expressed an appreciation
of phenomenal worlds differing from that of the human with its two hands,
two eyes and two feet. The bodies analyzed and mapped were not
restricted to already defined capabilities, structural forms or mere
evolutionary trees. Instead, in a manner of Deleuzian ethology of forces,
these explorations were after the potentials, affects of bodies. In a way,
this entailed a kind of extended Kantianism interested in the a priori
conditions of alternative life worlds. Curiously the obsession with new
phenomenal worlds was connected to the emergence of new technologies
of movements, sensation and communication (all challenging the Kantian
apperception of Man as the historically constant basis of knowledge and
perception). Nature, viewed through a technological lens, was gradually
becoming the new "storehouse of invention" (New York Times, 4 August
346 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
Art, regarded as a human skill, differs from science (as ability differs from
knowledge) in the same way that a practical aptitude differs from a
theoretical faculty, as technique differs from theory. What one is capable
of doing, as soon as we merely know what ought to be done and therefore
are sufficiently cognizant of the desired effect, is not called art. Only that
which man, even if he knows it completely, may not therefore have the
skill to accomplish belongs to art. (Canguilhem 60)
Animal Captures
In the physiological research so dear to Kapp, the thresholds of human
sensation and perception became a crucial field of research for the aspiring
media culture. This development emerged alongside the need to provide
information on the human-animal physiology for the new rationalization
and organization of labour and what spun-off into new creations of modes
of sensing in visual media culture. The physiological understanding of the
human organism provided the necessary impetus for research focused
specifically on perception severed from the human observer, leading to the
subsequent rationalization, reproduction and control of physiological
events. This can be deciphered as a key field of biopolitics of modern
media technological culture (see Crary). In physiological research, the
human being served as the storehouse of sensation and perception, as in
Johannes Müller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (from 1833
on). Müller's work exemplifies research that focused on the interfacing
layer of sense organs between the outer world and the inner consciousness.
Senses were seen as the indispensable layer that informed animals of the
environment outside them, an interface that also determined the mode of
orientation for a specific animal. Tones perceived are determined by the
quality of the sense of hearing, just as light and colors are qualified by the
specific energy of nerves of vision (Müller 255). Senses are seen as tools
with which to grasp the world, world-forming probes and modes of
folding the inside with the outside. In developmental biology, resonating
views of organs as tools and organisms as complexes of instruments were
proposed by Wilhelm Roux at the turn of the century, later criticized by
Heidegger (213). What Heidegger embraced, however, at least to a certain
extent, was Jacob von Uexküll's 1920s appreciation and development of
Müller's ideas into his own ethological approach to the world.
As Jonathan Crary explains, Müller understood the body as resembling
a factory of decentralized actions, "run by measurable amounts of energy
and labour" (88). Life was primarily a set of interconnected
physiochemical processes, and the body became an inventory of
mechanical capacities (Crary 89). Indeed, not just human beings, but also
animals and insects, were seen as part of this storehouse. In the early 1826
work Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinns, Müller addresses
Jussi Parikka 349
the sense thresholds of insects. The later work Handbuch der Physiologie
des Menschen, and especially its second part, similarly addresses the
visual capacities of insects, spiders and other "lower animals," noting the
peculiar aggregate vision of insects. (Müller 305-312). Consider Crary's
observation of how Müller, also writing as part of the Kantian legacy
concerning the perceptional apparatus of human beings, nevertheless
already stands at the crumbling point of Kant's apperception as the crucial
and indispensable synthesis of perception:
When Müller distinguishes the human eye from the compound eyes of
crustacea and insects, he seems to be citing our optical equipment as a kind
of Kantian faculty that organizes sensory experience in a necessary and
unchanging way. But his work, in spite of his praise of Kant, implies
something quite different. Far from being apodictic or universal in nature,
like the "spectacles" of time and space, our physiological apparatus is
again and again shown to be defective, inconsistent, prey to illusion, and,
in a crucial manner, susceptible to external procedures of manipulation and
stimulation that have the essential capacity to produce experience for the
subject. (92)
example. The work of cutting (into) time from Marey's work to devices
such as the Phenakistoscope, the Thaumatrope and the Zoetrope (note the
direct reference to animal life) provided a new understanding of the nature
of time but also of space that could now be optimized and rationalized, as
in the factories or the emerging entertainment industry (most evidently
cinema). Yet, this did not exhaust the contingency and chance inherent in
the tensions of time and media technologies as argued by Mary Ann
Doane.
In addition to a number of other interests, Marey stands as one of the
early pioneers of insect media. For example human bi-pedal locomotion
remained merely one potential example of how movement could be
conducted (contrasted with for example the four-legged movement of the
horse), opening up a panorama of nature to be analyzed in their discrete
moments of movement. Insects were a special case of flight for Marey,
interesting due to the huge pace of wing movement as well as the sounds
emitted from that process. In La Machine Animale, the questions regarding
insect flight were: 1) the frequency of wing movement, 2) the successive
positions the wings take as part of the loop of movement, 3) how the
power of motion that moves and upkeeps the movement develops. The
same key questions were also expressed in various other publications
reporting on Marey's insect studies (La Machine Animale 188; "Note sur le
vol des insectes" 136-9; "Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the
animal kingdom" 226-85).10 The practical dilemma was how to record the
movement that was beyond the human eye to perceive. On the one hand,
Marey saw the acoustic traces left by movement as indexes of the
frequency, but on the other hand, more accurate research equipment was
needed. Proceeding from observation to potential causes, the so-called
graphic method, and especially Hermann von Helmholz's invention of the
myograph in the early 1850s for registering movement in graphical form,
provided invaluable assistance in turning continuous movement into
distinctive and analyzable units ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in
the animal kingdom" 227). The actual wings were taken here as indexes
and harnessed so as to leave wing marks on a blackened paper, traces of
the points of the continuous movement ("Lectures on the phenomena of
flight in the animal kingdom" 235).11 The result was a graphical
representation of various kinds of movements, at best like beautiful
abstract lithographic art. Thus, it is no wonder, as Marta Braun argues in
her book Picturing Time, that Marey's way of capturing temporal
intensities into a media technological form found resonance later in
modernist art, for example in Marcel Duchamp's work, where Marey's
positivism was turned into a fascination for temporal perception detached
Jussi Parikka 351
from the everyday habitual human way of seeing the world. A new way of
seeing articulated in scientific and media technological contexts (later
celebrated by such filmmakers and writers as Jean Epstein) was connected
to a search for new perception/action-connections that moved beyond the
human eye/hand-couple. Perception moves beyond the human perception
to contexts technological (the nonhuman eye of the movie camera) but
also animal (the nonhuman affects and percepts lived through for example
insects.) This represents the new phase in perceptual techniques tensed
between the animal and the technological where beyond registering the
non-human we can talk about the ontogenetic potential these machines
express (see Manning 85).
An expression of Marey's interests of particular relevance here was his
artificial insect creation (1869), a tool for theoretical study. In a model
construct of wings moved by an air pump and inserted on a drum, Marey
was capable of reproducing the flight patterns of insects (wing stroke
patterns in the form of an eight) that allowed him to measure the capacities
of animals in their environments even better than the originals. The
question was how the wings and their potential allowed such a "rapid
translation of motive force" ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the
animal kingdom" 246). Marey's experiments soon attracted interest
beyond France. For example, various U.S. newspapers and publications
were keen to report on curious interfacing of animal locomotion and
artificial creation. The papers expressed the undoubted potential in
Marey's research for the emerging topic of human flying. Scientific
American underlined how Marey's experiments are useful to aeronauts
"and those aspiring to be aeronauts" ("The Velocity of Insects' Wings
during Flight" 241-56).12 Certainly, war and the continuous effort put into
finding aerial solutions to warfare is a key context for understanding the
interest in flying and aerial movement of bodies. The U.S. had just come
out of the Civil War and France and Prussia were on the verge of their war
around that time. War provides an exemplary context of the workings of
biopolitics as a mobilization of population(s) but also research into
efficient solutions in organization and projectiles for example. If a crucial
part of the analysis of moving bodies with Marey and others was to focus
on the problem of perceiving bodies in motion, then the solutions in
military context to producing bodies into motion and subsequently
catching them in their motion was of utmost importance.13
352 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
These machines are not only destined to replace the observer, in which
case they perform their role with overwhelming supremacy, but they also
have their own domain where nothing can replace them. When the eye
ceases seeing, the ear hearing and the sense of touch feeling, or when our
354 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
senses give us deceptive appearances, these machines are like new senses
of astounding precision. (La Méthode graphique 108, qtd. in Väliaho,
"Simulation, Automata, Cinema" 19)
which refuses the dualism of nature vs. culture, or human vs. non-human.
Instead, bodies are products of ethological, environmental forces and
exhibit various potentials through experimentation in their relatedness. As
Braidotti argues, this signals the core of Deleuze's political ecology as
ecosophy which looks for potentials of bodies beyond the human
organization ("Politics + Ecology).
Notes
1
In addition, on insects and contemporary cultural analysis, see for example
Eugene Thacker's article "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes. Part Two" and Rosi
Braidotti's book Metamorphoses. Braidotti has recently continued on similar ideas
as Grosz when emphasizing the immanent and multimodal lessons that we could
learn from animals: "The strength of animals is that they are immanent in their
territories and environmentally bound: insects and animals mark their territories
acoustically, olfactorily, by their own sign system" (Transpositions 111).
2
Instinct was a much-debated theme during that period. Often referred to as a
mechanical reaction to external impulse, contemporaries of Bergson were
continuously also keen on debating a strict distinction between instinct and
intelligence. Instinct was often divided into further two more precise modes: open
and close, where only the latter was deemed as a mechanical and predictable
reaction to external stimuli, as John Mullarkey (78) explains. However, despite the
seemingly dualist nature of Bergson's division, the two are more in the manner of
tendencies than clear-cut categories.
3
"When we see any structure perfected for any particular habit, as the wings of a
bird for flight, we should bear in mind that animals displaying early transitional
grades of the structure will seldom continue to exist to the present day, for they
will have been supplanted by the very process of perfection through natural
selection" (Darwin 149).
4
Bergson addresses this in terms of tendencies. Even though life is differentiation
and emergence of specialized tendencies, the traits of elementary directions are
preserved. Bergson (136) writes how "[t]here is no intelligence in which some
traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more especially no instinct that is not
surrounded with a fringe of intelligence … all concrete instinct is mingled with
intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover, neither
intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition: they are tendencies, and not
things" (112-9).
5
In a style to some extent reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, in E. van Bruyssel's
The Population of an Old-Pear Tree, or Stories of insect life an everyday meadow
is disclosed as a vivacious microcosm in itself. The harmonious scene, "like a great
amphitheatre" (2), is filled with life that easily escapes the (human) eye. Like
Alice, the protagonist wandering in the meadow is "lulled and benumbed by
dreamy sensations" (4) which, however, transport him suddenly into new
perceptions and bodily affects.
Jussi Parikka 359
6
Later, in the 1920s, William Wheeler saw this even as a special defining instinct
of ants: the instinct of craftsmanship (and also the instinct of communication).
"Scientific Observations of Ants and Etymologists." New York Times, 29 July
1928.
7
In Kapp's anthropological philosophy of technology, the human being's key focus
was to be on itself: "[D]er Gegenstand des Menschen nichts anders ist, als sein
gegenständliches Wesen selbst" (138). Kapp's influence was later acknowledged
by for example Alfred Espinas, in 1897, who adapted Kapp's ideas of organ
projection as the key element of philosophy of technology centered on action (what
he called praxeologie). The worker remains unconscious of his intertwining with
the tools, which seem as natural extensions of his capabilities. The machinic
ensemble is not merely an extension but an articulation. As Espinas notes, the
machine is a coordinating system which has to remain unconscious for the worker
in order to function properly (45-6; 84-5.)
8
The ideas also amounted to a hierarchy of morphological elements so to speak,
cultivated later in France by Espinas. Lowest were the reflexive and instinctive
forms of will, and highest the voluntary and (self-)conscious appropriation of
technology as a mastering of nature. (Espinas 281-3.)
9
As Deleuze and Guattari write: "Science fiction has gone through a whole
evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of
bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible" (A Thousand Plateaus 248.)
10
Even though Marey's studies on insects took place fairly early in his career, end
of the 1860s, he returned to the analysis of their movements in the 1890s, cutting
into their movements at a camera speed of 1/25000 of a second. (Braun, 166;
Marey, "Le vol des insects étudié par la chronophotographie" 135-8.)
11
For Marey, insect flight was not a phenomenon of the muscles and organization,
but their interaction with especially currents of air. The insect wings for example in
the dragon-fly were optimized to adjust to air currents: "Thus the reaction of the
air, which combines its effect and acts perpendicularly upon the surface which it
strikes, can be decomposed into two forces, a vertical and a horizontal force; one
serving to elevate, and the second to propel the animal" (244). The insect was a
folding of forces of physiological organization and the environment.
12
Marey himself also engaged with plans of engine powered aircrafts. Around the
end of the 1870s he collaborated on such plans with his assistant Victor Tatin
(Braun 49-51).
13
This is related to Paul Virilio's often mentioned ideas relating to war and
logistics of perception (Virilio 63.) For example the French War Ministry was
supporting research into flying apparatuses at the end of the nineteenth century.
One of the examples that could be cited include Clément Ader's 1890s design that
was modelled on biological movements (resembling a bat) and aimed to produce a
new kind of a war machine—Avion III (Siukonen 53-6.)
14
On the biopolitics of modern cinematic technologies, see Väliaho, The Moving
Image. Gesture and Logos circa 1900.
15
Grosz herself has recently developed these ideas towards a neomaterialist
appreciation of art that stems from a wider ontology of nature, rhythm and
360 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
vibration. Bodies and art are contractions of the vibrations of the world (see
Kontturi and Tiainen).
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Anon. "Flight of Birds and Insects." Harper's New Monthly Magazine
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(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 209-11.
—. Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
Braun, Marta. Picturing Time. The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–
1904) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Bruyssel, E van. The Population of an Old-Pear Tree, or Stories of insect
life (New York: Macmillan and co., 1870).
Canguilhem, Georges. "Machine and Organism." Incorporations. Eds.
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992).
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Roger
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Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massch.: the MIT Press, 1992).
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Edited with an Introduction and
Notes by Gillian Beer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian
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Jussi Parikka 361
TOM GREAVES gained his PhD from the University of Warwick with a
thesis on the ecological thought of Martin Heidegger. His research
interests include ecological phenomenology, philosophy of nature and
ecological poetics. He has been active in various environmental
campaigns, including the international movement against large dams. He
is currently writing an introduction to Heidegger entitled Starting with
Heidegger and is associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, UK.
JUSSI PARIKKA teaches and writes on the cultural theory and history of
new media. He has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of
Turku, Finland and is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin
University, Cambridge, UK. He is also the Co-Director of the recently
founded Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ARCDigital). Parikka
has published a book on "cultural theory in the age of digital machines"
(Koneoppi, in Finnish) and his Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology
of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, Digital
Formations-series (2007). Parikka is currently working on a book on
"Insect Media", which focuses on the media theoretical and historical
interconnections of biology and technology. In addition, two co-edited
books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other
Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Hampton Press) and
Media Archaeologies. Homepage: http://www.jussiparikka.com.