The Music of Bateson-Deleuze

“The French are too human, too historical, too concerned with the future and the past”(37)–from Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet’s Dialogues II.

“To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it”(29)–from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

In the previous posting, I noted an instance in which Deleuze identifies an anthropomorphic mystification within Nietzschean philosophy. I did this from the perspective of Mario Perniola’s Sex Appeal of the Inorganic in which he raises the issue of vitalism. In showing how Deleuze diffuses the anthropomorphism in Nietzsche by referring it to an impersonal cosmos, I wanted to show how the relationship amongst the triad Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Perniola is more complicated than Perniola suggests. The relation between Deleuze and Perniola is particularly complex, given that Sex Appeal is comfortably ambiguous towards Deleuze, as I will detail in the next posting. Here, I want to focus on the unique feeling of Deleuze’s space-sound philosophy, but I will introduce this by starting from the question of vitalism and humanism.

Dismissing humanism does not necessarily imply dismissing vitalism, yet Deleuze does not “dismiss” even humanism. You will not find an anti-humanism in Deleuze but rather a de-humanism. Again and again, with humans, there is a belatedness, a negligence. Speaking of music primarily in terms of bird calls in ATP’s “Of the Refrain,” Deleuze and Guattari write of art in general: “Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated conditions”(320). By going to birds for the elements of music, humans are de-emphasized, a mere digression. Even within the realm of consciousness and language, humans are displaced: “A schizophrenic said: ‘I heard voices say: he is conscious of life.’”(ATP 84). The schizophrenic does not have direct access to life consciousness. Deleuze and Guattari broach this schizophrenic patient’s hallucination as an indication of how language is fundamentally indirect. There is no shortage of indirect voices in ATP.

Reading A Thousand Plateaus for the first time is an unprecedented experience–you can hardly believe the words coming out of your mouth. Critics easily brand the book’s bewildering and bedazzling style with the stigmatic label of “elitism.” The elitist slur refers to the overwhelming crowd of people and ideas piled within the book’s covers. If you count the names in ATP, you find about 580 different people, more names than there are pages in the book, 575. The 580 count does not even include fictional people cited, such as the aptly named “Monsieur Zero” and “Shrinking Man.” Setting the tone from the book’s first paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari ask, “Why have we kept our names?” To which they answer, “Out of habit, purely out of habit”(3). The more accurate and revealing label for the book’s style is schizophrenic. To understand in what way ATP bewilders and bedazzles, it is essential to keep in mind that the book is certifiably schizophrenic!

The critic above, however, could easily retain his cynical position. ‘Why would someone mimic a psychological disorder in their writing style? How could this be anything more than a privileged intellectual experimenting for the fun of it, kind of like a super-crossword or sudoku puzzle that only ten people will ever figure out,’ so this cynic’s logic goes. Rather than an idle intellectual exercise, though, I think the schizophrenic style replies to a paradox discovered by one of the book’s many inspirations. To understand what it means to describe ATP as schizophrenic and to understand why it is schizophrenic, it is imperative to refer to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

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The breadth of Steps to an Ecology of Mind reflects the breadth of Gregory Bateson’s career, from anthropologist to therapist. Arguably SEM’s most extensive and lasting contribution is its theory of schizophrenia, to which a sixth of the book is dedicated. The book’s value, though, consists in the expansive perspective of Bateson, in his reframing of schizophrenia with concepts outside of psychoanalysis.

Bateson’s broadest frame of reference for schizophrenia is logic. Illuminating the paradoxical situation of the schizophrenic, for Bateson, involves teasing out the intersection of mathematics, logic, and psychology. First, we begin with the concept of the “psychological frame,” which sets logic apart from mathematics’s Set Theory. Bateson lists the two basic functions of psychological frames as, first, to exclude, and, second, to include(187). With sets of numbers, the two functions are synonymous: either a number is a part of a set or it is not. But in communication, one psychological frame can tacitly exclude a message while another frame could include a message that explicitly negates what was previously denied indirectly. The logical peculiarity of communication consists in the fact that saying something is not so is different from altogether disregarding it.

Bertrand Russell’s theory of Logical Types delineates the fundamental paradox of communication. Russell’s Logical Types attempts to explain a specific kind of paradox. “This statement is false.”, is an example of the type of paradox in question. The statement asserts its falsity, so it is false, but, consequently, the statement is true. In order to diffuse the paradox, Russell asserts that ‘class of classes are not members of themselves’(qtd in SEM 186). To avoid a paradox, a statement must not delimit two different logical types; the statement’s logical type must not be a part of the statement itself (that is, the class a member of itself). In the above paradox, the statement, which is of one logical type, asserts its own falsity, a different logical type (namely the type ‘evaluation of the statement’). Following the rule of logical types, the statement must only differentiate between other possible statements, not possible evaluations.

Yet, when the theory of Logical Types is taken to its logical conclusion, the paradox remains intractable. The theory itself delimits two logical types: first, the type of paradox in question, and, second, how to evaluate the paradox. Thus, in drawing the paradox of Russell’s Logical Types, Bateson sets the ground for describing schizophrenia rather than curing it.

Over the course of SEM, Bateson moves from higher levels of generality to more specific levels. Yet this movement is not a culmination but rather parallels. Bateson moves Russell’s Logical Types into the more concrete frame of psychology without changing any of its fundamental aspects. The direct link between Russell’s theory and schizophrenia is that both fundamentally consist of a confusion of logical types. The work of Bateson lies in demonstrating how schizophrenia is bounded by the logical paradox.

The “psychological frame” is the preliminary descriptive mechanism whereby Bateson shows how schizophrenics have difficulty linking communicational contexts with their specific messages. The example given is of a friend’s benign question becoming a nexus of conflicting and unwarranted suspicions. “What would you like to do today?”, a schizophrenic is asked. To which, Bateson imagines telltale ways in which a schizophrenic doubts the meaning of the message, “unable to judge…whether he was being condemned for what he did yesterday, or being offered a sexual invitation, or just what was meant”(211). If, assuming the question was directed at us, we were to apply the theory of logical types, we could matter of factly dismiss the paranoia of being condemned because it is a friend talking to us, not an authority figure. Likewise with the sexual invitation, since this is a friend talking to us, we can assume that they are not thinking about sex. Yet, as this example shows in contrast with the simpler one that demonstrated Russell’s theory, the case is less clear. There are plenty of times when friends become each other’s accusers and plenty of other times when friends become sexual partners. In any event, given it was in fact a benign question within a stable friendship, a normal person’s conscious and unconscious awareness of his or her friend’s psychological frame would implicitly dismiss both of these possibilities. From the mannerisms used (for example, soft voice and calm gestures) to more transparent cues (for example, meeting at a ritual time), it would be clear that the friend wants to do something relatively interesting that we, the listener, would be interested in as well. Or, if the far-fetched possibilities were not entirely discounted, we, as a “normal” person, could confuse them for the sake of humor.

With the rigor of a practitioner’s position papers, Bateson then moves to another more specific level. The “double bind” hypothesis is Bateson’s most general formulation of schizophrenia. Gained by this level is a passage by which the terminology established above can be used to understand the case histories of schizophrenia without being distracted by questions specific to psychoanalysis. Coming at schizophrenia from the perspective of logic and anthropology, Bateson is not interested in whether schizophrenic symptoms are indicative of a sexual or oral pathology(196) or whether the disorder might be related to a stage of psychological development in infants(206). By contrast, the double bind outlines the “causal network” of schizophrenia, relating its symptoms in the broadest terms possible from a therapeutic perspective.

The double bind lists six different aspects to the “sequential patterns of schizophrenia. The first aspect is that there must be two or more persons involved in the genesis of the pathology. This aspect reiterates the disorder’s fundamentally communicational quality. The second aspect is repeated experience, weighing recurrent patterns of behavior in favor of isolated traumatic episodes (such as, sexual trauma during child development). The third and fourth aspects relate to each other in the form of two conflicting negative injunctions. The first negative injunction is simply a “context of learning” based on punishment rather than rewards–”Do not do so and so, or I will punish you”–while the second more abstract injunction is also negative but contradicts the first–”Do not see this as a punishment.” The double bind’s fifth and sixth aspects develop by means of the two conflicting injunctions. The “victim” is prohibited from escaping the “negative field” (the fifth aspect) because the second injunction masks the nature of the first. And, for the sixth and final aspect, unable to escape, the victim learns to perceive the universe in terms of the double bind (”can’t win”) situation(SEM 206-07). The double bind formalizes the particular case histories of schizophrenics.

The next level of specificity is “A Description of the Family Situation”(SEM 212). With its formal elements established, Bateson walks us through the most recognizable elements of schizophrenics’ case histories. Most often, the (1)interpersonal aspect of schizophrenia develops within a mother-child relationship. This relationship usually occurs within a family context absent of any other strong figures who could intervene on behalf of the child, thus leaving him or her (5)entraped. The mother, for whatever reasons, is intensely ambivalent towards the child, becoming “anxious and withdraw[ing] if the child responds to her as a loving mother,” yet the mother is unable to accept recognizing her feelings of anxiety and hostility and so denies them by expressing “overt loving behavior”(SEM 212). The mother’s emotional state thus provides the background for understanding the paradoxical behavior between the mother and child.

The last degree of specificity consists of characteristic episodes between a mother and her developing schizophrenic child. Bateson gives the example of a mother who responds to feelings of hostility towards her son by telling him, “Go to bed, you’re very tired and I want you to get your sleep”(214). The statement expresses care for the child but without regard for how the child actually feels because it in fact masks a hostility. The mother is incapable of a more diplomatic attitude, like “Let’s stop right now; I’m tired and at my wit’s end,” and so implicitly betrays a bitter attitude along the lines of, “Get out of my sight because I’m sick of you”(214). The son in this case is left in a no-win situation: in order to affirm his mother’s affection, he must affirm his mother’s message, but this requires deceiving himself (he is not actually tired). The son has not only failed to discriminate between the logical types “simulated feelings” and “real feelings” but is also confused internally.

The double bind situation impairs the son’s communicational skills from the most general to the most personal. The most immediate fallout from the episode is the son’s need to ignore the context of the mother’s message: “My mom is angry with me,” instead of, in the more diplomatic case, having the opportunity to ask himself in private, “Why is my mom angry with me?” The relationship will dull the son’s ability to read other people because, with his mother, his survival depends on ignoring the context of messages. The less apparent feature of the episode is the son’s need to ignore his own feelings–he could very well have been tired during the episode but that was not what motivated his mother. Over time, as the mother continues to define how the son feels in order for her to appear affectionate, the son will become disjoined from and confused by his own feelings. Depending on the intensity of the relationship and the presence of other exacerbating factors, the child develops the recognizable symptoms of “overt” schizophrenia.

The double bind situation, illuminated with the stereotypical family episode, shows how multiple personalities and the schizophrenic “word salad” are positive responses that express the logic of the paradoxical situation. Beginning as a paralyzing confusion of their internal feelings, schizophrenics can find in multiple personalities a means fo recognizing prohibited messages–the son may not be able to identify his mother’s hostility but his alter-ego will. Likewise, the long and complicated fantastic monologues characteristic of schizophrenics (the “word salad”) can enable prohibited things to be said by means of “unlabelled metaphors”(205). The sixth and final aspect, the point at which the “victim” projects the double bind onto the universe, explains how multiple personalities and the word salad manifest outside of the family context.

Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia delimits the possibilities of the therapeutic field: this is the theory’s brilliance! SEM presents the theory in five different chapters, each more extensive and specific. All of the five pieces are directed at mental health professionals. Bateson’s message is this: do not think about schizophrenics without thinking about yourself. The importance of this insistence is easy to overlook because Bateson does it in the most rigorous and formal terms: conceiving of “covert” and “overt” schizophrenia (the mother and child respectively in the example above), downplaying the difference between schizophrenic and “normal” behavior(222), and invoking the general revision of scientific thought whereby the observer (in this case, the therapist) must be included with the focus of observation(246).

Bateson formulates the paradox of treating schizophrenia. The mental health profession itself is challenged by questioning its potential for being paternalistic towards the schizophrenic, which in turn perpetuates the disorder. The challenge for therapists, from this perspective, is to frustrate the schizophrenic’s expectation of the double bind situation (that is, to frustrate the expectation that the therapist will not emathize with the patient’s feelings and instead project onto them therapy’s own prescriptive interests(244-47). Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia shows the it to be a unique pathology in relation to psychoanaylsis, one that contains a meta-communicative element that calls into question the therapeutic setting itself. The paradox of Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia, paralleling Russell, is that anyone who seeks to treat an “overt” schizophrenic inherently becomes a “covert” schizophrenic.

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What were fragments of an incomplete theory of schizophrenia, position papers given at mental health conferences and published in journals, become something different in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. In the book’s foreword Mary Catherine Bateson writes, “It was not clear for many years, even to Gregory, that his disparate, elegantly crafted, and argued essays, the ’steps’ of this title, were about a single subject…’an ecology of mind’”(SEM viii). By collecting his ideas on schizophrenia with various other works in his life, Bateson recontextualizes the theory in SEM. The pathology becomes an extreme expression of normal human communication and thus a means for understanding the larger dynamics of the human mind…its “ecology of mind.” Mary Catherine Bateson ends her foreword by encouraging the reader to “move” with the trajectory of Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, to “empathize” with it: “Scholarly analysis of the work of Gregory Bateson is only a fraction of the task…It is more important now to respond(SEM xiv). This foreword, written in 1999, might as well have been written in the 1970s, considering the response from Deleuze and Guattari.

A Thousand Plateaus, among being many other things, is a response to Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Having been introduced to Bateson’s book via Deleuze, I prone to thinking the title is Steppes to an Ecology of Mind. Looking through the theory of schizophrenia, we find precursors to ATP. One of these precursors relates to the paralleling of ideas in SEM, a recursiveness.

In outlining Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia, I have already shown its recursiveness as it parallels different levels of thought, moving from the most general to the most specific. Mary Catherine Bateson understands this recursive element as related to Bateson’s “epistemological ecology” and opposes this to the “largely materialistic ecology of academic departments”(SEM xiii). Thus, in the context of schizophrenia, Bateson refers to “the gap between Newtonian world of objects and the communicational word of contexts”(SEM 250-51). Bateson criticizes Freudianism for taking the idea of energy from the world of objects and applying it to mental phenomena. “Perhaps one day,” he adds, “an ultimate synthesis will be achieved to combine the Newtonian and communicational worlds”(250-51). We should likewise understand ATP as a response to this challenge, even if it considers itself to be a synthesis rather than “an ultimate synthesis.”

We are almost ready to return to Deleuze. But first we need some perspective on how ATP “modulates” or recontextualizes/reterritorializes Bateson’s thought, a move that Bateson suggested above when he recontextualizes them as steps to an ecology of mind. Yet Bateson’s modulation consists almost strictly of juxtaposition, with the addition of an introduction and small commentaries at the end of each part. Otherwise, the reader has to make the connections on the basis of the labeling and sequencing of the six parts as well as the volume’s overall title. Deleuze and Guattari are unwilling to settle for this kind of tacit reframing.

In response to the gap between materialistic and epistemological ecologies that SEM establishes, Deleuze and Guattari synthesize two pieces of the book. Playing with the recursive parallel parts of SEM, ATP intersects the short chapter on Balinese culture, “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State,” with the theory of schizophrenia that I have carefully detailed above.

I outlined the entirety of Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia for a few reasons. First, I said the theory would illustrate what it means for ATP to be schizophrenic. It did this indirectly by giving us the idea of the schizophrenic word salad. But before going any further, I should expand upon this connection. Remember Bateson describes the word salad as “unlabelled metaphors,” whose presence in ATP I indicated earlier by showing the overall density of people cited. Although Deleuze and Guattari dismiss the use of metaphors, their writing style srikes a similar cadence by rapidly connecting thoughts and people at a speed only possible when most of the connections are “unlabelled.” The rapidity of these connections creates complexes of message/meta-message on levels at which the reader, without giving up on coherence, cannot ignore. ATP induces its readers to listen as much to explicit messages as their implicit contexts.

Second, I said Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia would help us understand why Deleuze and Guattari’s writing takes a schizophrenic form. It does this in three ways. The first way is by presenting the “over-covert” paradox of therapy for schizophrenics; Bateson’s theory thus contextualizes Deleuze and Guattari’s choice to exclude the therapeutic perspective from their work and, indeed, schizophrenia itself. Relating the reinforcing cycles of therapy in general, Deleuze and Guattari write at the beginning of ATP’s second plateau, “The Wolf-Man knew that Freud would soon declare him cured, but that it was not at all the case and his treatment would continue for all eternity under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire”(26). Detached from its usual context, schizophrenia exists in ATP as a shaping presence.

The second way also deals with the exclusion of the therapeutic perspective. By outlining the entire theory of schizophrenia and its original context within the mental health profession, I want to appreciate that which Deleuze and Guattari exclude, thus showing how they “modulate” Bateson’s ideas. For Bateson, modulating ideas is the essence of communication: “All communication has this characteristic–it can be magically modified by accompanying communication…It is this modulation which is music”(SEM 230). Bateson himself modulates his theory of schizophrenia but only slightly, juxtaposing it with disparate other writings as a step to an ecology of mind. With Deleuze and Guattari, the overarching context is not a conceptual project, like the “ecology of mind,” but music itself.

The third way leads into the most general discussion of Bateson-Deleuze. Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia formulates the pathology’s causes as a network of sequential patterns. These sequential patterns open up a form of communication that is nonprogressive and noncumulative. In this horizontal movement, Deleuze and Guattari find a formal rendering of Bateson’s “plateau ethos.”

The concept of the plateau, limited to a twenty-page chapter of a 500 page book, is the center of Bateson’s book for Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, taking my reflexive associations with SEM’s title a step further, Deleuze would have us change the book’s title to Steppes of an Ecology of Mind. The concept underpins the title A Thousand Plateaus, although Deleuze and Guattari enlarge the concept. More than the Balinese culture that Bateson studies, there are a multitude of plateaus in ATP, beginning with its reference in the introduction to bulbs, tubers, and rhizomes, as the term had been used in classical botanical studies(fn 20 520). And so on.

By displacing the center of Bateson, Deleuze modulates his message into a music of horizontal movement. This horizontal movement plays out at the most formal level through schizophrenia (what Deleuze and Guattari call “schizoanaylsis”) and at the most material level of the plateau. By synthesizing these two ideas, Deleuze and Guattari synthesize what Mary Catherine Bateson contrasted as the epistemological ecology of Bateson versus the material ecology of academic departments, what Bateson contrasted as the communicational world of contexts and the Newtonian world of objects. What exists in SEM as parallel levels of the ecology of mind become two complementary poles of the same plane in ATP.

Like Bateson did in his movement from Russell’s Logical Types to schizophrenia, let’s walk through the concept of the plateau by recontextualizing the ideas of schizophrenia. Bateson describes the Balinese plateau ethos in terms of a culture in which “activity is commonly valued for itself, rather than aimed at some deferred goal. Instead of deferred purpose, there is an immediate and immanent satisfaction in performing beautifully”(117). Schizophrenic communication, likewise, does not identify the common purposes of messages that are to be found within their normal contexts. The messages exist by themselves. Bateson further describes the nonprogressive movement of the plateau ethos: “The Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance and generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance. The Balinese state is maintained by continual nonprogressive change”(125). Schizophrenic communication also is maintained by continual nonprogressive change, sequential patterns of communication that can operate by means of unlabelled metaphors, multiple personalities, and so on. The biggest difference between Bateson’s descriptions of the plateau ethos and schizophrenia is that the former does not have the negative connotations inherent to the therapy’s curative intentions. With the concept of the plateau, Deleuze and Guattari have a material onto which they can liberate schizophrenia from the therapeutic setting.

The schizophrenic writing style of ATP is not an idle intellectual crossword puzzle. Deleuze and Guattari hear in it a liberating potential: “There is a schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace”(ATP 403). The importance of SEM for Deleuze consists in the nearness with which it comes to formulating the schizophrenic mode of communication outside of its manifestation as a pathological disorder.

Translating this Bateson-Deleuze terminology into the more neutral and abstract one that I began the post with, we find the unique feel of Deleuzian philosophy. There is the space of the plateau and the sound of the schizophrenic language. Together, in a shared nonprogressive horizontal movement, we listen to the music of Deleuzian philosophy, “each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau”(ATP 22). There are those who would dismiss Deleuze as elitist or even less; those looking for argumentation that progesses up to a culminating point will be frustrated. But is that not Deleuze’s point, that philosophical positions, debates…indeed that all points are beside the point. A Thousand Plateaus is not the statement of a philosophic system but rather a compact disc of philosophy, a CD with fifteen music tracks for us to play, to listen to, and improvise upon.

Three Relativities: Part One

Three Relativities listed in (1) order of time, to be (2)repeated as the (3)feeling of each are drawn out in space. The following blog post is the first of three in which I will discuss three relativities, each post in turn emphasizing one in contrast to the two others. The three posts will approach the relativities from the different aspects numbered above, that it to say, each relativity will be appraoched by the others.

But first! A clip from WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to set the mood:

The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward teh sun before turning west. Spread out beneath us lay one of the most densely-populated regions in Europe, with endless terraces, sprawling satellite towns, business parks, and shining glass houses which looked like large quadrangular ice floes drifting across this corner of the continent where not a patch is left to its own devices. Over the centuries the land had been regulated, cultivated, and built on until the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern…Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the langes of the moterways, while the ships moving up and down river appeared as if they had been halted forever…Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. no matter whether flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretchs from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall…it as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding(90-91).

The three relativities that I will list in order of sequence are:

Friederich Nietzsche’s space-time relativity

Gilles Deleuzes’s space-sound relativity

Mario Perniola’s space-feeling relativity

1)space-time; 2) space-sound; 3)feeling of space.

None of the three philosophers summarized their thought as succintly; I would be curious to hear what Perniola, as the only surviving philosopher, would think of the label. Both Nietzsche and Deleuze diligently avoid such formulaic generalizations of their respective philosophies. Apart from it being an unspoken stylistic method, Nietzsche and Deleuze both posit themselves against the formalized laws of dominant and dominating sciences [for example: Nietzsche's critique of equivicating thermodynamics(qtd in NP 45) and Deleuze's epxlication of "the minor sciences"(ATP 361-374)]. With that being said, I do not intend to summarize any of the three philosophies but rather suggest a consistency or, if you will, a concretion…a concretive property of each philosophy.

I am fascinated by the medium that each philosophy creates and, in which, it is created by, the medium through which each philosophy applies and spreads itself. Appreciating the reasons that the three philosophers avoid such broad labels, I am positing the summary descriptions primarily as a means of traveling from one to the other. If I were not treating each in contrast with the two others, I would place less weight on the labels, the purpose of which is to give a “sharper” sense for how each philosophy uniquely feels its existence.

The connection between Nietzsche, Deleuze , and Perniola is, first, a direct influence of one on the successive other. This connection primarily has a temporal sense: A–>B–>C. One of the currents of influence flowing amongst these three thinkers involves the theme of feeling. Each philosophy invests itself in the potency of feeling; each philosophy, so to speak, feels its existence. Make no mistake, though: I have chosen this theme on the disruptive basis of Perniola, who sees himself separate from the first two: A/B–>C. I, for my part, want to sharpen the differences between Nietzsche and Deleuze because, by doing so, I think will simultaneously refocus the differences between Nietzsche and Perniola/Deleuze and Perniola respectively. It is not that I wish to reveal how Perniola has mis-portrayed the other two philosophies, but rather, I think sharpening their differences means minimizing them. I hope to connect Perniola’s writing and narrative style (his philosophic method) to his idea of a “kingdom of things”(Sex Appeal 11).

Let me begin with the differences between Nietzsche and Deleuze:

In my essay “Taking Zizek from the Front: Deleuze on Nietzsche on Zizek,” I tease out two aspects of Deleuze’s relation to Nietzsche, taking it as an exemplary case of Deleuze’s philosophic relation to others in general and in contrast to Zizek’s relation to others. The two aspects characterizing Nietzsche to Deleuze relate, first, to Deleuze’s early monograph of Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy) and, second, as Nietzsche’s relatively tacit presence in A Thousand Plateaus.

First, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze draws from the breadth of Nietzsche’s writings, framing and connecting quoted and paraphrased passages. It is a careful editing of Nietzsche’s thoughts, invested as much in fidelity to the original author as interest in Deleuze’s own philosophic projects. In condensing the extant of Nietzsche’s writing, Deleuze frames Nietzsche in ways the historical individual could not have done himself: “If we do not discover its target, the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy remains abstract and barely comprehensible”(NP 8). That target, which is indirectly Deleuze’s as well, is dialectics: “Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that force has another force as its object. But it is important to see that forces enter into relations with other forces. Life struggles with another kind of life. Pluralism sometimes appears to be dialectical-but it is its most ferocious enemy, its only profound enemy”(NP 8). For Deleuze, the most systematic consequence of Nietzsche’s thought is its rebuke of dialectics’ negativity-in-itself. The re-oriented, sharpened Nietzsche is the anti-dialectian par excellence.

The pluralism mentioned above, I should note, is nearly synonymous with what I mean by relativity. Forces never exist alone but always in relation to other forces”–this is the essential thing. I have chosen relativity as my descriptive lens in order to distance myself form the political sense of pluralism, thus focusing on the fundamental elements of each philosophy rather than their more ambiguous consequences.

Second, in A Thousand Plateaus, honing in on the tightest and most structured plateau, “1837: Of the Refrain,” one feels the presence of Nietzsche more than one hears of it. “Of the Refrain’s” tripartite structure relates back to a critical philosophy project that Deleuze identifies in On the Genealogy of Morality, which was itself a rewriting of Kant’s tripartite Critique of Pure Reason(NP 87-88). The explicit connection between the concept of the refrain and Nietzsche is abrupt (as are almost all of the astonishing number of references in ATP): “Let us recall Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return as a little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos”[italics my own](343). The explicit connection permits itself to also be a site of contrast: the eternal return primarily invokes the element of time (Deleuze here recalling one of its less familiar manifestations as a “little ditty”; conversely, the refrain primarily invokes the element of sound, specifically repetition within music. The difference at play here refers back to the “targets” of each philosophy.

Time and sound are reference points for Nietzsche and Deleuze within their philosophies’ respective trajectories. For Nietzsche, time is the shared medium with dialectics, the central concepts of each being genealogy and the dialectical movement of history, respectively. For Deleuze, as I also tease out in “Taking Zizek,” sound is the shared medium with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the refrain converting Lacan’s linguistic foundation into a neutral sound: Anti-Oedipus. It is not that the direct influence of Nietzsche on Deleuze consists of a shared identity (eternal return does not equal the refrain), yet neither is there a contradiction between the two (the refrain does not refute the eternal return). When comparing/contrasting Nietzsche and Deleuze, my writing took on the abstract feeling with which Deleuze dressed the encounter.

Enter Perniola, with his own wardrobe with which he dress the newly formed encounter primarily in terms of feeling things.

In terms of an explicit presence, Deleuze is wholly absent from The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic while Nietzsche briefly appears, criticized for limiting sexuality by attaching it to life(17). At first it would seem that both’s influence on Perniola is only negative, both too viatlistic (as Slavoj Zizek faults them for in Organs without Bodies). Yet, as I will show in my third “Relativity” posting, the explicit absence of Deleuze relates to the neutral-thing perspective that Perniola deploys. Yet that absence also relates, as with Nietzsche, to an item of contention, Perniola’s inorganic feeling.

Although common to all three, feeling as an independent thing only occurs within Perniola. Sex Appeal begins by separating feeling from sensibility (both spiritual and vital). Surprised by this formulation, one is tempted to ask, “What sense does that make?” Feeling divided apart from sensibility, for Perniola, manifests the ontological reality of the kingdom of things.

Targeting Descartes as beginning the “modern appropriation of feeling by thinking”(8), Perniola ‘considers the thing and the feeling in themselves rather than in the function of a thinking subject’(8). Perniola’s method of division divides feeling apart so that it can be its own thing, so it can feel the fullness of other things. “Descartes,” Perniola wants us to feel, “considers the notion of thing as synonymous with substance and foundation…[disregarding] the neutral dimension which is implicit in the notion of thing. As far as feeling is concerned, according to Descartes, it is not separable from thinking and from willing”(8). Distracted in its search for the origins of knowledge, Desxartes’ Meditations disregards the indeterminate essence of the thing (the wax that melts in your hand). (We will see a similar instance of this un-avowed presence of the thing with regard to Nietzsche later.)

Yet the “appropriation of feeling” exceeds Cartesian orthodoxy. Even though Descartes asserts that “the thing that feels with immediacy and evidence is not the body but the mind”(8), Perniola dismisses the vitalist reproach to the Cartesian mind: “One would be tempted to claim against Descartes the rights of the body, considering it the bearer of a stronger and more vivid sensitive evidence than the intellectual one. But this is the way of sensationalism that in reducing all knowledge to a sensation has always been the poor parent of Cartesian rationalism”(8-9). Sensationalism, for Perniola, is an inferior alternative used to re-embark on the ill-fated journey for the origins of knowledge. Committing oneself to a knowledge project (whether via the mind or body), according to Perniola, inevitably culminates in the “self-consciousness of the mind”(9). Perniola is interested in the thing as “opaque, indeterminate, and open which is not self-evident and is not a machine”(9), “self-evident” and “machine” being the respective culminating points for spiritualism and vitalism.

The opening five chapters of Sex Appeal aim to open us, the reader, to the indeterminate feeling of things: “It is not I, it is not you that feels, but those hats and clothes [casually] mentioned by Descartes”(10); to open us “toward a complete exteriority in which everything is surface, skin, fabric”(12). This last aim, especially, does not seem inherently counter to either Nietzsche or Deleuze, but there is good reason, in addition to the brief admonition of Nietzsche noted above, to presume that both are culprits in the “modern appropriation of feeling by thinking.”

Deleuze’s Nietzsche in Nietzsche and Philosophy is apparently guilty. We do, in fact, witness a one-to-one correspondence between feeling and sensibility, sensibility (or lack thereof being nihilism) being the intermediate stage of an impersonal will. Some examples: “Before treating power as a matter of will, he treated it as a matter of feeling and sensibility”(62) and “But, as Nietzsche often says, we would need another sensibility, another way of feeling”(64) and, as a last example, “The possibility of transmutation as a new way of feeling, thinking, and, above all, being [the Overman]“(71). Strictly linking feeling to sensibility, a seemingly self-evident move, implies, as Perniola’s distinctive perspective is showing us, a vitalistic bent to one’s thoughts. The feel of Nietzschean thought culminates in a sensibility, albeit transmuted, that the new being of the Overman manifests, a living being albeit alive in ways heretofore unknown.

What is fascinating, for me, is that I appreciate Perniola’s minimal (and mostly indirect) critique, but I think, if redressed or just carefully read, one can push Nietzschean thought past the critique: True, feeling directly corresponds to sensibility, but, for Nietzsche, it is a transmuted sensibility. True, the new sensibility is at the service of life, but it is an alien kind of life–it does not perfect humanity but creates something past humanity.

Deleuze, in a very similar vein, redresses Nietzsche against a humanistic bent: “The remaining anthropomorphism in this text should be corrected by the Nietzschean principle that there is a subjectivity of the universe which is no longer anthropomorphic but cosmic”(NP 44). More important than the particular strain of anthropomorphism here is the fact that Deleuze recognizes it while also sensing a separate impersonal counter-current. This ambivalence between Deleuze and Nietzsche expresses a fundamental inter-conceptual tension between the two and also Perniola. What is expressed is the nature of the differences, namely that the differences are relative rather than definitive, a qualitative difference of feeling rather than one of quantifiably different bits.

To summarize, if we, in something of a curious reversal of Socrates’ case, put Nietzsche on trial for being vitalistic, Nietzsche could defend himself as follows: ‘Yes, I considered feeling connected to sensibility that in turn connected to a way of existing, all of which are symptoms of the Will that they express. But the Will-to-Power, at least, is not the conscious willing for this or that object but rather an impersonal Will, a Cosmic force. I, for one, am not afraid “to admit that there are perceptions in the inorganic world”(VP II 87)’. Rather than feeling the perceptive reality of the inorganic world, Nietzsche admitted it. Paying due importance to the relative differences at play here: having to articulate the defense against vitalism is symptomatic of the qualitative difference from Perniola. What Nietzsche admits, Perniola embraces. For Perniola, referring to a living (even if impersonal) cosmos obscures the dimensions of neutrality and immortality constitutive of things.

Perniola’s endeavor comes to this: dismissing humanism is not enough to dismiss vitalism. We will have to later see how the eternal and indifferent cosmos is different from the immortal and neutral kingdom of things.

In departing from this first relativity, I leave with a well-known passage from Nietzsche that is expressive of a very special ambivalence from the perspective of Perniola’s kingdom of things: “There is only perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be”(GM III, 12). For Perniola, the perspective of a thing is not a matter of seeing with any sort of eye, no matter how many one might use, but precisely in becoming a thing oneself!

Installation of Modern Art–IoMA

Some years ago, it must have been four or five, my friend Cutter Wood had an idea for the expanding MoMA in Manhattan. In doubling its building size, the museum had to demolish some of its neighboring buildings. One was an apartment building with an old Irish pub on the ground floor. Cutter’s idea then was to slice the side off the apartment building facing the museum, turning it into an exhibit of live New Yorkers. Forget about reality TV shows; this would be a reality exhibition show. Think MTV’s Real World without the careful editing–the “real world” in all of its dramatic mundanity.

There are plenty of people that have already criticized MoMA’s expansion: if you search the New York Times for “MoMA expansion,” you will find articles like “Where MoMA Has Lost Its Edge” and “Architecture Curator’s Challenge: Warm Up A Frosty MoMA Inc.” Leaving the particular criticism to the art critics, I want to here imagine, beginning with Cutter’s idea and with help from Mario Perniola, what a modern museum’s expansion could look like. Essentially, I want to consider how to turn a museum into an art installation.

The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic redefines modern architecture on the basis of a new way of feeling, what many would say is a lack of feeling. One example of this is Inorganic’s affinity, as I see it, for Cutter’s idea. Take for example this passage from the chapter “Plastic Landscapes”:

“The fundamental confirmation of the inorganic orientation of architectural experience…The rejection of functionalism, the critical revision of the fundamentals of architecture, the often indeterminate, porous aspect of interiors of buildings that lack any clear delimitation, the privileging of a public building topology destined for transit, performances, cultural tourism, the dissolution of housing units, attention to spaces of transit rather than residences, are similar aspects of a tendency oriented toward the abandonment of any organic character”(86).

The deconstruction and assimilation of an old apartment building into a massive modern museum seems an exemplary project for demonstrating the above aspects of modern architecture. Slicing off one or more sides of the apartment building would enact a becoming-porous. And would there be a better way of confusing a museum’s limits than incorporating alien bodies like a common-place apartment complex? The museum would dissolve not-so-much the housing units as their organic sanctity, opening them up to public spaces of transit. To be sure, this would be an extreme experiment in cultural tourism!

More than simply a fanciful idea, the connection between Perniola’s Inorganic and Cutter’s idea jumped out at me towards the end of the book, when Inorganic describes what it considers to be one of the most “radical examples of inclusive metaliterature”(125). This is in keeping with Perniola’s aim of cutting the sanctity of life into an infinity of pieces, turning life into things. At the same time, Perniola faults Perec for de-sexualizing his book; for Perniola, sexuality essentially belongs to the kingdom of thins rather than either the spiritual or vital dimension that both Perniola and Perec displace. Perniola suggests that the lack of sexuality with Perec’s Life (”life” is in italics!) is due to a lack of a philosophical perspective that could impregnate the book’s thinking with an “emotional rapidity capable of unleashing a neutral and abstract excitement”(126). Taking a cue from another Perniola chapter, “Philosophical Cybersex,” this philosophical perspective, I think, consists in creating a virtual reality that would be less voyeuristic (and hence more sexual) than Perec’s novel.

Instead of an outsider looking into the apartment building from the street, IoMA would have to displace voyeurism by turning museum visitors into performers rather than observers. This would involve additions to Cutter’s basic idea.

For starters, as I alluded to above, it would be important for the apartment building and museum to merge. The museum would engulf the apartment units from the sides and maybe even above, making it a dysfunctional and somewhat unsightly appendage. What would be important is for the museum to abut the residential units on at least two sides, allowing transit between the two buildings to vary from seamlessness to absurdity. A few floors of the apartments could be remodeled to be a simple extension of the museum space; on other floors, the apartment building could remain essentially intact.

For the Real World exhibit, on those intact levels, the apartment would keep most of the standard amenities of any other New York apartment building. The biggest difference would be the dissolution of the walls in favor of a glass surface. This glass barrier could be a sometimes one-way mirror, other times transparent window. Thus the “real person” living inside the museum apartment would be capable of watching the museum-goers, even if only as brief distractions from their daily routine. This would complicate the atmosphere of the exhibit, undermining the immutable god perspective of a complacent and gawking visitor. There would be potential for extreme misunderstandings: imagine, as the real-world person, you check your teeth in the mirror of your glass wall for a bit of stuck food; on the museum side of the glass, exhibit-goers lurch back at the brisk appearance of you approaching the mirror and then barring your teeth. Not only would the motion be unsettling in itself, the exhibit-goers would not be sure whether it was a one-way mirror or transparent window, whether you meant it as a joke or were irritated by something stuck in your teeth. Probably both.

Essential to the exhibit would be a continual shifting of the museum-goer/real-world person relationship. This would frustrate participants’ reflexive wish to fix the exhibit into one thing, thus making the participants realize that they, we, are the things. Perniola says of installations, they “are a kind of happening represented by things rather than people…Installations must not be considered the object of a visitor’s evaluation…It is the installation that feels the visitor, welcomes him, touches him, feels him up…One does not go to exhibitions to see and enjoy art, but to be seen and enjoyed by art”(107). Between Perniola and Cutter, the Museum of Modern Art would become the Installation of Modern Art.

With the proper framing of the Real World Exhibit, visitors would be likely to experience awkward feelings of ambivalence. One such framing would disseminate the atmosphere of petty surveillance to everyone involved in the exhibit. Imagine cameras on the interior of the glass barrier, photographing people’s reactions, the IoMA store selling prints of the most memorable and forgettable, the New Yorker running one snapshot in their caption contest. Those willing to watch the “real people” would be required to become “real people” themselves, entering their faces and clothing into the public record as well. With attention passing through both sides of the glass, there would be an element of instability of feeling that would ensure that all involved would become a thing.

The exhibit would unsettle at least one political debate, that of privacy. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I appreciate the worthiness of defending privacy. Such an exhibit would, first, showcase surveillance technologies: it is one thing to know that many institutions record your presence, but to do it with an extreme of fidelity and clarity coupled with the ability and willingness to publicly disseminate the material, that is something altogether different. In addition to those who will have their fifteen minutes of fame, there would be embarrassed people who feel humiliated and violated, people upset who would not have expected it. In all of this is almost a moral: we should not oppose the government’s domestic spying program on the basis of an already non-existent right to privacy. We should oppose the government’s spying because the government is, among many other things, a violent organization with a taste for scapegoats and witch hunts. American citizens, like myself, will not stop the government from using its surveillance resources; we can only, ourselves, surveil the government itself. A less attractive subject than relatively impotent and anonymous people.

Exhibit-goers, I hope, would, in realizing the extent and pettiness of their surveilling drive, would divide their attention elsewhere. You, the neighbor whose eyes and ears perk up at anything out of the ordinary, or, God forbid, something indecent, do us all a favor and train your eyes, ears…your feeling on something much more indecent and dangerous, a police state. But perhaps, we are expecting too much from the Real World exhibit; it would just be another trip to the museum, right? For now, we can wonder if a museum, even the MoMA, might experiment with a Real World exhibit.

Inorganic Cut-outs

Here, in chronological order without pretending to be a summary of its most important points, are cut-outs from Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Before going in any one direction with the book, I wanted to relate some of its oddity, give you a sense of its persuasive insanity. Having grouped the passages by their chapters, I will also provide some minimal context in places (anything after a heading’s colon marks is quoted directly from Sex Appeal:

From the beginning, “Senses and Things”:

Contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme experience that has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy and sexuality(1).

Things and sense are no longer in conflict with one another but have struck an alliance thanks to which the most detach abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement are almost inseparable and are often indistinguishable…philosophy’s speculative extremism and sexuality’s invincible power(1).

Maybe an allusive homage to Gilles Deleuze, the next chapter it titled, “Sex Plateaux”:

To free oneself of orgasmomania, which has raged for decades and has conditioned negatively the lives of generations, is the first step toward the neuter, suspended, and artificial sexuality of the thing that feels(3).

From “God, Animal, Thing”:

When I say that man is a thing that feels, at first I extinguish, blunt, and close off the feeling, or, at least, I take away its liveliness, its brio, its flagrancy, but secondly I promote its extreme sharpness, I make it similar to a point, to a needle, to a sword(6).

From “Becoming Extraneous Clothing”:

The body experienced by neutral sexuality is not a machine, but clothing, a thing(10).

It is precisely up to the philosopher…his task and his responsibility to state that the kingdom of things is not so much the triumph of technology and capitalism as much as the empire of a sexuality without orgasm(11).

As long as sexuality is tied to vitalistic and spiritiualistic representations, the sharp feeling of philosophical abstraction functions as a block: thus, and not without irony, one could recommend a philosophy course to those who suffer from premature ejaculation(11).

From “Exemplary Addictions”:

It is not a question of getting inspiration from immoderate and excessive experiences in order to compose texts or write books, but of understanding philosophy as a practice that creats a dependency similar to that instituted by drugs, as a need that cannot be satisfied unless in a temporary and unstable manner, because it is infinite(15).

It is not at all a question of using common drugs as instruments for philosophizing or for the practice of sexuality–to have interesting thoughts or some exciting images–rather, that the encounter of philosophy and sexuality generates a similar effect as opium and its by-products. thus it seems that philosophy and sexuality move on the side of evil in a much more essential and constitutive manner than ever before(16).

From “Kant and the Spouse as Thing”:

Precisely because of their excess, sexuality runs toward marriage and philosophy towards the university…It is time to see marriage and the university on the side of evil, as pushers of sexual and philosophical excess that one cannot do without, rather than on the side of good as remedy to sexual and cognitive libido(19).

From “Sadism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

The empire of the senses, that is the infinite search for always new sexual sensations, proves the inability of sexuality to reach excess on its own(25).

The excess of Philosophical sexuality is not something that one reaches through a progressive increase of sensations and situations but is already given all at once..It neither states: “I feel” or “we feel”, but asserts impersonally “one feels”(26).

From “Philosophical Cybersex”:

Neutral sexuality is not inhumane or inhuman, it is perhaps, posthuman in the sense that it finds its starting point in man(29).

We have not yet accessed the artificial and always available world of things that feel. This access is made easier if we start from parts of the human body that are less sexually characterized…The breath unites the greatest sensorial stimulation because it strongly arouses our sense of smell, with the greatest abstraction, because it evokes two cavities, the lungs and the stomach, which we will never be able to penetrate…In the breath, the noble exhalation of the lungs, which one imagines having a pinker and thinner coating than the vulva’s or the anus’s, mingles with the heavy exhalation of the stomachs contents, to which be added, alas in an invisible way, our sperm(31).

The corneous quality of hair gives an impression of the inorganic. But hair, at the same time, presses with force to come out of the cutis of the head, so that the absence of life of the thing is connected with the experience of an abstract power(32).

From “Bodies as Clothing”:

The real opposition is not between body and soul, but between life and clothing(46).

As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organisicistic aestheticism that consider sexuality in terms of life(46).

From “Fetishism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

How can the fetishism of borrowed money constitute an imaginary, symbolic, and emotional reference point for the philosophical sexuality of the thing that feels?(59)

From “Hardcore Sonority”:

The essence of music is neither sentiment nor life, but more essentially, sound, understood precisely in the neutral and inorganic indifference evoked by this word(65).

What distinguishes the inorganic from the disorganic, the pile, the mess?(66)

The sex appeal of the inorganic relies on the generous and hospitable spatiality of the world of things–bodies, sounds, and thoughts–that infinitely welcome us with unlimited accessibility(69).

From “Plastic Landscapes”:

Architectural experience is a drifting, an uncontrollable dragging through which the continuous change of perceptive framework changes continuously what can be seen(84).

In deconstruction is implicitly an architectural and philosophical maximalism which is solidly anchored in the neutral, impersonal, and suspended character of experience. It puts into motion a device of de-spiritualization and de-vitalization that can be applied to any material(87).

Cyberspace is the practical realization of Schelling’s idea according to which architecture is spatialized music(91).

From “Desire and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

The opinion of Ignatius Loyola, according to whom eternal love is even more ready to bestow holiness than we are to desire it, fits in with this tradition whereby what is given, what is available, namely, the present is much more valuable than what is desired, coveted, that is the future(98).

The sex appeal of the inorganic is closer to an existence full of wonder than to the very equal and apathetic life of the Sceptics…The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire(99).

The checkmate of desire consists precisely in the impossibility of maintaining the tension between existence and carnality(100).

From “Overflowing Installations”:

The collection represents an important step toward teh sex appeal of the inorganic because it despiritualizes and devitalizes what it collects(103).

The libido of collecting is not yet a neutral sexuality because it is still too cautious and timid.

Installations are a kind of happening represented by things rather than by people(107).

From “Division and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

Androgyny seems to me as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic. It is the victory of organic unity over sexuality, metaphysics over neuter, thinking over feeling. Closer to the sex appeal of the inorganic is hermaphroditism…[not] the unification of opposites [but rather] their neutralization(115).

Inorganic sexuality is not able to understand why there should only be two sexes, and not as many sexes as there are numbers, that is, infinite sexes(117).

The Stoics [claim] that all bodies can be divided to infinity and that man, as a result, is not made up of a greater number of parts than a finger, or the universe of a greater number of parts than man. As a result, there are no ultimate parts and the whole real is solid, continuous(118).

From “Inclusive Metawriting”: Why do I find the expression ‘inclusive metawriting more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words(126)?

From “Pleasure and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

And now we come to the saddest topic of this book: pleasure!(132)

Hedonism is characterized by an inane and conceited idleness, an indolent and mellifluous self-complacency, a self-important and obtuse enervation which is only capable of bragging of its own savoir-vivre(132).

All the defenders of pleasure are more or less, openly or secretly, partially or entirely, enemies of sexuality(132).

From “Perverse Performance”:

“I would rather go crazy than feel pleasure,” Antisthenes used to say(142).

(the book’s very end)The sexualization of philosophy and the arts is probably a perverse effect, that is an unforeseen and undesirable consequence provoked by the political irrelevance of these activities. But an even more perverse effect would be that through the sex appeal of the inorganic one would re-establish a live relation between them and society(144).

The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

This book, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, written by Mario Perniola, has patiently waited for me for four years. One of those books that sits on a bedroom shelf more a guilty reminder of money apparently mispent than an enticement. I always loved the title, the kind of thing that can inexplicably come out of someone’s mouth, bewildering the contented and frustrating the cynical.

It is a happy fortune that books do not lose anything with age, not this one anyway. Once unfolded, it begs for pulling this way and that, whether pulling of the book or oneself.

Provoking Hegelian Wolves

“To the famous positivity of the negative Nietzsche opposes his own discovery: the negativity of the positive”(NPh 180).

Catherine Malabou, in her essay that I last posted on, unleashes a pack of wolves on Deleuzian philosophy. One of those wolves, the one I am most familiar with, is Slavoj Zizek’s Organs without Bodies. I would be very curious to hear what Malabou thinks of Zizek’s monstrous creation, as he would himself likened it.

Zizek adopts the central premise of “Hegelian Wolves,” the claim that Hegel is the sole outsider of Deleuzian philosophy. The premise’s justification, as well, is adopted by OwB with little added: in both, we are told that Hegel, as a ‘proper philosophical name,’ fails to designate an impersonal mutliplicitous force that is in excess of the Prussian individual who bore the name. The textual support for this, with only passing reference to primary textual sources, is that even Deleuze’s other philosophic enemies–Plato, Descartes, and Kant–have a multiplicitous conceptual personae within the Deleuzian paradigm.

Deferring, for a moment, to Malabou and Zizek, I appreciate that both probably have a wider familiarity with the body of Deleuzian philosophy, a familiarity from which they could possibly assert this. But, it is important, I think, to underline just what their claim entails: not only does it claim that Hegelian philosophy is oversimplified within the whole of Deleuze, but, also and especially, the much greater claim that this is an unique instance different from anyone else Deleuze encounters.

The same claim in “Hegelian Wolves” is less misleading than in the booklength monograph of OwB. To begin with, Malabou attributes this exceptional quality to Hegel while alluding to passages in which Deleuze, even if abruptly, addresses him (such as in NPh, What is Philosophy?, etc). Zizek, on the other hand, repeats Malabou’s proposition without any Deleuze-Hegel perspective outside of that which emanates from himself. From reading OwB, you would not know of one instance in which Deleuze addresses Hegel.

In two and a half pages (45-48), the beginning of the chapter “Hegel 1: Taking Deleuze from Behind,” Zizek tries to make the case that Hegel is the “absolute exception” of Deleuzian philosophy. We hear again, as we did in Malabou, that Deleuze approached Plato, Descartes, and Kant but not Hegel. Trimming a passage from Negotiations, Zizek describes Deleuze’s approach as a “Taking from Behind,” as opposed to Malabou’s neutral description of ‘creating a conceptual personae.’ Running off with the idea, b the end of the chapter’s opening pages, Zizek asks us: “Why should we not risk the act of taking from behind Deleuze himself and engage in the practice of the Hegelian buggery of Deleuze? Therein resides the ultimate aim of the present booklet”(48).

The little evidence given that Hegel is an absolute exception then passes into a discussion of method–how should we take Deleuze from behind. The evidence, indeed, is not a conclusive case supported by textual sources, but is glossed over by the suggestive atmosphere of “Why not?”. For Zizek in particular, this is not an isolated error but rather based on a psychoanalytic logic that devalues the importance of such argumentation in view of unconscious processes.

This logic is supplemented in this instance by the negative example of Francis Fukuyama. As indicative of “textbook philosophy,” Fukuyama, in his history of philosophy, builds his argument by attributing ideas directly to individuals, such as in the form “Hegel believes that…”(OwB 50). The positive lesson we, the readers, are supposed to draw from this is that philosophy is “not about the beliefs of different individual persons”(OwB 50). In terms of the book as a whole, the assertion is that contemporary Deleuzian philosophy is not about the French man who penned it in the 20th Century.

This is, in essence, a more theoretically expressed form of Malabou’s “Hegelian Wolves.” Their punch is a provocative injunction to their readers rather than an appeal to an objective body of literature. The persuasiveness of both is not a matter of textual support but in their ability to accuse their readers of a latent belief. Their arguments’ validity comes to this: if the reader cannot qualify Deleuze’s relationship to Hegel as no more different than Deleuze’s relationship to, say, Plato, as Deleuze’s relationship to Plato is different than that to Descartes, then they are right. Insofar as the reader can only say, “Deleuzian philosophy affirms while Hegelian philosophy negates,’ Malabou and Zizek are on to something. Let me here, as one of the those readers, detail a more substantive account of Deleuze’s relationship to Hegel.

First, I will locate where and how Malabou and Zizek have brought me.

Malabou and Zizek’s relationship is complimentary: Malabou invites Zizek to the thrust of his speculative reasoning. In gesturing at the substance of Deleuze’s reading of Hegel, Malabou dismisses its constructive relevancy. To do this, she cites a passage from Nietzsche and Philosophy that reads “We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche’s work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principle concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights”(NPh 162). The passage moves in two directions: first, it is supposed to typify Deleuze’s strictly categorical dismissal of Hegel, and, second, it beckons the reader to reconsider what “against whom” means for Deleuze.

Both Malabou and Zizek must negatively account for the textual Deleuze in order to move the discussion onto the contemporary Deleuzian reader. Above I mentioned Zizek’s digression on the shared ontological existence of philosophy and the history of philosophy that Fukuyama failed to appreciate. If we return to Malabou, we find the root of Zizek’s digression in a blunt and self-serving claim. Purported as a matter-of-fact, Malabou, referring to NPh, tells us that “Anyone who as read Deleuze knows those pages well. What purpose would be served by reproducing or paraphrasing them?”(118). While this discussion is not soon to benefit from a comprehensive poll of Deleuzian readers, I, for one, can say that I did not read NPh until after a number of Deleuze’s other writings, including A Thousand Plateaus. I read OwB before I happened to read NPh. With what certainty would Malabou suggest that readers of Slavoj Zizek have read Nietzsche and Philosophy, a book critical to understanding the Deleuze-Hegel encounter that is wholly absent from OwB.

Juxtaposing Malabou and Zizek’s shared difficulty on this point further reveals the argument’s fundamental weakness. Malabou discredits NPh, a move that Zizek is tacitly grateful for, on the basis that we cannot be sure whether “Neitzsche makes Hegel his single, worst enemy”(118). Although dependent on this maneuver, Zizek would not as easily of made it himself because it relies heavily on the notion of authorial fidelity. Even though I am criticizing Malabou and Zizek for ‘complicating’ what was already a complicated relationship by ignoring NPh, I do not do so on the grounds of authorial fidelity. That is to say that Malabou unfairly dismisses NPh by dismissing the possibility that Nietzsche had a single worst enemy. This is unfair because we are not tlaking about Nietzsche alone, but rather the Nietzsche that Deleuze (re)creates in NPh.

Writing almost a hundred years later, what Deleuze sees between Nietzsche’s genealogy and Hegel’s dialectics are as important (in these circumstances) as what Nietzsche himself saw. If, as Malabou suggests, we cannot limit ourselves to a static Deleuzianism (this less than twenty years after Deleuze’s death), then she, and by extension Zizek, should be more sensitive to how Deleuze recreates Nietzsche in NPh.

Malabou and Zizek’s accounting of the textual Deleuze is defined in negative terms (justifying why it should not be present) but is also impotent. Looking closer at NPh, we find troubling passages for the given caricature of Deleuze-Hegel. Deleuze writes, “It has been said that Nietzsche did not know his Hegel. In the sense that one does not know one’s opponent well”(NPh 8). How quickly, then, should we dismiss the extent to which Deleuzian philosophy is anti-dialectical? It is imperative for any claim that Deleuze avoids Hegel to show how this evasion differs from, as Deleuze sees it, the false impression that Niezsche avoided Hegel.

My divergent narrative of Deleuze-Hegel comes to this: I think Deleuze addresses Hegel in the negative!

Consider it this way: imagine yourself, as a matter of vital course, as being against the idea of a productive negativity. Do you express your disagreement by negating negativity? Deleuze “takes” Hegel from behind” when he writes about Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Philosophy, whose last chapter is titled “The Overman: Against the Dialectic,” details a conceptual personae that defines Hegel in negative terms.

On what basis does Deleuze orient Nietzsche towards Hegel?

Apart from some childish notion of good or bad, Deleuze understands a way in which Nietzsche and Hegel are closer to each other than either of them are to him. The common referent for both Nietzsche and Hegel is time, hence their central concepts of genealogy and dialectics respectively. Deleuze’s medium, by contrast, is that of sound, hence the concept of the Refrain. By the same token, Deleuze’s counterpart, “enemy” if you will, is psychoanalysis, especially the psychoanalysis heavily influenced by linguistics (such as Lacanism). Arguably Deleuze’s greatest aim is the becoming-musical of language, deterritorializing the conventional sounds of language. Thus, I do not think Hegel is Deleuze’s worst enemy, his philosophy’s “absolute exception.”

The insights that Malabou and Zizek respectively impart to Deleuzian philosophy are, I think, separate from and in spite of their characterization of Hegel being its worst or absolute or lone enemy. It is not only provocative but also constructive to bring attention to the unique ways in which different philosophies play off of each other. Contemporary readings of a philosophy, which can bring to light latent aspects but also obscure vital ones, is as important as the figure’s individual expression of it. Keeping both in contact with each other better ables us to discern the vital force that pulses through it.

Malabou and Zizek identify an encounter that contemporary philosophers have generally simplified, but they do so with little regard for how the original philosopher thought of it. In doing so, the exploration of Deleuze-Hegel is limited in direct proportion to how much of it is contrived. Separating this exploration from the dialectical tendency to see the two philosophies as diametrically opposed to each other, will enable, I think, a keener sense for both Deleuzian and, if only in negative terms, Hegelian philosophy.

Catherine Malabou’s “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” and its Style

Provocative. Catherine Malabou’s essay, “who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” is, by any measure, provocative. I mean that in a good way, but also in a bad way. To put it in a slightly different way, you could say its provoking. “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” plays Gilles Deleuze and GWF Hegel off of each other, not in order to resolve the conflict but to uncover more of the conflict’s dynamics.

A little background on the conflict: the essay’s title refers to a chapter, “One or Several wolves,” of Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus. In the chapter, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Freud for reducing a patient’s fantasy of a pack of wolves into one single wolf father figure, Malabou’s essay suggesting that Deleuze has likewise reduced the scope of Hegelian philosophy.

Malabou’s style was at times frustrating for me. Malabou challenges readers by defying partisanship while recreating and, in a way, intensifying a partisan conflict. This style or recurrent pattern manifests itself in another essay, “Polymorphism Will Never Pervert Childhood,” in which Malabou juxtaposes Deleuze with Jacques Derrida. In “Polymorphism,” Malabou hints at a violent silence between Deleuze and Derrida, without overtly telling the reader what direction her voice takes in the passage between the two thinkers. In “Hegelian Wolves?” Malabou again, as it were, plays both sides, but this time in an explicit conflict. Near the beginning, Malabou declares her afaffiliation with Deleuze: “From the place of my firmest conviction, as it were in the heart of the [Deleuzian] crowd or pack…” but only in order to pervert Deleuze…”that I will venture to ask whether, in the case of Hegel, Deleuze [repeats] the gesture that he condemsn in Freud”(114).

What is somewhat frustrating, for me, reading Malabou is that her writing feels like a cross between a polemic and a news article. In the first seven pages of her essay, Malabou stages the encounter by shaming orthodox Deleuzianism (look in the yellow pages for a church coming near you) for its hypocrisy with regard to Hegel. Yet this is more the perspective of an principled daughter rather than a Hegelian, for Malabou pays respect to the two thinkers intractable differences as Deleuze himself saw them(qtd on 118). Malabou does not clearly weigh in on one side in order to welcome, even if partially, the other. And we should thank her for this.

The problem I have with Malabou’s style consists chiefly of this: “Hegelian Wolves” has a wide enough scope to raise questions but not enough depth to adequately characterize them. After its opening’s polemical tone–”In spite of appearances my foreword is not polemical”(118)–”Hegelian Wolves” feels like its holding something back. An insider has leaked news of a bastard filiation between Deleuze and Hegel, and, what’s worse for us who are orthodox, is that they have not told all.

Beginning with the suggestive parallel of reductionism in Freud, Malabou’s essay accords an exceptional status to Hegel as the sole object of universal Deleuzian derision: “the ‘bow-wow’ of contemporary philosophers”(117). There are, if you look closely enough, two pieces of evidence for this exceptional status. First, we are told in passing that Deleuze constructs a conceptual personae for all of his other philosophic enemies: Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Descartes(116). Second, we are shown a brief passage from What is Philosophy? to demonstrate an instance in which Deleuze could have constructed an Hegelian personae but settles for fixing Hegel in an “immobile image” of a “severe and fatigued figure”(117). These two pieces of evidence hardly make a case for Hegel’s exceptional status, but polemics nor news articles lend themselves to making convincing arguments. That is not to say that Malabou lacks anything in logic, but rather that she is more intent on provoking and stimulating a response than encapsulating it herself.

The atmosphere of evidence that Malabou creates turns on a quote from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy: “We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche’s work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principle concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights”(qtd on 117). Deftly, without signaling that this begins the decent from the circumstantial clouds of evidence, Malabou redirects our attention to the Hegel-Deleuze block of becoming that she is presently creating. Sensing that the essay’s tone has outpaced its substance, the next paragraph begins with the “In spite of appearances” quote. The rest of the foreword deals with method.

For a method, Malabou rules out summing up the positive statements that Deleuze made on Hegel because it would amount to a “list of complaints”(118). Having read the entire essay, looking back I can see a latent methodological choice, one that Malabou is not prepared to articulate at this point in her essay. The choice is this: Malabou decides to abbreviate both Deleuzian and Hegelian philosophy in order to contract them into a single Hegel-Deleuze block of becoming. At this point, though, Malabou describes the process as “an uncovering of the network or dynamic of the conflict…a non-critical crossing of pathways”(119). A lot hinges on the word “non-critical”: describing a certain something that is not uncritical.

You could simply read this, as would be fitting for a news journalist, as a disinterested perspective. At its best, I take Malabou’s idea of a non-critical perspective to mean that she wants to be critical but not judgemental. In tangible terms, it means that, as a Deleuzian, we should not categorically dismiss Hegel, should not as a rule expel him from the grounds of discourse. To this end, “Hegelian Wolves” suggestively succeeds. We should not, indeed, stricken Hegel’s writings from philosophic discourse.

My frustration with Malabou’s style is what I see to be its perspective’s tendency towards disinterestedness and conciliatory equivocation. The latter two-thirds of “Hegelian Wolves” jumps back and forth between passages from Deleuze and Hegel, looking for and, in effect, creating a connection between the two thinkers. It is not that I want Malabou to, as in a debate, take a side, but I want Malabou to, more clearly and substantively, make a side.

The concise clarity with which Malabou jumps back and forth between Deleuze and Hegel in the latter two-thirds of “Hegelian Wolves?” reassures me that we are following a heretic rather than a disillusioned or unwittingly disloyal partisan. Malabou is someone else altogether.

The climax, if you will, of this back and forth between two conflicting realms, occurs in the “problematic of animal habit“(130). In this problematic is identified “an economy of multiplicity,” through which we will find a middle passage through the two kinds of multiplicity that have already been identified, teleological and adestinal. The first logic of becoming, the one directed towards a determinate end such as being and nothing, is associated with Hegel, the second, the unnatural and transitory “ontological jazz,” is associated with Deleuze.

In jumping back and forth, Malabou keeps Deleuze and Hegel apart. First, in the final third of “Hegelian Wolves,” we have a passage from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition that refers to Deleuze on the Aristotelian conception of the living as composed of small animals(131). In this way, Malabou introduces the Deleuzian idea of contraction through contemplation: “It is simultaneously through contraction that we are habits, but through contemplation that we contract”(from DR 74). At another time, I want to return to this passage but presently I report it as the thematic pin that binds Deleuze, here in DR to Hegel in Philosophy of Nature.

Malabou spends most the rest of the paper sketching Hegel’s problematic of animal habit in PN. I’ll leave you to read the particulars of this connection to you in its original context. There is a convincing logic, here, one that locates a similar dynamic within the two thinkers. The import of this dynamic, I will have to explore later. But for now, thinking about the style of “Hegelian Wolves,” I want to end on how the Hegel-Deleuze relationship is described.

Malabou, in keeping with her goal of ‘complicating’ the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel, remains vague about just how we should conceive it. “One is struck by the fact that, in the PN, Hegel develops a problematic of habit that is very close to that of Deleuze”(132). “Very close”? Very close, to me, sounds like someone whose textual support shows sameness but, since that’s inconsistent with the overarching argument, very close will suffice. Another example of vagueness: “I have tried to read Deleuze’s relation to Hegel as symptomatic”(135). Here, Malabou admits that the ‘exceptional status’ argument essential to her essay’s narrative has weaknesses, without pointing out any weaknesses or suggesting how it would be stronger. My third and final example of vagueness: In attempting to bring this configuration to light I have machinated an unusual relation between Hegel and Deleuze”(136). An unusual relation? After thirty pages exploring the relation between the two, “Hegelian Wolves” should have something more precise to say than “unusual.”

Perhaps a lack in precision is necessary in order to retain its power to provoke. For provoke “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” certainly does.