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!
Tags: Deleuze, Nietzsche, Perniola, relativity, the feeling of conceptual mediums
