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Edited by
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Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
Notes on Contributors ix
2 One More Next Step: Deleuze and Brain, Body and Affect
inContemporary Cognitive Science John Protevi 25
Index 233
Notes on Contributors
Rosi Braidotti (B.A. Hons. Australian National University, 1978; PhD Cum Laude, Uni-
versit de Paris, Panthon-Sorbonne, 1981; Senior Fulbright Scholar, 1994; Honorary
Degree Philosophiae Doctrix Honoris Causa, University of Helsinki, 2007; Knight in
the Order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005; Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy
of the Humanities, 2009) is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director
of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her books include Patterns of
Dissonance (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991); Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994 and 2011a [second ed.]); Metamorphoses (Polity Press, 2002);
Transpositions (Polity Press, 2006) La philosophie, l o on ne lattend pas (Larousse,
2009) and Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti (Columbia University Press,
2011b). Since 2009 she is a board member of Consortium of Humanities Centres and
Institutes (CHCI).
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She
has written books on Deleuze, literary history, gender, literary criticism and contem-
porary European philosophy.
x Notes on Contributors
Matthew Fuller is the author of various books including Media Ecologies (MIT Press,
2005), Materialist Energies (MIT Press, 2005), Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture
of Software (Autonomedia, 2003), Elephant & Castle (Autonomedia, 2012). Editor of
Software Studies, a Lexicon, and co-editor of the new Software Studies series from MIT
Press, he is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and works at
the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. http://www.spc.
org/fuller/
Laura Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at
Simon Fraser University. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cin-
ema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000), Touch: Sensuous
Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002) and many essays.
Her new book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT
Press, 2010) brings Islamic and Deleuzian philosophy into contact. She has curated
programmes of experimental media for venues around the world. Her current research
interests are the media arts of the Arab and Muslim world, intercultural perspectives on
new media art and philosophical approaches to materiality and information c ulture.
Patricia Pisters is professor of Media and Film studies at the University of Amster-
dam. She is the Chairperson of the Department of Media Studies of this University
and member of the steering committee of NECS (European Network for Cinema and
Media Studies). Her research and teaching focuses on film-philosophical questions in
conjunction with neuroscience and on political implications of contemporary trans
national screen culture. She co-directed with Rosi Braidotti (University of Utrecht)
the third International Deleuze Studies Conference Connect, Continue, Create which
included a summer school Mille Gilles and a double art exhibition The Smooth and
the Striated. For the Rietveld Academy Studium Generale Festival, she curated an
international art and science programme entitled Give me a Brain! Clash Continuum
Senses of Cerebral Screens. Her publications include: The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian
Filmphilosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012),
The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University
Press, 2003), From Eye to Brain (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 1998).
Arkady Plotnitsky is a Professor of English and Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue
University, where he is also a Director of the Theory and Cultural Studies Program,
and a co-director of the Philosophy and Literature Program. He has published several
books and many articles on philosophy of physics and mathematics, continental
xii Notes on Contributors
John Protevi Phyllis M Taylor is Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philo
sophy at Louisiana State University. He received the PhD in Philosophy from Loyola
Chicago in1990. He is the author of Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida
(Bucknell, 1994); Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic (Athlone,
2001) and co-author, with Mark Bonta, of Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and
Glossary (Edinburgh, 2004). In addition, he is editor of A Dictionary of Continental
Philosophy (Yale, 2006) and Founding Editor of the book series New Directions in
Philosophy and Cognitive Science with Palgrave Macmillan. His latest book is Political
Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minnesota, 2009).
This volume assembles a selection of the most distinguished scholars in the field of
Deleuze studies. The topic on which all contributions converge is the issue of nor-
mativity, the law and the question of norms and values in the ethical, political and
methodological sense of the term. It is by now accepted that the theoretical core of
nomadic thought consists in the rejection of the unitary vision of the subject as a self-
regulating rationalist entity, of consciousness as the transcendent universal common
denominator of the human and of the traditional image of thought and of normative
practices that rest upon it.
Normativity is traditionally expected to be structured around and to implement a
number of axioms which are drawn either from a canonical set of universal rules as
postulated in the Kantian tradition or by coercive reference to a master signifier,
asargued by Lacan and Derrida. The implication of both these traditions of thought
is that laws are produced through the submission to a central matrix of power be it
moral universalism or the terror of the master signifier which governs social and
ethical normativity. The same mechanisms also police the borders of what counts as
respectable, acceptable and workable as a set of operative norms and values both in
society and in scientific, philosophical and cultural practice.
Deleuzes philosophy opposes to this traditional view a differential notion of nor-
mativity. This rests on a non-unitary vision of the subject as situated beyond the
liberal model of an entity that coincides with self-reflexive individualism and is con-
sequently capable of self-correcting agency, transcendental consciousness and moral
universalism. Nomadic jurisprudence is rather process-oriented and its value system
is differential but never relativistic. Deleuzes philosophy also enacts a critique of the
despotism of the master signifier, the structural negativity of the Law or any suggestion
that power is governed by a primordial symbolic system, a representational matrix that
functions by linguistic mediation, as suggested, with slightly different inflections, by
both Lacan and Derrida.
Nomadic normativity moves beyond the mere critique of both the identitar-
ian category of a sovereign self and the dominant subject position on the one hand
and the image of thought that equates subjectivity with rational moral consciousness
on the other, while avoiding the free fall into relativism and nihilism. It proposes an
alternative vision of both the thinking subject of his or her normative status and the
structure of thinking. The normativity of this non-unitary subject of becoming is
in-built in the monistic ontology that sustains its material and yet vitalist processes of
2 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
In Chapter 2, One More Next Step: Deleuze and Brain, Body and Affect in
Contemporary Cognitive Science, John Protevi discusses Deleuzes normativity
as a dynamic system by bringing his philosophy in contact with the 4EA school of
thought in cognitive science (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective).
Deleuzes work resonates with the 4EA thinkers in seeing cognition as immanent to
extended/distributed/differential bio-environmental systems in which real experience
is the non-representational direction of action through the integration/resolution of
differential fields. Thus they are naturalist in fighting the myths of the self-identical,
representationalist, isolated and spiritualist subject. Moreover, Deleuze can help the
4EA thinkers in further demystifications of the subject. The political orientation of
Deleuze and Guattari can help, for instance, fight the myth that still haunts the 4EA
schools that the object of analysis is an abstract subject, the subject, that even though
embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective is still unmarked by political
categories such as race and gender. A Deleuzean approach helps here by thematizing
multiple subjectification practices; in other words, we have to see subjectification prac-
tices as intensive individuation processes from a virtual social field.
In a different way Arkady Plotnitsky reveals Deleuze and Guattari in Chapter 3,
The Spacetimes of the Nympheas: Matter and Multiplcity in Einstein, Monet and
Deleuze and Guattari, as uncompromising thinkers of, jointly, both materiality
andmultiplicity. Deleuze and Guattaris thinking of the multiple is more customarily
linked to mathematics, in particular calculus and Riemanns concept of manifoldness,
which radically transformed our understanding of spatiality by giving it the architec-
ture of the irreducibly multiple. Historically, Deleuze and Guattaris use of Riemanns
ideas was mediated by both Bergsons and Lautmans engagements with them, and both
engagements were inflected by Einsteins theory. In part following Leibniz, Einsteins
general relativity tells us that gravity curves the space it defines and gives this space
the Riemannian architecture of heterogeneous multiplicity, as against the Newtonian
homogeneity of absolute space (pre-existing matter), which defines classical physics.
These connections to relativity also allow one to explore, from a new perspective, the
role of temporality and dynamics in this architecture. Arkady suggests that Claude
Monets Nympheas murals in the Muse de lOrangerie in Paris, created in the wakeof
Einsteins theory of relativity, offer the image of this architecture, better captured by
Deleuze and Guattaris philosophical architecture and Einsteins physical-mathematical
architecture than by the latter alone. Ultimately, at stake is what Deleuze and Guattari
see in What Is Philosophy? as interferences between the planes of philosophy, art and
science that create new thoughts and new norms.
In the last chapter of this part, Chapter 4, The Question of Deleuzes Neo-
Leibnizianism, Simon Duffy provides an account of the role of mathematics in the
reconstruction of Leibnizs metaphysics that Deleuze undertakes in The Fold. Deleuze
provides a systematic account of the structure of Leibnizs metaphysics in terms of
its mathematical foundations. However, in doing so, Deleuze draws upon not only
the mathematics developed by Leibniz and developments in mathematics made by a
number of Leibnizs contemporaries but also a number of subsequent developments
in mathematics. Deleuze then retrospectively maps these developments back onto the
structure of Leibnizs metaphysics in order to offer a solution to overcome and extend
4 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
the limits that Deleuze identifies in it. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explica-
tion of the structure of Leibnizs metaphysics which comes to explain the underlying
dynamics of Deleuzes normativity of the genesis of the individual.
After the (inter)disciplinary analysis of Deleuzes normativity, the second part
deals more specifically with normativity in relation to habits, jurisprudence and
problems of law. Constantin V. Boundas warns in Chapter 5, Encounters, Creativity
and Spiritual Automata, against the idea that in the name of creativity, associative
bricolage and normative anarchy is celebrated. Boundas asserts that on the one hand
the representational and recognitive, dogmatic image of thought has at its core the
subsumption of the new under the old and renders, as a result, genuine creativity
impossible. On the other hand, the jolt administered to our faculties whenever sin-
gular cases are encountered cases that resist the process of subsumption has been
welcomed by Deleuze as the necessary condition for every new creation. However, in
the euphoria of a climate of experimentation that this notion of the encounter gener-
ates, what is often overlooked is that Deleuze puts encounters to work side by side
with the notion of spiritual automaton. Without the coordination of the two con-
cepts, Boundas argues, the old problem created by the alleged incommensurability of
the logic of discovery and the logic of demonstration is bound to strike again, in the
harshest possible pre-hermeneutic terms. The chapter first explores the shortcomings
and the pitfalls of a theory of creativity from which a rigorous logic of demonstration
is lacking by undertaking three diagnostic excavations: in the domain of jurispru-
dence; in the domain of the philosophy of science and in the domain of the creation
of concepts. In the sequence, the notion of the spiritual automaton is introduced
in order to conclude that in Deleuzes work, the spiritual automaton prevents the
disjunction of the logic of discovery and the logic of demonstration, without aban-
doning the thinker to the threatening decisionism of the dictum, pas des ides justes,
juste des ides.
Claire Colebrook demonstrates in Chapter 6, Norm Wars, that it might be pos-
sible to use the philosophical resources of Deleuze and Guattari to chart our way
through the present and the great normativity binary: either one assumes vital norms
(in the manner of Esposito) that will free us from systematic relativism or one regards
normativity as the matrix through which we might destabilize the operations of con-
stitutive structures of power (Butler). As with most binaries, Deleuze and Guattari
destroy this poorly posed problem in order to think beyond the humanity of norma-
tivity and the post-humanism of normalization. Life requires neither the constitutive
norms of recognition and identification nor some post-human and vital norm of life.
On the contrary, what presents itself to be thought is the refusal both of recognition
and vital transgression. It is in this sense that Colebrook argues for a Deleuzian criti-
cism of all that has come to be known (however variously and precariously) as post-
human and life in general.
In Chapter 7, Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism, Ronald Bogues thesis is that
Deleuze and Guattaris thought may be usefully approached through what he calls
chaosmopolitanism. This notion is drawn in reference to the cosmopolitanism of the
Cynics and early Stoics, especially in terms of the relationship between the cosmos
and the polis. Whereas being a citizen of the cosmos for the Cynics and Stoics entailed
Introduction 5
living in accordance with the natural rational law of the cosmic city, for Deleuze and
Guattari being a citizen of the chaosmos involves living in accordance with an emergent,
metastable and metamorphic world whose processes resonate, in the new harmony of
a concordia discors, with social and political practices that engage new conceptions
of law and community. Chaosmopolitanism, Bogue demonstrates, is in keeping with
Deleuzes ideas of jurisprudence and sympathy, both of which arise from Deleuzes
early work on Hume. Chaosmopolitanism is also compatible with the realistic utopia
that Patton has traced in Deleuze and Rawls, as well as the ecosophy proposed by Guat-
tari in The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis. The issue of norms is addressed through an
investigation of Vogts analysis of the Stoic city as a normative concept, Canguilhems
definition of normativity as flexible, creative health capable of surviving catastrophe
and establishing a new order, and Pattons characterization of realistic utopianism as
entailing an evaluative judgement of concrete socio-political institutions in terms of
fundamental standards of justice and equality.
Ronald Bogues chapter forms a transition to the more explicit political questions
of normativity and deterritorialization that the third part of this book explores. In
Chapter 8, Infinite Debt and the Mechanics of Dispossession, Matthew Tiessen inves-
tigates Deleuzes notion of the limit by challenging the common interpretation that
Deleuzes is an ontology open to endlessly new potentialities by emphasizing that crea-
tive processes are always at once enabled, held captive and determined by the limits
constituted by their relations. The focus of this discussion is Deleuze and Guattaris
critical assessment of capitalisms infinite creation of debt understanding capitalism
as a body that has reached its limits. Debt has become a global problem with destruc-
tive force. Tiessen argues for a new theory of money that moves beyond debt-based
conditions of our existence and demonstrates in which ways a Deleuzian concept of
limits is helpful in doing so.
In Chapter 9, Posie en tendue. Deleuze, Glissant and a Post-Postcolonial Aes-
thetics of the Earth, Birgit Kaiser discusses the work of the Caribbean writer Edouard
Glissant who in his later work has drawn inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari.
This chapter pursues the ways in which Glissant translates Deleuze and Guattaris
rhizomatic thought into what he calls relation-identity. The concern with relation-
identity might at first perhaps seem at odds with Deleuzian/Guattarian thinking,
but drawing on the rhizome Glissant endeavours to think identity as a process of
spatial-temporal weaving through expansion rather than filiation, and as an only pre-
liminarily stabilized pole within a network of relata brought about in the process of
relating and hence moves beyond the conceptual shortcomings and political pit-
falls of identity politics and a logic of representation. From this angle, Kaiser reads
Glissant as a post-postcolonial writer akin to Deleuze and Guattari, a writer whose
stress on the relational and processual emergence of identity is indeed critical of the
logics that underlie not only colonial but also national, postcolonial projects. Glis-
sant leaves national frames of analysis behind and, given the close echoes between
Glissant and Deleuze and Guattari, the chapter proposes to take Glissant as a case
in point to explore the connections of Deleuzian philosophy and the postcolonial
where and how Deleuzian thought comes to bear on the (post-)postcolonial issues
of identity or cultural specificity if we affirm a world swirling with multiplicity.
6 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
This moves us with Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari towards an aesthetics of the
earth and more complex understandings of identification and towards thinking and
practicing relation-identity and moral generosity.
Tina Rahimy discusses in Chapter 10, The Minor Philosopher: The Political-
Philosophical Relevance of Incomprehension, that what refugees and migrants, and
also victims of extreme violence such as rape, often experience is a form of pause in
their familiar forms of expression, an experience of stuttering and hesitation. This kind
of numbness, whether perceived as an excuse to exclude such victims from political
arena or as a moral instrument to show mercy, has often been looked upon as a form of
passivity. Rahimy appeals to another form of politics, in which pausing is not seen as a
negation of language but as the act that dynamically envisions the most characteristic
element of language. However, if hesitation and stuttering are part of the game, and the
rules change every time we speak, how can we communicate? Agamben, and Deleuze
and Guattari, suggest that in order to do so, we need to deterritorialize the structure
of our thought and experience language as a pure means, as a means as such. But what
is the politics of a communicability that is willing to speak while knowing that we
cannot communicate fully and clearly? How can we comprehend incomprehension?
By analysing the film Bagdad Caf, Rahimy demonstrates how it is to experiment as a
minor philosopher.
Chapter 11, Worse Luck, is dedicated to the problem of chance. Matthew Fuller
and Olga Goriunova suggest looking at the concept of luck as a cultural figure that
is a means of understanding and experiencing the tensions between different forms
of time, but more importantly as the operations of chance. Luck as well as fate are
forms of hypotheses. But they are also a means of explaining or experiencing the dif-
fering ontological loads, the variable exposures and ability to act upon a condition of
chance that people, cultures, ecologies, moments undergo. The game, in Deleuze and
Guattari,is to multiply the means of recognizing and experiencing the multiplicity of
ways by which things occur. As such, the stake of a metaphysics is to become adequate
to the world, and consequently, such grand formulations as chance, will, causation,
subconscious, history, are never enough and must themselves be recognized as rolls
of the dice with all their concomitant hauntings and lingerings or misses of chance
in which new deformations of chance may arise. Fuller and Goriunova conclude by
urging that in the present conjunction we are faced with the challenge of the means of
inventing chance, not taming it.
The final part of the book turns to the question of normativity and creation in art
and media. In Chapter 12, Concepts and Creation, Daniel Smith investigates the con-
cept of creation in philosophy and in art. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari
define philosophy, famously, as an activity that consists in forming, inventing and fab-
ricating the concepts. But this definition of philosophy implies a somewhat singular
analytic of the concept, to borrow Kants phrase. One of the problems it poses is the
fact that concepts, from a Deleuzian perspective, have no identity but only a becoming.
This chapter examines the nature of this problem, arguing that the aim of Deleuze ana-
lytic is to introduce the form of time into concepts in terms of what he calls continuous
variation or pure variability. The aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal,
but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).
Introduction 7
In Chapter 13, The Death Index, Felicity Colman looks at media images of the dead
body. The political manifestos of different nation states in the world today do not vary
a great deal. Acts of aggression and domains of aestheticism are force fed into collec-
tive subjects, ensuring that the work by the state-made-self continues. The situation
is amplified by the media regulations of specific nation-state controls over rituals and
habits, and becomes a component of the production of social and familial affective
controls that work to regulate the worker-bodies required for the nation, in and for
economic order to be maintained. However, one collective subject that appears regu-
larly on our media surfaces is the dead one. In militarized economies, a dead body is
still required to be productive, and the dead body exists as both an object for the terms
of dying and a highly subjectivized subject. Engaging with the ontological terms of the
refrain that Guattari used to describe the territorial aspect of a concrete machine (in
Molecular Revolution), later expanded with Deleuze (in A Thousand Plateaus), Colman
considers Guattaris concept of machinic subjectivation through the death of the sub-
ject. This chapter examines some of the public structures of the death of the subject as
arranged by national security institutions and the media by looking, for example, at the
processes given on the death of soldiers and civilians in the current war in Afghanistan
and Iraq or the deaths in custody of indigenous people.
Laura Marks takes in Chapter 14 plant life as the non-human norm. In Vegetable
Locomotion: A Deleuzian Ethics/Aesthetics of Traveling Plants, she asks if humans
might learn from our evolutionary heritage by observing the travels of plants and asks
this in light of the long history of traveling plants in art. Muybridge analysed animal
locomotion, but vegetable locomotion remains relatively little studied, as plants are
commonly considered not to locomote. This fixity promotes in plants a discerning
receptivity and a wily opportunism, both of which are themes in Bergson that inspired
some of Deleuzes work. Yet the movement of plants is also a significant theme on the
underside of Deleuze and Guattaris writings: not only the rhizome but also the foliated
scroll analysed by Riegl. Its just a weed, Deleuze remarked of the acanthus, but in art
and architecture, the vine-like form becomes a transformative force as it twines from
culture to culture. Further, we humans understand other creatures and plants because
we have more in common with them than we differ from them; Deleuze and Guattari
take up this argument from Bergson in Creative Evolution. But usually humans see, and
make, plants in terms of our immediate needs. Much of plant migration is the reactive
result of human agriculture, climate change and genetic engineering. How might we
expose ourselves to plant ways openly and creatively? Marks turns to contemporary art
in which plants are a living presence, as in the dancing trees and unpredictable mold
farms of Gordon Matta-Clark, for example, of inspiring vegetable locomotion.
In the final chapter Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface: Autonomy, Sensation
and Biopolitics, Stephen Zepke takes the interface as his starting point for reflecting
on issues of normativity. The digital interface is the realm where our contemporary
consciousness is being created. Not only is information the field of the emerging
practices of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism but also the production and
management of affects within the culture industry continues to be a realm of political
dispute. By looking at different biopolitical approaches towards the interface (excessive
parasitic acceptance by Pasquinelli, rejection by Bifo and post-modern embrace by
8 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Shaviro), Zepke points to Deleuze and Guattaris stubborn insistence upon the political
efficacy of the radical autonomy of art and the sensations that it creates. It is precisely
this insistence that makes art a kind of science fiction, inasmuch as science fiction can
be understood as the creation of an untimely future that resists the present.
After revisiting normativity with Deleuze in the various chapters of this book, one
can conclude that normativity has become dynamic and creative, transforming real-
ity always according to hidden intensities which are not limitless, but which, in going
beyond the human and organic organization of the world, present the ethical norm of
finding new ways of how we might inhabit the earth.
Part One
Normativity in Deleuzes
Philosophy
10
1
This means that the metaphysics of Deleuze aims at changing and not at describing or
founding the world in which we live. He wants to transform and experiment with the
way that we can possibly think about something. As a consequence, metaphysics for
Deleuze is primarily ethical as he describes in a late interview:
I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician. Bergson says that modern science hasnt
found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that
interests me. (Villani, 1999: 130, quoted in Smith, 2003b: 49)
If we cannot begin from any founding (or transcendent) term, then nothing
neither justice, nor democracy, nor law, nor humanity can be appealed to as a
ground for political argument. (2002: 89)
There is no given normative ground for political arguments; this normativity has to be
invented. It is this invention of new ground that makes it possible for a different way
of thinking that can open new forms of action and belief. Thinking is therefore not
only a matter of epistemology but an ethical concern with the possibility of thinking
differently through the invention of new fields of thinking. In this chapter, I will discuss
the role of normativity in Deleuzes thinking. I will argue that in order to understand
the role of normativity in Deleuzes thinking we should understand his thinking as a
science in special sense. The missing universal ground of normativity does not mean
that it is not a science it is, rather, a profoundly critical science in the sense that it, on
the one hand, creates new forms of problems and concepts in which we can understand
and transform the real and, on the other, criticizes common-sense assumptions in the
particular field of thinking. It is in this sense that Deleuzes metaphysical science is
normative.
Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory
of what there is. What we do has its principles; and being can only be grasped as the
object of a synthetic relation with the very principles of what we do. (1991a: 133)
In the first sentence, Deleuze argues that philosophy is a theory of what we are doing,
an ethics (see also Fuglsang, 2007: 79; Morss, 2000: 188). Ethics is something other than
morality since it is not a given theory of practice but is constituted as a theory of prac-
tice (see also Stankovic, 2008: 5). From this it follows that it is practical thinking itself
that should be ethical (Goodchild, 1997: 39). Hence, ethics in Deleuzes thinking is
always embedded in an ethos as something that is done and carried out and thus can-
not be reduced to represented moral codes (Goodchild, 1997: 39). But why can being
only be grasped in relation to what we are doing and not in relation to what there is?
In other words, why must ontology be ethical?
Thinking and Normativity inDeleuzesPhilosophy 13
Deleuze rejects the Kantian establishment of a ground for what there is in terms of
the a priori concepts necessity and universality (1995: 11). The reason for this is that
they are given outside of experience. A priori concepts are connected to sensibility
by necessity (McMahon, 2004: 13). In this sense, Deleuzes philosophy is groundless,
because the effect of experience [is] producing the structure of experience (Bryant,
2008: 205). Necessity can therefore not be founded on the ground of a priori concepts
that exist independently of experience; there is nothing outside of experience. However,
this does not lead Deleuze to suggest a philosophical perspective of anything goes far
from it. Instead, Deleuze proposes that necessity and chance have to be established as
immanent conditions of what we do: being can only be grasped as the object of a syn-
thetic relation with the very principles of what we do (Deleuze, 1991a: 133).
There is no reason or being beyond being that regulates being (Bryant, 2008: 206).
Consequently, the principles of what we do have to be found within the praxis itself.
These normative principles are not given as we just have argued but have to be consti-
tuted inside the given, which means that the object of doing is constituted and deter-
mined inside doing. For Deleuze, normativity is concerned with the determination
of the critical (the very principles of what we do). We should therefore understand
critique in a twofold way: a literary sense as criticism and in a philosophical sense, that
is, critique as the determination of the transcendental elements (determinable forms,
problems and modes of individuation) that constitute the conditions of real experi-
ence (Deleuze, 1991b: 23; see also Smith, 1998: xxiv). Critique is a necessary element
in thinking and critique does not constitute being as such but the ethical principle on
which being is given as object. In this sense, it establishes and conditions the synthetic
relation between objects of thinking and ethical principles (Deleuze, 1991a: 133).
This synthetic relation is not the given de facto but is that by which the given is given
(Deleuze, 1994: 140). The synthetic relation is not a sensible being but the being of the
sensible (Deleuze, 1994: 140). In other words, the synthetic relation is the transcen-
dental, which for Deleuze is that by which something is given (Deleuze, 1994: 140).
One of Deleuzes favourite philosophers, the medieval thinker Duns Scotus, argues
that metaphysics is the transcending science, because it is concerned with the trans
cendentals (Scotus, 1987: 2; see also King, 2003: 15). It is exactly in this sense that we
can say that Deleuzes philosophy is a science: a metaphysical science of the transcen-
dentals that is concerned with what is beyond the science of human nature (Scotus,
1987: 2). It is a science of the transcendentals that begins with Bergsons call for phi-
losophy to go beyond the human state (2002: 277).
Deleuze names this science transcendental empiricism (see Baugh, 1992; 1993; Bell,
2005; Bryant, 2008; Hayden, 1995; 1998; Lapoujade, 2000; Lash, 2007). It differs from
the traditional concept of empiricism on six points. First, knowledge is not derived
from experience or from senses but from empirical ideas (Deleuze, 1991a: 107; see also
Bell, 2005: 96; Buchanan, 1999). Second, the determination is not purely subjective
but is rather a matter of the expression of being (Deleuze, 1997: 194). There is nothing
human or anthropological to knowledge. Third, it is therefore a matter of the ontol-
ogy of sense rather than the epistemology of sense, because it is not a human subject
that experiences how the given is given; this is expressed by being. Fourth, difference
is internal to being in itself and not external to being, which means that it is not a
14 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
subject who thinks but being who thinks itself (Deleuze, 1997: 1924). It is therefore
more accurate to say that it thinks than I think (Bryant, 2008: 12). Fifth, ontologi-
cally speaking, knowledge is a matter that distinguishes between absolute knowledge
(beings knowledge of itself) and empirical knowledge (reflection of being in man),
which means that absolute knowledge distinguishes itself only by also negating the
knowledge of indifferent essence (Deleuze, 1997: 194). It is important to bear in mind
that this is a distinction between absolute being and empirical man (and not historical
man) (Deleuze, 1997: 194). Sixth, there are no distinctions between being and thought
when ontology is seen as a matter of sense and not essence: Being thinks itself and
reflects itself in man (Deleuze, 1997: 195). Transcendental empiricism is concerned
with what is beyond the humanism and anthropomorphism of social science (see also
Colebrook, 2004), because it does not refer to an image of man but to an image of
thought. This is important, because it implies that it is not man who thinks but thought
that is thinking in the forms of knowledge constituted by man. This means that the
transcendental condition should not be sought in the fully constituted individual
(Deleuze, 1994: 38) but rather in the problematic forms of knowledge in which the
individual is constituted. The individual, on this view, is not constituted by the human
condition, but something else. From a Deleuzian perspective the human is not a limit
that is given to thought. Indeed, what is important here is not what the given is but
the transcendental constitution of thinking, which is that by which the given is given
(Deleuze, 1994: 140; see also Bryant, 2008).
address knowledge from the distinction between subject and object (or thought and
being) as the empirical given and the given subject.
The constitution of the subject should not be thought of as a mental state. It is
not the subject that is the fact of knowledge. Hence it is not the active already consti-
tuted subject of psychology that constitutes the world within which the subject lives
(Hallward, 2006: 120). Knowledge can neither be conditioned on the human conscious-
ness, the reflectivity of the subject, nor in the object itself but must be conditioned in
unconditioned thought. The question is not to explain the truth about recognition,
because as Deleuze explains, nothing in the mind transcends human nature, because
it is human nature that, in its principles, transcends the mind ... (Deleuze, 1991a:
24). This means that the mind is not active (organizing and connecting ideas) but is
transcended by the ideas that are connected in the mind. The mind is passive. The
mind does not grasp knowledge. Everything happens in the mind. Hence, we cannot
understand empirical knowledge as an experience of something because experience
itself must be understood as a principle (Deleuze, 1991a: 108). It is from this princi-
ples constitution of the subject inside the given that knowledge of the produced object
is derived.
From a Deleuzian perspective what is studied does not exist outside of its crea-
tion, which implies that what is explained is always at the same time in the process of
beingcreated. In other words, how is X constituted inside the given? The question is
not what is X? because knowledge is not something to be found in the transcendent
idea but to be created immanently within the real. Knowledge is always a question of
what is it for me? (Deleuze, 2005: 77). This means that we instead should ask who
and which one? (Deleuze, 2004: 946). These questions mean what is expressed about
being in the constitution of me? Knowledge is not based on abstract universals in
which we seek truth; rather, the foundation of knowledge is subjective in the way that
conditions of knowledge are created in the subjects constitution inside the given. In
this sense, the subject is rather an impersonal becoming. The subject does not become
a person. The subject is a becoming of being. It is being which is expressed in the sub-
ject in the becoming. It is being in itself that becomes being in something other than
itself. Becoming in a Deleuzian sense does not mean the realization of the individual
subject but means that being in itself is constituted inside something else, for example,
a subject. The immanent principles of creation are expressed in the constitution of the
being in itself in something else, which means that they always have to be explained
in their transcendental deployment, specifically, how the principles of creation can be
located as immanent forces within a thing, a human subject.
If we take the statement as our point of departure, we cannot find the object of thinking
in either seeing or speaking, that is, to something purely empirical or transcendental.
On the one hand, it is not possible to base knowledge on certain ground either in the
ideas, language and logic of signification or base it in the empirical realm. Neither is it
possible to place knowledge beyond empirical and theoretical ideas as Deleuze writes
about in his critique of the vulgar sense of phenomenology in the form of intentional-
ity (1999: 1089).
To overcome this metaphysical gap between seeing and speaking, Deleuze argues
that knowledge must be a result of setting problems (Kerslake, 2004: 501). However,
Deleuzes understanding of problems differs from Kants; as Deleuze explains, Kant
still defines the truth of a problem in terms of the possibility of its finding a solution:
this time it is a question of a transcendental form of possibility ... (1994: 161). The
Kantian method of transcendental reflection, namely, that only reason can judge reason,
is replaced by the Deleuzian method of transcendental problematization, implying that
ideas become problematic in the sense that regulative ideas are different in kind from
concepts (Kerslake, 2002). It is exactly from this notion of problematic ideas in Kant
that Deleuze takes his point of departure in developing a transcendental empiricism in
opposition to Kants transcendental idealism (Bogue, 1989). The difference between
the two forms of transcendental thought is that transcendental idealism seeks to find
the formal transcendental conditions of possible experience in the identity of catego-
ries, whereas transcendental empiricism aims at creating the genetic conditions of real
experience in the differentiation of the idea (Lord, 2008: 1; see also Williams, 2005: 30).
Knowledge is not about an essence but about a produced object and the transcend-
ing process in which it is produced. This implies that knowledge is derived from the
production of an effect. The object of knowledge is not the sensible that is given to the
human subject.
It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that
by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible.
(Deleuze, 1994: 140)
object of perception. It is an object for thinking (Deleuze, 1994: 140). For Deleuze, this
object is an idea but in a different way than for Kant. Deleuze writes:
An idea ... is neither one nor multiple, but a multiplicity constituted of differ-
ential elements, differential relations between those elements, and singularities
corresponding to those relations. These three dimensions, elements, relations and
singularities, constitute the three aspects of multiple reasons: determinability or
the principle of quantitability, reciprocal determination or the principle of qualita-
bility, and complete determination or the principle of potentiality. There is there-
fore an empiricism of the Idea. (1994: 278)
For Deleuze, the Idea is not the Kantian idea, which is a concept which itself goes
beyond the possibility of experience and which has its source in reason (Deleuze, 1995:
8). Deleuze criticizes the Kantian categories, as possible conditions of possible experi-
ence, for either being too general or too large for the real (1994: 68). For Deleuze, the
conditions of a real experience are not larger than what they are conditioning (1994:
68). The reason for this is that the conditions of a real experience are not mediated by
the identity of categories but by the immediate element of disparity (Deleuze, 1994:
69). The element of disparity is difference of difference. This element is an immanent
principle both of the transcendental and the genetic constitution of real experience.
The criterion for philosophical activity is not representational accuracy of how the
world really is as a closed system independent of experience but, given a theory
of immanence, the success of the construction of concepts designed to respond to
specific problems and real, particular conditions of existence. Thus for Deleuze the
goal of an empiricist philosophy is practical: to make a positive difference in life, to
invent, create, and experiment. (1998: 7980)
For Deleuze, philosophy should not aim for truth by representing or discovering a hid-
den world. It should rather denaturalize the general imperatives for how we represent
and understand the given in order to make room to raise problems in new, positive
18 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
ways. Truth lies in the effort of creating new forms of problems rather than finding the
first principle, or as Deleuze and Guattari put it, a concept always has the truth that
falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation (2003: 27).
The act of creation is to not only invent new concepts but also positively destruct
problems in an effort to make it possible to state new forms of problems. So, creation
is much more than inventing new solutions. It also involves creating new problems.
This focus on problems is not to say that we should not pay attention to solutions. It
is simply to say that we need to address problems first because the problem always
has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated (i.e. the condi-
tions under which it is determined as a problem) (Deleuze, 1991b: 16). If solutions, in
this sense, are inseparable from problems, then we cannot address solutions, we need
to employ the constitutive power of problems to be able to know (Deleuze, 1991b:
16). We have to develop concepts to apprehend something that does not yet exist
but is about to come into existence. This is also why Spoelstra (2007: 25) says that
the method of Deleuzian philosophy is not discovery but experimentation. It is not
concerned about finding solutions but about creating problems in which something
new can be created.
It is knowledge that is nothing more than an empirical figure, a simple result which
continually falls back into experience; whereas learning is the true transcendental
structure ... . (Deleuze, 1994: 166)
From a Deleuzian perspective, learning is a matter of not basing thinking on the human
experience beyond the human condition. However, it is important that this means that
we should think beyond the condition and not the human. Thus, Deleuze is interested
in going beyond the human condition but not in leaving the human behind (Ansell
Pearson, 2007: 201). It is therefore a matter of expanding the possible experience of
something by not basing this on the state of being human that is Deleuzes idea.
Learning is the appropriate name for the subjective acts carried out when one is
confronted with the objectivity of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge designates
only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling process.
(1994: 164)
Learning is not mediated by reason but by an ethical ethos about creation of possi-
bilities of life. If we cannot found knowledge on reason what is then the principle of
Thinking and Normativity inDeleuzesPhilosophy 19
knowledge? For Deleuze, the basic question of a philosophical analysis is what makes
its belief legitimate.
Hence, knowledge is not about seeking truth but rather about asking why the prob-
lem that is raised is necessary (see also Penner, 2003: 55). In this sense Deleuzes criti-
cism of Kant is profoundly Nietzschean (see, e.g. Deleuze, 2005: 934). This implies a
different form of philosophical analysis, as Nietzsche writes ... it is high time to replace
the Kantian question how are synthetic judgments a priori possible? (Kant, 1990:
B19) with another question why is belief in such judgments necessary? (Nietzsche,
1972: 24). We need to believe to make a priori judgements possible but do we want
to believe in these judgements? For Nietzsche, Kant not only poses the wrong problem
but also gives the wrong answer that synthetic judgements a priori are possible because
of the court of reason. Critique has to establish a court of reason based on pure reason,
which should make it possible to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate deployment of
the faculties (Tampio, 2004: 16). Hence, the problem with the Kantian question is that
it focuses on justifying our prior idea rather than justifying why we should believe in
this judgement. The point of critique differs for Kant and Deleuze in the sense that for
Kant it is justification of reason while for Deleuze it is another sensibility of the real
the being of the sensible (Deleuze, 2005: 94). For Deleuze, the justification of thought
as a principle of knowledge is not something outside of thought itself but is an ethics in
which thought can be creative. In this sense, the foundation of Deleuzes thinking will
always be normativity or ethics.
What is philosophy today ... if it is not the critical work that thought brings to
bear on itself? In what does it consists, if not in the endeavour to know how and to
what extent it is possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already
known? (Foucault, 1985: 89)
We might think that it is more valuable to think of philosophy like this. But why is
it necessarily better to think differently than legitimizing what one already knows?
Ibelieve that it is impossible to answer the question of why it is better from a Deleuzian
perspective; rather, I think that we should discuss how it is better. That is, we should
base our judgement not on moral principles but on principles of affirmation or crea-
tion. Maybe we should understand this in the sense that Deleuze suggests in a lecture
on Spinoza:
The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence
a return to this sort of cry of Spinozas: what can a body do? We never know in
advance what a body can do. We never know how were organized and how the
modes of existence are enveloped in somebody. (1980: 3; see also 1988: 1718;
Spinoza, 2003 [Ethics, III, 2, scholium])
20 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
We can invoke neither accuracy nor precision as it is not a matter of representing a given
empirical object. If thought cannot orient its practical activities towards something given
outside itself, it necessarily becomes a self-grounding practice. It is not possible to justify
this practice by reference to any external means or foundations. Hence, critique cannot
be based upon a transcendent principle, but it must be based on an immanent principle.
For Deleuze, this immanent principle is an ethical principle of creation or expression.
This principle should always be discovered by how it is expressed or given expression
within the individual. In this sense, it is more a proposition than a judgement.
The ethical is so to speak expressed in the individuation of the individual (i.e. how
the individual is given in the expression of the actual given), which imply that it is both
an ontological and ethical principle that can only be found within the constitution
of the individual composite. It is an individuating difference or that by which each
individual becomes distinct from all others. Hereby, the individual gives expression to
a certain mode of existence in which the ethical principle has to be found. We could
therefore, following Nick Nesbitt (2005), call it the ethics of internal difference. In this
sense it is not an ethics that is based on the individual but rather one that is constituted
by individuation. This means that ethics is not an external form that is moulded onto
matter or subjects; it is not a transcendent form but a determinable mode in the form
of an internal Difference which establishes an a priori relation between thought and
being (Bryant, 2003: 10). As a consequence, this ethical principle is not transcendent
but, precisely, transcendental; it has to be found in the process of the individual consti-
tution, that is, in individuation.
However, it is important that we do not define the transcendental as conscious-
ness (Agamben, 1999: 225), because immanence is not immanent to consciousness.
It is rather the reverse that is the case; consciousness is a transcendental field, which is
why we should think of the conscious as impersonal and pre-individual. Conscious-
ness does not have the form of a transcendental subject (the primordial form of I) as
is the case with Kant. This is why Deleuze (following Nietzsche) prefers to talk about
the non-person: he, one, He speaks or One speaks (Deleuze, 1999: 7). So when
Nietzsche speaks about bad consciousness, this should not be understood in a psycho-
logical sense; it does not belong to an individual or to someone in particular. Nietzsche
expressed it this way:
Someone or other must be to blame that I feel ill this kind of conclusion is
peculiar to all sick people, and in fact becomes more insistent, the more they
remain in ignorance of the true reason, the physiological reason. (2007: 934)
We could put it is this way: I do not have a bad consciousness, it is bad consciousness
that has me. Bad consciousness is a mode of existence that can be expressed in and
not by the individual. In this sense we should not understand bad consciousness as a
moral code installed in the human subject; rather, we should see this as an expression
of a certain form of ethics.
In relation to Spinoza (and Nietzsche) Deleuze writes that ethics is
s ystem of Judgement. But Ethics overthrows the system of judgement. The opposi-
tion of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of
existence (good-bad). (1988: 23)
The ethical principle is immanent to the modes of existence; it does not exist outside
of its expression within these. It is correct that Deleuze is for immanence (see, e.g.
2001), but what I believe is at least as important to recognize is that immanence is
not a transcendent principle. Instead immanence constitutes a transcendental field.
Hence we have to make a distinction between immanence in itself (pure immanence)
and the expression of immanence in something else (transcendental field). However,
it is important to notice that this expression of immanence in something else does
not imply that it is expressed in the human subject or consciousness. Immanence is
expressed in itself as immanence. We could hereby say that univocality is the opera-
tive function of immanence; the function that expresses immanence in something else
than itself which is the transcendental field.
For me, then, the important aspect of Deleuzes ethical thinking is that it is univocal
and not only for immanence as such. That being is univocal means that it is said in
one and the same sense of everything about which it is said (Deleuze, 1990: 179; see
also Deleuze, 1994: 35). It is univocal because what is expressed and who is express-
ing is expressed in a single voice (expression). There is no opposition between the
expressed and the expression; they are enveloped and folded into each other. What
is expressed (ethical principle) is to be found within the expressed (individuation),
and who is expressing it (type) can be determined by referring what is expressed to
the expression. Thinking is therefore not based on a transcendent principle but on an
immanent principle that transcends the constitution of modes of existence. Deleuze
writes that
Law is always the transcendent instance that determines the opposition of values
(Good-Evil), but knowledge is always the immanent power that determines the
qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad). (1988: 245)
If knowledge is not simply something there is but is something that has to be created,
then the ethical question is not what something ought to be but what it might be. By
what right can I claim that the philosophical perspective on something is any bet-
ter than contemporary scientific perspectives? We can state that knowledge is based
neither on given facts nor on rights. It is instead based on principles of creation, that
is, in which problems might knowledge be experienced. However, the values of crea-
tions according to which we can judge the constitution of problems are not given. This
means that the problem of knowledge cannot be judged by given moral values. Instead
these constitutive values are themselves subject to judgement. Ethics is not a given
state of affairs but a preferred state of affairs against which existing states of affairs can
be judged (McMahon, 2004: 138). This means that ethics is something that has to be
invented or created. Thus, it is not possible to speak about a given norm or rule but a
normative that can come into existence and in what sense this should be constituted,
that is, which problem should it be based upon (see also Smith, 2009: 66). This implies
that the ethical foundation of thinking always involves something new: it has to be
22 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
reinvented constantly because it does not exist in itself. It is not a given transcendent
norm that exists independently of its deployment. We could talk about the ethical as a
constitutive principle in which the problem of knowledge is conditioned. The ethical
foundation transcends the problem when the subject is constituted inside the given.
The constitutive principle of ethics is not an object of science but a guide for scientific
activity (McMahon, 2004: 86). From a Deleuzian perspective we cannot state the ethi-
cal as a factual right independent of its empirical deployment, as Kant does with the
categorical imperative, but must rather state by the ethical foundation by which we can
say that this particular constitutive principle or value is the best one.
A Deleuzian inspired social science is profoundly ethical as it is not based on facts
or rights. Rather, it is interested in the possible becoming of life rather than the nature
of human subjects. Hence, we are not interested in the actual essence of something
but rather want to create another way of thinking about something, which makes it
possible to have a different praxis. As Hayden writes for Deleuze, it is never enough
to ask what thought is since the question is always that of what thought becomes
(1998: 7). The implication of this is that normative foundation is only expressed in the
way that problems are actually constituted by human subjects. Hence, it can only be
traced in the actions, beliefs and aspirations of human subjects. From a Nietzschean
perspective, we could talk about the normative as the creation of values or the value
of values. Values are not judged by a principle according to which we can find the
right problem. Rather, values are transcendental principles that are evaluated by each
other. The positive ethical task of philosophy, then, is to create concepts in which an
immanent transcendental principle of thinking can be deployed in the evaluation of
the problem of knowledge.
References
Agamben, G. (1999), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (translated by D. Heller-
Roazen). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Alliez, E. (2004), The Signature of the World, or What is Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy?
(translated by E. R. Albert and A. Toscano). London: Continuum.
Baugh, B. (1992), Transcendental empiricism: Deleuzes response to Hegel, Man and
World, 25, 13348.
.(1993), Deleuze and empiricism, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 24,
(1), 1531.
Bell, M. (2005), Relations and reversals: Deleuze, Hume and Kant, in A. Rehberg and
R.Jones (eds), The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kants Philosophy. Melbourne:
Paul& Co Pub Consortium.
Bogue, R. (1989), Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.
Bryant, L. R. (2003), Immanence and the fractured cogito: Deleuzes grounding of the
transcendental field. Paper presented at the 2003 Midsouth Philosophy Conference.
.(2008), Difference and Givenness: Deleuze Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology
of Immanence. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Buchanan, I. (1999), Introduction, in I. Buchanan (ed.), A Deleuzian Century?. Duke:
Duke University Press.
Thinking and Normativity inDeleuzesPhilosophy 23
Michael Wheelers Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step was an impor-
tant contribution to what we can call 4EA cognition: embodied, embedded, enactive,
extended, affective (Wheeler, 2005; other leading works in this field include No, 2004;
Gallagher, 2005 and Thompson, 2007). The philosophical resource for Wheelers next
step is Heidegger. I propose here to use Deleuze to take another next step in the 4EA
approach.1 In doing so, I will use Deleuzes essay on Lucretius in Logic of Sense as a
lead (Deleuze, 1990). In his Lucretius essay, Deleuze writes about naturalism as demys-
tification. The 4EA schools also fight against mystification; specifically, they fight the
myths of the subject.
A few definitions will help us set the stage. For the standard approaches in cog-
nitive science, computationalism and connectionism, brains, like computers, are
physical symbol systems and minds are the software run on those computers (Varela,
Thompson and Rosch, 1991 provide a clear introduction). The difference is in the
respective computer architectures. Computationalism sees cognition as rule-bound
manipulation of discrete symbols in a serial or von Neumann architecture, which
passes through a central processing unit (CPU). Connectionism, the second standard
approach, is another computer metaphor, but it has a different, allegedly more biologi-
cally realistic architecture: parallel distributed processing. In connectionisms so-called
neural nets, cognition is the change in network properties, that is, the strength and
number of connections.
We can begin by noting that the 4EA thinkers have already fought several myths of
the subject: that it is self-identical, representationalist, isolated and spiritualist.
First, within the brain, they, like connectionism, break with computationalisms
serial computer metaphor. They dismiss the central point, the CPU, by employing
dynamical systems theory to study neurodynamical processes as integration or resolu-
tion of distributed-differential neural systems. Thus, resonating with Deleuzes desire
to think identities as emergent from fields of differences, they have fought the myth of
the self-identical subject.
26 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Second, having dismissed the CPU, like connectionism, they go another step and
break with the representationalism that binds connectionism and its computationalist
rival. In other words, they fight the view that cognition is the middle slice in what Susan
Hurley called the classical sandwich model of the mind: sensory input processing
of representations motor output (Hurley 1998, 401). So the 4EA schools accord with
Deleuze in fighting the myth of the representationalist subject.
Third, these schools draw the consequences of non-representationalism by dis-
placing cognition from the isolated brain and putting it in distributed systems of
brain body world. So, in accord with Deleuzes notions of haecceity and assemblage
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), they fight the myth of the isolated or world-transcendent
subject.
Fourth, they put the distributed brain-body-world systems firmly in nature, uphold-
ing a mind in life thesis, whereby cognition is biologically grounded (Thompson,
2007). They are thus in accord with Deleuzes anti-humanism, whereby humans do
not form a completely separate case, a kingdom within the kingdom, as Spinoza put it.
They thus fight against the myth of the non-natural or spiritual subject.
Altogether, then, the 4EA schools resonate with Deleuze in seeing cognition as
immanent to extended-distributed-differential bio-environmental systems in which
real experience (Deleuze 1994; Voss 2011; Lord 2011) is the non-representational
direction of action through the integration or resolution of differential fields (Deleuze
1994, 211). They thus are naturalist in fighting the myths of the self-identical, represen-
tationalist, isolated and spiritualist subject.
Deleuze can help the 4EA thinkers take another next step in three further demysti-
fications, fighting three other and even more tenacious myths of the subject.
First, the concept of the virtual can help them think the mode of being of
distributed-differential systems, continuing and sharpening their fight against myth of
the actual, given, subject.
Second, the political orientation of Deleuze and Guattari can help us fight two myths
that still haunt the 4EA schools: (1) that the object of analysis is an abstract subject,
the subject, that even though embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective
is still unmarked by political categories such as race and gender; (2) that culture serves
as a reservoir of cognitive resources for individual problem solving. A Deleuzean
approach helps here by thematizing multiple subjectification practices; in other words,
we have to see subjectification practices as intensive individuation processes from a
virtual social field.
Third, the Deleuzean notion of affect can help us fight the myth of the rational-
calculating subject.
fall into a particular basin of attraction from the attractor layout proposed by system
dynamics.
We can relate this notion of neurodynamics as the integration of a differential field
to the passage in Difference and Repetition in which Deleuze refers to Leibnizs notion
that the Idea of the sea is a system of differential relations and singularities (Deleuze,
1994: 1645). Thus, he says Leibniz helps us think conscious perception as emergent
from a differential field of tiny unconscious perceptions: the micro-sounds of the
waves coalescing into the murmur of the ocean. Furthermore, learning to swim is then
conjugating distinctive points of our bodies with singularities of the Idea of the sea in
order to form a problematic field, a distributed-differential system of brain, body and
environment. And any one exercise of swimming is a resolution of that differential
field, an individuation. Another philosophical reference would take us to Or Bergsons
account of memory in Matter and Memory (Bergson, 1991). Current neurology holds
that memory also occurs through the formation of RCAs, which means that Bergson
is correct that the brain does not store memories (as actual wave patterns). Rather the
brain possesses the (virtual) potential to generate (actual) wave patterns that produce
memory effects. We thus have a thorough materialism, which, as long as it includes
a notion of virtual as potential for generating actual patterns, can avoid Bergsons
dualist invocation of spirit. We can even see the integration of differential fields on a
longer-term temporal scale and a higher organizational scale, that of the subject. We
can say that adult fixed personality structures are actual (sometimes these are Oedi-
pal), socialization practices that are intensive processes or impersonal individuations
that produce personality (in conjunction with the endogenous potentials of the child
subjected to the practices), and the Idea of society is a virtual differential field (i.e. the
set of relations of practices) with pre-individual singularities as turning points for the
production of one society or another.
And the practices that produce these capacities can be analysed with political catego-
ries. Following Deleuzes biopolitical orientation, we can call the socially embedded
person the body politic.
So, for example, access to training in affective and cognitive coping skills, and hence
the development of those skills, is differentially distributed with regard to the catego-
ries of masculine and feminine. Feminized and masculinized bodies politic have dif-
ferent spheres of competence: a flat tire can appear as a mildly irritating challenge or
as an insurmountable problem; a subway entrance as the enticing gateway to the city
or as an anxiety-producing danger. Iris Marion Youngs Throwing like a Girl (Young,
2005) is the classic piece in discussing the restricted body competence of the feminized
body-subject. Youngs critique is aimed at Merleau-Ponty, in which the assured com-
petence of the presumably neutral or non-gendered body subject hides a masculinist
presupposition (see also Butler, 1989).
But this is still too simple. It does no good to replace a single abstract subject, the
body politic, with two abstractions, the feminized and the masculinized body poli-
tic. We need to think in terms of a range of gendering practices that are distributed
in a society at various sites (family, school, church, media, playground, sports field
and so on) with variable goals, intensities, and efficacies. These multiply situated gen-
dering practices resonate or clash with each other and with myriad other socializing
practices (racializing, classing, religionizing, nationalizing, neighborhoodizing
[thats the way we roll] and so on). In other words, we have to think a complex virtual
field ofthesedifferential practices, a complex phase space for the production of bod-
ies politic, with shifting attractor layouts as the subjectification practices intensive
morphogenetic or individuating processes, to use Deleuzes terminology clash or
resonate with each other.
But even this is still too simple, as these gendering practices also enter into complex
feedback relations with the singular body makeup of the people involved; these cor-
poreal constitutions are themselves regionalized slices of the virtual, modelled with a
phase space of what that body can do, its own habitual yet variable patterns of attractor
layouts. These complex dynamics cannot be analysed into a relation of independent
and dependent variables, no matter how powerful the regression analysis one attempts
in order to isolate their effects. There is no one magic element that enables us to find
the key to gender or other politically important categories.
Lacking a population perspective on the development of affective cognition capaci-
ties, the abstraction of the embodied-embedded school impoverishes its notion of
cultural scaffolding (Clark, 2003) by relegating the cultural to a storehouse of heuris-
tic aids for an abstract problem-solver who just happens to be endowed with certain
affective cognition capacities qua the ability to interact successfully with the people
and cultural resources to which it just happens to have access. But not every subjecti-
fication practice is empowering! It is not just that sometimes you are denied access to
an empowering practice. Some cultural practices positively harm individuals, instill-
ing affective-cognitive traits that help keep them in subservient positions through an
internalization of negative self-image and so on. This is not to discount raw coer-
cion, but to call attention to its relative lack of importance in most social situations. As
Deleuze and Guattari say, following Spinoza: the wonder is that men will fight for their
slavery! (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 29).
Deleuze and Brain, Body and Affect in Contemporary CognitiveScience 31
The real bio-cognitive or mind in life question has to be the level of selection. Lets
say that a certain distribution of capacity X holds in population Y. Why do we think
we have had individual-level selection for reproduction of that trait, that is, that each
trait is adaptive for each subject? With group selection (selection for sets of subjectiv-
izing practices that reliably yield a certain distribution of traits) then traits might be
passed on that may harm some individuals but benefit the stability of the group in
creating a dominant class who benefit from the disabling effects of those traits on the
subordinate class.
Political affect
For our third point, we need to examine the connection between the use of affect in
affective neuroscience and in Deleuze.
First, a negative distinction: although affect is felt, it is not equal to subjective
feeling. Rather, it can often precisely be de-subjectifying or de-personalizing (i.e.
affect can be the move from the actual to the impersonal intensive). Just as for
Deleuze and Guattari, pleasure is the subjective appropriation of joy, subjective feel-
ing is the appropriation of physiological-emotional changes of the body, the recog-
nition that this is me feeling this way (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 156). Deleuzes
and Guattaris point about affects extension beyond subjective feeling dovetails with
extreme cases of rage and panic as triggering an evacuation of the subject as auto-
matic responses take over; drastic episodes of rage and fear are de-subjectivizing
(Protevi, 2009). Thus, the agent of an action undertaken in a rage or panic state is the
embodied affect program acting independently of the subject. Here, we see affect
freed from subjective feeling. There can be no complaints about eliminating the first
person perspective in studying these episodes of political affect, because there is no
first person operative in these cases. Agency and subjectivity are split; affect extends
beyond feeling; the body does something, is the agent for an action, in the absence
of a subject. This affect and body agency beyond the subject can be key in concrete
problem of state violence. If political sovereignty is displayed in the monopoly of
legitimate violence, then the forces of order have to be able to act. But this is less easy
than it sounds. So rages and reflexes and quick reactions are (always partial) solu-
tions of this problem.
Second, we have to appreciate the eco-social embeddedness of affect. Affect indi-
cates that living bodies do not negotiate their worlds solely or even for the most
part by representing the features of the world to themselves but by feeling what they
can and cannot do in a particular situation. Deleuze and Guattari follow Spinoza,
defining affect as a bodys ability to act and to be acted upon, what it can do and what
it can undergo (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 2567). Affect has two registers. First, it
is being affected, that is, undergoing the somatic change caused by encounter with an
object; this aspect of affect can also be called affection as the composition or mixture
of bodies, or more precisely the change produced in the affected body by the actionof
the affecting body in an encounter. Second, affect is the felt change in power of the
body, the increase or decrease in perfection, felt as sadness or joy. There are multiple
possibilities here. The encounter can (1) enhance the power of one of the bodies and
32 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
decrease that of the other (in eating or in enslavement), or it can (2) decrease both (in a
mutually destructive encounter), or it can (3) increase both (in a mutually empowering
encounter, what Deleuze and Guattari call a consistent assemblage).
The primary contact with another being in the world is a feeling of what the
encounter of the two bodies would be like; what the assemblage to be formed would
be like. We can advance the hypothesis that the neural mechanism for this felt imagi-
nal encounter is what Damasio calls the as-if loop producing a somatic marker
(Damasio, 1984; 1994). As you move into an assemblage, you are de-personalized or
de-territorialized: you form new habits. Now in this de-personalization you have to
maintain homeostatic viability constraints, but thats only the biological versus the
political organism: two very inadequate terms, as Deleuzes and Guattaris whole point
is that concrete real experience is biopolitical. Affect is the feeling for this variation; it
is de-personalizing intensity as opening up access to the virtual, to the differential field,
Idea or multiplicity of the situation. As Brian Massumi puts it: Affect is the virtual as
point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly (Massumi, 2002: 35).
It is the feeling of change in the relation of bodies entering a new assemblage (youre
always in an assemblage, that is, you are always a haecceity) and the feeling of how the
present feeling might vary in relation to what might happen next in a variety of futures.
Affect then is a resolution of a complex differential field, relating changes in the rela-
tions among changing bodies.
For Deleuze and Guattari, affect is inherently political: bodies are part of an eco-
social matrix of other bodies, affecting them and being affected by them; affect is part
of the basic constitution of bodies politic (Protevi, 2009; 2010). Here, we need the
distinction between pouvoir and puissance. We will have to exaggerate differences for
clarity and need to remember that everyday French usage does not draw such clear dis-
tinctions. Nonetheless, we can say that pouvoir is transcendent power: it comes from
above. It is hylomorphic, imposing form on the chaotic or passive material of the mob.
In its most extreme manifestation, it is fascistic: it is expressed not simply as the desire
to rule but more insidiously as the longing for the strong leader to rescue us from the
chaos into which our bodies politic have descended. Puissance, on the other hand, is
immanent self-organization. It is the power of direct democracy, of people working
together to generate the structures of their social life. The difference between pouvoir
and puissance allows us to nuance the notion of joyous and sad affect with the notions
of active and passive power.
Consider the paradigm case of fascist joy. The Nazis at the Nuremberg rallies were
filled with joyous affect, but this joy of being swept up into an emergent body politic
was passive. The Nazis were stratified; their joy was triggered by the presence of a
transcendent figure manipulating symbols flags and faces and by the imposition of
a rhythm or a forced entrainment marches and salutes and songs. Upon leaving the
rally, they had no autonomous power (puissance) to make mutually empowering con-
nections. In fact, they could only feel sad at being isolated, removed from the thrilling
presence of the leader. They had become members of a society of the spectacle, to use
Guy Debords term: their relations with others were mediated by the third term of the
spectacle the others had attended (the in-group) or had not attended (the out-group)
(Debord, 2000).
Deleuze and Brain, Body and Affect in Contemporary CognitiveScience 33
Political affect then includes an ethical standard: does the encounter produce active
joyous affect? Does it increase the puissance of the bodies, that is, does it enable them to
form new and mutually empowering encounters outside the original encounter?
Conclusion
How can we put the concept of the virtual together with that of a population of subjects
and that of affect together in the context of Deleuze and cognitive science? We can
begin with a Deleuzean reading of Alva Nos notion of perceptual content as virtual
(No, 2004: 21517). This means that concrete perception happens as the resolution of
a differential field, an Idea or multiplicity. The differential elements are movement and
perceptual presence or appearance; the differential relations are those between these
two elements; and the singularities thrown out in those relations as thresholds where
qualitative perceptual change occurs (e.g. move too close to a pointillist painting and
all you see are colour dots, no longer forms) (Smith, 1996).
I propose using our Deleuzean take on Nos account as a model of political affec-
tive cognition as the perception of social affordances. When we make sense of a situ-
ation, we determine the potentials in this encounter for making assemblages. That is,
we let de-personalizing affect arrive. This de-personalizing affect as sense-making
has different temporal scales: it is often an extended process of dynamic exchange/
negotiation, but it can also arrive as a flash of insight, a feeling of what is possible.
This feeling can be a definite reading of the situation (this stinks! or this is for me!),
but it can also sometimes be just a vague feeling of good or bad possibilities (I dont
know, I cant quite put my finger on it, but just maybe ...). Now if we want to use
Nos notion of virtual perceptual content to help us think affective cognition in its
concrete political context, we cannot stick with the physical/visual vocabulary of a dif-
ferential relation between movement and appearance. The differential relation in the
sense-making of bodies politic is that between potentials for becomings or assemblage
formations which vary as the members of the encounter make a move in the social
game, moves in which someone offers, commands, cajoles, persuades, pleads and so
on. The possible moves of a situation are the moves allowed by the social grammar and
syntax (there is a syntax at work here in social situations: the order of moves is some-
what prescribed: some moves just cannot come after other moves). But of course such
grammar and syntax are not propositional rules but embodied competences, which
are affects or feelings for the potential. But these possible moves are themselves taken
up in relations of change: what Deleuze and Guattari call de-territorialization (leading
to what would be unexpected, because changing the allowable patterns of the game)
and re-territorialization (settling back into an old game or setting forth the potentials
of the new game) (Massumi, 2002: 7180).
To sum up, then, affective cognition unfolds in a social context between embodied
subjects formed by that context. But context is too static: there are multiple levels and
time scales involved. That is, in de-personalizing affective cognition, we see bodies
in concrete situations act in real time with response capacities that have crystallized
over developmental time scales as produced by multiple subjectivation practices in a
34 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Notes
1 Instead of focusing on Deleuzes remarks on the brain, Im going to build upon the
analyses of Protevi 2009 in order to develop my own Deleuzean-inflected take on
current neuroscience, and more generally, on cognitive science. I believe that what I
write here is broadly consonant with Deleuzes and Guattaris From Chaos to the Brain
of What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) but its hard to say definitively;
the Brain section is highly figurative, though I do appreciate what Eric Alliez does
with it in The Signature of the World (Alliez, 2005). I can say that the Deleuzean take
on cognitive science I propose avoids the science versus philosophy division of What Is
Philosophy? by being one of a minor sciences invoked in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987); we could call it the study of biopolitical affective cognition.
2 I have not yet attempted to articulate this notion of sense-making (drawn mostly
from Varela 1991) with Deleuzes Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990). I think there
are resonances, but I dont want to make any firm judgements yet. Recall that for
Deleuze sense is a fourth dimension of propositions; sense is what is expressed in a
proposition. It cannot be reduced to referred objects, to speaking subjects or to other
propositions. Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and
the attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one side toward things, and another side
toward propositions. ... It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things
(Deleuze 1990, 22). Now for Varela, sense-making goes much deeper than proposi-
tions. However, insofar as he upholds the continuity of mind and life (Thompson
2007), there must be a development from biological sense-making to the proposi-
tion. In a great article entitled Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves, Varela
points to what he calls the surplus of signification opened by the sense-making of
the bacterium: There is no food significance in sucrose except when a bacterium
swims upgradient (Varela 1991, 87). Varela says this surplus of signification is
enacted; it is not the internal representation of an outer fact. Can we say that this
enacted sense is neither a reference to an object nor the manifestation of a subject,
but is between them, at their surface? If so, we might be on the track to articulating
this biological sense-making with the treatment of the dynamic genesis of sense in
the infants body in the latter part of Logic of Sense.
References
Alliez, E. (2005), The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy?
(translated by E. R. Albert and A. Toscano). London: Continuum.
Bergson, H. (1991), Matter and Memory (translated by N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer).
New York: Zone Books.
Bonta, M. and Protevi, J. (2004), Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze and Brain, Body and Affect in Contemporary CognitiveScience 35
.(1995), Resonant cell assemblies: A new approach to cognitive functions and neuronal
synchrony, Biological Research, 28, 8195.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science
and Human Experience. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Voss, D. (2011), Maimon and Deleuze: The viewpoint of internal genesis and the concept
of differentials, Parrhesia, 11, 6274.
Wheeler, M. (2005), Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.
Young, I. M. (2005), On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays.
New York: Oxford University Press.
3
In their What Is Philosophy? (1994), Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari define thought,
the true thought, as a confrontation between the mind, indeed the brain, and chaos, a
confrontation pursued especially and, they argue, most fundamentally by art, science
and philosophy, which are, accordingly, our primary means of thought (the term to be
italicized henceforth when used in this sense). At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari
see chaos as not only an enemy but also a friend of thought, its greatest friend and its
best ally in a yet greater struggle that thought must wage that against opinion. As they
say: the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy,
because another struggle develops and takes on more importance the struggle against
opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos. ... [T]he struggle with chaos is only
the instrument in a more profound struggle against opinion, for the misfortune of peo-
ple comes from opinion. ... But art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast
planes over chaos. These three disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of
gods, or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint the firmament on the umbrella,
like the figures of an Urdoxa from which opinion stem. Philosophy, science, and art
want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into chaos. ... And what would think-
ing be if it did not confront chaos? (1994: 202).
The confrontation between thought and chaos takes a particular form in each
respective domain: a creation of affects and planes of composition in art; a creation of
functions or propositions and planes of reference in science (including mathematics) and
a creation of concepts (in Deleuze and Guattaris special sense of the term) and planes
of immanence in philosophy. The specificity of the workings of thought in each field
makes them different from each other, and part of the books project is to explore this
specificity and this difference. Deleuze and Guattari go as far as to argue that thebrain
is the junction and not the unity of the three planes through which art, science
38 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
and philosophy, each in its own way, cut through chaos (1994: 208). In other words,
art, science and philosophy or, at least, something that neurologically defines each as
a particular form of the confrontation between thought and chaos, are seen as more
immediately linked to the brains neural functioning rather than as mediated products
of thought. Cultural mediation does play a role in the specific forms of practice that
each endeavour may take, but this mediation acts upon the neurological architecture
defined by the three corresponding planes of thought or defining these planes.
And yet, the interrelationships among art, science and philosophy are ultimately
equally significant for Deleuze and Guattari, which compels them to develop a more
complex heterogeneous, yet interactive landscape and history of thought in relation
to which each of these fields is positioned. The books conclusion, in particular, invokes
interferences between the three fields or, to begin with, between the corresponding
planes in the brain. The term interference should not be understood in the nega-
tive sense of inhibiting something, but instead in the sense it is used in wave optics,
where interference at certain points amplifies and at others cancels out the force of the
interacting wave fronts. Such interferences are as significant as the specific workings of
thought in each field, as just described. Indeed, I shall argue that these are interferences,
especially, as Deleuze and Guattari call them, nonlocalizable interferences, among
art, science and philosophy that ultimately define each field most fundamentally. Fur-
thermore, non-localizable interferences are not only crucial to thinking and creativity
in each field but also point beyond them, towards a different future of thought. As
Deleuze and Guattari write: In this submersion [of the brain in chaos] it seems that
there is extracted from the chaos the shadow of thought in the form ... that art, but
also philosophy and science, summon forth, but cannot themselves encompass (1994:
218; emphasis added).
My argument in this chapter is based on three specific cases of interferences among
art, science and philosophy. Each case arises in a different field, but all three cases
are shaped by analogous configurations of interferences among all three fields, or
more accurately, between the corresponding planes of thought that define each field.
Thefirstcase is that of Claude Monets paintings, specifically the Nympheas murals in
the Muse de lOrangerie in Paris; the second is that of Einsteins general relativity, his
non-Newtonian theory of gravity, based on the Riemannian geometry of manifolds
and the third is that of Deleuzes and then Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy itself asa
philosophy of materiality and multiplicity. I shall begin with the latter, first because
their philosophy is my main concern on this occasion and secondly because the con-
figurations of interferences in question essentially relate to the juncture of materiality
and multiplicity.
Both his own work and his collaborations with Guattari reveal Deleuze as an
uncompromising thinker of, jointly, both materiality and multiplicity. Deleuzes and
then Deleuze and Guattaris thinking of the multiple is more customarily linked to
mathematics, in particular calculus, and Riemanns concept of manifoldness, which
radically transformed our understanding of spatiality by giving it the architecture of
the irreducibly multiple. These connections, which I have discussed previously (e.g.
Bernhard Riemann), are important and I shall address them as well. I shall also argue,
however, that these connections may also and arguably more fundamentally (especially
The Spacetimes of Nympheas 39
if one wants to bring materiality into the picture) be related to physics classical
physics, in which calculus originates, and Einsteins general relativity theory, Einsteins
non-Newtonian theory of gravity, which is based on Riemanns geometry of manifolds.
Deleuze and Guattaris use of Riemanns ideas was mediated by both Bergsons and,
especially, Lautmans engagements with them, and both engagements were shaped by
Einsteins theory, which in part followed Leibniz in considering space as defined by
matter inhabiting it. Einsteins general relativity theory tells us that gravity of matter
curves the space and gives this space the Riemannian architecture of heterogeneous
multiplicity, as against the Newtonian homogeneity of absolute space (viewed as pre-
existing matter), which defines classical physics. These connections to relativity also
allow one to explore the role of temporality and dynamics in this architecture. Ishall
suggest that Claude Monets Nympheas murals in the Muse de lOrangerie in Paris
offer the image of this architecture. Painted in the wake of Einsteins introduction of
general relativity in1915, Monets murals might have been impacted by Einsteins ideas
and might even have been painted also as an image of the Riemannian-Einsteinian
spacetime, comprised of spacetime manifolds defined by matter. At the very least (since
the corresponding historical lineage remains conjectural), these paintings may be seen
as such an image of the Riemannian-Einsteinian spacetime, or as a richer image cap-
tured by Deleuze and Guattaris philosophical architecture and Einsteins and Riemanns
physical-mathematical architecture, conjoined at the point of an interference among
art, science and philosophy.
Let us begin with Riemanns concept of manifold, arguably the most significant
mathematical reference in Deleuze and Guattaris work. A Riemannian manifold or
space is a conglomerate of continuously connected (local) spaces, each of which can
be mapped by a (flat) Euclidean, or Cartesian, coordinate map and treated accord-
ingly (and thus can also be given geometry), without allowing for a global Euclidean
structure for the whole, except in the limited case of a Euclidean homogeneous (flat)
space itself. More precisely, every point of such a space has a small neighborhood
(also used as the technical mathematical term) that can be treated as Euclidean, while
the manifold as a whole in general cannot. This may also be expressed by saying that
a manifold is Euclidean infinitesimally. In the case of the sphere, for example, one can
imagine small circles on the surface around each point and project each such circle
onto the tangent plane to this point to a regular flat circle on this plane. If the first circle
is very small, the difference between two circles becomes very small as well and can
be neglected, allowing one to treat both circles as Euclidean. Deleuze and Guattari see
Riemann spaces as reflecting the most important features of the smooth and nonmet-
ric manifoldness, as opposed to the metric manifoldness, or of the nomos of smooth
space. As they say, following and citing Lautman:
vicinity and the next is not defined and can be effected in an infinite number of ways.
Riemann space at its most general thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of
pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other. It is possible to define this
multiplicity without any reference to a metrical system, in terms of the conditions
of frequency, or rather accumulation, of a set of neighborhoods; these conditions
are entirely different from those determining metric spaces and their breaks (even
though a relation between the two kinds of space necessarily results). In short, if
we follow Lautmans fine description, Riemannian space is pure patchwork. It has
connections, or tactile relations. It has rhythmic values not found elsewhere, even
though they can be translated into a metric space. Heterogeneous, in continuous
variation, it is a smooth space, insofar as smooth space is amorphous and not
homogeneous. (1987: 485)
Thus, the architecture of Riemannian manifolds is defined by the multiplicity and con-
nectivity of local spaces and, therefore, local mappings, and functions and, one might
also say, movements, connecting these spaces and maps, as against being defined as a
set of points. The concept, mathematical and philosophical (it is both), of a Rieman-
nian space is, accordingly, defined as a conglomerate of spaces through the (contigu-
ous) connectivity of such spaces. One might say that it is composed of spaces, rather
than of points, and the corresponding mathematics may be seen as compositional as
well, akin to the way it happens in certain art works, for example and in particular, to
the way local spaces comprise the space of each of Monets Nympheas murals. Laut-
mans description, cited by Deleuze and Guattari, is inflected by Einsteins relativity,
through the idea of observers in a Riemanns space, whose curvature is defined by
matter. It is this inflection that establishes the link between the mathematical con-
cepts in question to temporality and dynamics, a link that historically extends from
the standard calculus to, through Riemanns tensor calculus on manifolds (which is
a generalization of the standard calculus), Einsteins relativity. Deleuzes thought (in
either sense) is deeply connected to both fields and, I would argue, develops, through
both fields, from a philosophy of difference to a philosophy of multiplicity. I would like
to briefly trace this development.
Calculus is concerned, first of all, with the behaviour of a certain class of func-
tions, often corresponding to curves, such as a parabola, defined as f(x)x2, and Ishall
restrict myself to such functions, which is sufficient for my purposes here. Differentia-
tion allows one to assess the local behaviour of the curve, say, the degree of inflection
by knowing a tangent to the curve, which is to say, by infinitesimally replacing the
curve with a straight line, always uniquely defined at a given point. In doing so, one
also locally replaces non-linear functions (such as f(x)x2), which are difficult to work
with by linear functions of the type f(x)axb, which are easy to handle mathemati-
cally. The case of the parabola, f(x)x2, is not so difficult and is just about the simplest
case one can think of, but even in the case of many common functions, in mathematics
itself or those used in physics, beginning with higher-degree (e.g. cubic) polynomials
or trigonometric functions, these difficulties could be quite substantial and are often
just about unmanageable without calculus. What is most significant in the present
context is that, from this viewpoint, the concept of difference essentially relates to an
The Spacetimes of Nympheas 41
inflection of the line, usually a spatial inflection. We generally tend to think of time,
especially in physics, in terms of a straight directed line, although the temporal and
dynamic dimensions of calculus are important both in general and in the present
context. Calculus was born from physics or from the marriage of mathematics and
physics, especially in Newton, in part against Leibniz, who thinks more mathemati-
cally, albeit, as will be seen presently, not without connections to physics either. The
curves considered in (the early) calculus describe the motion of material bodies, such
as parabolas in the case of projectile motions or ellipses in the case of planets moving
around the Sun. Eventually, calculus moved far beyond physics. Calculus allows us to
capture the law of this inflection and thus the behaviour of this curve, and thus also
tomeasure distances along the curves. The degree of inflection defines the curvature of
the curve at a given point. Some curves, such as circles, are inflected equally through-
out or, in mathematical terms, have constant curvatures; others have varying inflection
and thus varying curvatures.
The idea of difference as inflection has, in large part through calculus, preoccupied
Deleuze throughout much of his work, from Difference and Repetition on. Thus, in
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, the Baroque is largely defined, through Leibniz and
his (rather than Newtons) conception of calculus, by the inflection and curvature of
curves. Inflection, Deleuze says, is the pure Event [an intrinsic singularity] of the line
or of the point, the Virtual, ideality par excellence (The Fold 15). The Baroque is the
curving of curves, surfaces and spaces, which is why we need the fold the pleats
of matter and the folds of the souls and vice versa (3, 14). In the interior of Franc-
esco Borominis famous church, S. Carlo alle Quatro Fontane (S. Carlito), not only are
all curves different but also each curve, or just about each, has a variable curvature.
This concept and the Baroque also have crucial temporal and dynamic dimensions,
the energy shaping Baroque curves and spaces. It is not coincidental that Leibniz was
also the inventor of the concept of kinetic energy, the energy of a moving body. The
Baroque defines movement as engendered and determined by different forces and dif-
ferent types of the play of forces, for example, both distinguishing the (more mechani-
cal) motions of bodies from the (more organic) motions of souls and yetalso relating
them. But, as Deleuze says, movement itself is irreducible: it cannot be stopped (The
Fold 12). From this perspective, Leibnizs and then Einsteins physics may be seen as
that of the Baroque (the new Baroque, in the case of Einstein [The Fold 137]) versus
Descartes and Newtons physics of the Renaissance.
Now, consider a surface instead of a curve, and, while calculus began to study sur-
faces early, I shall give the picture a Riemannian inflection, which changes the per-
spective more radically towards manifoldness-multiplicity. Extending the approach of
differential calculus, as just described, surfaces (essentially, two-dimensional manifolds
in Riemanns sense), say a sphere or a paraboloid, can be locally handled analogously
to one-dimensional curves by studying tangent planes to them at each point. But, con-
sider the difference in the picture also. The inflection of the surface is defined in an
infinite number of directions, along the infinite number of gradients and, thus, fol-
lowing the infinite number of curves of the surface. Difference becomes multiplicity,
but, equally crucially, differential multiplicity. In a given direction on the surface, one
can proceed along the corresponding curve, just as one does in the regular calculus.
42 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Onestill deals with a tangent plane, rather than a line, at each point, but there will also
be a tangent line to a given curve at each point of the curve. The concept of difference
must also be extended because we can proceed in many directions, possibly changing
them at different points, and develop, rhizomatically, the relationships between these
different differentiations or inflections.
The picture becomes especially rich when a surface has a variable curvature and var-
ies or unfolds differently in different directions in its manifoldness-multiplicity. Inflec-
tion becomes multiple and redefines the key Deleuzian structures, such as the virtual,
the actual, the event and so forth, accordingly, that is, as always embedded within and
arising from or giving rise to the differentiated manifoldness or manifold differentia-
tion rather than differentiation alone. If one has an object that has a constant curvature,
such as a sphere, it curves or unfolds in the same way in every direction. In general,
however, one can contemplate and mathematically define the multiplicity, manifold-
ness, of unfoldings, different in different directions and possibly different in every
direction. Riemannian geometry and its calculus, tensor calculus, allow one to handle
this inflectional multiplicity and the corresponding laws of curvature and unfolding,
and, in particular, allow us to measure the distances between points and thus speak
of geometry. The mathematical handling of the situation is simpler if the curvature is
constant, as in the case of a sphere (which, again, has a constant positive curvature,
defined by its radius, 1/r2, where r is the radius). Riemann extended this approach to
geometry or calculus to three-dimensional spaces (which can thus be curved as well)
and ultimately to the spaces of any dimensions, even infinite-dimensional spaces. With
this extension, the mathematical landscape defined by a given manifold becomes truly
immense. A three-dimensional case may be illustrated, loosely but graphically, by cer-
tain Baroque objects, defined by multitudes and manifolds of curves, such as picture
or mirror frames, or chandeliers, or for that matter, a wig, such as that of Leibniz in
his portraits.
My main point at the moment is that these ideas define a powerful and pregnant
mathematical and philosophical concept. It has a philosophical stratum even as a math-
ematical concept, which also allows one to generalize the concept to other fields. This is
what Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari do as part of the shift in question from a phi-
losophy of difference in early Deleuze to the philosophy of manifoldness-multiplicity
in Deleuzes and Deleuze and Guattaris later work. Pronounced connections to
geometrical conceptuality just described (sometimes supplemented by dynamical,
physical conceptuality) are found throughout A Thousand Plateaus, The Fold, Foucault
and What Is Philosophy?
This shift is not without continuities, since, first of all, as just explained, the laws and
hence the philosophy of difference are still part of the new matrix of multiplicity, which,
as it were, multiplies these laws. It is literally a question of extending difference into
multiplicity by multiplying the possibilities and movement of difference, from a given
point not in (infinitely) many directions in accordance with the different dynamics
and laws of difference. In other words, the philosophical mathematics, or mechanics
and dynamics, of the types developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition would
still apply along any given direction, analogously to the way the mechanism of calculus
would still apply in Riemannian geometry. Second, although the theory of difference
The Spacetimes of Nympheas 43
dominates Deleuzes earlier work, it can be shown that this work involves the think-
ing of the multiple in this sense. For one thing, in Difference and Repetition, calculus
is already seen in juxtaposition to the dialectical form of Platonism (1993: 1802),
which Riemanns concept of manifoldness suspends as the grounding determination
of thought. Deleuze and Guattari will ultimately credit Riemanns introduction of the
concept as mark[ing] the end of dialectic and the beginning of topology and typology
of manifolds (1987: 4823). By the same token, ideas are multiplicities: every idea is
a multiplicity (1993: 182).
This move from difference to multiplicity is inevitable. It may not be possible to
have either a philosophy (or mathematics) of multiplicity without that of difference
or a philosophy (or mathematics) of difference without that of multiplicity. Already
in calculus, especially in Leibniz, one finds intimations of this type of traffic between
difference and multiplicity. The point is not missed by Deleuze in the Fold, as in his dis-
cussion of monads and conic sections, in which case the point of view, the summit of
the cone ... does not so much apprehend a perspective, as would the point of viewof
the Renaissance, but brings forth the connection of all the related profiles, the series
ofcurvatures and inflections (The Fold 24). This is why Leibniz is the thinker of the
Baroque par excellence. For Leibniz, as later for Einstein (whom Leibniz, again, antici-
pates), materiality dynamically and multiply, in a manifold way, defines spatiality and
temporality alike, rather than, like in Newton, is placed into (absolute) flat space and
time, as a background of world events.
Let us return to the picture of Riemannian geometry and (extended) calculus on
a manifold, keeping the two-dimensional case sketched above as a model. Now, how-
ever, we want to consider, la Einstein, the corresponding physical space in relation
to and as defined by bodies and motions, due to various forces they exert upon each
other, and possibly additional resources of energy supplied by some specified overall
exterior source. Thus, in Deleuze and Guattaris ontology, such a source, conceived
as a body without organs, may be seen as the primary source of energy, while other
material entities, bodies, involved are seen as desiring machines interacting with each
other by using the energy supplied by the body without organs. This use, however,
also means that desiring machines interact with the body without organs as well,
which, thus, is only a part of the overall picture. While still Riemannian as concerns
its manifold-multiple architecture, the picture becomes physical, that of material enti-
ties acting upon each other and, as a result, developing in time, sometimes enabling
some of the bodies involved to move along particular fast and smooth trajectories or
what Deleuze and Guattari call lines of flight. In physics, either in general relativity or
even in the Newtonian theory of gravity, the corresponding Riemannian mathematics
maps the physical processes involved. We recall that physics only deals with ideal-
ized models of this type, which, however, also enable excellent approximations of and
predictions concerning observable phenomena, such as, say, those of planets moving
around the Sun. One could argue more strongly, along Kantian lines, that in either
Newtons or Einsteins theory, this mathematics and the corresponding phenomenal
idealizations or models only serve to predict the outcomes of the relevant experiments,
without actually representing nature. In quantum theory, it is very difficult to argue
that the mathematics does anything more than enable such predictions, which makes
44 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
always that of finding what monument to erect on the plane [of composition], or what
plane to slide under this monument, and both at the same time:
The plane of material ascends irresistibly and invades the plane of composition of
the sensations themselves to the point of being part of them or indiscernible from
them. ... And yet, in principle at least, sensation is not the same as the material.
What is preserved by right is not the material, which constitutes only a de facto
condition, but insofar as this condition is satisfied (that is, that canvas, colour, or
stone does not crumple into dust), it is the percept or affect that is preserved in
itself [through composition]. (1994: 1667)
Thus, sensations, percepts and affects exist as the products of planes of composition,
enacted in the material substance of a work of art. These planes are contrasted planes
of immanence, inhabited by concepts, in philosophy, and planes of reference, inhab-
ited by functions, in science. Each plane of composition is defined as an image of a
Universe a cosmos or chaosmos of affects and percepts appearing in the field of
thought, in which the thought of art intersects with the chaos of forms that are born
and that disappear with an infinite speed (1994: 656). Such an image is, however, not
a representation or any real sense, since no art and no sensation have ever been repre-
sentational (193). Thus, there are the universes, vast planes of compositions (188): the
universe of Rembrandt and Debussy, Rembrandt-universe [and] Debussy-universe
(177); Wagner-universe (191); the universes of Klee (1845); the universes of Kleist,
Melville, Hardy, Proust and Virginia Woolf. Cezanne, who is inescapable here, is cited
virtually on every page of the chapter on art (16399). Then, there is Monets cosmos
of roses, in which Monets house finds itself endlessly caught up by the plant forces of
an unrestrained garden (180).
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a great astrophysicist who won a Nobel prize for
his work on collapsing stars (if the star is heavy enough, the result is a black hole),
made an intriguing connection between the landscapes of Einsteins general relativ-
ity and Monets series of paintings, such those of the Haystacks, the Poplars or the
Nympheas, also known as series paintings. In these paintings, Chandrasekhar notes,
Monet was interested in the way immutable objects constantly took on new forms
in changing colors and light during a day or during seasons (1997: 136). In paral-
lel, Chandrasekhar considers how Einsteins equations describe different gravitational
landscapes, depending on the choice of parameters, thus allowing one to think in
terms of a series of cosmic landscapes, each, however, defined by the immutable formal
mathematics of Einsteins equations. I shall not address the question of this intrigu-
ing parallel; and Chandrasekhars, mostly technical, paper is, in my view, much more
effective and profound on Einstein than on Monet. I find more intriguing and impor-
tant that, while suggestively bringing Einstein and Monet together, Chandrasekhar
missed three important points, perhaps not surprisingly, given his conventional aes-
thetic and reductive philosophical views.
The first point that Chandrasekhar missed, although his elegant discussion of
Einsteins theory makes this point unavoidable to the present reader, is that Einsteins,
or earlier Riemanns, thought is also both the invention of a new philosophical concept
46 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
The three planes, along with their elements, are irreducible: plane of immanence
[or consistency] of philosophy, plane of composition of art, plane of reference or
coordination of science; form of concept, force of sensation, function of knowledge;
concept and conceptual personae, sensations and aesthetic figures, figures and partial
observers. ... But what to us seem more important now are the problems of inter-
ference between the planes that join up in the brain. (1994: 216)
These interferences are of three types, progressively making it more difficult to main-
tain the definition and function of a given field, ultimately, in the case of nonlocaliz-
able interferences, taking thought beyond art, science and philosophy. As Deleuze and
Guattari say:
The first type of interference appears when a philosopher attempts to create the
concept of a sensation or a function (for example, a concept peculiar to Riemannian
48 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
In other words, in this case, interferences are essentially in the service of building up
the architecture of philosophical concepts and planes of immanence in philosophy,
affects and planes of composition in art, or functions or propositions and planes of
reference in science.
But, Deleuze and Guattari say next, there is a second, intrinsic type of interfer-
ences. In these cases: concepts and conceptual personae seem to leave a plane of
immanence that would correspond to them, so as to slip in among the functions and
partial observers of science ... on another plane; and similarly in other cases. These
slidings are so subtle, like those of Zarathustra in Nietzsches philosophy or of Igitur in
Mallarms poetry, that we find ourselves on complex planes that are difficult to qualify
(1994: 217). In this case, we can no longer maintain the determination of the respective
fields, at least not at the level of the planes of thought defining them.
Finally, however, there are interferences that cannot be localized: This is because
each discipline is, in its own way, in relation with a negative: even science has a rela-
tion with a nonscience that echoes its effects. ... Each of the disciplines is, on its own
behalf, in an essential relationship with the No that concerns us (1994: 218). Thus,
in quantum theory, we have to say No to any scientific or even philosophical ideas
concerning what quantum objects, such as electrons or photons, or black holes, really
are, or to giving an aesthetic or artistic, or any other denomination to Klees paintings,
or perhaps to some of Monets lilies or roses. In this view, the latter no longer appear as
flowers but only as image-gravity spots in the canvas. Deleuze and Guattari then say:
Thus, the book brings us and itself to an unexpected place in answering or re-asking its
title question What is philosophy? But then, this is perhaps where the book has been
The Spacetimes of Nympheas 49
all along, at least in its practice of philosophy. Because philosophy must also say No to
itself, it is also, fundamentally, something else than itself, which may be why the books
title is a question: What Is Philosophy? The same is true for art and science, which must
be something else than themselves to be themselves. Philosophy is a particular form of
interference between philosophy and non-philosophy, as science is a particular form of
interference between science and nonscience, and art a particular form of interference
between art and non-art. As such, however, all three philosophy, art and science
also point even further beyond themselves, to a different future of thought, even if they
are still fundamentally linked to the planes of thought that philosophy, art and science
define or that define them. Deleuze and Guattari write, closing the book:
Now, if the three Nos are still distinct in relation to the cerebral plane, they are no
longer distinct in relation to chaos in which the brain plunges. In this submersion
it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow of people to come in the
form that art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth, but which leaves all
three behind: mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaos-people nonthink-
ing thought that lodges in the three, like Klees nonconceptual concept or Kandin-
skys internal subject. (1994: 218; emphasis added)
One could add Heisenbergs and Bohrs non-concept of the un-thinkable quantum
objects, or the singularities of black holes, or the undecidable nature of certain math-
ematical propositions in mathematics. The concept of undecidable proposition was
introduced by Kurt Gdel, along with examples of such propositions themselves,
in1931. For example and in particular, a countable infinity (such as that of all whole
numbers: 1, 2, 3, ...0) is smaller than that of a continuous infinity (such as that of all
points in a straight line). It was a remarkable earlier discovery of Georg Cantor that
mathematical infinities can have different magnitudes. There is, however, no decidable
definitive answer whether there is anything in between these two infinities, contrary
to Cantors initial conjecture, known as the continuum hypothesis, that there is noth-
ing in between. That is, the proposition that something infinite in between does or
does not exist cannot be demonstrated to be either true or false: this proposition is
undecidable, and this undecidability has been mathematically demonstrated by Paul
Cohen in 1963. This fact makes the constitution of mathematical continuity deeply
enigmatic and gives it the dimension of non-thinking thought and of the unthink-
able within thought, which, at the very least, involves the non-localizable interference
between philosophy and mathematics that, arising from both, is beyond both.
Perhaps there is an interference with art as well, insofar as the idea of a point is
concerned. Monet might or might not be correct regarding nature when he says, in the
statement used as my epigraph: Nature has no points. But the idea of a point and of a
continuous space comprised by discrete points reveals a bottomless, unthinkable abyss
of thought and image, as Leibniz and the Baroque already realized from all three inter-
fering sides mathematical-scientific, philosophical and artistic even though they,
the old Baroque, also often thought that they could bridge this abyss, unbridgeable
in the new Baroque. I would contend that Monets statement, too, is a product of an
ultimately non-localizable interference among art, philosophy and mathematics and
science. For this abyss, the abyss of the point-less point has also haunted philosophy,
50 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
mathematics and physics at least since the pre-Socratics and reveals the bottomless
abyss of thought itself, beyond art, science and philosophy, as both abysses mirror and
invade each other. Although the dash of point-less is prudent and even necessary
here, the other sense of pointlessness might well have haunted our thought since the
pre-Socratics as well.
Both Gdels undecidability and the question of the continuity, now of thinking,
if perhaps not of thought, itself, arguably our first model of continuity, might even be
on Deleuze and Guattaris mind here, or shape their thought from the unconscious,
since the idea of undecidability, by way of interference between their own philosophy
of philosophy and mathematics, enters next. As they say, closing the book and open-
ing a new space of thought: It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become
undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible,
as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across their different natures and
constantly accompanies them (1994: 218). The sense of the constitution of this con-
tinuum of thought as composed of dissolving and emerging spaces and not of points in
the space of interference among art, philosophy and science unless, again, these are
point-less points, abyssal non-spacetimes or black holes, where art, science and phi-
losophy dissolve. These black holes, however, are also immense sources of energy and
as such give rise to new energies and new forms of thought.
References
Chandrasekhar, S. (1997), The Series of Paintings by Claude Monet and the Landscapes
of General Relativity, in S. Chandrasekhar, Selected Papers. Chicago: The University
ofChicago Press, pp. 13567.
Deleuze, G.(1988), Foucault, (translated by S. Hand). Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
.(1990), The Logic of Sense (translated by M. Lester). New York: Columbia University
Press.
.(1993a), Difference and Repetition (translated by P. Patton). New York: C olumbia
University Press.
.(1993b), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (translated by T. Conley). Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
.(1999), Interview with Arnaud Villani, in A. Villani, La gupe et lorchide. Essais sur
Gilles Deleuze. Paris: ditions de Belin.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus (translated by B. Massumi).
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
.(1994), What is Philosophy? (translated by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Lyotard, J. (1988), Heidegger and the Jews (translated by A. Michel and M. Roberts).
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Weyl, H. (1952), Space Time Matter (translated by H. L. Brose). New York: Dover.
4
Deleuzes texts are replete with examples of mathematical problems drawn from differ-
ent historical periods. These engagements with mathematics rely upon the extraction
of mathematical problems or problematics from the history of mathematics and the
development of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics in order to recon-
figure particular philosophical problems and to develop new concepts in response to
them. The example that will be explored in this chapter is the problem of continu-
ity as encountered by Leibnizs mathematical approach to natural philosophy, which
draws upon the law of continuity as reflected in the calculus of infinite series and the
infinitesimal calculus. Deleuze traces alternative lineages in the history of mathemat-
ics based on non-canonical research and solutions that have subsequently been offered
to these problems. The relation between the canonical history of mathematics and the
alternative lineages that Deleuze extracts from it are most clearly exemplified in the
difference between what can be described as the axiomatized set-theoretical explica-
tions of mathematics and those developments or research programmes in mathematics
that fall outside of the parameters of such an axiomatics; for example, algebraic topol-
ogy, functional analysis and differential geometry, to name but a few. This difference
can be understood to be characteristic of the relation between what Deleuze and Guat-
tari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) refer to as Royal or major science and nomadic or
minor science. Royal or major science refers to those practices that fall within the sci-
entific norms and methodological conventions of the time, whereas nomad or minor
science refers to those practices that fall outside of such disciplinary habits and resist
attempts to be reduced to them. Scientific normativity can therefore be understood to
operate as a set of principles according to which respectable research in mathemat-
ics is conducted, despite the fact that developments continue to be made that under-
mine such constraints and, by a process of destabilization and regeneration, lead to the
development of alternative systems for structuring normative frameworks. The aim
of this chapter is to provide an account of the mathematical engagement that Deleuze
undertakes with Leibniz, which he draws upon to structure the alternative normative
framework that is developed in his philosophy. An understanding of any of the math-
ematical engagements that Deleuze undertakes throughout his work requires a clear
explication of the history of mathematics from which the specific mathematical prob-
lematic has been extracted and of the alternative lineage in the history of mathematics
52 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
that is generated in relation to it. These mathematical problematics extracted from the
history of mathematics are directly redeployed by Deleuze as philosophical problem-
atics in relation to the history of philosophy. This is achieved by mapping the alterna-
tive lineages in the history of mathematics onto corresponding alternative lineages in
thehistory of philosophy, that is, by isolating those points of convergence between the
mathematical and philosophical problematics extracted from their respective histo-
ries. The redeployment of mathematical problematics as philosophical problematics
is one of the strategies that Deleuze employs in his engagement with the history of
philosophy.1
Deleuze has gained a lot of respect among historians of philosophy for the rigour
and historical integrity of his engagements with figures in the history of philosophy.
Particularly in those texts that engage with the intricacies of seventeenth century met-
aphysics and the mathematical developments that contributed to its diversity.2 One
of the aims of these engagements is not only to explicate the detail of the thinkers
thought but also to recast aspects of their philosophy as developments that contrib-
ute to his broader project of constructing a philosophy of difference. Each of these
engagements therefore provides as much insight into the developments of Deleuzes
own thought as it does into the detail of the thought of the figure under examination.
For the purposes of this chapter, Deleuzes engagement with Leibniz is singled out for
closer scrutiny. Much has been made of Deleuzes Neo-Leibnizianism,3 however not
very much detailed work has been done on the specific nature of Deleuzes critique of
Leibniz that positions his work within the broader framework of Deleuzes own philo-
sophical project. The present chapter undertakes to redress this oversight by providing
an account of the reconstruction of Leibnizs metaphysics that Deleuze undertakes in
The Fold. Deleuze provides a systematic account of the structure of Leibnizs metaphys-
ics in terms of its mathematical underpinnings. However, in doing so, Deleuze draws
upon not only the mathematics developed by Leibniz including the law of continuity
as reflected in the calculus of infinite series and the infinitesimal calculus but also
the developments in mathematics made by a number of Leibnizs contemporaries
including Newtons method of fluxions and a number of subsequent developments
in mathematics, the rudiments of which can be more or less located in Leibnizs own
work including the theory of functions and singularities, the theory of continuity and
Poincars theory of automorphic functions. Deleuze then retrospectively maps these
developments back onto the structure of Leibnizs metaphysics. While the theory of
continuity serves to clarify Leibnizs work, Poincars theory of automorphic functions
offers a solution to overcome and extend the limits that Deleuze identifies in Leibnizs
metaphysics. Deleuze brings this elaborate conjunction of material together in order
to set up a mathematical idealization of the system that he considers to be implicit in
Leibnizs work. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explication of the structure
of Leibnizs metaphysics. What is provided in this chapter is an exposition of the very
mathematical underpinnings of this Deleuzian account of the structure of Leibnizs
metaphysics, which, I maintain, subtends the entire text of The Fold.
Deleuzes project in the Fold is predominantly oriented by Leibnizs insistence on
the metaphysical importance of mathematical speculation. What this suggests is that
mathematics functioned as an important heuristic in the development of Leibnizs
The Question of Deleuzes Neo-Leibnizianism 53
metaphysical theories. Deleuze puts this insistence to good use by bringing together
the different aspects of Leibnizs metaphysics with the variety of mathematical themes
that run throughout his work. Those aspects of Leibnizs metaphysics that Deleuze
undertakes to clarify in this way, and upon which this chapter will focus, include: the
definition of the monad, the conception of matter and motion and the representation
of the continuum.
Leibnizs work on the infinitangular polygon, which actually approaches the smooth
character of the curve, comes to the fore here, as it was only by representing motion as
a smooth curve that the seventeenth century resources of algebra and geometry were
able to be deployed to calculate the velocity and acceleration of a body at any time.
However, the Leibnizian model of the structure of matter satisfies the premises of
the syncategorematic idea of infinite division, such that any finite portion of matter is
able to be infinitely divided into progressively smaller finite parts, each of which is also
infinitely divisible. The infinity of infinitely divisible parts of matter forms a plenum.
The continuously curved trajectory of a body is the mathematical representation of a
fictitious limit of the trajectory followed by the body which is constantly subject to the
impact of other bodies from all directions in the plenum. So when Leibniz denies the
uniformity of motion, he is denying not only the uniformity of acceleration but also
the kind of directionality represented by a polygonal curve.
Since every finite interval of motion is infinitely divisible into increasingly small
finite and distinct moments, the moving body suffers the impacts of infinitely many
distinct forces during each and every interval of motion, however small. The resulting
motion is not accelerated continuously by a force that acts throughout the interval, as
we now understand accelerative force to act, but rather each impact adds a distinct
and instantaneous change to the motion of the body (see Levy, 2003: 386). According
to this impulsive account of acceleration, the non-uniformity of motion is maintained
throughout every subinterval, however small.
In the Pacidius, Leibniz advances an analysis of the structure of the interval of
motion, according to which, at any moment, the moving body is at a new point, and
the transition of the moving body from the end of one interval to the beginning of the
next occurs by a single step, which Leibniz characterizes as a leap (2001: 79), from an
assigned endpoint to what Leibniz describes as the locus proximus (2001: 16869), the
indistant but distinct beginning point of the next interval. The conclusion that Leibniz
comes to in the Pacidius is that motion is not continuous, but happens by a leap; that
is to say, that a body, staying for a while in one place, may immediately afterwards be
transplanted to another; i.e. that matter is extinguished here, and reproduced else-
where (2001: 79). In Numeri infiniti (1676), Leibniz further characterizes motion per
saltus, or through a leap, as transcreation (2001: 923), where the body is annihilated
in the earlier state, and resuscitated in the later one (2001: 1945).
The endpoints of each subinterval of motion remain nothing but bounds, the ends
or beginnings of the subintervals of motion into which a whole subinterval is divided
by the actions of impulse forces on the apparently moving body.
The example that Leibniz uses in the Pacidius to characterize the continuum, of
which the interval of motion that has non-uniform acceleration is an instance, is the
folded tunic:
Accordingly the division of the continuum must not be considered to be like the
division of sand into grains, but like that of a sheet of paper or tunic into folds....
It is just as if we suppose a tunic to be scored with folds multiplied to infinity in
such a way that there is no fold so small that it is not subdivided by a new fold.
(2001: 185)
The Question of Deleuzes Neo-Leibnizianism 55
The image of the tunic scored with folds multiplied to infinity is a heuristic for the
structure of the continuum (Levy, 2003: 392), and insofar as each moment in the con-
tinuum is an endpoint of motion, it is also a heuristic for the structure of the interval
of motion.
The interval of motion and the folded tunic therefore display similar structure, and
this structure, as Leibniz describes it, displays the very properties that fractal mathemat-
ics was later developed to study (Levy, 2003: 393). The fractal curve that best represents
the structure of folds within folds that is suggested in the image of the folded tunic
in the Pacidius is the Koch curve, demonstrated by Helge von Koch in1904 (Deleuze,
1993, p. 16). The method of constructing the Koch curve is to take an equilateral trian-
gle and trisect each of its sides. On the external side of each middle segment, construct
equilateral triangles and delete the abovementioned middle segment. This first itera-
tion resembles a Star of David composed of six small triangles. Repeat the previous
process on the two outer sides of each small triangle. This basic construction is then
iterated indefinitely. The Koch curve is an example of a non-differentiable curve, that
is, a continuous curve that does not have a tangent at any of its points. More general-
ized Koch or fractal curves can be obtained by replacing the equilateral triangle with a
regular n-gon, and/or the trisection of each side with other equipartitioning schemes.8
In this example, the line effectively and continuously defers inflection by means of the
method of construction of the folds of its sides.
Fractal curves typically are not differentiable, that is, there are no points on the
curve at which tangents can be drawn, no matter what the scale of magnification.
Instead, the intervals display only corners which are singularities, where the nature
of the curve changes. Leibnizs account of accelerated motion, as depicted in the image
of the folded tunic, displays fractal structure. The action of impulses at every single
moment ensures that the interval of motion of the moving body includes infinitely
many singularities in every subinterval of the motion. The fractal curve of the motion,
like the Koch curve, is therefore not differentiable.
According to Leibniz, each fold or vertex of the fractal curve, which is a singularity,
is a boundary of not one but two intervals of motion, each of which is actually subdi-
vided into smaller subintervals. Each vertex or singularity is in fact an aggregate pair
of indistant points: the end point of one subinterval and the beginning point of the
next. A body in motion makes a leap from the end of one subinterval to the begin-
ning of the next, and every leap, which occurs at the boundary between the distinct
subintervals of motions, marks a change in the motion of the moving body, both of its
direction and velocity. Because these subintervals are infinitely divisible, the divisions
of a subinterval of motion are distributed across an indefinitely descending hierar-
chy of distinct scales, of which, according to Leibnizs sycategorematic account of the
infinitely small, there is always a subinterval at a scale smaller than the smallest given
scale. Any motion across an interval therefore contains a multiplicity of singularities,
vertices or boundaries of intervals of motion, that is, a multiplicity of unextended leaps
between the indistant ends and beginnings of its various subintervals of motion, with
increasing scales of resolution.
The impulses at the root of motion, that is, the leaps between indistant points, are
neither intervals nor endpoints of motion. They remain unextended and are rather
56 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
effected by divine intervention. The body is transcreated by God from one moment
to the next. The changes in motion, that is, the actions of accelerative forces, which
Leibniz characterizes as primary active force, are not the effects of moving bod-
ies upon one another, which he characterizes as derivative forces, they are rather
ascribed to God (Leibniz, 1965: 46870; 1969: 4323). For Leibniz, motion is not
a real property in bodies, but merely a positional phenomenon that results from
Gods creative activity (Levy, 2003: 406). In Leibnizs later metaphysics, he explains
that whatever new states a body will possess have been predetermined by virtue of
Gods selection of the best of possible worlds and the pre-established harmony that
that entails.
According to Leibnizs theory of motion, the properties of motion are divided
into (1) those that apply to the phenomenon of motion across an interval of space,
that is, motion as it appears in perceptual experience and is determined by derivative
forces and (2) the conception of motion as a multiplicity of unextended leaps between
indistant loci proximi, which is reserved for the metaphysical reality that subtends
that phenomenon, and which is determined by primary active force. In perceptual
experience, motion appears to consist in extended intervals that can be resolved into
subintervals, ad infinitum. However, metaphysically, motion consists in a multiplicity
of unextended leaps. Those leaps that are manifest in experience are the singularities
at which motion is perceived to be accelerated, but neither all leaps nor subintervals of
motion are perceived consciously. In the sense perception of finite minds, the corpo-
real world always appears immediately as only finitely complex and piecewise continu-
ous, though upon closer scrutiny it is determined as indefinitely complex and fractal
in its structure.
One of the problems with Leibnizs account of the divisibility of matter in the
Pacidius (1676) that was not resolved until the later development of his metaphysics of
monads is that the problem of how matter and the objects we perceive in perceptual
experience as bodies are grounded.
Any particular part of matter is infinitely divisible into progressively smaller finite
parts without ever reaching or being resolved into a smallest part which could serveas
its ground. The division doesnt terminate in atoms or material indivisibles. The
problem is that there must be something in virtue of which the bodies, as the objects of
our perceptual experience in the corporeal world, are true unities despite their indefi-
nite subdivision into parts. There must be foundations for matter, but those founda-
tions cannot be parts of matter. The grounding of bodies that are the objects of our
perceptual experience issues from something immaterial in the foundations of matter
whose unity is not subject to the same indefinite, and therefore, problematic division.
The indivisible unities, whose reality provides a metaphysical foundation for matter
while residing outside of the indefinite regress of parts within parts, are immaterial
substances that Leibniz calls monads (Monadology, 1714). It is by means of the monad
that the multiplicity of parts of matter that make up a body can be considered as a
unity. The monad is prior to the multiplicity that constitutes the body, and the monad
exists phenomenally only through the body it constitutes.
The constructivism of the syncategorematic infinite explains the content of our
experience of reality; however, it has no place in the account of metaphysical reality.
The Question of Deleuzes Neo-Leibnizianism 57
next interval, which marks a change in the direction and velocity of the moving body.14
However, rather than marking a change in direction and velocity of the moving body,
the essential singularity brings unity to the variables of the composite function, which
correspond to the compossible predicates contained in the concept of the subject, inso-
far as it determines the form of a solution curve in its immediate neighbourhood by
acting as an attractor for the trajectory of the variables that jump across its domain.
According to this Neo-Leibnizian account, in the sense perception of finite minds,
the corporeal world still appears immediately as only finitely complex and piecewise
continuous, and matter only appears to be continuous because our imperfect percep-
tual apparatus, which is differential in nature, obscures the minute perceptions of the
divisions which actually separate the parts of bodies. However, the relations of motion
that are exhibited between parts of matter that are more or less perceived in perceptual
experience are no longer predetermined according to the pre-established harmony nor
are they resolved into leaps in relation to the impulses of monads, determined by pri-
mary active force. Instead, motion can actually be considered to be the result of the
impact of bodies upon one another and is explained by mechanics. And the jumps
of variables in relation to essential singularities, which displace the leaps in relation
to impulses of monads, no longer determine the forces of motion, but rather deter-
mine the transformations of individuals to different levels or degrees of individuation.
The concept of individuation that is being used here is that developed by Deleuze in
relation to Spinoza. The essential singularities take on the role of the dominant monads
as unities. Any particular degrees of individuation appear immediately as only finitely
complex and piecewise continuous, though upon closer scrutiny they are determined
to be composed of a multiplicity of degrees of individuation and thus to be indefinitely
complex and fractal in structure. Rather than motion exhibiting a fractal structure, it
is the multiplicity of degrees of individuation that now exhibits fractal structure, that
is, the complexity of individuation, which consists of a mapping of essential singulari-
ties, exhibits fractal structure. Of course, the resolution of the jumps of variables in
relation to essential singularities, or of the compossible propositions in the concept of
the individual or monad, because no longer predetermined, is far from complete. It is
rather open ended, and the logical possibilities of all incompossible worlds are now
real possibilities, all of which have the potential to be actualized by essential singulari-
ties, or individuated, as the composite functions characteristic of states of the current
world.15
The reconstruction of Leibnizs metaphysics that Deleuze provides in The Fold draws
upon not only the mathematics developed by Leibniz but also upon developments in
mathematics made by a number of Leibnizs contemporaries and a number of subse-
quent developments in mathematics. Deleuze then retrospectively maps these devel-
opments back onto the structure of Leibnizs metaphysics in order to bring together
the different aspects of Leibnizs metaphysics with the variety of mathematical themes
that run throughout his work. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explication of
Leibnizs metaphysics, and it is this account that subtends the entire text of the Fold.
It is these aspects of Deleuzes project in The Fold that represent the new Baroque
and Neo-Leibnizianism (1993: 136) that Deleuze has explored elsewhere in his body
of work and that structures the alternative normative framework developed in his
The Question of Deleuzes Neo-Leibnizianism 61
hilosophy, notably in Chapters 1 and 4 of Difference and Repetition (1994) and in the
p
ninth and the sixteenth series of the Logic of Sense (1990b), where Deleuze explicates
his Neo-Leibnizian account of the problematic and his account of the genesis of the
individual.
Notes
1 Deleuze actually extracts philosophical problematics from the history of p hilosophy
and then redeploys them either in relation to one another or in relation to
mathematical problematics, or in relation to problematics extracted from other
discourses, to create new concepts, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari in
What Is Philosophy? (1994), is the task of philosophy.
2 Levy 2003, p. 413. Levy cites Deleuze (1993, p. 16) as one of the commentators to
have picked up on the idea of fractal structure to describe the folding of matter in
Leibnizs metaphysics.
3 See Hallward 2003, p. 382; Rajchman 1997, p. 116 and Simont 2003, p. 42.
4 Letter to Simon Foucher (1693), Leibniz 1965, I, pp. 41516.
5 For a discussion of the Leibnizian fictional or syncategorematic definition of the
infinitesimal, see Jessup 2008, 21534.
6 A summary of which appears in Leibnizs Monadology, 1714 (Leibniz 1991,
pp.6881).
7 Huygens in his 1656 study De Motu corporum ex percussione (On the Motion of
Bodies by Percussion), parts of which were published in1669. Newton also handles
accelerated motion in essentially this way in the Principia (1687).
8 See Lakhtakia etal. 353.
9 Deleuze, sur Leibniz, 29 April.
10 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that for eachworld, a series which
converges around a distinctive point [singularity] is capable of being continued inall
directions in other series converging around other points, while the incompossibility
of worlds, by contrast, is defined by the juxtaposition of points which would make
the resultant series diverge (Deleuze, 1994: 48).
11 For further discussion of Deleuzes interpretation of the difference between compos-
sibility and incompossibility, see Duffy, 2010.
12 For further discussion of Deleuzes engagement with Poincars theory of
automorphic functions, see Duffy, 2006b.
13 See Deleuze 1994, p. 49, where Deleuze characterizes the limitations of the c oncept
of convergence in Leibnizs philosophy.
14 The jump of the variable across the domain of discontinuity also corresponds to the
leap that Deleuze refers to in Expressionism in Philosophy (1990a) when an adequate
idea of the joyful passive affection is formed (283). It characterizes the leap from
inadequate to adequate ideas, from joyful passive affections to active joys, from
passions to actions. For a further explication of the correspondence between the
jump and the leap in Deleuzes engagement with Spinoza, see Duffy 2006a, 15863,
1857.
15 Further developments of this framework in the history of mathematics can be traced
through the nineteenth century, particularly in the work of Gauss and Riemann,
which then feed into the developments of twentieth-century physics.
62 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
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.(1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (translated by T. Conley). Minneapolis:
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.(1994), Difference and repetition (translated by P. Patton). London: Athlone Press.
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Part Two
Pas des ides justes; juste des ides! Deleuze was fond of this plea of Godard. Beginning
with the Heideggerian provocation that we do not yet know how to think; identify-
ing the representational and recognitive kernel of the dogmatic image of thought with
the will to subsume the new under the old; welcoming the encounter with the new
case and holding the jolt with which the unexpected impacts on our faculties turning
them into a necessary condition for creativity all these are apt to make Godards wish
feel like a breath of fresh air coming from the backyard. But this should not make us
forget that Deleuzes appreciation of Godard is a road sign only upon a long itiner-
ary that leads to the re-appropriation of Spinozas enigmatic notion of the spiritual
automaton. Without this re-appropriation, the begging for juste des ides could very
well be a moment in the logic of discovery, but it cannot be a sufficient condition in it
nor could it be of much relevance to the logic and the grammar of confirmation. Steven
Shaviro and I do agree when he writes that, unlike Kants stance which is legislative
and juridical because it seeks to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses of reason,
Deleuze seeks rather to have done with the judgment of God (Shaviro, 2009: 11).
Iagree with him when he writes that Deleuzes criterion is constructivist rather than
juridical, concerned with pushing forces to the limits of what they can do, rather than
with evaluating their legitimacy (2009: 11). But I do not think that turning our back
on the juridical model means that we should abandon every quest for validation as
well. We like to think that we have long given up the sterile debates that the distinction
between the logic of discovery and the logic of confirmation used to elicit, at the time
of positivist and crypto-positivist sympathizers, marching to the tune of protocol sen-
tences and irreducible verities. But I doubt that having rid ourselves of those agendas
justifies the catachresis built into the statement that follows: The question we should
be asking is not: How can we establish valid criteria and critical standards? But rather:
How can we get away from such criteria and standards, which work only to block inno-
vation and change? (Shaviro, 2009: 16) As far as I am concerned, I do not believe that
Deleuze was uninterested in the relationship between discovery and confirmation. On
the contrary, I think that he chose to re-situate it inside the new image of thought that
he was busy defending, and that, in doing this, he was capable of reaching conclusions
66 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
every bit as rigorous as some of those who faced the problem before him had reached.
I will try then to show in this chapter that the creativity that Deleuze championed has
confirmation as one of the conditions of its success. To show this will require that we
give equal place of honour to the two complementary stances that Deleuze held to be
prerequisites to the act of creation: a stance, reminiscent of Paul Feyerabends, which
demands from the hero of creation an anarchic posture in front of the doxa and the
clichs of the dominant, dogmatic method; but also another moment, where it makes
no difference whether we speak of creation or whether we speak of discovery, because
at this point the old promise of veritas index sui is being kept, thanks to the spiritual
automaton that is, to a process without subject that adjudicates without subsuming
under well-worn concepts and without involving decisions or choice. There are many
commentaries on Deleuzes claim that creativity and thought depends on the formula-
tion of problems and that solutions of problems abides in their more and more refined
and better and better determined reformulations. But not enough has been done to
explain what it means (or what it takes) to come up with a more refined and a better
determined formulation of a problem.
Now, what do I mean by validation? I mean a process at the end of which epistemic
and in some cases ethical constraints placed upon the concepts we construct succeed
in reflecting the constraints inscribed in the rhythms and the articulations of the real.
It is true that a constructivist agenda cannot tolerate tribunals of reason. But it is not
creating tribunals of reason to suggest that concepts and the real have rhythms of their
own that must be respected nor is it falling back onto a logic of representation to ask
that our mapping of the real take into consideration the epistemic and ethical norms.
After all, creativity and the quest for the new have consequences, and not all of them
are worth shouldering.
In this chapter, I will first explore the shortcomings of theories of creativity from
which the demand for validation has been either altogether absent or, in my opinion,
insufficiently supported. This exploration will undertake (with the help of Laurent de
Sutter and Alexandre Lefebvre) a diagnostic excavation in the domain of jurispru-
dence. In the sequence, I will argue that, in Deleuzes work, it is the notion of the
spiritual automaton that prevents the disjunction of discovery and confirmation from
setting in, and saves the thinker from the looming decisionism of the incantation, pas
des ides justes, juste des ides. Specifically, in the domain of jurisprudence, I will argue,
it is the notion of the spiritual automaton that sustains the conviction that validation is
possible, that is, that adjudications are correct when the law evoked fits the case and
does, in some sense, justice to it and incorrect whenever it does not fit in and does not
do justice to it. I will conclude the chapter with a defence of my belief that creativity
in Deleuze occurs in the nexus of two inclusive disjunctive series the series of (a
Feyerabend-like) subversion and the series of perversity (an epistemology without self
and other).
I begin with the diagnostic excavation. The last three years have witnessed the
publication of two books on Deleuze and jurisprudence two very different books in
terms of ambitions and conclusions. Laurent de Sutters Deleuze: La Pratique du droit,
published in2009 in the series Le Bien Commun of Les Editions Michalon, defiantly
proclaimed that Deleuzes philosophy of Right has nothing to offer the jurist other
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 67
than sending her back to work with a clear conscience jurisprudence has no need for
philosophy to flourish. On the other side of the Atlantic, Alexandre Lefebvres The Image
of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza, a book published in 2008 in the series Cultural
Memory in the Present of Stanford University Press, sets out to demonstrate that the
tools that Deleuze made available to us suffice to articulate an ontological pragmatism
that would free jurisprudence from the dogmatic image of Law and Right that Holds
it in its grips. The book suggests that this liberation does not require the giving up
of judgement altogether, as a certain reading of the pour en finir avec le jugement de
Dieu prompts us to do. Truth to tell, Lefebvre warns his readers not to take his book
as a commentary on Deleuzes reflections on jurisprudence. He and de Sutter agree
that Deleuze himself had very little to say that a philosophy of Right should hasten to
appropriate. His text, Lefebvre tells us, is not a book on Deleuze but rather a book with
Deleuze.
(I confess here that my choice to discuss the problem of validation with reference to
jurisprudence is based and I have argued for this elsewhere (Boundas, 2006: 215)
on my being intrigued by Deleuzes sudden shift of focus to jurisprudence whenever
the discussion veers in the direction of law, rights and politics. I have equal respect for
the work of Philippe Mengue and Paul Patton on the subject of Deleuze and politics.
However, instead of thinking of these two as inconsistent with each other, I hold the
view that Mengues critique and Pattons clinic can be reconciled, provided that the
simultaneous presence of two attitudes in Deleuzes work subversion and perver-
sity be properly understood, co-ordinated, and made the key to our assessment of
Deleuzes complex position on the political the way that the late Franois Zourabich-
vili once suggested (Zourabichvili, 1998: 33557).
De Sutters book attributes to Deleuzes critique of Law and to his interest in juris-
prudence the intention to show the fly the way out of the bottle: librer le Droit de la
philosophie! (2009: 68) In its first part the part of the critique de Sutter discusses
Deleuzes claim that the Law is capable of being thought only comically. Whether with
the classical image of Law that positions the Law between a higher principle the
Good its foundation, and its consequences the Best the reason for our obedi-
ence; or whether with the Kantian modern image, which subordinates the Good to
the form of the Law and makes the consequences of our actions irrelevant to their
moral value, but also irrelevant to our knowing whether obedience of the law is or is
not for the Best whether, I say, with the classical or with the modern image, the Law
is being approached in the spirit of comedy (2009: 19). Even those who undertake
the critique of these images do so in the spirit of comedy. The disciples of Socrates,
who laughed when the verdict of his trial was read (2009: 223); De Sade, who, in
opting for the principle of Evil instead, rebuilt the throne of the higher principle that
Kant had demolished (2009: 279); Sacher-Masoch, who, with his strictly enforceable
contracts, rehabilitated the Best in the consequences of our obeying the Law (2009:
2931); Kafka, who refuted the claim that the Law is unknowable because of its tran-
scendence, and showed instead that its unknowability is the result of its being always
already elsewhere (in the office next door). In this way, Kafka re-established the inno-
cence of the Law by lifting the spectre of guilt that had become the horizon of the
Kantian imperative (2009: 406). And, finally, Bartleby whose negativism and slapstick
68 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
humour shows that the Law collapses on its own accord and transforms the critique
of the Law into a paradoxical, positive indifference (2009: 4750). With all these, the
Law whether founded or criticized is founded and criticized in irony and humour,
which, of course, are both figures of the comic. And, beyond these figures perhaps,
beyond the realm of critique de Sutter delights in the quick step of the jeunes filles of
Prousts that no longer criticize but, rather, help and save us (2009: 5961).
To be sure, there must be a counterweight to criticism if the latter is not to become
total and, for Deleuze, this counterweight is jurisprudence. The second half of de
Sutters book, therefore, moves from the critique of Law to the clinic of Right (2009:
63106). Rather than focus on the application of Law and on legal judgements in the
making, it discusses Deleuzes views on the creation of Law. Following a Humean lead,
de Sutter claims that legislation consists in the construction of a net (maille) a net
which does not bear the signature of anyone in particular. Against the old image of
Law, which presumes that legislation regulates the cases that can be subsumed under
it, and that its raison d tre is the institution of a generalized pastoral care, the making
of the law, according to de Sutter, invents and re-invents relations between individuals,
societies and institutions (2009: 967). Laws and institutions, instead of being limiting
or organizing, are positive tools they expand the way rhizomes do. The method of
the law-maker is the association, because her objective is the institution and expansion
of relations and connections among things and beings. The worth of a legal precept is
established by its ability to blend with other already existing relations, by producing
something new. Jurisprudence is, therefore, the taxonomy of cases and grows through
the prolongation of singularities to the vicinity of other singularities (2009: 10001).
Being indifferent to laws, to principles of justice and to institutions, jurisprudence,
writes de Sutter, gives account to life onlywhose juridical expression it is (2009:
101). Were we to search for principles, the principles of jurisprudence that we will
find would be plastic mobile, is the word of Paul Patton (Patton, 2010: 1940) no
broader than what they condition. They will be transformed according to what they
condition and they will be determined by what they determine.
At this point, de Sutter comes with the mot d ordre that carries the reason for
Deleuzes summoning up jurisprudence to save the honour of thought. Il faut librer
le droit de la loi, cest dire de la philosophie (2009: 68). The Kantian emancipation of
Right from the Good has made possible the axiomatization of Law: the coding made
by the custom and the overcoding made by the Despot are no longer the grounds of
our obedience and respect for the Law. But, on the other hand, the transition of our
societies from discipline to control secrete a Kafkaesque image of Law and Right and
usher in a crisis of axiomatization: The table of axioms cannot be made complete and,
as we know, an incomplete table of axioms provides no guarantee against the possibil-
ity that the set may turn inconsistent, as new axioms are being added to it.
Nothing in this bold critique, de Sutter repeats, is meant to be of any use to the
legislator except in strengthening him or her resolve to keep jurisprudence away
from philosophy. Deleuze does not intend to praise or blame courts and tribunals
because sanctions and norms are alien to jurisprudence (de Sutter, 2003). Elsewhere,
de Sutter will write: Far from being a mere practice of application, interpreta-
tion, or even creation of rules and norms, the practice of law ... is a practice of
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 69
invisible and that they are invisible because only conceptual differences can be cogni-
tively accounted for: difference is always a difference between concepts (2008: 5962).
But then, given these three postulates, the dogmatic image of Law leads inescapably to
the conclusion that genuine novelty and creativity cannot be seriously entertained.
The task then that Lefebvre chooses for himself is the study of the conditions for the
making of legal judgements. Faced with a legal case requiring adjudication, what is the
role of the judge? How is the law evoked in order to handle the case? Does the applica-
tion of pre-existing laws to the case make no difference to these laws? Or does the act of
adjudication affect the system of the Law? Such questions, of course, in the opinion of
de Sutter, miss the whole point of Deleuzes turn to jurisprudence, which has nothing,
according to him, to do with judges and courts and everything to do with speculative
jurisprudence (whatever this may be) and with the innocence of the Law (le droit) in
its taxonomic and associationist coordination of cases.
As I said already, according to Lefebvre, Deleuzes critique of Law and of the dis-
course on human rights targets the dogmatic image of adjudication that insists on the
subsumption of cases under pre-existing rules. A case only falls under the law once
the law speaks of it (Nancy, 2003: 156; quoted in Lefebvre, 2008: 13). To the dogmatic
image of subsumptive adjudication, Deleuze juxtaposes jurisprudence because juris-
prudence, as he sees it, in its encounters with new cases and new litigations, creates
law. The logic of encounters cannot be accommodated inside the model of recogni-
tion because encounters work as stimuli for the generation and formulation of prob-
lems, which will be singular, transcendental and means of invention and creativity. Far
from subsuming cases under rules, a judge, confronted with a case, must formulate a
problem, and create concepts without which the adjudication of the encounter is not
possible. Pre-existing laws are modified in the encounter in order to turn what is new
into an intelligible legal case (2008: 21011). Deleuzes claim that a problem is coming
closer to its solution the more it gets to be determined means that adjudication is not a
solution like an answer to a ready-made problem; it means that solutions give a sense,
that is, determination, direction, specificity and meaning to the problem that makes
them pertinent. Problems are the transcendental condition for ... judgments that are
not straightforward application of rules (2008: 213).
All these claims, however, would be empty and ungrounded were it not for Deleuzes
skilful appropriation of Bergsons theory of perception and judgement. That memory is
the sine qua non of perception to the point that Bergson was prompted to say that the
primary function of perception is to motivate the manifestation of memory makes
sense if our philosophical anthropology adopts a praxiological point of view. If action
and response to the case we encounter is what we want, then either we recognize the
case as unproblematic and familiar, in which case we select appropriate habits and
recollections in order to act or, in case of encounters we do not recognize, that is, in
cases for which we have no ready-made habit or recollections, the search for the con-
struction and for making intelligible of the new will be the task that we have to under-
take. Bergsons correlation of the familiar with the inattentive and the unfamiliar with
theattentive follows from these observations. Familiar encounters call forth inattentive
perceptions and judgements; unfamiliar encounters, on the other hand, require atten-
tive perceptions and judgements (2008: 16290, passim). The latter disrupt recognition
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 71
between the real object and the object of knowledge and institutes a break with the
real object, whether sensible, historical or empirical in order to constitute a distinct
object of theory. But I choose this moment to remind the reader of a thesis that we omit
in our discussions a nearly forgotten today theory that Karl Popper launched in the
1960s the theory of the third world which I find instructive both in its mistakes and
in its strong points (Popper, 1972: 10690).
Popper, in his quest for knowledge without a knowing subject, was led to distin-
guish between a world of physical objects and states, a world of mental states and a
third world a world of objective contents of thought especially, as he put it, of
scientific and poetic thoughts or of works of art. I quote here a passage from his Epis-
temology without a Knowing Subject (Popper, 1972: 10652)
Among the inmates of my third world are, more especially, theoretical systems;
butinmates just as important are problems and problem situations. And I will argue
that the most important inmates of this world are critical arguments, and what
may be called in analogy to a physical state or a state of consciousness the state
of a discussion or the state of a critical argument; and of course, the contents of
journals, books and libraries. (1972: 107)
I do not think that Popper intended this list of his inmates to be exhaustive, but what
is intriguing is that he clearly thought that if one wanted to avoid the conundrums of
intensional languages and the sterile attempts to settle the debates over representation
and recognition through an appeal to a real that would be theory-independent, one
needs to make room for a third world that is both man-made and autonomous and,
therefore, subject to history and change.
There are of course glaring differences between Poppers third world and Bergson
and Deleuzes virtual. Besides the unfortunate connotations of the expression third
world and its proximity to the out of this world expression that James Williams has
recently wished to exorcise (Williams, 2008), Poppers hypothesis is proposed from
within the domain of epistemology. Although it is important that what it seeks to
establish is knowledge without a subject, the third world is man-made and has a his-
tory that is the result of this fact. That it is anchored in epistemology is shown in Pop-
pers concession that I give here in quotations: I do admit that in order to belong to the
third world of objective knowledge, a book should in principle or virtually be capa-
ble of being grasped (or deciphered, or understood, or known) by somebody (1972:
116). By contrast, Deleuzes virtual, Franois Zourabichvilis strictures notwithstanding
(Zourabichvili, 2004: 610), is rising in the domain of ontology. It is not man-made (or
it is not always man-made) and its history and becoming encompass the human ani-
mal, without positioning it as motor-engine. Moreover, the inmates of Poppers third
world are the products or the not-known by-products of the inmates of the second
world mental acts or states of consciousness. They are, therefore, virtual replicas of
noemata. On the other hand, Deleuzes virtual problem-setting does not resemble the
solutions in which it is actualized. From the point of view of Bergson and Deleuze, it is
in bad taste to duplicate explananda, to repeat them and inscribe them in the line that
was supposed to carry the explanans and calling then this slight of hand an explana-
tion. Finally, Poppers inmates are propositional and their implicatur is one of logical
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 73
are universally arrived at or that one specific component necessarily leads to another
specific component for all judges. We mean that the legal concept is autopoietic
(2008:217).
Now, the arrival of the spiritual automaton on the scene raises a number of ques-
tions. If it were possible to codify and publish all the laws that have been produced
throughout our entire history, still we would not have produced the virtual assemblage
of laws. The totality of the actual actualized and to be actualized laws is not identical
with the virtual system of the law. The spiritual automaton, therefore, being the site of
another thought, is not an agent enjoying a God-like overview of the actual whole. But
what could then be? Ronald Bogue helps move the discussion:
The unusual term spiritual automaton Deleuze takes from Spinoza, who On the
Improvement of the Understanding argues that the soul, like the body, obeys laws
of cause and effect, and is, as it were, an immaterial automaton. Spinozas point
is that the mind cannot be exempt from the law of causality, and that the proper
formation and connection of our ideas must follow a necessity equal to that of
physical laws ... Deleuze adopts the term initially to stress the involuntary nature
of thoughts response to the moving image ... (But) when {he} turns to the modern
cinema and the time-image, he uses the term to suggest as well that the thought
aroused by the image is like that of an alien thinker within, another as remote from
our ordinary human world as a wondering mummy or a robotic machine. (Bogue,
2003: 1667)
It follows, therefore, that when Spinoza places the mind under the law of cause and
effect, he offers it a direction in its quest for truth. The adequate ideas that the mind
searches for are those ideas whose cause(s) are known. A system of adequate ideas is
then (in principle) capable of being assembled, by following the thread of cause and
effect. Once adequate ideas occupy a proportionately larger amount of the mind than
the ideas of the imagination, it is possible to infer that the minds progress is automatic;
for nothing can stop it for knowing still more and better. The ordo geometricus of Spino-
zas Ethics is not a whimsical choice or a mere pedagogical device chosen to impress
the mentally undisciplined. It is a demonstration that the laws of physics (body) and
the laws of logic (mind) work in tandem; in other words, that being and thinking are
identical in the incessant actualization of the virtual. Their identity is made clear when
and only when the mind begins to grasp adequate ideas in a systematic way or when it
begins to discern virtual processes in the act of being actualized. I think, therefore, that
I can conclude that the presence of the spiritual automaton in Deleuzes philosophy is
meant to mark the road that leads from the logic of discovery the logic of encounters
to the logic of confirmation the logic of adequate ideas. Godards plea can still serve
to remind us that we have not yet been thinking, but it can now be completed: juste des
ides pour que des ides adquates soient engendres dans la pense!
But we must prevent hasty impressions from turning misleading. Unlike Spinozas
one substance, the Deleuzian virtual is an open whole. The whole is open, because it
cannot be given all at once: it constantly gives rise to the new. We are then in a position
to understand why the notion of the perfect, actual archive of laws, whether actualized
or yet to be actualized, cannot even be formulated as a working hypothesis: there can
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 75
be no such an archive in a theory that views time as duration. Time, as Bergson said,
is invention or it is nothing at all. Creativity is not possible as long as the future can be
calculated from elements of the present. Every adjudication actualizes a virtual law
which means that, in being actualized, the law is being modified to fit the encountered
situation. The modification impacts on the actual assemblage of the law (which, with-
out it, would have acted on its tendency to close upon itself) and transforms it. But
the fact remains: The concept, spiritual automaton, in the context of the open whole,
operates by giving direction to the adjudicating mind in its process of discovery a
direction that grounds and sustains confirmatory consistency.
Till now, I dealt with the problem of confirmation in its epistemological dimension.
But there is an ethical side to confirmation as well. Let us suppose that the reason for
the appeal to the legal virtual has been made clear and that the advantages accruing to
the jurist for reshaping it and making it suitable to the encounter and the case are there
for all to see. We can still ask: does this theory of adjudication permit the distinction
that must be made between correct and incorrect adjudications? Is the confirmatory
consistency, obtained thanks to the operation of the spiritual automaton, sufficient to
also ground and sustain the ethical probity of the adjudication? What would prevent
Deleuzes call to a creative jurisprudence from turning into an irresponsible fantasy
sanctioning global violence? What would it prevent a creative jurisprudence of disen-
franchisements and show trials? (Lefebvre, 2008: 87). Is this question that expresses
a suspicion legitimate when it is brought to bear on Deleuzes work? I think that it is,
and I will try to show it with the help of an argument that Juan Luis Gastaldi worked
out in the recent publication of his essay La Politique avant l tre. Deleuze, ontologie
et politique (2009).
Gastaldis essay begins with Kant claiming that politics makes sense only if it is sub-
jected to morality. Kants political ontology maintains, as we know, that the will must
be free in order to possess the moral credentials that make the domain of politics real.
Against this Kantian claim, Gastaldi argues, Deleuzes endeavour attempts to emanci-
pate politics from morality. Deleuzes political ontology, Gastaldi points out correctly,
has no place for the free will hypothesis. The will is not free a priori. But it can become
free, provided that it creates its own freedom. Creation is not possible without free-
dom, not because freedom is the condition of creation, but rather because it is its effect
(2009: 63). Deleuzes project, therefore, is to think of a becoming free, without presup-
posing that the will is always already free. His solution, according to Gastaldi, lies in
an ingenious reformulation of Kants intersection of the two causalities the causality
of nature and the causality of freedom, and the key to this reformulation is Deleuzes
complex notion of different/ciation, which presides over the distinction between recip-
rocal determination and complete determination. And Gastaldi concludes his essay as
follows: That desire, as a principle of creation is machined, means that it is not free or
spontaneous, but rather determined by the situations inside which desire finds itself
inextricably placed. However, that the machines are desiring machines means that the
situations determine us only to desire and to create something new, which does not yet
exist in these situations (2009: 71). The essence of politics, therefore, would not be in
the application of the law, the multiplication of discourses on human rights, or in the
search for principles of freedom and justice, but rather in the analysis and production
76 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
of actual assemblages for the sake of new situations. It is the liberation of politics from
morality that leads to jurisprudence, to the way it creates law, and makes relations
between people and things grow through associative thinking and techniques (2009:
72). If the task is to make free, the Deleuzian sage is the one with the cool head, the one
with the requisite distance from the noisy doxa and the space necessary for the creation
of concepts and the summoning of the people to come.
I come back now to Lefebvres question: What would prevent Deleuzes call to a
creative jurisprudence from turning into an irresponsible fantasy sanctioning glo-
bal violence? What would it prevent a creative jurisprudence of disenfranchisements
and show trials? (2008: 87). Gastaldis de-moralization of Deleuzes politics makes
the question even more topical and urgent. Lefebvre has at least tried to give an
answer to his own question although initially the answer does not seem all that
relevant. To see, he writes, that judgment is, under certain conditions, necessarily
creative undermines evaluating this fact as either good or evil (2008: 253). To be fair
to him, he does go on to write: How creativity is or is not exercised can certainly
give rise to good or bad judgments.... but, given the conditions of adjudication,
criticism or praise of its creativity per se is senseless (2008: 253). But, still, the dis-
tinction between good and bad judgements cannot be left to an afterthought. And in
order not to leave it as an afterthought, Lefebvre tries again: Although the theme of
prudence is not one usually associated with Deleuze, it is one of his most recurrent
themes ... No doubt experimentation must be prudent. [But] what the limit might
be is unclear ... The limits of and the need for prudence can be judged only by the
problems to which they are internal (2008: 237, 238). Unfortunately, it seems to me,
Lefebvres optimism is rather premature. Prudence used to be the practical virtue of
the phronimos the man (yes, lamentably, the man) of practical wisdom the man
supposed to flourish inside the old image of thought, where the Good was still the
voice from up high. Is an appeal to prudence still possible? Is it sufficient to do the
job? Whether it is or it is not, I will leave for another occasion. I will also leave for
another occasion the question as to whether or not Deleuze can consistently be the
post-Kantian philosopher for whom the Good is subordinate to the Right, while still
tapping the resources of a Spinozist ethic of joy. Joy, after all, strikes me as one of the
names of the Good.
Of course, I do not dispute the presence of prudential considerations in Deleuzes
work. On the contrary, prudence, whether grounded or ungrounded, is the consti-
tutive element of Deleuzes attitude that Franois Zourabichvili and Jrmie Valentin
have registered under perversity (Zourabichvili, 1998; Valentin, 2004). An inclusive
disjunction runs through Deleuzes politics and, perhaps, through his entire work
subversion or perversity, and both at once a disjunction that overlaps, without being
identical with, his two postures, critique and clinic. Subversive tendencies are easier to
spot in his work and also in his work with Flix Guattari. They tend to cluster around
the concepts minority/majority and nomad/sedentary, developed in A Thousand
Plateaus in the attempts to summon the forces that will stand against the States cap-
turing tendencies. The notion, subversion, involves minor, transformative forces (of
life, politics, thought or artistic creation) and designates lines of flight away from the
sedentarism and the stratification so dear to majorities.
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 77
ocuments (2010: 181, 182). Patton does not overlook Deleuzes critique of doxa, but
d
he thinks that the latters anti-doxological position can be reconciled with the tenets of
an enlightened democratic liberalism, if a distinction is made between the day-to-day
opinions of citizens ... and the considered opinions of a given people on fundamental
principles of right (2010: 196).
From my vantage point, jurisprudence is neither innocent nor guilty; it has every-
thing to do with norms and constraints, and that this is so, even if we were to follow
a Humean lead and to conclude that the Laws primary task is to extend relations and
associations. Indeed, jurisprudence has a lot to teach us philosophers, not because it
shows us how to get rid of judgement it does not and not because its mobile con-
cepts are best suited to the irreducible singularity of all legal cases (they are not) but
rather because it foregrounds the question of confirmation, strengthens our resolve
to get it right, because judicial errors, unlike questions of taste, cost lives and sets the
spiritual automata that we are in search of open wholes of virtual legal pasts in the act
of being actualized. Of course, my conclusion is only sketchy here. Whether jurispru-
dence is innocent or guilty will take a careful re-reading and a subtle deconstruction
of Bruno Latours impressive work, The Making of the Law (2009), whose ethnographic
study of the French Conseil d Etat keeps inspiring the construction of a jurisprudence
as it should be de Sutter calls it, speculative jurisprudence (2009). Wanting to define
law by means of rules writes Latour,
is like reducing science to concepts. Let us begin law at the beginning, that is to
say, at the stamps, elastic bands, paperclips and other office paraphernalia which
are the indispensable tools of cases. Jurists always speak of texts, but rarely of their
materiality. It is to this materiality that we must apply ourselves. (2009: 72)
To which, I say: Indeed! Lets apply ourselves to materiality it is high time! But let us
not jump to the conclusion that
[t]here is nothing to know about law. There are only things to do. ... As a word,
law is without any content; without any knowable content ... . What is impor-
tant with the word ... . is the effect of it ... The legal effect is not a mere effect of
language. It is not a type of effect among others ... The word law designates the
moment when a word has an effect ... . (de Sutter, 2003)
To this, I retort: Let us not jump to the conclusion before we spend some time analys-
ing the sense of the word law as in the rule of law the sense that gives law content
and knowability: The world defined by the rule of law is not a world without stand-
ards. De-moralizing the law pour en finir avec le jugement may look like a good idea if
what we want is to avoid the sterile dialectics of good and bad conscience. But this does
not require that we get rid of all norms and standards. The de-moralized law, which,
supposedly, can do without norms of justice and fairness, is still subject to standards
and norms, every bit as rigorous as the ones we tried to leave behind. Here is a tenta-
tive, and therefore, incomplete list of these constraints a list that I put together with
the help of the book of Michael Neumann, The Rule of Law: Avoidability laws must
impose constraints only if these constraints can be avoided when the law is followed.
Encounters, Creativity and Spiritual Automata 79
Feasibility Ought implies can. Provability show that the requirements of the law
have or have not been met. Public observability everyone should be able to under-
stand what the law means. Accuracy and effectiveness a sufficient number of violators
(and sometimes innocent ones) must be apprehended and punished for the rule of law
to be respected. These look like epistemic norms, limiting the imposed constraints to
knowable and avoidable obligations. But they are normative conditions, the absence
of which would invalidate the law, and would make jurisprudence, monstrous (51).
Furthermore, their impact on and implications for ethics is not hard to discern.
I have tried, in this chapter, to register my dissatisfaction with readings of Deleuze
that, in the name of creativity, seem to celebrate associative bricolage and normative
anarchy. I welcomed attempts to demonstrate that, with Deleuzian resources, one is
able to build a jurisprudence that avoids the dogmatic image of Law and sustains adju-
dication, creative (of Law) and open to epistemic and ethical validation. If we grant
Zourabichvilis point that Deleuzes stance on norms and normativity is best articulated
in terms of the inclusive disjunction, subversion and perversity, then any attempt to
over-value one of the disjuncts, at the expense of the other, will be facing us with a
choice between decisionism (judicial activism) or nihilism (ne faire rien). If perversity
is the absence of Other and Self from the world in which case the agent of adjudication
would be none other than the eternally returning spiritual automaton, then the normed
schematism of cases facing adjudication will be able to exhibit the fitness required by
our legitimate expectations for epistemic validation. However, the extension of this
epistemic validation in the direction of ethical justesse will require, in the context of
ongoing experimentation, a more potent theory of prudence (akin to the Aristotelian
phronesis), the centrality of which is not, I think, all that obvious in Deleuzes work.
References
Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge.
Boundas, C. V. (2006), Deleuze and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense (translated by M. Lester and C. Stivale, edited by
C.V. Boundas). New York: Columbia University Press.
.(1992), L puis, in S. Beckett, Quad et autres pices pour la tlvision; suivi de Lpuis
par Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Les ditions de Minuit.
.(2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (translated by D. W. Smith). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1977), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane). New York: Viking Press.
.(1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translated by B. Massumi).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987), Dialogues (translated by H. Tomlinson and
B.Habberjam). New York: Columbia University Press.
Latour, B. (2009), The Making of the Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d tat. London:
Polity.
Lefebvre, A. (2008), The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
80 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Norm Wars
Claire Colebrook
It might seem at first glance that Gilles Deleuze would be the anti-normative theo-
rist par excellence and that we could turn to his work to add rigour to a widespread
and increasingly intense affirmation of seemingly counter-normative concepts such
as immanence, affect and performativity. I will argue that these concepts, however,
have two sides: one is anti-normative, and therefore defined against (and within the
same terrain as) normatively. The other side of these concepts is positive and opens
out a thought of life as positive force defined against the critique of values. These reac-
tive modes of defining anti-normativity are subjectivist in Heideggers sense: they posit
some ground from which all relations emerge (and, further, in rejecting Descartes sub-
ject of mental substance they posit some other ultimate subject such as life, affect,
embodiment or immanence) (Heidegger, 1967). Deleuzes concepts of immanence,
affect and act or fiat (rather than performativity) are I will argue composed on
another plane, from a different style of problem.1
This has direct consequences for disciplines and disciplinarity. If it were the case
that one might appeal to some generative ground such as life from which rela-
tions would emerge, then knowledge would be a single field, and may enjoy something
like interdisciplinarity, which would encompass all the different but conversant and
convergent ways in which life appears. Seeming disciplinary divergence such as lit-
erary theorists or art critics tendencies to treat works of art as detached from life, or
philosophys approach to logic as having some Platonic reality, or the scientists disen-
chantment and reification of life could all be remedied by an acknowledgement of the
genesis and emergence of all these facultys from one self-furthering life. Habermas,
the great theorist of inescapable normativity, has insisted that we need some reflec-
tive practice such as critical philosophy that locates and negotiates the knowledge
practices of various lifeworlds:
The difference between lifeworld and communicative action is not taken back in
any unity; it is even deepened to the extent that the reproduction of the lifeworld is
no longer merely routed through the medium of action oriented toward reaching
understanding, but is saddled on the interpretive performances of its agents. To
the degree that yes/no decisions that sustain the communicative practice of every-
day life do not derive from an ascribed normative consensus but emerge from the
82 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
No discipline should be a world unto itself, rigidly imposing its field upon life. The task
of the disciplines, and especially the humanities, today would lie in just this ideal, but
not actuality of, convergence. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) focus on the
incommensurable and divergent nature of the faculties lacking anything like a sensus
communis, good sense, common sense, lifeworld or lived. The concepts created by
philosophy have a thought and consistency of their own and are responses to problems
that take hold of and do violence to thinking. Works of art manage (at least in part)
to tear something like affects from affections: as though the lived affection were the
expression of a pure power or quality. Scientific functions are definitely not those of the
lived, but have success insofar as they formulate new observers that would allow for a
consistency and truth that is certainly not that of human experience:
With its concepts, philosophy brings forth events. Art erects monuments with
its sensations. Science constructs states of affairs with its functions. A rich tis-
sue of correspondences can be established between the planes. But the network
has its culminating points, where sensation itself becomes sensation of concept or
function, where the concept becomes concept of the concept or of sensation, and
where the function becomes function of sensation or concept. And none of these
elements can appear without the other being still to come, still indeterminate or
unknown. Each created element on a plane calls on other heterogeneous elements,
which are still to be created on other planes: thought as heterogenesis. (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1994: 199)
Certainly, then, there would be no distinction between the hard world of scientific
facts and the norm-constitutive or meaning-productive humanities. Nor would there
be some imprisoning and reactively nihilist sense that the sciences, too, are norma-
tive or value-producing, and that beyond normativity there only exists some reality
or lifethat is known ex post facto as beyond the sense we make of it (Latour, 2004;
Stengers, 2011).
Life, as articulated by Deleuze, is not a generative ground. It is not life in general
as some force or algorithm that generates a vital normativity, such as the imperative
for life to maintain and persevere in itself (Esposito, 2008). Nor is life some negated
or mourned real that is given only through the narrow forms that we impose upon it.
Rather, by referring to a life that is distinct from the actualized individual, life does
not become some force of retrieval, redemption or repair. It does not have the sense of
drawing our attention back to the force of life from which individuals have emerged.
On the contrary, life is like the three faculties of Deleuze and Guattaris What Is
Philosophy? a detaching power.
Norm Wars 83
This is because it is a life: neither the life of an individual nor life in general:
We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not
immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the
immanence of immanence, absolute immanence; it is complete power, complete
bliss ... it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer
refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life. (Deleuze, 1991: 27)
If normativity is a commitment to ones life, such that I could not be who I am if I were
not committed to some ongoing, stable and disciplined self (Korsgaard, 1996), then
a life shifts the terrain of the problem. One is neither a free, self-creating individual,
always other than any reified or imposed norm (anti-normative subjectivism) nor is
one a self who gives a law to oneself, recognizing oneself through the capacity to be
someone. In contrast to ones life or dynamic life in general, Deleuzes a life has two dis-
tinguishing features. First, Deleuze argues that this potential for thought for thinking
about immanence as a life is expressed in literature. That is, in order for this strange
thought of a life to emerge, it needs to be distilled, articulated or constituted through
some specific faculty. When Charles Dickens describes the loathsome character Rider-
hood whose organized and identifiable individuality no one would seek to save he
manages to articulate a moment at which all the general and stable qualities, including
the characters personal striving, fall away:
Between his life and his death there is a moment that is only that of a life play-
ing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet
singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and
external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a
Homo tantum with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beat-
itude. It is a heacceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life
of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject
that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. (Deleuze,
1991: 289)
One is given neither an individual who wants to live nor life in general, but some-
thing like a spark one force in an eternity and infinity of forces that flickers here
and now, and that may or may not endure. If there is an individual who endures
as a relatively stable ongoing collection of predicates, all given form through rela-
tions to other individuals and predicates, then this is because there are individuat-
ing sparks, flickers of a life that might create a differentiated person located in a
specific point of view. Life, given as a life, would therefore be closer to a power of
dispersal and positive destruction: a life is that which is stabilized when individu-
als are brought into being, but which appears as individuating when the individual
falls apart and is now the potentiality for individuation. Second, this way of thinking
about immanence is radically destructive and anti-foundational. Rather than posit
something like life, humanity, labour, responsiveness, affect, being or the lived as
that receding ground from which relations emerge, a life is counter-actualizing or
anti-relational. It does not express itself through some normative commitment that
84 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Why think that supernatural powers and magical aggressions constitute a myth
that is inferior to Oedipus? On the contrary, is it not true that they move desire in
the direction of more intense and more adequate investments of the social field, in
its organization as well as its disorganizations? ...
Could it not be said that Oedipus is also a traditional norm our own to be
exact? How can one say that Oedipus makes us speak in our own name, when
one also goes on to say that its resolution teaches us the incurable inadequacy
of being and universal castration? And what is this demand that is invoked to
justify Oedipus? It goes without saying, the subject demands and redemands dad-
dy-mommy: but which subject, and in what state? Is that the means to situate
oneself personally in one owns society? And which society? The neocolonized
society that is constructed for the subject, and that finally succeeds in what colo-
nization was only able to outline: an effective reduction of the forces of the desire
to Oedipus, to a fathers name, in the grotesque triangle? (Deleuze and Guattari,
1983: 1701)
orientations. First, only normativity can save us. Second, normativity needs to be
defined against normalization. Third, and finally the question of norms is a false or
badly posed problem. These three orientations allow for different attitudes towards
the problem of disciplines. If normativity is the condition for the possibility of a
future, then we require disciplines as positive and enabling practices. The humani-
ties, with its generation of meaning and legitimation procedures, would be crucial
for our ongoing survival. If, however, disciplines have been intertwined genealogi-
cally with processes of normalization, then our normative future would require a
radical upheaval of the humanities. This would demand something like a Foucault-
ian approach, where the very modes of knowing from which the humanities have
emerged would need to be criticized in light of the distribution of powers that consti-
tuted something like life that could function as a transcendental ground. Life would
be the horizon that enabled the formation of human sciences, the division of labour
that would yield the humanities and a relation among disciplines that would sub-
sequently generate a conversation concerning man as a norm-constituting animal.
Against these two modes of approaching disciplines, both of which would support a
defence of the humanities to some extent and would present interdisciplinarity as
a prima facie good, I would like to propose a Deleuzian approach. Here, one neither
appeals to normativity as the definitive human horizon nor aims to disengage norma-
tivity from human normalization. Rather, by destroying both the positive and critical
aspects of disciplines, it would be possible to achieve modes of thinking that look to
a post-humanities future.
Anti-norm
Before launching into some of the academic and disciplinary accounts of normativ-
ity, we can begin by considering the unstated war on normativity that dominates
the present. In its nave form, this has been deployed by marketing strategists,
consciousness-raising forms of identity politics and certain unreflective readings
of theory. From early forms of liberation feminism and other seemingly radical
approaches to politics, the word stereotype is a clear pejorative. Rather than be
defined and determined by images or clichs, selves should be defined through one
equal and self-organizing humanity or should be detached from anything other than
their own real and authentic individuality. That is, one should either reject stere-
otypes by arguing that beneath colour, sexual orientation, gender or religion we are
all ultimately human and capable of recognizing each other across manifest divides.
Or, one could appeal to the unique and distinct nature of each individual. Both
of these notions have been common marketing and moralizing ploys. In the late
1980s, Benettons United Colors of Benetton campaign featured posters of ethnic
diversity a range of bodies all wearing the varied colours of Benetton. The family
of man motif celebrated difference as apparent and enriching, beneath which lay a
friendly and affirmative sameness. This unity in diversity notion (that was ironized
by William Blakes I am black but O! my soul is white) was expressed in popular
song lyrics, including Michael Jacksons Black or White of 1991: Im not going to
86 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
spend my life being a color. Even more cloying was the earlier Ebony and Ivory (of
1982 by Stevie Wonder):
We all know that people are the same where ever you go
there is good and bad in everyone
we learn to live when we learn to give each other what we need to survive
together alive
That deep down we are all human motif survives happily in cinema as well, ranging
from Paul Haggis Crash of 2004 in which the urban conflict and racial violence of
interweaving narratives resolve in a final moment of cross-racial human recognition
to the more recent Avatar of 2009, in which the rapacious human species, living in
end times, meets a different species only to find that these blue humanoids seem to
embody all the virtues of community, reciprocity, altruism and patriarchal lineage that
had (once) defined humanity.
One might refer to this knee-jerk humanism as the normativity that dare not speak
its name: there is no norm other than the norm that we have no norms. Despite race,
creed or (in the case of Avatar) species differences, we are all capable of recogni-
tion of each other, for there is no real otherness no norm that does not, in the end,
give way to humanity. Religion? Not significant, if we just converse and face each
other. Race? Nothing more than a colour akin perhaps to the cohabiting keys on
a piano keyboard (Ebony and Ivory). Gender? Sexuality? Dont mention it. (This
ultra-humanism is I would suggest masked by what passes in theory today for
many modes of post-humanism: we no longer believe in the privileged distinction
of privileged white man, for everything that lives is an agent subjected to the one
norm of unity, community, communication, reciprocity and ecology: deep down we
are all human.)
Perhaps more significant, though, is the more explicit counter-normative resist-
ance to any image or figure that is in any way transcendent to the individuals very
own being. The first notion that deep down, despite manifest appearances we are all
human derives from a liberal commitment to human self-regulation: I am free to
be anything I want, to pursue anything I want because I am a member of one human
community that recognizes and tolerates all others of its kind. There is a minimal
transcendence here: the only regulation is self-regulation, and this occurs by way of
acknowledging that one is nothing more than human; any other norm (religious, sex-
ual, ethnic, political and so on) is of ones choosing and cannot impede the broader
recognition of humanity in general.
The second and more stringently counter-normative position both extends and
reacts against liberalism. Differences between earlier modes of liberalism were that tra-
ditional post-Kantian forms relied on a minimal and formal normativity: a just society
would be one that would be chosen by all, regardless of ones social position. The good
self would be one who was not defined through any specific norm, but who recognized
that some normative structure giving a law to oneself is constitutive of reason and
selfhood. Against this liberal commitment to minimal and formal normativity, one
might define the present as shrilly anti-normative: not only should there be no norm
Norm Wars 87
imposed on the individual flexibility of my own being, I ought not to enslave myself to
any overly stringent idea of who I ought to be. The self-help industry is largely built on
an imperative of self-acceptance of not judging oneself, of not imposing any figure
or ideal upon the self. (Sometimes these imperatives have a feminist slant such that
one ought to avoid internalizing media images of ideal women, or sometimes the pitch
is apparently ecological or anti-capitalist, so that one is warned not to be a victim of
trends and hype. A recent campaign of a popular form of soft drink worked by urging
consumers to be intelligent enough to realize they were buying a drink, not an image
of coolness or masculinity.) New forms of branding rely less on the appeal to a unified
humanity, and more on a rebellious individualism; this can range from Nikes id (or
individually designed range) to limited edition versions of streetwear. Advertising now
draws heavily from counter-culture, so that environmentalism, anti-corporatism, non-
conformism and feminism can be branded. The beauty brand Dove used the notion
of real women to market its products; Starbucks has been one of many companies
selling itself through fair trade; other brands such as The Body Shop or Pret Manger,
despite their vast sales empires trade on setting themselves against chain branding,
beauty hype and fast food.
In terms of theory, it is possible to observe an anti-normativity in at least three ten-
dencies. First, immanence in one of its popular versions sets itself against any image,
norm, law or state that does not derive from the self-constituting act. In Hardt and
Negris formulation of it, immanence would be distinguished from liberalisms seem-
ingly similar freedom from imposed tutelage, for there is no individual or presumed
rationality that would guide the formation of the polity. Instead, humanity consti-
tutes itself; whatever counts as human is achieved through an ongoing and collective
becoming. Liberalisms ultimate value of liberty has always impeded collective self-
formation, because liberty was liberty of the individual. (We can see this in the way
Rawls definition of freedom imposed a responsibility on the individual to choose in
such a way that her decision could be universalizable for all.) Against this, Hardt and
Negris collective discourse abandons any already given subject or grounding agent,
arguing for a self-forming humanity, with the multiple nature of the political preclud-
ing any settled norm (236). The human is neither a norm of reason nor an underlying
ground. Contemporary capitalism has already, they argue, abandoned norm-regulated
forms of behaviour in favour of corporate efficiency (178), and so democracy can-
not take the earlier forms of city-state models but now requires global creativity. This
creativity cannot be calculated by any measure other than itself, not capital, and not
the free individual:
... living labor [is] the form-giving fire of our creative capacities. Living labour
is the fundamental human faculty: the ability to engage the world actively and
create social life. Living labour can be corralled by capital and pared down to
the labor power that is bought and sold and that produces commodities and
capital, but living labor always exceeds that. Our innovative and creative capaci-
ties are always greater than our productive labor productive, that is, of capital.
At this point we can recognize that this biopolitical production is on the one
hand immeasurable, because it cannot be quantified in fixed units of time, and,
88 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
on the other hand, always excessive with respect to the value that capital can
extract from it because capital can never capture all of life. (Hardt and Negri,
2004: 146)
Outside of high theory, recent economic crises and corporate corruption or the
war between Wall Street and Main Street have prompted left-wing calls for individ-
ual participation and collective constitution of the polity alongside right-wing small
government imperatives. What distinguishes these recent manoeuvres from standard
liberalism is a rejection of any norm or model of reason or regulation that is not that of
a continually self-creating and self-inventing becoming. This is also how movements of
new labour or the third way managed to cast off notions of being constrained by left-
ist ideology: rather than having a revolutionary programme or privileged norm of the
primacy of the working class, the model of government was primarily managerial and
procedural. It is not surprising, then, that Hardt and Negris multitude had to expend
quite a bit of labour of its own on distinguishing itself from third way movements: the
new collectivity of humanity should not be grounded on appeals to global security or
war alliance but should be generated from a creative, rather than managed, multitude
(Hardt and Negri, 2004: 233, 398).
Second, we might consider the concept of affect. Defined against mind-centred,
Cartesian, cognitive and computational models of consciousness, affect has (in its less
critical articulations) enabled a privileging of life that is regressively organicist. Rather
than the body being seen as a part of the world or as a known object, the body and
its responsiveness is now the horizon from which knowledge emerges. In the begin-
ning is the affect or feeling from which systems, relations and terms have their genesis.
In its relatively popular scientific mode, this affective turn away from rigid entities
and systems to dynamic relationality is perhaps most clearly expressed by Antonio
Damasio, whose work, even more than that of Hardt and Negri, crosses from uni-
versity culture to a broader reading public. The titles of Damasios books read like a
series of theses: Descartess Error (1994) describes the problem of beginning inquiry
from the position of the cognitive self, and in that regard expresses a widespread anti-
Cartesianism that has much resonance with a more general counter-normativity. For
what at least one mode of anti-Cartesianism expresses is a hyper-subjectivism. The
properly relational, emotive, responsive, affective and living self has been reified into
some normative ghost in a body that has become a machine. Damasios The Feeling
of What Happens (1999) argues for the primacy of emotion, which far from being a
state of mind or mental phenomenon is given or felt after its bodily and definitely non-
cognitive occurrence. (Bodily is not quite the right word here, for there is no body
as object; there is a domain of emotive responsive and auto-poetic interactive self-
regulation, which is then felt and it is from that feeling that a self is formed.) Look-
ing for Spinoza (2003) enables Damasio to strengthen the philosophical ground of his
anti-Cartesianism, but his Spinoza is a curious beast. Yes, Spinoza was a philosopher of
the affections who defined mind not in opposition to the body but as an aspect or per-
ceptive feeling of what occurs affectively. But Spinoza was also a philosopher of reason,
whose positing of a third kind of knowledge, or a capacity to consider substance or
what is beyond the point of view of our own affections, opened up a theology (even if
pantheistic) that would be distinctly out of tune with any insistence on the primacy of
Norm Wars 89
the lived body. Damasios most recent work focuses on what he refers to as biological
value, which accounts for the genesis of the self, not so much from extrinsic, historical
or transcendent systems but from minute selections:
... in addition to the logic imposed by the unfolding of events in the reality exter-
nal to the brain a logical arrangement that the naturally selected circuitry of our
brains foreshadows from the very early stages of development the images in our
minds are given more or less saliency in the mental stream according to their value
for the individual. And where does that value come from? It comes from the origi-
nal set of dispositions that orients our life regulation, as well as from the valuations
that all images we have gradually acquired in our experience have been accorded,
based on the original set of value dispositions during our past history. In other
words, minds are not just about images entering their procession naturally. They
are about the cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological
value has promoted. (Damasio, 2010: 71)
I would suggest that Damasios use of logic here for all its appeal to individual bodily
immediacy reveals what Derrida diagnosed as logocentrism: some ground deter-
mines systems and relations in advance. Here, that ground is life (Derrida, 1998: 74).
Finally, the concept of performativity especially as one tracks its migration from
linguistics to account for the self demonstrates the contraction of action away from
any consideration that would be beyond processes of subjectivity and subjection. The
force of the concept of the performative lay in the capacity of language as action as
doing things with words that would free philosophy from having to deal with odd
immaterial or mental entities such as meanings. Language works not because our
exchange of tokens allows some transfer of pure sense that would exist outside our
usage, but because conventional usage produces relative stability (Austin, 1962). When
this term was translated into the problem of the production of identity, it had (at least)
two sides: on the one hand it produced an affirmative concept of matter, whereby there
is no such thing as life or matter that lies outside language, for language like anything
that could be said to be exists only in its differential distribution: What I would
propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of mat-
ter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time
to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter (Butler, 1993: 9).
On the other hand, performatvity privileges an action from which something like the
ground of identified matter would emerge. One might, following this, consider matter
to be performative: in this case, Butlers work would open up a new materialism that
would pose questions quite distinct from those of subjective normativity. This did,
indeed, occur, but Butlers own work posed questions (of recognition, subjection and
what counts as grievable) that tended to return processes of performativity to an agent
who (admittedly) is not a doer so much as one who is given as a subject through the
exclusion of something extra-discursive:
Outside of human nature, there is no normative point of view from which morality
can be challenged. But morality can meet the internal challenge that is made from
the point of view of self-interest, and it also approves of itself. It is human nature to
be governed by morality, and from every point of view, including its own, moral-
ity earns its right to govern us. We therefore have no reason to reject our nature,
and can allow it to be a law to us. Human nature, moral government included, is
therefore normative, and has authority for us. (Korsgaard, 1996: 66)
negated by, the normative. Second, one needs to politicize rather than individualize
normativity: just what modes of self one will recognize as normative, both for oneself
and others, are restricted not least by what Butler referred to as the heterosexual
matrix or what has been marked more generally as hetero-normativity:
Here a certain normative crisis ensues. On the one hand it is important to mark
how the field of intelligible and speakable sexuality is circumscribed, so that we
can see how options outside of marriage are becoming foreclosed as the unthink-
able, and how the terms of thinkability are enforced by the narrow debates over
who and what will be included in the norm. On the other hand, there is always the
possibility of savoring the status of unthinkability, if it is a status, as the most criti-
cal, the most radical, the most valuable. As the sexually unpresentable, such sexual
possibilities can figure the sublime within the contemporary field of sexuality, a
site of pure resistance, a site unco-opted by normativity. But how does one think
politics from such a site of unrepresentability? (Butler, 2004: 1067)
ossible only with the idea of man. Here, I do not assert a value because I say that this
p
is how the world is. Rather, it is because man is that being who realizes that as a cultural
(linguistic, historical, desiring) animal he has no nature other than the nature he gives
to himself that he must not simply assert a value but come up with some formal value-
generating procedure:
It seems obvious enough that, from the moment when man first constituted him-
self as a positive figure in the field of knowledge, the old privilege of reflexive
knowledge, of thought thinking itself, could not but disappear; but that it became
possible, by this very fact, for an objective form of thought to investigate man
in his entirety at the risk of discovering what could never be reached by his
reflection or even by his consciousness: dim mechanisms, faceless determina-
tions, a whole landscape of shadow that has been termed, directly or indirectly,
the unconscious.... Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration
in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and
outside itself, at its borders yetalso in its very warp and woof, an element of dark-
ness, an apparently inert destiny in which it is embedded, an unthought which it
contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught.
... Superficially, one might say that knowledge of man, unlike the sciences of
nature, is always linked, even in its vaguest form, to ethics or politics; more fun-
damentally, modern thought is advancing towards that region where mans Other
must become the Same as himself. (Foucault, 2002: 355, 358)
For Foucault, this has concrete consequences for the disciplines. Human sciences
are only possible if man is at once a being with a certain cultural nature; these sci-
ences study man as an effect of hidden forces of which he can be only dimly aware.
There now becomes a possibility both of biopolitics managing man according to his
liferequirements (the health of populations) and also according to a conception of the
humanities. For now there is ethics: if man cannot know himself as he is in himself,
then he can at least read his own cultural production as an expression of this unthought.
(Foucaults own suggested direction was quite different: to tear language away from
man would open up a domain of forces beyond normalizing life. Deleuze extended this
path to life: how might we imagine mutations of life not based on theliving such as
the geneses enabled by silicon? [Deleuze, 2006: 74].)
Today, with the humanities turning to historicism, cognitive archaeology, neuro-
science and other interdisciplinary sources, it is presupposed that concrete forces can
provide the ground for interpretative reading. What is assumed is both a notion of
man as a being with certain imperatives of life (requiring him to speak and labour)
and also as a being who properly gives himself his own lawful being. This might be
Kantian liberalism act in such a way that your act could be assented to by all. Or it
might, more insidiously, be what Foucault referred to as biopolitics; whatever we
do has no value or morality, but is nothing more than the effective management and
regulation of a population. Added to this world of managerial facts would then be
the reflective or normative discussions of the humanities. What has happened is that
something like life a concept that explains the emergence and self-maintenance of
all living beings destroys any immediate or unreflective morality; instead, one sees
Norm Wars 93
all moralities as expressions of a human life that is given in various languages, cultures,
epochs or systems.
Foucaults project was at once historical in demonstrating that this seemingly anti-
foundational manoeuvre was normalizing: if man is that animal who has no nature
other than the law he gives to himself, then we at once assert the universal primacy
of the liberal reasoning, self-furthering subject of reason and calculation and (more
alarmingly) posit something like life that is the manageable ground of this subject.
It follows that polities ought to act in such a way that they maximize this subjects
capacity to give himself his own norms: education as the creation of critical, reason-
ing subjects; health care reforms that enable the fruition of life; intervention in areas
that would impede rational activity (protecting individuals from drugs, gambling,
debt, pornography, poor diets anything that would corrupt their supreme capacity of
choice). Foucault did not, as some have suggested, want to retreat from a managerial
and biopolitical modernity to some golden past where (either) one simply acted with
mastery and fiat to create oneself as a work of art. He did chart a genealogy of the self,
demonstrating that what we (today) deem to be the inescapable horizon of normativ-
ity the liberal subject who gives a law to himself in a world of self-regulation ought
to be seen as transcendent rather than transcendental. That is, it is something that we
encounter as opaque and contingent, not the ultimate horizon of our being. Further
and this is where we can mark a distinction between Foucaults genealogy and Deleuze
and Guattaris geology or stratigraphy one needs to mark a disciplinary distinction.
The human sciences are possible because of the assumption of normativity as normal:
we study cultures, languages, epochs, counter-cultures, genders, sexualities, ethnicities
or societies because we assume that man is an animal who constructs himself through
enabling normative systems, systems that ought to be the object of our (managerial)
critique and reflection. Today, as the humanities (especially literature) has become an
amalgam of historical positivism, sociology of knowledge and (worst of all) evolution-
ary criticism, it would be possible to distinguish a different mode of the humanities
(if one wanted to call it that). Foucault argued that man emerged from the complex of
life, labour and language: man speaks and works because he is the living being whose
nature compels him to work and speak in common. If we uncoupled language from
its grounding in man as the being who gives himself self-furthering laws, we would
have literature. Language considered not as sign of our self-creating being but as
something that has its own being (its own density or shining) would give us a positive
criticism. How do texts form relatively autonomous field of problems and with what
other problems do they intersect? How do they mutate and what do they enable?
sexed, or the thinker who works with a logic, are possible because of what we might
refer to (but this time differently) as immanence, affect and fiat.
In his book on Foucault, Deleuze (2006) makes two remarks that suggest a subtle
but important difference from Foucault. First, Deleuze suggests that there is a Kantian
limit in Foucaults work: one knows power in its differential effects, as a distributive
force, but one never crosses the line to power itself. (And this is why, by contrast,
Deleuze and Guattari will choose to write about desire, as something their method
seeks to intuit desire itself as productive synthesis, not as produced [Deleuze and
Guattari, 2004: 585].) Second, Deleuze suggests that it is possible to decouple (or deter-
ritorialize) life (and not just language) from the normalizing motif of man.
I have already suggested that immanence, considered in the multiple singular
immanence always as a life a disturbing force or spark, creates a new challenge
for the discipline of thinking. If life is given in these sparks, from which individuals
emerge but which might also have produced different syntheses of individuation, then
a discipline would be the posing of a problem from a differential field. Such a field
would not be one view among others on the same general terrain, but would encoun-
ter other fields, composed differently by different problems different actualizations
or individuations of a life. One uses the singular a life to mark its distinction, but
desists from granting this life a body or individuality. This brings us to affect, which
would not be emotion, feeling and certainly not responsiveness (and certainly not),
a vital normativity. Let us consider inertia or weariness or stupid malevolence as an
affect. This potentiality would insist and persist, always there, and capable both of
seizing hold of us and of being detached or deterritorialized. I am in a debate with my
parliamentary colleague, and we are both engaging in a discourse about managing
the nations debts (both its financial and political debts to the present and its possibly
imagined geological debts to its future); there is a potentiality for positive destruction:
we might talk, gesture and move in such a way that the thought of a future seizes hold
of us, or we might speak and act in such a way that we become gripped by the inertia
of all the old figures. Who knows what syntheses might allow one affect rather than
another to take hold? One might want to think of such questions in geological terms,
by looking at the strata that compose such a scene. (I imagine, writing now, that talks
between Obama and Boehner regarding the supposed US debt crisis were gripped by
all sorts of free-floating affects nave hope, regressive racism, financial fear, political
expediency, nostalgia for a real America, panic, psychotic incapacity to imagine dire
consequences, the lure of smooth rhetoric, the strictures of procedural and managerial
discourse, the visual affects of gentlemanly comportment, visceral anger and so on. I
am not saying that Obama or Boehner should feel these affects nor that the Tea Party
or Left expresses these feelings. Rather, just as an artist can capture an affect such
as the litigious torpor that is the affect of Dickenss Bleak House one might say that
no one in the United States in July 2011 was panicking, and yet the affect of panic
haunted the scene: that there may be panic.) This would differ markedly from look-
ing at the scene in terms of competing norms leftist welfare liberalism versus com-
petitive small government conservatism because the scene would not be motivated
by deliberation or cognition alone. It would also differ from rabidly anti-normative
reactivisms: either the individualism that resented systemic government enclosure in
Norm Wars 95
becoming a life beyond how they are figured as good or bad for me, then some-
thing like a counter-ethics would be possible. Rather than an ethos of my own habits
and practices, or an ecology where there is one system of interconnected life, or the
political where decisions are examined from the point of a view of a polity, the con-
cepts of becoming-imperceptible and a life enable us to pose problems that are
adequate to twenty-first century horizons. Should we really be asking about normativ-
ity, values, identity and self-maintenance in an era of climate change, when this very
self-furtherance and myopia threatens not only human existence but also life in gen-
eral? Surely now is the time not to ask how we decide to maintain who we are but
whether there might be questions, powers, problems that are not of our own choosing
that affect us not as doers or performers but as barely adequate witnesses.
Note
1 It is correct to say, as Paul Patton does, that Deleuze and Guattaris ontology is
normative: that is, their approach to the ways in which we account for the forma-
tion of the world of beings is tied to decisive values and commitments. That is, their
theory of being is not some neutral, value-free or purely scientific theory. This is
true so long as one wishes to talk the language of normativity, I would argue that one
ought not talk this way: normativity has no sense, or should have no sense, unless
we assume that there are things that are not normative (facts? brute matter? chaos?).
That is not the case. Anything that is, or that makes a claim to being occurs through
processes of force, interaction, inclusion and exclusion; there is no realm of what
simply is and then a normative domain that adds value.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962), How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York:
Routledge.
. (2004), Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.
Damasio, A. (1994), Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York:
Putnam.
.(1999), The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.
.(2003), Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt.
.(2010), Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon.
Deleuze, G. (1991), Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (translated by A. Boyman).
NewYork: Zone Books.
.(2006), Foucault (translated by Sean Hand). London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane). Minneapolis: University
ofMinnesota Press.
.(1994), What is Philosophy? (translated by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill). London:
Verso.
Norm Wars 97
bread namely, that he had no polis and rejected the polis as against nature (para
phusin) (Moles, 1996: 107). Yet Moles points out saying that, I am without a polis
(apolis eimi) is a negative statement, whereas saying, I am a citizen of the cosmos
(kosmopolits) is a positive assertion, one in keeping with the Cynic ideal of living
according to nature. Nature, in the Cynic view, provides an ethical norm observ-
able in animals and inferable by cross-cultural comparisons (Branham and Goulet-
Caz, 1996: 8). This norm ignores all the human class, gender, racial and national
distinctions that institutions such as the polis enforce. Living according to this norm
facilitates harmonious relations among humans, animals and the gods and promotes
the Cynic pursuit of freedom (eleutheria) and self-sufficiency (autarkeia), whereas
living according to the laws of the polis limits freedom, imposes distinctions among
human and impedes proper relations with the natural world. True sages are at home
anywhere, and their moral attunement to nature gives them the autonomy of kings or
gods. Their politeia, their state, Moles argues, is nothing other than a moral state:
that is, the state of being a Cynic, and in claiming to be a kosmopolits, the Cynic
expresses a positive allegiance to the whole earth (Moles, 1996: 111). Although the
wisdom of the sage is rare, sages together form an ideal politeia, and through their
teachings they seek to extend their wisdom to all humankind and thereby point the
way towards a universal cosmic politeia, one that has no need of law-courts, currency,
temples and so on.
Cynic and Stoic conceptions of cosmopolitanism are often contrasted, but Moles
concludes that Cynic cosmopolitanism already contained all the essential positive
qualities that the Stoics endowed with a fuller exposition, and that they integrated
into a fully developed physical system (Moles, 1996: 119). What differentiates Cyn-
ics from Stoics is that, though both advocated living according to nature, the Cynics
gave greater weight to animalistic primitivism and individual self-sufficiency, because
these ideas contributed to the simplicity and attractiveness of their message: What
could be more natural than to live the life of animals? What more comforting than the
conviction that self-sufficiency leads to happiness? (Moles, 1996: 120).
In Moles view, Cynic cosmopolitanism, in rejecting the city and advocating life
according to universal nature, provided the impetus for a crucial move in ancient
political thought: that between theories based on the polis and those based on natural
law (Moles, 2000: 434). Yet, though the Cynics provided the impetus for such a move,
they themselves did not identify law as the central principle governing nature. The
Stoics made this connection, for which reason, says Katja Maria Vogt, the early Sto-
ics may justly be counted among the ancestors of natural law theory (Vogt, 2008: 3).
Early Stoics refer to the law as the common law (koinos nomos), which Vogt sees as
an ancestor of what has later come to be called the natural law. Stoic law is common
in that it is common to all human beings, and exists independently from the actual
laws and customs in actual cities, and in this regard it resembles natural law. What
differentiates Stoic common law from later conceptions of natural law is that Stoic law,
unlike natural law, is physical as well as ethical, a law that pervades the cosmos, and is
identified with a corporeal god (Vogt, 2008: 161). For the Stoics, law and reason are
identical. It is a core claim of Stoic physics that law, or reason, pervades and regulates
the cosmos, and is identical with Zeus. It is a core ethical claim that law and reason
100 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
are prescriptive (Vogt, 2008: 162). The cosmos is the dwelling place of the gods and
humans, and hence the cosmos is their polis, a cosmic city already governed by law and
reason, even if no actual polis, in the conventional sense of the term, fully manifests
this cosmic order. The cosmic polis of Stoic cosmopolitanism, then, in one regard, is
not a utopian ideal since
the cosmos as a city exists, will not deteriorate, and could not be instituted through
any human effort. The cosmos is the common home to all its inhabitants, and it
is regulated by the law. Since no city other than the cosmos is regulated by the
common law ... the cosmos is the only city. (Vogt, 2008: 67)
The goal of the Stoic sage is to live according to the common law, which means to
become a fully reasonable being whose actions are completely at one with the cosmic
order. The sage seeks always to engage in appropriate action (kathkonta) suited to the
given situation, and in so doing, to follow the law of perfect reason, a law that is not
a set of specific rules but a single guiding principle of cosmic order. As practitioner
of appropriate action, the Stoic sage becomes a genuine citizen of the cosmic city, not
a mere inhabitant, like other humans, who are rational creatures that is, creatures
capable of reason but not yet fully reasonable beings. The collectivity of Stoic sages
and gods forms the citizenry of the cosmic polis, and among this human citizenry the
kinship of reason and law establishes a bond that makes the individual sages fellow-
citizens in a genuine community. But what of the unenlightened inhabitants of the
cosmic city? Are they of concern to the Stoic sage? Some scholars have said no, that
the Stoic conception of the cosmic city is exclusively that of a community of sages, and
that the bonds that unite them are simply a product of their individual attainment
of perfect reason. Vogt and others, however, have argued persuasively that the Stoic
principle of oikeisis, or belonging to us, dictates that the sage consider all humans as
potential fellow-citizens, towards whom kindness, warmth, generosity and affection
should be extended. According to this reading, then, Stoic virtue involves not simply
personal enlightenment but a beneficent engagement with all humanity, and thus the
Stoic concept of cosmopolitanism has as an essential component the notion of a bond
of kinship among all humankind.
By articulating the notion of cosmopolitanism in terms of the cosmic law of rea-
son, the Stoics transformed Cynic cosmopolitanism as a practice into a philosophical
concept. Two important consequences arose from this concept of cosmic law. First,
it separated humans from other animals in a decisive way. Cynics such as Diogenes
scorned intellectual abstraction, and though adept at syllogistic reasoning, they stressed
the importance of action in accordance with nature. Their model for human behav-
iour was not that of logicians but animals, whose simplicity showed the way towards
happiness. Admittedly, the Stoics did include all of creation in their conception of a
law-governed cosmos, but they distinguished clearly between the human soul and the
souls of other animals. Humans alone possess a governing principle (hgemonikon),
which allows them to perform ethical actions and which makes them, according to
Chrysippus, the only animals whose nature is political (On Law, cited in Vogt, 2008:
186). Hence, Stoic cosmopolitanism, while embracing a broad cosmic law, pertains
primarily to human beings, the only political animals.
Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 101
Yet, Ciceros basic interest, he says in de Republica, is not to use these concepts to fol-
low the example of Socrates in Platos work, and myself invent an ideal State of my
own (de Rep. 2.3) but to apply them to issues of governance in the actual Roman state.
Cicero shares the Stoic belief that all humans are capable of reason, but unlike the
Stoics, he tends to minimize the differences between the sage and the unenlightened,
suggesting that adherence to right reason and true justice is within the capacities of all
people. He admits that human laws are not always just indeed such laws are not really
laws at all (de Leg. 2.12) and he concedes that his reflections on law must accommo-
date certain limitations in the masses: But since our whole discussion has to do with
the reasoning of the populace, it will sometimes be necessary to speak in the popular
manner, and give the name of law to that which in written form decrees whatever it
wishes, either by command or prohibition (de Leg. 1.19). Nonetheless, Cicero enter-
tains the possibility of creating an actual just State whose citizens observe laws that are
formulated in accordance with right reason. Such laws would fulfil laws fundamental
aim of ensuring the safety of citizens, the preservation of States, and the tranquility
and happiness of human life (de Leg. 2.11), and the citizens virtue would consist of
obeying these State laws.
From Diogenes to Cicero, then, we may trace a dramatic change in the relationship
between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and the State. For Diogenes, the actual polis
is against nature, and the only true polis is the cosmos. Being a citizen of the cosmos
means pursuing the virtues of freedom and self-sufficiency by living, as other animals
do, in accordance with nature. For early Stoics such as Zeno and Chrysippus, the cos-
mos is a polis in that it is regulated by perfect reason and common law. To be virtuous
is to engage in appropriate action, thereby following a single governing principle the
law rather than observing specific rules. Although the Stoic concept of oikeisis, or
belonging to us, suggests that the sage has concern for all humankind, the Stoic vision
of an eventual worldwide polis accommodates no compromise in the standard of virtue
as perfect reason but requires the full enlightenment of all citizens. In such a future
polis, there would no longer be any need for political or legal institutions. Hence, as
Schofield argues, the Stoic idea of the city is not a conception of the state: if we take it
that there have to be further conditions satisfied (e.g. the centralization of authority, the
102 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
division of powers) for a community to form a state (Schofield, 1999: 73). The citizens
of such a universal cosmopolitan community would be the gods and all humans (but
only humans, since other animals do not possess a rational soul). Finally, in Cicero, the
cosmos is most decidedly a State ruled by rational laws, and human communities may
aspire to be embodiments of that cosmic order. Law is not an inner guiding principle,
but a set of precepts that ensure the safety, tranquility and happiness of citizens and the
preservation of the State. Virtue is less a matter of practicing appropriate action than of
obeying rules and fulfilling civic duties.
Let us turn now to Sellars appraisal of what he calls Deleuzes cosmopolitanism. If
the Ciceronian version of the concept is in question, then Deleuze is decidedly anti-
cosmopolitan, in that he consistently rejects the State apparatus as an oppressive struc-
ture. This is nowhere more evident than in the Nomadology section of A Thousand
Plateaus, where the nomadic War Machine is contrasted with the State apparatus. As
Sellars correctly observes, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari tie nomad-
ism to the concept of smooth space, an unmarked domain of nomadic movement,
which they oppose to striated space, a geometrically graphed and charted area of fixed
positions and stable identities. Striated space is quintessentially polis-space, whereas
smooth space is the pasturage and wilds of the nomads, outside the city (see Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987: 380; 557 n. 51). The nomads are a turbulent metamorphic force,
and to ward off the constant threat of the State they invent the War Machine, which is
less an instrument of destruction than a practice of transformation and revolutionary
change. Deleuze and Guattari clearly valorize smooth space, the nomadic and the War
Machine over striated space, sedentarism and the State. In smooth space, individuals
roam freely over the open land; in striated space, a transcendent authority allocates
demarcated real estate to individuals. Hence, Sellars argues, What we are offered is a
political ethic in which individuals distribute themselves across a territory rather than
distribute territory to themselves. It is, fundamentally, a cosmopolitan ethic, a rejec-
tion of political ties to particular locations, and a reorientation of the way in which
one relates to social and political space (2007a: 34). Sellars sees the primary difference
between the Stoics and Deleuze and Guattaris cosmopolitanism in their conception
of the cosmos. The Stoic cosmos is a polis governed by reason (logos) and law (nomos),
whereas for Deleuze-Guattari, the cosmos is a chaosmos, in which, according to Sell-
ars, everything is in a continual state of flux at various levels of speed and slowness
(2007a: 35), and such a chaosmos, Sellars argues, is governed neither by reason nor
by law. Despite this fundamental difference, however, Sellars sees both the Stoics and
Deleuze and Guattari as advocates of a utopian politics inspired by a personal ethical
project of self-transformation in which each individual alters their own relation to
space and traditional political states (2007a: 36).
There are several problems with Sellars analysis. First, Deleuze and Guattari always
stress the collective over the individual in political action. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze
and Guattaris critique of psychoanalysis is precisely that it is personological, famil-
ial and apolitical, and one of their fundamental theses is that desiring-production is
immediately social and political. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and
Guattari define minor literature in terms of the deterritorialization of language, the
connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage
Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 103
Third, it is not at all certain that Deleuze and Guattaris opposition to the State is
also an opposition to the city. In ancient Greece, two usages of the term polis may be
distinguished: polis versus hinterlands (roughly city vs country) and polis versus sur-
rounding State territory. In the former, polis designates a demographical/geographical
concept, in the latter, a political concept. At first glance, the two concepts of the polis
seem identical in Deleuze and Guattari the city and the state appear to be the same
thing. The City of Ur is the Urstaat (1987: 217); the War Machines enemy is the State,
the city [ville], state and urban phenomenon [le phnomne tatique et urbain] (1987:
519); the War Machine destroys the State-form and the city-form with which it col-
lides (1987: 418); the city and the State are in reciprocal presupposition (1987: 434).
And yet the distinction between the sedentary and the nomadic is not absolute: there
are distinctions among the transhumant, semisedentary, sedentary [and] nomadic
(1987: 4301). It is possible to create a smooth space within the city and live in the
city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller (1987: 500). Paris at times is a city haunted by
nomads (1987: 558 n. 61), and Amsterdam is said to be a rhizome-city (1987: 15).
Most decisively, in an extended passage on the difference between towns (villes) and
States, the town
is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes
a frequency. ... It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is
fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterri-
torialization, because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized
enough to enter the network, to submit to the polarization, to follow the circuit
of urban and road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in the
tendency of maritime and commercial towns to separate off from the backcoun-
try, from the countryside (Athens Carthage, Venice). ... Towns are circuit-points
of every kind, which enter into counterpoint along horizontal lines; they effect a
complete but local, town-by-town integration. (1987: 432)
In every regard, the State is the towns opposite. The State is a phenomenon of
intraconsistency. ... It makes the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by
stratification; in other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans a
dimension of depth (1987: 433).
In What Is Philosophy? this same contrast of the horizontal and the vertical, of
trans-consistency and intra-consistency, is framed in terms of the horizontal city ver-
sus the vertical State. The State assimilates the surrounding territory within a higher
arithmetical Unity, whereas the city adapts the territory to a geometrical extensiveness
that can be continued in commercial circuits (1994: 86). Both the State and the city
deterritorialize the unmarked earth and impose a reterritorialization on it, but the
State does so through transcendence, whereas the city does so through immanence.
In ancient Greece, the city functioned as a milieu of immanence (1994: 87), Athens
being the paradigmatic example of such a milieu: For a fairly short period the deepest
bond existed between the democratic city, colonization, and a new imperialism that
no longer saw the sea as a limit of its territory or an obstacle to its endeavor but as a
wider bath of immanence (1994: 88). The development of such a milieu of immanence
was what made possible the invention of philosophy, since the milieu of immanence
Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 105
allowed for a pure sociability, the friendship and rivalry of citizens, and the exchange of
opinions, all of which were inhibited in the stratified, hierarchical State. Ancient phi-
losophy, then, was intimately linked to the horizontal, immanent deterritorialization
of the city, and in a similar fashion philosophy was revived in early modern Europe
with the advent of capitalism and the emergence of commercial cities (such as Venice),
which provided a similar milieu of immanence outside the control of the State. The
ancient city and the early modern city, then, served as the contingent condition for the
development of philosophy. Modern philosophys link with capitalism, therefore, is of
the same kind as that of ancient philosophy with Greece: the composition of an absolute
plane of immanence with a relative social milieu that also functions through immanence
(WP 98). Given this valorization of the city in opposition to the State, it seems clear
that the contrast of nomads and the city/State does not sum up Deleuze and Guat-
taris political philosophy and that the dual meaning of polis as city and Stateis one
they exploit in an effort to articulate a more nuanced differentiation of the State from
other forms of social organization than that framed in the simple War Machine-State
opposition. This positive assessment of the city is important to note, since it counters
any temptation to see Deleuze and Guattaris remarks on nomadism as an anti-urban
primitivism. And the connection of philosophy with the city and capitalism sug-
gests that among the problems facing philosophy and political action today is that of
exploiting the citys milieu of immanence as a means of escaping the oppressive grip
of capitalism.
Fourth, Sellars analysis simplifies and distorts the concept of chaosmos. Deleuze
and Guattaris point is not that the cosmos is chaotic but that it combines forces of
formation and deformation within a process of constant transformation. Only at a cer-
tain level of analysis is everything in a continual state of flux at various levels of speed
and slowness, and only as a virtual dimension that coexists with and is immanent
within an actual dimension of individuated entities, regulated processes and relatively
stable power relations. In Deleuze-Guattaris terms, forces of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization are omnipresent in the cosmos, and though these forces are quali-
tatively different, they are only tendencies that are always manifest in mixtures and
inextricable combinations of multivalent interaction: the territory itself is inseparable
from vectors of deterritorialization working it from within; and deterritorialization is
in turn inseparable from correlative reterritorializations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
509). These forces pervade the cosmos, from quantum, atomic and molecular elements
to inorganic and organic forms at various scales of composition, to social, cultural
and political modes of organization and practice. The chaosmos is replete with muta-
tive, metamorphic forces that dissolve structures, undo relations and send elements
in random trajectories and velocities. But the same forces connect elements in new
combinations, form assemblages of heterogeneous elements that function together and
establish provisional, relatively homeostatic processes of organization that shape the
specific environments of individual life forms, including humans, with their complex
creations of machines, institutions, customs, laws, art works and so on. Deleuze, after
all, calls his philosophy a constructionism or constructivism (Deleuze 1995: 147;
158), but nowhere a deconstructionism or destructivism, and philosophys goal is the
invention of concepts whereby new connections may be forged, new assemblages of
106 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
relations that cohere and co-function. These same principles of construction, crea-
tion and connection are at play throughout the cosmos. As the Geology of Morals
plateau in A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, such principles are present in geological,
biological and human strata, and they are inseparable from the anorganic life (1987:
503) that courses through the universe. In the plateau on the ritournelle, or refrain,
these principles are fundamental to Deleuze and Guattaris analysis of the common
features of animal and human territories. The refrain, which pervades the construction
and functioning of territories, is always a pattern that simultaneous territorializes and
deterritorializes, forming not only points of order and areas of control but also lines of
flight towards new zones of potential invention and construction.
Finally, if Deleuze-Guattaris politics can be described as utopian, it is only in a
very limited sense of the word, and certainly not that which informs Sellars uses of
the term. Deleuze and Guattari reject the utopian strain of political thought that ori-
ents social action in terms of a pre-established plan, blueprint or model of a desirable
future. Such utopian visions are by their nature projections of the limitations of the
present, and they are generally the creations of individuals, which are later adopted
by groups. Most schemas are transcendent impositions of pre-constructed concepts
developed by an individual who has risen above the fray, in no way immanent produc-
tions of the groups directly engaged in struggles for social transformation. Given the
frequent identification of such transcendent schemes as utopian, it is not surprising
that in What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari cast doubt on the usefulness of the
term, saying at one point that, in view of the mutilated meaning public opinion has
given to it, perhaps utopia is not the best word (1994: 100), and at another that utopia
is not a good concept (1994: 110). They also caution that in utopia (as in philosophy)
there is always the risk of a restoration, and sometimes a proud affirmation, of tran-
scendence, so that we need to distinguish between authoritarian utopias or utopias
of transcendence, and immanent, revolutionary, libertarian utopias (1994: 100). In
their immanent, revolutionary and libertarian sense of the term, utopia is what links
philosophy with its own epoch (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 99). The word utopia des-
ignates that conjunction of philosophy, or of the concept, with the present milieu (1994:
100). Philosophys task is to engage the forces of relative deterritorialization present in
the milieus of immanence that give rise to philosophy and sustain it (such as ancient
Athens, early modern European cities, or, let us hope, our contemporary world) and
push them to the level of absolute deterritorialization. By creating concepts, philoso-
phy surpasses the limit internal to relative deterritorialization, and in so doing turns
that limit back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people (1994:
99). The new earth and new people do not exist at present; they are to come, venir, a
future new earth [une nouvelle terre venir] (1994: 88), the people to come [le peuple
venir] (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109). And, we should note, although philosophy
summons forth a new earth and new people through absolute deterritorialization, the
future earth and people are sites of reterritorialization: Deterritorialization of such a
plane [the milieu of immanences plane of relative deterritorialization] does not pre-
clude reterritorialization but posits it as the creation of a future new earth (1994: 88).
If Deleuze and Guattaris political philosophy is utopian, then, it is only in this very
specific sense: their project is to identify elements of relative deterritorialization in a
Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 107
given social milieu and push them beyond their internal limits to the level of absolute
deterritorialization, with the goal of facilitating a reterritorialization of forces in a new
earth and a new people. And it is precisely this utopian project that may be described
as chaosmopolitan.
Deleuze and Guattari focus their attention on strategies for initiating social change,
and hence on processes of deterritorialization that make possible the invention of
something new. This orientation no doubt arises from their sense that developing such
strategies is the most pressing task philosophy faces today. We do not lack commu-
nication, they say. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We
lack resistance to the present (1994: 108). Resistance to the present is the necessary
condition for the invention of a new earth and a new people, but resistance only initi-
ates such a creative project. Deleuze and Guattari say little about subsequent stages
of utopian creation beyond inaugural deterritorialization, yet there are indications
in Deleuzes late thought that certain principles, if not specific institutions, might be
brought to bear in the constructive phase of creating a new earth and people, and that
these principles are normative and compatible with democracy and the rule of law.
These principles concern what Deleuze calls jurisprudence, becoming-democratic and
becoming-imperceptible.
In his insightful study of law in Deleuze, Laurent de Sutter distinguishes a critical
approach from a clinical approach to law: the critical approach exposes the absurdities
and fundamental injustices of various traditional conceptions of law, while the clini-
cal approach provides a positive, curative model of law as jurisprudence. Deleuze sees
Sade and Sacher-Masoch, for example, as carrying out a critique of law; Sade through
the invention of institutions of implacably logical cruelty and ironic defiance of law
and Masoch through the masochists contract, which assents to law, but in such a way
as to parody law and expose its emptiness as a pure form. The clinical conception of
law as jurisprudence rejects the model of law as restriction, prohibition and limita-
tion and argues for a positive, creative practice of law that extends human relations.
Deleuze finds inspiration for this notion of law in Hume, who envisions institutions
as means of inventing ever-expanding and increasingly inclusive relations among
humans. Jurisprudence for Deleuze is essentially a case law, and its positive function
is similar to that of Humes institutions. Jurisprudence is not a foundational body of
fixed laws, but an open practice of assessing singular situations and inventing ways of
promoting rights, equality and freedom. As Deleuze says in a 1988 interview, Rights
arent created by codes and pronouncements but by jurisprudence. Jurisprudence is
the philosophy of law, and deals with singularities, it advances by working out from
singularities (1995: 153). This valorization of jurisprudence clearly indicates that
Deleuzes critique of law (and Deleuze and Guattaris critique of the State) does not
reject notions of law and governance as a whole, but makes room for a positive prac-
tice of law, and one may assume that such jurisprudence would be an important part
of any future collectivity.
Paul Patton also notes the importance of jurisprudence in Deleuzes late thought,
commenting that Deleuzes endorsement of rights and jurisprudence clearly commits
him to the existence of law and the kind of constitutional state that this implies (2010:
153). Patton counters the claim that Deleuzes thought is elitist and anti-democratic,
108 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
there is no such thing as abnormal, if by the term we mean merely the absence of a
previous positive condition or state. From the biological, social and psychological
points of view, a pathological state is never a state without norms such a thing
is impossible. Wherever there is life there are norms. Life is a polarized activity, a
dynamic polarity, and that in itself is enough to establish norms. (1994: 351)
Each life form is normative, in the sense that it establishes the values that delimit the
parameters of the normal and the pathological and determine the norms which inform
its actions. There is no fact that is normal or pathological in itself . The normality and
norms of a given life form will come to them through their normativity (1994:354).
Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 111
The health of a life form is determined by its normativity by the norms and the
domain of normality it produces for itself.
deterritorialized thought to the pragmatic realm of sociopolitical action. The Stoic fig-
ure of the cosmos as city has no counterpart in chaosmopolitanism, save in the very
loose sense that the chaosmos is the common habitat of all life forms, and hence the
polis of which all life forms are citizens. The polis does have a place in chaosmopoli-
tanism, however, as the locus of politics within the chaosmos, a site distinct from, but
inextricably connected to, the world as a whole. Here, the normativity of jurisprudence
and becoming-democratic guides political action, while at the same time embodying
the broader normativity of health that fosters creative norms ... with a forward thrust
(Canguilhem, 1994: 352). Chaosmopolitanism does indeed posit a different concept
of the cosmos than that of Cynic or Stoic cosmopolitanism, and its sense of the polis
is at odds with the notion of a cosmic city, but chaosmopolitanism is not chaotic and
anarchic nor is it utopian in an idealistic sense. Rather, it is a complex of thought and
practice that brings the chaosmos and politics together in a single concern.
References
Branham, R. Bracht and Goulet-Caz, M. O. (1996), Introduction, in R. Bracht Branham
and M. O. Goulet-Caz (eds), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its
Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 127.
Canguilhem, G. (1994), A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem
(edited by F. Delaporte, translated by A. Goldhammer). New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations: 19721990 (translated by M. Joughin). New York:
Columbia University Press.
.(1997), Essays Critical and Clinical (translated by D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane). Minneapolis: University
ofMinnesota Press.
.(1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (translated by D. Polan). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
.(1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translated by B. Massumi).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
.(1994), What is Philosophy? (translated by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Moles, J. L. (1995), The cynics and politics, in A. Laks and M. Schofield (eds), Justice and
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Part Three
relations or what he calls the complete conditions (1987: 159) that produce novelty
and change as their effects (Tiessen, 2010).
The limits and determinations generated by relations, then, function as the bulwark
against which bodies discover what their respective situations afford (Gibson, 1977).
The body of capital, then, seems to have recently bumped up against its own bulwark.
The question now, as Deleuze might observe, is: how far will capital push against its
own limits? As Deleuze explains, when commenting on the nature of a bodys limits,
it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing
whether a [body] eventually leaps over or transcends its limits in going to the limit of
what it can do, whatever its degree; of course, he also reminds us that, To the limit,
it will be argued, still presupposes a limit (1994: 37).
Regardless of whether capital has in fact reached its limit or not, Deleuze and Guat-
taris fear of the despotic effects of infinite debts and a debt of the existence of the
subjects themselves (1983: 1978) has indeed been realized. Indeed, in our era of
sovereign debt crisis and austerity measures, their warning seems especially presci-
ent. For although it was once perhaps assumed that the capitalist system could go on
expanding by facilitating infinite flows of unencumbered desiring, these days desires
are increasingly being defined by the limits of that which was once thought infinite
capitals credit-creating capacity. Indeed, in many cases for example, the Greece debt
crisis or the American mortgage and foreclosure crisis debt- and credit-creation has
reached its own (immaterial) limit and overshot debtors carrying capacity. Given the
limits reached by capital in a post-Deleuzian world, eco-theorist and feminist philoso-
pher Mary Mellor notes that it is odd that radical theorists have ignored the role of
money when it is such a totalizing phenomenon in modern societies, pointing out,
rather alarmingly, that todays total money economies have no self-provisioning
sector resulting in people having no choice but to engage in labor or trade [and] work
for wages if they want to eat (2005: 48).
Debt, since the credit crunch of 2007, is a topic that is increasingly dominating
the news both in my country of Canada and around the world. Debt, these days, is
everywhere whether being described, as in this writing, in conjunction with Greeces
sovereign-debt-crisis; the imminent debt-shock to be experienced by the Euro-PIIGS
(Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain); the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)
that precipitated the Global Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis; the fact that as of this writing
the average Canadian family is $96,000 in debt; the $212 billion debt of the province of
Ontario (2010 Ontario Budget); the $530 billion debt of Canada; the $13 trillion debt of
the United States; or the trillions of dollars of debt owed by the United States to China. As
it expands, as it grows, and as it flows, debt becomes more aggressive, active and destruc-
tive inevitably forcing individuals, corporations, nation states and globally integrated
economies to their respective knees. Debt and debts potential also contributes to global
crises, violence and war and has for centuries been the primary method used to finance
militarism more generally. Indeed, when Deleuze and Guattari ask rhetorically what the
effects are of money that produces more money, of money that is a matter of flows, of
stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows, they reply that the effect of something that
flows and runs is to produce desire by carrying along with it interested subjects but
also drunken or slumbering subjects toward lethal destinations (1983: 1045).
118 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Today, then, debt and monetary policy have become weapons of financial warfare.
Indeed, we might say that war is increasingly being waged not only on the battlefield
but also in the bankbook, with wealth extraction, debt loads, derivative markets and
financial terrorism qualifying as what billionaire investor Warren Buffet described as
weapons of mass destruction (2002). As the recent SEC show-trial featuring Goldman
Sachs demonstrates, debts capacity to generate infinite (virtual) potential (as loans)
results in debtors being potentially destroyed by the potency of their own desires as
debts virtual promises loop back with actual force, leaving people homeless, industries
decimated and countries destroyed.
Debt, then, is a global problem. While it is measured using risk-instruments and
rating agencies, we must remind ourselves that debt itself is a risk and that the prolifera-
tion of indebtedness is synonymous with the proliferation of risk. Recently, the potential
to expand this risk has grown excessively large thanks to historically low interest rates,
lax legislation, and algorithmically enhanced derivative and high-frequency trading
technologies. In our current economic-epoch one wherein financial markets have
become more economically important than manufacturing or the industrial economy
digitization, globalization and financialization have resulted in the dollar-value of debt-
instruments in2008 (i.e. the total global derivatives market) being worth, according to
the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), approximately $1.29 quadrillion, or $1.29
thousand trillion (Baba etal., 2008: 246). This number dwarfs the global GDP of $45
trillion (Matai, 2010). In other words, the world of debt and financial betting is 29
times as large as the total economic output of the globe, credit and risk having become
completely decoupled from their relationship to underlying assets. As Davidson and
Dunn explain: Such speculation leads to euphoria or overtrading irrational exuber-
ance in the words of Alan Greenspan in which rising collateral and securities prices
encourage speculative excess; they explain that as debt accumulates a situation arises
in which debts can only be serviced by issuing new liabilities. As long as financial mar-
kets are booming it is possible to sustain low levels of cash inflow by issuing new stocks
and securities to finance current liabilities (Davidson & Dunn, 2008: 512).
Not only is the potential destructive force of these debt bombs staggering were they
to come due or default, the location of the bombs are unknown since financial securi-
tization using derivatives,1 CDOs, synthetic-CDOs, dark pools and off-balance-sheet
accounting results in risk management becoming a massive game of hot-potato
wherein risky assets and liabilities are discretely and deceptively packaged and passed
off from one speculator to another. Moreover, these days when the debt bombs do
go off, the debt obligations do not disappear with the jobs and industries; rather, the
holders of the debts that is, investment banks are propped up using public funds
leading to private risk being assumed by public citizens and taxpayers, which in turn
lead to increased national debt levels, reduced public services and other austerity
measures, thereby socializing losses and privatizing gains. As Mary Mellor explains:
The modern system of money issue has left the direction of the economy effectively
in private and commercial hands. Commercial borrowing is lauded as investment,
while government borrowing is decried as expenditure. ... Which institutions have
the social capacity to issue money and on what basis is therefore a critical question
(2005: 54).
Infinite Debt and the Mechanics ofDispossession 119
When confronted with such a problem we might be inclined to seek out solu-
tions. To do so, we could follow the advice of Deleuze, who observes that solutions
follow from the complete conditions under which the problem is determined as a
problem, [and] from the means and the terms which are employed in order to pose
it (1994: 159).
My objective here is to outline tentatively how the globalized risks posed by
debt are created by the conditioning effects of contemporary money- (or, as we will
see, credit-) creation itself. Drawing on Deleuzes and Guattaris description of
the potential for debt to invisibly create the conditions of endentured servitude, I
want to suggest that much of the critical commentary about neoliberal capitalism,
resource wars, terrorism, global poverty and ubiquitous indebtedness overlooks
the ways that contemporary international monetary policy and the nature of
money itself create the complete conditions (1994: 159) for debts and these
crises endless proliferation. I want to point out too that the ontological status
of contemporary credit-money precipitates and precedes todays most destructive
economic expressions at the moment of its inception, since these economic and
political expressions are not merely ideologically driven but debt-satisfying. That
is, because the vast majority of todays money comes into being as debt (or credit)
with the debt owing to private banks, the very creation of privately produced money
concurrently creates an insatiable debt monster that effectively requires that we
develop social and economic tactics for feeding it. This debt monster, in turn, has a
voracious appetite for ever more money, requiring ever more loans, financial specu-
lation, debt creation and risk production. Individuals, corporations and nations are
all compelled to keep filling the debt hole (faster and faster). This scenario results
in the benefits of interest payments being transferred out of the public sector into
the private sector, leaving citizens with a debt bill they are often unable to repay
and sovereign countries being relegated to being clients of private bond markets,
speculators and financial terrorists. As macro-economist Steve Keen explains in his
book, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences, Rather than
the State directly controlling the money supply via its control over the issue of new
currency and the extent to which it lets banks leverage their holdings of currency,
private banks and other credit-generating institutions largely force the States hand
(2004: 303). And as Deleuze and Guattari point out, when capital becomes the full
body or the new socius it appropriates all the productive forces (1983: 227). These
days, however, the global debt hole is often so large that increasingly individuals,
corporations and countries are discovering that their debts are unserviceable, lead-
ing to defaults, bankruptcies, foreclosures, bailouts, violent conflict and other debt-
derived destruction.
Nevertheless, what should be understood is that debt and money creation is itself
an invisible machine that in our culture not only creates value and satisfies desire but
also attaches itself to our desires2 creating through its own production the condi-
tions of its own emergence. As Philip Goodchild recently observed: It is not so much
we who desire and believe in capital, but capital that believes and desires in us. Should
capital no longer desire or believe in us, then we fall into the impotence of economic
collapse (2010: 35).
120 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Canadians interested in monetary reform point out that these interest charges are
technically and legally unnecessary since the Bank of Canada can produce money with
interest owing to the Bank of Canada. In other words, Canadians could be paying
interest to themselves on their own money. Politicians like Finance Minister Flaherty
in a recent e-mail exchange, in which I inquired why Canada doesnt borrow from
the Bank of Canada at market rates instead of borrowing it from the international
bond market, suggested that increasing the monetary supply this way (i.e. internally)
is inflationary, but whether the money supply is increased by borrowing internally
or externally, it would seem to amount to the same thing. Regardless, as described
in Canadas recent 2010 Budget document, Canada has successfully undertaken
substantial new borrowing since 20082009 in order to create the money to finance
its plan to stimulate the economy and improve access to credit; most importantly,
debt securities issued to fund this money creation have found a ready and diversified
investor base thanks to Canadas strong fiscal position (http://www.budget.gc.ca/2010/
plan/anx3-eng.html) in other words, Canadas capacity to create its own money is
contingent upon the willingness of private interests to purchase our debt securities
(i.e. bonds). This willingness, in turn, is based on our credit worthiness (i.e. our AAA
rating and our ability to pay as determined by American-based credit rating agencies
like Moodys or S&P4). If, as in the recent case of Greece, our credit rating were to fall to
junk status, no one would be willing to fund our own money production, resulting in
our not being able to issue Canadian dollars to pay for public services, infrastructure,
etc. As Deleuze and Guattari observe, capitalist economists are not mistaken when
they present the economy as being perpetually in need of monetarization, as if it were
always necessary to inject money into the economy from the outside according to a
supply and a demand. In this manner the system indeed holds together and functions,
and perpetually fulfills its own immanence. In this manner it is indeed the global object
of an investment of desire (1983: 239).
The ontological status of money is something that few are aware of. Just the other
day, a professor friend of mine asked: Whats with all these countries in debt? And
who are they in debt to? The answer, of course, is that they are in debt to private inter-
ests, investors, speculators, the international bond market and other private banking
interests who, by issuing loans (i.e. creating debt) bring money into existence ex nihilo
with interest owing. In other words, banks dont so much lend money as create credit.
Evidence of the ex nihilo conditions of moneys creation was recently on display in
a conversation between US Republican Congressman Ron Paul and Federal Reserve
Chairman, Ben Bernanke. While asking Bernanke where the American dollars will
come from to add $105 billion to IMF bailout funds (much of which, weve since learnt,
will be destined for Greece) Mr Paul asks rhetorically: Who pays for this? Where does
it come from? Will this all come out of the printing press once again? before replying,
in response to his own question, that of course this money will get created out of thin
air; Bernanke, nodding anxiously, replies, well its a loan ... [and] if its not paid back
[by countries like Greece] we [and the IMF] would take our share of the loss [from the
Greek people] (CSPAN).
The trend towards private banks issuing the publics money is not a new one. For
example, since the 1950s and 1960s, the Canadian Government has increasingly
122 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
orrowed money from private banks at interest rather than creating the money effec
b
tively interest-free insofar as interest owing could be cycled from the publicly owned
Bank of Canada back into government operations and social programming. This has
resulted in Canadian taxpayers paying, in2009, $44 billion in interest payments (thats
$120 million/day) (http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/govt48b-eng.htm). The fact
that money today is created out of thin air as bonds and loans (i.e. debts) and only
backed by, for example, the taxpayers future ability to pay, finds that contemporary
credit-money, as fiat currency, is theoretically capable of being produced infinitely since
todays credit-money is not backed by hard assets at all (as it was, for example, until 1971
when Nixon finally decoupled the American dollar, and hence all other currencies, from
its long-standing and restrictive link to gold). As Mellor points out, It is ironic that even
the government historically the issuer of debt-free money (coin and paper) now
borrows new money from the banking system. As bank money is effectively created
out of thin air, the people, through the state, are being made to repay with interest
something they could have created out of thin air themselves (2005, p. 54). Similarly,
Deleuze and Guattari correctly identify this potential flow of infinite debt by describing
it as an instantaneous creative flow that the banks create spontaneously as a debt owing
to themselves, a creation ex nihilo that, instead of transferring a pre-existing currency
as means of payment, hollows out at one extreme of the full body [of capital] a negative
money (a debt entered as a liability of the banks), and projects at the other extreme a
positive money (a credit granted the productive economy by the banks) (1983: 2378).
Today, then, moneys relevancy and value are completely dependent on belief and
faith which, in turn, are related to citizens-as-desiring-assemblages5 who, by drawing
on credit, keep the belief and faith alive. As Goodchild explains: Those who inter-
pret the liberation of desire in terms of Spinozas and Nietzsches battles against the
residually theological form of the State are still perpetuating the humanistic, bourgeois
revolution: they rarely appreciate the extent to which the unlimited productivity and
desire they seek is made possible by the capitalist mode of production. When have God,
the State, or Capital ever repressed a desire? Are these not great objects and catalysts
of desire? (2010: 28).6
One final point worth making about banking, money-creation and debt is that in
many countries not only is money-creation in the hands of private banks and created
out of thin air but also these banks neednt keep any money in reserve at all in
order to lend out as much interest-bearing-debt-risk as they (think they) can handle
(Australia, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom operate
this way, with the United States Federal Reserve recently stating that it is possible that,
ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve
requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system (Bernanke,
2010) that is, loss of potential profits). As Goodchild notes, credit-money is not
restricted by accumulated assets, but by anticipations of a rate of return; in short, he
goes on, the global economic system functions as a spiral of debt, where future labor is
progressively mortgaged, and where individuals, corporations and governments suffer
from a progressive degree of enslavement to debt bondage (2010: 34).
Money, then, can be described as an invisible force with its own peculiar desires and
consumptive needs. Tragically, of course, while immaterial money can be produced,
Infinite Debt and the Mechanics ofDispossession 123
and virtual credit can be created, ad infinitum, that upon which it feeds the mate-
rial world, human lives, the natural environment is as finite as money is potentially
infinite. This discrepancy, of course, creates ratios of scarcity that defy the imagination,
resulting in moneys voracious appetite to consume natural resources and human
labour leading to resource-inflected conflicts and heightened geopolitical tension.
The conditions, then, under which money is created, in turn condition the con-
ditions within which societies and economies come into being at once enabling,
limiting and determining7 their emergence, and enabling and constraining debtors
desires.8 In other words, money and its mode of production (rather than money as a
means of production) must be understood as that which mediates all social relations
and as that which reproduces the conditions of its own production as credit by putting
debt to work on and against us. Indeed, Mellor points out that in contemporary soci-
ety: the link with real commodities is so detached that we see a sequence where Money
is invested in Money to make more Money: (M - M - M). This, she observes:
is unsustainable for three reasons: First, since money is a debt upon society
(i.e., a call upon goods and services), piling up mountains of money produces
unredeemable demands. Second, because there is no real investment in goods
and services to be consumed, investment in money just breeds more money, which
requires more money investments to be found. Third, as in any crisis of overpro-
duction, the system collapses when there are no more purchasers that is, when
stock market or house prices move beyond the ability of new people to enter the
market. (2005: 51)
These ponzi-esque facts about money are, for most people, invisible. For most folks,
money is a neutral means of exchange or saving, an act of faith bolstered by blissful
ignorance. That being the case, these same people put themselves to work in service of
money and in service of their faith and belief in money as something potentially attain-
able in great amounts if only they stay on the treadmill and keep their collective noses to
the grindstone. As Goodchild observes, peoples beliefs about money is like their beliefs
about spiritual forces: there is nothing that can reveal them; this leads, of course, to
these invisible and ineffable forces becoming all the more powerful insofar as people
are unaware of the forces that ventriloquize their own beliefs and desires (2010: 35).
Unbeknownst to most, money has become the complete condition of our lives,
determining what we desire and what we are capable of. As Deleuze and Guattari
describe, once money becomes value as such capital becomes the full body, the new
socius or the quasi cause that appropriates all the productive forces (1983: 227). And
Goodchild states: It is no longer sufficient to oppose being and becoming, representa-
tion and production, the one and multiplicity, transcendence and immanence, for the
relations between these dualisms in the schiz-flow are mediated by credit (2010: 35).
Of course, this has also lead others, like Mellor in a recent article, to suggest that
the banking system cannot be allowed to run up indebtedness without limits, and to
suggest instead that capitalism, and its ecocidal expressions, must be cut off from the
oxygen of bank credit, and that speculative investment must build on already issued
money in real time. That is, the saver/investor must wait until the debt is cleared or the
investment sold to be repaid; for Mellor, the only way to achieve this separation of
124 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
creates the purchasing power, instead of presupposing it. Who would be capable of
stealing? Certainly not the industrial capitalist as the representative of the afflux of
profit (1983: 2389).
Indeed, these days whether average citizens are careful with their personal finances
or not, indebtedness is the condition into which they are born and in which they will
inevitably operate (whether its sovereign debt, ecological debt, student debt, credit
card debt, mortgage debt, etc.). My argument, then, is that the predominance and
excessive expansion of privately created credit-money must be regarded as a destruc-
tive force due both to its very nature and to the effects debt-moneys precondition con-
ditions. That is, today debt- and fiat-based money inevitably reshapes and reorients
a society, away from desires and creative forms of productivity or sustainability, and
towards debt slavery in perpetuity. Its voracious appetite has an infinite capacity to
consume finite hard assets and real productivity leaving everything not in service of
anything other than the crass requirements of debt itself. In sum, we could say that
these days desiring production is reproduced not by the flow of libidinous desire but by
the demands of debts, with debt repayment replacing the desires that were the impetus
for bringing the debt into being (or into non-being, as it were) in the first place. Tragi-
cally, today too many desire little more than to be free from debt, while debt in turn
desires nothing but that it be repaid.
While this scenario is admittedly disturbing, Mellor points out that debt-based
money does have internal contradictions that make it vulnerable; namely, it requires
constant growth within the productive economy if it is to be sustainable since a
widespread failure to borrow could at any time provoke a crisis (2005, p. 54). But even
more than constant growth and constant borrowing, what a credit-money economy
requires is that we keep the faith and that we keep believing the blips, bank balances
and occasional paper bills that stand in as ultimate arbiters of value. What is required,
then, in order to resist moneys preconditions is that the invisible force that is fiat-
based credit-money be made visible.
Nietzsche, of course, regarded guilt as the most horrible of psychic states and belief
in guilt as one of the most misguided expressions of faith. For him, institutionaliz-
ing and manipulating guilt produced a culture of resentment, a life-hating culture
with misdirected values and nihilistic impulses. The powerful relationship among
guilt, debt, bad conscience, faith and their potential for manipulation is objectified
by Deleuze and Guattari when they point out that infinite debt [is] internalized at
the same time as it becomes spiritualized (1983: 222). This spiritualization of debt
was recently on display on the IMFs blog IMFdirect in a religiously referential (or
reverential?) post entitled: Ten Commandments for Fiscal Adjustment in Advanced
Economies (Blanchard and Cottarelli, 2010).
As if invoking the understanding of debt foregrounded in this chapter, Nietzsche
describes guilt as preconditioning certain styles of life and as predetermining destruc-
tive modes of valuing and evaluating. Moreover, guilt like debt is a mode of exchange
that designates value in order to manipulate others and in order to exert control. As
Nietzsche explains: The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, ... originated ... in the
oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship of buyer
and seller, creditor and debtor: here person met person for the first time, and measured
himself person against person (2006b: 414).
Nietzsche suggests that debt-based and guilt-based modes of exchange eventually
became the precondition against which value is determined; as he explains: No form
of civilization has been discovered which is so low that it did not display something
of this relationship. Fixing prices, setting values, working out equivalents, exchanging
this preoccupied mans first thoughts to such a degree that in a certain sense it
constitutesthought: the most primitive kind of cunning was bred here, as was also,
presumably, the first appearance of human pride, mans sense of superiority over other
animals (2006b: 414). Moreover, he argues, by always being in position to punish
thedebtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares
the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an
inferior... . So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to
cruelty (2006a: 41).9
Measuring life and defining value, having once shifted from relations of debt to
relations of guilt has, in our era (and with the waning of religious conviction so com-
mon in the West) returned to its debt-based roots. What remains the same is that both
debt and guilt depend on the faith and belief of the debtors (the guilty) and the ability
of those owed (the creditors) to manipulate and modulate belief. Hard though it may
be to see beyond the debt-based conditions of our existence, it is imperative that new
modes of life-loving and sustainable valuing be developed if the yoke of debt (and
guilt) is ever to be removed.10
Notes
1 Derivatives are not just a claim a relation of obligations of credit and debt they are
themselves computations of relative values, embodying social relations of competi
tion,not just trust, power, promises and obligations (Dick & Rafferty, 2007, p. 145).
Infinite Debt and the Mechanics ofDispossession 127
2 It is capital that exerts a determining role over political ecology; it is capital that
exerts a maximal leverage through a non-expenditure of effort; it is capital that is
neutral in the social field and becomes invulnerable through its very impotence.
For in the Anti-Oedipus, capital is announced as a new social machine based
on a new mode of representation: the schiz-flow. It is difficult to appreciate the
radical s ignificance of this transition: we are no longer concerned with assem-
blages of power, as encountered under imperial representation, but assemblages
of desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 531 n39). All the discourses on imperial
representation,and resistance to it, from theology to politics, become relativized:
the construction of society no longer passes through such social r epresentation.
Ofcourse, c apitalism cannot function without the State, it intensifies and p roliferates
the regulatory function of the State (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 252); but this is
precisely the point faster than the State can wither away under c ommunism, it
is reborn under capitalism. Capitalism is the immanent social field of potential in
which states spring up like weedsnation-states, corporate empires, disciplinary
micro-regimes, new religious movementsin each case, these are not founded
by power, which is merely the competition between states, but by desire. Capi-
tal g enerates the State, generates power, just as it generates the proletariat, the
multitude or productivity; but it does so through its own impotence, through its
ownvulnerability. Power politics is replaced by a politics of desire (Goodchild,
2010,p. 29).
3 Currently, 97 per cent of all money is borrowed into existence by governments,
companies and individuals. In recent years mortgages have been a source of
money issue as the same houses are bought over and over again at ever-increasing
prices. M ortgage borrowing in the U. K. accounts for approximately 60 per cent
of c redit-money and 80 per cent in the U. S. In earlier eras it was agricultural and
industrial bor- rowing; today consumer and student debt are growing sectors
(Mellor, 2005, p. 53).
4 What about the Raters? (2010, May 2). The New York Times. Retrieved from http://
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02sun1.html?srcme&refgeneral.
5 Credit is a flow, a conjunction of belief and desire, which gives birth to further
flows of belief and desire. Where Deleuze and Guattari differ from the mainstream
of c ultural theory is in naming the propagation of credit as a machinic or systemic
process. Constituted by positive feedback loops of leverage and speculation, it is not
merely a cultural phenomenon, an output of collective human subjectivity. On the
contrary, consumer culture is called into being by the speculative operation of the
banks, and not vice-versa (Goodchild, 2010: 34).
6 Yet as the means of access to all other desired objects, the principle that converts
demand into effective demand, money is that which is most in demand. One can
only gain access to ones desires through money. Money becomes the embodiment
of the Reality-principle: it is the means of access to pleasure, the means of making
desire effective. This is the profound link between capitalism and the Oedipus com-
plex: one only gains access to pleasure by passing through the undesirable. Yet here
we encounter a strange duality: for the rational economic subject, money is merely a
passive substance, sterile and impotent; for the capitalist investor or financial specu-
lator, however, money, as the means of access to more money, is most to be desired.
This is because of the dual role of money as a schiz-flow: as a unit of account, as
bookkeeping money, money is a measure of values; as a means of payment, money
is a quantum flow. From a static perspective, money measures value, but has no
128 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
i ntrinsic value in itself; from a dynamic perspective, money is what realizes value,
what makes values real. It brings things into being. Thus, as the means of access
to reality, it affirms itself as the supreme principle of reality, as true Being. Within
capitalism, one is under an unlimited demand to make money. Capital is thus desire,
but a desire that insists outside of the human subject, impersonal and abstract,
beyond the pleasure-principle. It constitutes the social reality within which desires
are produced and rendered effective. It constitutes a mechanical principle of social
effectivity, a sterile impotence that has an ultimate determining role. Hence Deleuze
and Guattari explain that power has become directly economic (Deleuze & Guattari,
1984, p. 249) (Goodchild, 2010: 32).
7 Ingham goes on to point out that any scarcity of money is socially and politically
determined and that conventional economics is only applicable once money has
been produced. He sees the epiphenomenal status of money as resulting from
the fragmentation of the social sciences, such that the question of how money was
produced and how it functioned was not posed. For Ingham, money is arguably the
most important institution in capitalist society. The money market is therefore the
headquarters of capitalism that links the hierarchy of debtors from the private
sector to the state through the banking system. The elastic creation of credit-money
is the mechanism through which the capitalist system can be actualized (Mellor,
2005, p. 54).
8 Capitalism is the immanent social field of potential in which states spring up like
weeds nation-states, corporate empires, disciplinary micro-regimes, new r eligious
movements in each case, these are not founded by power, which is merely the
competition between states, but by desire. Capital generates the State, generates
power, just as it generates the proletariat, the multitude or productivity; but it does
so through its own impotence, through its own vulnerability. Power politics is
replaced by a politics of desire (Goodchild, 2010, p. 29).
9 I ask again: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for debts? To
thedegree that to make someone suffer is pleasure in its highest form, and to
the degreethat the injured party received an extraordinary counter-pleasure in
exchangefor the injury and distress caused by the injury: to make someone
suffer, - a true feast, something that, as I mentioned, rose in price the more
it c ontrasted with the rank and social position of the creditor. I say all this in
speculation: because such subterranean things are difficult to fathom out, besides
being embarrassing; and anyone who clumsily tries to interject the concept
revengehas merely obscured and darkened his own insight, rather than claried
it (- revenge itself just leads us back to the same problem: how can it be g ratifying
to make someone suffer?). It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the
tartuffery of tame house-pets (meaning modern man, meaning us) revolts against
a truly forceful realization of the degree to which cruelty is part of the festive joy
of the ancients and, indeed, is an ingredient in nearly every pleasure they have;
on the other hand, how naive and innocent their need for cruelty appears, and
how fundamental is that disinterested malice (or, to use Spinozas words, the
sympathiamalevolens) they assume is a normal human attribute -: making it
something to which conscience says a hearty yes! (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy
ofMorality, p.42).
10 Or as Goodchild states, what is required is a new material vehicle for belief and
desire (Goodchild, 2010, p. 36).
Infinite Debt and the Mechanics ofDispossession 129
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130 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
In his work since the late 1980s, the Caribbean poet and theorist douard Glissant
has developed a concept of Relation with which he tries to account for the cultural
multiplicity of our globalizing world. Glissant capitalizes Relation in order to highlight
that it addresses the world as ontological relatedness, with Relation inhering in all actu-
alized relations a world in constant becoming and metamorphosis, in which humans
and non-humans share, but which is also historically and politically left with the herit-
age of colonial exploitation and violence vis--vis others and nature. Under such con-
ditions, Relation for Glissant allows to rethink the stakes of cultural interrelatedness
and exchange and rework the questions of cohabitation with others and relations to the
other from the perspective of an immanent world a Tout-monde, as Glissants novel
of the same title has it, or a totalit-monde, as his Poetics of Relation (1997) proposes.
One of Glissants primary philosophical inspirations for this is the work of Deleuze and
Guattari (1987). Not only did he dedicate his novel Tout-Monde (1993) to the memory
of the latter but he also implicitly and explicitly draws on Deleuze and Guattaris work
repeatedly; explicitly even in the novel itself (cf. 63, hereafter referenced as TM), and
also, for example, at the beginning of Poetics of Relation:
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps,
notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and kill-
ing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed
root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no
predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome main-
tains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root.
132 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
hizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in
R
which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.
(11, hereafter referenced as PR)
At first sight, Glissants stress here on identity could seem to fit neatly into the tradi-
tion of postcolonial analyses of representations of colonizer and colonized, as well
as those of the constitution of postcolonial subjects and nations, ultimately based on
the same logic of representation. However, the challenge Glissant poses to us and
precisely in the vein of Deleuze and Guattaris rhizomatic thought, of nomadology
and their monistic ontology is to think identity without tying it either to a logic of
representation or to the idea of a self-reflexive individual, thought as a separate entity
from others, understood as points in Euclidean space that pre-exist their relations. As
the above passage notes, rhizomatic thought maintains the idea of rootedness, but of a
rootedness in which as the French original perhaps makes clearer each and every
identity, stend dans un rapport lAutre (Glissant, 1990: 23), extends or unfurls
itself in the relationship (rapport) to anOther and in mutual exchange. By thinking
identity as a process of spatio-temporal weaving through expansion rather than fili-
ation (cf. PR: 4762), and as an only preliminarily stabilized pole within a network of
relata brought about in the process of relating, Glissant moves our thinking of iden-
tity elsewhere beyond the conceptual shortcomings and political pitfalls of identity
politics and beyond a logic of representation. Following Deleuze and Guattaris rhi-
zomatic thought, Glissant is after what he terms a relation-identity, as opposed to a
root-identity based on filiation, legitimacy and transparency. We need to move away
from root-identity as the thought of self and of territory [which] set in motion the
thought of the other and of voyage (144) and towards relation-identity, which exults
the thought of errantry and of totality (144), of an understanding of the world as a
differential and immanent totality. Glissant links the former thought of identity to
what he calls an arrowlike nomadism (12), the (historically Western) nomadism of
voyage and colonial discovery, setting out to seize and settle on a territory that is made
ones property. In contrast, he speaks of the rooted errantry of relation-identity and its
circular nomadism (137). The coinage of a circular nomadism highlights that Glis-
sant does not propose a free-floating detachment from localities (errantry remains
rooted), and does not indiscriminately praise any form of nomadic travel, but only a
specific one: a movement sustained by relational and horizontal spatial expansion (not
set on taking root in a predatory manner), a movement that can even happen in the
same place (it circles or spirals), but is set on change, drawing on the dynamic inher-
ent to relating and distancing within an immanent totality. Nomadism in this circular
fashion is movement (and change) due to an internal dynamic of the totality-world,
not due to a mere displacement in space. In this sense, Nick Nesbitt has demonstrated
the strong reverberations between the late Glissant and Deleuze: Like the later Glis-
sant, Deleuze has always been concerned not with dialectical change, but with what
he has called internal difference (107)1 a fundamental difference that Glissant also
sees as constitutive of the world. While Nesbitt sees such change in Deleuze and
Glissant as the self-sufficient transformation of a body in sheer indifference to its
surroundings (107), I would like to pursue Glissants concept of relation-identity here
Deleuze, Glissant and a Post-Postcolonial Aesthetics of the Earth 133
than grasps (PR: 144). The task is to revive an aesthetic connection with the earth
(PR: 150), in which our approach to the earth and to others works as a relating-related
donner-avec.5
The disposition Glissant calls donner-avec neither appropriative comprehension
(com-prendre) of territory nor dissolution of all differences into one global harmony
is an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion (PR: 151), which Glissant phrases as the
task: of forming specific locales and clusters through dynamic sharing in and distanc-
ing from a Tout-monde and of creating specific relation-identities in the process. It is
the new passion of our post-postcolonial worlding, to borrow this term from Donna
Haraway (2008: 92).
The new passion to make this totality-world happen, without excluding even the
most imperceptible of its components, has required different secret efforts from
the humanities of today, in the first instance that of recognizing difference (differ-
ences) as the primal element of Relation (in the world). The different, and not the
identical, is the elementary particle of the tissue of the living, or of the web that is
woven of cultures. (PhR: 29)
La passion nouvelle de voir raliser cette totalit monde, sans en excepter la
plus inaperue des composantes, a requis des humanits daujourdhui dautres
exigences secrtes, en premier lieu celle de reconnatre la diffrence (les diffrents)
comme llment premier de la Relation (dans le monde). Le diffrent, et non pas
lidentique, est la particule lmentaire de tissu du vivant, ou de la toile trame des
cultures. (PhR: 29)
Hence, Glissant moves the articulations of his most immediate point of cultural ref-
erence the Caribbean and Martinique beyond ngritude and crolit, the histori-
cally consecutive assertions of Caribbean identity, and moves to a consideration of
the Caribbean as an exemplary case of crolization, the web woven of cultures.6 In this
vein, Eric Prieto has recently noted that Glissant has been able to use the specifically
Caribbean, postcolonial dimension of his experience as the point of departure for a
general theory that seeks to understand the underlying forces that drive the evolution
of all cultures (114). Creolization is a condition of the world at large today, one which
can be analysed by taking the Caribbean as its exemplary exposition, but which does
not pertain to the Creole cultures alone.
The above passage also shows that Glissants conception of creolization as a phe-
nomenon of what he calls the totality-world is close to Deleuzes philosophy not only in
the explicit recourse to Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the rhizome we saw earlier but
also in its privileging of difference and relationality, in its stress on the imperceptibility
of some components of the web of relations and in the explicit recourse to the baroque,
especially if we think of Deleuzes work on Leibniz and the baroque. The passion of
contemporary post-postcolonial thought (and poetics) as Glissant pursues it is close
to the task that Deleuze demonstrated with the help of Leibniz: to think differences
without envisioning these atomistically as separate, discrete entities (Deleuze, 1993:
2931), to think a relational Oneness Glissant says totality7 without forefeiting the
possibility of differentiated entities. The latter differentiated entities, on the basis
of a fundamental relationality is what Glissant comes to call relation-identities: as
Deleuze, Glissant and a Post-Postcolonial Aesthetics of the Earth 135
we heard above, the emergence of (entangled) points from which one sees the world.
It would take a longer study to draw out the reverberations between Glissants neo-
baroque and Leibniz baroque as well as the differences between them and I here
rather want to pursue Glissants post-postcolonial poetics of relation as a Deleuzian
opening for postcolonial studies. But when Deleuze explains for Leibniz that such a
point from which one sees the world is not exactly a point but a place, a position, a
site, a linear focus, a line emanating from lines (1993: 19) and to that degree can be
called point of view (19), this entails the rethinking of the subject of the point of view
as well. We are no longer dealing, Deleuze writes, with a pregiven or defined subject; to
the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains
in the point of view (19). It implies a point of view, is an effect of a certain point of
view as much as the subject of Glissants relation-identity is not a pre-given subject
but the effect of the lines of contact and exchange it emanates from. In her study on
Postcolonial Agency, Simone Bignall describes this process of production beautifully
for Deleuzes ontology.
The stress on relationality in this process becomes very clear here and resonates with
Glissant, as well as the reminder that identities as negotiations of self/other are never
only abstract identification with symbolic categories, nor relations only between me
and another. We are always complex bodies, as Bignall writes, and always several are
involved.
Given what we have seen so far, Peter Hallward is right to call Glissant perhaps
the most thoroughly Deleuzian writer in the francophone world (67) whose Tout-
monde (1993) and Potique de la Relation (1990) provide, in fiction and in theory,
an extraordinary tribute to Deleuzes smoothly nomadological philosophy (67). If we
look especially at Glissants later texts Poetics of Relation, his novel Tout-Monde, and
his two theoretical essays Une Nouvelle Rgion du Monde. Esthtique I and Philosophie
de la Relation. Posie en tendue we find that these do move from what we might call
a properly postcolonial writing of Martinique (present in earlier novels such as La
Lzarde [1958] and Le Quatrime Sicle [1964]) to what is called a post-postcolonial
perspective here, and what Hallward calls nomadological philosophy, less concerned
with one specific community, and more so with the totality of the world as interre-
lated and Relation. Especially in these late writings, Glissant comes to see, as Prieto
136 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
remarks, the postcolonial situation as part of a larger puzzle, and understood that the
resolution of postcolonial problems requires a sense of how the totality can be repaired
(114). In that sense, Prieto also speaks of Glissant as a post-postcolonial thinker (113).
Contrary to what Hallward claims in his reading of Glissant in Absolutely Postcolo-
nial, however, such a move is not fuelled by a desire to transcend the world and move
beyond relationality or the relations to others a worry that Hallward expresses for all
four of the postcolonial writers he discusses (Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed
Dib and Severo Sarduy).8 Hallward reads the resonances of Deleuzian philosophy in
these works as the cause for a move beyond this world and towards absolute, deter-
ritorialized errance, much in line with his reading of Deleuzes own work (cf. Hallward
2006). As can be seen from Glissants late texts, however, his notion of Relation does
not transcend relations to the world or to others, but rather accounts for a world con-
stituted by nothing but relations, on the basis of an immanent universe whose produc-
tive entanglements he terms Relation (for Glissants Spinozist resonances, cf. Burns
1069). In the course of these entanglements, specificities emerge from within the
weave (trame) that the human (and non-human) participants are co-constituting, by
way of differentiation and distancing.9 Glissant responds, thus, to what he sees as the
changed condition of the world: from the assertions of (cultural and political) inde-
pendence and root-identity to the recognition and production of the totality-world
(totalit-monde) and relation-identity, a condition that results from five centuries of
intense cultural exchange, trade, exploitation and (asymmetrical) relations.
[W]e no longer view the world in a coarse and projective way: as, for example,
yesterday, five continents, four races, several large civilizations, several voyages of
discovery and conquest, continuous amendments to knowledge, a future roughly
divinable. We now, and to the contrary, enter into an infinity of detail, and con-
ceive of multiplicity everywhere, which is non-extended and for us not to disen-
tangle, unpredictable. (PhR: 27)
[N]ous ne voyons plus le monde en manire grossire et projective: et par
exemple, comme hier, cinq continents, quatre races, plusieurs grandes civilisations,
plusieurs priples de dcouvertes et de conqutes, des avenants rguliers la con-
naissance, un devenir peu prs devinable. Nous entrons maintenant et au con-
traire dans un infini dtail, et dabord nous en concevons de partout la multiplicit,
qui est intendue, et qui pour nous est indmlable, et sans prdiction. (PhR: 27)
We are shifting from a generalized vision of the world (four races, five continents) to
the increasing perception of detail and asked to affirm the fact that every minor detail,
even if non-perceived, is an active constituent of Tout-monde. This moves us from the
measures of quantifiable units to inextricable entanglement (emmlement), which will
never be entirely cleared up for any of us.
[T]he very measure of what we call a civilization gives way to the entanglement of
these cultures of humanities, neighboring and implicated. Their details engender
totality, everywhere and from everywhere. The detail is not a descriptive fixed-
point, it is at the same time a poetic depth as it is a non-measurable expanse. These
inextricables and unforeseeables fashion rather than define reality or the sense of
Tout-monde. (PhR: 28)
Deleuze, Glissant and a Post-Postcolonial Aesthetics of the Earth 137
[L]a mesure mme de cela quon appelle une civilisation cde lemmlement de
ces cultures des humanits, avoisinantes et impliques. Leurs dtails engendrent
partour, de partout, la totalit. Le dtail nest pas un repre descriptif, cest une
profondeur de posie, en meme temps quune tendue non mesurable. Ces inex-
tricables et ces inattendus dsignent, avant mme de les dfinir, la ralit ou le sens
de Tout-monde. (PhR: 28)
In a way, the affirmation of multiplicity and detail necessarily entails a certain opac-
ity: an obscurity of the many details that will have to remain unattended to, that are
implicated but not activated in a concrete weave and remain obscure. Glissants
stress on the opacity of the totality-world due to obscure(d) details (PR: 11120; PR:
18994; 2006: 1977; PhR: 6971) corresponds to his neo-baroque conception of an
endlessly (un)folding totality (cf. PR: 7780), and again, like for Leibniz, as Deleuze
elaborated in The Fold, this does not mean that obscure(d) elements are irrelevant
or non-existent. Rather, for Leibniz, the dark depths of the monad contain elements,
whose imperceptibility nevertheless entails the possibility for them to move into
clarity. They are not, contrary to Cartesian dualism, nothing. As Deleuze notes, for
Leibniz [c]larity emerges from obscurity by way of a genetic process, and so too clar-
ity plunges into darkness, and continues to plunge deeper and deeper: it is natural
chiaroscuro, a development out of obscurity, and it is more or less clear to the degree
that sensibility reveals it as such (1993: 90; also Kaiser, 2010). In much the same sense,
Glissant affirms opacity as a necessary dimension of our knowledge of the world and
each relation-identity. It allows him to speak of the unpredicatability of the world as
a totality in constant becoming everywhere and from everywhere and of the dis-
position of donner-avec as adequate to this, since it opens onto what is not graspable,
instead of strive for clarity.
To view Relation and Tout-monde as the celebration of a global harmony of same-
ness, in which all identities and specific conglomerations would dissolve to the benefit
of a global that is, a radically dislocated and uprooted errance, as Hallward fears, is to
disregard Glissants stress on rootedness and relationality. Already Glissants oxymoron
of a rooted errantry (PR: 3742) speaks of this endeavour. The weaves of relayed and
transformed utterances, proliferating like Deleuze and Guattaris rhizomes (Britton,
1999: 178 and 164; PR: 187) that are constituted by such relayed-relating errantry do
not confuse or muddle or evaporate pre-existing identicals but distinguish between
differences and permit them, tune them and attune to them in the first place (PhR: 72).
Certainly, both principle terms (Relation and Tout-monde) imply flux and movement
Relation is movement (PR: 170) and might cause us to see only the deterritorial-
izing dimension of such movement. Glissant, however, is careful to note their different
degrees, or different tendencies, whereby Relation is active within itself, whereas total-
ity, already in its very concept, is in danger of immobility (PR: 171). When conceiving
of the processes whereby specificities aggregate and congeal in relation to totality, we
thus have to take into account the two different tendencies of mobility that are implied
between activity (Relation) and immobility (totality). What Glissant puts to use here
are Deleuzes and Guattaris concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization,
which denote precisely the unstoppable dynamic inherent in these tendencies and by
implication inall formations of relational identities. As Deleuze and Guattari write in
138 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
the problem of an us behind, but to rethink it according to that crowd, to think (in
the case of that book A Thousand Plateaus) the two of us as a productive agencement,
and in other cases the cultural specificities as productive entanglements of bodies
enmeshed in spatial (locales with Tout-monde) and temporal (historical legacies with
present inclinations) coordinates. In affirming Relation as primary to any relata, Glis-
sant situates the dynamic of such entanglements in the middle, in much the same way
as Deleuze and Guattari propose towards the end of the first plateau on the rhizome:
The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up
speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one
thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal
movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end
that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (25)
What Deleuze and Guattari note for Kleist, Bchner and Lenz a few lines before the
above passage that they proceed from the middle, through the middle, coming and
going rather than starting and finishing (25) corresponds to what Glissants nar-
rator of Tout-monde holds: that come-go is much more than universal ... (24). In
the sense of a come-go a perpetual movement in the middle relation-identity is
neither arrested once and for all nor dissolved into global errance. As for Deleuze and
Guattari, the question is not one of a localizable relation that is, one between fixed and
unchanging poles of a relationship but rather one of manoeuvring speeds, direction
and movement, in the process of which all that relates comes about and congeals into
singular weaves. For any relation-identity, based on rhizomatic thought, this means
degrees of flux and coagulation, since [e]very rhizome contains lines of segmentarity
according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc. as
well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees (1987: 9).
One of the examples Glissant gives for these simultaneous tendencies of segmen-
tarity (territorialization) and flight (deterritorialization) is not only specific to the
Caribbean the context or natural cultural environment which continues to inform
the imaginaries of his writings in a privileged way but also a startling one: the planta-
tion system as an utterly striated space and territorialized social structure, yet as har-
bouring knots of entanglements that open lines along which its striation can be and has
been deterritorialized. Deported and uprooted in a systematic way from their cultural
practices and languages, Africans were brutally forced into slavery and to reterritorial-
ize in the plantation system, the economic system that predominated in much of the
Americas, and especially in the Caribbean. Glissant makes this the point of departure
in Poetics of Relation (1990: 59), and in a later chapter returns to the plantation system
as an enclosed place: each Plantation was defined by boundaries whose crossing was
strictly forbidden; impossible to leave without written permission or unless authorized
by some ritual exception (PR: 64), organized along rigid power structures and the
radical foreclosure of any movement or (inter)relation. In that sense, the colonization
of the Caribbean was based on the production of striated spaces of which Deleuze and
Guattari note that [t]he more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation, the
more homogeneous the space tends to become (488). Glissant links such a formation
of space and with it a rigid conceptualization of identity as souche to the colonial
140 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
An aesthetics of the earth? In the half-starved dust of Africa? In the mud of flooded
Asias? In epidemics, masked forms of exploitation, flies buzz-bombing the skeleton
skins of children? (PR: 151). How and why would we speak of an aesthetics of the
earth in view of these realities of our planet, Glissant asks. And why and how does
the conception of relation-identity matter in the process? Glissant is not blind to the
suffering and the devastation of our planet. And yet, he says that reactivating a dif
ferent relation to the earth (which is bound to a different relation to others), based on
Relation, might perhaps help differ this nightmare, air-conditioned or not (PR: 150).
The difficulty is that for such reactivation there is no prescriptive course of action
or any catalogue of norms.
[W]e realize that Relation does not have a morale, it creates poetics and engen-
ders magnetisms between differences.... None of our morals can be inferred or
deducted from Relation, it is entirely up to us to inscribe them into it, by means of
a terribly autonomous effort of consciousness/conscience and of our imaginaries
of the world. (PhR: 73)
Il se ralise alors que la Relation na pas de morale, elle cre des potiques et
elle engendre des magntismes entre les diffrents. ... La Relation ninfre aucune
denos morales, cest tout nous de les y inscrire, par un effort terriblement auto-
nome de la conscience et de nos imaginaires du monde. (PhR: 73)
If we affirm Relation, which does not come with any normativity inscribed, we will
also have to find our bearing in each and every one of the places in whose weaving
and imagining we partake; always (and pitilessly) also knowing, as Glissant insists,
that where all is related, we are today also always facing the pitiless panorama of the
worldwide commercial market (PR: 152) of a fiercely globalized economy. In view
of this, declarations grounded in the old Manichaeanism of liberation (PR: 152) are
not of much use. Instead, we are in need of a poetics of relation that attunes us to
the possibility of new regions of the world, and imagines them: Utopia is always the
path that we miss (Glissant and Chamoiseau, 2009: 45). In stumbling along these
paths although we might miss them in both senses of the word an affirmation of
the production of places is needed. Not of an abstract (capitalized) Earth but of the
earths we walk on. What, for example, the couple Artmise Marie-Annie in Tout-
monde encounter two women who are magnetically drawn to each other, without
knowing why is not the Earth, of which they did not have any idea, no ... but the
suffering humus/matrix (terreau) on which they spent and used their bodies (TM:
192).13 Noting that she does not know why she is drawn to Marie-Annie, Artmise
nevertheless intuits that it must be that in this way she tried to reconstitute a ter-
rain, a garden, a morne [forested hills of Martinique]. In any case, a landscape, for
lack of a country, where she could take place in peace (TM: 186).14 Such a place is
not given, nor at the characters (or our) disposal, but produces and ex/changes with
them, as much as they with her: [T]he earth stirs and multiplies, you dont see that,
she suffers and supports and also changes you (TM: 487).15 All that is given is a hint
of direction: In the constitution of relation-identity as a weave of (not only human)
components, linking to a place in the preliminary arrest of flux and with the potential
for future (and clandestinely contemporaneous) deterritorializations, Glissant goes
142 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
only so far as to note that in this lies the moral generosity disposing me to accept the
principle of alterity, to conceive of the world not as simple and straightforward, with
only one truth mine (PR: 154). But he also remarks that, alongside such a thought
of the other, it takes what he calls the other of thought in order to alter and push us
to action. The thought of the Other can dwell within me without making me alter
course, without prizing me open... (PR: 154). It is the principle that we can take
care not to violate. But in addition, in order to alter course and imagine new regions
of the world, it takes an aesthetic (ragged vision or imaginary of the world) that we
live, together and directly, most often in chaos (PhR: 74) and that is implemented in
relation. The other of Thought is always set in motion by its confluences as a whole, in
which each is changed and changes the other (PR: 155). These others, of which I am
one, are no longer the Other as a safe transcendental structure nor the other oppos-
ing the self in a mere self/other binary. Glissants moves his thought of Relation, on
the one hand, beyond Otherness as structure and in that sense towards the world
without Others that Deleuze finds in Tourniers novel Friday (1990: 30120). What
in Glissant and Deleuze and Tournier, we might add is missing, is any prefigured
manner of relating, the structural Other. For such an absence of the Other as structure
(or as binary structural necessity) in Deleuze, Thiele notes that such Otherlessness
in Deleuze does ... in no way speak for a self-centered or even more rigid identitarian
discourse (26) nor, we might add, for the self-sufficient transformation of a body in
sheer indifference to its surroundings (Nesbitt, 2010: 107). Rather, with their stress
on relationality Deleuze as much as Glissant claim a thought of waiting, following,
and carrying, all notions inherently expressing the task for relation (Thiele, 2008:
26). What we thus have nevertheless, on the other hand although we might miss
the self/other binary of a logic of representation and the structural Other , is the
moral generosity vis--vis alterity as a principle, and especially in Glissant very
many (human and non-human, dead and alive) others. The becomings that Glissants
relation-identity describes are not fleeing this world or their locales; they are alterna-
tive modes of positioning whose parameters and morales are not prescribed. Only
a certain directionality: the generosity of following and tracing paths with others, of
giving-on-and-with. Such a perspective might move the postcolonial elsewhere per-
haps towards a post-postcolonial concern for our earthly existences, mindful of the
planetary scope of our entanglements, but also conscious of our legacies of injustice
and violence, and of the necessity of ever-renewed, yet not cheaply granted, moral
generosities.
Notes
1 Nesbitt also points to the shared critiques of identity, territory and Oedipus as well
as baroque proliferation, variation, deterritorialisation (107).
2 Ne partez pas de votre rive comme pour un voyage de dcouverte ou de conqute.
Laissez faire au voyage. ... Ne croyez pas votre unicit, ni que votre fable est la
meilleure, ou plus haute votre parole (TM: 31). All translations from French are
mine. Extended quotes are given in English and French in the text.
Deleuze, Glissant and a Post-Postcolonial Aesthetics of the Earth 143
3 ... on voit le monde d partir de nimporte quel pays, ne croyez pas que vous tes
lu prdestin, tous les pays du monde sont des pays des Revenant, aller-venir est
bien plus quuniversel ... (TM: 24).
4 Recently, this connection of Deleuze and the postcolonial has come increasingly into
view; see Bignall 2010; Patton/Bignall 2010; Burns/Kaiser 2012.
5 Translated by Betsy Wings as to give-on-and-with, and introduced by Glissant as
a different mode of understanding from the grap and seizure implicit to compre-
hension (fr. com-prendre). Donner (to give) is meant as a generosity of perception.
(InFrench, donner can mean to look out toward). There is also the possibile sense
of yielding, as a tree might give in a storm in order to remain standing. Avec both
reflects the com- of comprendre and defines the underlying principle of Relation
(Translators introduction, PR: xiv).
6 For the transitions from ngritude (le cri du morne) and crolit (le cri de la man-
grove) to Glissants creolization (le cri du monde), cf. Dash 1995; also Britton 188
note 14.
7 Although at first sight this is perhaps counterintuitive, totality for Glissant does
not mean a stable unity or static whole. He insists that it is precisely not totalitarian
(PR: 171), not the arrest of differentiation, but always a totality in evolution (PR:
133). He couples totalit-monde with chaos-monde with explicit reference to chaos-
theory (PR: 1347) and with cho-monde. Of the latter, Glissant writes: In order to
cope with or express confluences, every individual, every community, forms its own
chos-monde, imagined from power and vainglory, from suffering or impatience.
Each individual makes this sort of music and each community as well. ... They
pattern its [the chaos-mondes] constituent (not conclusive) elements and its expres-
sions (PR: 934).
8 Cf. Hallward 2001; for engagements and critical assessments of these readings, cf.
also Burns 2009; Burns/Kaiser 2012; Hiddleston 2004; Kaiser 2012.
9 We find a wealth of vegetation as non-human elements in Relation in Tout-monde
especially the banyan trees and the mangal or mangrove forest which live hetero-
geneous and horizonal ways of rootedness. Many of the novels human characters
draw upon the examples of these plants to adopt and imagine manners of rooted
errantry (cf. TM: 6270; 25570).
10 To elaborate the emergence of a subject from the weaving of partial subjects and
partial objects more fully, it would be necessary to explore the resonances between
Glissant, Deleuze and Bracha L. Ettingers work on matrixial weaving as drawing
non-phallic relations the others (cf. Ettinger 2006). This goes beyond the scope of
this chapter.
11 Marronage (from fr. maronner, to growl, to snarl) designated originally the political
act of slaves who escaped into the forested hills of Martinique, now designates a
form of cultural opposition to European-American culture (cf.PR:xxii).
12 La crolization nest pas ce mlange informe (uniforme) o chacun irait se perdre, mais
une suite dtonnantes rsolutions, dont la maxime fluide se dirait ainsi: Je change, par
changer avec lautre, sans me perdre pourtant ne me dnaturer (PhR: 66).
13 ... pas la Terre, dont elles navaient pas ide, non, ... mais le terreau souffrant o
elles avaient us leurs corps (TM: 192).
14 ... elle sessayait de la sorte reconstituer un terrain, un pan, un jardin, un morne.
Unpaysage en tout cas, dfaut dun pays, o elle pourrait se tenir en paix (TM: 186).
15 ... la terre bouleverse et multiplie, vous ne voyez pas a, elle souffre et supporte
etelle vous change aussi (TM: 487).
144 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
References
Bignall, S. (2010), Postcolonial Agency. Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Bignall, S. and Patton, P. (eds) (2010), Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Edinburgh: E dinburgh
University Press.
Britton, C. M. (1999), douard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. Strategies of Language
andResistance. Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia.
Burns, L. (2009), Becoming-postcolonial, becoming-Caribbean: douard Glissant and
thepoetics of creolization, Textual Practice, 23, (1), 99117.
Burns, L. and Kaiser, B. M. (eds) (2012), Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial
Pasts, Differential Futures. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dash, J. M. (1989), Introduction, in . Glissant, Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
.(1995), douard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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.(1993), The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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.(1993), Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard.
.(1997), Poetics of Relation (translated by B. Wing). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
.(2006), Une nouvelle rgion du monde. Esthtique I. Paris: Gallimard.
.(2009), Philosophie de la Relation. Posie en tendue. Paris: Gallimard.
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Thiele, K. (2008), The Thought of Becoming. Gilles Deleuzes Poetics of Life. Zurich/Berlin:
diaphanes.
10
and many more. So the philosopher could not satisfy its quest for knowledge just by
one language. In this sense, philosophy has always been multilingual. Moreover, the
philosophers use of language does not even limit itself to the present time. Latin is a
fine example here. As a dead language, this language challenges the philosopher to act
on a language plane that lacks any form of activity. A living being that is challenged
to give life to a thought on a lifeless planet. The philosopher devotes itself3 to the lan-
guage; it urges itself to excel, in order to bridge the impossible strangeness.
However, we could also bring forth another event that on the one hand seems
to overlap the other two, and on the other hand seems to exist outside the realm of
philosophy. If we categorize the first event strangeness within philosophy as a concep-
tual event and the second event the foreign philosopher as a subjective experience,
which is by no means merely personal or individual, then we could speak of a third
event namely the conceptual subjective event of the tongue of the other on the plane
of philosophy. This third practice acts as a twofold tension; on the one hand we could
speak of an inter-subjective tension between the philosopher and the other, and on
the other hand we could speak of an inter-conceptual tension between the concept
of the other and the concept of philosophy. The complexity of the third event is also
due to the fact that the tongue of the other is not bound to one plane of intensity but
rather has become a battlefield of multiple planes, such as sociology, politics, art, sci-
ences, linguistics and more. We could speak of an inter-plane event in the experience
of otherness.
a paradoxical character. The new refers to something that is already there. When a
person from Ghana learns Italian, it experiences something new while it seems to dis-
cover something that has already been there for a while, namely the Italian language. I
would rather argue that the mode, in which the Italian language is learnt, is rather an
invention than a discovery. The Ghanaians use of language is as much a transformation
of the Italian language as well as of the Ghanaian language, a change for the Ghanaian
as well as for the Italians. No matter how hard we try to keep them pure, the different
grammars have already started their interaction in waves of our brains, leaving the
subject behind with a complex of interwoven lines that cannot be clearly differentiated
in one or another language.
The inventing act of language of the other is also related to the mortality aspect of
the language. This does not concern the mortality of a certain language nor the end
of an attitude towards a certain language. It is more than that. The mortality concerns
the death of the speakers attitude to language in general. Learning another language is
effective here, but the becoming of the other, the concept of becoming-other is crucial
to change ones mind on the act of speech. How could one speak of this becoming?
Which language should one choose to discuss this event? Even more so, is there a
form of speech capable of utterance of such an event or make it comprehendible? We
could initially think of experiences such as migration and flight and also other forms
of intense experiences such a rape, torture or the loss of a child that visualize in their
extremeness an inability to speak within the process of expression itself. Through such
encounters, language leaves its comfort zone; a lack of trust spreads itself through
words. I call this event the loss of the mother tongue, the loss of the language that you
imagined to speak flawlessly.4 A language in which you imagined to be free to create
new structures, in contrast to the tongue of the other in which you are forced to create.
The first creation relates to joy, the other to survival, the duty to find ways to tell a tale
that must be told.5 When the familiarity of a language disappears, the ability to express
oneself becomes instable. The uncertainty of the new language spreads itself to other
domains of speech, losing the certainty of the possibility to express. In this sense, the
other subject experiences the same event as the philosopher who is trying to master
the dead language of Latin. The subject the other also attempts to bring alive a language
within a fading milieu. And exactly this urge to speak, and at the same time the lack
of the ability to speak, is the engine that creates new forms of speech that makes the
subject of the other a creative subject and the concept of the other inventive, a possible
world within the impossible.6
The third event also relates itself to the two other events through the notions of
inside and outside. The stranger that enters the plane of a language is an intruder. It
is an outsider that enters in order to own or to blend into the inside. However, this is
not a plain familiarization with the language, as we have seen before. Once inside, the
stranger changes the streams of the language from within, despite its characterization
as the outsider. The outsider has lost its exteriority. It is an immanent transformation,
for both the old and the new insider. The uncertainty and stuttering of the stranger is
born within the new plane of language and produces an overall mode of uncertainty.
As a consequence, the experience of language as a stranger is neither just related to a
certain subject nor just related to the property of a certain identity. It is not a personal
148 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or
not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are
forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children,
the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem
for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it
to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to
become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to ones own language?
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1986:19)
The Minor Philosopher 149
What is the affect and effect of a non-language? How and why should one make
an effort to express the uncommon? Is the lack of words a personal problem and
the lecture to describe this merely a biographical work? The immediate assembly
between the subject of enunciation and the subject of statement has often brought
up the assumption that the minor problem has no major effects. How relevant is the
speech of a minor? Here, the minor is different and beyond the common division
between the minor, being a child, and the major, being a grownup. Minor refers
to an action and speech beyond the logic of majority.9 How far does its language
reach? The analysis of such a language must relate itself immediately to the ethi-
cal and political interpretations of the assumed equalization between concepts such
as loss, lack and shortcoming, and the supposed division between politics and the
personal.
Is loss of a language necessarily bound to become a lack? Writers like Vladimir
Nabokov, Milan Kundera and Ariel Dorfman have often shown that the loss has gained
them words. Their departure has multiplied their sentences. Moreover, is a lack always
a shortcoming? The lack of blond hair, the lack of manhood, the lack of a body part
or a beautiful face, are these shortcomings within a moral and political judgement or
ontological facts? Or rather could a lack of words and gestures create an opportunity
to escape the destructive boredom of the never-changing reality? There is however, a
more daring question: is it not the philosophy that due to its expertise has excluded the
potentiality of this lack and the spontaneity of this loss from the domain of philoso-
phy? Can philosophy relate to the amateur? It seems that the tradition of philosophy
only includes the masters of speech, a mastery that has the tendency to leave out the
subject of the other as a legitimate subject of communication because of its incapabil-
ity to speak well. So while in the first approach philosophy and flight could become
excellent spouses of thought and event, in the further approach on the experience of
otherness and the experience of philosophy seem to be incommensurable and in addi-
tion unrelated.
Second, the problem of the personal and the political or the philosophical is crucial
in the analysis of the other and language. Can a biography become relevant on the
political-philosophical plane? Can a personal experience become crucial in the abstract
analysis of the other? Hannah Arendt has as a political thinker a paradoxical relation
to this division. In her The Human Condition (1998), she argues that the entrance of
the personal into the political has created a social reality that in a senseleads to the
destruction of the private as well the political. Due to the social obsession for statistics,
politics has lost its foremost characteristic, namely a plane of differentiation a plane
upon which man can become unique, not as identities but as stories that are spoken
an agora where men can appear multiple. Yet, although Arendts analysis is extremely
relevant and adequate for our political reflection on modernity, her hard distinction
between politics and the private is in contrast with her own experiences. It is the harsh-
ness of her life that has made her a political subject par excellence. It was her need
of survival that forced her to turn political thought and human rights upside down.
So the question remains: could we ever speak of a work that has not been affected by
the biography of the writer? It is easy and common to point out personal elements in
the writings of a female, a gay or a migrant writer and call them non-political, and
150 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
This receptiveness is also present in politics. As an Arendtian, Agamben pleas for a pol-
itics as a pure form of communicability. In this commonality, life is not distinguished
from its form, in a sense from its biography, and communication is not for the sake of
a message, proper grammar or perfect understanding. Politics means the experiment
of communicability, in which the factum loquendi as such (Agamben, 2000: 116) is
experienced. It is the event of language as such. Language becomes a mean but this
time without an end. There is no purpose beyond its own event. Speaking in public
isthe political act and birth of another form of relationality. This birth is not obsessed
with death; it is the never-ending natality, as Arendt puts it (1976: 9).
Agambens community is then not based on a shared identity or an actuality but
rather on a possibility, the potentiality of thought and communicability. However,
what is the meaning of this communicability and of the coming community for the
one who is unable to tell a tale, the creature of a non-language and the creature of a
simple gaze? Minor expression is born out of a political life, a life without cohesion
in ones language or ones subjectivity; it is a narrative without a logical linearity; an
urge to indicate something but in the loss of gesture. This loss, according to Agamben,
not only defines the experience of a migrant but also defines the experience of every
modern subject (2000: 4960). In a sense we have all lost, we all suffer from a loss of
a specific form of language. And as Deleuze puts it, we are all becoming more and
more excluded from the realm of communication. The entrances are getting narrower
by the day and we have no passwords. It is the age of Control Societies (Deleuze, 1995:
17682).
The loss of gesture is the central dilemma as well as the engine of the double-named
film: Out of Rosenheim or Bagdad Cafe (1985). The confusing playfulness of the gesture
already starts in the attitude of the filmmaker. The German Percy Adlon is challeng-
ing his own as well as his main characters sense of speech by producing the film in
English, between the two countries and gives it a double name, and thus emphasizing
its undecidability.
This tragic comedy starts with a German couple in the American Californian
Mojave Desert, along the magical Route 66. The couple poops and pees, without any
sense of embarrassment. After this basic act of sharing, the husband starts to shout and
curse his wife Jasmin, Ms Mnchgstettner. The pure visualization of their trust seems
to bother the man. He has seen more than he wishes to see. He becomes aggressive and
is throwing empty tins at his wife. She remains calm, but this calmness irritates him
even more. He is starting to crash the car back and forth, and finally she is fed up. With
a calm and emotionless face she takes her suitcase out of the trunk, puts her German
green hat with a feather on and leaves without any hesitation the car and her husband
behind. The husband is satisfied. He leaves but not before tossing the thermos flask out
of the car. The thermos flask is not only the odd image of his act of departure but also
an object that visualizes the cultural difference: the strong brain killing German coffee
versus the American tasteless brown water. As a recurrent object, it shows the strange
multiplicity of the worlds in an empty dessert. In the film it becomes the constant fac-
tor in the chaos, every time the viewers become confused the thermos flask is shown
to comfort them with the familiar image.
Jasmin, however, also leaves this object behind. Neither Ms. nor Mr. Mnchgstettner
has an idea on the importance of the bonding coffee. She has enough baggage. The sound
of her footsteps accompanies her strange figure for a while. The image of the dry Ameri-
can landscape is recognizable but her figure and clothing, her gait and the shape of the
German hat from Bavaria seem to be out of place in this s etting.
After a little while, her husband decides to pick her up anyway, confident of the
fact that the woman has come to her senses. Except, Jasmin doesnt want to be found.
She sees the car and hides her immense body, and despite her poor disappearing act,
thehusband fails to see her. He enters the caf and asks for coffee, while minutes before
Brenda, the owner, fought with her husband because of the broken coffee machine.
However, while couples are mad and frustrated, the calm and taciturn Indian bartender
Cahuenga has already solved the problem. He has already discovered the thermos and
pours the coffee. Mr Mnchgstettner is sitting at the bar, the thermos is in front of
his eyes, but he does not recognize the familiar object, he just nods approvingly. The
coffee tastes good. The only gesture remaining is the vague taste of something that
once has been familiar. Slowly, he prepares himself to leave; some kind of amnesia has
befallen him. He has forgotten about his companion and her thermos.
The empty, uninviting and messy bar slowly gets crowded and the new characters
are introduced. Next to Cahuenga, the peace holder and the furious wife Brenda who
needs to control everything but seems to have lost this long time ago, we are intro-
duced to Sal, the forgetful husband, whose angry wife throws empty tins to his head
what, in turn, makes him decide to leave her in the hope that she will calm down. At
The Minor Philosopher 153
the backside of the caf the young Salomo, Brendas son is building something within
the unfilled desert, as his namesake Solomon; he is the pianist that performs without
spectators. A single parent with ambition, Brenda is also the owner of the motel next
to her caf. Then we meet Rudi Cox, who gives the impression to be the oldest guest.
He is a paradox, hippy with a gun and a guest who will never leave. The unreachable
spoiled daughter Phyllis, who has been neglected for a while and who listens only with
the headphone on, is running off with her older white boyfriend on a motorcycle.
She is the wild daughter of a mother who is in need of stability. Debby, the hot chick
that seduces truck drivers to her room and allures them in tattooing their body, reads
Thomas Mann. The cute baby of the ambitious father and frustrated grandfather is
bound to a chair and the Indian sheriff who sincerely wishes to obey the law. And
finally, Eric the camper who despite the angry tone of Brenda perceives her kindness.
They are all in each others world while no one appears to fit the other ones character.
There are no matches.
Chaotic scenes, all expressing Adlons intention, that is, relating the opposite, two
extremes, by visualizing two contradictory women, Brenda and Jasmin, mad and
fearful, dark and light, thin and thick, the one whose has been left behind and the
fugitive, the rebel and racist, and both recently single; all in Baghdad, in the middle
of the Californian landscape. However, soon the viewers assumptions are contra-
dicted; they are false expectations. Jasmin rents a room in Brendas minimalist motel.
Nevertheless, she fears thin dark figure and fantasizes how her fleshy body is going to
be cooked in a huge pan by African tribes. Brenda is the leader. Nonetheless, her fear
doesnt chase her away. Jasmin wants to stay, despite the danger. Slowly, all the charac-
ters are losing their routines.
In the motel Jasmin, accustomed as she is, starts to unpack her suitcase. Something
is wrong though. Jasmin amazed face fills the image. What is wrong? The box seems to
reveal something new and old, leaving the viewer in the dark. The well-cared Bavar-
ian women neglects to change her clothes; her tight coiffure becomes tangled. After
a day, while Brenda is changing her room, the viewer and Brenda gradually start to
notice what is wrong with the woman. She has her husbands suitcase, something old
that Jasmin was trying to forget. However, then the awareness of the sudden complete
transformation of her life seems to have shocked her. As a good housewife, she has
displayed all his belongings in the room as a last attempt to capture the common
gesture in her life in its passing.
Now its up to Brenda to be xenophobic. The motel owner is unaware of the exist-
ence of a husband. Is she a transvestite? A prostitute? A cheater who pretends to be
in need of a single room, while harbouring a man in the room? In any case, man or
woman and despite the financial benefit, Brenda wants the stranger to leave. Even Jas-
mins permanent kindness and shyness does not comfort Brenda, it makes her even
more anxious and therefore angrier. Only the sheriff is able to stand up to her and
brings her into her sense, by arguing that Jasmin has not acted outside the law. Only a
crack in the law is an argument for the sheriff to deport the outsider.
The white German lady is the foreigner, the other who gets to be excluded as an
alien. She is the one who breaks the rules, the familiar order and turns everything
154 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
upside down. While every guest in the motel is peculiar, it is Jasmin that scares Brenda.
No one could break through Brenda; no one can calm her fury, the familiar fury. Only
Jasmin is the one who seems to dismantle her without extreme effort and also the other
way around. It is the in-between uncertainty and the contradictory clash of character-
istics that changes the characters. It is the permanent transformation of relationality
that renovates the relata. Destruction is the unwanted task of the other, and without the
pain of which the new will never come.
Jasmin appears to be aware of her guilty character. She left her furious husband, and
nevertheless she understands Brendas anger. Despite her calmness, she shares their
common sense of frustration. As a guest she wishes to make Brendas office a home, the
destructor that cleans the chaos of the inhabitant. She takes care of the unwanted baby;
make the rebellious girl take her headphone off willingly by connecting the lederhosen
trousers of her husband to the girls African roots. Jasmin is the only one who under-
stands Salomos play of Bach. Her experienced German ears and the European culture
are being expressed through his long eloquent dark fingers. She sees how Salomo gives
tone to the cheap piano as well as the painted one. Jasmin is the only one who can
teach Cahuenga to make German coffee. This new hotel guest is the one who tries to
please the hotel owner, and it is exactly this reversal that makes Brenda distrust her
even more.
Slowly the whole family and friends are drawn to Jasmin. Brenda feels threatened.
She is losing her territory. The territory of disobedient children, crying grandchil-
dren, lazy husband, the lonely place that she hates, and nevertheless in the process of
its disappearance she panics. She wants to hang on to it and cultivates her fury. And,
precisely in this fear of loss of the known expression, things start to change for both
women. Because, strangely enough, while Jasmin in her guilt of otherness attempts
to find a common goal or desire with Brenda, it is quite the opposite element that
binds them.
When Brenda finds all her children in Jasmins room, she is wound up. She starts
to shout, demanding her children to go back to the caf and orders Jasmin to leave the
motel forever. She appeals to Jasmins moral lack of judgement: Who the hell do you
think you are? ... Go play with your own children. Slowly, for the first time Jasmin opens
up and reveals something. Her German accent accentuates her sentence even more,
the lack of something, we supposed to have or someone we supposed to be. Aphrase
expressed precisely on time, just before the door is closed on both of them: but... I
do not have children. Brenda sees her pain and the hesitation to express just before
the door is about to shut out the strangers from her life. The door is closed but the
object seems to hesitate about its condition. Seconds of silence and the entrance slowly
opens. It is the childlessness of the one that effectuates the motherhood of the other.
It is the frustration, despite the contradictory circumstances that has been shared. The
silence of the mother that is unable to keep her children in check and the childless
woman capable of making a mothers life liveable again. Brenda is calm, sympathetic
and silence. A silence that often returns to the desert-like images, while Jevetta Steele
sings, I am calling you ....
Adlons film is a tribute to two women: a fat German woman and an independent
wife. A comic figure from Bavaria is through the eyes of an Indian hippie cowboy
The Minor Philosopher 155
painter, the yearning Rudi, transformed into a sensational woman and a passionate
lover. She gets slimmer without losing a pound. Painting after painting, losing her
clothes slowly, her hair is getting redder and looser, her eyes so light blue, and there is
almost no difference between her pupil and sclera. A woman gets to know her husband
in his absence. She learns his magic and all magic, nevertheless sharing it with another
companion, Brenda. She receives children, by giving them back to their mother as
passionate offspring. Brendas husband is all this time at distance, repeating her name.
Through Jamsin, Brendas heart is calmed and she is able to be tender to the forgetful
husband. The deterritorialized territory is reterritorialized, a new space of passionate
businesswomen instead of damaged life desperately in need of regulation of the so-
called lacks.
However, inall this happiness, the sheriff comes back. Jasmin, formerly known as
Ms Mnchgstettner, with red hair, fair skin and blue eyes has broken the law. She is
an illegal. The law will manifest itself. It is not the people who rule the law but it is the
law that in its practice does not tolerate its opposite, the illegal that negates it. Jasmin
must leave due to the lack of papers and the brooding silence of Brenda returns. The
taciturn bartender Cahuenga, the honest passage, seems even to have fewer words.
The magic... the magic is gone! he whispers.
But, do not worry. It is not a film noir; it is Route 66 California, where the magic
is legendary. The stranger returns as a magical family member. Her German accent is
desired now. The forgetful husband returns and amazingly experiences his redundancy
and nevertheless feels wanted at the same time. A new gesture is in process of birth
through the half hanging bow ties. Only Debbie is protesting, she is leaving; she cannot
live in this magnitude of harmony. Debbie, the reader, reminds others that it was the
conflicting element that had brought them to this point. The magic is back. Jasmin has
already forgotten about her husband. She has a new lover, maybe even for the first time.
She is out of Rosenheim into Bagdad Cafe.
The non-communication of
the world of communication
The story of Brenda and Jasmin illustrate the difference between loss of a form of ges-
ture or language and the absence of gesturality or expression. There is a difference
between this inability to act and to express and the transformation of an act or expres-
sion. Action and speech are the two main practices that characterize politics, according
to Arendt a politics that is defined as plurality of man and also of action and speech.
This is a politics that needs permanent transformation in order to relate to the plurality
between its subjects. However, Arendt is not really optimistic about our time. An age
of Societies of Men, wherein speech has become a mere sound and action has become
impotent. It is the time of homogenizing social and statistic knowledge, decapitating
the plurality of men. Are we able to change this process? And in case of Arendt, it
sounds as changing back and forward, changing back to the free citizen of the Greeks,
but this time with the inclusion of all men.11
156 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Agamben shares this sincere concern of Arendt and acknowledges the homog-
enizing character of modernity. However, he does not perceive a lack of speech
and gestures as the endpoint. He does not bewail this overall lack of the society of
communication and the society of the spectacle; a society in which communication
is the central theme of politics, however, not for the sake of speech. Arendt and
Agambenboth fear the targeting character of this speech. The extreme demand of
clarity does not bring further involvement, but rather empty statements. Neither
thought nor its affect is involved. Communication as mere transformation of data
has become an instrument of politicians to enact mass sentiments. It is the commu-
nication itself that lacks the plurality of language, communication that lacks com-
municability.
The age in which we are living, in fact, is also the age in which, for the first time, it
becomes possible for human beings to experience their own linguistic essence to
experience, that is, not some language content or some true proposition, but the
fact itself of speaking. (Agamben 2000: 115)
Notes
1 The strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritori-
alization; moreover, absolute deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and
the strata are spinoffs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere,
always primary and always immanent. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari,
AThousand P lateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The Athlone Press, London,
1987, p. 70.
2 This is one of the main topics of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is
Philosophy?, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994.
3 In this text I will use the words it and itself instead of he/she and himself/herself, in
order to avoid the outdated differentiation and unnecessary structures in language
that are bound to keep this binary structure.
4 With mother tongue, I do not necessary mean the mother tongue of ones mother. In
my case, my mothers mother tongue is Azerbaijani, from Iran. My mother tongue
is rather Farsi, the language that is spoken by my parents and the language that I
have been innocent in the most. In a sense we could wonder whether the second and
third generations of migrants have ever experienced such a thing as a comfortable
mother tongue.
5 On this subject, see Giorgio Agambens reflection on Primo Levis notion of w riting
and survival in the first chapter of Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the
Archive, Zone Books, New York, 1999, pp. 1539.
6 See for the concept of the other as possible-world Deleuze and Guattari, What Is
Philosophy?, pp. 1617.
7 On a political level in The Netherlands the term allochthon refers to a person who
either itself or one of its parents has been born outside the Netherlands.
8 Here I mean another form of middle than Deleuze and Guattari. While for Deleuze
and Guattari middle means the reality of permanent relationality, here Irefer to the
centre of power that rather wants to disconnect with the unfamiliar.
9 For the distinction between being and becoming a minor, see Gilles Deleuze, Nego-
tiations, 19721990, European Perspectives, Colombia University Press, New York,
1995, pp. 1734.
10 On the concepts politics and philosophy in relation to relationality, see Henk Oost-
erling, Philosophy, Art and Politics as Interesse, towards a Lyotardian post-Kantian
aesthetics. Paetzold, Heinz, Nadeda ainovi (eds), Issues in c ontemporary culture
and aesthetics, no. 9, Jan van Eyck Akademie, April 1999, pp. 83101.
11 These are the main concepts of Arendts The Human Condition. The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985.
12 See, for an analysis of the concept of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986.
158 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
References
Adlon, Percy (dir.) (1985), Out of Rosenheim/Bagdad Caf [Film]. DE: Bayerischer
Rundfunk/Hessischer Rundfunk/Pelemele Film.
Agamben, G. (1999), Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive. (translated by
Daniel Heller-Roazen). New York: Zone Books.
. (2000), Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis/London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Arendt, H. (1976), The Origins of Totalitarianism (revised edn with added preface).
SanDiego/New York/London: Harcourt Inc.
.(1998), The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, 19721990, European Perspectives. New York: Colombia
University Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (translated by Dana
Polan). Minneapolis/London: The University of Minnesota Press.
. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translated by Brian Massumi).
London: Athlone Press.
. (1994), What is Philosophy? (translated by H. Tomlinson and G.Burchell). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Oosterling, H. (1999), Philosophy, art and politics as interesse: Towards a Lyotardian
post-Kantian aesthetics, in H. Paetzold en N. ainovi (eds), Issues in Contemporary
Culture and Aesthetics. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, pp. 83101.
11
Worse Luck
Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova
of being, and the way in which chance can in turn be reconfigured and interpreted
as an ethico-aesthetic term by means of ways of living, imagining and experience. To
write in the present moment of chance as an ethico-aesthetic means to write about the
figurations of chance that run through history, formulated by fate, risk and luck.
The notion of the ethico-aesthetic in Guattari works with an understanding of aes-
thetics that is prior to the separation of aesthetics from life. That is to say that although
it traverses fields in which aesthetics is explicitly refined and worked on in relatively
laboratory-like conditions, such as art, its domain has no a priori institutional or con-
ceptual limit. This is of crucial interest because such an approach does not find itself
wincing at the anticipation of capture or recuperation, or conversely relishing a saving
purity, in the context of art but rather, recognizes such factors as part of a wider set
of compositional dynamics which are to be navigated and manipulated, ignored or
indeed gambled with or endured.
One way into the aesthetics of chance and of economies of luck is through the
discussion of the ideal game in Deleuzes Logic of Sense. A classical understanding of
games, running through from Huizinga to contemporary studies of computer games
entails that one enters the game willingly and that the game comprises the magic cir-
cle, a zone in which the norms of the outer world are suspended, in order to follow
through the iterations of logic, skill and luck inherent to the game (Huizinga, 1939;
Salen and Zimmerman, 2003). Each game has its own economy of chance and an end
point of triumph or loss and refers simply to the constrained range of activity within
the circle, the iterations of cards, pieces or gameplay. One can immediately see the
attraction of games and the special dispensation they can arrange from the norms of
life by the honing and focusing of particular kinds of sensibility and experience they
make possible.
But what is so fascinating in many games is the staging of their eruption from the
magic circle into an all-consuming mayhem of other forms of energy, such as the deep
implication of violence within football, and in a game as serene and mad as chess,
the multiple filiations of the cold war with world chess championships (mind games,
accusations of conspiracy and manipulations, actual conspiracy and manipulation,
vast tranches of propaganda on both sides and the effect on and conduct of all this by
eminent players).
More recently, the game is backlit by the shadow of the computational overlords
finally forcing humans to accept their subordination to first Deep Thought and then
Deep Blue. The tension of the game is stirred, often to an immense degree, by such
things, but manages to maintain its gravitation towards the zone of play, governed at
times by the addition of surplus rules or procedural agreements covering the staging
of the game. The interplay between rule sets and their distributions of potentiality and
with other kinds of drives generates scintillating, obliterating, compulsive tensions that
inhabit and stretch the game.
The games Alice experiences in Wonderland are of a different sort, no longer organ-
ized around hypotheses of chance but played out in an open indeterminate universe
traversed and textured by momentary adherences, prognoses and gambles (2004: 58).
Rules change, the players become pieces, animals become instruments, the universes
of reference and action convulse from moment to moment in passages of cruelty and
Worse Luck 161
vivaciousness. The magic circle itself becomes subject to convulsion, fragmenting into
an infinitely fissiparous cascade of throws of the dice, at each point of which the dice
itself and the form of the throw mutate, staging the flickering between Deleuzes Berg-
sonian interpretation of the figures of Chronos and Aion, or crudely put, of pulsed
time, that of beats, repetitions and refrains, striations and that of the time of pure
becoming, the one shearing off from the other in a dance of pulsions and becomings.2
We want to suggest here that the cultural figure of luck is a means of understanding
and experiencing the tensions between these forms of time, but more importantly for
our purposes here, the operations of chance. Luck and Fate are forms of hypotheses.
But they are also a means of explaining or experiencing the differing ontological loads,
the variable exposures and ability to act upon a condition of chance that people, cul-
tures, ecologies, moments, undergo.
In order to get to this point, we want to sketch a relation to the understanding of
chance in Deleuze and in Guattari. To tentatively start, one can suggest that chance
manifests most strongly in the writing of the early Deleuze,3 but is transfigured by
an exuberant proliferation of kinds into chaos and generative multiplicity in later
work. This current of chaos is readily apparent in Difference and Repetition but comes
exemplarily to the fore in What Is Philosophy? By the time of A Thousand Plateaus,
however, there is no chance as such to be read of because the proliferation of causes,
quasi-causes, becomings, side-effects, creative processuality refines and multiplies the
universe of dynamics articulated in the text.4 Among the fundamental ontological
inevitability of chance then, A Thousand Plateaus proliferates multiple kinds of rela-
tion to it, many kinds of monsters, multiple kinds of causality, with greater or lesser
ranges of relations to chance as it is supplemented by ideas of non-linearity. Neverthe-
less, the fundamental relation to chance is worth returning to in order to trace out the
particular ethico-aesthetic trajectories and inflections it evokes.
Deleuzes figuration of chance in Nietzsche and Philosophy is drawn through Zar-
athustra who places chance in relation to eternity through the roll of the dice of the
gods upon the tables of the earth and the sky (Nietzsche, 2003). And in Logic of Sense,
the two tables of sky and earth, have Aion5, the indefinite time of the event, as player
of the game (Deleuze, 2004a, b: 63). Both tables act as the place of the roll of the dice
and the place that it falls back, time as actual and as virtual and their interweaving
through modalities of becoming. As in Carroll, with the dining table and the multipli-
cation table placed side by side, there is no symmetry between these two. These two
figures of time, that of construction and that of a plenitude of indeterminacy, interact
with the germinations of chance, generating reality, echoing the insight that, Ontol-
ogy is the dice throw, the chaosmos from which the cosmos emerges (1994: 199).
Here there is a fundamental interplay (following Mallarm)6 between necessity and
chance the roll of the dice never finally decides things but invokes the conditions
for more chance. Nietzsches figuration of chance is always in dialogue with Darwin, a
Darwinism not reduced to a system of laws but of indeterminate interactions between
ontogenetic forces.
To embrace chance is to put the dice in the mighty cooking pot of Zarathustra
(Deleuze, 1986: 28) and thus to affirm the whole of chance, its rolling and its settling,
at once, a lesson, or recognition, that is both harsh and liberating, and not without the
162 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
condition of reconstitution by further roll of the dice. As Bifo says in his book on Guat-
tari, truth must be thought in singular terms, as a gamble (Berardi, 2008: 53) but not
simply one gamble, and without inherent rules, a condition ramified at each moment.
In turn, the ethos of chance as one of innocence, the open, coupled with necessity,
is itself born of and reconstitutes the open, and in turn is disturbed and perpetuated
by the action of chance, of change upon change. The game, in Deleuze and Guattari,
is to multiply the means of recognizing and experiencing the multiplicity of ways by
which things occur. As such, the stake of a metaphysics is to become adequate to the
world and consequently, such grand formulations as chance, will, causation, subcon-
scious, history, are never enough and must themselves be recognized as roll of the dice
with all their concomitant hauntings and lingerings or misses of chance in which new
deformations of chance may arise.
A deformation of another kind, of relation to chance through the play of the game,
is the context in which Jean Baudrillard addresses Deleuzes Tenth Series of the Ideal
Game in Logic of Sense. His account begins with an affirmation and intensification of
the regime of the magic circle as a place of self-chosen fate that overcomes mere nature.
Having a certain resonance with Deleuzes tender elaboration of masochism in Cold-
ness and Cruelty, this is an account that is pleasingly perverse (1991). Nevertheless,
the grounds for this twist are of a rather different order, as Baudrillard maintains that
the multiplicity of dynamics called upon by Deleuze and Guattari are, as a philosophy
of desire, rather too readily subsumed within the regime of meaning, or ordering, a
risk that, to him, is better handled by the cool and measured raptures of a dandy or
the explicitly artificial adoption of ritual. Here, relying on a differentiation from the
law configured as nature there is an emphasis on the game as a choice of arbitrary
rules and orders, rather than the naturalness of chance. The game is solely internal,
adopted, chosen and must be played out, even, or especially, when deadly. The impor-
tance of such a measure being that, [b]y choosing the rule one is delivered from the
law (Baudrillard, 1991: 133).
Deleuze, for Baudrillard, by being so gushingly affirmative of the univocity of chance
and being, proposes a species of anti-morality, and in doing so valorizes the random,
turning it into a good just as, in another manner, science also poses its own techno-
cratic morality, that of the Grand Neutral Aleatorium (a very literal example of which
is discussed below) (1991: 143). Indeed, Deleuze cites Nietzsche echoing the sermon
on the mount, let chance come to me, it is as innocent as a little child (Deleuze, 1986:
26). Baudrillard suggests that to affirm chance in the way that is done in the Logic of
Sense is to step aside slightly from it. This is a second-order function that, while still
being in itself subject to chance, sets up a reflexive swerve within it, a little turbulence
among the lines. The understanding of luck, the game, as operating within the tur-
bulence of chance, the introduction of a social, political understanding, redolent of a
certain range of religiosity and erotics, that Baudrillard makes possible is compelling,
but it is a relation to chance that is ultimately anthropocentric, even if euphorically
tragic as such, in a way that Darwin, Nietzsche and Deleuze are not. That is to say, that
within its domain of reference, it provides a highly compelling gambit.
The question that a reading of Seductions therefore poses is to recognize or inhabit
chance, despite the necessary differentiation that any act of recognition requires, is
Worse Luck 163
Chance as risk
Perhaps related back to Gods exasperation at the player who refuses to begin the
game, and to the question of how one might know that he is a good player rather
than apathetic, Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, suggests that a bad player makes
use of several throws of the dice by use of the spiders web of reason, mitigating and
anticipating, warding off, fortune (1986: 267). As the spiders web of reason extends,
it also attempts to fold chance inwards and make it tractable. Indeed, by virtue of
certain experiments, modes of unreason are also mobilized in a rationalized manner.
Numerous instruments, devices and technical infrastructures are elaborated to man-
age suchstaging.8
An endearing example of such is Galtons Board, a set of pegs or nails set into a
board like a bagatelle or pachinko game except with evenly spaced pegs following the
dimensions of a Gaussian curve, setting out a distribution of chance with a triangular-
shaped profile. Balls are dropped onto the board, each time they hit a peg they have,
given a further layer of probability given by variation in material properties (Kozlov
and Mitrofanova, 2002: 4319) an equal chance of falling to either side. Given a series
of such a process of falling, striking and falling again, the balls have a greater likelihood
of falling in the centre of the distribution range of the board, with those falling on the
outer edges of the range being much more rare. Here we have a conflation of both
constructivist notions of chance, in that they are produced by specific configuration
of chance as an idea in mathematical terms that of a binomial distribution and in
those produced in the idiosyncrasies of its realization in the form of a specific instance,
with, also, an interrelation with chance as a pure force.
This artefact is a means of not only entering into and inhabiting chance but also
constructing it, most importantly, through an axiomatic object. It suggests one mode
of an ethico-aesthetic of relation to chance, enunciated through a mathematical model,
a fairly reduced one to be sure, but, in the rattle and clatter of its operation, one that
vibrates rather thrillingly.9
As a device with a variable history of ending up in unsuspected places, the Galtons
Board plugs reason into the unreason through its use in certain long-lived experi-
ments in the use of psychic powers by the US military during the cold war. Alleged
psychics were paid, over several decades to sit on a sofa in front of a large glassed
board, watching polystyrene balls bounce to the bottom, the silence and slowness of
the spheres contributing time and peace towards their efforts to predict the point at
which the balls would end their fall. The point of such attempts at prediction being
the entertainment of the possibility that marginally psychic powers might be turned
to strategic use.
The progress of such a fall is something that operates not only at the level of its
mathematical contrivance, as an ideational and axiomatic force, but also in the
Worse Luck 165
s pecificity of its actual occurrence. As such it brings into a state of flickering resolu-
tion the delineation of the relation between what Logic of Sense articulates as the event
which produces the problematic that it is then turned into (2004: 54). History, becom-
ing, produces events that are apprehended, interpreted and made redundant as prob-
lematics. Each fall is unique, but apprehended by the problematic, the mechanism, in
and of which it manifests as such. The different modalities of time intersect here, but
we can also say that their interrelation is structured by preformation, not only by the
endless rolling back and forward of the dice but also by the tables or grid of pegs upon
which it falls.
And such action is integrated in a multi-scalar way with numerous forms of
prehension not the least of which, in carrying through the relation of reason and
unreason, is in the reversals and enhancements of fortune promised by modelling
(Lane etal., 2011), risk management (Power, 2007), the biopolitical force of statistics
(Hacking, 1990; Foucault, 2007) or probabilistic methods to mark out, summarize and
shape chance. Just as Galtons Board provides one route into the understanding and
shaping of chance, so there are numerous others, each with their own range of quali-
ties and dynamics, moving across instantiations, and each as events opening up new
roles of the dice, and instigating the possibility of new problematizations. Such prob-
lematizations may fail to cohere, haunt chances but never resolve them, or drive new
unfoldings of the possible without ever being manifest as more than an unrealized
iteration of chance. Here, while Galtons Board has similarities to the ideal state form
of hierarchy (with the simple but telling, though perhaps more ostensible, difference
of a uniform distribution, with all options of traversal taken simultaneously) provided
with a system of vertical communications via the region, the district and the kolkhoz
committee (Platonov, 1999: 158), each of these transmissions may end in conditions
of vagueness or irresolution, tighten into full stops. Given the perfection of the board,
there is not enough happening to make it truly complex. It is left to the matter of
dreams to allow the ball to leap sideways and backwards, or thicken or sleight into new
kinds of machining of chance.
Actions on randomness produced by its theorization are manifold; King Oleg sends
his stallion away in order to evade the fate set in play by the prophecy of the horse
causing his death, only to be bitten by a snake on encounter with its skeleton.10 Robert
K. Merton, in describing how, for instance, fears of bankruptcy threaten to produce
bankruptcy, introduces the concept of the self fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1968).
The first is a form of fate, the navigation and construction of which we turn to below,
thesecond a form of structural delirium engendered by contemporary modes of luck
gone recursive by their anticipation.
Luck here becomes a means of traversing chance, but in a way that is entangled with
its problematization, its equal entanglement in ordering and prehension. In a famous
paper on investments, Cowles and Herbert Jones showed that the value of stocks
tendedto go in sequences, rather than in reversals. That is, if they were announced
to be going up, they would be more likely to continue going up, and down if down
(Cowles and Jones, 1937; Mackenzie, 2006). They warn, however, that forecasting
based on this apparent effect, Could not be employed by speculators with any assur-
ance of consistent or large profits (Cowles and Jones, 1937: 294).
166 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
The Chernobyl explosion can be seen as producing such a chain reaction of order
out of chaos out of order out of chaos; an order of catastrophe, an order of the nuclear
plant, an order of the current thriving of biodiversity in Chernobyl region, where such
rare species as the lynx can be found due to the removal of the anthropogenic factor,
an order of mutation, an order of thyroid gland cancer, leukaemia in children, an order
of the beta-decay of Pu-241 producing an ever-growing level of Am-241, which will
only reach its maximum in the second half of the twenty-first century; where all order
is a fluctuation in chaos.
Fate can be chosen, or produced, too, when the only available lot is drawn. Hero-
ism is a form of response to fate, and its embrace, a propulsion of fate itself. Whereas
the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BC relied on sortition, a process in which
political positions were filled by a selection process decided by black and white beans
being drawn along the candidates names (James, 1956), contemporarily official forms
of throwing oneself into fate are circumscribed by a very few delineated spaces and
procedures, such as horse races or lotteries. Here the lottery is a very public form,
the degeneration of an abstract form or decision-making process into banal fate is
celebrated as a prize to the commoner, a divine throw of the dice disrupting the mun-
dane to produce a tabloid event, whereas more complexalterations of fate are hid-
den in dispersed networks of incidents, connections, processes, objects and decisions.
Ecological disasters such as oil spills are primary examples here: fateful, they are in
question, out of sight; governed by network logic, they have every and no clear point
of entry, no black and white beans, no lots to draw. Ironically, human agency is aban-
doned here.
Luck as homey
In his meditation on globalization and violence, Arjun Appadurai recognizes uncer-
tainty and incompleteness as a driving force in the generation of ethnic and national
certainties, things to hold on to in the context of globalization (Appadurai, 2006: 9).
The distribution of certainty and uncertainty across the globe is a crucial means of
understanding the composition of the world. Certainty and uncertainty also have dif-
ferent kinds of valence and meaning in different locations for different people, ecolo-
gies and societies at different times. The distribution of certainty is not only a crucial
political question but also a thoroughly experiential one. At the level of the individual,
it is often experienced as luck, a curse, a run of good fortune, the luck of being born
into a non-starving family or that of an inability to find water.
Things move from risk to luck and back again, and in so doing they change the
ontological status. A stroke of luck, whether good or bad, is a domestic form of chance
conjoining the scales of oikos with ecology. As an element in the ecology of actors, this
scale is a combination that measures risk and chance, a lucky event is a conceptualiza-
tion, a form of understanding, but one that is also manifest as essentially a belief, a
myth, as something subject to magic. Luck, chance and risk are all models that link
the divinatory to the computational each having a history of relation to sorcery.12 As
a mythical force, luck depends on belief, even if it is the faulty logic of a belief in the
168 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
disbelief in the belief in which there is belief: Certainly, I dont believe that a horseshoe
brings luck, but I heard that it brings luck even to those that dont believe in it.
Luck is a means of explaining chance in advance of its occurrence or after it has
taken place, in this it mimics the virtual of aion. But it is also a form of staging multiple
arrangements within which chance can be played; it is a form of energetic and ignorant
living through the throw of the dice, a rhythmanalysis of the self working on the beats
of chronos. With insight, empathy and effort, the need for luck as a scarce resource
can be diminished; for example, the need for the luck of surviving a landmine explo-
sion is removed by an effective ban on landmines, the application of the precautionary
principle. Those for whom reliance on luck is as good as any other measure available,
because no other measures are available, are complex figures: accursed, holy, invisible,
in some cases and also repositories, turning points and improvised devices for bearing
and yielding ontological loads. To make your home in bad luck takes some doing.
But such luck in turn, may also be subject to kinds of master planning. Luck is
found in correlation with technical instruments, precision, political measurements:
whether one falls in or out of a massacre of the innocents may rely on possessing docu-
ments (a related regulatory measure to the luck of the landmine treaty) or by how ones
measurements stand up to a rule marked in centimetres. High or low interest rates are
a form in which luck is personalized, a chance assessment in the economy of debt. Per-
sonalized luck may be disastrous for the ecology; and its instrumentalization, as with
risk, brings it into certain ranges of dependency on the distribution of political will.
Luck is not nice. Luck is a factor, in its domestic mode often taking the role of a
document, or a rule and adherence to it, good luck is always fitted with a downwards
spiral en suite and play with or against it is never exhausted, unless of course, it ends.
Luck can be connected to a bifurcation imposed by choice that can itself be enacted
by chance or explained by luck in the dynamic network of chance, where choice is an
interruption, the participation of agents of a different order and kind.
Luck is an anti-reason, a superstition that has its own logic, a kind of vaccinatory
ruse by which the unreason of chance becomes recursive. Luck is the taming of chance
that is replayed in order to enter into a harmony with larger networks. It is an unjust
form of harmony to be found within the unreason of life, or rather than a harmony, a
kind of non-correspondence between things, an unsympathetic magic.
It is not quite the case that forms of luck pertaining to non-human animals are
always bad, simply that with humans in a place to observe them it may seem likely that
they are so. What bad luck for a badger to cross the road, carelessly leaving itself with a
spilled belly as a monument to the unused chance for a driver to release the accelerator
pedal. A good harvest makes a lucky year with plentiful food allowing for the survival
of two chicks rather than one, thus saving the life of the second sibling, normally sac-
rificed under harsher conditions (Forbes, 2007). What a good harvest that 27 million
chickens are killed every day in the United States and how easy it is to palpate a nerv-
ous twitch of outrage like the lazy artist installing the instant scandal of an animals
corpse. Such contexts in turn, end as nearly nothing the breakdown of matter on
asphalt, or the chance for new viruses, such as H5N1, to breed given the unspeakably
good conditions for such in the well-ordered mechanism of the battery farm. Leaving
nothing to chance prompts chance itself to evolve.
Worse Luck 169
The figure of the dice, like that of Galtons board or the system of lots is too granular
at times to encompass chance rather than produce it. Zarathustra, we remember, threw
his dice into the cooking pot in order to fuse its fragmentary parts, rather than simply
affirm its articulation in a branching system. Chance is more flowing, coiled and mul-
tivalent, as much as it is also abrupt and fatal or recursive. There is something truthful
captured in Rossets observation that to describe chance is to ruin it. But this is in a
sense to see chance as solely natural. While we need a non-anthropocentric sense of
chance in order to recognize its ecological dimensions, the assertion of a dark vitalism
is in a sense to understand the nature of chance as it intersects with the kinds of chance
rendered as formalisms and blindnesses and structures generated by humans, and in
turn by further structurations, including descriptors, of chance. This is something dis-
tinct from the games that Baudrillard describes, (in which luck is a means of making
sense of chance, a way of making chance tailored to you, the scalar level at which it is
experienced) but speaks of other kinds of systematics, economies and abstract instru-
ments of luck with their varying forms of concretization and problematic, and how
they in turn feedback into our capacities, the rolling again of the dice.
Ascription of an event to causation by Luck is a way of avoiding attentiveness,
of shrugging off analysis. Luck is a means of taming chance, making it safe. As an
ethico-aesthetic approach, it is a refashioning of chance to make sense. This may not
be appropriate. This is the risk of its domestication. Nevertheless, luck, while being a
trivialized form of determinism, is a forming of the charming of chance and assumes
an ethico-aesthetic dimension to the way it is lived and endured or gamed.
The ontological condition of chance is necessarily ironic, in that things play by
multiple layers of interlocking, fraying law, interpreted in turn as the scalar prolifera-
tion of the irony of problematics and humour, the hypnotic stupidity of the depths of
possibility.
Here we can wager the assertion that it is also possible to invent chance for chance
to turn upon chance and to create the unprecedented. Luck, fate and risk are all forms
of such invention, among others, as well as declensions from it. In the present conjunc-
tion we are faced with the challenge of the means of inventing chance, not taming it.
But, worse luck, we have yet to gather a vocabulary of sufficient harshness to attend to
the deletions of chance that our species also seems capable of provoking nor one yet
adequate to knowingly affirm them.
Notes
1 See, for the development of a related argument, Maurizio Lazzarato, The Aesthetic
Paradigm, in, Simon OSullivan and Stephen Zepke eds, Deleuze, Guattari and the
Production of the New, Continuum, London, 2008.
2 A critical assessment of the apparent roots of these concepts in Stoic thought is made
by John Sellars, Aion and Chronos: Deleuze and the Stoic theory of time, Collapse
vol. 3, pp. 177205. See also, John Sellars, Stoicism, Acumen, Durham, 2006. See, for
a discussion of Chronos and Aion, R ichard Pinhas and Gilles Deleuze, http://www.
webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle5&groupeAntiOedipeetMille
Plateaux&langue2.
170 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
References
Appadurai, A. (2006), Fear of Small Numbers. Durham: Duke University Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1991), Seduction. New York: St. Martins Press.
Berardi, F. (2008), Flix (translated by G. Mecchia and C. J. Stivale). London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
.(2009), The Soul at Work, from Alienation to Autonomy (translated by F. Cadel and
G.Mechia). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Burroughs, W. (1959), Naked Lunch. London: Paladin.
Cowles, A. and Jones, H. E. (1937), Some a posteriori probabilities in stock market action,
Econometrica, 5, 28094.
Cramer, F.(1986), Nietzsche and Philosophy (translated by H. Tomlinson). London:
Continuum.
.(1991), Coldness and Cruelty (translated by J. McNeil). New York: Zone Books.
.(2004a), Logic of Sense. London: Continuum.
.(2004b), Difference and Repetition (translated by P. Patton). London: Athlone.
.(2005), Words Made Flesh. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute.
Forbes, S. (2007), A Natural History of Families. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (2007), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France 197879
(edited by M. Senellart and translated by G. Burchell). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
George, S. (1988), A Fate Worse than Debt. London: Pelican.
Worse Luck 171
turn linked it to Kants concept of the manifold. Both Husserl and Bergson adopted
Riemanns concept for their own philosophical purposes, and Deleuze first wrote about
the concept with regard to Bergsons distinction between two types of multiplicity
continuous and discrete which he again develops in his own manner.4 On this score,
one of the great texts in the history of philosophy is Kants opening to the Transcenden-
tal Dialectic, where he explains why he is going to appropriate Platos concept ofIdea
rather than coining his own term, since Plato was dealing with a problematic similar
to the one Kant wants to deal with, although Plato, according to Kant, had not suf-
ficiently determined his concept (1929: 30914). Deleuze in turn does the exact same
thing when, in Difference and Repetition, he takes up Kants theory of the Idea and
modifies it in his own manner, claiming that Kant had not pushed to the limit the
immanent ambitions of his own theory of Ideas. One might say that the becoming
of concepts within Deleuze work is a continuation of the becoming within the history
of philosophy.
As a final complication, Deleuze says that even he and Guattari never did under-
stand the body without organs in quite the same way (2007: 238). This is not a ques-
tion of authorial intention. If one considers Deleuze and Guattaris jointly authored
books as belonging fully to the trajectory of Deleuze writings, and equally fully to the
trajectory of Guattaris writings, then one could take Deleuzes comment to imply that,
even within a work like Anti-Oedipus, the concept of the body without organs has a
different sense, a different becoming, depending on whether one reads it in the con-
text of Deleuzes trajectory or Guattaris trajectory. In other words, even within a single
work or project, Deleuze and Guattaris concepts do not have an identity that would be
reducible to a definition. Indeed, Deleuze insists on this point. Working together [with
Guattari], he says, was never a homogenization, but a proliferation, an accumulation
of bifurcations (2007: 238). Moreover, if Deleuze entered into a becoming-Guattari
in his jointly authored works, one could say that he did the same thing in even his
monographs where he entered into a becoming-Spinoza, or a becoming-Leibniz,
and so on, such that, even in his solo works, Deleuzes concepts never lose this status of
becoming. As Deleuze liked to say, I am nearly incapable of speaking in my own name
[en mon nom] (2007: 238). In this sense, Deleuzes critique of the identity of the self
or ego has as its exact parallel a critique of the identity of concepts. If experimentation
on ourself is our only identity, as Deleuze says, then the same is true of concepts: their
only identity lies in experimentation, that is, in their intrinsic variability and mutations
(Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 11).
So this is the problem I would like to address today: the non-identity and becoming
of Deleuzes concepts. There is a becoming of concepts not only within the entirety of
Deleuzes corpus but also in each book and in each concept, which is extended to and
draws from the entire history of philosophy.
Philosophy as creation
Now this is exactly what one would expect, theoretically, from a philosopher like
Deleuze. If Deleuzes philosophy is a philosophy of difference, then this differential
Concepts and Creation 177
status must be reflected in his own concepts, which cannot have an identity of their
own without belying the entire nature of his project. But how is one to understand
this becoming of concepts and Deleuzes definition of philosophy as the creation of
concepts?
Deleuze definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts has three important
consequences. First, it defines philosophy in terms of an activity that has traditionally
been aligned with art, namely, the activity of creation. For Deleuze, philosophers are
as creative as artists the difference being that what they create happens to be con-
cepts rather than paintings, or sculptures, or films, or novels. In Deleuzes language,
philosophers create concepts, whereas artists create sensible aggregates of percepts or
affects. Deleuzes approach to the question What is philosophy? has the advantage of
characterizing philosophy in terms of a well-defined occupation or a precise activity,
rather than simply an attitude for instance, knowing yourself, or wondering why
there is something rather than nothing, or taking nothing to be self-evident, and so
on. To create concepts, Deleuze writes, is, at the very least, to do something (1994:
7). This is why conceptual creations bear the signature of the philosopher who cre-
ated them, just as works of art bear the signature of the artist. In painting, we speak
of Van Goghs sunflowers or Jasper Johns flags, just as in philosophy one speaks of
Descartes cogito, or Leibnizs monads, or Nietzsches will to power or in medicine,
one speaks of Alzheimers disease or Parkinsons disease. In these cases, the proper
name refersless to the person than to the work of art or to the concept itself the
proper name is used here to indicate a non-personal mode of individuation (1991b: ix).
In this sense, it would be possible to do a history of philosophy along the lines of an
art history, that is, in terms of its great products or masterworks. From this point of
view, Descartes cogito and Platos Idea would the philosophical parallels to Leonardo
da Vincis Mona Lisa or Michelangelos Last Judgment the great philosophical mas-
terworks, signed by their creators.
Second, Deleuzes definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts not only
implies that philosophers are as creative as artists; more importantly, perhaps, it also
implies that artists are as much thinkers as are philosophers they simply think in
terms of percepts and affects rather than concepts: painters think in terms of lines
and colours, just as musicians think in sounds, writers think in words, filmmakers
think in images and so on. The idea that thought is necessarily propositional, or
representational, or linguistic or even conceptual is completely foreign to Deleuze. He
writes, There are other ways thinking and creating, other modes of ideation that, like
scientific thought, do not have to pass through concepts (1994: 8). When sculptors
mold a piece of clay, or painters apply colours or lines, or filmmakers set up a shot,
there is a process of thought involved; it is simply that that process of thought does not
take place in a conceptual medium nor even through the application of concepts upon
that sensible medium (Kant). Rather, it is a type of thinking that takes place directly in
and through a sensible medium.
A third consequence follows from this. Neither of these activities art or philoso-
phy has any priority over the other. Creating a concept is neither more difficult nor
more abstract than creating new visual, sonorous or verbal combinations in art; con-
versely, it is no easier to read an image, painting or novel than it is to comprehend a
178 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
concept. Philosophy, for Deleuze, can never be undertaken independently of art (or
for that matter, science or politics and so on). It always enters into relations of mutual
resonance and exchange with these other domains, though for reasons that are always
internal to philosophy itself. This is why Deleuze could constantly insist that, when he
wrote on the arts, or on science, or on medicine, or on psychiatry, he did so as a philos-
opher and that his writings inall these domains must be read as works of philosophy,
nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word (1980b: 99). Thus, in his
studies of the arts, Deleuzes aim, as a philosopher, was to create the concepts that cor-
respond to the sensible aggregates created by artists or authors. In his book on Francis
Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each
of which, he says, relates to a particular aspect of Bacons paintings, but which also find
a place in a general logic of sensation. In a similar manner, Deleuze insisted that his
two-volume Cinema book can be read as a book of logic, a logic of the cinema that
sets out to isolate certain cinematographic concepts, concepts which are specific to the
cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically (1990b: ix; 1995: 47).5
It is these three rubrics, then, that seem to sum up the way Deleuze characterizes
the relationship between philosophy and art or more generally, between philoso-
phy and the act of creation. First, philosophers are as creative as artists (they create
concepts); second, artists and authors are as much thinkers as are philosophers (they
simply think in a non-conceptual material or matter) and third, neither activity has
any priority whatsoever over the other (philosophers can create concepts about art,
just as artists and authors can create in conjunction with philosophical concepts as,
for instance, in so-called conceptual art).
all the works of art produced during the Baroque period look like Baroque works of
art. But the Baroque, as a period, like the Classical period that preceded it, does not
exist apart from its concept, and what Wlfflin did, in his art history without names,
was an attempt to isolate the components of the concepts of Classic art and Baroque
art: the linear versus the painterly, plane versus recession, closed versus open form,
clarity and chiaroscuro, and multiplicity versus unity (Wlffin, 1950). Though Deleuze
breaks with Wolfflins analyses in part because he insists on the role of the fold as a
fundamental component of the concept of the Baroque one can still see in Wlfflins
work in art history a vast effort at concept creation.6
Deleuze suggests that a similar concept creation takes place in medicine. If
illnesses such Parkinsons disease, Alzheimers disease or Aspergers syndrome
are named after doctors, it is not because the doctor invented the disease but
rather because the doctor was able to isolate it: he or she distinguishes cases that
had hitherto been confused by dissociating symptoms that were previously grouped
together, and juxtaposing them with others that were previously dissociated, thereby
constructing an original clinical concept for the disease or syndrome. The components
of the concept are the symptoms, the signs of the illness, and the concept becomes
the name of a syndrome, which marks the meeting place of these syndromes, their
point of coincidence or convergence (Deleuze, 1991a: 1516). Even more incisively,
perhaps, Arnold Davidson, in his well-known work on the emergence of the concept
of sexuality, has shown that, strictly speaking, there were no perverts or homosexuals
prior to the nineteenth century, precisely because their concepts had not yet been
formulated by Krafft-Ebbing and others (Davidson, 2001). Following Davidsons
work, Ian Hacking has shown how the creation of concepts, particularly in the human
sciences, can have the effect of making up people (Hacking et al., 1986), creating
phenomena, or making possible new modes of existence (Hacking 1982; Hacking
1986). Here too, there is a becoming of concepts: homosexuality has ceased to be
strictly a concept of perversion (except perhaps for certain fundamentalists), and
there can often be overt political struggles around such concepts, such as the retrieval
of once-derogatory terms such as queer.
My point is simply that concept creation is not necessarily an exclusive concern of
philosophy. Though Deleuze sometimes speaks in this manner, he nonetheless writes,
as long as there is a time and place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes
this will always be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even
if it is called something else (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 9).
of propositions: only similar things can differ from each other (Aristotle), and only
differences can resemble each other (1995: 156). In the first proposition, resemblance
between things is primary; in the second, things themselves differ, and they differ
first of all from themselves. From this viewpoint, Deleuze suggests that the concept
of a straight line is a universal, whereas the concept of the fold is a singularity. The
concept of a straight line is a universal, because all straight lines resemble each other,
and the concept can be defined axiomatically, as in Euclid. The concept of the fold,
by contrast, is a singularity, because folds vary, every fold is different, all folding
proceeds by differentiation. No two things are folded in the same way, no two rocks,
no two pieces of paper, and there is no general rule saying the same thing will always
fold in the same way. In this sense, there are folds everywhere, but the fold is not
a universal. Rather, it is a differentiator, a differential. The concept of the fold is a
singularity, and it can only gain terrain by varying within itself, by bifurcating, by
metamorphosing. All folds differ from each other, and differ from themselves. One
only has to comprehend mountains and above all, to see and touch mountains
from the viewpoint of their foldings for them to lose their solidity, and for their mil-
lennia to once again become what they are: not permanences, but time in the pure
state (1995: 157).7
This, then, is the initial answer to the problem of the incessant becoming of
Deleuzes concepts: the aim of Deleuzes analytic of concepts is to introduce the pure
form of time into concepts, in the form of what he calls continuous variation or pure
variability.8 The aim, he says, is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to
find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness) (Deleuze
and Parnet, 2002: vii). This is why the concept of the fold as a singularity is linked to
Levi-Strauss second proposition: all folds differ, and this difference is primary, but
they are, secondarily, made to resemble each other in the concept. As Deleuze says
elsewhere, it is not at all a matter of bringing things together under one and the same
concept [universals], but rather of relating each concept to the variables that determine
its mutations [singularities] (1995: 31).
to the question What is beauty? by citing examples of the beautiful, by noting who is
beautiful (a young virgin), just as one cannot answer the question What is justice? by
pointing to where or when there is justice, and one cannot reach the essence of the dyad
by explaining how two is obtained and so on. To the question What is beauty? one
must not point to beautiful things, which are only beautiful accidentally and according
to becoming, but to Beauty itself, which is nothing but beautiful, that which is beautiful
in its being and essence. The question What is ...? thus presupposes a particular way
of thinking that points one in the direction of essence, it is for Socrates the question of
essence, the only question capable of discovering the concept.9 This is where Deleuzes
work implies a certain reversal of Platonism. For while it is certainly a blunder to cite
an example of something beautiful when asked What is beauty?, it is less certain that
the question What is ...? is a legitimate and well-posed question, even and above all
for discovering essence.
Second, Deleuze suggests that the very question What is ...? presupposes an
entire pre-philosophical (and dogmatic) image of thought that can be summarized
in several interrelated postulates: (1) it presumes that thinking is the voluntary and
natural exercise of a faculty and that the thinker possesses a natural love or desire for
the truth, a philia (the philosopher as the friend or lover of wisdom, who ascends to the
Idea, in dialogue with others, through his submission to the What is ...? question);
(2) we fall into error, we are diverted from the truth by external forces that are foreign
to the nature of thought and distract the mind from its natural vocation (the body, the
passions); therefore (3) what we need in order to think truthfully is a method that will
ward of error and bring us back to the truthful nature of thought itself. Against this
more or less Greek image of thought, Deleuze will oppose the possibility of a thought
without image: (1) thinking is never the product of a voluntary disposition but rather
the result of forces that act upon us from the outside: we search for truth, we begin to
think, only when compelled to do so, when we undergo a violence that impels us to
such a search and wrests us from our natural stupor; (2) the negative of thought is not
error, which is a mere empirical fact, but rather those more profound enemies that
prevent the genesis of thought: convention, opinion, clichs, stupidity; (3) finally, what
leads us to the truth is not method but rather constraint and chance: no method
can determine in advance what compels us to think, it is rather the fortuitousness of
the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it forces us to think. Who is it that
searches for the truth? It is not the friend, exercising a natural desire for the truth in
dialogue with others, but rather the jealous lover, under the pressure of his beloveds
lies, and the anguish they inflict. The jealous lover is forced to confront a problem,
whose coordinates are derived precisely from the questions Plato rejected: What hap-
pened? When? Where? How? It is the problem that imposes the claws of necessity on
the search for truth: not a categorical imperative, as Kant would say, but a problematic
imperative, the imperative imposed by a problem.
We could perhaps summarize these two rubrics by considering Deleuzes somewhat
surprising claim that he considers himself to be a pure metaphysician. He has little
interest in the Heideggerian and Derridean themes of the overcoming of metaphys-
ics. If the old metaphysics is a bad one, he says, then we simply need to construct a
new metaphysics; in this sense, he says he considered himself one of the most nave
182 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
hilosophers of his generation. But this is a slightly feigned move on Deleuzes part.
p
For if one asks him what the nature of his metaphysics is, what the nature of ultimate
reality is, what the nature of Being itself is, his response is: Being is a problem. Being
always presents itself to us under a problematic form, as a series of problematizations.
Hence the two dense chapters at the heart of Difference and Repetition: chapter four
(The Ideal Synthesis of Difference) analyses the ideal and intelligible nature of the
problems that constitute Being itself; chapter five (The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the
Sensible) analyses the way these problems are given us under the form of an intensity
that does violence to thought.
c reated by the philosopher, but also the power of their becoming when they pass into
one another (1994: 32). It is through this kind of analysis that one can account for the
various kinds of conceptual becomings that one finds in Deleuzes work, with which
we began.
What is given, quite possibly, one could always call a flow. It is flows that are given
... . Imagine the universal thought flow as a kind of interior monologue, the interior
monologue of everyone who thinks ... . The concept is a system of singularities
extracted [prlev] from a thought flow ... . One can also conceive of a continuous
acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence (perhaps
that is only an idea, but it matters little if this idea is justified). A musician is some-
one who extracts something from this flow. (Deleuze, 1980a)
A thought ... comes up in me where from? How? I simply dont know. It comes,
independently of my will, usually surrounded and obscured by a mass of feelings,
desires, aversions, and also other thoughts .... One pulls it [the thought] out of
this mass, cleans it off, sets it on its feet, and then sees how it stands and how it
184 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
walks all of this in an astonishing presto and yet without any sense of hurry. Just
who does all this I have no idea, and I am surely more a spectator than originator
of this process. (2003: 34)
(2) Second, what then does it mean to say that a concept is a system of singularities
extracted from a thought flow? To answer this question, we need to consider what we
might call the usual status of the universal thought flow, and Deleuze has a word to
describe it: stupidity. Stupidity [btise], Deleuze writes, is a structure of thought as
such (1986: 105). More to the point, to a certain degree, stupidity is the basic struc-
ture of the universal thought flow. The thoughts we think, the thoughts that pop into
our mind every day, the thoughts that suddenly appear while we are daydreaming
and so on, are stupid thoughts, thoughts that have the structure of stupidity. They
are not falsehoods, they are neither errors nor a tissue of errors; every thought may
be true, but they are nonetheless stupidities. There is, no doubt, a certain provoca-
tion involved in Deleuzes use of this word, since other philosophers have made the
same point while making use of seemingly less offensive terms. Heidegger spoke of
idle talk or idle chatter, and the fact that, most of the time, the thoughts that pass
through our head are simply the thoughts of what they think, the thoughts of Das
Man. Plato spoke about the reign of the doxa or the realm of opinion, and he saw the
task of philosophy as precisely the attempt to break with the doxa, to extract oneself
from opinion. Deleuzes point is exactly the same: the thoughts that pass through our
heads, carried along by the universal thought flow, are stupid thoughts thoughts that
are determined, often, by the imbecilic culture that surrounds us. (Is this not the aim
of marketing and advertising: to modify the thought-flow, to populate it with anony-
mous thoughts about getting the colours in your laundry brighter, or your teeth whiter
than white and so on.)
For Deleuze, the negative of thought, the misadventure that constantly threatens
thought, is not error or falsehood, which can always be corrected, but stupidity. In fact
and in principle, what prevents genuine thinking from ever taking place is nothing
other than the flow of opinion, the doxa, the flow of convention, idle talk and idle
chatter, the discourse of the They (what they say). Stupidity and not error is the
true threat to thought, the internal threat to thought; it is what prevents new thought
from ever taking place. As Heidegger said, what is most thought-provoking in our
thought-provoking time is the fact that we are not yet thinking (1968: 64). On this
score, Deleuze often likes to cite a phrase of Jean-Luc Godard, the French filmmaker:
pas une image juste ... juste une image; not a just image, just an image. What Godard
seems to mean is this: given the fact that we are constantly besieged by images that are
nothing but clichs, the task of the filmmaker is not to create just or moral or uplift-
ing images but rather to simply create an image tout court, that is, manage to create an
image that is not a clich. That, in and of itself, is enough: to create even a single image
that is not a clich. The same is true in the realm of thought.
(3) That leads to the third and final question: Given the reign of stupidity in the
realm of thought and the reign of clichs in the realm of art (and even the reign of
psychic clichs in our affective and perceptive life), what then is the process that
constitutes a true act of creation? What exactly does Deleuze mean when he says that
Concepts and Creation 185
Notes
1 Citing Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Random House, 1967), 409, 220: Philosophers must no longer accept
concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but must first make and create
them, present them and make them convincing.
2 Ive undergone a change. The surface-depth opposition no longer concerns me.
What interests me now is the relationships between a full body, a body without
organs, and flows that migrate (p. 261).
3 The same is true of Deleuzes other concepts as well. The concept of affect, for
example, first arises in Deleuzes work on Spinoza, where it designates the passage
from one intensity to another in a finite mode, which is experienced as a joy or a
sadness; in A Thousand Plateaus and What Is Philosophy?, however, the affect is no
longer the passage from one lived state to another, but has assumed an autonomous
status along with percepts as a becoming that takes place between two multi-
plicities. See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p.173: The affect is not the
passage from one lived state to another but mans nonhuman becoming.
4 The types of reductions that he analyses not only from the continuous to the
discrete but also from the problematic to the axiomatic, the intensive to the
extensive, the non-metric to the metric, the nondenumerable to the denumerable,
the rhizomatic to the arborescent, the smooth to the striated and so on while inter-
related, are not identical, and each would have to be analysed on its own account.
5 Strictly speaking, there is no philosophy of art in Deleuze: art is itself a c oncept,
but a purely nominal one, since there necessarily exist diverse problems whose
solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. Hermann Broch once wrote that the sole
raison dtre of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover (quoted in
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher [New York: Grove Press,
1988], pp. 5, 36), and each of the arts, and each work of art, can be said to confront
its own particular problems, utilizing its own particular material and techniques. The
cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is
these two aspects of the film that Deleuze sets out to analyse in The Movement-Image
and The Time-Image: What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time
that the other arts dont show? (1995: 58). As Jean-Luc Godard noted, a panoramic
shot and a tracking shot give us two very different types of spaces: a panoramic shot
is e ncompassing, it gives us a global vision, as in projective geometry; whereas a
tracking shot constructs a line, it links up spaces and neighbourhoods that in them-
selves can remain fragmentary and disconnected, more like a Riemannian geometry.
Even the choice between a pan and a track is an activity of thought in filmmaking
(Godard says: it is a moral choice).
6 For a penetrating analysis of Wlfflins work along these lines, see Davidson, 2001.
7 In the Gay Science, Nietzsche considers the familiar example we have of becoming
more reasonable, of growing up. Something that you formerly loved as a truth or
probability, Nietzsche writes, [now] strikes you as an error; so you cast it off and
fancy that it represents a victory for your reason (GS 307). But it is less a victory for
reason, for your reason, than shift in the relations among the drives. Perhaps this
error was as necessary for you then, Nietzsche continues, when you were a different
personyou are always a different personas are all you present truths....What
killed that opinion for you was your new life [that is, a new drive] and not your rea-
son: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the
Concepts and Creation 187
light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal
event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and
shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live
and affirmsomething that we perhaps do not know or see as yet (GS 307).
8 On this score, John Rajchman notes that Deleuzes logic of multiplicities must be
contrasted with the logic of sets, and is therefore prior to the logical connections
of subject and predicate and the sets and functions that Gottlob Frege proposed to
substitute for them (Rajchman, 2001).
9 Contemporary antifoundationalism implies, at the very least, the rejection of
this platonic form of questioning, of this search for a foundational essence. I
cannot characterize my standpoint better, wrote Wittgenstein, than to say it is
opposed to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues. For if asked
what k nowledge is (Theatatus 146a) I would list examples of knowledge, and add
the words and the like ..., whereas when Socrates asks the question What is
knowledge? he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases
of knowledge. Ludwig Wittgenstein, manuscript 302, p. 14, as quoted in Garth
Hallett, 1977: 334; see also Hallett, 1977: 163. In general, however, Deleuze was
hostile to Wittgensteins philosophy, which he thought had had a pernicious effect on
Anglo-American philosophy; see Boutangs lAbcdaire de Gilles Deleuze, W as in
Wittgenstein.
10 Raymond Bellour nicely summarizes the tension inherent in Deleuzes analytic when
he asks: How can the concept be both what suspends, arrests, consists, and what
flees, opens all lines of flight? See Bellour, 1998.
11 Paul Patton makes the comparison of Deleuzian concepts with hypertext document
in his review of What Is Philosophy? in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 June 1995,
pp. 1012.
12 See also Deleuze, 1994: 118: It is not even clear that thought, in so far as it
constitutes the dynamism peculiar to philosophical systems, may be related to a
substantial, completed, and well-constituted subject, such as the Cartesian Cogito:
thought is, rather, one of those terrible movement which can be sustained only
under the conditions of a larval subject.
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13
Were in the same boat: a sort of lifeboat, bombs falling on every side, the lifeboat
drifts toward subterranean rivers of ice, or toward rivers of fire, the Orenoco, the
Amazon, everyone is pulling an oar, and were not even supposed to like one another,
we fight, we eat each other. Everyone pulling an oar is sharing, sharing something,
beyond any law, any contract, any institution. Drifting, a drifting movement or
deterritorialization.
Deleuze, 2004: 255
Death as reported by the media: the latest homicide, genocide, energy or transport-
related accident, public execution of individuals, militant murders of individuals or
groups, death through warfare. Reportage of the event/s of death mediatizes the activ-
ity of death. This mediatization can either serve or impede the order of the state by
regulating the ethics and labour energy of their collective workers and standardizing
the forms of legal operations of groups within that state (Abel, 1995: 58). Used for
the measurement and regulation of various laws over different types of bodies within
cultures, death provides an indexical expression of the legal modification of life. In
what follows, I consider the image of the death of the subject not in the senses of
absence, loss, mourning or as memorial (Frasca, 2004; Boltanski, 2009; Parr, 2008)
but as a political and aesthetic index. Through mediatization, the death index cate-
gorizes subjectivity in terms of its legal utility as a body. This chapter discusses two
instances of this mediatized death, indexed as the workers body and as the aesthetic
body. Examples described are from the military worker (the soldiers body), and the
aesthetic body (Australian indigenous body). As an indexical subjectivity, the body of
the worker is a vital component of and for all types of communities, required not only
for the successful operation of a socialist collective but also for the larger requirements
of capitalism. The subjectivity of this worker, the ability of their human body, their
motivation and overall utility provides pure capital (Moore, 2010: 1401). Similarly,
the aesthetic body performs a capital utility by injecting into the community and/or
market place new ideas for consumption. The subjectivity of artist, or musician, for
example, creates expressive sites that provide interpretative dramatization or a vehicle
for sensorial expression of ideas produced by the world; a measure of relief in things
190 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
as they are. Body types are maintained by the mediatized image of their life, and death,
where images are directed through mass media forms and subjectivity is motivated by
deterritorialized expressions. This mediatization performs and produces a political and
an aesthetic agency for the activities of that capitalized subjectivity, and in its agency,
it can enact many microfascisms.1 To engage a critique of this agency and its operative
management of communities, a categorization of the types of mediatization through
recognition of the normative life legal paradigms that are imposed upon subjectivity
and its cultural field is productive for not only discourse and diagrammatization of the
shifts that occur but also signal indexical markers that can be engaged differently, in
order to achieve different pathways.
Media cultures, whatever their technological platform, are used for the constitution
of experience and construction and maintenance of governing laws where the political
orders of subjectivity are determined (Gies, 2008: 16; 19ff). Accounts of exactly how
the public and individuals receive and connect with mediatized information remains a
difficult area to tabulate (cf. Cottle 2006; Couldry, Markham & Livingstone 2007), and
this chapters focus is on modes of expression and the content of mediatized death and
not on audience reaction. The question of how death can be indexed for its affective
connection for the living, in the terms of the types of political affect that the media-
tization of death is able to produce, is an issue that lies at the heart of contemporary
politics and government. While different societies engage the dead subject as an aes-
thetic index subject to a myriad of different types of cultural laws, the continuum that
engages the dead subjects body in territorializing configurations of specific gender,
class, race and aesthetics is in fact a media paradigm. I use the term paradigm here in
a post-Guattarian sense, extending the meaning from its objectivist associations to a
use that implies a collective shaping of something, and an epistemological perversion
or coercion, as it may be linguistically or legally defined. The image and conceptual
abstractions of media paradigms thus can be seen as determining the aesthetic of the
political regime of any given era, in turn feeding the laws that must respond to and be
responsible for the collective subjectivity under that regime.
The labour of the refrain is a provocative phrase that Deleuze and Guattari engage at
the end of their discussion of the processes of becoming as a form of deterritorialization
(1987: 3029 original emphasis; I discuss this process further in Colman, 2010). What
constitutes labour within the refrain of pure capital, and what types of subjectivity
are enabled within this refrain? Guattaris discussion of the refrain foregrounds the
movement between deterritorialization of something, and its reterritorializaton
through capitalism, the results of which are seen in the actions of the machinic uncon-
scious; an unconscious cognitive movement towards and for capital (Guattari, 2011).
Guattaris general definition in Cartographies Schizoanalytique describes the affective
points that this movement of the refrain creates as it produces: reiterative discursive
sequences that are closed in upon themselves and whose function is an extrinsic cata-
lysing of existential affects (Guattari, 2000: 87 n25). So while the refrain is a term that
has diagrammatized aesthetic sites such as the constructions of imagination, reverie
and Proustian liberatory sensorial vectors,2 as a territorialparadigm, the political site
(the range of gender gunfire; data signals; a work station; fashion; language; music; food
production) emerges as a normative refrain that standardizes legal concepts such as
The Death Index 191
reality or truth. Mediatized legal territories normalize their values through refrains
by models of labour and indexing the deaths of bodies within those territories.
Normative legal order thus relies on a dynamic of cultural and political laws that
operate on a number of levels Kelsen refers to this as the process of nomodynamics
(Kelsen, 1945: 110; see also Del Mar, 2009: 17). Normative orders dialectically organ-
ize the forms of mediatized death. The first order engages a collective cultural history,
from which difference is judged as deviant, and the second provides scope for a juris-
prudence to be ascribed, one where value judgements concerning difference may be
reconsidered, augmented or jettisoned. To achieve the second position, the collective
subject must break in some way with the first and be prepared to risk everything and
to undertake the deemed illegal activity in the spirit of experimentation with their
collective political culture. Death provides the catalytic break with how a collective life
may be legally lived.
Workers index
In the conjugation of labour and territorial definition, we find the workers body,
as defined under its political paradigm; enslaved, colonialist, feminist, activist,
suicidal, reproductive, medicated or other forms of becomings that are enabled,
directed or determined by capitalism. Ive argued elsewhere that Guattaris use
ofthe terms of iconicity enables a reterritorializing affect (Colman, 2008: 71). Like
the icon, the index is a component of what Guattari describes as part of societies
territorialized symbolic fields (2011: 60). Extending Guattaris use of the index
enables us to consider the indexical function of death through the normative-
territorializing affects of mediatization upon subjectivity. Guattari describes the
function of indexical components within the symbolic field in terms of an active
dialectic (ibid.: 53); as a component of the machinic unconscious, as well as per-
taining to the structural significations within Integrated World Capitalism [IWC]
(Guattari, 1984: 91; 2011: 60ff; 2000: 32). Indexes are connected and accumulated,
Guattari argues, creating a store of capitalistic abstractions (2011: 64). The death
index is one such abstraction.
For the life of the worker, mediatized abstractions of their life provide motivation
for activities of a life that feeds work. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudril-
lard suggests that capital refuses workers death and makes them slaves condemned
to the indefinite objection of a life of labour ([1976] 1993: 3940). Baudrillard points
us to the thinking of the perpetuity of the life of the worker as a collective body in a
continuum of labour. In Deleuze and Law (2009), qualifications of this continuum are
given. Editors Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Patrick Hanafin, note their authors
explore the relation between law and life following the demise of the linguistic para-
digm in critical theory and the advent of a politics of life. (1) The engagement with
Foucaultian ideas by Agamben, they argue, points out that the notion of the self is
one that has been replaced by mere life in various instances of contemporary life. (2)
Braidotti argues that the management of life in the regime of biogenetic globalised
capitalism entails that of dying (107), noting that this management operates in a
192 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
aradoxical way, where the corpse is a daily presence in global media and journalistic
p
news, while it is also an object of entertainment (108). Braidotti goes on to provide a
definition of death according to a Deleuzian philosophy: death is a conceptual excess,
both the unrepresentable, the unthinkable, the unproductive black hole that we all
fear, and also a creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming (109).
These observations direct us to death as an indexical abstraction at the service
of capitalism. The unproductive black hole that we all fear is also a Blanchotian
definition of death; as a concept that is part of the immanence of life, where death
is implicit inall live situations. And thus indexed, death is used as a manipulative
component of the labour of the refrains of subjectivity in collective and in
individuated instances. Surveying different mediatized fields reveals a topology of
affective political intentions, which work to direct the conditional placement of the
mediated corpse and its situation. Death and the dead subjects of a nation-state are
engaged in media paradigms as different modes of political insurance. These are
necessarily staged in different ways as a refrain of a particular mediatization. This
staging of a particular type of political affect includes nationalistic modes (as with
the mourners in Wootton Bassett, United Kingdom or in the public funeral of South
Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun in2009), paradoxical (as Braidotti engaged), or
ironic, even anarchic (as we see staged by underworld or alternative public figures,
such as the public funerals of gangster Carl Williams in2010 or Malcolm McLaren
in2010) and aesthetic (the deaths of the musicians John Lennon (d. 1980), or Kurt
Cobain (d. 1994), and the canonization of various artists). The media focus and
the spectacle of the public funeral is primarily the domain of the male gendered
figure, with notable public exceptions including the pariah figures of Benazir Bhutto
(d.2007) and Diana Spencer (d.1997); both of whom suffered traumatic deaths in
public places. The mediatization of singular subjectivities in these instances provide
the nomodynamics of a culture with often a false intentionality, by ascribing
singular meanings to the event of death. Mediatized events produce truths or certain
epistemologies of individual death, but these events are nonetheless conditional
products of specific refrains, which in turn affects the collective community. It is
in the specific mediatization of the event that different refrains can be discerned
soldier, governor, gangster, celebrity inall cases the mediatized body becoming
the event that determines the nomodynamics of the situation. But the question
arises how to describe the histories of such events?
Working on the image of thought, Deleuze critiques the notion of recognition as
a model that can only ever speculate on what are questions of form, or current values
(1994: 1326). What are the current values of media forms? Or to put this in post-
Deleuzian terms, what are the elements of categorization by media paradigms of the
face of life and its reverse; the terms of death? Deleuze describes death in Difference and
Repetition (1968) as the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and ques-
tions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response, the Where? and
When? which designate (non)-being where every affirmation is nourished (1994:
112). In referring to Death as a sign of the problematic, Deleuze indicates the indexical
function of death, perhaps a redundant observation, but the nuances of which direct
attention to the modification/s occurring in a given condition or situation.
The Death Index 193
completely removed, and any intensity of life is restricted to its immediate familial
unit. And the media depict this state inall of its extreme banality. The familial unit
of the dead UK serviceperson, for example, will continue to press for reification of an
individualized subjectivity, even after death, as if a way of providing intimacy (e.g. the
endless interviews with parents of the dead soldier who make statements such as: they
barracked for [x football team], I have all their posters on the walls of their bedrooms,
just the way they liked it; here are their military medals, theirs a life worth giving up
in service, s/he was a top bloke, etc. (BBC 2009). Such seemingly intimate details, as
Guattari noted, particularly when produced by the family, provide a way of produc-
ing a subjectivity based on the large-scale social machines of language and the mass
media which cannot be described as human (1995: 9). The index of a personal death
is mediatized and passes into the political sphere of the collective military activity.
The language of intimacy appeals directly to the language of nationalist pride and
civic duty of the citizen. The UK medias focus on war affects engages the use of the
term Soldier Mothers to describe the mothers of soldiers in service to the state (BBC
2009; also used by other nation-states). These mothers receive a particular merit when
at the funerals of their children killed in service. This is a labour that has been fully
tabulated under capitalism; it remains a relatively cheap and bountiful resource to be
exploited. This is a value that is representative of an enormous schism in economic and
political systems, but one that the media unfailingly engages. The mediatized soldier
mother engages this labour, and recognizes critical political power, in whose values the
development of future citizens is modelled.
Aesthetic index
Laws on death provide a constant media refrain for specific countries. The circum-
stances under which people must die in societies are also a component of the dead
subject of the media paradigm. The bodies of nation-state workers are further indexed
according to normative hierarchies of gendered subject, ethnic type subject, criminal-
ized subject and so on, according to the laws of the nation. In indigenous Australia,
as for many communities living with the effects of colonization and militarism, death
isa central, structuring figure of life. Death is everywhere, as this indigenous culture is
based on a spirituality different to Western cultures, where dead spirits are embodied
in the materials of the earth, the elements, and the remembrance of ancestors through
gender-specific everyday and ritual activities (Moreton-Robinson, 2000: 1819).
Australian colonial history, as with every colonial history, is a fraught domain,
with the problems of contemporary laws engaging differences in cultural memories
and differences in practices of historiography. The differences in representations are
made more complex through the capitalist focus on the material conditions of the
present at the expense of glossing the awful and unresolved issues of the past (Mac-
intyre and Clark, 2003). The bodies of indigenous and convicts and settlers and the
colonial workers are all ascribed different death indices. The so-called history wars in
Australia of the first decades of the twenty-first century when the issue of reconcili-
ation between indigenous peoples and the still controlling British legal system were
The Death Index 195
Territorial illusions
In contemporary life, it falls on the media to convey how people living in certain
conditions conceive of their situation. The media selects and collates information in
quite specific ways, providing the means, the principles, and determining the inter-
pretation of the content of the frame; it can, in Deleuzes terms either saturate or rarify
(1986: 1213). The mass media in its various configurations, I want to suggest, func-
tions to provide the consistencies of life, inall its commodified glory. The media gener-
ates useful and useless machinic platforms for active and passive processes to occur. It
is not so much the narrative tropes of the media paradigm that have been essential for
realizing the otherwise imagined connections, but the determining vector, and vecto-
rial field where media paradigms emerge to produce new value domains that assist in
forming the labour of our refrain. So while the histories and anti-histories of media
formation engage us in stories about shifts in technological platforms and aesthetic
systems of taste and value, it is the larger, paradigmatic condition that they contribute
to, that I see as indicative of what a media philosophy might look like, as it accounts
for the variations in mediatization: where platforms extend their metaphors, tropes, or
slogans and manifestos (such as the post-human cyborg bodies of the late 1990s) to
offer new ways of describing subjectivity, sensoriality; of various new media commodi-
ties; media ecologies and strategies such as remix and dub, network, immersive or viral
cultures, the enlargement of aspects of the public sphere through the creative commons
projects; the media archaeological projects these instances are, as Sylvie Agacinski
noted, a continuation of the performative narrativity that people enjoy, the theatre of
media (2003). Specific vectors produce specific content, and while we could compare
the ethics behind the design of the Australian one dollar bill and the Apple iPad, all
operate within the laws of mediatization, and are thus subsumed by its largess.
When we begin to consider the conceptual histories of the labouring body of the
worker, it is the concepts that the specific bodies give rise to that are of interest, and
the body itself insignificant aside from its gender role or age use-value (such as the
soldier mother figure). Specific bodies become abstracted in the historical conditions
of the labouring body of the worker (such as the bodies described by Engels and Marx
198 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
which became vectorial paradigms for the communist manifesto), or in the historical
conditions of the situation of all women, colonized indigenous and other situations
of minority groups denied full civic rights, denied from public roles, yet munificently
contributing to the perpetuation of the human species these are addressed by Guat-
taris notion of becoming-woman, and developed by Deleuze and Guattari into larger
concepts of minor and molar thinking. Becoming-woman works as an empirical test
or experiential process against the historical sense of things and offer a measure against
the registration of events as they unfold.
The labour of the refrain created by a becoming body is what provides us with the
ability to make such anti-historical connections such as the communist manifesto or a
feminist manifesto such things are the study of the signs of specific kinds of labour.
Following this thinking, I want to extend not the conception of the post-cogito (as
theorized by Deleuze and Guattari) but of precisely the indexed subjectivity of the cog-
nitive body as a body that belongs to an indicative group, community or conjugation.
The body is not only a medium but also a mediatized component of the media. Medium
implies vehicle, passage or method, whereas it is the body as media that engages differ-
ent modes or methods or indeed vehicles in order to execute its labour and/or respond
to a particular refrain. The labouring or aestheticized body can produce; it also is a
technical object or idea like any other (an oil painting, a recorded sound or image, a
mass of information stored online or a film or computer game, a body of scholars, a
body of players, a body of women, a body of children, a body of water, or indeed a body
without organs). The labouring body is productive not only of forms of instrumentality
but also of forms and encounters with potential or historical knowledge or concepts.
The body of the worker or aesthetic figure is only useful insofar as it is able to per-
form as any other media body. A performance must be able to be sustained as mode
of subjectivated ability, measured by the political currencys standards of technical as
well as pragmatic desires. Yet, the body remains a sentient being, capable of conscious-
ness, and thus subject to the affective directions produced by signifying affects of its
own and other bodies. According to the prototypical form it is able to assume in any
given era and to paraphrase Guattari paraphrasing the feminist movement we are
not castrated so you get fucked it is a body that holds power. The power of that body
is as an affective self; a media paradigm maintained within capitalism but capable of
self-affecting autonomous degrees.
The mediatization of the abstraction of specific cultures ecologies of death feeds
capitalism. But just as mediatization can deploy normative regulators over the collec-
tive, it is also used in minor ways by the collective workers culture to demand political
shifts in capital controls over the conformity of subjectivity to standardized modes of
labour. By collecting media evidence of oppressive practices, including the illegal use
of aestheticized and workers bodies and instances where human rights violations have
occurred, collective bodies demonstrate that they are not afraid of the experience of
individual death. That the mediatized death, required to support their cultural laws
and their interventions in their legalized public realm, with the intention to demand
alternatives and political changes to the controls over life, is in turn used by capital as
evidence for its own campaigns is the frustration of the anti-capitalist subject who ends
up feeding the dialectic perversions of capital.
The Death Index 199
The ontology of these media bodies are marked out by the movement of their affec-
tive perception of mediatized conditions, as they are also marked out to be media-
tized, manifested in capitalism as acts of wilful ecological neglect (the Gulf of Mexico
BPoil disaster of 2010); acts of aggression (the war in the Congo and a maimed peo-
ple dying of malnourishment); acts of communication (that signal from the depths of
the machine, the mobile media death of an ashen faced Sadam Hussein encountering
rope). We didnt want to see any of these things, but as recorded actions, they remain
in the perceptual consciousness, screen signs registering deterritorialized excesses of
capital deaths. These excesses are not experienced in the phenomenological sense,
as they for the most part come to us through screen-based media, even if at the
physical site of any event, a recording device is on hand to frame and edit. These are
perception-images, affective vectors that contribute to the whole set of the image that
is framed by the media; the becoming media-body. The media addresses subjectivity
as the machinic, schizoid creation that it is. The media holds democratic visibility
(Agacinski 2000: 145), where individual death is mediatized, politically affecting the
collective refrain with its psychosis. To maintain a semblance of ethical peace, we learn
how to switch channels appropriate to the conditions of our enveloping culture, or risk
paranoia, madness and inability to function as per the standards and demands set by
the political agendas of the nomodynamic conditions of our present.
Notes
1 The term mediatization is used by media theory to describe the political controls
of mass media forms (cf. Castells, 2001; Hjarvard, 2008; Lundby 2009). To consider
how this process works, Im engaging Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattaris discus-
sion of territorialized signs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 656), to think about the
semiotic regimes of mediatization. For example, the mediatization of death is found
in the oil painting Le Radeau de la Mduse ([The Raft of the Medusa] 181819)
by the French artist Thodore Gricault, and in the documentary film Shoah (dir
Claude Lanzmann 1985).
2 The refrain is the translation of term used by Massumi in A Thousand Plateaus of
the French word ritournelle (ATP: 31050). I prefer to use the refrain in the sense
of its territorial function (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 31050).
3 The report includes recommendations such as: where possible, aboriginal people
should not be admitted into custody (e.g. minor offences, intoxication, to be diverted
away from watch houses and jails). In particular regional areas of Australia, with a
higher density of indigenous people, such as in Queensland, the police service came
up with solutions to implement their own versions of this non-incarceration starting
a Murri-watch in1991, which had no deaths in custody until 2004.
4 In indigenous Australian law, the use of the names and images of the dead is
restricted due to protocols and ceremony. The reasons for ceremony are regionally
specific, varied (its not always about representational imperialisms) dependent upon
whichever land their ancestors are from and how far European influences have been
intertwined. Like European cultures, many indigenous cultures believe and live
in fear of a culture of hauntology, which not only acts as an agent for vernacular
200 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
disturbance but also activates huge rifts in social authority and organization, as the
spectral disturbs the temporality of the living (cf. Smith, 2003) and its nomody-
namic organization. In aboriginal communities, a necronym (a substitution name)
is given, but in elaborate rituals of remembrance, the deceased person is continually
interwoven into the living through a trans-semiotic placement. For example, an
announcement of a death might be along the lines of: bad news from X, Y doesnt
have a Z, or bad news from Alice Springs, Napurrurla got no sister (Musharbash
[on Walpiri rituals] 24).
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.(1994), Difference and Repetition (translated by P. Patton). London: Continuum.
.(2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts: 19531974 (translated by M. Taormina).
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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complexity in central cape York peninsula. Social Analysis, 47, (3), 826.
14
My title is borrowed from Hollis Frampton and Marion Fallers 1975 series by that
name, a spoof on Eadweard Muybridges Animal Locomotion.1 The photographs show
vegetables undergoing various actions that carry out in successive frames: a grow-
ing pile of beets, an apple appearing larger in each frame. In the titles, Frampton and
Faller use the active voice: Apple advancing, Beets assembling, Pumpkin emptying,
Zucchini squash encountering sawhorse. Yet, the titles add pathos to the vegetables
entirely passive encounter. The joke is that vegetables dont locomote.2 Frampton and
Fallers photographs actually emphasize the vegetables immobility and vulnerability.
Flung, broken, eviscerated, the vegetables seem to suffer, and the photographs take on
a sadistic quality. Is this response entirely anthropomorphic, projecting human feel-
ings on plant bodies, silly because plants do not feel?
Henri Bergson wrote that a basic difference between animals and vegetables is
the material of their cell walls: respectively, a thinalbuminous pellicle and cellulose
(1998: 120). The cellulose sheath prevents movement and protects plant from stimuli
of the sort that would keep an animal awake. Plants can afford to be stoical because
their cell walls are hard. The plant is therefore unconscious, he wrote (1998: 124).
Of course, they do move sometimes, as when an acacia leaf folds up in responses to
a light pressure, but [i]n the exceptional cases in which a vague spontaneity appears
in vegetables, it is as if we beheld the accidental awakening of an activity normally
asleep (1998: 121). Bergson presumed a relationship between mobility and conscious-
ness: The humblest organism is conscious in proportion to its ability to move freely.
Furthermore, he reserved the highest state for those beings that are truly capable of
responding to duration, of differentiating in unforeseeable ways (1998: 42). So he priv-
ileged animals over plants.
But in fact, as Bergson acknowledged and as contemporary science confirms, plants
are quite active. Like nomads, plants occupy space intensively. Biologists are finding
that plants, far from passive, defend themselves from attackers and communicate
with other plants in a variety of inventive ways.4 For example, a recent paper in Plant
Physiology, A Plant Notices Insect Egg Deposition and Changes Its Rate of Photosyn-
thesis, finds that when sawflies deposit their eggs on the Scots pine, the plant emits
terpenes, volatile chemicals that give pines their scent. These chemicals attract a wasp
that attacks the eggs (Schrder etal., 2005). Note that the title uses an intentional verb:
the plant notices that it is in danger and acts to defend itself.5 And a 2009 study in the
Journal of Chemical Ecology reveals an operatic drama animating plant-insect relations.
When butterflies mate, the male often deposits benzyl cyanide into the female butter-
flys eggs: benzyl cyanide is an anti-aphrodisiac that discourages other male butterflies
from mating with the female, protecting the first males paternity. However, this same
chemical proves to be indirectly lethal to the butterflys progeny. When the female
deposits her eggs on the leaves of Brussels sprouts, the traces of benzyl cyanide prompt
the plant to emit a chemical that attracts parasites to the eggs (Fatouros etal., 2009).
If it were an opera, imagine the anguish of the female butterfly at losing her children,
the suicidal fecklessness of the male and the Machiavellian satisfaction of the Brussels
sprout plant! In such ways, what Deleuze and Guattari write of nomads is entirely true
of plants: for by staying in place they create an intensive relation to space.
Moreover, plants do move. This is why the concept of vegetable locomotion that
inspires this chapter comes not from Frampton and Fallers photographs but from Gor-
don Matta-Clarks drawings from the mid-1970s. The drawings imagine trees that pro-
duce new life forms at the tips of their branches, pick up their roots and dance, and link
arms to form a slightly threatening mega-tree, what Deleuze and Guattari call reticular
schemas (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 519). These plants embody a wild energy that
refuses to stay rooted. And in Ivan Henriques Jurema Action Plant (2010), plants can
motor along with human help: electrodes attached to an Acacia pudica or sensitive
plant transmit impulses that drive the toy tractor carrying the plant.
As all readers of Deleuze and Guattari know, plants travel through underground
root systems: the rhizome. Their central example of the rhizome is couch grass, Eltry-
gia repens, which is considered a noxious weed in many places because it infiltrates
Vegetable Locomotion 205
water of boats and a recent scourge as decorative aquarium plants that escaped. For
example, the floating water plant Salvinia molesta, native to Brazil, became a noxious
weed after it was imported as an aquarium plant. As its name suggests, Salvinia molesta
is extremely invasive, covering entire lakes in Australia, New Zealand and parts of
North America and robbing other plant and animal life in them of oxygen.
Weeds of course are defined relatively to human needs or, we could say, to the state.
Valuable plants often become weeds when humans import them as animal feed, and
then, with no local competitors, they become vegetable war machines, invading vast
territories. Vines are especially visible war machines, as anybody knows whos seen the
radical travelling capacity of kudzu, a vine of Japanese origin imported to North Amer-
ica as cattle feed. Deleuze and Guattari casually ask, The question is whether plant
life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic, and indeed it is. This is a good point
to remember that Deleuze and Guattari do not valorize the war machine exclusively;
rather, they sought a more fair interaction between the state and the war machine.
ADeleuzian ethics/aesthetics would most appreciate the lively conflict zones between
the two: the inventiveness and will to live of both plants and humans, as well of course
as the ecosystem of animals, insects, microorganisms, etc. that thrive on a lively, rhi-
zomatic exchange.
But this is not the case now. Most cases of human-caused vegetable locomotion
occur for profit reasons, sometimes for reasons of state ideology. The result may be a
short-term increase in human life, but it is always a net reduction in plant life, for only
certain strains are domesticated in mass farming, and others go extinct.
So it is time to ask, what is a Deleuzian ethics of vegetable locomotion? Deleuzian
ethics sounds like an oxymoron insofar as ethics is prescriptive. So I seek here to be
mostly descriptive, of some of the ways plants have travelled in history and our times.
I think Deleuzes ethics consists fundamentally in his vitalism, a privileging of life and
the conditions for life and a rejection of forces that curtail life. Vegetable locomo-
tion critiques normativity, at least when plants are left to their own devices. Plant life
invades the privilege normally accorded to animals. Weeds breach norms of human
culture. As we will see, travelling plants, in their aggressive, creative evolution, toss off
in a leafy gesture the hierarchies humans seek to maintain. In art, plants evolve with
thrilling vitality, twining around the normativity of the figure. And plants indentured
to genetic servitude evince the deathful limits of a machinic norm applied to life.
ADeleuzian ethics of vegetable locomotion privileges the rhizome (as Ive discussed),
the war machine (though as weve seen it can be a regressive force), the machinic phy-
lum, the capacity for individuation and what Deleuze and Guattari call neo-evolution.
Fundamentally it looks for evolution that is creative.
Bergson, in Creative Evolution, pointed out that we humans are more similar to
animals, and plants, than we differ from them and invited us to expand consciousness
by recalling our animal and vegetable nature7 and rediscovering the modes of knowl-
edge of earlier stages of evolution. If, in evolving in the direction of the vertebrates in
general, of man and intellect in particular, life has had to abandon by the way many
elements incompatible with this particular mode or organization and consign them ...
to other lines of development, it is the totality of these elements that we must find again
and rejoin to the intellect proper, in order to grasp the true nature of vital activity
Vegetable Locomotion 207
(Bergson, 1998: 56). If we want to really be alive, we need to revitalize the intellect by
reviving other species ways of evolving.
In short, humans are not so different from the things we think about, and that is
why we are able to think (alongside) them, to think matter. This realization underlies
Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the machinic phylum. The machinic phylum, Deleuze
and Guattari write, is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is
matter in movement, in flux, in variation, carrying singularities or haeccities that are
already like implicit forms (1987: 409). So a criterion for good vegetable locomotion is
that it follows the matter-flow.
In the contemporary machinic phylum, plants, animals and metals form new
rhizomes in response to human industry. As I mentioned, plants invade, carried by
humans wittingly or not; they change a local ecosystem, often destroying its biodiver-
sity. But some of the same invasive or noxious weeds in turn heal the earth of human-
generated toxins: this process is called phytoremediation. The war-machine water plant
Salvinia molesta that we encountered above is a hyper-accumulator of lead, chromium
and zinc; the sunflower phytoremediates soil poisoned by lead zinc, uranium, stron-
tium and cesium (McCutcheon and Schnoor, 2003: 898; Adesodun etal., 20108). Inter-
estingly, Deleuze and Guattari characterize the machinic phylum as fundamentally
metallurgical. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere (1987: 411). Like the
itinerant artisan Deleuze and Guattari use to describe the matter-flow, African metal
smiths used to identify ores underground by the presence of plants that have a high
tolerance for the metals.
Scientists, capitalists and artists are interested in this process. In China, biologists
are proposing to place enormous tanks of algae alongside coal factories, as the plants
absorb carbon dioxide. The artist Mel Chin, in Revival Field, begun in1990, planted the
toxic waste site Pigs Eye Landfill, poisoned with cadmium, zinc and lead, with plants
that have a high tolerance for heavy metals. The plants contain such high concentra-
tions of metals that the growers can harvest and incinerate them to get high-grade ore
to pay for the process (2000: 40).
A next element in a Deleuzian ethics of travelling plants is individuation a
conceptalready implicit in Bergsons radical empiricism.9 As Gilbert Simondon wrote,
echoing Bergson, pre-individual nature is full of potentially realizable relations that
constitute a field wider than, and preceding, the individual (1992: 306). Individuation
is a way to think of how life force differentiates particular plants (in this case) accord-
ing to entirely specific local events. It creates differentiation on the basis of an intense
pre-individual field, singularized solely through differences of intensity (Alliez, 1998:
235). Those differential relations that are most intensive, that is, bursting with virtual-
ity, will be actualized.
Figure 14.1 Detail, Caucasian carpet, eighteenth century, from storehouse of Ekvaf
Trust in Tokat. Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul.
Source: Photograph by Laura Marks.
s eventeenth century are bursting with forms that can only be called haecceities they
are entirely singular, even when woven from a pattern. The carpets themselves are
fields of intensity; indeed if you wanted to know what a place of immanence looks like,
I would show you a Caucasian carpet.
Caucasian carpets motifs are not resolutions but extensions of intensivity, for the
carpets are still not at rest, they are uncannily alive. They are omniphagic fields of
becoming: dragon and other animal motifs become flowers and crystalline forms that
never give up the memory of their dragon life. The results of individuation in one
carpet beg to be differentiated further, in the hands of future designers and weavers.
Caucasian carpets are radically empirical, for they evidence not only existents but also
the virtualities from which they emerged. Ive argued that Caucasian carpets predate
computer-based artificial life by several centuries (Marks, 2010). I still believe we can
measure all other artificial-life art against them.
Caucasian carpets, as well as the uranium-absorbing sunflower, also exemplify the
last concept I propose for locomoting-vegetable ethics, neo-evolution. Like the other
concepts, it values a net increase in life as a whole. Neo-evolution, Deleuze and Guat-
tari write, implies that the animal (or plant) is defined not by genetic characteristics
but by populations that vary from milieu to milieu or within a milieu (1987: 239).
Vegetable Locomotion 209
This concept, which follows closely with the others, allows us to respect the rhizomatic
differentiations that plants undergo in human company. Like individuation, it rips
away any remaining vestige of romanticism that would prefer to celebrate nature in
an impossible segregation from human activity. We must be prepared for monsters,
for monstrosity is not the problem; a diminishment of life is the problem. I will
return to this in the final discussion of computer-based and genetically modified
plant life.
In art, plants have travelled, with great liberty and inventiveness, for millennia.
Their internal will to grow and change, what Alos Riegl termed Kunstwollen, is the
lan vital of art. Riegls Problems of Style demonstrated that a plant motif, the palmette,
varied and transformed continuously from the lotus in Egyptian Old Kingdom art
(c. 2500 BC) to the Greek palmette and acanthus to the Islamic arabesque. Problems
of Style might well be subtitled All about Vines, for the art historian focused most
meticulously on the transformation of the vine scroll, from its first tendrilly springing
in Myceanean art of the fourteenth century BC. We can extend the vine scrolls kudzu-
like advances forward to Renaissance art (with its Islamic influences) and Baroque
art, a brief mineralization in the rococo curvy shell motif (Gombrich, 1979: 189), the
whiplash line of the Jugendstil and the gyrating digital plants of new-media art. Thats
4,500 years of travelling plants!
Riegls concept of Kunstwollen emphasizes a will to form that is more powerful
and more inventive than material means, artistic intention, or zeitgeist. In a 1981
lecture on art, Deleuze said of Kunstwollen, Une des ides de base de Riegl cest que,
lart a ne se dfinit jamais par ce quon peut faire mais par ce quon veut faire. Il y a
un vouloir la base de lart (Deleuze, 1981; One or Riegls fundamental ideas is that
art is never defined by what one can do but by what one wants to do. There is a desire
at the base of art). Deleuze continues, for Riegl art is not a question of savoir-faire
but of vouloir-faire (1981). In other words, art is not defined by what one can do but
by what one desires to do. Moreover, as Deleuze notes, Riegl was not interested in art
that imitates nature, but in art that corrects nature, spiritualizes nature or recreates
nature (1981).
Riegl noted that ornamental motifs become more and less abstract or representa-
tional in the course of their travels; in later Greek art it reached an apogee of lyrical
abstraction (Riegl, 1992: 1856).
A funny thing happened when the vine scroll twined into fifth-century Greek art:
It incorporated a plant that is definitely not a vine, the acanthus, which we know from
Corinthian columns. Art thus created an unusual hybrid plant, the acanthus scroll. At
the same time, the vine scroll lifted up from a relatively abstract line into naturalistic,
three-dimensional sculpture.
Here, Riegl was at pains to argue that the Greeks did not copy the actual acanthus
plant.10 Acanthus was an appreciated weed it grew outside the formal garden of Pliny
the Younger, contrasting picturesquely, Pliny remarked with satisfaction, to the regu-
larity of the sculpted boxwood but still a weed (cited in Gotheim, 1966: 103). At the
National Museum of Syria in Damascus you can see the stony acanthus alongside its
vigorous living counterpart so vigorous that the museum gardeners regularly need
to trim it.
210 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Figure 14.2 Acanthus scroll. From Alos Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a
History of Ornament.
RIEGEL, Alois; PROBLEMS OF STYLE. 1992 Princeton University Press. Reprinted
by permission of Princeton University Press.
Figure 14.3 Acanthus growing in the courtyard of the National Museum, Damascus.
Source: Photograph by Laura Marks.
Vegetable Locomotion 211
The acanthus scroll, which has evolved in hardy hybridity for centuries, leafily
testifies that Kunstwollen is inspired not by slavish imitation but by a life force. If it
were imitation, the Greeks surely would have chosen a more dignified plant to imitate.
Deleuze picks up this point with relish. Dun point de vue reproduction de la nature,
comprenez que cest trs important, cest quoi lacanthe? Cest une mauvaise herbe.
Comment est-ce quon va foutre dans les temples de la mauvaise herbe? (1981). What
the fuck are you going to do in the temple of a weed?
This is not imitation, this is modulation. In the same lecture, Deleuze discusses
Simondons concept of modulation as one of the ways by which form may be created.
Form may be created by a mold, as articulation, or by a force, as modulation, which
implies an energy of continual variation, a molding of the mold itself. So the form is
the actualization of a continually varying internal energy: Simondons example is the
constant changes of energy in an electronic tube (Deleuze, 1981). In light of this con-
cept we can understand Kunstwollen, and also lan vital both as terms for modulation
through continual variation (1981).
The Greeks combined acanthus and vines inall kinds of serpentine motifs, and the
acanthus scroll with its odd celery-like tendrils travelled as far as India and China.
However, the plants remained naturalistic and stubbornly three-dimensional. But the
palmette continued to travel in Islamic art. Where the Greeks deprived the vine scroll
of its free-moving qualities, in order to remake it figurative, in Islamic art it found a
new liberty. The Islamic tendencies towards abstraction, flow and infinite growth cul-
minated in a style that arose in Samarra, Iraq, in a flurry of building construction in
the mid-ninth century. Riegl did not know about it when he wrote Problems of Style,
but the beveled style constituted a missing link between the vine scroll and the later
arabesque. A curvilinear, abstract form that is both linear and sculptural, the bevel-
led style seems to struggle to find a resting place between plant and geometry. Art
historians have often identified the bevelled style as the beginning of something new,
something typically Islamic. While still a plant, it gave rise to forms that were dynamic,
infinite and open-ended, growing with the flat plane of the surface. I argue in Enfold-
ment and Infinity that both abstract line and haptic space originate in this flowing
ornament, which seems constantly to shift between figure and ground, line and surface
(Marks, 2010: 5361). As Christine Buci-Glucksman notes, the arabesque is a plant-
based calculus (2008: 53). It is Leibnizs mathematical transformation, the infinitely
variable curve, drawn not from geometry but from the life force of the vine.
Moreover, the bevelled style, which became what we call the arabesque, has a radi-
cal anti-naturalism that prefigures artificial life. As Riegl noted with astonishment, in
the arabesque, the vine scroll, rather than terminating in a bud, abandons its mimicry
of real plants to sprout at any point whatsoever, which can then and grow in any direc-
tion. This makes possible what Riegl called the principle of infinite rapport (1992: 234,
238, 272). It is the origin, in stone and stucco, of non-organic and artificial life. Riegl
pointed out that it is impossible in nature for a new stem to grow from a flower, which
is the principle of infinite rapport. Ernst Gombrich believed that he found an exception
in the arum lily, but even looking at his reproduction in The Sense of Order you can tell
the arum lily is no freak of nature in which a stem grows from a flower but just a floral
spike springing from a bract (1979: 187).
212 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Calculated locomotion
In our time, many plant motifs arise from calculations. Much computer art operates
in a seemingly plant-like way, using recursive and feedback-responsive algorithms and
also algorithms for artificial life. Artificial life algorithms give rise to forms or activi-
ties that cannot be predicted from its component parts. Digital plant forms sprout and
twine all around us. But are they alive, in the way biological plants are, and in the way
the travelling plants of analogue art are?
For a pretty, and pretty disturbing, example, I turn to the work of Jennifer Steinkamp,
who makes immersive environments populated with computer-animated floral forms.
Her Florence Nightingale (2010), installation at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, is based
on flowers used in healing, including St Johns wort (depression), chamomile (nerv-
ousness), foxglove (heart problems), tobacco and jimsonweed and oleander (both
poisons). Blown by a slow algorithmic breeze, the plants twitch and gyrate with an
uncanny inner life.
Steinkamps computer-generated works are closed systems. Other examples are
more life-like because they use genetic algorithms, which transform in response to the
milieu, such as the interventions of a user. Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappens
interactive artwork E-Volved Cultures, 2008, which they call an image-breeding
machine, imitates biological evolution: changes come about when a user touches the
screen in some way: the image first looks like a primordial soup, then evolves like a
high-speed film of lichen growing on a rock, then continues to differentiate in rela-
tively unpredictable ways.
Vegetable Locomotion 213
So is e-life life? Is the world in which code is written and executed a machinic
phylum? Do genetic algorithms evolve creatively? Bergsons statement that A manu-
factured thing delineates exactly the form of the work of manufacturing it (CE 104)
seems to apply to software, insofar as it is written in a top-down manner with the
intention to produce particular effects. By contrast, self-organization, or what he called
the organizing act, an emergent kind of production, has something explosive about it,
Bergson wrote.
Speaking of explosive, sometimes blowing up plants is the best action in response
to their indentured situation. Annette Wehrmanns Floral Blastings targets decorative
plants stuck in public settings. We know they wont be allowed to live on or bear off-
spring, that their purpose is just a short-term prettification for capitalist or ideological
settings. So why not blow them up now and put them out of their misery?
A Deleuzian ethics of travelling plants also thinks about plant migration due to
human interventions, not only for agriculture and exportation, which I discussed,
but also for breeding, climate change and genetic engineering. Again, the distinction
between natural and artificial inducements to change doesnt hold up, for many of
plants adaptations respond to human actions. Maybe human-assisted biodiversity is
like sculpting, building and other adaptations of the natural environment. When it
makes a new kind of life, that is, evolves creatively, thats fine. The problem arises when
the sum of biodiversity is diminished. Weve seen this is often the result when invasive
plants introduced by humans alter a local habitat and diminish the variety of species.
We know it to be the case when markets privilege a single variety of a given plant, such
as corn, and others become extinct.
The complex science of genetic engineering requires careful study, well informed
by scientific knowledge, before we can pronounce on the inevitable outcome of genetic
modification. In a Deleuzian spirit of celebrating new connections, I am excited about
genetically modified proposals, such as one to borrow plants highly efficient transfer
of light energy as an alternative energy source. In the initial stages of photosynthe-
sis, plants process the suns energy with almost no loss, because pigment molecules
have overlapping quantum states, meaning there is a coherent transfer of the energy
of excited electrons. It would be great to harness this for photoelectric cells (Herman,
2007). And maybe genetic engineering could return us biological creatures to the
primordial soup in which there were no separate species, just a community of cells
sharing their genetic information. I think of that soupy golden age as motivated by a
genetic Kunstwollen, a desire to grow and transform, as form travelled freely among
organisms without regard for their nature. Deleuze and Guattari certainly valorized
the creativity of the primordial soup.
However, genetic engineering most likely produces a net loss of life. For this dim
view, I look to the artist Ron Benner, whose work focuses on extinctions and muta-
tions of plants. His Papaya Vector documents the effects of genetically modified
papayas in Thailand. The genetically modified papaya, invented in 1996, contains a
gene from the ring spot virus that makes it resistant to that virus. But this travelling
plant becomes a vector for a lot of other problems: it short circuits the effects of tradi-
tional papaya-based medicine, making people vulnerable to diseases; it contaminates
non-genetically modified papaya trees, and it thus threatens the market for papayas
214 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
and the livelihood of farmers. So I doubt genetically modified creativity meets the
creative-evolution test. Certainly genetically modified plants are rhizomes in the short
term, and they certainly behave like war machines. But as top-down modifications,
they deprive a plant of the capacity for individuation. It would take more studies atthe
level of chemistry and physics, but I dont think the genetic modification operates at
the level of the machinic phylum. For even by focusing on coded genes, it ignores
the uncoded but meaningful fragments alongside it (e.g. Svoboda, 2006). The value of
so-called junk DNA, those traces of other creatures lying dormant in our genes isnt
this exactly what Bergson presaged when he wrote that we must reconnect with those
elements that human evolution left by the wayside, in order to grasp the true nature
of vital activity (1998: 56). Meanwhile, it is most likely that changes resulting from
climate change can only diminish diversity.11
Bergson urges us to learn from our evolutionary heritage. Deleuze and Guattari,
benefiting from more recent science, point out that we have no choice, for creatures
develop in a non-evolutionary way when fragments of genetic information are com-
municated among species, for example by viruses (1987: 519). Deleuze and Guattari
invite humans to be weed-like and to celebrate [d]runkenness as a triumphant irrup-
tion of the plant in us, an interconnected receptivity. We would like to become more
plant-like, and let plants keep on being plants, instead of all becoming more like code.
The question of whether computer-generated and genetically modified plants are any
good rests not on the difference between organic and inorganic nor between natural
and man-made, but whether the outcome is creative and to what degree normative
molding has given way to energetic modulation. This means the results cannot be fore-
seen and planned for. This means we must be prepared for monsters in the becoming
of our interdependent species (Thiele, 2010).
What people see as Deleuze and Guattaris romanticism results from their privi-
leging of forces that struggle against containment. Yet they write that the romantic
artist risks sinking too deeply into the earth (1987: 339). Its a suicide to idealize
nature separate from human involvement suicidal and at the same time oddly
privileging the human. We see a vegetable romanticism in traditional English and
Japanese gardens that, in symbolic rebellion against constraining social force else-
where, are planned to seem wild, or wilder than wild. Its a human projection on
plant life, a paradoxical longing for the freedom of the vegetable. A true becoming-
vegetable puts aside anthropocentric desire. To conclude, I give as example this
description by Gerhard Meier of a modest garden planted by the artists Fischli
andWeiss:
Upon entering the garden over the small wooden bridge past the romantic ani-
mal figures, certain viewers better-informed in matters of art will at first perhaps
fail to perceive a garden at all but will see an exhibition object, an installation or
something else resembling a work of art instead. These viewers should then, as
the artists imagine it, be shown along a way that will take them to where they see
nothing but a garden, to a place where their consciousness finally reaches ground
level, where the lettuce grows, from which point the other more abundant world
may perhaps become visible (Meier, 1995; Nemitz, 2000).12
Vegetable Locomotion 215
Notes
1 The vegetables do locomote in the movie at http://hollisframpton.org.uk/ssfvl.
htm.
2 Indeed, the verb to plant means to stick something in the ground though the
Latin root of the noun plant means a sprout or graft, something that is going to
grow. In Arabic, the nouns meaning of rootedness is clearer, for the word for
plant is nasiba, something that is stuck in the ground.
3 About all that is left, in each case, is an archetypal fragment of living action,
potentially subject to the incessant reiteration that is one of the most familiar
and intolerable features of our dreams (Frampton, 1973: 50).
4 Incidentally, much of this research is carried out on Arabidopsis thaliana, a
small plant in the mustard family that is a model organism for research in plant
genetic and molecular biology.
5 A similar study finds that when larvae of the fall armyworm eat the leaves of the
cowpea, their oral secretions stimulate the plant to produce phytohormones that
emit volatile chemicals that attract the armyworms natural predators. Clearly in
the vegetable world, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (Schmelz etal., 2007).
6 http://www.loisweinberger.net/.
7 The line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths,
divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed, which,
Bergson writes, are not as free from constraint as the human but which,
none the less, also express something that is immanent and essential to the
evolutionary movement (Bergson, 1998: xxii).
8 This research conducted in Nigeria indicates a hopeful direction for A frican
countries that permit dumps for toxic waste from northern countries.
Phytoremediation is a growing academic field, with a journal, International
Journal of Phytoremediation, published since 1999.
9 At the root of life there is an effort to engraft on to the necessity of physical
forces the largest possible amount of indetermination (Bergson, 1998: 127).
10 The search for new ornaments among natural flora is really a product of the
most modern artistic sensibility, Riegl noted interestingly, reflecting to a certain
extent the contemporary artistic dilemma (1992: 207).
11 Research suggests plants suffer from increase in temperature and salinity. See,
for example, Hideyuki Matsuura etal., 2010.
12 I cut off the quote at the point where it becomes utterly arboreal: the one with trans-
parent horizons that encircle a garden on whose axis stands the Tree of Life.
References
Adesodun, J. K., Atayese, M. O., Agbaje, T. A., Osadiaye, B. A., Mafe, O. F. and Sore-
tire, A.A. (2010), Phytoremediation potentials of sunflowers (tithonia diversifolia
and helianthus annuus) for metals in soils contaminated with zinc and lead nitrates,
Water,Air, & Soil Pollution, 204, (14), 195201.
Alliez, E. (1998), On Deleuzes bergsonism, Discourse, 23, 22646.
Bergson, H. (1998), Creative Evolution (translated by Arthur Mitchell). Mineola, NY:
Dover.
216 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Schrder, R., Forstreuter, M. and Hilker, M. (2005), A plant notices insect egg deposition
and changes its rate of photosynthesis, Plant Physiology, 138, (1), 4707.
Schroeter Gothein, M. L. (1966), A History of Garden Art (edited by W. P. Wright,
translated by L. Archer-Hind). New York: Hacker Art Books.
Shaviro, S. (2009), Without Criteria: Deleuze, Kant, Whitehead. Cambridge, MA:
MITPress.
Simondon, G. (1992), The genesis of the individual, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds),
Incorporations. New York: Zone Books.
Svoboda, E. (2006), Scientists sort through junk to unravel a genetic mystery, The New
York Times, 7 February.
Thiele, K. (2010), Difference in itself in contemporary feminisms, in Connect, Continue,
Create: The Third Annual Deleuze Studies Conference. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 14
July 2010. Amsterdam: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and Utrecht: Centre
for the Humanities, Utrecht University.
15
Matteo Pasquinelli has put it very succinctly: it is impossible to destroy the machine,
as we ourselves have become the machine (2008: 151).1 This is a very precise formula-
tion of the biopolitical problem posed by the interface, the machine of capitalism has
become inseparable, and in some cases indiscernible from the processes of life. To take
Barbara Krugers slightly older but even more pithy version of the same idea; I shop,
therefore I am. Capitalism and life are interfaced through digital technology, which
amplifies, accelerates and captures our biological, emotional and intellectual force in
order to convert them to profit. As a result, biopolitics centres on the control of affec-
tual and creative power, on the control of the production of subjectivity and the social
bodies that congeal around it, making politics a question of aesthetics. Huge industries
are dedicated to the production of images and their affects, making the analysis of
these images and the production of images that resist or subvert instrumentalization
an urgent political task. I will examine some of these strategies of aesthetic resistance
here, but my specific focus will be the question as to what role art might have within a
more broadly conceived movement of aesthetic resistance. This question will allow me,
I hope, to draw some useful distinctions between the Italian tradition of post-Operaist
thought, the American philosopher and film-theorist Steven Shaviro and the work of
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, on which the others base their work.
Pasquinellis analysis of the interface uses Michel Serres figure of the parasite to
describe how digital technology creates fictional worlds, builds collaborative environ-
ments and provides communication channels in order to form a symbiosis of desire, a
synergy of capitalist and human interests that captures libidinal forces in the interface
(2008: 64). What is interesting about Pasquinellis account is his insistence on themate-
riality of the interface, and the way in which digital hardware and infrastructure ena-
bles capital to parasitically profit from it. The material parasite is for Pasquinelli the
operative figure for the post-Operaist assumption of the absolute immanence of capi-
talism, a figure that therefore works against the autonomy of the digital sphere (2008:
65). This assumed autonomy has been championed by the digital commons and free
software movements, for example, which Pasquinelli condemns as a form of digital-
ism or code fetishism (2008: 65). Digitalism in a popular sense is the idea that reality
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 219
can be entirely re-coded and subsumed within a digital world think Baudrillard and
Matrix while in a political sense it is the belief that internet based communication
can be free from any form of exploitation and will naturally evolve towards a society
of equal peers (2008: 66). In either case digitalism assumes an autonomy of the dig-
ital realm that, Pasquinelli argues, the materiality of hardware and its rental economy
denies in advance. It doesnt matter how free our software or digital content, capital-
ism makes a profit through any rental of infrastructure support (access to energy, to
networks, etc.). This means that political desire can be as (naively) anti-capitalist as
it wants, as long as resistance is interfaced corporate capitalism gets a cut. Aesthetic
resistance will therefore never succeed by idealistically championing an autonomous
digital realm untouched by capitalist parasites. There is an important lesson here for
all political strategies that wish to draw upon the idea of artistic autonomy, Pasquinelli
argues, and that is that autonomous production is no longer possible; we cant destroy
the machine because we are it.
But this is only one side of the parasitical relation, where capital is interfaced with
desire on a material level, and on the other desire is captured in affects and ideas that
are formatted by the media that communicate them. Here, the libidinal and uncon-
scious drives are enabled by the aesthetics of the interface, and especially images of
sex and violence, to which the drives attach themselves and proliferate. Porn images
are perhaps the best example, their ubiquity in the interface captures sexuality in a few
standardized actions and postures (clichs), reducing the polymorphous character of
the libido while simultaneously seeing it proliferate in an unending production of
image-commodities. Nevertheless, Pasquinelli argues (and here his argument is typi-
cal of post-Operaist thought), desire is always in excess of the images that embody,
capture and instrumentalize it, and so they can never be entirely controlled. On the
wild side of the interface, desire and digital technology produce excessive affects
that escape the subjective, social and commodity forms of the market. These exces-
sive expressions of a communal unconscious belong to everyone and no one inas-
much as they announce an upsurge of experimental and uncontrolled life. Pasquinelli
embarks on a pathology of these desiring digital parasites, or what he calls animal
spirits, rejecting the idealism of a clean and democratic interface in favour of its
dirty and demonic violence (2008: 66). Pasquinelli goes in search of anomalous out-
breaks of libidinal force that can counter-parasite the capitalist machine, and thereby
find ways to proliferate through it. These libidinal surges are anomalous and excessive
parasites of the interface rather than autonomous creations; they emerge according
to its conditions and attempt to shift its capitalist priorities and mechanisms. This,
Pasquinelli argues, is the nature of the parasites immanence: The parasite is another
politically ambivalent diagram that shifts from a tactical alliance to a strategic sabo-
tage (2008: 48).
Unsurprisingly, Pasquinelli quickly rejects traditional art forms as irrelevant to our
digitized networks and also rejects more contemporary art and/or political projects of
the digitalist type (he is particularly scathing about the Creative Commons move-
ment). But surprisingly, he nevertheless affirms and adopts two of his central principles
of Deleuzes reading of the painter Francis Bacon. Pasquinelli is interested in the way
Bacons paintings materialize invisible forces, or as Deleuze calls them at one point,
220 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
animal spirits (quoted in Pasquinelli, 2008: 174), and the way these forces are violent
and cruel, confronting and dismantling the human nervous system and its represen-
tational formats. In these senses, the paintings of Bacon, or more precisely Deleuzes
reading of them, are taken by Pasquinelli as exemplary of the way the parasitical econ-
omy of the interface operates. What is interesting about this moment of Pasquinellis
account (as is his extended engagement with J. G. Ballards book The Atrocity Exhibi-
tion) is that he draws important operational (we could call them virtual) principles
from Modernist art, while rejecting its actual (that is political) relevance. Pasquinelli
believes that the economy of the interface has rendered the concept of aesthetic auton-
omy irrelevant, along with art produced under its assumption.
As we shall see, this question of arts autonomy, or in more philosophical terms of
the status of the Outside, is deeper than simply a question of the continued relevance
of Modernist art. It is in fact the ontological question of how heterogeneous animal
spirits can be turned productive, and perhaps more importantly how heterogeneity is
produced in the first place. Pasquinelli follows the Italian tradition of post-Operaist
thinkers in rejecting the modernist autonomy of art because it separates itself from
wider social and capitalist processes, which, they argue, reduces its political potential
to a kind of dreamy utopianism. Instead, we need political strategies capable of engag-
ing directly with contemporary capitalisms biopolitical interface where the aesthetic
production of sensation and subjectivity takes place. We need, in other words, aes-
thetic political strategies, but these cannot, according to post-Operaism, involve any
appeal to an Outside of Capitalism, especially not one named art. But, and here is the
problem, it is clearly art that offers the most immediate and developed tradition of
aesthetic experimentation and resistance. As a result, post-Operaist thought has drawn
heavily on Deleuze and Guattari in formulating its account of the affectual realm of the
new economy (as we have just seen Pasquinelli do), but it has done so while rejecting
Deleuze and Guattaris more modernist affirmation of the political efficacy of the inter-
nal Outside produced by an autonomous art.
Post-Operaist thinkers convert Deleuze and Guattaris affirmation of art to poli-
tics by subordinating it to the dialectical process of negation as the necessary form of
political engagement. Negation means that any aesthetic strategy of creation is going
to begin from the givens of capitalism, what Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call being
against, which will clear space for consequent creations. This strategy, I will argue here,
is not Deleuze and Guattaris, who affirm an immanent Outside that emerges in an
event, and is always already detached from any historical or social givens, although
these givens will subsequently play a role in the events actualization. An obvious symp-
tom of this difference is that Deleuze and Guattari tend to affirm a rather traditional
canon of painting, cinema and music, while post-Operaist aesthetics often begins from
this traditions negation, which is not the negation of art but the tradition of art called
non-art. While it is certainly no accident that this tradition is hegemonic at the present
moment, it is also ironic that this tradition is almost illegible outside the rarified dis-
courses of contemporary art. What this question finally comes down to is whether the
modernist conceptions of artistic production and its figure of the artist have any politi-
cal value within the interface. Deleuze and Guattari believed that they did, but this
seems an increasingly forlorn belief within both the post-Operaist realm of political
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 221
philosophy and that of contemporary art, both of which are otherwise enthusiastic
about Deleuze and Guattaris thought.
Despite what Ive just written, I wouldnt want to give the impression that post-
Operaist thought is in any way homogeneous. Its not. It in fact offers an exciting
and vibrant range of options regarding the political realities of the contemporary
interface. In quite stark contrast to Pasquinellis work, for example, is that of Franco
Bifo Berardi, who while sharing Pasquinellis interest in the pathology of the interface
draws from it quite the opposite conclusion. Rather than encouraging its excesses,
Bifo suggests a withdrawal from or slowing down of contemporary capitalism as an
antidote to the pathologies of depression, panic, fear and psychosis that are increas-
ingly defining life today. In this context, art emerges as a treatment, a kind of psycho-
therapy (Bifo calls it, following Guattari, schizoanalysis) that might lead us towards a
type of creation that can resist the psychological implosion wrought by our interface
with capitalism.
Bifos apocalyptic account of the interface identifies a psycho-cognitive mutation
among the video-electronic generation that has resulted from our current state of
info-invasion, nervous overload, mass psychopharmacology, as well as from the frac-
talization of working and existential time and social insecurity caused by the interface
(2005: 2). The expansion of what Bifo calls the Infosphere has led to a proportional
decline in our ability to sense anything that is not formatted in codified signs, result-
ing in an impoverishment of our relationships with others through the prevalence
of stereotypes and ready-made emotions (2009a: 86). This process of re-formatting
our sensibility through the interface produces a standardization of subjectivity, and
its increased passivity, even while our identity is becoming ever more flexible (2005:
4). The constant mobility, stimulation and tension of the interface create an inconclu-
sive excitation (2005: 5) that produces a de-eroticization of our relationship to alter-
ity, turning it into a joyless fiction (2009a: 87). Here, desire is fully instrumentalized
bycognitive labour in a frigid thought where the relationship to the other is artificially
euphoric but substantially desexualized as well (2009a: 103). Human sensibility fully
subjugated to the accelerated and fragmented experiences of the interface has led, Bifo
argues, to a dis-empathy diffused in social action (2009a: 134), a cold functionality in
everything from work to sex that has drained human experience of reality and vitality,
while accelerating the speed of human relations beyond their slow becomings and
towards the inhuman efficiency of communication.
How can we resist this mutation? Bifo suggests a returned and planetary humanism
(2009a: 133) that sings of the danger of love, the daily creation of a sweet energy that
is never dispersed. This requires the slowing down of the human organism through
a strategic unplugging from the network. Bifos appeals for a renewed humanism can
sound rather conservative,2 largely because of the opposition he sees between the inter-
face and the human body and the way one lives at the expense of the other. Strongly
influenced by Baudrillard in this respect, his descriptions of the interface often veer
towards an apocalyptic digitalism where human sensibility is erased in a new elec-
tric and codified nervous system. The interface as info-system; Digital technology, he
writes, makes possible a process of infinite replication of the sign. The sign becomes a
virus eating the reality of its referent (2009a: 149). To escape the simulacrum, we must
222 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
return to the real, we must return, Bifo claims, to the slow sensibility and emotional
predictability of the human organism.
The problem with Baudrillards dandyish necrophilia of the System (as Pasquinelli
calls it, 70), and Bifos adoption of it, is that like a rhetorical mushroom cloud it obliter-
ates any creative and political potentials inhering in the interface, letalone its artistic
possibilities. The proliferation of simulation viruses, Bifo writes, has swallowed the
event. The infinite capacity of replication of the recombining simulator device erases
the originality of the event. What is left is suicide (2009a: 161). Such nihilism leaves
little room to move, except towards an onanistic aesthetics of catastrophe. This is no
better seen than when Bifo refers to Pasquinellis libidinal parasites as a sort of cancer
reaching the very heart of the libidinal experience. Libidinal energy is attacked by a
replicant of a parasitic type, as shown by the phenomenon of synthetic media pornog-
raphy (2009a: 157). By calling parasites a cancer, Bifo misses Pasquinellis most inter-
esting point, which is not the horror of the capitalist parasite of desire but the way this
parasitic logic might allow libidinal forces to emerge in an excessive event that para-
sites the capitalist interface to create new forms of social and subjective production.3
Consequently, although Bifos call for a sensibility capable of engaging with alter-
ity is important, it must be disengaged from any return to humanism, and under-
stood strictly in relation to what he calls the productive Unconscious. This productive
and libidinal force is capable, he suggests more optimistically, of producing a singular
existence in its complex relation to the world (2009a: 118). This force of creation is
the beginning of a process of social recomposition on the basis of a relationship to
otherness. This process is, as Bifo also calls it, art and aesthetics. Art, he claims, looks
for new possible modalities of becoming, and aesthetics seems to be at the same time
a diagnostic of psychospheric pollution and a therapy for the relation between the
organism and the world (2009a: 130). What is required, and what art can achieve, is
the creation of new centers of attention (2009a: 131) that produce bifurcations within
the interface powerful enough to make heterogeneity and singularity genetic factors
in the production of subjectivity. On a more practical level, it involves confronting the
libidinal entropy that Bifo associates with the psychopathology of the interface; panic,
anxiety, depression (2009a: 135) with alternative aesthetic attractors or parasites of
attention.
The question now becomes what these aesthetic attractors might be, and how do
they work? In many ways this is a question that must be posed not only to Bifo but also
to post-Operaism as a whole, and more precisely to its insistence on the dual strategy of
negation and creation. As Sergio Bologna has very astutely observed of post-Operaist
thought: Its not clear which was greater: the paean to the working class, or that to the
capitalist capacity of subsuming this working class from the point of view of its compo-
nents (quoted in Wright, 114). And indeed, post-Operaist thought often seems to take
more pleasure in describing the horrors of an absolutely immanent capitalism than
in affirming the creative potentials that might resist it. When capitalist violence is so
spectacularly and seductively described that it condemns any attempt at autonomous
creation as being utopian or insignificant, it demands that politics counters capital-
ism with an equal or even more spectacular response. This often takes the form of an
aesthetics of catastrophe, a crash n burn militancy that takes heart from Deleuze and
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 223
towards those of a Heavy Metal concert and its inevitable salute of Hail Satan. Crawl-
ing from the abyss of the immaterial, he tells us, come the animal spirits of new
capitalism incarnated in the forms of internet pornography, war imagery and video
terrorism (2008: 156). These demonic figures of the digital unconscious constitute a
collective imaginary feeding its a media frenzy on our libidinal energy, but they
also contain, Pasquinelli argues, an excess or surplus of energy that can turn against
their captors (2008: 157). This internet underground (2008: 158), this biomorphic
horror of the subterranean libido (2008: 165, 167) therefore needs to be unleashed,
like, he says, monsters emerging from the collective Id (2008: 159). A perverse poly-
morphism would become the model for an excessive libidinal mediascape, one that
would return war imagery and porn to the social body only massively amplified in
order to launch this body on its trajectory away from human subjectivity and away
one presumes from Bifos now quaint appeal to the joy of sex. As the popular say-
ing has it, nothing succeeds like excess, and there is no doubt Pasquinelli has high
ambitions for his atrocity exhibition; Warpunk uses warporn in a tragic way to over-
come Western culture and the self-censorship of the counterculture itself (2008: 199,
italics added).
Despite its alluring teen spirit, Pasquinellis parasites remain dialectical figures
inasmuch as their libidinal violence requires what they escape to give their negations
political force. This suggests, to me at least, that perhaps we need to approach the prob-
lem the other way around, and try to hallucinate what Deleuze calls pure differences
which have become independent of the negative ..., destructions in relation to which
those of the negative are only appearances (1994: xx). If, as post-Operaism inevita-
bly does, we glorify the horror and power of capitalism to the point where only its
direct negation or apocalypse even one that operates immanently is going to satisfy
our outrage, then we will be forever doomed to a glorious death, a kind of aggressive
suicide as Bifo calls it. This is precisely to ignore any form of image production that
does not try to negate capitalism, but instead privileges the creative potentials of the
interface. I am talking here of an unfashionable thing art. Art in its modernist sense,
as an autonomous aesthetic process creating new sensations, which is precisely what
the Italians leave out of their account, and more significantly for us, it is precisely what
they leave out of their account of Deleuze and Guattari.
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri articulated this position with most vehemence in
Empire when they directly reject Bergsons concept of the virtual in favour of the pos-
sible (2000: 356, 468). What is at stake here is the genetic or constituent power of the
multitude, which Deleuze and Guattari locate in art and Hardt and Negri locate in
living labour.6 What is most interesting here is that Hardt and Negri reject the virtual
because it is not, they claim, real enough. What they mean by this is that it is not suf-
ficiently grounded in the actual state of things, it doesnt, they say, give sufficient onto-
logical weight to reality (2000: 468). The possible on the other hand, is directly related
to reality, inasmuch as it dialectically defines politics as a negation of the existing situ-
ation. In this sense, the possible is the ontological category of what Hardt and Negri
call being-against, or counter-empire. Indeed, in one of the most startling metaphors
of the book, they argue that the Empire is the inverted image of the multitudes pro-
ductive activities something like a photographic negative (2000: 211). In this strange
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 225
inversion it is the Empire that appears as the condition of possibility (the photographic
negative) for the multitudes creative work. Politics must begin with a dialectical nega-
tion of existing oppression that, according to Hardt and Negri, grounds the creative
event in the reality of everyday life. As a result, they claim that Deleuze and Guattari,
What is so wonderful about this rather acerbic description of Deleuze and Guattari
is that it is absolutely right. They are committed to the event in its most ungraspable
aspect that is in its creativity entirely undetermined by what is, in its absolutely vir-
tual and heterogeneous aspect. This aspect is what Bifo called the productive uncon-
scious and what Guattari calls the machinic unconscious an unconscious turned
towards the future (2011: 10) a future that does not emerge through negating the
present but by affirming an aleatory role of the dice. This affirmation is, as Nietzsche
had it, art and nothing but art, the great stimulant to life. So while Guattari agrees
with post-Operaism that capitalism subsumes all productive processes, he maintains
that some psychotic and unconscious aspects of production involve a dimension of
autonomy of an aesthetic order (1995: 13, italics added). It is going to be precisely this
aesthetic and impossible element, this militant sensation, that Guattari will affirm inall
its political efficacy, in the way, he says, it grabs you by the throat. It is this existential
impact that makes art the most advanced model for resistance against the steam-
roller of capitalist subjectivity (1995: 901). We have seen that Bifo advocates art, but
this is a post-Operaist non-art that seeks to abolish the separation between poetry
and mass-communication (2009b). Deleuze and Guattari do not embrace non-art,
they instead affirm the necessity of the autonomy of the modernist art work. Deleuze
argued that [t]o thrive, all art needs the distinction between these two sectors, the
commercial and the creative (2006: 208). Art needs this distinction not only to be
good art but as well and this is the point in order to do politics. Guattari praises the
phenomenon of rupture in the plastic arts (2008: 383), its ability to suddenly launch
us into an entirely new sensual world, into a new existential Universe. Guattari found
this micropolitics of sensation in what seems unlikely places to us today, such as the
paintings of Modigliani (2008: 260) or Balthus (1987), but the lesson to be drawn from
these examples (as from those of Deleuze and Guattari) are straightforward ones. In
the context of contemporary art, the first is that painting is already a political practice,
if politics is thought of as the affirmative power of rupture contained in every real cre-
ation. The second, adding to this, is that painting in fact provides the model for other
forms of visual arts, and even, Guattari seems to suggest, for the aesthetic paradigm
itself. He writes, One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an
artist creates new forms from the palette (1995: 7; see also 2008: 74). Why doesGuat-
tari privilege the painting in this way? It is because painting produces sensation the
226 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
traditional realm of the aesthetic without tarrying with the concept. The concept
having become the dominant concern of post-Conceptual art today most obviously
seen in the pre-eminence of information and perhaps the defining feature of con-
temporary art. Deleuze and Guattari famously rejected Conceptual art for its mixing
of their foundational categories of thought, philosophy (concept), science (function)
and art (sensation), and for attempting to use art to produce information. This is coun-
ter-productive in Deleuze and Guattaris opinion, because it compromises both the
political power of rupture inherent in sensation, and the autonomy of sensation from
the ready made and pre-formatted perceptions, affections and opinions circulating
in the everyday world of contemporary capitalism. Artists, for Guattari, are not imma-
terial workers, they are not models for the precariat nor are they psychotherapists, [f]
inally, artists are like errant knights, like Don Quixote and his chivalry, lost in a certain
type of subjectivation. Art has the sense of a heterogenesis against the homogenesis
of capitalism (1994). This heterogenesis appears within capitalism, but as an internal
outside, as a rupture of normalized sensibility and the managed subjectivities of bio-
political banality. In this sense then, art emerges from an autonomy of an aesthetic
order, an autonomous production of new sensations that gives it its political power.
Guattari affirmed the necessity of arts autonomy quite explicitly:
Fabricated in the socius, art, however, is only sustained by itself. This is because
each work produced possesses a double finality: to insert itself into a social network
which will either appropriate or reject it, and to celebrate, once again, the universe
of art as such, precisely because it is always in danger of collapsing. (1995: 130)
This affirmation of the universe of art as such seems far away indeed from the post-
Operaist understanding of Guattaris thought. For example, and typically, Bifo claims
that for Guattari the aura [of art] was definitively forgotten (2008a: 34). But then
what are we to make of Guattaris statement that Duchamps Bottle Rack singularizes
a constellation of referential universes in such a way that the Benjaminian aura arises
from this genre of singularizing ritornellization (1996: 164, italics in the original). For
Guattari this aura was precisely that of an autonomous singularity, an eruption of the
future awaiting its social network.7 We will come back to the possibility and potential
of an autonomous aesthetic production a hallucination as Deleuze calls it. But first I
would like to explore the alarming possibility raised by the work of Steven Shaviro that
arts modernist rupture is flourishing today, not in the obscure ateliers of avant-garde
invention but as successfully instrumentalized and put to work by commercial cinema.
Shaviro therefore goes a step further than post-Operaist thought in claiming that the
virtual heterogeneity of the Outside is not simply conditioned by the negative that
actualizes it as politics, but that the virtual is directly instrumentalized by capitalism,
as are its modes of expression developed by Modernist cinema.
Cinema was one of Deleuzes great case-studies of how an artistic micropolitics
might operate. In Cinema I and II Deleuze produced an entire tool-box of concepts
showing how cinema was an art form that produced resistance directly within the
brains of the people. Cinematic art produces, he argues, an ontological resistance by
producing new affects that escaped the cliches of the human, all too human sensory
motor, and its domination by Hollywood. In 1985, Deleuze framed cinemas future
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 227
within the contrasting terms of the unsolved political problem of whether cinema
was a matter of cerebral creation or deficiency of the cerebellum? (1989: 266). Clearly
observing the emerging features of our contemporary interface, Deleuze places the
brain-screen as ambiguously situated between these contrasting terms of creation or
subordination and clearly locates its powers of resistance in the biopolitical production
of affect and subjectivity or what he calls the will to art (1989: 266). The will to art is
the ahistorical emergence of singular events in which the future is created. As a result,
Deleuze continues in relation to the digital cinema still to come:
[E]lectronic images will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet
unknown aspects of the time-image. The artist is always in the situation of saying
simultaneously: I claim new methods, and I am afraid that the new methods may
invalidate all will to art, or make it into a business, a pornography, a Hitlerism...
What is important is that the cinematographic image was already achieving effects
which were not like those of electronics, but which had autonomous anticipatory
functions in the time-image as will to art. (1989: 266, italics added)
Deleuze argues that Modern cinemas adoption of new technologies becomes a new
will to art when its powers act autonomously from the industries producing and
instrumentalizing them, and so anticipate a new future, and a people to come.8 But
Shaviro will argue, nearly 30years later, that Deleuzes opposition of cerebral creativ-
ity and deficiency, of modern cinema and Hollywood as Hitler simply doesnt work
anymore. Shaviro sees Deleuzes opposition as having collapsed in recent films mix-
ing extremely banal narratives with experimental formal and technical developments,
producing a new and ultimately cynical cinema that merges the commercial and the
avant-garde. In this sense, Shaviro argues, the autonomous functions of modernist
cinema that for Deleuze was the condition of a new will to art of electronic images,
anticipated only their political instrumentalization.
Shaviro claims that the emergence of cognitive capitalism has led to a mutation
in the relation of the actual and the virtual (2010: 44), one in which the event has not
been destroyed in the interface, as Bifo claimed, but fully subsumed. Shaviro explains
this in terms of Deleuzes cinematic concept of any-space-whatevers, a space not only
disconnected from any actual space but also that has eliminated that which happened
and acted in it. It is an extinction or a disappearing, but one which is not opposed to
the genetic element (1986: 120). Clearly then, the any-space-whatever is an aspect of
modernist cinema, it is the autonomous emergence of what Deleuze calls pure Powers
and Qualities independent of any actualization. Its dominant feature in fact is abstrac-
tion, inasmuch as it is a collection of locations or positions which coexist independ-
ently of the temporal order which moves from one part to the other, independently of
the connections and orientations which the vanished characters and situations gave
to them. There are therefore two states of the any-space-whatever, deconnection and
emptiness (1986: 120). Such spaces are devoid of the aspects we usually associate with
cinema narrative and subjectivity but in themselves they are full of pure potential
and are what Deleuze will call pure optical or sound situations (1986: 120). Signifi-
cantly, Deleuze will repeatedly associate these situations with hallucination (e.g. 1989:
12, 46, 55, 167, 263).
228 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Shaviro argues that the technological and accompanying formal innovations that
contemporary cinema has drawn from the growing ubiquity of the interface (from
computer games, music videos, multi-tasking, surfing etc.) commodify and thus
instrumentalize pure optical or sound situations. Mainstream cinema, he argues, has
moved away from narrative and characterization, which remain only as a rudimentary
support, in order to exploit the realm of affect that was opened up by art cinema but
has now become our biopolitical mode of interface. Shaviro draws on Brian Massu-
mis influential distinction between emotion and affect, where emotion is understood
as a feeling that belongs to me, that I have, and that defines my temporal trajectory
through the different moments of my life. An affect, on the contrary, is a feeling in
which I am not yet, a libidinal intensity fuck or fight that leaves no room for a
subjective reflection (see Massumi, 1996). These pre-subjective affects are those that
Pasquinelli and Bifo describe as traversing the interface and animating for better
or worse its shared flesh, and which Shaviro identifies in a new style of film that is
entirely generic in its narrative and characterization, but experimental (precisely in the
sense of experimental cinema) in its camera-work and editing. These films de-connect
the viewer from the subjective level of emotion and narrative, in order to plug them
into the realm of animal spirits, of affect hits or sensations edited behaviouristically
rather than spatially, that convulse the interface but are emptied of sense. This allows
the film to be arranged around its action sequences, which seem to occupy an agitated
and multi-dimensional space constructed by an extremely mobile camera and a very
rapid montage (Shaviro calls it ADD editing), and unfold in a permanent present.
These camera and montage techniques are made possible by CGI technology, and are
sometimes referred to as digital compositing. This technology allows a bi-polar com-
position of long shots and close-ups, subjective and objective point of views, strange
angles and an extremely fluid and fast camera movement that make up a seamless
object (the sequence) that is no longer organized in a space that contains it, but unfolds
within the intense and constantly variable sensation of the affect it produces. All of
thisannounces, Shaviro claims, a radical new and biopolitical aesthetic regime, a new
style of filmmaking that abandons the ontology of time and space, and the articulation
of bodies in relation to this, in order to instead set up rhythms of immediate stimula-
tion and manipulation (2009).
What Shaviro likes about these films, and it comes as no surprise for those of us
who have followed his work since Doom Patrols, is the way their embrace of affect
joyfully abandons both narrative coherency and moral position. But apart from (or
perhaps because of) the naughty pleasures films like Gamer (Neveldine and Taylor,
2009 Shaviro discusses this film extensively on his blog 2009) deliver, they also pro-
vide us with something like a cognitive mapping of the contemporary world system
(Shaviro, 2009). In Gamer, the games Slayer and Society are real, or unreal, as you
want (they are computer games in which the players avatar is real). In either case,
constant and intense stimulation is the norm, a permanent production/consump-
tion of the hormonal hysteria of teenage sex and violence, where every taboo can be
broken and excess simply doesnt exist. This means, at least according to Shaviro,
that the strategy of Gamer in this regard is not to offer a critique [of contemporary
capitalism], but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 229
it to the point of absurdity (2009). Shaviros affirmation of the film risks turning its
political strategy into a type of over-identification and leaves him with few political
options outside the postmodern standbys of irony, parody or even sarcasm. Indeed
Shaviro accepts that such films offer no political gains greater than a demented fabu-
lation that reflects upon our actual situation, while at the same time inserting itself
within that situation (2010: 93). Finally then, Shaviros cognitive mapping seems to
be a type of cognitive estrangement (despite his explicit denial of this [2009]), where
the ultimate political achievement of Gamer is to give us a critical distance on and
in the present. Shaviro, at least, admits that this is a less than overwhelming form of
politics.
Pasquinelli is less cynical than Shaviro, although not as funny. Pasquinelli firmly
rejects over-identification, which, he says, may paradoxically repeat the dominant
language but feature no real hacks at all. The problem is simple, once the ideologi-
cal tricks are recognized and turned upside down through over-identification, what
is the critique of the economic model sustaining the culture industries themselves?
Where are the real forces driving over-identification? (2008: 22). Shaviro argues that
there are no differences (only a little critical distance) between the force of economic
production and the force of cultural production, and together they produce a biopo-
litical affect operating within our Society of the Spectacle. Pasquinellis parasite how-
ever, posits a relation between the realm of interface aesthetics and real forces that
can produce an energetic and political excess (2008: 22). Nevertheless, Pasquinellis
affirmation of a material sabotage poses a similar dilemma to Shaviros postmod-
ernism, because as long as he understands cultural production as the pathological
symptom of new capitalism, as long as art remains subordinated to politics, then
any excess of real forces capable of sabotaging (or negating) the system remains
captured by it.
No doubt time has come when cards must be laid on the table and we must think
about what possible political strategies remain within an interface aesthetics. It will
come as no surprise that I would like to return at this point to Deleuze and Guattaris
very Nietzschean affirmation of art. Obviously the mainstreaming of Deleuze and
Guattaris work has been in no small part due to their remarkable perspicuity in seeing
creation and connection as the new ontology of the globalized world. We have already
seen how useful this ontology has been for post-Operaist theorists such as Bifo and
Pasquinelli, and for others such as Shaviro. What has been lost in this uptake however
has been Deleuze and Guattaris insistence upon the autonomy of art as the political
mechanism operating inside any aesthetic production. We have already seen Deleuze
affirm the pure optical or sound situations produced by modern cinema as discon-
nections of sensation from the clich of human experience. Such images, he argued,
cause our sensory-motor schemata to jam or break revealing the thing itself, literally,
in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character (1989: 20).
The thing itself is the asubjective affect, the virtual space of pure potential, or as he
also liked to call it, the event. Although Pasquinelli maintains a role for the event qua
excess, by limiting its genetic emergence to a negation of the actual situation, he makes
politics the condition of art. This tends to restrict the political possibilities of aesthet-
ics to anti-art, and so denies its autonomous and unjustifiable aspects found in, for
230 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze
Notes
1 Petar Milat, Tom Medak, Ivana Ivkovi, Leonardo Kovaevi, Ralph Paine and Nick
Thoburn made important contributions to the writing of this essay, and I thank
them all for it.
Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics 231
2 He claims, for example, that without the heritage of Humanism and the Enlighten-
ment, capitalism is a regime of pure, endless and inhuman violence (2009a: 132).
3 Pasquinelli mirrors Bifos misreading, although in the opposite direction, when he
rather generously suggests: The basic assumption behind Berardis position is that
libidinal energy is limited and we simply cannot party all the time (2008: 203).
Although this is an aspect of Bifos work, his Baudrillardian digitalism is a more
basic assumption within it.
4 Not to withdraw from the process, Deleuze and Guattari write, but to go f urther, to
accelerate the process, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is we havnt seen
anything yet (1983: 240).
5 Pasquinelli references Negris claim that Proletarian self-valorization is s abotage,
and so is the negative power of the positive (quoted in2008: 154).
6 Living labour is what constructs the passageway from the virtual to the real; it is the
vehicle of possibility (Hardt and Negri 2000: 357).
7 I have discussed Guattaris Modernist aesthetics and its relation to post-Operaist
thought in more detail in Zepke, 2011b.
8 Hardt and Negri also use Alois Riegls term will to art (Kunstwollen), although
quite differently from Deleuze. The will to art, they claim, is a desire that articulates
all singular artistic expressions, all the overflowing social forces as a coherent
institutional development (2009: 375). In this sense, the will to art is the model for
what they call a Rechtswollen or will to institution and constitution, which articu-
lates the singularities of the multitude, along with its diverse instances of revolt and
rebellion, in a powerful and lasting common process (2009: 375). Perhaps it is just
a difference of emphasis, but Hardt and Negri seem to shift the will to art from
the creative and revolutionary event itself to the organizational and institutional
process constituting the people who emerge from this break. Deleuze and Guattari
also recognize the necessity of this distinction, and of the organizational work of
politics, but their difference from Hardt and Negri nevertheless remains clear; the
organizational work of politics should not be confused with the creative autonomy
of the virtual event, which is its condition and which they call art (see Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 177).
9 For an account of the importance of Kants concept of the sublime for Deleuzes
conception of art, see Zepke, 2011a.
10 Just as the thought of pure difference makes, Deleuze claimed, a book of philoso-
phy a kind of science fiction (1994: xx). Or, as Guattari somewhat more sheepishly
admits; To think time against the grain, to imagine what came after can modify
what was before or that changing the past at the root can transform a current state
of affairs: what madness! A return to magical thought! It is pure science fiction, and
yet... (2011a: 1011).
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Index