What Concepts Do: Preface tothe Chinese Translation ofA Thousand Plateaus

Brian Massumi Université de Montréal, Montréal

Abstract

This essay suggests an approach to the reading of Deleuze and Guattari’sA Thousand Plateaus, grasped as a philosophical event that is as directlypragmatic as it is abstract and speculative. A series of key Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts (in particular, multiplicity, minority and doublebecoming) are staged from the angle of philosophy’s relation to itsdisciplinary outside. These concepts are then transferred to the relationbetween the authors’ philosophical lineage and the new cultural outsideinto which the Chinese translation will propel their thought. Emphasisis placed on the writing – and reading – of philosophy as a creative actof collective import and ethical force.

Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, speculative pragmatism,minority, becoming

‘Philosophy, nothing but philosophy’.1 (Deleuze 2007a: 176/163, trans.mod.)

That was Gilles Deleuze’s simple answer. The question – what kind ofbook is A Thousand Plateaus? – has likely occurred to many a readerupon opening the book. It is clear at a glance that something is going on.Each chapter heading bears a date as well as a title, and is accompaniedby an image. The images, the reader quickly senses, are not directlyillustrative. What connection, for example, does a diagram of a partridgehunting device have to do with the theory of the State and its relationto capitalism (plateau 13)? Or a line-drawing of an egg to the nature ofthe human body (plateau 6)? The suspicion that Deleuze’s answer is notas simple as it seems is reinforced by a brief introductory authors’ noteinforming the reader that the book is not divided into chapters at all

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but is instead composed of ‘plateaus’. The difference is that plateaus canbe read in any order. Each plateau threads a sinuous weave of topicsrelated to many disciplines other than philosophy: art, mathematics,geology, biology, linguistics, anthropology, history, ethology, literature,music, religion, political theory, economics. The breadth and diversityseem unbounded. The reader is led to a cliff-edge of bewilderment.Suddenly connections leap out, often between disparate passages indifferent plateaus, like conceptual flashes of lightning joining earth andsky, briefly illuminating a vista with a clarity at once too intense andtoo fleeting to hold. The flash connections-at-a-distance multiply at eachreading, launching the weave of topics into a performative rhythm.Written not unlike a work of experimental fiction, the book reads withthe feel of music: in movements. Resonances build at each ‘playing’,enriching the experience with a self-enhancing sense of variation. Didn’tDeleuze once comment that a book should be read as one listens to arecord (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 13/10)? Another complication: thevery first line of the first plateau announces a duet. Every passage wasintegrally co-authored, and ‘since each of us was several, there wasalready quite a crowd’.

Deleuze’s co-multiple, Félix Guattari, was not a philosopherby profession. He was a lifelong political activist and a trainedpsychoanalyst – who never belonged to a political party, and neverpractised as an analyst. He agitated tirelessly in the extra-parliamentaryleft that would explode into view with the worker–student revolt ofMay 1968, energising the social movements that would characterisethe following decades. Guattari worked for his entire career at anexperimental psychiatric clinic, La Borde, which was allied to theanti-psychiatry movement. Guattari’s life, Deleuze writes, was itself arhythm of perpetual movement, uncontainable by any set ideology,disciplinary enclosure or established institution. ‘He can leap from oneactivity to another, he sleeps little, travels much, and does not stop’.His life is like a ‘sea’, ‘always mobile in appearance, with constantflashes of light’ (Deleuze 2007b: 237/218 trans. mod.). Earth, sky, sea.Flash, rhythm, resonance. ‘Nothing but philosophy’, it seems, is madeof many things. ‘Forces, events, motions and sources of movement,winds, typhoons, diseases, places and moments’ (Deleuze 1995a: 34/52).Everything but an interiority of thought. ‘Philosophy is not made toreflect on anything . . . Nobody needs philosophy to reflect’ (Deleuze2007c: 318/292 trans. mod.). A book of philosophy is ‘in a relation withthe outside’. Philosophical thought ‘exists only through the outside and

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on the outside’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4/10). ‘It’s not in the head’(Deleuze 1995b: 134/183 trans. mod.).

Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a way of engaging withthe world. Speaking for both co-authors, Deleuze remarks that in AThousand Plateaus ‘we have the impression we are doing politics. . . .The question is whether other people can make use of the work it does,even just a little, in their life and projects’ (Deleuze 2007a: 180/166trans. mod.). Philosophy engages with the world in a way that is aspolitical as it is musical. Its politics is pragmatic, not programmatic.Rather than directing, it donates. It gives a gift of potential for use inother people’s lives and projects. Philosophy is a doing, and it acts forchange.

This is why philosophy cannot be content to reflect, pronouncingupon the world from a disengaged posture of explanatory description orjudgmental prescription. To contribute to change is to herald the new.The new, by definition, cannot be described, having yet to arrive. If itsarrival can have been pre-described, it will not have been new. It willhave been programmed in the present as a prescription for the future.Philosophy as Deleuze and Guattari practise it is neither descriptive norprescriptive. It is constructive. ‘Everybody knows that philosophy dealswith concepts. . . . But concepts don’t turn up ready-made, and theydon’t preexist: you have to invent, create concepts, and this involvesjust as much creation and invention as you find in art’ (Deleuze 1995a:32/48). Philosophy has but one object: the crafting of concepts. ‘Nothingbut philosophy’ is a conceptual art.

Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to philosophy has importantconsequences for how the reader may best approach the experienceof A Thousand Plateaus. It bears directly on the status of the non-philosophical disciplines from which the authors draw much of theirmaterial for the book. The authors do not appeal to other disciplinesfor outside authority. That is not at all what they mean by philosophybeing in relation with an outside. Neither is it a question of setting upphilosophy as a judge or outside arbiter of other modes of thought andaction. There is an evaluation involved in the activity of philosophy,but it is of a different kind. Each discipline is credited as having itsown mode of construction, for which it invents its own self-policingcriteria of judgement. Philosophy does not presume to instruct otherdisciplines in their own affairs. It does not confirm or deny the validity oftheir results relative to their own sphere of activity. Nor does it simplyimport their results into its own activity, taking them on board with

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borrowed authority. Rather than lay judgement upon other disciplines,or kneel down before their judgement, philosophy takes something foritself from them. It extracts something from their outside activity, whichit then artfully goes about making its own. What it extracts, from non-philosophy, is philosophical potential. It applies its art to recrafting thepotential, recasting it to lead in directions it could never have gone in hadit stayed where it started. Philosophy frees potential from the captivityof disciplinary self-policing. It does this in the interests of passingthe potential forward, to other lives, for other projects. Deleuze andGuattari’s philosophy helps itself to the potential of other disciplines.More than one discipline at a time. The potentials it extracts from eachenter into proximity with those of others. Together, they enter a weaveand a rhythm. Philosophy performs this feat following its own criteriaof mutual inclusion. It is not just anything goes. This artful inclusion ofthe otherwise disparate in a mutuality of conceptual movement requiresgreat craft and much sobriety.

Loosed upon the world again, the proximities philosophy hasproduced translate into a complex network of potential passagesbetween spheres of activity at work in the world, including but notlimited to the disciplines from which potential was originally mined.From these ‘transversal’ connections something as yet unseen may arise:a new synthesis. What philosophy takes, it gives back, with a difference.Deleuze and Guattari call this freeing of travelling potential for makinga difference in the world ‘deterritorialisation’.

This is what philosophy is all about for Deleuze and Guattari. Notreflection, description, prescription or judgement. Philosophy is aboutnew potential coming together, between activities which in the normalcourse of their affairs tend judgmentally to sequester themselves andjealously hold to their own. The object of philosophy is not thingsas they are, but things as they potentially come-between, to become-together, outside of their normal conditions of captivity. The meaningof a philosophical concept cannot be reduced to its semantic content,defined in abstraction from this process. There is a transformationalaspect to the concept’s letting loose, by which it effectively overspills itsown definition. This is the aspect of what philosophy comes to do in theworld: its pragmatic aspect. It is the processual aspect of the concept’smoving on, to new effect. The concept’s meaning cannot be abstractedfrom its flow-over effects. Its meaning is one with the movement of itstaking excess effect. In addition to the semantic meaning that it can bedefined to contain, a philosophical concept carries a surplus of meaningthat is one with the transformative movement of its performative force.

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Philosophy is doubly engaged with non-philosophy. It needs existingrealms of non-philosophical activity from which to extract the potentialit makes its own; and it needs becoming realms of non-philosophicalactivity to which to pass on its own potential, to inclusive new effect. Itneeds the wideness of a participatory world to gear into. Philosophygears its activity to the potential of existing domains of activity,approached from the angle of how they can move together and changetogether. It is all about relation. Relation is all about co-variation.

To get the most out of the book, readers of A Thousand Plateaus mustbe willing to open themselves to the book’s performance of conceptualforces. Nothing, but nothing, comes of philosophy, unless its pragmaticsweep is allowed to wash through the reading experience. What this‘means’ for the reader will co-vary. Only one thing is sure. It meanstaking the risk that the movement of philosophy will pass into yourlife and projects next, to new and unpredictable effect. True thought,said like-minded philosopher A. N. Whitehead, is truly an adventure. Ifthe thought of adventure is not already a pleasure, the reader is well-advised to go elsewhere. There are any number of less becoming thoughtpractices on offer.

It was probably clear from the first lines of this preface that achief concern for Deleuze and Guattari is multiplicity: many disciplines,many plateaus, many rhythms, multiple subjects, co-varying travellings.Philosophy, as it came to be institutionalised as a discipline in the West,is not in fact very adept at processing multiplicity. Quite the opposite,it has developed an arsenal of techniques for turning away from it.Institutional philosophy enjoys subsuming multiplicity to the One oftotality. Or compartmentalising it in the Two of duality and opposition.Then, nostalgic for the lost unity it now regrets splitting up, it oftenlabours to overcome the duality that it itself produced, in order to refindthe One through a one-two-three of dialectical synthesis.

This is not to say that there are not great thinkers of multiplicityin the history of Western philosophy who resist the romance ofthe One of totality: Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson. It is with thinkerssuch as these that Deleuze and Guattari ally themselves. Given theaccumulated weight of Western philosophy’s totalisations, dualisationsand triangulations, added assistance is appreciated. So they turn, forexample, to mathematics, a discipline that has no choice but to grapplewith multiplicity. For what is number, if not the very problem ofmultiplicity as such? Mathematics will accordingly invent a variety ofspecialist formal languages for handling multiplicities. Philosophy, notbeing mathematics, does not need the formalisations. But built into each

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formalisation is a concept of multiplicity, constructed to yield specificallymathematical results. Deleuze and Guattari’s attitude is that there isno reason in the world why that concept of multiplicity cannot orshould not be extracted from its specifically mathematical expressionand redeployed in a manner specific to philosophy, so as to generatephilosophical results.

For example, Riemann’s geometry invents a formalisation of space asa patchwork of regions all of which connect at the edges of each. Spacefor Riemann is the continuity of the multiple, unreduced to a unity,unsplit, and needing no salvation through triangulation. The continuityof this infinite connectivity of the multiple makes the preoccupationwith the One simply unnecessary. A displacement has occurred. Theproblem has changed. Deleuze and Guattari will make use of that dis-placement for philosophy, taking care to deterritorialise it in relation toits previous institutional incarnations. They will extract from Riemann’smathematical project the properly philosophical concept of ‘smoothspace’ (plateaus 13 and 14). They do this in order to bring to philosophya new potential for its thinking which alters the problems it encounters.Philosophy’s engagement with mathematics does not simply import amathematical solution from mathematics. It uses a mathematical solu-tion to reproblematise philosophy. In doing so, philosophy challengesitself to invent new solutions proper to its own sphere of activity.2

The concept of smooth space is that of a space in which there is thepotential to go from any point directly to any other, without passingthrough intervening points. This raises a series of properly philosophicalproblems that are beyond the ken of mathematics. Can a body cometo move in ordinary space in such a way as to transform it into asmooth space? Can movement invent its own operative space of infiniteconnection, freeing itself from the boundaries and limits of alreadyinstituted spatial formations? Can movement deterritorialise space itself,to produce a space of a different order? To think these problems Deleuzeand Guattari invent the conceptual persona of the ‘nomad’ as the figureof the embodiment of this transformation, exemplified in history in theancient societies of the Inner Asian steppes (plateau 12).3 If it happenedonce in history that the nomad invented itself as a people by inventinga smooth space of movement, there is no reason why it cannot happenagain. The fact that it happened once demonstrates that the potentialwas there. Once a potential, always a potential. What, Deleuze andGuattari speculate, would be the embodiment of the nomad in our time?What are the present world’s peoples to come, already perhaps in theprocess of self-invention?

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Their answer: what we term ‘minorities’ (plateau 13). They usethe word minority in a special philosophical sense. A minority is ahuman multiplicity that is non-denumerable. It is a human multiplicityin continual flux, such that the individuals composing the multiplicitycannot be counted one by one and placed in recognisable categories.They cannot be attributed a definite identity, nor assigned a normalfunction. Because they cannot be pinned down, they can move‘smoothly’ from any point directly to any other in the territoriallandscape of recognised categories and instituted functions. They arein a flux of collective becoming. Their movement makes a Riemannianspace of the territoried patchwork of recognised national and localidentities and the functioning institutions that contain and regulatetheir activities. The modern nomad reinvents the ‘steppe’ for the age ofglobal capitalism. Their movements secrete a smooth space of becomingthat is uncontainable within the boundaries of existing identities andunregulated by the economy of their normal channels of circulation.This philosophical concept of a smooth space of collective becomingdid in fact pass into other lives and projects. Taken up by elements ofthe anti-globalisation movement, it contributed in the first years of thetwenty-first century to the invention of a new transnational space ofanti-capitalist resistance.

A philosophical concept always moves through ‘double becomings’,and double becomings cascade. Something passes between mathematicsand philosophy, such that a construction that was nothing butmathematical becomes philosophical, in a way that changes howphilosophy is done. Philosophy itself becomes through that engagement:more capable of thinking multiplicity; more free of the burden of itsacquired historical habits. Double becoming between the disciplinesof mathematics and philosophy. Cascade: the concept strikes fertileground in a different domain, that of activist political practice, whereit generates flow-on effects that overspill the discipline of philosophy –and of disciplinarity as a model. Extraction, transformation, overspill.This relational development of undisciplined potential is the pragmaticmovement of philosophical thought.

It is through this processual engagement with mathematics, andothers like it, that Deleuze and Guattari develop what may beconsidered the key concept of the book: multiplicity as a continuity ofbecoming, uncontained. Other key concepts play out from analogousencounters with different disciplines belonging to the natural sciences,the social sciences, the humanities, anything at all. A reencounterwith philosophy’s own discipline is of course a crucial part of the

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mix. It gives already philosophical concepts the chance to rebecomephilosophical and take on new life. It is these conceptual becomings- andrebecomings-philosophical which interweave to form each ‘plateau’,and which return in a rhythm all their own across plateaus, makinga smooth conceptual space of the book itself. A plateau, the authorssay, is a region of ‘intensity’ of a concept’s deterritorialised becoming:a particular coming-together of a multiplicity of strategically displacedconceptual movements-between. These movements compose the text.Their composition couches in the text a charge of relational potentialthat may well move outside again, into non-philosophical spill-overeffects.

Each reading of the book is a performative ‘mapping’ of thesemovements: a recreative travelling of ‘abstract lines’ of conceptualpotential; a reinventive ‘tracing’ producing anew the thought-regionsit traverses. The book as a dynamic whole is a ‘geology’ of theseregions whose tectonic plates are constantly shifting and folding, andrising under the force of their folding-together to form the apparentlystable compositional landmarks called ‘plateaus’. The result is a complex‘cartography’ of potential becomings of thought, coursing in fromthe outside of non-philosophy, through philosophy, then back outagain in potentialised overspill. Philosophy, practised in this way, ismetabolic. It energises. Any non-philosophical domain can provide thenourishment. Deleuze and Guattari are notoriously omnivorous in theirsourcings. What would be the point of limiting the energies philosophymay metabolise by preselecting what it can feed on? Philosophy asa discipline – philosophy as it exists institutionally, embodied inspecialised university departments – is an ascetic shadow of what itcan be. It is philosophy on a starvation diet. It is philosophy that haslong ago renounced its symbiotic relation to the outside, restricting itsinput to the canon of recognised authors over which it claims exclusiveownership rights. This is philosophy feeding on its own. As a direct resultof this cannibalism, institutional philosophy suffers from a conceptualnutrient deficiency. It can only regain its energies and rebecome themetabolically creative enterprise it always was – philosophy and nothingbut – by adventuring beyond the interiority of its institutional repair andreengaging with the varied life of the world at large.

It is little wonder, then, that the publication of A Thousand Plateaus,the great book of the philosophical outside, was at first deafeninglyignored by its own discipline. It is only in the last five years orso that it has been added to the institutional larder. There is stilldiscomfort. There is something institutionally indigestible in its way of

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practising philosophy. This is not at all to say that A Thousand Plateauswas without effect for its first twenty-five years. It had enormousimpact from the start, just not in the institution of philosophy. Itwas immediately taken up in a panoply of other domains of activity,towards their own creative becomings-between: architecture, literature,dance, cinema, new media and interactive art, experimental music,performance, education, anthropology, international relations, politicalscience, political activism. The list is long, and still growing. The book’sconceptual rhythms have struck many a chord.

A warning is in order: there is nothing inherently good or bad in aphilosophical concept, or in the creative process it fosters. To return tothe concept of smooth space, Deleuze and Guattari underline that themovements producing it are by nature ‘war machines’ (plateaus 12 and13). It is not, they explain, that these movements seek conflict, or havewar as their object. It is that their uncontained becoming places themin a permanent state of potential conflict with territorial orders and theway of life they support. That potential may always be ‘captured’ bya military institution and rechanneled so that it does take war as itsobject. The first modern reinvention of nomadism, according to Deleuzeand Guattari, was in the arena of maritime warfare, and evolved as anoffshoot of the Western powers’ colonial hegemony, as it transitionedinto the Cold War. More recently, Eyal Weizman has shown how theconcept of smooth space was consciously appropriated by the IsraeliDefense Forces to reinvent urban warfare for use in their occupationof Palestine, with A Thousand Plateaus itself used as an officer trainingmanual (Weizman 2007). The movement of thought metabolised by thecreative movement of philosophy is not a priori morally good or bad.Nor is it necessarily right or left in political terms. It has the potential togo either way. This means that it can only be judged on its own terms.Which is to say pragmatically: in its consequences.

Since what effectively follows from a philosophical concept comeswith how it is remobilised outside philosophy, the value of a philosophyis always the product of a collaboration. According to William James,a founder of pragmatism, a concept is what it does. Its value is thedifference it effectively makes in the world. If it looks like a concept,sounds like a concept and even tastes like a concept, but doesn’t makea difference in the world, it’s not a concept. James’s favourite exampleof a concept which isn’t one is, once again, the One itself (James 1996).Nothing can be done with absolute totality. It dissolves into nothingnessat the slightest attempt to make something of it. Because then there aretwo: its lost grandeur, and the slightness of your attempt. Which has

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made no difference. One might as well skip the dialectical third step thatusually comes next, and just make do with the multiplicity with whichthe world presented itself in the first place, instead of wasting thought-energy fruitlessly trying to overcome it. That is the more creative optionby far.

Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that creatively making-do withmultiplicity involves a collective project of becoming. This is the meaningof their frequently repeated formula that the creative force of a conceptis ‘a people to come’ (plateau 11). A people’s coming-to-be in outsiderelation is the evaluation of the concept. A conceptual evaluation comesin the form of an event. It is a lived judgement. Deleuze and Guattariname this self-inventive, event-based evaluation ‘ethics’. FollowingSpinoza and Nietzsche, they oppose ethics to morality. Morality isprescriptive. It pre-judges. Ethics unfolds. It makes-do. The ethical valueof a philosophical concept is its pragmatic truth. That truth occurs tothe concept, in the course of its own unfolding process. It is not in thehead. Pre-judging the concept makes no difference to its true potentialfor event. Critiquing a concept in the abstract, standing grandly injudgement outside and above it, does nothing. It leaves the conceptunlived, separated from its own event. Deleuze and Guattari advocateinstead what they call ‘immanent critique’.

An immanent critique acts from within the movement of the problemat hand. It consists in entering the flow, and acting within it to infectits course. The ability to do this requires an experiential assessment ofthe direction of the movement and the potential it carries forward. Itis in this sense that a truly philosophical evaluation is always, ethically,‘affirmative’. It must begin by actively opening itself to the experienceof the problem which concerns it. Participatory concern is its necessarycondition. A conceptual movement submits itself to judgement onlyto the extent to which it awakens concern, taking on ‘importance’in the world. And it does this precisely to the extent to which it iscollectively felt to make a difference. Deleuze lists the markers of aphilosophical concept as the Singular (the event), the New (becoming)and the Important (lived force of consequence). ‘Concepts’, he says, ‘areinseparable from affects, by which I mean the powerful effects they haveon our life, and from percepts, which is to say the new ways of seeingor perceiving they inspire in us’ (Deleuze 2007b: 238/163 trans. mod.).Concepts are not abstract. They are for the living, and it is life whichjudges them.

Another word for a movement which is oriented, in the sense ofcarrying a certain kind of potential, but is at the same time open-ended in

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its consequences, as well as being self-affirming, is a tendency. Conceptsare always of tendencies. Which means they are always ultimately‘about’ their own movement, because they are tendencies. Conceptsare pragmatically self-referential. This point is especially importantunderstanding how the concepts mobilised in A Thousand Plateausrelate to history. Perhaps the most persistent misreading of Deleuzeand Guattari’s ideas is to think that they refer to something outsidetheir own movement: to mistake them for empirical descriptions. Thisis also not what Deleuze and Guattari mean by philosophy relating toits outside. The historical events and formations Deleuze and Guattarimobilise in such great abundance are not empirical states of thingsto which philosophical concepts are descriptively applied. Deleuze andGuattari are not concerned with applying their philosophy to history,or to anything else. They are interested in letting philosophy loose onthe world. What their concepts are ‘about’ are the tendencies whichwash through historical events and sweep historical formations into amovement of becoming, including that of philosophy itself. Tendenciesare transhistorical. They pass through historical moments, joining themin the continuity of variation that is as much about philosophy asphilosophy is about it. The philosophical issue is not, for example,whether the societies of the Inner Asian steppes were or were notnomadic, judging by whatever empirical criteria a historian may wishto apply. Philosophically it is not a question of what they were, but howthey were: what they did, as concerns becoming.

What they did was to bring a certain transhistorical tendency toexpression, to the greatest extent possible, given the conditions. Theyexemplified a tendency to the highest degree. The function of the datesin the title of each plateau is to mark the arrival in history of a highest-degree expression of a transhistorical tendency. This is not an empiricaldescription, but rather a speculative proposition. The proposition isthat the tendency will carry forward through history, to find furtherexpression, in equally high-degree variations exemplifying the sametendential movement to the limit of what changing conditions willpermit. The philosophical conception of history concerns the movementof a tendency through a series of limit-case exemplifications.

The series, in principle, is unending. There could always, potentially,be a next tendential expression. All it takes is a people to come toinvent it. The philosophical thinking of history bears on this leftoverof creative potential that is in excess over any given expression of it ina given state of things. What philosophy thinks in relation to history isthe charge of futurity energising the historical present’s passing. This is

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what philosophy concerns itself with: the ‘untimeliness’ of the historicalmoment (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 296/363). Since the concern isfor futurity, philosophy is speculative. Speculation is ‘superempirical’in the sense that it concerns the empirical overspilling of history bytendency. The best way to ‘describe’ a tendency is to mobilise it inthought, and take it as far as it can go in thought. Philosophy stagesthought-experiments extrapolating movements it finds astir in the world.A tendency is characterised by a certain mode in which a multiplicity ofelements come together in becoming and hold together in a dynamicunity of movement that makes a difference in history. This mode ofmaking a difference is what Deleuze and Guattari call an ‘assemblage’.An empirical object has properties defining what it is. A tendency haspoles governing how it goes. Make a concept for how a given multiplicityof elements come together and hold together to make a difference inhistory. Then extrapolate that assemblage to the absolute limit of whatit can do, in thought. How would it go, were it to exemplify itself to thehighest conceivable degree?

This absolute limit of a highest-degree expression of a tendency is apole, almost in the magnetic meaning of the term: an attractive forceorienting a tendency. The philosophical extrapolation of a tendency isan active diagnosis of this orientation. What is at issue philosophicallyis never the empirical question of ‘what’ something is (the question ofbeing). It is the pragmatic question of ‘how’ things go (the questionof becoming-oriented). What is always at issue philosophically is thispragmatic question, taken to the limit of thought (Deleuze 2004:95–6/132–4). At that limit lies an attractive force that is never exhaustedin any particular historical present. Taken to the limit, a movement is inprocessual excess over any empirically describable instance of its activity.What philosophy extrapolates is this excess, which as such is empirically‘pure’. As a polarity, it is historically empty – and philosophically loaded.Philosophy is the speculative invention of pure experimental thought-forms. It is in these limit-forms that its creativity finds its own highestexpression. It is crucial to bear this in mind in thinking about the role ofhistory in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing.

‘Philosophy’, it must not be forgotten, ‘is as creative a discipline asany other’ (Deleuze 2007c: 318/292). As a creative endeavour, Deleuzeand Guattari often emphasise, philosophy is closely allied with art.Repeat: ‘you have to create concepts, and this involves just as muchcreation and invention as you find in art’ (Deleuze 1995a: 32/48).Deleuze and Guattari think philosophically in relation to the outsideof art and literature as extensively as they do in relation to history,

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mathematics or science. One of the reasons they place an image atthe beginning of each plateau is to mark this kinship with art, andto suggest that there is a conceptual activity in art itself that cannourish philosophy in a way that is much closer to its own activitythan any other of its outsides. The kinship they feel between art andphilosophy has to do with the fact that the object of art is also theuntimely. Art, like philosophy, looks past ‘what’ things are, to howthey become. It ‘looks only at the movements’ (Deleuze and Guattari1987: 282/346). In order to do this, it ‘breaks’ things as they are‘open’, in order to liberate the pure form of their potential, makinga tendential event of it (Deleuze 1995c: 86/119). This is a speculativeact, a conceptual gesture, in much the same way that a philosophicalthinking is. It is also an act of resistance: to the way things are, outof concern for how they may become (Deleuze 2007c: 327–9/300–2).Philosophy makes resistance thinkable. Art makes it perceptible (Deleuzeand Guattari 1994: 163–99/154–88). They are both, in Guattari’s terms,‘ethico-aesthetic’ practices of inventive resistance oriented to becoming(Guattari 1995).

The ‘artfulness’ of philosophical concepts should not be taken to meanthat they are unrigorous, merely metaphorical. ‘For me’, warns Deleuze,‘metaphors do not exist’ (Deleuze 2007d: 202/186 trans. mod.). Fora philosophical concept to do what it can do best, to the limit of itsinventive abilities, it must achieve a pragmatic excess of conceptualprecision. It is only with pragmatic precision that things can be madeto happen through thought. To make an event of thought is a mostrigorous endeavour. Deleuze does not recoil at the word ‘system’. Aphilosophy, for him, must have all the rigour of a complex ‘open’ system,constitutively open to changing relations of the outside (Deleuze 1995a:29–34/44–52).

The Chinese translation of A Thousand Plateaus is a rigorous thought-event in its own right, ‘involving as much creation and invention’ as

the original. It is only fitting that the Chinese reader, finding this newcreation in their hands, treat the translation of their book as Deleuzeand Guattari treat every achievement: break it open. Resist its ‘being’European. Don’t take it as descriptive of where it has come from. Andespecially don’t take it as prescriptive for where it has now arrived.Liberate the pure form of its potential – for Chinese thought, in acontinuing of its own singular adventures in becoming-between, coming-together again in a relation to the great outside of its own futurity.Nothing would please Deleuze and Guattari more than their philosophy

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taking on a new and untimely importance beyond the limits of ‘what’they, as the European thinkers that they were historically, could everhave imagined.

Notes1. Where necessary, page numbers for the English version are given first. Page

numbers for the original, French edition are given second. Some translations havebeen modified by the author. These are noted in-text.

2. On philosophy as the invention of problems, see Deleuze (1991: 15–21/3–11).

3. On the notion of the ‘conceptual personae’, see Chapter 3 in Deleuze andGuattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994: 60–83).

ReferencesDeleuze, Gilles (1991) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam,

New York: Zone Books. [Deleuze, Gilles (1968) Le bergsonisme, Paris: PUF.]Deleuze, Gilles (1995a) ‘On a Thousand Plateaus’, in Negotiations, trans. Martin

Joughlin, New York: Columbia University Press. [Deleuze, Gilles (1990) ‘Lesintercesseurs’, en Pourparlers, Paris: Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles (1995b) ‘Mediators’, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughlin, NewYork: Columbia University Press. [Deleuze, Gilles (1990) ‘Les intercesseurs’, enPourparlers, Paris: Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles (1995c) ‘Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open’, inNegotiations, trans. Martin Joughlin, New York: Columbia University Press.[Deleuze, Gilles (1990) ‘Fendre les choses, fendre les mots’, en Pourparlers, Paris:Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles (2004) ‘The Method of Dramatization’, in Desert Islands and OtherTexts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, New York:Semiotext[e]. [Deleuze, Gilles (2002) ‘La méthode de la dramatisation’, en Îledéserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, Paris: Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles (2007a) ‘Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview’, in Two Regimes ofMadness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. AmesHodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext[e]. [Deleuze, Gilles (2003)‘Huit ans après: Entretien 1980’, en Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens1975–1995, Paris: Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles (2007b) ‘Letter to Uno: How Felix and I Worked Together’, in TwoRegimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges andMike Taormina, New York: Semiotext[e]. [Deleuze, Gilles (2003) ‘Lettre à Uno:comment nous avons travaillé ensemble’, en Deux régimes de fous. Textes etentretiens 1975–1995, Paris: Minuit, p. 163.]

Deleuze, Gilles (2007c) ‘What is the Creative Act?’, in Two Regimes of Madness.Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges andMike Taormina, New York: Semiotext[e]. [Deleuze, Gilles (2003) ‘Qu’est-ce quel’acte de création?’, en Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975–1995,Paris: Minuit, p. 292.]

Deleuze, Gilles (2007d) ‘Letter to Uno on Language’, in Two Regimes of Madness,Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges andMike Taormina, New York: Semiotext[e]. [Deleuze, Gilles (2003) ‘Lettre à Uno

What Concepts Do 15

sur le langage’, en Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975–1995, Paris:Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. BrianMassumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. [Deleuze, Gilles et FélixGuattari (1980) Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. GrahamBuchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso. [Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari(1991) Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris: Minuit.]

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press. [Deleuze, Gilles etClaire Parnet (1996) Dialogues, Paris: Flammarion.]

Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bainsand Julian Pefanis, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. [Guattari, Félix (1992)Chaosmose, Paris: Galilée.]

James, William (1996) A Pluralistic Universe, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Weizman, Eyal (2007) ‘Urban Warfare: Walking Through Walls’, in Hollow Land:

Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso, pp. 185–220.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000772

Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference andRepetition in Postcolonial ‘Writing Back’,a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’sWide Sargasso Sea

Lorna Burns University of Glasgow

Abstract

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novelas an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actualrepetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as anexpression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’sthree syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming thatDeleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as aviolence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnessesis a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, someof which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcingAntoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies.

Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Jean Rhys, writing back, becoming, WideSargasso Sea, virtual, Difference and Repetition

Within the postcolonial critic’s lexicon, terms such as ‘hybridity’,‘writing back’ and ‘creolisation’ have come to be associated with afundamental ambivalence that lies at the heart of the postcolonialproject. Indeed, Homi Bhabha’s characterisation of the ‘location’ ofthe postcolonial moment as a transitory site, ‘neither a new horizon,nor a leaving behind of the past’ (Bhabha 1994: 1), confirmedradical ambivalence and ‘in-betweenness’ as the archetypal features ofpostcolonial resistance: the hybridised subject or creolised text worksto undermine colonial authority precisely because it is not easilyaccommodated into the coloniser’s self-assured world-view. In the sameway, where postcolonial authors such as Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott,J. M. Coetzee or Aimé Césaire appropriate and rewrite canonical texts,

Becoming-Bertha 17

writing-back to the imperial canon as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffithsand Helen Tiffin (2002: 96) have argued, it is the production of a textthat both does and does not resemble the original work that marks itsambivalent status as a hybrid or creolised text. Yet, what has remainedunderstated in contemporary postcolonial criticism is the extent to whichboth hybridity and creolisation do witness the birth of ‘a new horizon’.Rather than locating the revisionary potential of postcolonial aestheticswithin an ambivalent hybridity, I contend that it is the overlooked abilityto effect the new that distinguishes postcolonial discourse and, crucially,marks its compatibility with the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze.Elaborating the distinction that Deleuze in Difference and Repetitionidentifies between the first and third syntheses of time, this essay outlinesa Deleuzian approach to postcolonial writing back by drawing on theparticular example of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and identifyingthe repetitions of virtual difference and becomings that make Rhys’scanonical re-dress a genuinely original literary expression.

At issue in this essay is not simply the question of whether Rhys’snovel, or any example of postcolonial writing back, is a new work ofliterature, but rather, at a more fundamental level, a question of theparticular relationship between the postcolonial present and the colonialpast enacted in writing back. Indeed, this question is evident in Bhabha’sown formulation of the postcolonial moment as neither a ‘new horizon’nor the abandonment of historical memory. Despite this suggestion,The Location of Culture does not oppose the idea of the postcolonialas the production of the new: Bhabha later defines cultural translationas ‘an encounter with “newness” that is not part of the continuum ofpast and present’ (Bhabha 1994: 7), and argues that the hybrid objectbe recognised as ‘new, neither one nor the other’ (25). However, itis the concern to define postcolonialism as both the liberation of thesubject from the traumatic legacies of colonialism and the care thatthe past be not forgotten that leads Bhabha to ostensibly reject thehorizon of the new. In turn, what is needed to address this concernis an understanding of postcolonialism as a historical relation thatgives rise to a newness ‘that is not part of the continuum of past andpresent’, but which is, nevertheless, derived from a particular (colonial)history. It is this paradoxical relation in which the engagement withhistory both generates a future with the potential to become somethingwholly new and revises our understanding of all that led up to it (anew continuum that leads from past to present and into the future)that Deleuze establishes in his third synthesis of time: articulating atheory of becoming that accounts for the production of the new from a

18 Lorna Burns

re-dress of the past and, I argue, when applied to writing back, revealsthe revisionary force of postcolonial writing.

The significance of Deleuze’s philosophy for postcolonial studieshas received little attention to date, with Peter Hallward’s AbsolutelyPostcolonial remaining the most comprehensive critique of Deleuze’sinfluence on the field. For Hallward, questions of singularity, specificityand, crucially, locatedness take centre stage in his attack on a Deleuzianpostcolonial discourse, arguing that while colonial and counter-colonialdiscourse may indeed be criticised for their over-specification of thesubject, in his view, the postcolonial has moved in precisely the oppositedirection, towards a singular reality which ‘will operate without criteriaexternal to its operation’; replacing ‘the interpretation or representationof reality with an immanent participation in its production or creation:in the end, at the limit of “absolute postcoloniality”, there will benothing left, nothing outside itself, to which it could be specific’(Hallward 2001: xii). Implicit in Hallward’s argument is the viewthat postcolonialism tends to follow a logic of immanence or single-substance (Burns 2009: 104–5). As such, everything exists as a particularelement within the singular substance that we might term the universe,and is nothing other than a particular configuration of that single-substance. Accordingly, for Hallward, the postcolonial will tend towardsthe elimination of specific histories, locations or cultures as independent,contextualising forces and, as a result, postcolonial discourse can beregarded as ‘more or less enthusiastically committed to an explicitlydeterritorialising discourse in something close to the Deleuzian sense – adiscourse so fragmented, so hybrid, as to deny its constituent elementsany sustainable specificity at all’ (Hallward 2001: 22).

While Hallward’s work does represent a significant and distinctintervention in the field of postcolonial studies, the core logic behind hiscritique should sound familiar since it echoes precisely the criticism thatHegel levelled against Spinoza’s notion of singularity. To recall Hegel’sindictment of Spinoza in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy,‘the cause of his [Spinoza’s] death was consumption, from which hehad long been a sufferer; this was in harmony with his system ofphilosophy, according to which all particularity and individuality passaway in the one substance’ (cited in Hardt 1993: 257). For Hegel, asfor Hallward, the Spinozist conception of substance and positive (orimmanent) differentiation cannot provide a basis for particularity orthe specific since it lacks the core feature of determination: dialecticalnegation. As Michael Hardt argues, ‘according to Hegel, the unique andabsolute being of Spinozism cannot provide a basis for determination

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or difference because it involves no other or limitation’ (Hardt 1993:67). Within a Hegelian ontology, determinate or specific being emergesthrough the negation of its opposite, nothingness, and it is thisopposition between being and nothingness that ‘defines the foundationof real differences and qualities’ (Hardt 1993: 3). In other words,difference is always produced through a negative movement and eachthing exists in its particularity and difference through the active negationof something else. Importantly, this view of difference is echoed inAbsolutely Postcolonial in which Hallward highlights what he considersto be effective acts of postcolonial resistance, such as the fiction of V. S.Naipaul, in which difference emerges when ‘Naipaul puts himself and hischaracters in a position of judgement, as alternatively judge and judged’(Hallward 2001: 332). As a result, Naipaul’s work ‘is simply specificrather than singular, inflected through the experience of a positionednarrator or character and maintained as a network of [. . . ] relationships’(332). In other words, for Hallward difference and specificity areproduced negatively through one’s situated opposition to an other.

Hallward’s claim that the lack of situated opposition or determinationin postcolonial literature results in a discourse that, given the absenceof negation, cannot sustain real difference and will inevitably dissolveinto an undifferentiated nothingness must be recognised for what it is:a contemporary elaboration of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s positiveontology. As such, Hallward’s argument faces strong criticism fromthe philosopher he holds responsible for the singularising nature ofpostcolonialism: Deleuze. Hardt has shown in detail how Deleuzedraws on both Spinoza and, in particular, Bergson to demonstrate thatnegative determination not only presents a false notion of difference butalso, controversially from Hallward’s point of view, ‘fails to grasp theconcreteness and specificity of real being’ (Hardt 1993: 4). Put simply,Deleuze elaborates both Bergson and Spinoza to argue that Hegel’sconcept of negative or dialectical differentiation cannot provide anadequate foundation for being since it depends on external causes, thusintroducing contingency and causality into being: to quote Deleuze, ‘inBergson [. . . ] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According toHegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first of all with all it isnot’ (cited in Hardt 1993: 7). Hallward’s reluctance to fully acknowledgethe Hegelian logic behind Absolutely Postcolonial results in an argumentagainst postcoloniality and Deleuze that fails to address Deleuze’s ownready-made answer to the charge of singularity as well as postcolonialcriticism’s demand to face the emergence of newness and not just specificinstances of located resistance. As a result, his reading rests upon a

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critique of differentiation at odds with Deleuze’s commitment to animmanentist philosophy. However, by recognising the value of positivedifferentiation and the shift away from dialectical negation as thefoundation of being, a more significant form of postcolonialism emergesbased on instances of virtual difference, repetition and becoming-new.1

It is this aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy that Caribbean writers such asÉdouard Glissant and Wilson Harris draw on in their own postcolonialworks. Notably, both Glissant and Harris envision the postcolonialproject as an engagement with the traumatic history of colonialismthat, nevertheless, creates a new, unpredictable future: a ‘propheticvision of the past’ (Glissant 1999: 64), for Glissant or in Harris’scharacteristically opaque prose, ‘continuities running out of the mysteryof the past into the unknown future yield proportions of originality,proportions of the “genuinely new”’ (Harris 1996: 6). The particularengagement with history that both Harris and Glissant propose in theirwritings represents a shift from what Walcott designated a literature of‘recrimination and despair’ (Walcott 1998: 37) which endlessly repeatsthe biases of colonialism, towards a revisionary postcolonial literature.Wole Soyinka’s denunciation of the negritude movement as that whichtrapped ‘itself in what was primarily a defensive role’ (Soyinka 1976:129) and ‘stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectualanalysis both of man and society and tried to re-define the African andhis society in those externalised terms’ (136) highlights the point ofcontention: counter-colonial discourse is wholly specified by the colonialcontext in which it exists, it adheres to the ‘pre-set system’ in whichthe black man is cast as the racial other. The postcolonial, on theother hand, while drawn from a particular socio-historic milieu (onemarked by the traces of the colonial era), is distinguished by its ability tomove beyond the ‘defensive role’ of counter-colonialism. It is a discoursethat exceeds the already established, ‘pre-set’ value systems that Europeimposed on its colonial others. In other words, postcoloniality denotesa synthesis of the past that does not repeat predetermined attitudes, butcreates something new: an original future not determined at the outset bypre-existing socio-historic subject positions or cultural hierarchies, but,nevertheless, specific to those legacies.

I. Expectancy, Stereotypes and the First Synthesis of Time

The distinction that I am arguing for between a historical relationthat repeats already established biases and fixed subject-positions anda postcolonial re-dress of history that engenders the absolutely new is

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clarified by Deleuze’s account of the first and third syntheses of time.As Deleuze presents it in Difference and Repetition, the first synthesis oftime is a theoretical paradigm that accounts for the continuation of thesame and the general. Crucially in terms of the particular relationship tothe canon that is enacted in writing back or what Edward Said designates‘contrapuntal’ reading (Said 1993: 59), for Deleuze the first synthesis isthe creation of expectancy through repetition, accounting for the wayin which, in the present, we come to anticipate future events becauseof their past occurrence. For example, the repetition in the series AB,AB, AB, A. . . , Deleuze argues, ‘changes nothing in the object or stateof affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mindwhich contemplates: a difference, something new in the mind. WheneverA appears, I expect the appearance of B’ (Deleuze 2004: 90). In this‘contraction’ of specific instances of ‘A’ and ‘B’ into ‘AB’, the firstsynthesis of time produces a movement from the specific to the general(91). Furthermore, the effect of this contraction is to create a sense ofexpectancy: in this case, the recurring experience of A followed by Bis contracted in the present into the projected expectancy that AB willrecur in the future.

It is this sense of expectancy that underlies postcolonial authors’problematic relationship with the canon and historical legacies.Following Ashcroft et al., the relationship envisioned here is not betweenindividual authors or works since the ‘canon is not a body of texts per se,but rather a set of reading practices (the enactment of innumerableindividual and community assumptions, for example about genre, aboutliterature, and even about writing)’ (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 186). Inwriting back, postcolonial authors seek to expose not only specificprejudices, expressed in particular cases, but the continuing influenceof these views. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example,the reader encounters particular references to the colonies and racialothers, expressed in a particular way. One might then read CharlotteBrontë’s Jane Eyre and register a repetition in the way in which bothauthors depict the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised,a repetition that is echoed as one then reads Austen, Dickens and soforth. It is the repetition of these specific ways of characterising therelationship between centre and periphery that is contracted into whatmight be termed, in general, as a colonial attitude. Importantly, asDeleuze’s account of the first synthesis emphasises, it is not a changein the texts themselves or in that which is repeated, but it is a change inthe mind of the reader who registers the repetition. This is why the canonevokes reading practices: the repetition of themes, attitudes or genres in

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specific texts are synthesised in the mind to create a general expectancy,a general set of reading practices that will, accordingly, shape futurereading experiences. As the process which engenders this expectancy, thefirst synthesis is that which makes of the canon a set of reading practicesthat determines in advance one’s response to the text.

It is this expectancy that writers such as Rhys seek to challengeas they produce works which ostensibly repeat canonical texts. WideSargasso Sea as a whole, and in particular Part Three of the novel,is a repetition of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. However, it is a repetition thatexposes the processes of contraction and projection that Deleuze’sfirst synthesis envisions by deconstructing colonial stereotypes anddemonstrating, as Albert Memmi argued, that in colonialist discoursewhat ‘is actually a sociological point becomes labelled as being biologicalor, preferably, metaphysical’ (Memmi 1974: 71–2). Thus, in Part One ofWide Sargasso Sea, Mr Mason’s complaint that the recently manumittedblack Jamaicans ‘won’t work [. . . ] don’t want to work’ (Rhys 2000: 30)is re-read by Rhys within the specific historical context of Jamaica in thewake of Emancipation and the end of the Apprenticeship scheme. As aresult, Mr Mason’s statement is revealed as a contraction of a numberof converging sociological features of Jamaican society at that time intoa general ‘truth’ about the newly manumitted population. A similarprejudice is articulated by Rochester during the couple’s honeymoonat Granbois when he criticises Christophine’s ‘horrible’ language as sheasks him to ‘taste my bull’s blood, master’ (71), her trailing dress and herlanguorous appearance. Here Rochester expresses the coloniser’s pointof view: the black woman, he infers, is unclean, sexualised and lazy.All colonial stereotypes, yet in each case, Antoinette responds by tellingRochester that each of these traits have a logical explanation: allowingone’s dress to get dirty is an expression of affluence, slow movements areabout precision. The difference between the two characters’ perceptionof Christophine’s actions is that Rochester reads in them a confirmationof colonial stereotypes as inherent or biological truths about blackwomen, whereas Antoinette understands them as sociological points.

Rhys’s novel consistently undermines stereotypes by illustrating theirconstructed, sociological basis. However, more than this, Wide SargassoSea draws attention to the additional issue of expectancy that is created:the specific repeating trait drawn from the past is generalised to formsome ‘truth’ about the present and, as Deleuze points out, determinesthe way in which future repetitions are perceived. In Rochester’schanging relationship with his wife, the full force of Rhys’s critiqueof expectancy is felt. Throughout Part Two of the novel, Rochester

Becoming-Bertha 23

is clearly involved in a process of, to paraphrase Sartre, makingAntoinette like what she would have to be like to deserve her fate(her eventual incarceration in the attic of Thornfield Hall as the mad,violent Bertha).2 Rochester does this in the most matter of fact way:literally renaming her Bertha. More than this, however, he exploitsprevalent stereotypes about white creoles in order to reread Antoinette’sactions as a sign of her sexual proclivity and inherited madness. Inthis way, Antoinette’s white dress, once admired by Rochester, comesto reflect his expectations of his wife’s disposition. The dress that‘had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed too large for her’(105), as Carine Mardorossian argues, evokes association with ‘(black)female sexual wantonness and prostitution’ (Mardorossian 1999: 1076),suggesting an intentional provocation on Antoinette’s part and recallingRochester’s earlier claim that ‘one afternoon the sight of a dress whichshe’d left lying on her bedroom floor made me breathless and savagewith desire’ (78). While this latter quotation evidences his sexual desire,Rochester’s narrative increasingly seeks to read Antoinette’s actionsas a sign of her unrestrained sexuality. Thus, the dress that was,perhaps, carelessly left lying on the floor is misconstrued as a purposefulincitement to Rochester’s desires. Antoinette’s misunderstood intentionsare underscored by the parallel image of the Miller’s Daughter thatoccurs earlier in the text: one evening at Coulibri Antoinette recalls her‘favourite picture “The Miller’s Daughter”, a lovely English girl withbrown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders’ (30,emphasis mine).3 Antoinette’s later mirroring of this image is, therefore,a misunderstood attempt to conform to Rochester’s cultural values, toproject an image of what, to her limited understanding, ‘a lovely Englishgirl’ should look like.

It is, however, after his meeting with Daniel Cosway, the illegitimateson of Antoinette’s father and a black slave, that Rochester’s wilfulmisinterpretation of his wife’s character becomes most apparent.Daniel’s vindictive assertion that ‘Mrs Cosway is worthless and spoilt,she can’t lift a hand for herself and soon the madness that is inher, and in all these white Creoles, comes out’ (80) re-enforces theprevalent stereotype that madness afflicts the white creole plantocracy.However, although Daniel’s venom is clearly directed against the ex-slave-owners (he does not single out madness as Antoinette’s or evenAnnette’s affliction, but rather as the fate of ‘all these white Creoles’(Mardorossian 1999: 1082)), Rochester recalls only that which confirmshis misgivings about his wife. Echoing Daniel’s parting words, ‘give mylove to your wife – my sister. [. . . ] You are not the first to kiss her pretty

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face’ (104), the final pages of Rochester’s narrative refigure Daniel’saccusation as an admission of incest: ‘give my sister your wife a kiss fromme. Love her as I did – oh yes I did’ (130). Rochester’s firm resolutionto secure his wife and her fortune by returning to his English estate isrevealed as the product of his distorted recollection of Daniel’s wordsand the confirmation of his own pre-determined expectations aboutcreole, female sexuality: ‘she thirsts for anyone – not for me [. . . ] (amad girl. She’ll not care who she’s loving). She’ll moan and cry and giveherself as no sane woman would – or could. Or could’ (135–6). Facedwith the discrepancy between Antoinette and the portrait of the ‘lovelyEnglish girl’ she tries to mimic, here Rochester resolves to make of hiswife the very opposite image of female sexuality and, just as he names herBertha, here he names her mad by giving her a sexual proclivity that ‘nosane woman would’ have. In his final resolution to ‘see who hates best’(140), Rochester reveals the extent to which fears about miscegenationand the licentiousness of white creoles in nineteenth-century colonialistdiscourse created a projected expectancy about creole behaviour: a pre-established framework that determines Antoinette’s actions from theoutset of the novel.

Rhys consistently confronts colonial stereotypes not purely as a meansto suggest that, in agreement with Memmi, that which is misconstruedas a biological or metaphysical fact is, in truth, socially or culturallydetermined, but also in order to expose the force of expectancy. It is,in particular, the issue of canonical expectancy, created by the texts ofthe past in the mind of the reader and projected into the future as a setof regulatory reading practices, that underlies the postcolonial traditionof writing back. In enacting a contrapuntal rewriting, authors exposethe ideological biases that lie behind certain generalised expectations:highlighting the syntheses that occurred in order to produce particularstereotypes or reading practices, while at the same time revealing whatwas excluded by such generalisations. Rhys’s text is exemplary in thisrespect: returning her text to the historical moment of Emancipationin the Anglophone Caribbean to expose the formation of colonialstereotypes and prejudices, and to highlight the social factors thatwere excluded from accounts of creole madness such as she found inBrontë’s novel. By deconstructing colonial stereotypes, Rhys’s novelchallenges preconceived attitudes by returning the general to the specific.Writing back, therefore, works by confronting expectancy and what wemight term a contrapuntal rereading/rewriting, in line with Deleuze’sfirst synthesis of time, directs its attention to the contraction of thespecific past into a generalised framework for determining the future.

Becoming-Bertha 25

In turn, this is exemplary of the distinction between counter-colonialdiscourse and the postcolonial previously delineated: by writing againstthe expectancy created by the first synthesis of time, Caribbean writersdo not envision the continuation of a fixed relationship between centreand periphery, but engender an unpredictable future specific to but notlimited by the contracted past. In other words, postcolonial texts mustreject the determination of the Deleuzian first synthesis as a contractionof the past that has created the generalised colonial relationship andpropose a new continuum. This latter process Deleuze calls the thirdsynthesis of time: a differentiation of the past as a virtual presence inthe production of an unpredictable future. It is only through an analysisof the ways in which Rhys contrapuntally exposes the virtual past sheencounters in Brontë’s novel and depicts the singular conditions bywhich Antoinette becomes Bertha that we can appreciate the full forceof Rhys’s re-dress and uncover the processes of virtual repetition andbecoming-new that characterise a truly postcolonial aesthetics of writingback.

II. Becoming-Bertha

Far from remaining ambivalent to the role of past trauma in shaping thepostcolonial present, writers such as Rhys, Harris and Glissant recognisehistory as formative, but see in trauma and oppression a potentialityto re-dress historical antagonisms and create something new. Indeed,it is this appreciation of a historical relation that effects the ‘genuinelynew’ that Harris locates in Rhys’s novel (Harris 1996: 6). Relating WideSargasso Sea to a template of war he finds in the history of the Caribsand Arawaks, Harris uncovers in the mythology of opposing cultures,common, repeating features that speak of a single source of collectivecreativity:

it is a time of war. The rainbow compression of a tree is set on fire by theCaribs when the Arawaks seek refuge in its branches. [. . . ] Creation suffersand needs to be re-dressed if the spirit of the stars is to be discovered again.The fire rages and ascends even higher to drive the Arawaks up and up untilthere is no further escape, they burn and rise into a spark in the sky of fiction.That spark becomes the seed of the garden of the Pleiades. (Harris 1983: 50)

For Harris, the memory of past conflict retains a virtual aspect, a ‘seed’,which remains latent in the collective unconscious, ready to be recalledand explored in order to creatively re-dress historical trauma. WhatHarris finds in Rhys’s novel is the potential for a future that is not a

26 Lorna Burns

repetition of historical antagonisms and conflicts, but one which ‘yieldsproportions of originality’ (Harris 1996: 6) through a re-dress of thepast. As Harris argues in his own novel Jonestown, ‘it is essential tocreate a jigsaw in which “pasts” and “presents” and likely or unlikely“futures” are the pieces that multitudes in the self employ in order tobridge chasms in historical memory’ (Harris 1996: 5). What Harris refersto as the ‘incalculable’ (5) line of continuity between the past and anunpredictable future emerges in the postcolonial project as a form ofrestructuring by which genuine novelty or ‘newness’ results.

It is in this respect that Deleuze emerges as an important figure inthis debate and, in particular, his reformulation of a Spinozist planeof immanence or single-substance philosophy. Where Spinoza recastthe Cartesian separation of Thought and Extension as an immanentistphilosophy in which the single-substance universe (God or Nature)is conceived under two attributes termed natura naturans and naturanaturata, a (virtual) self-creating aspect and the structure of (actual)created things respectively, Deleuze adopts Spinoza’s dual sense of actualcreated world and virtual creative force as the two ‘unequal odd halves’of reality (Deleuze 2004: 261).4 Like Spinoza, Deleuze argues that realitymust be considered both as the actual world and, at the same time, asa virtual plane which exists in opposition to the actual. Crucially, whilethe Cartesian split ensured that Thought and Extension persisted as non-relational, distinct spheres, Spinoza’s single-substance ontology offers arelational structure that is reflected in the way in which Deleuze presentsthe actual and the virtual as caught up in a ceaseless movement fromone to the other; where elements of the virtual become realised withinthe actual, experienced as sensations, events or identities. Where Deleuzeexceeds Spinoza is in the profound creativity that he locates within thismovement from virtual to actual. Rather, it is to another philosopher,Henri Bergson, that Deleuze turns to find a theory of the virtual as botha creative force (what Bergson terms élan vital) and a historical relationthat, to recall Harris, ‘yields proportions of originality, proportions ofthe “genuinely new”’ (Harris 1996: 6).

It is the virtual’s status as the absolutely-other, as that which cannotbe represented since by definition it is that which exceeds the limits ofthe actual, that ensures its role in maintaining the renewed potential fornewness. As Daniel Smith explains, because ‘the virtual is constitutedthrough and through by difference [. . . ] when it is actualised, it thereforediffers from itself, such that every process of actualisation is, by itsvery nature, the production of the new’ (Smith 2007: 6). Thus, anyactualisation of the virtual is essentially a creative process since what

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emerges will be different from that which already exists within theactual. Crucially, it is this movement from virtual to actual (whatDeleuze terms ‘differentiation’) that Bergson introduces in his notion ofélan vital, understood as ‘a virtuality in the process of being actualised’(Deleuze 1991: 94). With this concept, a full sense of the relationbetween actual and virtual comes into focus and, moreover, offers aphilosophical paradigm for change and novelty. Since each actualisationof the virtual designates the emergence of the new, both élan vitaland differentiation describe the creative evolution of the immanenttotality: ‘evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution isactualisation, actualisation is creation’ (Deleuze 1991: 98).

Differentiation accounts for the ways in which newness enters theworld; however, more than this, Bergson’s sense of the virtual as a‘gigantic memory’ (Deleuze 1991: 100) ensures that this creative processis also a temporal evolution. The past for both Deleuze and Bergsonis a virtual field that is available for differentiation within the presentas recollection. At issue here is not history since the past as virtual has‘no psychological existence’, it is ‘not a particular past of a particularpresent but [. . . ] is like an ontological element, a past that is eternaland for all time, the condition of the “passage” of every particularpresent. It is the past in general that makes possible all pasts’ (Deleuze1991: 56–7). By constituting that which enables each present to pass and‘preserve itself in itself’ (58), the pure or general past (what Deleuze inDifference and Repetition terms the second synthesis of time) representswhat James Williams describes as a virtual ‘archive’ in which ‘allevents, including those that have sunk without trace, are stored andremembered as their passing away, independent of human activity andthe limitations of physical records’ (Williams 2003: 93, 94).5 Clearly,the premise of a pure past independent of physical records or activerecollection is of great significance to Caribbean writers and theoristsfaced with a historical inheritance of ‘amnesia’ (Walcott 1998: 39–40).As Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant write intheir manifesto of créolité, ‘our history (or our histories) is not totallyaccessible to historians. Their methodology restricts them to the sole-colonial chronicle. Our chronicle is behind the dates, behind the known’(Bernabé et al. 1993: 99). Precisely by accessing that which lies ‘behindthe known’, a postcolonial synthesis of the past repeats the processesof actualisation that Deleuze locates in Bergson’s theory of memory asvirtual presence. Further, as a differentiation of the virtual what emergesfrom this process is new, a wholly novel postcolonial ‘chronicle’.

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Deleuze’s account of the relational movement of the actual and virtualas a temporal, creative evolution in Bergsonism echoes his elaborationof the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. While thepast as virtual implies that any differentiation of the past will result inthe production of the new, the first synthesis gives consistency to thepresent by relating it to a distinct series (AB, AB . . . ) of the pure past andthen subjecting it to the processes of contraction and generalisation. Inthis way, the newness that is created via differentiation is assimilated byhabit and generalised as anticipated behaviour towards the future. Thefirst synthesis alone cannot account for the radical sense of the futureas an infinite potentiality that is evident in the writings of Harris andGlissant. As a result, this demand to account for a future with the abilityto become-new leads us beyond the first and second syntheses of time ‘inthe direction of a third’ (Deleuze 2004: 111).

With the third synthesis of time Deleuze offers a full account of hownewness enters the world. Where the first synthesis demonstrates the wayin which actual things gain consistency in the present and the secondsynthesis details a pure past into which each present falls, the thirdsynthesis accounts for the prevailing sense that the future maintainsthe potential to become something wholly new. In other words, whatI have presented here as differentiation, the actualisation of the virtual,Deleuze names the third synthesis of time: a theoretical paradigm thataccounts for the infinite ways in which the actualised present retains theability to become in unpredictable ways. Further, as a differentiationof the pure or virtual past, Deleuze’s third synthesis may be used toelaborate Said’s claim that contrapuntal reading uncovers that whichwas excluded from the colonial text. In other words, when Said arguesthat we should re-examine Jane Eyre to discover the latent prejudiceswithin the text, he is asking us to differentiate Brontë’s work, exposingthe unspoken assumptions and unacknowledged exploitations that aretaken for granted within the economy of the nineteenth-century novel.In turn, what this contrapuntal reading engenders, according to theDeleuzian model, is new. By actualising the virtual (here the virtual‘side’ of the canonical text), the repetition on which the third synthesisis based is not, as in the first, grounded on recurring instances of thecontracted past, but on the repetition of the virtual past’s becoming-actual, of differentiation as the production of the new (what Deleuzedesignates the eternal return of difference-in-itself). In turn, writing backproduces an original work of literature not because it repeats the actualtext or canon that has generated certain generalised expectations andreading practices, but because in actualising the virtual aspect of the

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canon it repeats only the processes of differentiation necessarily as abecoming-new.

The same holds true of Rhys’s contrapuntal reading of stereotypesin Wide Sargasso Sea, in which her account of the ways in whichthese stereotypes become established reveals the specific socio-economicfactors that were excluded from the generalised form. What Rhys’s novelrepeats then is not the actual colonial stereotype per se, but the processesof becoming that engendered those contractions. In the same way, bycontrapuntally rewriting Jane Eyre, Rhys’s novel does not repeat theactual elements of Brontë’s work, but, more specifically, the processesof becoming that constitute it: Antoinette’s becoming-mad; Rochester’sbecoming-cold-hearted. Moreover, as with all becomings, according tothe Deleuzian model, the movement from virtual to actual that the thirdsynthesis encapsulates does not exhaust the virtual: the virtual is notactualised outright. Rather, a virtual aspect is differentiated with eachbecoming and each actual state that one becomes maintains, in excessof its actuality, its virtual aspect: ‘every object is double without it beingthe case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtualimage the other an actual image’ (Deleuze 2004: 261). It is this renewedvirtuality that accounts for the prevailing sense that things always havethe potential to become-new: as Claire Colebrook argues, ‘each actualthing maintains its own virtual power. What something is (actually) isalso its power to become (virtually)’ and that this virtual difference is‘the power to become in unforeseen ways, always more than this actualworld, and not limited by its already present forms’ (Colebrook 2002:96). As a result, with each repetition (of stereotype, of text) in Rhys’snovel, not only do we see how things became what they actually are, butremain aware of how very different they might have been and, indeed,might yet become. It is this potentiality to become in unforeseen waysthat the third synthesis as differentiation evokes. Accordingly, with eachactualisation of Bertha (Antoinette’s becoming-mad, becoming-violent),Rhys highlights how things might have been or might yet become verydifferent. Rochester’s moment of hesitation, ‘I shall never understandwhy, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I hadimagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream aretrue – all the rest’s a lie. Let it go’ (138), Christophine’s offer to care forAntoinette, and Rhys’s famously open ending, these alternative paths allsuggest lines of becoming that remain virtual, engendering the possibilitythat in every repetition of becoming-Bertha, becoming-Rochester thingscould have been different. It is this virtual aspect of becoming thatdestabilises the expectancy of the first synthesis of time and ensures that

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the historical re-dress enacted in postcolonial writing back repeats onlythe revisionary potential of differentiation as the production of the new.

This is why, to use Colebrook’s phrase, becoming is ‘the hidden forceof difference’ (Colebrook 2002: 120): it designates the actualisationof different virtual intensities as a becoming-new and conceives ofdifference ‘independently of the forms of representation which reduceit to the Same, and the relation of different to different independentlyof those forms which make them pass through the negative’ (Deleuze2004: xvii–xviii). Deleuze rejects the Hegelian formula of differencewhereby any object (salt, say) is differentiated negatively via itsoppositional relation to its other (pepper). Rather, for Deleuze differenceis an expression of becoming, so that, to extend the example, salt isdifferent to other sensations as an actualised intensity of becoming-salty,becoming-crystallised. As Williams explains, ‘according to Deleuze youare not different from other humans because you differ in this or thatactual characteristic but because your thoughts and sensations, the wayyou change, express a different relation of intensities’ (Williams 2003:9). Thus, if we look to Wide Sargasso Sea and find that Antoinette isdifferent to Brontë’s Bertha, it is not in actual characteristics that thesignificant difference lies, but in Antoinette’s actualisation of differentdegrees of becoming-mad, becoming-licentious. What we recognise inRhys’s novel is a different process of becoming at work: Antoinettedoes not become mad because of some inherited disposition to do so,but because of a range of emotional, social and gender-specific forcesacting upon her. This is the very definition of what Deleuze calls aminor literature: repeating not the actual elements of the canon, but thevirtual becomings as that which makes things differ. Texts like WideSargasso Sea, Colebrook argues, repeat ‘the hidden forces of differencethat produce texts, rather than repeating the known texts themselves’(Colebrook 2002: 120); or again, ‘a work of literature is not to copythat work, but to repeat the forces of difference that produced that work[. . . ]: a repetition of the virtual and hidden power of difference’ (121).6

Wide Sargasso Sea in a very clear way draws from the virtualside of Jane Eyre. As Rhys herself claimed, responding to Brontë’sdepiction of ‘the poor Creole lunatic’, ‘that’s only one side – theEnglish side’ (cited in Raiskin 1996: 133). Bringing to light the otherside of the story, detailing Bertha’s West Indian upbringing, tracingthe disillusionment of Rochester, taking her reader behind the closeddoors of Thornfield Hall, Rhys contrapuntally differentiates Jane Eyre.In doing so, what is produced is not a continuation of the same(this would be a result of the first synthesis), but an original work

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through the repetition of the processes of differentiation: ‘repetition isnever a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under whichsomething new is effectively produced’ (Deleuze 2004: 113). Further, byaccounting for an engagement with the past that creates a new visionof the future, Deleuze’s third synthesis can be used to expose the fullsignificance of Harris’s reading of Wide Sargasso Sea. The fire motif thatruns throughout the novel, signifying both destruction (the burning ofCoulibri) and resistance (Antoinette’s fire-red dress which symbolises herrevolt against her husband and foreshadows her expected burning of hisestate house), speaks to Harris of Rhys’s attempt to re-dress absolutesand ‘the paradox of resources of variables of the imagination throughwhich the past speaks to the present and to the future [. . . ], its innercapacity for re-dressed bodies and imageries’ (Harris 1983: 61). WhatHarris envisions is a return to the memory or mythology of past conflictsin order to uncover unconscious (virtual) dimensions which may besynthesised in such a way as to allow the past to ‘speak’ to the presentand future in a new way. Indeed, Deleuze envisions this too: the thirdsynthesis, he tells us, marks a break or ‘caesura’ in the contemporaryordering of time and witnesses the birth of a new order of ‘the beforeand the after’ (Deleuze 2004: 112). The third synthesis is not a rejectionof the past and although it incites a future that is radically different fromwhat has come before, it is a future that is both linked to the past andwhich, to evoke Bhabha, generates a new continuum that leads frompast to present and future.

Where Harris and Deleuze ostensibly disagree is in Harris’s claim thatRhys’s re-dress of historical antagonisms in Wide Sargasso Sea worksthrough the identification of what he calls a ‘core of likeness’ (Harris1983: 56). This point emerges in his discussion of the Arawaks andCaribs whose adverse relationship, he argues, might be addressed bythe realisation of a common creative thread. In the same vein, Harrisfinds in Rhys’s ‘re-dress of Charlotte Brontë’s polarisations’, a similartrajectory in which ‘a cross-cultural web and likeness are revealed [. . . ]through points that unravel apparently incompatible appearances’ (56).It is in the exposure of ‘likeness[es]’ in apparent polarisations that Harrislocates the potential for historical re-dress, a move that ostensibly setshim in opposition to Deleuze’s celebration of difference and becoming.However, Harris’s evocation of likeness is not to be misunderstoodas signifying the same: the same is the foundation of the ‘narrowbasis of realism [. . . which] tends inevitably to polarise cultures or toreinforce eclipses of otherness within legacies of conquest that rule theworld’ (55). Realism is a reflection of the same and, accordingly, creates

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the polarisations Harris seeks to overcome. Likeness, therefore, is notequivalent to the same: as Harris argues,

the politics of culture assume that like to like signifies a monolithic cradleor monolithic origin. Whereas in creative subtlety or re-dress [. . . ] monolithsare extremes/extremities that become fissures of emotion in claustrophobicand historical or cultural space, when imbued with asymmetric spirit orintangible, untameable life. Those fissures are parallels, extensions [. . . ] inand into bodies of experience whose mental point or core of likeness turnsinto the spark or passion of science and art. (Harris 1983: 56)

What Harris refers to as a ‘core of likeness’ is not the identification of thesame, but what he senses in the cross-cultural web: a single, collectiveunconscious that links all peoples and ties all cultures to a commoncreative ‘spark’. Put another way, what Harris finds revolutionary isthe virtual presence of the past as an undifferentiated (virtual) whole,to frame this in Deleuze’s terms, as that which gives all the ability tobecome in unforeseen ways.

Harris’s presentation of the past or collective unconscious as avirtual archive into which each present passes is fundamentally alignedwith the Deleuzian/Bergsonian sense of creative evolution and memory.Paradoxically, although Harris identifies a ‘core of likeness’ at the heartof historical re-dress, it is fundamentally an issue of what Deleuze termsdifference: a repetition of the virtual past’s becoming-actual as thatwhich engenders a new ordering of history. In particular, Harris invokesa Deleuzian concept of difference-in-itself rather than the Hegeliandialectic by arguing for the recognition of ‘ceaseless parallel animationsor subtle likeness through contrasting densities or opposite and variedappearances’ (56). In other words, what is taken for granted as adifference achieved through opposition is, in fact, a difference of degreesof becoming, of ‘densities’ or ‘appearances’. That Harris employs theterm ‘likeness’ rather than Deleuze’s difference-in-itself is a sign of theemphasis that Harris wants to place on the immanent creativity ofthe virtual as that from which differences are actualised or become-actual. To the extent that all identities are particular configurationsor expressions of differentiated becomings emerging from the infinitevirtual aspect of a single, immanent reality, all apparent adversaries are‘like’ one another in that they all actualise the virtual albeit in differentways. Thus, Harris notes, despite their polarisation in Jane Eyre, ‘Berthaand Rochester possess in themselves, within the genius of CharlotteBrontë, the seeds of such re-dress’ (61). Brontë’s characters always hadthe potential to overcome historical antagonisms, the ability to become

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in unforeseen ways. If the ‘seminal force of the fiction of the whole’(61), Brontë’s commitment to the structuring influence of tradition andideology, meant that this potential remained virtual in Jane Eyre, inRhys’s novel the repetition of becoming rather than the actual aspectsof Brontë’s text realises the potential for re-dress in the production of anew work of (minor) literature.

Through the repetition of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea the readerencounters not an accumulation of actual differences, but difference-in-itself: the expression of becomings that emerge in particular waysrelative to a range of other becomings. The actual differences betweenJane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea – the discrepancy of names (‘Bertha isnot my name’ [121]); of dates (the timeframe of Jane Eyre is 1789–1808,while Wide Sargasso Sea is set slightly later, roughly 1834–44); ofmother’s name (Bertha’s mother’s name is Antoinetta, not, as in WideSargasso Sea, Annette); of family lineage (there is no Cosway line in JaneEyre) – these actual discrepancies alone diminish full the significanceof Rhys’s novel by setting up an oppositional framework in whichWide Sargasso Sea is measured against the gold standard of the originalparent text, Jane Eyre.7 On the other hand, by acknowledging thevirtual repetitions in Wide Sargasso Sea a more significant differenceis uncovered, one which does not function through negation but as anexperience of becoming expressed in relation to other becomings orintensities such as Emancipation, creole society and colonial attitudes.Features of Rhys’s novel such as the changes in Antoinette’s namefrom Antoinette Cosway to Mason and finally Rochester, her husband’srenaming of her as Bertha, Christophine’s affectionate but childlikenames for her, and Daniel’s reference to her as Antoinetta (the middlename of Brontë’s Bertha and her mother’s name in Jane Eyre) should notbe misunderstood as a form of violence against the original identity thatis Antoinette. Such a move would be based on actual difference. Rather,these developments express Rhys’s repeated presentation of becoming,expressed not from the point of view of a pre-determined, originalidentity against which these becomings are judged as good or bad, butas constitutive of Antoinette’s identity itself.

Such an approach is necessary for any Deleuzian reading of WideSargasso Sea given his claim that repetition ‘is not underneath themasks, but is formed from one mask to another’ (Deleuze 2004: 19).Here Deleuze characterises identity as an always-changing series of be-comings, a process, Williams explains, akin to death: ‘as we become, wedie as this particular self and we move towards a final death. But thereis something revivifying in the expression of becomings, they make a

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life that must end in death one that participates in intensities’ (Williams2003: 9). In a very clear way, by presenting us with a series of becomingsthat will end in Antoinette’s becoming-Bertha and her suicide, Rhysshows us the inevitable decline towards death as Antoinette Coswaybecomes Mason becomes Rochester. The reader witnesses the death ofa number of Antoinette’s ‘selves’, but in line with Williams’s reading ofDifference and Repetition, remains aware of the ‘revivifying’ potentialinherent in that process. Antoinette’s declaration of her new Masonpatronymic, embroidered in vivid red – ‘I will write my name in firered, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, SpanishTown, Jamaica, 1839’ (44) – records the passing of her previous self(Antoinette Cosway) and stands as a positive assertion of a new identity,a point Simpson touches upon when she argues that in writing her nameAntoinette ‘creates a bold, fire-red marker of her life that very much con-trasts with the attempts at erasure on the part of those who surround her’(Simpson 2005: 126). Although not consciously pursuing a Deleuzianreading of Rhys’s novel, here Simpson identifies the central drive of thenovel as the tension between a process of becoming that renews the lifeof the protagonist and one which leads to her pre-determined fate.

Antoinette’s other masks or becomings similarly expose such atension. The parallel established between Antoinette and her childhoodfriend Tia, who appears as a mirror image of the protagonist on thenight of the burning of Coulibri – ‘we stared at each other, blood on myface, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass’ (38)– is recalled (repeated) at the end of the novel to offer a sense of howthings might have been very different for Antoinette. Tia, as Antoinette’sdouble, is, in Part Three of the novel when she appears in Antoinette’sdream, a virtual side or, more precisely, a potential differentiation ofAntoinette’s character: a sign of one self she might have become ifit were not for the factors of economic tension, racial difference andsocial discontent (all intensities expressed in relation to the experience ofEmancipation in Jamaica), which led Antoinette’s becomings in a specificdirection, towards becoming-Bertha. The same is true of another double,the picture of ‘The Miller’s Daughter’, which Antoinette attempts tomirror. In doing so she hopes to become more like the image of Englishvirtue she believes her husband desires in a wife. Yet again, this projectednew self does not allow Antoinette to become like ‘a lovely English girl’(30), because of her relation to another set of intensities and becomings.Antoinette, like her mother, is ‘so without a doubt not English’ (30),and her creole heritage evokes for Rochester a different set of becomingsthat express degeneracy, madness and an illicit sexuality. As a result, her

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attempt to become-English is overwhelmed by the forces that repeat theprocesses of Brontë’s novel as becoming-Bertha.

One of the most commented upon aspects of Wide Sargasso Sea,besides that of its association with Jane Eyre, is the novel’s explorationof the mother/daughter relationship. Critics such as Ronnie Scharfmanemploy the developmental psychology of Nancy Chodorow and D. W.Winnicot in order to read Rhys’s novel as ‘the narrative of a subject’spainful inability to constitute itself as an autonomous identity, to belong’(Scharfman 1981: 99–100).8 Following Winnicott’s claim that what ababy sees in his/her mother’s face is him or herself, Scharfman arguesthat Antoinette projects a fragmented identity because as a child she didnot experience her mother as a mirror. However, rather than readingAntoinette’s narrative, as Scharfman does, as the account of an originalidentity that then becomes fragmented throughout the course of thenovel, a Deleuzian approach suggests that Rhys presents a series ofinevitable becomings that co-exist alongside a range of virtual ways inwhich Antoinette could possibly become. These alternative possibilitiesare presented to the reader in the mirror images and doubles that existwithin the novel not only as virtual lines of becoming that Antoinettemight have followed, but in themselves as actual differentiations thatcannot be mirrored or repeated: as difference. Deleuze, Williams argues,paints a similar picture:

reflections, doubles, soul sisters and brothers, acts of celebration andcommemoration are all cases where the repetition or the experience ofrepetition is accompanied by intense reactions allied to the persistence ofdifference. [. . . ] In each case, the emotions are double – something is sensed inthe same way but there is also a sensation of a profound difference. (Williams2003: 32–3)

Just as Rhys’s novel contrapuntally differentiates Jane Eyre, Antoinette’sdoubles offer virtual lines of becoming that coexist with the various waysin which Antoinette ‘actually’ becomes. Moreover, just as Wide SargassoSea as the repeated double of Jane Eyre illustrates ‘the persistence ofdifference’, the fact that in every repetition the only likeness is differenceor the power to become, so Antoinette’s doubles evoke the dual senseof similarity and difference. For Antoinette, Tia is her mirror image –‘it was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass’ (38) – but also a signof their irreducible difference. ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ is the image ofAntoinette’s future self and the marker of her unsettling creole differencethat Rochester will never manage to accommodate. For Rhys, as for

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Deleuze, the repetition evident in reflections, mirror images and doublesecho only the forward movement of becoming and the impossibility ofany other form of repetition. The self cannot become its double or mirrorimage, it can only become: ‘I remember watching myself brush my hairand how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was my self yet notquite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tired to kissher. But the glass was between us – hard, cold, and misted over with mybreath’ (147). It is this persistent separation, the repetition of differencerather than the same that Wide Sargasso Sea evokes in its presentationof Antoinette’s reflected image.

Antoinette’s mirror image evokes the double emotion that Williamsrecognises in Difference and Repetition: almost herself, but not quite.Instead of unity, separation persists, and a similar process emergesin Antoinette’s relationship with her mother. In line with Winnicott,Antoinette does, initially, approach her mother’s face as a potentialmirror. But rather than never seeing herself reflected in her mother,as Scharfman argues, Antoinette encounters in her mother a seriesof becomings (becoming-disillusioned, becoming-unstable) that she isexpected to mirror. The most striking example of this is offered inthe repeated image of Annette’s frown, ‘deep – it might have beencut with a knife’ (17), in Antoinette. As Rochester later observes ofhis wife, ‘I looked at the sad droop of her lips, the frown betweenher thick eyebrows, deep as if it had been cut with a knife’ (114).This apparent realisation of the mother mirror image is enforced onceagain by the novel’s ending, in which Antoinette’s appearance as themadwoman surrounded by the flames of the burning estate house is arepetition of her mother’s fate: ‘I went into the hall again with the tallcandle in my hand. It was then that I saw her – the ghost. The womanstanding with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but Iknew her’ (154). Here Antoinette becomes both her mothers, Annetteand Bertha, signifying for critics such as Scharfman a ‘long-desired,long-delayed mirroring fusion’ with the mother that gives Antoinettea ‘paradoxical freedom through death’ (Scharfman 1981: 104).9 Whatsuch a reading ignores, however, is the way in which the endingrepresents a culmination of forces that have coerced Antoinette to mirrorthose aspects of her mother that she does not identify with, her pain andher madness: ‘I hated this frown and once I touched her forehead tryingto smooth it’; ‘after I knew that she talked aloud to herself I was a littleafraid of her’ (17). Looking beyond the actual repetition of images whichrecall the mother figure – the barefooted woman, the burning house, thesecluded madwoman – Rhys’s novel depicts a process of becoming that

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is stunted by being coerced (by expectation and habit) into a repetitionof the same rather than difference.

Mirror images and doubles are discrepant throughout Wide SargassoSea because, as a repetition itself, Rhys’s novel draws attention to thefact that there is no possible ‘mirroring fusion’ only, to use the Deleuzianformula, the eternal return of difference. Characters such as Rochesterwho fail to recognise the difference in repetition, who see in repetitiononly the recurrence of the same or the general and find in Antoinetteonly the recurring image of the madwoman in the attic that is hermother/Bertha, fail to realise the potential for re-dress in the virtualaspect of Brontë’s novel. In this respect, he becomes the Rochester ofJane Eyre who claims ‘Bertha Mason is mad and she came of a madfamily. [. . . ] Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parents’ (Brontë1990: 298). It is the fate of Antoinette’s other mother, Bertha, thatwarns the reader against celebrating too readily any union with themother, for she is precisely the image of creole madness that Rhyssought to deconstruct. Rhys is not the ‘dutiful child’ copying the mothertext; rather Wide Sargasso Sea is a difficult double, a ‘repetition-with-difference’ (Harrison 1988: 135) as Nancy Harrison observes. It is anaccount of Antoinette’s becoming-Bertha that continually repeats herdifference (her becoming).

Rather than reading in Antoinette’s alienation from her mother asign of her fragmented psyche, the model of becoming that I haveused to discuss Rhys’s novel offers an understanding of identity as aseries of masks. In turn, as Williams explains with respect to Deleuze,this demands a new approach to psychoanalysis based not on thevalidation of actual events or the recovery of an original trauma, butrather ‘analysis “works” because roles and masks are authenticated.[. . . ] It is a site where a way of creating other masks is given a sealof approval’ (Williams 2003: 49). If we may be empowered by theauthentication of our masks, then the converse also holds true: maskswhich are rejected creates alienation. This, I would argue, is preciselythe trauma that Antoinette suffers. Her attempt to validate her identityas Antoinette Mason by embroidering it in fire red, her attempt to takeon the role of the Miller’s Daughter, her childhood mirror image inTia, these all stand as masks (becomings) that are never authenticated.Her marriage to Rochester, his fixation on her sexuality and heritage,and the racial tensions of post-Emancipation Jamaica, these factorsdeny Antoinette’s masks the approval she seeks. Instead, those maskswhich offer Antoinette the least degree of freedom are the ones thatare approved: her becoming-Annette, becoming-Bertha. Thus, what the

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reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which arevalidated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certainmasks, forcing Antoinette to become like what she would have to be liketo deserve her fate, that the greatest violence lies.

It is the denial of the significance of the virtual past, the ability tobecome in unforeseen ways, that Rhys most directly seeks to challengein Wide Sargasso Sea. As a repetition itself, Rhys’s novel differentiatesJane Eyre by actualising the series of becomings that lead up to theburning of Thornfield Hall. What results is new, drawn from the virtualaspect of the canon, repeating its difference. Rhys’s open ending whichonly suggests that Antoinette finally enacts Bertha’s role again exposesthe expectancy of the reader and the desire to find in repetition theperfect mirror image: ‘at last I know why I was brought here and whatI have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickeredand I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burnedup again to light me along the dark passage’ (155–6). Although thismoment is a repetition of Brontë’s novel, it is not an actual repetition:it takes us behind the closed doors and ‘dark passage[s]’ of ThornfieldHall that cannot be accessed by Jane Eyre. As a result, Rhys’s endingremains alive with the potential to become a very different story – theflame might go out, Antoinette might not follow the fate of Berthaforetold in her dream and in the life of her mother. Such a virtualpossibility critics like Graham Huggan have identified in the novel’sresolution: ‘should we take Rhys’s Antoinette for Brontë’s Bertha, andinterpret the ending of Wide Sargasso Sea accordingly as the preludeto an inevitable act of self-sacrifice? Or should we listen again to theresurrected Creole parrot? “Ché Coco, Ché Coco”. Answering back,cheekily, to Her Mistress’s Voice’ (Huggan 1994: 657). It is in thediscrepancy of repetition that Rhys’s novel opens up to the virtualpotential of Antoinette’s narrative, foregrounding a series of becomingsthat, in illustrating how the protagonist becomes-Bertha, draws attentionto the myriad ways in which things could have been very different.

The Deleuzian framework that this article has traced provides the op-portunity to reread Rhys’s postcolonial ‘writing back’ as an illustrationof difference as well as repetition: challenging the reader’s expectancyand presenting its own becoming-new through a differentiation of thevirtual text of Brontë’s novel. In the final analysis, Antoinette’s claimthat ‘there are always two deaths, the real one and the one people knowabout’ (106) not only prepares the reader for another death besides hersuicide at Thornfield Hall (the death people know about), but displaysa sensitivity towards understanding being as a series of becomings

Becoming-Bertha 39

and deaths. Like her mother whose ‘death’ she witnesses at the burn-ing of Coulibri, Antoinette dies as one particular self as she becomesanother: ‘like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinettedrifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and herlooking-glass’ (147). Rhys’s presentation of Antoinette’s two deaths,‘two at least’ (106), then, finds resonance with Deleuze’s claim that‘every death is double’, and that ‘suicide is an attempt to make the twoincommensurable faces coincide or correspond. However, the two sidesdo not meet, and every death remains double’ (Deleuze 2004: 322–3).Bertha’s suicide leaping from the rooftop of a blazing Thornfield Hall isdiscontinuous with Antoinette’s inevitable, actual death. The impossibil-ity of bringing together the two sides of death – the death of Antoinetteas she becomes-Bertha and her actual suicide – is underscored by Rhys’somission of the anticipated death scene. Her suicide remains outsidethe bounds of Wide Sargasso Sea, for although Antoinette’s becoming-Bertha brings her one step closer to her inevitable end, it is a deaththat Rhys leaves resolutely double, existing virtually in her own novel,only to be realised ‘later’ in Jane Eyre as the continuation of Bertha’sstory.

Notes1. Despite Hallward’s employment of Deleuze to demonstrate the self-defeating

aims of postcolonialism, his distinction between a counter-colonial stance that islocked into a fixed dialogue between coloniser and coloniser and an alternativeview that holds that ‘any creative expression is irreducibly specific to (though notspecified by) the situation of its articulation’ (Hallward 2001: 62), is one whichI adapt to delineate the postcolonial project. For further analysis of Hallward’sproblematic reading of postcolonialism, see Burns (2009).

2. As Sartre writes, ‘the oppressors produce and maintain by force the evils thatrender the oppressed, in their eyes, more and more like what they would have tobe like to deserve their fate’ (Sartre 1974: xxvi).

3. Mardorossian also notes the parallel between Antoinette’s dress slipping off oneshoulder and the depiction of the Miller’s Daughter (Mardorossian 1999: 1076).

4. Stuart Hampshire’s Spinoza and Spinozism provides a lucid outline of Spinoza’ssingle-substance philosophy. For further discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy in apostcolonial context, see Burns (2009).

5. Jay Lampert similarly implies this sense of archiving in his description of thesecond synthesis as ‘a “storehouse” of temporal moments’ (Lampert 2006:41). If the ‘flaw in [this] metaphor is that it suggests inert memory packages’(41), then Williams’s evocation of the Foucauldian/Derridean archive betterunderscores the creative force of the second synthesis. See, for example,Derrida’s claim that ‘the archive [. . . ] is not only the place for stocking andfor conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in anycase, as such, without the archive. [. . . ] No, the technical structure of thearchiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in

40 Lorna Burns

its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The activationproduces as much as it records the event’ (Derrida 1995: 17). Foucault’s archiveis similarly creative, particularly as that which drives the production of thenew as differentiation: ‘its threshold of existence is established by the breakthat separates us from what we can no longer say, and from what falls outsideour discursive practice. [. . . ] It causes the other and the outside to burst forth’(Foucault 1972: 130–1).

6. Colebrook’s brief analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea remains one of the fewDeleuzian readings of Rhys’s work. In another Deleuzian reading, CarolDell’Amico draws on Deleuze’s account of masochism in Coldness and Crueltyin order to reread Rhys’s early texts as expressions of a subversive femaleempowerment (Dell’Amico 2005: 57–95). The main body of recent criticism onWide Sargasso Sea, however, has focused on Antoinette’s ambivalent creolenessas the primary site of resistance to colonial/patriarchical orders (see Alcocer2005: 160–6; Huggan 1994; Mardorossian 1999; Murdoch 2003; Simpson2005: 111–15, 136).

7. Kloepfer’s study presents an analysis of the specific repetitions of Jane Eyre inRhys’s novel, such as parallels between Jane and Antoinette’s dreams (Kloepfer1989: 154).

8. For further discussion of the mother/daughter relationship in Rhys’s work,see Gunner (1994: 136–51), Simpson (2005: 8–16, 115–21), O’Connor (1986:171–96), Kloepfer (1989: 142–58).

9. Following Scharfman, Klopfer and Gunner have similarly viewed the motherconnection as empowering, allowing Antoinette to narrate her story (Kloepfer1989: 147–8); or to challenge patriarchy (Gunner 1994: 143).

ReferencesAlcocer, Rudyard (2005) Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature, London

and New York: Routledge.Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (2002) The Empire Writes Back:

Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge.Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant (1993) Éloge de la

créolité, trans. M. Taleb-Khyar, Paris: Gallimard.Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.Brontë, Charlotte (1990) Jane Eyre, London: Virago Press.Burns, Lorna (2009) ‘Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Édouard

Glissant and the Poetics of Creolisation’, Textual Practice, 23:1, pp. 99–117.Colebrook, Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze, London: Routledge.Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Zone Books.Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London:

Continuum.Dell’Amico, Carol (2005) Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early

Novels of Jean Rhys, Routledge: London.Derrida, Jacques (1995) ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, trans. Eric

Prenowitz, Diacritics, 25:2, pp. 9–36.Foucault, Michel (1972) Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith, New

York: Tavistock Publications.Glissant, Édouard (1999) Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael

Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Gunner, Liz (1994) ‘Mothers, Daughters and Madness in Works by Four Women

Writers’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 14, pp. 136–51.

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Hallward, Peter (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular andthe Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hampshire, Stuart (2005) Spinoza and Spinozism, Oxford: Claredon Press.Hardt, Michael (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, London:

UCL Press.Harris, Wilson (1983) The Womb of Space, London: Greenwood Press.Harris, Wilson (1996) Jonestown, London: Faber and Faber.Harrison, Nancy (1988) Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text, London:

University of North Carolina Press.Huggan, Graham (1994) ‘A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys, and the Uses of

Colonial Mimicry’, Contemporary Literature, 35:4, pp. 643–60.Kloepfer, Deborah (1989) The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean

Rhys and H. D., Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Lampert, Jay (2006) Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, London:

Continuum.Mardorossian, Carine (1999) ‘Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and

Double-Entendre in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Callaloo, 22:4, pp. 1071–90.Memmi, Albert (1974) The Coloniser and the Colonised, trans. Howard Greenfield,

London: Souvenir Press.Murdoch, H. Adlai (2003) ‘Rhys’s Pieces: Unhomliness as Arbiter of Caribbean

Creolisation’, Callaloo, 26:1, pp. 252–72.O’Connor, Teresa (1986) Jean Rhys and the West Indian Novels, New York: New

York University Press.Raiskin, Judith (1996) Snow on the Canefields: Women’s Writing and Creole

Subjectivity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Rhys, Jean (2000) Wide Sargasso Sea, London: Penguin Books.Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto and Windus.Sartre, Jean Paul (1974) ‘Introduction’, The Coloniser and the Colonised, Albert

Memmi, trans. Howard Greenfield, London: Souvenir Press.Scharfman, Ronnie (1981) ‘Mirroring and Mothering in Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et

vent sur Télumée Miracle and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Yale French Studies, 62,pp. 88–106.

Simpson, Anne (2005) Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys,Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Smith, Daniel (2007) ‘The Conditions of the New’, Deleuze Studies, 1:1, pp. 1–21.Soyinka, Wole (1976) Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Walcott, Derek (1998) What the Twilight Says, New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux.Williams, James (2003) Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000784

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal thanthe Big Mac?

Kane X. Faucher The University of Western Ontario, London

Abstract

The popularity of Deleuze and Guattari is an undeniable precedentin current theoretical exchanges, and it could be stated without muchcontention that one’s theoretical positioning must at some point dealwith the salient conceptual offerings of Deleuze and Guattari, especiallytheir double-opus, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus wherein awealth of critique abounds. However, the significant trends concerningDeleuze and Guattari ‘scholarship’ may be jeopardised by the (ab)use ofcertain conceptual themes and methods in their work that are distortedand employed by big business looking to secure their legacies of powerby means of a control mechanism that looks to subjugate an entire worldby means of (to borrow a term from Mihai Spariosu) ‘globalitarianism’.Our aim here will be to use McDonald’s Corporation as an exampleof how the theoretical offerings of Deleuze and Guattari have beenindirectly and hastily deployed for corporate ends, how these attemptsare counter-Deleuzian, and to answer at least one of Žižek’s criticismsagainst Deleuze.

Keywords: Deleuze, immaterial labour, corporate structure, rhizome,Žižek, nomadology

One of the most pressing problems facing Deleuze and Guattarischolarship is a criticism that Žižek evokes in Organs without Bodies:Deleuze and Consequences (2004); namely, that those who have somebrief familiarity with the texts will misemploy the conceptual strategiesfound there for the purposes of advancing corporate interests. What ifsome post-Machiavellian corporateer reads the Deleuze and Guattaritrinity of Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?What if the lessons gleaned there are distended or abused for nefariouscorporate ends? One can only imagine the applications where such a

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 43

being reads the chapters on how to create concepts as how to createglobal corporate empires, or how to build a global corporate empirewithout micromanagement and accountability as a merely metaphorictransposition from the body without organs (BwO). And what ofcreating the business of pure affect? No longer relying on traditionalmonopoly capital, but global zones of intensity with rhizomal webworksthat operate under a new ‘virtual’ digicratic order. These constructionsare ghastly and do not demonstrate a careful reading of Deleuze andGuattari’s oeuvre; however, even misapplications can run the perilousrisk of actually succeeding as models and practices, to the detriment ofthose working to limit the viral capacity of global capitalism.

The new slogan of late capital is to appear to concede locally,dominate globally. One of the new developments that distinguishescontemporary capitalism from the Fordist economy is precisely thedecentralisation and rhizomal expansion of the corporation that makesthe evasion of national bodies of law a much simpler affair. Calling toaccount the major meta-corporations for environmental degradation,labour abuses abroad and the flow of wealth to alternate regionsof the world that function as tax shelters has quickly become thecentral problem that governments today are now powerless to face,for to pinion the expansionist policies of certain corporations onlyleads to the more disastrous economic repercussions of glissement;that is, the corporations are fully in their power to dismantle theiroperations in one region and set upon a more favourable terrain.Wal-Mart, for instance, can effectively de- and reterritorialise a giventerrain by selecting areas of employment vacuum, offering the desperatemultitude jobs, and effectively reinscribe and reterritorialise that regionas yet another town that bears the indelible stamp of Wal-Mart,even to the detriment of local fledgling industries or environmentalconcerns.1 Like fungus after a storm, these meta-corporations can popup anywhere and add to the resonance factor of its rhizomal powernexus as it is surreptitiously wielded inter-regionally. As Laclau pointsout, the disparate elements come to resonate and thereby constitutethe emergence of a fascist nexus. However, the strength of thisnexus is its ability to shift its centre so that the archaic ‘centre’ isconstantly shifting and adapting to new phenomena. This still classifies,qua Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, as a fascicular root-tree ofsorts rather than a true rhizome, but trees look like rhizomes whenone is encompassed by the mad proliferation of its varying foliage.What makes the true determination or cut between the two modelsis precisely the awareness and critique of the ubiquity of strategies

44 Kane X. Faucher

employed by these meta-corporations that merely champion diversitywithin prescribed limits rather than true affirmative differences – tocater to local tastes while maintaining an Aristotelian taxonomic-stylestructure at its global base. For example, McDonald’s has perfectedthis to an art: by catering to local-specific tastes as a kind of softcultural concession (in Maine, the McLobster), McDonald’s effectivelyreinscribes the social margin into its totalising menu, and makes it bearthe stamp of the corporation so that there could come a point when,in Maine, the lobster industry will be completely non-distinct from thecorporation that has absorbed it into its product array.

I. McDeleuze

When careful fidelity to the text is not heeded, it is no secret thatconstitutive and wilful misreadings may result. Let us consider Deleuzeand Guattari’s notion of the concept and how it seems already installed(per bad reading) in the concept that is McDonald’s. What can bemore crudely and physically rhizomal than the Big Mac? The sizeof the ‘beef’ patty itself will shrink or expand in anticipation of, orresponse to, cultural demand. McDonald’s is an intriguing paradigmcase for discussing corporate global expansion. The ‘intensive affects’that impersonally de- and reterritorialise the traditional meat andpotatoes fare as ‘burger and fries’ are merely a metonymic transition, andthe ‘flow of becoming’ is also rendered crudely in the McDonald’s systemby designing seating that will be uncomfortable after twenty minutes (aswell as the strategic use of ‘panic colours’) so that there is a constantflow of new customers supplanting the old.

Was Ray Kroc, the founder of the modern McDonald’s and anindustrious opportunist who bought out the previous roadside burgerstand from its originators, an ante-Deleuzian? Does he not qualify asa ‘concept creator’ in that rigorous Deleuzian sense? If a concept ‘isonly created as a function of problems which are thought to be badlyunderstood or badly posed’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1990] (1994): 16),did not Kroc find in the old concept of McDonald’s a problem of non-expansionism, non-proliferation and limited access, thereby applying hisown conceptual innovations to resolve or repose the problem differently?Kroc began as a salesman for Dixie cups and appended the task of sellingmilkshake machines that could multiply production, and so incorporatedthese as ‘concepts’ to the newly posed problem of a fledgling burgerstand. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘In any concept there are usuallybits or components that come from other concepts, which corresponded

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 45

to other problems and presupposed other planes . . . each concept carriesout a new cutting-out, takes on new contours, and must be reactivatedor recut’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1990] (1994): 18). Each of the conceptshad to share their zones. For Kroc, the problems posed were the efficacyof cups, milkshake machinery and fast food restaurants. By unitingthese concepts, or at least their components, he was able to recastthe new creation as the concept of McDonald’s that has mostly beenhanded down today in its current form. Inspired as well by the useof cartoon characters, Kroc was able to respond to the problem ofhow to entice families to frequent these restaurants by targeting hismarketing to children. These ‘conceptemes’ were made to resonate insuch a way as to ensure a heterogeneous endoconsistency that made eachconcept component indiscernible in their neighbourhood or zone. Theexoconsistency of the McDonald’s concept was its subsequent allianceswith various other concepts: movie promotions, toys and the like. TheMcDonald’s concept speaks its Event, the haecceity of its expression.The actual restaurant is not determined by its coordinates on a map;it only suffices that it appears somewhere, anywhere, as an intensiveordinate. The means by which it absorbs other concept componentsassures its resonant becomings, such that ‘each concept will therefore beconsidered as the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulationof its own components’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1990] (1994): 20). Thefurther danger in misreading may be noted here when the concept isconsidered in properties both absolute and relative:

It is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on whichit is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolutethrough the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, andthe conditions it assigns to the problem. As whole it is absolute, but insofaras it is fragmentary it is relative. (Deleuze and Guattari [1990] (1994): 21)

Even the variations within the concept are inseparable. However, wecan see how this can easily be misread: McDonald’s, as a conceptpacked with inseparable components upon a larger plane of expansionistcapital, will be absolute in the appropriations (condensations) it canmake wherever it is located, but will be fragmentary insofar as thereis no one expression of the concept of McDonald’s that could trulybe said to function as the true and distinct ‘archetype’ since its successdepends on local variations catering to local tastes. Although corporatedecentralisation theories have aimed to resolve the dangers of vertical-based power distribution, differential concepts still function as auxiliary

46 Kane X. Faucher

to categorical thinking that functions as an a priori tracing rather than anon-hierarchical cartography.

The basis for isolating McDonald’s is not to critique this particularcorporation for not showing fidelity to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts,for this would presuppose an intention on behalf of this corporation todo so; rather, it will be of some utility to demonstrate the disagreementbetween multinational corporate practices and the ideas of Deleuzeand Guattari as a means to answer Žižek’s accusation that these ideasactually enable contemporary corporate logics. There are confusingsimilarities between what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the rhizomeand the practices of corporations, but these similarities are merelyappearances – a league of representations.

II. The Rhetoric of McDonald’s

One need not turn to the legion of texts that criticise the practicesof McDonald’s Corporation since McDonald’s own publicly releasedannual report discloses the rhetorical devices it employs to ensure brandloyalty and the maximisation of profit. In releasing these reports tothe public, doubtless in response to critics who have lambasted thecorporation for lack of disclosure, McDonald’s abides by one of itsinitial guiding ‘ethics’: namely, that trust is hard to earn and easyto lose. Rhetorically, releasing an annual report is partially designedto ‘earn’ that public trust and to maintain its global credibility as adynamic, caring corporation sensitive to the needs of all its employeesand customers. There are frequent appeals to the ‘founding principles’of Ray Kroc, verging on the religious near-deification of their founder.The overarching ethical conduit by which McDonald’s wants to beperceived is the association between food production and (moral) value.Nothing can be more personal than what one eats and what one believes,and so it is essential for McDonald’s, in order to be prosperous, totread in such a way as to appeal to a reductionist ‘common value’that encircles a perceived majoritarian set of values. In doing so,the corporation produces a regulatory framework flexible enough toallow regional differences while still maintaining a totalising systemof common relevant moral values. Nowhere is this false or negativedifference more evident than in its business model, ‘Freedom withinthe Framework’. This model, pictorially demonstrated in their 2004report on Corporate Responsibility, is a series of overlapping ‘spheres’governed by both a central nexus of locations and corporate revenues,and an encompassing outer sphere that unites the structure into a

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 47

whole. Three ‘rhizomatic’ elastic spheres issue from the central nexus,namely owners/operators, company employees and suppliers (Skinnerand Bell 2004). Presumably, the ‘freedom’ within this framework is theexpansive character of the three spheres by which the centre sphereis fed by titration of profits. As well, floating as if in a soup, arethree corresponding aspects that determine the encompassing sphere:policies (good business conduct and environmental policy to becomethe best employer, to give back to the community which presupposessomething taken away, and holding themselves in the highest possibleethical standards). These three determining aspects have a dubiety aboutthem, and this is precisely due to their substitutability in responding tothe dynamic demands of any regionalist conditions that may later impactupon the whole. This model is more of an organism than a DeleuzianBwO since its power rests in a power structure that is governed bythe crude metrics of profit and amount of locations. Is McDonald’s,despite its seeming ‘rhizomatesque’ features, still a centralised organism?According to Jim Skinner (Vice-Chairman) and Charles Bell (Presidentand CEO),

Decentralisation is fundamental to our business model – and to our corporateresponsibility efforts. At the corporate level, we provide a global frameworkof common goals, policies, and guidelines rooted in our core values. Withinthis framework, individual geographic business units have the freedom todevelop programs and performance measures appropriate to local conditions.We view this model as a source of strength.

Decentralisation within limits: That is, there is still a centralising featureof McDonald’s model, and this is located precisely in those ‘core values’it is ‘rooted in’. The moral overcoding is fascicular, a ‘root book’ ofvalues that regulate the corporate organism, ensuring that its claims of‘decentralisation’ is a confused one, especially since it (a) is stated as‘fundamental’, (b) operates according to a global framework and (c)is rooted in core values that regulate the peripheral functions of thecorporate structure. In essence, it would appear that decentralisation hasbeen loosely appended as a buzzword or vacuous homily. McDonald’salso discloses more than it perhaps realises by claiming its corporatestrength in accordance with its ‘Freedom within a Framework’ model,stating that it can maintain its corporate governance globally whilebeing flexible enough in the particulars to cater to local and regionaldifferences, pending that they do not violate the categorical unity. Thiseffectively trumps any truly affirmative difference from engaging andaltering the corporate totality, and so rather consigns difference to paltry

48 Kane X. Faucher

variations under a global framework that is itself inflexible. Ray Krocremains the unseen religious figurehead (as McDonald’s rather prefers touse cartoon icons by which to channel the ‘divine’ corporate influence),acting as a kind of ‘Holy Ghost’ that spiritualises and concretises thecore values the corporation relies upon. Nowhere is this more apparentthan in its motto: ‘At McDonald’s, we believe that good governancestarts with good values’. Harking to a worn Platonic dictate on theconstruction of a State, McDonald’s does not deviate far from thecommon sense notion of governance. Words such as ‘governance’ and‘value’ are frequently repeated as ultimate signifieds by which we areexpected to believe that indeed McDonald’s upholds these terms in all itsoperations. And even if these values were being upheld, it is unlikely thatthey were selected democratically or that those who are employed at thelowest employment tier would be invited or encouraged to dispute thesevalues. The looming figure of hegemony is most present when values are‘handed down’ to be ‘obeyed’, even if they come in the guise of generallyaccepted consensus or are articulated in the most broad and vague terms.

McDonald’s does not stop at seemingly appropriating (albeit badly)Deleuzian themes, but also makes blatant use of various postcolonialand postindustrialist terms such as ‘stakeholders’. For example, itsglobal ‘sensitivity’ is trotted out here: ‘And whether it’s called “goodcorporate citizenship” or “social responsibility,” we take seriously ourcommitment to conducting our business in a way that respects the worldaround us and the issues that matter most to you’, and

we work toward responsible actions by understanding the perspectives andneeds of our customers and other important stakeholders, by collaboratingwith experts to understand issues and opportunities and by inspiring thepeople in our system – company employees, owner/operators and suppliers –to share and act on these core values.

What are these issues exactly, and how can their relevance gain purchaseon this reductionist, universalised and structurally empty ‘you’? IfMcDonald’s could not assume a common set of values, and if thesevalues could be demonstrated not to hold for all persons for all times,the credibility of their regulative framework would be in jeopardy. Indesiring to provide meals and a dining out experience that exceeds itscustomers’ expectations, McDonald’s once again blunders in assuminga common set of predictable expectations, what their content would beand therefore how to exceed them.2

As to the globalising structure of McDonald’s, McDonald’s relieson its ‘Plan to Win’ business strategy: ‘We manage our worldwide

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 49

operations with McDonald’s global Plan to Win, which identifies five P’sthat drive our business – Products, People, Place, Price and Promotion’.Apart from what may have been construed in the planning offices, aclever use of alliteration and a mnemonic device for better corporateencoding, we find that these five P’s are as empty and vacuous as theyare attempts at totalisation and reduction. Instead of considering thevarious aspects of their business as a rich dynamism, a planomenon ofintercalated becomings, they have instead relied on a rigid stratification,an ecumenon of particular determinations that function in concertaccording to an overcoding moral set which euphemistically is dubbedtheir plan to win. We may take especial issue with this notion of winning,most notably as it is draped upon their core values, and pose the questionas to what winning means. It is not merely a victory of maximisingprofits per quarter, but a moral victory as well – that the McDonald’sworldview of what morally ought to be is realised and ensures theperpetuation of its regulative moral codes. McDonald’s succinctly states,

We provide a framework of common values, policies and business strategiesand then empower our owner/operators, our suppliers and company staff tocontribute in ways that reflect their unique expertise and local circumstances.Like other parts of our business, McDonald’s commitment to corporateresponsibility follows this ‘freedom within a framework’ approach.

Heavy yet most likely vacuous words like ‘responsibility’ are notinnocuous additions to their corporate mandate as they seek to respondto mounting criticism that McDonald’s is yet another cold, faceless,profit-accumulating machine that only provides homogeneity as itsmajor export:

Responsibility at McDonald’s means striving to do what is right, being agood neighbor in the community and integrating social and environmentalpriorities into our restaurants and our relationships with suppliers andbusiness partners . . . We have a responsibility to maintain our values and highstandards as we provide food that is affordable to a wide range of customers.

And again,

Our restaurants and drive-thru’s will be clean, relevant and inviting to thecustomers of today and tomorrow. We have a responsibility to manage ourbusiness by integrating environmental considerations into daily operationsand by constantly seeking ways to add value to the community.3

To what extent these ‘environmental considerations’ actually enterinto McDonald’s schema seems to be tacked on, and McDonald’s

50 Kane X. Faucher

claim to the addition of value to a community sounds hollow withoutfurther qualification. One may question how a McDonald’s actuallyadds value to any community rather than reduces value to a flatcommon set of prefabricated corporate ideals, low-income employment,a menu of false choices, perpetuating animal cruelty, diminishing theprofitability of smaller non-chain restaurants, infantilising the consumerpublic, the degradation of fine cuisine to mere convenience, massivegarbage production and contributing to rampant obesity. In what wayis McDonald’s representing ‘responsibility’? In recent years, ‘healthy’choices have been added to the menu in response to a growing concernover the deleterious effects of fast food.

What is this ‘healthy’ turn? On pages 6–8 of the report, McDonald’srepeats its mantra of food=value by making its first argument oneof ad populam (the average consumer’s values, highlighting a specificcase example of an average consumer, quite politically inflected bythe selection of a visible ethnic minority) and then moves towards anappeal to authority (a semi-alarmist message by Professor Paul Gately,member of McDonald’s Global Advisory Council in Balanced Lifestyles).Dr Gately does not make a firm connection between skyrocketingoverweight and obesity rates and the steps McDonald’s is taking to helpalleviate the problem, but rather states that,

In a world where technological advances and our risk-averse culture haveremoved opportunities for children to be physically active, we need to findways to give kids positive experiences of physical activity, exercise and sports.For children, what’s critical is engagement and fun – and that’s somethingMcDonald’s does very well.

After Gately shifts the blame for child obesity to broad social conditionsof technology and safety (making sweeping generalisations, we mightadd), he asserts that McDonald’s offers the following solutions:(1) providing ‘fun’ (which is a vacuous signifier), ‘engagement’, foodchoices within an ‘improved nutritional matrix’, convenience and goodtaste. Gately points to McDonald’s as a ‘powerful vehicle of change’, andsees McDonald’s role as provoking community changes via business andgovernmental partnerships to support and promote physical activity forchildren. The connection between the products McDonald’s serves andphysical activity among children is disparate and disingenuous at best.

On the whole, it seems, McDonald’s is still a fascicular corporateorganism abiding by inflexible moral schemas. Despite its claims todecentralisation and its appearance of being an immanent entity, theseare illusory at best, and are still transcendent apparatuses of capture.

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 51

One may see how a facile engagement with the works of Deleuzeand Guattari may actually perpetuate the stratified ends of corporateexpansionism and proliferation, although these seem to be lightconcessions and nominal utilisations of theory terminology.

III. Fear Capital

McDonald’s has only conformed to environmental and health standardswhen external pressure has been applied, and largely for reasonsof public relations. For example, McDonald’s has switched to theuse of organic milk in its milk-based drinks, and uses coffee beanscertified by the Rainforest Alliance. In addition, it has also aimed toreduce, if not entirely eliminate, its polystyrene packaging. However,the reason for embracing these environmental practices has a bearing onmarket practices that seek to broaden consumer appeal during a timewhen environmental issues are more predominantly of concern to theconsumers. Interestingly enough, no mention of past corporate liabilityis made – given that McDonald’s, among many other corporations, hadcontributed to environmental degradation for decades, thereby makingMcDonald’s culpable for its share of deleterious environmental impact.Nor does McDonald’s new turn towards environmental sustainabilityand corporate responsibility address the issue of overstressed farmlandand standardised destruction of arable land used as feedlots for cows.The failures and contradictions in McDonald’s Corporation’s attemptto foster a new ‘green’ and ‘fair’ image are legion as they continueto patronise agribusinesses over smaller local farms, have quashed allattempts at allowing a unionisation of its workers, abetted the increasingAmericanisation of global trade and American cultural imperialism,continued to limit biodiversity through dense central food processingfacilities, and the unsustainable use of water and energy to produceevery one of its menu items. In sum, although the corporation reportsits commitment to sustainable practice, it is unsurprisingly a public-relations smokescreen. As well, McDonald’s continues to direct itsmarketing enticements towards children in order to ensure lifelong brandloyalty, and this is effectively done through collaborative product tie-inswith toy manufacturers and movie companies.

McDonald’s, like many corporations that utilise the same or a similarmodel, seems to operate on a plane of immanence since it need notrefer to, or depend on, a transcendent state apparatus. It operates itsflows through network relations as a series of capital accumulations.Deterritorialisation and uncoded flows – essential conditions for the

52 Kane X. Faucher

spread of free market economics – have indeed overcome the shadowof state imperialism as it has been generally defined; however, asHardt and Negri point out, the segmentarity of the social has becomemore pronounced rather than less (Hardt and Negri 2000: 366).Economic theorists like Leo Strauss were instrumental in advocatingan economic model with a minimum of government interference,a view championed and put into action by neo-conservatives likeRonald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, George W. Bushand so on. Once the ‘emancipation’ of the market could engagein a regulatory axiomatisation supplanting the presence or perceivedneed for ‘big government’, welfare-state policies were downsized orphased out entirely to such an extent that even the then-PresidentBill Clinton was forced by market pressures to abandon his campaignpromises of restoring social spending. One of the significant, yetunder-examined, shifts was in the management of the US defenceprogramme. Despite a spike in defence spending in the last decade, adisproportionately small amount of this money funds troops or theirequipment. Ironically, a lion’s share of defence funding is earmarkedfor civilian salaries of those who work for Department of Defensecontracted corporations such as Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and soon. Under the guise of defence budgets directly financing militarypersonnel, the majority is spent on contracting corporations that willset up factories to increase domestic economic stability. In this way,the defence budget is tantamount to a jobs programme that replacesother forms of more socially based fiscal stimulus initiatives. Whenlobbyists favourable to these corporations, or former employees ofthese corporations enter into prominent positions of political power,political interests can become confused with corporate interests, ensuringthat the state becomes economically beholden to these contractedcorporations for fear of creating massive unemployment. The secondirony concerns the apparent purpose of increased defence spending:the worst possible scenario for the sustainability of what Eisenhowerfirst coined as the military-industrial complex is for there to be a warsince funds would no longer sufficiently finance the jobs programmethat corporations operate without spending more money on the waras well. The rather Orwellian scenario of increased defence spendingwhen there is no war is part of a concerted fear programme that ensuresthe rigidifying of social segmentation. ‘Fear of violence, poverty, andunemployment is in the end the primary and immediate force that createsand maintains these new segmentations’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 339).The choice between increased defence spending for capital accumulation

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 53

and that of war is captured in the disjunction Deleuze and Guattariidentify:

Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled throughwar – either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no armsand no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, ‘seizes’ and‘binds’, preventing all combat – or, the State acquires an army, but in away that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organisation of amilitary function. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 352)

In the case of the US defence industry, there would appear to be both,working curiously at cross-purposes.

The question would emerge as to what sort of ‘fear’ McDonald’sutilises in order to ensure its place in sustaining a severe socio-globalsegmentation. Very much like the above US Department of Defenseexample, the fear is primarily of economic provenance.

IV. McNomadology?

Domination and resistance are always at war in what Deleuze andGuattari call the body without organs. In this perpetual in-folding(Zwiefalt), the body (which need not be a physical body) is perpetuallydismantling and remaking itself. The organism resides as a stratumon the BwO: ‘a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, andsedimentation that, in order to extract useful labour from the BwO,imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchisedorganisations, organised transcendence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:159). If we take the BwO as the ‘scene’ or the ‘plane’ upon whicha war machine is organised, we must take care not to hastily declarethis an ideological aspect. If taken just on the level of the axioms,nomadology appears to share a zone with the methods of McDonald’s.The first axiom plainly states that the war machine is exterior to the stateapparatus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 351). As we have mentioned, theflow of contemporary capital operates with flows that are freed from thestate; however, it would be too quick to make an equivocation betweencorporation and war machine. If we are to consider corporations likeMcDonald’s as employing a strategy similar to Deleuze and Guattari’sexample of the game Go, we find that perhaps each individual franchiseis like that anonymous piece that operates situationally, ‘bordering,encircling, shattering’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 353). Unlike Chess,for McDonald’s there is not the instance of occupying maximum spacewith a minimum of pieces since the McDonald’s model operates by

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ubiquity and proliferation of its franchises. As well, its operations modeloffers a minimum of quality at the highest quantity, recoding quantityas quality.4 Go ‘succeeds’ by deterritorialising from within whereasChess must confront from the outside. But whereas Go thrives upona smooth space, free of the metric and striated space of Chess (the state),McDonald’s still employs striation at the micro-level, the stratum ofthe organism that makes McDonald’s its own kind of state – a micro-state, despotic in the way it organises itself between the governing andthe governed inside its corporate body. If there was a war machineinside McDonald’s, it would only seem to be a valorisation of liberalrevolution: the formation of unions and demanding of universal rights.Rather, the war machine would utilise the aspects of labour prized bythe contemporary state: mobility and flexibility. The labour force wouldnot ask permission to form a union, but would rather form clandestinepacks and gatherings, using the corporate methods of extreme efficiencyfor viral purposes. Far from becoming a Marxist romanticism that aimsto reify the worker as an emancipated subject, the labour force aswar machine would take on the role of non-subjectifiable, anonymousGo pieces, virally consuming from within and deterritorialising theMcDonald’s structure.

When once capital had a strategic set of purposes, usually linkedwith the state’s purposes, it has since become almost Spinozist: itwishes to persevere in its own aspect, to continue accumulating withoutany further purpose but accumulation itself. Blind, vagabond, capitalbecomes a nomadic accumulator with the sole purpose of growing itself:capital as cancer.5 The method of proliferation that McDonald’s usesas it franchises itself across the globe appears to have this cancerousor nomadic element. This, however, comes with at least one crucialdifference: the method of proliferation more resembles that of a religiousmodel than it does a nomadic distribution. McDonald’s grants theauthority for another individual or group to conduct commercialoperations on the condition that the franchisee conforms the rootprinciples as set down by the corporation’s laws. Minor variations arepermitted if not encouraged as long as these variations do not violatethe core principles. This transcendent ordering mechanism that regulateseach component, each franchise, is partially what makes McDonald’smore of an organism than a war machine.

If we follow Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of rhizome with its sixprinciples (connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture,cartography and decalcomania), we find moments where corporationslike McDonald’s seem to abide by a rhizomal programme. Most notably,

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 55

the aspect of asignifying rupture most closely resembles the decodingflows and de/re-territorialising strategy of capital, but more specifically,a decentralised corporate structure allows for local breakdowns andruptures that do not endanger the whole. If a McDonald’s restaurantfails to secure a certain profit level to keep it viable in one area, it can beshut down and reopened elsewhere. Since the success of the corporationis not contingent upon a rooted and fixed spatiogeography, it canmerely take up operations elsewhere. The second strongest rhizomalaspect would be McDonald’s capacity for cartographic expansion; ithas free ingress and egress as a corporation in being able to enterand exit local and national markets throughout the globe. However,its internal structure does not admit of this aspect, preferring tomanage its employees according to a rigid hierarchy. Multiplicity isdemonstrated through domination and absorption, forming a unityof multiples that contain the source and target cultures in any givenmarket in addition to its franchise proliferation mechanisms. However,this, too, does not qualify as an actual multiplicity since this form ofdomination and subversion is somewhat Hegelian in nature, forcinga synthesis by means of the Aufhebung of the cultural market itinhabits. Although recent trends in corporations like McDonald’s haveforced them to recontextualise their practices given the current increasein environmental concerns, this is not auto-derived as much as it isexternally imposed by both a response to critics and an attempt tosustain consumer trust. One could also say that McDonald’s employsrhizomal connectivity through the ability to construct an aggregatelabour force wherever it happens to be. However, this too succumbsto a process of labour exploitation and subjugation. Even in this age ofvector and network capitalism, corporations are still beholden to similarprocesses for their own sustainability as profit machines. A rhizome doesnot need to appeal to reactive methods in order to expand itself, whereasa corporation still contains within it the relatively unchanged phasesof capital recovery towards expansion such as performing managementchanges, retrenchment and divestiture, restructuring, market/productreorientation, improved controls, improved marketing, and increasein plant and machinery expenditure (or improvements thereupon).With such methods that would be considered reactive, even today’scorporations lack the critical apparatus and structural flexibility toimplement a truly rhizomal programme.

There is also the darker shadow cast by McDonald’s when itsubordinates local customs and eating habits while claiming to mobiliselocal talents and encourage cultural diversity by the artificial appendage

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of adding ‘local’ menu choices to its usual fare. Reducing cultureto clothing and cuisine only serves a market purpose that simplifiesand sanitises that culture for ‘quaint’ consumption by a presumedelite homogeneous group that can regard said cultures as secondaryto their own. McDonald’s effectively makes cultural consumption –culture based on mercantile utility – ‘safe’ for both the source and targetcultures. For the source culture that is sanitised and emulated, it providesthe illusion of cultural sensitivity. For the target culture that mayconsume these items, it provides a sense of satisfying the ‘exotic’, afalse communion with the Other that serves to assuage guilt. For thesource culture, a division may take place that recodes the cultural formfrom which the new menu option derives, a schism that may cause theconsumer to become a flaneur in one’s own culture. As a form of culturaland ecological imperialism, McDonald’s – as well as other global fastfood chains – aims to construct a new programme of eating habits aspart of the larger programme of marketing it as an ‘experience’.

V. Žižek contra Deleuze

One of the enduring criticisms Žižek makes against Deleuze in Organswithout Bodies would be in the manner by which Žižek flattens andreduces Deleuze’s insight of the rhizomatic multiplicity as being atodds with itself: between a leftist counter-capitalist ideology and beingdecidedly apolitical. Amid the raft of charges that Deleuze is merelytouting ideology, that there is a secret complicity with Hegelianism,and an uncritical admiration of Spinoza, the most serious charge for thepurposes of this article is that Deleuze and Guattari somehow providethe tools necessary for corporations to bolster their legacies of globalpower. Žižek goes on to criticise the Deleuze and Guattari projectindirectly, especially in dubbing Hardt and Negri’s Empire as a naïverevision of socialism (Žižek 2004: 196). What is fundamentally lost inŽižek’s accusation is contact with the esprit of A Thousand Plateaus;namely, that Deleuze and Guattari are not advancing a concretesocio-political programme, but rather are providing readers with aconceptual toolkit. For Žižek to make the leap to the consequencesof (mis)using those conceptual tools is an exercise in speculationsince it would presuppose that the tools themselves have only onepossible use, which in Žižek’s criticism would be to strengthen thehand of late capital. To be fair, this is but one of perhaps severalpossibilities, but as we demonstrated supra, the current operationalmethods of contemporary corporations like McDonald’s do not and

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 57

cannot adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts with strict fidelity withoutendangering their earning potentials derived from hierarchical controls.If corporations like McDonald’s were to make use of those toolsaccording to the effects they would inevitably produce, the rhizomaticnature of these tools would reorganise what we understand as themultinational corporation into a model incommensurate with economicdomination and control. A ‘rhizomatic’ corporation would be devoid ofany hierarchical structure, and would not operate according to a presetof conditions that orients its profit-accumulating activities. As well, arhizomatic corporation would not have homogenising social effects,but would actively connect with, and produce, differences based oncultural, aesthetic, political and economic affects. We should not confusedominant capitalist nations with their continued deindustrialisationvia the exporting of labour to developing nations as an example ofdecentralisation since the central profit-accumulating apparatus stillresides in the place of the corporation’s provenance. Moreover, if thecorporate structure abided by a rhizomal model, there would be free andunobstructed access to all employment roles and privileges accordingto the principles of connectivity and heterogeneity; there would beno ‘ladders’ to climb since every point of a corporate rhizome wouldhave connective accessibility. Despite the increase in ‘interfacing’ whichappears to grant the worker more decision-making capacity to conduct‘cooperative’ labour as a socially interactive force, the categoricalmandate of the corporation is still centred on the means by which togain control over the worker-subject. Although more control is vestedin the worker-subject through cooperative labour, the subjectivity ofthe worker must conform to the preconditioned set of expectationsto avoid any deviations. And so, akin to Isaiah Berlin’s notion ofnegative freedom, the worker-subject’s freedom is within a given set ofparameters that surreptitiously conform to corporate interests. Freedomwithin limits acts as a kind of enclosure mechanism that assures somedegree of distance control of the worker-subject.

One of the added productions beyond commodities for immateriallabour in a post-Fordist economy is that of communication – the socialrelation of information capital. The inscription of the worker-subjectinto a wider spectrum of the production-consumption network also hasas its outcome the production of a particular kind of subjectivity as agoal. This kind of subjectivity differs from the variety that is generallyperceived as celebratory of free choice: it is a subjectivity that grants theillusion of self-mastery through choices that still must come to the sameresult (if A must go to B, the creative worker can devise any method

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so long as B is reached). It is also the variety of subjectivity that, ratherthan becoming enslaved to the machine, one is instead subjected to it. Aswell, the ‘new’ subjectivity belonging to immaterial labour proper stillabstracts from the individual, still reduces that worker to a ‘knowledgecapital dispensary’ in a relay network that is governed by an overarchingset of corporate ends. The value of the knowledge that enters intothis relay is judged on how well it advances the goals of corporateefficiency, imposing a system of valuation even upon the disseminationand cooperation of information relayed in a labour network.

What remains in current corporate trends, as exemplified byMcDonald’s, and despite the movement towards decentralisingcorporate networks, is that the appearance of the rhizome is just that: anappearance. Contemporary capitalism by whichever name we give it –vector, cognitive, network, grounded theory – still plays a predominantrole in the shaping of subjectivity on behalf of subjects, even if themethods are clandestine. A rhizomal corporation, if such a thing couldever exist, would be a multiplicity, would allow the component labourwithin it to develop according to its own cartography rather than havea tracing imposed upon it.

Žižek makes two critical mistakes in his reading of Deleuze. First, hereads Deleuze as ‘pro-capitalist’, which assumes Deleuze is valorisingcapital rather than explaining some of its tendencies without makingvaluations that have no place in a conceptual project. From there,Žižek imputes a variety of consequences that would result from aparticular application of such concepts. Second, Žižek’s understandingof the rhizome appears flawed given that a true application of therhizome to multinational corporations will prove incommensurateto the existing structure of either. Instead, what we may be leftwith are corporate trends that borrow representations construed fromthese concepts to further their own agendas. What our McDonald’sexample demonstrated – and what presumably a similar study on othermultinational corporations would as well – is that a representation of arhizome is not a rhizome, but just another apparatus of capture.

Notes1. One deleterious use of ‘deterritorialisation’ and recoding of flows, albeit not with

full fidelity to the way Deleuze and Guattari employ these terms, has been inthe way Wal-Mart has utilised predatory pricing to ensure a zone of commercialcontrol in any given area that it ‘captures’.

2. Aside from the ambiguous ‘subject’ this statement alludes to, there appears to bea quiet equivalence between social responsibility and corporate citizenship.

McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? 59

3. Nested in this statement is a rather non-environmental consideration: thecontentious use and encouragement of drive-thru’s. Recently, McDonald’spartnered with Sinopec, China’s second-largest oil producer, to promote andencourage the use of personal motor vehicles at its restaurant locations in EastAsia. This corporate partnership adds substance to the seemingly odd use of theword ‘relevant’ in relation to drive-thru’s.

4. This quantity = quality distinction is an insight formulated by George Ritzer’sbook The McDonaldization of Society (1993), wherein he also isolates three otherMcDonald’s characteristics such as uniformity, calculability and a very narrowdefinition of efficiency.

5. This claim is drawn from Deleuze’s occasional comparisons between cancerand capitalism as well as McMurtry’s seminal article ‘The Cancer Stage ofCapitalism’. I make an attempt to clarify this distinction a bit further in‘Transcendent and Immanent Capital’ in Azimute (2004: online).

ReferencesDeleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari [1980] (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari [1990] (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. HughTomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress.

Skinner, Jim and Charles Bell (2004) ‘Corporate Responsibility Report 2004’.http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/values/socialrespons/sr_report.html (accessed27 December 2009).

Žižek, Slavoj (2004) Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, London:Routledge.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000796

Forum Introduction: Sense, Sensation andDeleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism

Peter Hertz-Ohmes, Leyla Haferkamp, Arno Böhler

The three papers in this forum were independently presented at theSecond Deleuze Studies Conference in Cologne, August 2009. That theybelonged together was quickly recognised. Each author focuses on theinterplay of sense and sensation as the crux of Deleuze’s transcendentalempiricism. But note that each author takes the interplay as primary.Only given the interplay can it propose to the philosopher Deleuzepossible approaches to its workings. Thus in all three papers sense andsensation are outcomes, just as transcendental empiricism is an outcome.All three papers, already familiar with Deleuze, work back in order towork forward. Sense and sensation, as well as their logics, turn out tobe provisional as only one way of reaching another goal, something thatmakes all this effort worthwhile.

But as long as these concepts happen to be available at the moment,they suggest the following assertions: Sense without concomitantsensation is void, and sensation without correlative sense is totallyindistinct. Yet there has never been a need to start from scratch. Thedifferential material of sensation is always already immanent, althoughfor the most part not actualised, and the fractal, self-organisationalequipment of sense is also always already immanent, even if for the mostpart virtual and unrealised.

Humans are condemned or privileged to enter at birth into a fullyfurnished, fully interpreted world. The majority takes this world forgranted. Many opt out, hoping for a better deal elsewhere. But a fewaffirm their existence by choosing to live again to the fullest the humancondition as it has been passed down to them, affirming through self-effacement a truly sensational world in every possible sense that can bemade to shine through them with the splendid impersonality of a fourthperson singular.

Fourth person singulars constitute a manifold of centres in aneccentric world. All together they are one but each is unique, different

Forum Introduction 61

from all the others. Each is a monad, a life, what in the present worldtakes form as the materialised sense of a life: not biography but Event.

Baumgarten may not have been an exciting writer or a majorphilosopher, and he hardly rates a readable biography, but throughhim shines the inspiration of an aesthetics that gave impetus to arebellious Romanticism. Nietzsche may have been a loner and a misfitwho overstated his ideas because no one listened, but through himshines the heat of a revelation whose political consequences continueto play out against an all-consuming, consumption-oriented nihilism.And what about Deleuze himself? What shines through Deleuze is theactive acceptance of the role he as actor must assume together with hisimmanent director not so much to ensure the integrity of his own worksbut to challenge the self-serving parochialism of so much institutionalphilosophy.

Forums like this are meant to put some spark into the philosophybusiness. The authors welcome feedback.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000802

Analogon Rationis: Baumgarten, Deleuzeand the ‘Becoming Girl’ of Philosophy

Leyla Haferkamp University of Cologne, Cologne

Abstract

Baumgarten’s Enlightenment Aesthetica provides an importantphilosophical analogon to Deleuze’s alignment of the ‘logic of sense’and the ‘logic of sensation’. By linking serious reason with its‘other’, frivolous feeling, the book greatly influenced Herder and theRomantic movement. Baumgarten called aesthetics ‘logic’s youngersister’. Like Deleuze he propagates nothing less than the ‘becoming-girl’of philosophy.

Keywords: aesthetics, feeling, Enlightenment philosophy, becoming-other, Baumgarten, Deleuze

‘Reason is a kind of feeling.’ (Deleuze 1991: 30)

Seen in retrospect, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) is nodoubt one of the minor figures in the syllabus of eighteenth-centuryGerman philosophy. This is probably not much of a surprise given thathe died at the age of 48 without having completed his most significantbook Aesthetica and wrote almost exclusively in Latin. Aesthetica, forinstance, was translated into German in its entirety only two yearsago, and, chronologically speaking, it was literally stuck somewherebetween Leibniz and Kant. Baumgarten, however, was not only arigorous logician in the Wolffian tradition of mid-eighteenth-centuryGermany; not only an ‘eminent analyst’ as Kant called him in Critiqueof Pure Reason (Kant 2003: 22n). Kant, in fact, is known to have usedBaumgarten’s Metaphysica (1739) as the basis of many a lecture inKönigsberg, but Baumgarten was also a poet who wrote verses in Latinon a daily basis. In an early piece entitled Meditationes philosophicae denonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [Philosophical Meditations on SomeRequirements of the Poem], he combined these two interests in a firsttheory of sensibility, the prototype of what he would later establish asthe first systematic theory of aesthetics.

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The attempt to align the philosophy of Baumgarten, whose work isoften associated with the rigid rationalism of the Wolffian tradition,with that of Gilles Deleuze, whose writings contain no direct referenceto Baumgarten’s work, may at first glance seem far-fetched. There are,however, parallels between the two philosophers, especially when thefocus is set on the aspect of ‘aesthetic intervention’. In other words, theway Baumgarten invents aesthetics as a philosophical category makeshim one of the precursors of Deleuzian philosophy.

What relates Baumgarten and Deleuze in general is their aim tostrengthen the link between life and thought from within a philosophicalframework that involves seemingly incompatible systems of logic. Inparticular, this affinity lies in their mutual interest in depicting theinterrelations between sense and sensation. As such, Baumgarten’s workprovides an important historical analogon to Deleuze’s alignment of the‘logic of sense’ with the ‘logic of sensation’ and to his development of atopology of complementarity.

As the bold attempt to lend sensation its own logical parameters,Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, based on lectures held between 1750 and1758, has served to establish aesthetics as a philosophical disciplinein its own right, thus marking a turning point in the philosophyof the Enlightenment. It is in this book, categorically dismissed byKant as ‘the disappointed hope . . . of subjecting the criticism of thebeautiful to principles of reason, and so of elevating its rules to ascience’, that Baumgarten is at his most radical (Kant 2003: 22n). TheNeo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who dedicates a considerableamount of space to Baumgarten’s two-fold model in his Philosophyof the Enlightenment, reverses the Kantian verdict and acknowledges‘Baumgarten’s decisive historical merit’ as truly vernunftskritisch. ‘[H]isreal intellectual accomplishment’, Cassirer writes,

consists in the fact that through his mastery of the subject he becameespecially conscious of both the intrinsic and the systematic limitations offormal logic. As a result of his consciousness of these limitations, Baumgartenwas able to make his original contribution to the history of thought, whichlay in the philosophical foundation of aesthetics . . . Thus aesthetics evolvesfrom logic, but this evolution discloses the immanent weakness of traditionalscholastic logic. (Cassirer 1955: 338–9)

To have ‘invented’ aesthetics as an independent discipline is, infact, Baumgarten’s major contribution to philosophical discourse. Oneshould note, however, that at its moment of inception aestheticswas much more inclusive than the philosophical investigation of artand beauty, to which it tends to be narrowed down today. With

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aesthetics, Baumgarten developed nothing less than a general theory ofsensibility with its own gnoseological faculty that produces a specifickind of knowledge. His aesthetics was a theory claiming epistemologicalrelevance for sensual perception. Along these lines, the first section ofAesthetica delivers a programmatic definition of the new science thatdefies the traditional categories of thought: ‘Aesthetics (as a theory ofthe liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinkingand as the art of thinking analogous to reason) is the science ofsensible cognition’ [Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologiainferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionissensitivae] (Baumgarten 2007a: §1, my translation).

With the primary aim to integrate aesthetics into the realm of rationalthought as the analogon rationis, Baumgarten draws extensively uponLeibnizian epistemology, which he modifies to serve as the basis ofthe new ‘science of sensible cognition’. Not only does he emphasisethe interconnections between the gnoseologia superior of the sense-making ratio and the gnoseologia inferior of sensation, but, even moreimportantly, he also underscores their genetic unity, which he regardsas grounded in the dark recesses of the fundus animae. In Aesthetica,the fundus animae figures as the source of all kinds of perception, adomain that is of interest to psychology though it is largely neglected byphilosophy itself; it contains that which remains forgotten, unconsciousand unpredictable (Baumgarten 2007a: §80). A general definition ofthe fundus animae is provided in Metaphysica: ‘The soul has darkperceptions. As a whole, these perceptions form the foundation ofthe soul’ (Baumgarten 2004: §511). Despite all its obscurity, however,the fundus does not lack truth. ‘What is abstraction, if not a loss?’Baumgarten asks, noting that the notion of fallibility and the verydichotomy of true vs. false are produced not by dark perception butby rational abstraction (Baumgarten 2007a: §560).

Despite resonances in terminology and approach, Baumgarten’s andDeleuze’s theories of the sensible are, needless to say, anything butidentical. A conceptual affinity, however, can be detected in Differenceand Repetition when Deleuze refers, without mentioning Baumgarten’sname, to the founding moment of aesthetics:

It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could befounded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverseprocedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the puresensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains oncerepresentation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody

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of sensations). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental and aesthetics anapodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible thatwhich can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference,potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitativediversity. (Deleuze 1994: 56–7)

Despite its anthropocentric tendency that sets it apart from Deleuzianphilosophy, Baumgarten’s aesthetics will have intervened in thephilosophical discourse of his time with a force comparable to theintervention that Deleuze has made in twentieth-century philosophy.Baumgarten aimed at maintaining the balance between the rational andthe sensual and set the emphasis on the ‘transitions’ between the two,the superior cognition of rationality and the so-called inferior cognitionof sensuality. Already Leibniz, in his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686),had addressed the inferior domain, the domain of confused knowledgeas opposed to distinct knowledge, as the mode of knowledge specific toart: ‘When I can recognise one thing among others without being ableto say what its differences or properties consist in’, Leibniz wrote, ‘myknowledge is confused. In this way we sometimes know clearly, withoutbeing in anyway in doubt, whether a poem or a painting is good orbad, because there is a certain je ne sais quoi which pleases or offendsus’ (Leibniz 1998a: §24). In Baumgarten’s context, this inferior facultydoes not simply receive a pejorative label for its less valuable and henceless favourable status; its inferiority is, rather, suggestive of a spatialmodel that renders sensation the crucial ‘underlying’ layer of the superiorfaculty of sense.

Baumgarten’s modification of Leibnizian thought consists in hisintegration of the seemingly ‘flawed’ inferior faculty into thephilosophical discipline of aesthetics as its unique mode of cognition.In fact, the confused cognition of sensuality becomes the one and onlytrue link between the two ends of the spectrum, that is the level ofrational knowledge on the one hand and the obscure level of whatDeleuze would later call, in direct reference to Leibniz, unconsciousmicro-perceptions on the other. Aesthetics originates in medias res toestablish the connections between the rational and the irrational:

One could say that confusion is the mother of error. My answer to this is:it is a necessary condition for the discovery of truth, because nature doesnot make leaps from obscurity to distinction. Out of the night dawn leadsto noon . . . We do not recommend confusion, but rather the amendment ofcognition insofar as a necessary amount of confused cognition is mixed intoit. (Baumgarten 2007a: §7, my translation)

66 Leyla Haferkamp

Interestingly, this sounds much like an echo avant la lettre of Deleuzeand Guattari’s statement: ‘To be present at the dawn of the world. Suchis the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality –the three virtues’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280).

Baumgarten’s notion of virtue is, no doubt, still closely related to theanthropological integrity of the individual (Baumgarten 2007a: §7). Thisintegrity, however, can only be attained if one explores the domainsbeyond the confines of the res cogitans, and it is for this reason thatBaumgarten attempts to establish the link to the inferior depths ofconsciousness, despite all the challenges posed to rational reasoning.Via the analogon rationis, a faculty that is at once ‘analogous’ toand decidedly different from the ratio itself, he paves the way for the‘becoming aesthetic’ of reason.

Deleuze, in his reading of Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature,draws attention to Hume’s interest in

the problems of animal psychology, perhaps because the animal is naturewithout culture: the principles act upon its mind, but their only effect isa simple effect. Not having general rules, being held by the instinct to theactual, lacking any stable fancy and reflective procedures, the animal alsolacks history. This is precisely the problem: how to explain that in the caseof humanity, culture and history are constituted in the way that the fancy isre-established, through the resonance of affections within the mind. How canwe explain the union of the most frivolous and the most serious?. (Deleuze1991: 60)

From the Deleuzian perspective, if we consider Baumgarten’s project asan attempt to conjoin the most frivolous and the most serious, we shouldnote that he does so by setting the analogon rationis between the tworealms. What is addressed by the term is less an analogical similarity toreason than an ongoing correspondence between Reason and its Other.Already placed by Christian Wolff in the rubric of empirical psychology(Wolff 1968: §506), the term analogon rationis originates from thedomain of animal psychology, and is mentioned as such in Leibniz’sMonadology (1714) (Leibniz 1998b: §26, §28). Hence, Baumgarten’suse of the syntagm in the context of human sensual cognition not onlyemphasises the human being’s hitherto neglected instinctive heritage, italso renders rationality complementary to the realm of the irrational.Thus, the aesthetic intervention brings about, in a very Deleuzian way,the becoming animal of the man of reason.

Furthermore, in order to underscore the clear yet confused characterof sensible cognition, Baumgarten makes use of the term haecceitas

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(haecceity), which he borrows from Duns Scotus. Unlike quidditas,by way of which the given object is rendered part of a typology,haecceity, following the dictum ‘Haecceitas est singularitas’, addressesthat singular property which lends something its individual difference.Baumgarten employs this term to emphasise the immediacy of aestheticcognition, an immediacy that sets it apart from the superior facultywhich, in order to attain clear and distinct perceptions, constantlyengages in series of intermediate operations based upon reflexionand abstraction (Baumgarten 2007b: §755). Baumgarten’s haecceity isnot unlike Emily Dickinson’s ‘certain slant of light’, the unique yetinexplicable property that constitutes the driving force behind whathe calls impetus aestheticus and its ability to incite ‘vehement’ affects(Baumgarten 2007a: §78).

In the case of Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of haecceity is used ina novel sense that does away with forms and subjects, ‘in the sense of anindividuation which is not that of an object, nor of a person, but ratherof an event (wind, river, day or even hour of the day)’ (Deleuze andParnet 2002: 155, translator’s note), or as ‘a mode of individuation verydifferent from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance’ (Deleuzeand Guattari 1987: 261). While forms and subjects belong to the planeof organisation, haecceities, ‘modest and microscopic’ (Deleuze 1995:141), are pre-personal intensities that circulate the plane of consistency,where ‘it is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate thatis a haecceity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 262). Interestingly, in theDeleuzian context it is the girl that is the very epitome of haecceity:

The girl is certainly not defined by virginity; she is defined by a relationof movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a combination of atoms,an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases to roam upon a bodywithout organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. Thus girls do notbelong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere,between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the lineof flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. Theonly way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, theintermezzo. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 276–7, emphasis added)

In Aesthetica, the analogon rationis that ‘crosses right through’ alsocorresponds to the figure of the girl insofar as Baumgarten refers to aes-thetics as ‘logic’s younger sister’ (Baumgarten 2007a: §13). The analogyconnotes on the one hand both the frivolity and the vivacity of aestheticsas opposed to the seriousness of formal logic, and on the other hand ithighlights the genetic relation between the sensual and the rational.

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As Deleuzian philosophy seeks the reversal of the relationship ofthe rational and the sensual, according to which the ‘superior’ facultyevolves from the ‘inferior depths’, the younger sister becomes, in actualfact, the older one. Thus Deleuzian philosophy retains its share of theobscure and the confused, just as it always retains something of the chaosof the plane of immanence in its concepts (Deleuze and Guattari 2003:118).

Baumgarten’s work is a first moment in the reversal of the relationbetween sense and sensation, a moment that would become a seminalimpulse for German romantic thought, whose importance for Deleuzeis not yet charted with enough precision. Baumgarten’s aestheticexperiment stands at the beginning of a movement that ‘feels’ andacknowledges the birth of philosophy from aesthetics. After all, JohannGottfried Herder’s praise of Baumgarten, which posits the rationalistphilosopher as the precursor of the (romantic) tendencies aimed atthwarting the rationalistic doctrines of the Enlightenment, could easilyapply to Deleuzian philosophy, as the mode of thought concentrating onthe in-between of sense and sensation:

The human soul lies before him, in its sensuous – that is, its most effectual andvivid – parts, like an enormous ocean that even in its calmest moments seemsfull of waves that are lifted up to heaven: there I place you, O philosopher offeeling, as on a high rock jutting out amid the waves. Now gaze down intothe dark abyss of the human soul, where the sensations of the brute shadeinto the sensations of man, and as it were commingle with the soul from afar;gaze down into the abyss of obscure thoughts, from which there subsequentlyarise drives and emotions and pleasure and pain. Place the feeling of beautywhere it belongs: between the angel and the animal, between the perfection ofthe infinite and the sensuous, vegetal gratification of cattle. [. . .] If you knowthe workshops of my animal spirits, then show me the spirit of beauty thatcourses through my veins [. . .]; show me beauty instead of conviction andreason and truth. Show me how the impressions in my sense organs becomeimages in my soul, how my imagination pours rapture into my veins and thatvery moment weaves a mist around my faculty of reason. (Herder 2006: 44)

ReferencesBaumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (2004 [1739]) Metaphysik, trans. Georg Friedrich

Meier, Jena: Schleglmann.Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (2007a [1750–8]) Ästhetik I (latein/deutsch), trans.

Dagmar Mirbach, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (2007b [1750–8]) Ästhetik II (latein/deutsch),

trans. Dagmar Mirbach, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

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Cassirer, Ernst (1955) The Philosophy of Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koellnand James P. Pettegrove, Boston: Beacon Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin V. Boundas,New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York:Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2003) What is Philosophy?, trans. GrahamBurchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2002) Dialogues II, trans. Graham Burchell andHugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press.

Herder, Johann Gottfried (2006 [1767]) ‘A Monument to Baumgarten’, in SelectedWritings in Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore, Princeton and Oxford:Princeton University Press, pp. 41–50.

Kant, Immanuel (2003 [1781, 1787]) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. M. D.Meiklejohn, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1998a [1686]) ‘Discourse on Metaphysics’, inPhilosophical Texts, ed. and trans. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks,New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–93.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1998b [1714]) ‘Monadology’, in Philosophical Texts,ed. and trans. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks, New York: OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 267–81.

Wolff, Christian (1968 [1732]) Christiani Wolffii Psychologia Empirica, Hildesheim:Olms.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000814

The Time of Drama in Nietzsche andDeleuze: A Life as PerformativeInteraction

Arno Böhler Universität Wien, Wien

Abstract

Nietzsche’s model of eternal return triggers a drama of affirmation,the overcoming of a simple miming of our ancestors in favour of anactive participation in the counter-actualisation of hidden potentials inrecurrent events. Based on a close study of Zarathustra’s struggle to freehimself from a suffocating nihilism, the paper focuses on the revelatorycaesura that ushers in what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time, atime of ‘doing’ rather than reflection.

Keywords: Zarathustra, eternal return, caesura, syntheses of time,drama, Deleuze

After all, since we are the products of earlier generations, we are also theproducts of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes. It isimpossible to loosen oneself from this chain entirely. Even if we condemnthose aberrations and consider ourselves released from them, we have not yetovercome the fact that we are derived from them. (Nietzsche 1999a: 270, mytranslation)

This passage by Friedrich Nietzsche, from his second untimelyinvestigation On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, gives us a clueregarding what it means to become a living being. A life starts preciselywith the performance of an act of repetition. It comes not with somerepetition of the future in which ‘the man without qualities’ reveals thevastness and joyful brilliance of the empty form of time on the planeof immanence, but in reproducing unconsciously the shades of one’sancestors by simply becoming their bodily double. Every singular modeof existence owes his or her life in the first place to the fact that oneentity has started to repeat another – and this not by will or reflection,

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but via the performance of what Deleuze has called, in accordance withHusserl, a passive synthesis, a way of acting that is performed IN DEEDin a pre-reflective, unconscious manner before one is even aware of whatone is actually doing as one is performing it, this act, this IT.

Repeating others in such a mode is precisely how acting the drama of alife begins. Since I never existed before this act, but am rather producedby and through its performance, it, this particular IT that has createdme at the very onset of my life is perforce the transcendental field of apre-individual essence. It is an unconscious activity that has started tocreate me rather than I having created IT. Even when one condemns thismode of repetition later on, after one has started to exist, the fact thatone derives from it is not annihilated or stopped by simply deciding notto repeat it, this IT, anymore in the future.

‘At best’, Nietzsche continues,

we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited customary natureand our knowledge. [. . .] We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a secondnature, so that the first nature atrophies. It is an attempt to give oneself, as itwere, a past a posteriori, out of which we may be descended in opposition tothe one from which we are descended. (Nietzsche 1999a: 270)

Perhaps, Nietzsche writes, one begins to repeat one’s ancestorsdifferently in one’s own life by cultivating new habits and differentinstincts, in short, by cultivating a second nature arising from theperformance of deconstructing one’s inherited past. Culture, in theseterms, is a word that indicates nothing less than the gap between twoforms of nature: a first and a second one, divided and fractured in twoparts by the occurrence of a powerful resistance, resisting the simplereproduction of a past tense, so that the repetition of one’s IT getsout of joint and thereby becomes agonistic in itself. This fracturedself longs for ‘me’ to be recovered by transforming it, this woundedIT, by transforming IT into a more promising one, a more promisingfuture.

In the very beginning of a life, that life usually does not stay in contactwith itself in an exuberant way. One is rather used to live one’s life as ifone were not alive at all. Being just the medium of one’s ancestors, one’slife simply mimes one’s heritage over and over again. In such a ‘bad’form of dramatising one’s life, one lives as those who taught one howto live. Zarathustra regards the animalistic existence of his animals ‘asbarrel organs and buffoons’, taking place even where one should finallylet go of the same old fables in order to regenerate them anew. It is not aquestion of relapse but rather one of regeneration, a call to perform the

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third synthesis of time, that temporality in which one is actually on theway to recover from a poisonous cultural beating, ready to counter-signlife again, once and for all, over and over again. Amor fati.

I. Caesura – The Time of a Drama

In Deleuze, as well as in Nietzsche, culture does not at all start with asocial contract but, with the event of a traumatic caesura, a global hit,responsible for the shattering of our IT. Deleuze says,

The caesura . . . must be determined in the image of a unique and tremendousevent, an act which is adequate to time as a whole. [. . .] Such a symboladequate to the totality of a time [that causes an entire world to pass away],may be expressed in many ways: to throw time out of joint, to make the sunexplode, to throw oneself into the volcano, to kill God or the father. (Deleuze1994: 89)

Clearly this is a dramatic situation, in which the unfolding of time itselfreaches a point where it longs for an epochal change: a nadir or zeropoint (Nullpunkt) in time in which the image of the totality of time is‘torn into two unequal parts’ (Deleuze 1994: 89). The first part signifiesthe totality of time that passes away and the second one, announcedalready by the taking place of a caesura, makes the simple reproductionof the world, as it passes away, impossible in the future. ‘In effect’,Deleuze writes,

there is always a time at which the imagined act is supposed ‘too big for me’.This defines a priori the past or the before [. . .]. The second time, which relatesto the caesura itself, is thus the present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equalto the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in theimage of the act [. . .]. (Deleuze 1994: 89)

The temporality of a drama is precisely that becoming in which asingular mode of existence is forced to counter-sign its life by rejectingthe simple reproduction of an offered past. That past simply does notappear promising anymore for the subject called to accept it that is tomime and fulfil it as the bodily agent of its survival. In such a case thepromise, promised by one’s ancestors, indeed fails, because the passiveaffections, transferences of joyful sentiments, in fact no longer comeabout. One is no longer kissed by the kiss of the muses, the messengersof joy, so that the demand to stay within a given promise has lost itspromise. It is this lack of joy, the impotence of the given promise tostimulate us anymore, that actually enforces our power to refuse it, even

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though we are not yet sure what this resistance and caesura will bringto us. In this sense, history is theatre: ‘the action of historical actorsor agents becomes a spontaneous repetition of an old role. . . . It is therevolutionary crisis, the compelled striving for something entirely new’(Rosenberg in Deleuze 1994: 91).

The becoming equal to the entirely new that is announcing itself inthe event of a caesura longs for modes of existence able and ready toaffirm the global challenge of a worldwide change, even if such fracturedmodes know that such a task is too big for them. Yet historical agentsare often not capable of doing what they have already been called todo: to counter-sign their fate to overcome their first nature in order totransform it into a second, more stimulating one. ‘O Zarathustra, yourfruit is ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruit. Thus you must return toyour solitude again’ (Nietzsche 1995: 147).

The drama of Zarathustra precisely bridges two striking events. Thefirst is the bitter, poisonous moment in which the monster of nihilismhas crawled into Zarathustra’s throat. The second is the moment of hisrecovery, in which he becomes capable himself of affirming his own,most abysmal thought: the doctrine of the eternal return of the same.Here is a new and paradoxical promise, one able to render him the meansto defeat the doctrine of European nihilism that he, Zarathustra himself,has inhaled in his youth.

To become equal to his fate to be the teacher of the eternal return ofthe same, Zarathustra first has to conquer the inability of his own soulto desire its own return eternally, once and for all. In the beginning ofthe drama of his life he himself revolted against the doctrine of his mostabysmal thought, which initially came to him as a daemon or monsterrather than as a stimulating promise. At this time his soul still resembledmore the conceptual persona of the truth-seeker whom he had met inhis youth and heard once say: ‘All is empty, all is the same, all hasbeen!’ (Nietzsche 1995: 133). Hearing this doctrine, Zarathustra himselfwas overwhelmed with an enormous sadness and exhaustion, as wasthe crowd who had gathered around the augur and heard him speak oflife in such a manner. ‘The best grew weary of their works’ (Nietzsche1995: 133). This speech of the soothsayer had something infectious in it.No one could effectively deny the illocutionary force of its words. EvenZarathustra himself was so infected by the speech that he ‘walked aboutsad and weary; and thereby became like those of whom the soothsayerhad spoken (Nietzsche 1995: 134).

Although Zarathustra had meanwhile learned that the words of theaugur were merely fable-songs, the self-fulfilling prophecy had at the

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time become word and remained stuck in his throat. This prevented himstill from taking the all-decisive step, which would have cut the head offhis disgust with life and freed him from his melancholy.

Even if he was not yet capable of completely digesting the bite ofthe poisonous words which had subdued him at the time, at leastZarathustra wanted to prevent his own friends and followers from beinginfected by the poisonous saying. ‘I led you away from these fables’,Zarathustra continued: when I taught you ‘the will is a creator’. All ‘itwas’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident – until the creative willsays to it ‘But thus I willed it’. Until the creative will says to it ‘But thusI will it; thus shall I will it’ (Nietzsche 1995: 141).

II. Remembering the Empty Form of Time – Amor Fati

In reference to Deleuze’s text Difference and Repetition (1994),Giorgio Agamben rightly reminds us that a ‘lively’ interaction withthe transferred heritage of a certain history is therefore not just aboutremembering the past in order to prevent it from being forgotten. Rather,the potentiality of an act of remembrance lies in an act of regenerative re-membering, which, during the process of recollection, is posthumouslyreturning a future to a past and thereby gives unfulfilled possibility backto a past. Such a creative, artistic remembering ‘restores possibility toa past, making what happened incomplete and completing what neverwas. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happenbut, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again’(Agamben 1999: 267).

A history in the service of life – a topos that Nietzsche early onaffirmed (Nietzsche 1999a: 243–334) – will therefore not be satisfiedwith having dealt with the transmission of a historical heritage onlyin historical-critical perspective. Rather it will be about a ‘plastic’interaction with history, in which our transmissions are treated primarilyas the material of synthetic-performative processes. It will not just beabout stating and staging that which was, in performing its historicalreplay over and over again, but about the performative interaction withthat which has been transmitted to us as ‘a fragment, a riddle, a dreadfulaccident’ (Nietzsche 1995: 141), as Zarathustra says, in order to dealwith it in multiple fragmentary ways. Zarathustra has to become ripe toexperience this stimulating yet paradoxical message inherent in his mostabysmal thought. In addition, if Zarathustra wants to do justice to hisfate IN DEED and present a polyphonic expression of his teachings onthe eternal recurrence of the same, then he needs to acquire a new and

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sensitive lyre which will allow him to transmit the nuances and the abyssof his teachings to those who have an ear for such unheard-of truths.‘Sing and overflow, O Zarathustra’, his animals advised him on his wayto recovery, ‘cure your soul with new songs that you may bear your greatdestiny, which has never yet been any man’s destiny. For your animalsknow well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, youare the teacher of the eternal recurrence. That is your destiny!’ (Nietzsche1995: 220).

Not yet ripe to affirm his doctrine as a third kind of knowledge inSpinoza’s terms, a knowledge that elates per se, Zarathustra first hasto undergo the temporality of a metamorphosis in which he himselfwill become adequate to this destiny. The temporality in which he willbecome who he is, is precisely the drama of his convalescence: the timeof his acting in the drama that is his life. A life, as an act of regenerationof those handed-down forms of life, means therefore more than justbeing generated, more than simply to be alive. It means to performour lives as a form of Ueberleben, a form of ‘sur-viving’ while we areactually alive. This performative turn within a life is exactly the unstable,revolutionary, a priori moment at work IN a life. Every inheritedhabit, every schema, every type of action now becomes a ‘dis-position’,a form that can be simultaneously deconstructed and regeneratedanew.

Deleuze calls this stage the third synthesis of time: the critical time inthe drama of a life in which a hero or heroine in revolt has to becomecapable of matching his or her own destiny. In this dramatic stage of alife, one literally has to prepare to counter-sign and endorse one’s fate,to embrace the caesura in the double affirmation of a singular amor fati,and confirm that affirmation IN DEED once and for all.

Zarathustra’s recovery obviously was not just about repairing thefunctionality of the already existing strings and chambers of hisdisposition in order to cure his chronic malaise of being infected bythe destructive force of Christianity as he experienced it on its dead-end road towards what he identified as European nihilism. The dramaof his recovery was not just about repairing old strings and rotteninstruments, but about the regeneration of his entire sensual sensorium.We are talking about the entire repertoire of his senses to which hecan momentarily refer, and thus the whole way in which his feelingsof being touched, inspired and moved by the world are perceived, pre-reflectively understood through passive synthesis and finally interpretedpre-ontologically. All this is at stake in the process of his recovery. Thefeelings that are still created by mechanical recourse to the existing

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chambers of his disposition have to be reconsidered anew, they haveto be checked for the temper of their constitution, sensitively reviewed,and if necessary synthetically expanded, emotionally transformed,supplemented, completed and therefore constitutively reworked. For thisreason a regenerative act is not just a recursive act by means of whichone can simply refer, retentionally, to already existing chambers of one’sdisposition in order to use them for the umpteenth time. For if thishappened, then this would just be a mechanical performance of feeling,nothing more than the production of a cliché of emotion in which wehabitually react to sensory impulses with this or that affective pattern.The contemporaneousness of the current situation would then not betaken into consideration; it would not be felt and experienced.

Deleuze calls it

struggling on the one hand against Habitus, on the other against Mnemosyne;[. . .] refusing the overly simple cycles, the one followed by a habitual present(customary cycle) as much as the one described by a pure past (memorial orimmemorial cycle). (Deleuze 1994: 94)

Not just this or that organ, to which Zarathustra up until now hashad recourse, but the way he ‘uses’ his entire sensitive sensorium istherefore at risk during the course of his convalescence. Interruptingthe habitual habitus of his soul, so that the execution of emotionalacts is examined during their execution and perhaps thereby ennobledand renewed: that is the recipe which not only Gilles Deleuze butalso Zarathustra recommends in order to regenerate their emotionalexistence. Throughout the new instrumentation of his soul, Zarathustrathus was not only concerned with the composition of new songs andthe creation of a new lyre, but he was also forced to immunise himselfagainst all those who are used to translate every new song immediatelyinto the same old recurring melody.

III. On Well-known Melodies and New Songs

As Zarathustra says on the way to his own dramatic convalescence, inorder to do justice to the lives of others who were medially transferred tohim in the act of his birth and therefore became his fate for his own wayof life, he first and foremost needs new songs. The old songs have becometoo démodé to reach him any longer. ‘Do not speak on!’ his animalsanswered him again, ‘rather even, O convalescent, fashion yourself alyre first, a new lyre! For behold, Zarathustra, new lyres are needed foryour new songs’ (Nietzsche 1995: 220).

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Therefore it comes as no surprise that Zarathustra’s animals alsospeak of his teaching in a tone of voice that gives it the ring of awell-known melody: There will be a great year of becoming, they say,a monster of a great year, which just like a sand clock always has tobe turned upside down again, so that it may run down and run outagain, and all the years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest(Nietzsche 1995: 220). Fate catches up with every creature, and aftera long cosmic minute it will be reawakened to life and the externalcircumstances will be repeated, so that it has to live the same life againthat it has already led many times, and will live again in the future(Nietzsche 1995: 217–18).

This is how Zarathustra’s animals spoke to him on that morning,making a pretence of having spoken of him and his most abysmalthoughts. ‘O you buffoons and barrel organs!’ Zarathustra replied andsmiled again. ‘How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days,and how that monster crawled down my throat and suffocated me. ButI bit off its head and spewed it out. And you, have you already made ahurdy-gurdy song of this? But now I lie here, still weary of this bitingand spewing, still sick from my own redemption. And you watched allthis?’ (Nietzsche 1995: 218).

While Zarathustra freed himself with a resolute bite from the historicburden of his own ‘it was’ – that beast, about whom he said that itsmothered him with a great weariness – his animals merely watched thisdramatic display, almost as if they did not have any historic burdenthat strangled them. Almost as if the notion of the ‘eternal recurrence ofthe same’ did not burden or bother them at all in their own animalisticexistence. Almost as if they, his animals, could tolerate this idea withoutbeing ashamed of the eternal return of their own animalistic existence.Nothing in his teachings seemed to be painful for them. On the contrary,they make us believe that some of his teachings correspond to theirown animalistic nature, which does not seem to know any resentfulmisgivings about their own lives.

For the majority of human beings, however, Zarathustra’s teachingsappear to be hard to digest. This is the sore spot that marks the decisivedifference between the animalistic and the human interpretation of histeachings. For while animals have a right to interpret the eternal returnof the same as a cosmic event in which their own life is fatefullyentangled and fatally embedded, for human destinies it is proper tointerpret the same event as the chance of a concrete challenge that allhuman beings need to face, give their own signature to, and hence haveto engage in as long as they are alive. Zarathustra’s phrase ‘the eternal

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recurrence of the same’ is for humans never just a fatal truth, but rathera type of guiding principle (Leitsatz), which humans should not simplybelieve or treat as a given fact, but should cope with as something thathas to be reciprocated in practice, that is to say, considered bad orgood, cursed or agreed upon, wanted or refused. Only after a person hasalready chosen to make Zarathustra’s concept of ‘the eternal recurrenceof the same’ the maxim (Leitsatz) of his or her own life is such a personenforced to internalise it as the governing principle guiding his or hersoul. The sensitive application of the teaching of ‘the eternal recurrenceof the same’ to an individual existence, as an act of maximisationand intensification of one’s liveliness, is a re-creation of pre-existingdispositions in a living creature and clearly not just an act with apurely descriptive character. Rather it is a performative-synthetic act inwhich the contemporary dispositions of a soul are not just cited, butexpanded, supplemented, re-created and creatively regenerated duringthe performance of such an act.

Thus too the dispositions that Zarathustra confronts during theinternalisation of the concept of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’– whether they concern his ability to feel, to think, to behave or todesire – all these abilities cannot be merely used, cited and applied intheir existing form. Rather, during the process of the internalisationof his teaching, they must be exceeded, reworked, and, if necessary,synthetically expanded and constitutionally reconstituted. In a passagethat is given the title ‘On Redemption’, Zarathustra can say this aboutthe act of redemption: ‘To redeem those who lived in the past and torecreate all “it was” into a “thus I willed it” – that alone should I callredemption’ (Nietzsche 1995: 139).

IV. On Redemption

To repeat what has been transmitted to us as a life – what we ourselveshence did not bring forth and yet are forced to be – to repeat this insuch a way that we come to the point of affirming it by willing it: thatalone would mean redemption for Zarathustra, since the burdensomecharacter of the past that is thereby repeated would completely disappearand melt away in such a moment of amor fati. Once we do understandthat Zarathustra, from the very beginning of his own recovery, startedto cut and refine the genealogically transferred historical burden of hislife in such a way that his ‘first nature’ became ennobled and purifiedand was made into a jewel by his life, then it is clear that Zarathustra’snotion of amor fati has nothing to do with a passive form of love. Since

The Time of Drama in Nietzsche and Deleuze 79

his reception of the life that has been transmitted to him, Zarathustra’sfulfilment of his own amor fati represents a synthetic act a priori,which Zarathustra has to perform and execute himself existentially inthe course of his own genealogical becoming. Thus every living act,structurally speaking, represents a synthetic act a priori because theexecution of a ‘lively’ behaviour necessarily brings with it a momentof instability: the possibility of an event that leads to the restructuring ofthose very structures that were involved in the act from its inception.

V. The Dawn

Today, at the dawn of his convalescence, Zarathustra was finallyprepared to bring the ill-tempered nature of his soul to a sudden end andto rid himself of the monster of nihilism that had overcome him. ‘It isI or you!’ (Nietzsche 1995: 157) he cried out against his ownmelancholy. This morning Zarathustra sprang up from his bed andscreamed with a dreadful voice: ‘Up, abysmal thought, out of my depths!I am your morning cock, your dawn, you sleepyhead. Up! Up! My voiceshall yet crow you awake!’ (Nietzsche 1995: 215). Now IT was time;now he was ready for the decisive, final act.

On this morning, a resolute Zarathustra began to plumb his soul’sabysses in order to hear what they had to say about his most profoundthoughts. Once Zarathustra had seen a young shepherd lying on theground, doubled over in pain because a heavy black snake had crawledinto his mouth. Now, this morning, something in him cried out as well:‘Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!’ (Nietzsche 1995: 159). Not just any dayhad begun this morning, but rather that day over which was written ‘theconvalescent’, a date which would mark the singular nadir in the lifeof Zarathustra. If Zarathustra wanted to recover by virtue of his ownthoughts, a morning would have to come to him on which he should beprepared not just to teach others his own teachings, but also to performthem on and by himself, an act of biting, in order to free himself fromthe burden of his own legacy. And look, today the day has come, the dayon which he will challenge his own abysses to divulge something of hismost abysmal thoughts. The final act in the drama of his convalescenceshould take place this morning and thus become a real event. ‘You arestirring, stretching, wheezing? Up! Up! You shall not wheeze but speakto me. [. . .] I summon you, my most abysmal thought!’ (Nietzsche 1995:215–16).

During the dawn of his convalescence Zarathustra dares his ownanima to speak of his most abysmal thoughts. All of the life that was

80 Arno Böhler

in him should today speak to him. His most abysmal thoughts shouldtoday testify to his soul. From them he finally wants to know what theythemselves have to say about his teachings. This morning it had finallycome to the point where they had to show their true colours and testifyto what touches them in the deepest depth. It is no longer Zarathustrawho speaks to his soul in the dawn of his convalescence. Rather it ishis soul that speaks to him today. ‘Hail to me! You are coming, I hearyou. My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out intothe light. Hail to me! Come here! Give me your hand!’ (Nietzsche 1995:216).

Now the doctrine, demand or law of the eternal return of aregenerating mode of repetition has finally become a stimulating one,one that does not stimulate merely our intellect as a social demand orduty but a stimulating promise that corresponds to Stendhal’s definitionof beauty as the taking place of an unanticipated promise of luck,‘une promesse de bonheur’ (Nietzsche 1999b: 347). For the first timeZarathustra’s teachings are reciprocated from the depths of his own soul.For the first time his soul echoes him. No longer does his soul fear itsown abysmal thoughts. On the contrary, today even its abysses speak tohim of his abysmal thoughts.

Have his teachings in the meanwhile really reached the deepest stringsof his soul? Have they in the meantime really reached these depthsand been desirously received in the deepest chambers of his anima?Shaken by the event that his soul reciprocated his own teachings,Zarathustra first remained lying, pale and stricken. Seven days he neededin order to digest that which he experienced during the final act of hisconvalescence. ‘At last, after seven days, Zarathustra raised himself onhis resting place, took a rose apple into his hand, smelled it, and foundits fragrance lovely’ (Nietzsche 1995: 216).

VI. Amor Fati as an Elating Double Affirmation(Counter-Signature)

‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is clearly a drama, a theatrical work’, writesDeleuze, summarising his theory on the drama of repetition-in-itself.‘The largest part of the book is taken up with the before, in the modeof a defect or of the past: this act is too big for me’ (Deleuze 1994: 92).The preparatory prelude of Zarathustra’s story culminates, accordingto Deleuze, in the transition from the second to the third part of thedrama. In ‘The Stillest Hour’, the last section of part two, we are told

The Time of Drama in Nietzsche and Deleuze 81

that Zarathustra must again return to his solitude, precisely because ‘hisfruit is ripe, but he is not ripe for his fruit’ (Nietzsche 1995: 147).

But Deleuze goes on to say, ‘Then comes the moment of the caesura orthe metamorphosis, the Sign, when Zarathustra becomes capable’. Onlya little later, in the second section of the third part, ‘On the Vision andthe Riddle’, Zarathustra’s metamorphosis begins because he starts INDEED to challenge his first nature. ‘Stop, dwarf!’ he says. ‘It is I or you!’(Nietzsche 1995: 157).

The only way to free himself from his past had appeared to himin the vision and the riddle of a young shepherd ‘writhing, gagging,in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out ofhis mouth’ (Nietzsche 1995: 159). Zarathustra would have to detoxifyhimself from the poisonous grip of the heavy black snake of Europeannihilism, a monster similar to the one that had crawled down thethroat of the young shepherd while he was asleep. Now the alchemiccontest between ‘the spirit of gravity’ (Nietzsche 1995: 158) and theperformance of accessing his most abysmal thought, the thought of theeternal recurrence of the same, longs for a conclusive and decisive act.Zarathustra bites. The cut takes place.

However, ‘The third moment remains absent: this is the moment ofthe revelation and affirmation of eternal return’ (Deleuze 1994: 92).Deleuze assumes that Nietzsche did not have enough time to formulatedramatically this third stage in doing philosophy. Of course, the timeafter Zarathustra’s recovery, the smell of the rose apple and its lovelyfragrance, is on the far side with respect to Nietzsche’s enterprise. Butit is by no means out of bounds. It rather expresses his will of doingphilosophy from a perspective located wholly within the scope andpurview of The Use and Abuse of History for LIFE. ‘In this sense’, onecan agree with Deleuze,

something completely new begins with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. They nolonger reflect on the theatre in the Hegelian manner. Neither do they set up aphilosophical theatre. They invent an incredible equivalent of theatre withinphilosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and anew philosophy. (Deleuze 1994: 8)

ReferencesAgamben, Giorgio (1999) Potentialities, Stanford: Stanford University Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:

Columbia University Press.Nietzsche, Friedrich (1995) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None,

trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: The Modern Library.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1999a) Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, Vom Nutzen undNachteil der Historie für das Leben, Vol. 1, in Sämtliche Werke – KritischeStudienausgabe (15 v.), Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp. 243–334.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1999b) Genealogie der Moral, Vol. 5, in Sämtliche Werke– Kritische Studienausgabe (15 v.), Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,p. 347.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000826

Sense, Being and the Revelatory Event:Deleuze and Metamorphosis

Peter Hertz-Ohmes State University of New York, Oswego

Abstract

Metamorphosis is a sudden change, a ‘becoming-other’ in life orin philosophical perspective. A revelatory event initiates in a doublemanner the move from Heidegger’s futile search for a transcendentalIT that delivers perceptible beings to the confident positing of Deleuze’stranscendental empiricism, suffused with the IF of incorporeal sense. Inthe process Deleuze dramatically enacts his personal connection betweensense (Sinn) and being (Sein).

Keywords: event, being, incorporeal sense, transcendental empiricism,becoming-other, Deleuze

When working with philosophers who live philosophy rather thanconsider it an academic exercise, key words that they use can be trapsthat prevent rather than facilitate understanding. This is especially aproblem when two or more languages are involved: French, German andEnglish or Greek and Hebrew, not to mention Japanese and English.1

To grasp the problem, it can be useful trying to translate a majorphilosopher such as Heidegger, with all of his etymological baggage,or Nietzsche, with his idiosyncratic, aphoristic and purposely counter-philosophical vocabulary. With respect to French philosopher GillesDeleuze, who draws heavily on both Heidegger and Nietzsche, thetraps multiply because he also lays them deliberately and subversivelyin order to mislead academic explication and thus to force the kind ofconfrontation with conceptual dead ends that has the power to lead to‘enlightenment’.

Take for example Deleuze’s use of ‘événement’. This term translateseasily into English ‘event’, a relatively innocuous, even weightless word.In German however, ‘evenement’ becomes ‘Ereignis’, which, thanks toHeidegger and a long philosophical tradition, carries the whole weight of

84 Peter Hertz-Ohmes

Being on its shoulders. Both translations are clearly traps. What Deleuzecalls ‘evenement’ is decidedly neither ‘event’ nor ‘Ereignis’. For Deleuze‘evenement’ is dramatically transformative, signalling a metamorphosisnot just in thinking but also in life as lived.

Let’s begin by asserting that even in English events can be fundamentalhappenings, that an event is a process or eventuation or becoming, whatDeleuze calls an actualisation or Heidegger calls a ‘coming into one’sown’ or coming into a way of existential being (seiend). We live after allin a world of givens, including ourselves, and in light of our finite powersof thought, there are always ultimate questions about how all our givenswere given in the first place. So then the age-old philosophical questionnaturally arises, as Heidegger would say, ‘What in the last analysis isIT that gives?’ (Heidegger 1972: 16).2 While for a finitist philosopherthat may be a question beyond answer, there certainly has been nolack of trying. And IT has never prevented one from giving Heidegger’sunknowable transcendent powers various names, like God or ideals,reason or noumena, and so on, causing philosophy endless trouble, notthe least of which is competing with self-validating religious doctrines.

For while all attempts to storm the transcendental realmphilosophically seem bound to fail – by definition, so to speak – therehave been no end of privileged communications from the transcendentalinto our world of reality. The word for such communication is‘revelation’. Revelations constitute major turning points or, literally,cata-strophes in the life of an individual or group. They radically changewho we are, give us a new identity, put us with newly gained convictionin the middle of an ongoing dramatic action, and allow us to proceedin life with a certainty we never had before. Harold Rosenberg, inthe Tradition of the New – a book highly praised by Deleuze (1994a:91–6) – calls attention to the tripartite dramatic structure of characterchange, using Hamlet as his prime example. He echoes thereby PaulTillich’s tripartite structure of religious revelation, which also involvesthe probing, unsettling uncertainty of an outsider looking in, a near-death ecstasy, and consequent committed action in the midst of whatTillich calls an ‘ultimate concern’.3 There is then in this respect a

fundamental connection between religious and dramatic thought. In both,the actor does not obey his own will but rather the rules of the situation inwhich he finds himself. In both, change (and escape from the plot) can beaccomplished through one means alone, the dissolution of identity and thereappearance of the individual in a ‘reborn’ state. (Rosenberg 1971: 152–3)

Or, as Gilles Deleuze would say, it is a question of ‘becoming other’.

Sense, Being and the Revelatory Event 85

Revelations take place in many areas of human endeavour, in religionand literary drama, to be sure, but also in revolutionary politics (Lenin),radical art (Bacon), Freudian psychology, the sciences – Archimedes’‘Eureka!’ is a prime example – and even in mathematics, wherePythagoras and the revelation of the dreaded irrational numbers comesto mind. Thomas Kuhn calls such events ‘paradigm shifts’, which arecertainly not without their dramatic moments.

So what about philosophy? What part can revelation play in the veryfield that regards revelation as nothing more than a crisis of thought andcondones transcendental or inaccessible sources only as a last resort,when all else fails to glue a system together? Empiricists are particularlyunhappy with the transcendental, yet in the last analysis the empiricists’starting points, simple perceptions, have to come from somewhere too,no matter how successfully one disparages so-called universal truths asproducts of habit.

A few philosophers actually admit to a revelatory aspect inphilosophy, as in Nietzsche’s famous revelation of the ‘eternal return’or Schelling’s systematic treatment of revelation. But other philosopherstake pains to deny that revelation has philosophical relevance. Nietzschestands accused of having hallucinations, and Kierkegaard faultsSchelling for misunderstanding the singular and personal aspect thatmakes revelation so special. Plato’s famous solution was to wrap theproblem of revelatory communication in myth!

So what about Gilles Deleuze? He should know something aboutrevelation because early in his career he too went through a trans-mutational experience, a veritable philosophical metamorphosis.4 Afterthe publication of his first book on Hume (Deleuze 1991/1953),Deleuze endured eight years of silence, what he himself calls ‘a hole’in his life before emerging again with a spate of major books and anew philosophical buzzword: transcendental empiricism (Deleuze 1997:138). ‘This eight year hole in Deleuze’s intellectual life does in factrepresent [. . . ] a period of dramatic reorientation in his philosophicalapproach’, says Michael Hardt (1993: xx). The movement fromordinary or classical empiricism to virtual-transcendental empiricismwas for him an extraordinarily difficult crisis of reconceptualisation,profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s own crisis. The result thereafter:the astonishing consistency of Deleuze’s thought, even if that is difficultto see under the breadth and complexity of his works.

But how are we to understand this ‘other’ Deleuze with his ‘other’philosophy? What in the world is ‘transcendental’ empiricism? Isn’tthat a contradiction in terms, a non sequitur or even a joke? If it is

86 Peter Hertz-Ohmes

a joke, that may sound hopeless but it is not serious. If it is a joke,it is in line with René Thom’s catastrophe theory. Catastrophe theorywas all the rage a few years ago, before chaos theory took centrestage, and culminated in a book by John Paulos called Mathematicsand Humor.5 But as Paulos knows, Thom’s catastrophe singularities arenot necessarily mathematical singularities at all but can be philosophicalbreaks or jumps between two ways of thinking, in this case betweenempiricism and transcendentalism.

If Deleuze is cast as an empiricist, his difficulty is clear: he isan outsider with respect to transcendental philosophy and cannotsatisfactorily attack its presuppositions. This is Hamlet’s problem aswell, and why Hamlet dithers and cannot kill the king in the firstpart of his play. Deleuze’s identity as an empiricist must undergoa radical transmutation if he is to re-emerge in the royal realm oftranscendentalism and legitimately kill its assumptions. Somehow hisempiricism must take on a virtual aspect it has heretofore avoided.

But how can Deleuze manage that? His new confidence, his newphilosophical persona, can only be grounded if he can make sense ofhis new position. Make sense of his new position? No. Not make senseOF the new position, but make sense THE new position. In otherwords, Deleuze decides to insert SENSE in the catastrophic break orjump between empiricism and transcendentalism as a new kind of linkbetween the actual or empirical and the virtual or ‘transcendental’.The point is basically as follows: Deleuze re-prioritises thought bymoving from being to sense, that is (in German) from SEIN toSINN.

Yes, transcendental empiricism is a kind of joke, but the joke is onthe transcendentalists. We began by saying that the transcendental isa source from which emanate the laws and models, the forms andideals, the originals and paradigms on which we base our accidentaland imperfect real world. Its Being is unassailable from this side, thatis to say, from the world of beings. But it communicates in privilegedand personal communications with the world through those we callpriests and rulers, prophets and principals. If like Kant we discountthe personages who claim a connection to the transcendental, there arestill the intuitions of reason or harmony or common sense to consider.Must we take these intuitions on faith? Or was Kant trapped by asearch for integrative sources, just as certainly as Hume was trappedby a ‘pointilism’ that simply could not coalesce to form the kindof actual worlds we all experience.6 As paradoxical as it may seem,it is precisely Deleuze’s ingenious concept of sense that supplies the

Sense, Being and the Revelatory Event 87

conceptual glue Kantians and empiricists have both failed to produce.And this is the subject of the intentionally paradox-ridden DeleuzianLogic of Sense.

How then can we characterise sense? In a way, Deleuze’s sense isnothing at all, at least insofar as it is incorporeal and cannot be touchedor felt as such. But if eventuation is a giving, the giving of perceptions,then, says Deleuze, the resulting extensive environment must necessarilybe charged with a correlative given, a correlative sense. Incorporealsense lies like a transparent skin on everything that is in the world,including and particularly the corporeal linguistic units, written or oral,whose various possible senses it implies. Philosophically speaking, sensecan be considered the tissue of concepts that holds any particularculture together, whether yours or mine or the possible worlds of anysocial group we can imagine. This tissue is entirely this-worldly, nottranscendental.

On the one hand, sense is neither inherently virtual nor trans-cendental, any more than are the more or less flexible concepts thatmake up sense. All this is truly real. But on the other hand, because it isincorporeal, sense is not imbedded in or directly attached to the physicalor material world, including actualised time and space. It is truly ‘entretemps’ or ‘meanwhile’ with respect to the succession of time, and assuch, unlike chronological time, sense is in a special way ‘recurrent’ orsuperimposed upon itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994b: 158). It thusbears some interesting resemblances, as we are beginning to see, to whatNietzsche calls the eternal return of the same or what Klossowski callsthe vicious circle.

The job of philosophy, as Deleuze understands it, is to create and/ordismantle concepts. Concepts make explicit implicitly held beliefs thatare fundamental to a society. Concepts are generated geopolitically andself-referentially out of their own constituent parts, without the needof controlling emanations from a transcendental source. They are, asDeleuze says, ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994b: 22). And, I repeat, constructing conceptsis what a philosopher does, with perhaps a crisis of thought, but notwith the help of otherworldly sources. Thus philosophy, by showing howconcepts are constructed, has the means to eliminate classical realms ofemanation.

Nevertheless, incorporeal sense would be completely vacuous if therewere no actualised worlds to cover. And no doubt we are all within aworld that is both constant and changing all around us. So the questionbecomes, how can empiricism account for the being of the sensible? Or

88 Peter Hertz-Ohmes

to phrase the problem succinctly, why is there something rather thannothing?

It is here that conceptual sense reflexively re-introduces the virtual,but not as an attribute of an inaccessible superior Being. As conceived byconceptual sense, the virtual is comprised of collections of yet undefinedand indefinite energies that, unlike the concept itself, have under the rightcircumstances the potential of corporeal, perceptual actualisation. Andwhere are all these undefined and indefinite energies? All around us, inand among us, that is to say they are immanent. Taken all together theyconstitute a plane of immanence. Taken as fortuitous singularities, eachsingularity is a differential ‘will to power’ – Nietzsche again – a differen-tial ‘will to power’ ready to differenciate itself – differenCiate with a ‘c’– through actualisation in the so-called real world (Rölli 2009: 36).

The syntagmatic differenCiation of the differential means setting aside(although not losing) inherent difference through necessary conforming,as a perception, to the already present habitual conditions of, forexample, subject/object, space/time and linguistic configurations, as wellas of phenomenological consciousness in our case as humans. As pre-actualised differentials, the virtual plane of immanence can be consideredtranscendental, but this is a ‘transcendental’ that is as fully accessible inits workings as those of Mallarmé’s post-metaphysical, aionic ‘Throwof the Dice’. I quote: ‘anxious, expiatory and pubescent . . . mute . . .laughter . . . that . . . IF (Mallarmé 1994: 138)’.7 There’s that IF thatsays we’re on our own! Always the same repetitive throw (Heidegger’sIT), always the subtle differences (Mallarmé’s IF) in its sense. Repetitionand difference, Difference and Repetition: isn’t that the true EVENT!

Yes, event. If the throw of the dice is Heidegger’s Ereignis, then its IFis the Deleuzian event. And that IF is the tissue of sense, the incorporealcounterpart to the three passive syntheses of time: past experience,present instant and future indetermination. But being incorporeal meansalso that sense-as-event swirls around and through time, space andperceptions as a constantly counter-actualising force. We might say thatDeleuze’s Nietzsche – or Mallarmé – oriented IF lights up Heidegger’sonto-theological IT. To put it another way, the Being of the sensibledepends on the sense of that Being. There is no Ereignis without thesplendour of the Event.8

It is appropriate to sum up in a special way. If one were to fictionalisethe life of Gilles Deleuze as the great destroyer of the transcendentmonster’s ‘emanating’ domain, one would make him first the author ofa Proustian novel.9 Then, for the end of his life – which unfortunatelygets all too little attention – it would be necessary to cast him in a

Sense, Being and the Revelatory Event 89

Greek-like tragedy very much like the anachronistic play Empedokles bythe eighteenth-century German genius Hölderlin. Here’s how the wholeDeleuzian story would play out from this perspective.

As our young fictional Deleuze looks at the history of philosophy tothe present day and realises that he is losing – no, wasting – time, healmost gives up his dream of becoming a philosopher. But then, havingregained in a transmutational crisis the secret weapon called sense thathasn’t been used since the Stoics, our fictional Deleuze morphs into aheroic knight, turns the transcendental dragon into Puff by writing aseries of timely tomes, and is increasingly cheered by his disciples as thenew philosopher king.

But in later years Deleuze comes to understand that without theneed for chosen leaders to interpret enigmatic messages from discreditedtranscendental sources, he must reject the kingship offered him. Toquote Hölderlin, ‘the time for kings has come and gone . . . You can’texpect my help if you can’t help yourselves’ (Hölderlin 1968: II, 1438and 1452–3, my translation).10 These words ought to trigger a socialrevolution. But they imply more. Our fictional Deleuze must recognise,as did the philosopher Empedocles, that by having dismantled the royalmantle of authority, he cannot any longer stay around and argue with hisdetractors. No, he must once again become ‘other’. No longer individualor universal within his social milieu, he must entrust himself to the‘singular splendour of the fourth person’, the truly immanent it-that-gives, and re-emerge for us through a final re-generative metamorphosisas the legendary FREE MAN. As his works and his actions show, thefree man

grasps the event and does not allow it to be actualised as such withoutenacting, the actor, its counter-actualisation. Only the free man cancomprehend all violence in a single act of violence, and every mortal eventin a single Event. (Deleuze 1990: 152)

We know from Hölderlin that Empedocles convinces his clinging friendsto leave him. He then climbs the slopes of the chaotic volcano Etna andabruptly jumps into its molten interior. So – in his own way – doesDeleuze.11 The revelatory sense of that event should continue to inspireDeleuzians both now and long hereafter.

Notes1. For relevant discussions of translation problems, see the author’s first translation

of Heidegger’s On the Way to Language in his Stanford dissertation (Hertz1967), then compare it to the version that was revised to conform to other

90 Peter Hertz-Ohmes

Heidegger translations at the time, published in 1971 and still in print. For Greekand Hebrew see Boman (1960), and for Japanese and English see Nishitani(1982).

2. ‘We are still faced with the enigmatic IT that we named in the expression:it gives time, it gives being (es gibt Zeit, es gibt Sein). . . . When we speakof IT, we arbitrarily posit an indeterminate power that is supposed to bringabout all giving of being and of time. . . . IT eventuates (ES ereignet). . . .Being is appropriated in the eventuation (Sein verschwindet im Ereignis). Whatremains to be said? The appropriating eventuation eventuates appropriately(Das Ereignis ereignet)’ (Heidegger 1972: 16–24, revised P. H.).

3. ‘Revelation is the manifestation of the mystery of being for the cognitive functionof human reason’ (Tillich 1951: 129).

4. As Deleuze says again and again regarding metamorphoses in literature (Kafka,Carroll, Proust, Melville, et al.), there is nothing metaphorical about them. Theyare ‘charts of intensities’. See for example Deleuze and Guattari (1975: 65).

5. See Paulos (1980) on the connection between jokes and René Thom’scatastrophe theory.

6. For a complete discussion of the traps Kant and Hume fall into, see Rölli(2003). The author of this paper is presently translating and editing the bookfor publication in English.

7. On Aion as ‘an empty and unfolded form of time’, on an event-oriented playingof the game, and on Aion again as ‘an infused and ramified chance’, all in relationto Carroll and Mallarmé, see Deleuze (1990: 58–65).

8. On the splendour of the event, see Deleuze (1990: 152).9. ‘Proust’s work is not oriented to the past and the discoveries of memory, but to

the future and the progress of an apprenticeship. What is important is that thehero does not know certain things at the start, gradually learns them, and finallyreceives an ultimate revelation’ (Deleuze 2000: 26). (Becoming ‘other’, becomingwriter.)

10. Nietzsche, who venerated Hölderlin, incorporates the same line in Also SprachZarathustra, part III, ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’ (Nietzsche 1999: v. 4, 263).

11. Taking one last breath into his collapsed lung, he kicks away the machine, andleaps into the mouth of the open window . . . ‘for dying [. . . ] gives him the rightto begin anew. . . ’ (Deleuze 1990: 65).

ReferencesBoman, Thorleif (1960) Hebrew Thought Compared to Greek, trans. Jules Moreau,

Philadelphia: Westminster.Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark

Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1991/1953) Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s

Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994a) Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997) Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York:Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1975) Kafka, Paris: Minuit.

Sense, Being and the Revelatory Event 91

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994b) What is Philosophy?, trans. HughTomliinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.

Hardt, Michael (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, London:Routledge.

Heidegger, Martin (1971) On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, NewYork: Harper and Row.

Heidegger, Martin (1972) On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York:Harper and Row.

Hertz, Peter Donald (1967) Martin Heidegger: Language and the Foundations ofInterpretation, Stanford University.

Hölderlin, Friedrich (1968 [1799]), Der Tod des Empedokles, M. B. Benn (ed.),Oxford: University Press.

Mallarmé, Stéphane (1994) Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield, Berkeley:University of California Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1999) Sämtliche Werke – Kritische Studienausgabe (15 v.),Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

Nishitani, Keiji (1982) Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt, Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press.

Paulos, John (1980) Mathematics and Humor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Rosenberg, Harold (1971 [1960]) The Tradition of the New, Freeport, NY: Books

for Libraries Press.Rölli, Marc (2003) Gilles Deleuze: Philosophie des Transcendentalen Empirismus,

Vienna: Turia and Kant.Rölli, Marc (2009) ‘Deleuze on Intensity Differentials and the Being of the Sensible’,

in I. Buchanan (ed.), Deleuze Studies, 3:1, pp. 26–53.Tillich, Paul (1951) Systematic Theology, vol. 1, ‘Reason and Revelation: Being and

God’, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000838

Forum Introduction: Deleuze, Whiteheadand Process

Keith Robinson University of South Dakota

At the First International Deleuze Conference held in August 2008at the University of Cardiff, Wales, each of the three contributorshere presented papers in the session on ‘Deleuze, Whitehead andProcess’.1 For this Deleuze Studies special forum, we were invited tore-address the relation between Deleuze and Whitehead by developingand elaborating our conference papers or, indeed, writing anew. Thepurpose of the conference session, and now this forum, is to examinesome of the resonances and disjunctions, the affinities and contrasts,between their respective systems of thought. That there are strikinglydeep and instructive convergences between Deleuze’s and Whitehead’sthought is now achieving recognition, not only from those who alreadywork seriously with and on Deleuze, but also within the scholarshipon Whitehead.2 Indeed, as James Williams points out in his paperhere, problems dealt with in the secondary literature on Deleuze andon Deleuze and Guattari often have parallels, sometimes remarkablyclose parallels, to those engaged with in the literature on Whitehead.Some of the most important interpretive issues raised within Deleuzestudies in the last few years regarding, for example, the relation betweenthe virtual and the actual or the problem of immanence, to name buttwo, have their counterparts in the Whitehead literature, and theseproblems are dealt with here in ways that are often directly relevant andilluminating for thinking about Deleuze. When placed in the contextof either Whitehead’s own thinking or the body of scholarship on histhought, questions pertaining to the meaning, purpose and scope ofDeleuze’s work, including questions on the nature of his thought andits relation to Western traditions of philosophy, science and aesthetics,are given a novel, surprising and ‘untimely’ quality.

Scholarship on Deleuze is clearly entering a new phase. The task nowis to move beyond the ‘introductory’ format stage that has hithertocharacterised a significant part of ‘Deleuze Studies’ and attempt to cometo terms with the sheer range and daunting complexity of Deleuze’s

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extraordinary legacy of thought. By bringing Whitehead to bear onDeleuze, this focus section will be a contribution to that task. Each paperengages some of the key concepts that define the Deleuze–Whiteheadencounter – immanence and transcendence, creativity and event, processand life – and each paper seeks to raise pressing questions about the roleand status of these concepts in both thinkers. The promise of readingDeleuze and Whitehead together is that it will provide not only a new‘image of thought’ for each thinker, but also an image of thinking thenew in itself alongside a restored belief in the world as ever in themaking.

Notes1. I thank Ian Buchanan and the conference organisers at Cardiff for giving our

session ‘plenary’ status.2. Recent Whitehead scholarship in French has often referenced Deleuze. See

Benoît Timmermans, Perspective: Leibniz, Whitehead, Deleuze (Vrin 2006);Didier Debaise, Un empiricisme spéculatif: lecture de Procès et Réalité deWhitehead (Vrin 2006); Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre ausauvage création de concept (Seuil 2002). The Whitehead Research Network(http://whiteheadresearch.org/) has actively encouraged readings of Whitehead inthe context of Deleuze’s work and continental thought more generally.

DOI: 10.3366/E175022411000084X

Immanence and Transcendence asInseparable Processes: On the Relevanceof Arguments from Whitehead to DeleuzeInterpretation

James Williams University of Dundee

Abstract

It is argued in this paper that recent work on immanence andtranscendence in Whitehead scholarship, notably by Basile and Nobo,provides helpful guidelines and ideas for work on problems regardingimmanence in Deleuze’s philosophy. By following arguments on theismand naturalism in the reception of Whitehead, it argues that Deleuze’sphilosophy depends on reciprocal relations between that actual and thevirtual such that they cannot be considered as separate without alsobeing incomplete. It is then shown that Deleuze’s philosophy allows formetaphysical terms such as ‘pure’ without having to concede a separateand self-sufficient pure realm.

Keywords: immanence, transcendence, God, relations, naturalism,metaphysics

A discarded magnifying glass lies by the side of a country lane, a merechild’s toy, given away free on the cover of a magazine. It captures, orprehends, the sun’s rays as they prehend its glass, focusing thereafteron withered, tinder-dry grass, setting it alight. A forest of mature treesis devastated in the subsequent fire, never to return, or at least notplausibly, in the new climate that turned the undergrowth to perfectkindling while conjuring up summer winds of unmatched intensity.Ancient homesteads and chancy new builds suffered equally on the firefront; those that did not or could not flee were choked then calcinated.

It takes a very detached eye indeed to survey this loss and to claimequal value for the new scrub and the ancient settled hills with theirnatural complexity, animal life and human bonds. ‘The world is thus

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faced by the paradox that, at least in its higher actualities, it craves fornovelty and yet is haunted by terror at the loss of the past, with itsfamiliarities and its loved ones’ (Whitehead 1978: 340). This hauntingis one of the forces behind the emergence of religion, with its clinging totranscendence as resistance to the passing of all immanent actualities:‘the culminating fact of conscious, rational life refuses to conceiveitself as a transient enjoyment, transiently useful’ (Whitehead 1978:340). Harmony, running from past to future through the accord oftranscendent entities with passing and novel ones, allows for a dance oftranscendence and immanence.1 Transcendent eternal objects carry forththe valuation of positive prehensions2 and, as a sum, as one, Whiteheadwill call them a side of God, his primordial nature:

In our cosmological constructions we are, therefore, left with the finalopposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction – thatis to say, the many in one – flux and permanence, greatness and triviality,freedom and necessity, God and the World. (Whitehead 1978: 341)

Yet Whitehead’s model for immanence and transcendence is very subtleand neither realm is full without the other, since each is formed by theother in creative processes.3 God’s consequent nature comes from actualcreations, each one creating a new valuation and a new series of relationbetween eternal objects, but each novel creation comes from a creativepull in God’s primordial nature:

For Whitehead, God is therefore immanent in each occasion by supplying itwith its initial subjective aim and instilling in it the desire for perfection as ispossible in its immediate situation. On the other hand, as consequent, Godis the conscious and unbiased reception of the physical world as it passesinto the immediacy of his ‘feeling’ [. . . ] So the mental, permanent side of theuniverse passes into the physical, transient side by the primordial nature ofGod, which is his guide for realisation. The one becomes many by the unityof God’s vision passing into the physical world. And the transient, physicalside of the universe passes into the mental, permanent side by the consequentnature of God, which is his coordination of achievement. The many becomeone by reaching a final completion and harmonisation in God’s eternal being.(McHenry 1992: 160)

Thus once Whitehead has set his speculative metaphysical categoriesin Process and Reality, he proceeds to describe and explain a set of‘derivative notions’ of which God is one. Derivative should be seen ina strong sense here, as logically derived from the categories, such thatGod’s consequent nature and primordial nature follow from categoriesfor eternal objects and immediate occasions.4 Here we can see the

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folding of one and many into one another, not layered and hierarchicalimbrications, such as the ones we shall see Deleuze move beyond a littlelater (see also Cloots 2009: 69–70), but relations of mutual derivationand dependency where the fold is all and the folded things, mere passingabstractions. One of these folds leads to an entire multiplicity, the manyin the one and the one in the many: ‘The primordial created fact is theunconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternalobjects. This is the primordial nature of God’ (Whitehead 1978: 31). Yetthis entire valuation is itself created, something that draws Whitehead faraway from traditional monotheisms:

One of the major aims of Whitehead’s metaphysical endeavour is to providea rational interpretation of the immanence of God without denying thenecessary element of transcendence enabling him to be considered as theprinciple of concretion and in that sense primordial, whereas the directconsequence of Plotinus’ philosophical efforts was to carry the transcendenceof God to its utmost extremity in his separation of the spiritual realm fromthe sensible world, placing him beyond being. (Wilmot 1979: 70)5

The consequent nature of God is the way this creativity and ‘all-inclusiveunfettered’ valuation touch the transcendence of a future destiny throughconcretions of prehensions: ‘By reason of its character as a creature,always in concrescence and never in the past, it receives a reactionfrom the world; this reaction is its consequent nature’ (Whitehead 1978:31). This creative circle moving from abstract eternal realm through acreative transformation in the actual and back to a now transformedvirtual realm is akin to Deleuze’s circle of destiny and his rejection offatalism (Deleuze 1990: 149), where Ideas or sense move through surfaceor intensity to an actual realm, where a counter-actualisation reworksthe form and power of the virtual, sending it back to return again as newcreativity (Deleuze 1990: 151). It could seem that surface and intensityare the missing terms in Whitehead’s account, but feeling can take onthis role and intensity has been surveyed as a central component of hisaccount by Judith Jones in this exact context:

The reference to the fulfillment of God’s own being here is unfortunate, forit suggests a divine agency with a directive office somehow transcendent ofthe creative process in which there is aim at intensity of satisfaction. ButWhitehead’s God has no such office. God’s ‘primordial appetitions’, wherebythere is this aim at intensity are not transcendent of creative process butprimordial in it. (Jones 1998: 146)

The Leibnizian term appetition is taken up by Whitehead to describethe work of valuation and hence eternal objects (studied of course by

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Deleuze in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque; Deleuze 1993: 76–82)and God in the drive forward of immediate occasions (see Shaviro 2009:24–6 and Williams 2009b: 286–7).

Where Deleuze often talks of the desires and compulsions shaping ourdestiny as genetic members of damned families or alcoholics (Deleuze1993: 69–70), Whitehead chooses the more universal example of thirst:‘Thirst is an appetite towards a difference – towards something relevant,something largely identical, but something with a definite novelty’(Whitehead 1978: 32). The elegance of his position comes out stronglyhere, refusing to lapse into notions of pure identity or essence towardswhich thirst would return us once we have satiated it, and insistinginstead on the becoming within the organism and its creative novelty,explicable only through an external source, but one whose full work canonly be when transcendence and immanence combine to project thingsforward: ‘ “Appetition” is immediate matter of fact including in itselfa principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not and may be’(Whitehead 1978: 32). Thus we find transcendence and immanence ontwo parts of a circle connecting them where neither transcendence, Godas the unity of all multiplicities, nor immanence, God as a consequenceof specific actual creations, can be treated independently of one another:‘God’s immanence in the world in respect to his primordial natureis an urge towards the future based upon an appetite in the present’(Whitehead 1978: 32).

There is an important lesson for speculative metaphysics to take fromWhitehead’s characterisation of immanence and transcendence.6 It liesin his positioning of the main philosophical problem away from worriesabout the mixing of the two terms: ‘The vicious separation of the fluxfrom the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, witheminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficientreality’ (Whitehead 1978: 346). Flux and becoming must be part oftranscendence and immanence; it is a mistake to define one in terms ofperfect self-identity and to assign it the role of setting relative identityand being in the other realm. Instead, they are relations we shouldthink of in terms of becoming of different kinds and with different, butcomplementary, processes. The real problem lies, on the contrary, intheir ‘vicious separation’. The surprising use of this technical but alsophysical adjective could be read in many ways, for instance, as a worryabout how the two terms are separated, or as concern for the denialof the priority of one or the other term in their separation. Yet whatWhitehead means has little to do with how the terms are divided, orwith a wish to preserve one or the other of them.

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Instead, the separation is vicious because of the results of theseparation for both terms. Both suffer violence because they belongtogether and can only be separated at the cost of creating a false image ofeach one: ‘But if the opposites, static and fluent, have been so explainedas separately to characterise diverse actualities, the interplay between thething that is static and the things which are fluent involves contradictionat every step of its explanation’ (Whitehead 1978: 346). For Whitehead,separated transcendence is pure stasis, meaningless because no changewhatsoever can take place within it, a timeless and momentum freeblock. Yet pure immanence is equally nonsensical, since as pure flux wecannot explain its valued forward momentum and novelty, it becomesfree of any realities and without sense. This sense is rendered, inProcess and Reality, in terms of ‘immortality’ and ‘everlastingness’(Whitehead 1978: 347). Again, though, the meaning of these terms istransformed by Whitehead. Immortality occurs through participationin a process of perfection through eternal objects and God, but not inthem or as them: ‘This factor is the temporal world perfected by itsreception and reformation [. . . ]’ (Whitehead 1978: 347). Once again,this determination of the world as everlasting and completed as such isanswered by a mirroring completing of God in the world7:

In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfaction of finitefact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union withtheir transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal orderwhich is the final absolute ‘wisdom’. (Whitehead 1978: 348)

Nonetheless, and against Whitehead’s own critical reaction to brutematerialism as a mistaken return to substance metaphysics,8 therehave been persistent attempts to situate his philosophy on one or theother side of the immanence and transcendence divide, as either aphilosophy that still culminates in a God consistent with the hierarchicaltranscendence of Christian monotheism,9 or as a form of immanentnatural realism with no need for any reference to God, eternal objectsand hence to transcendence in its strong sense implying different realms(even if these cannot be separated and share the same ontological statusin becoming rather than being under the same metaphysical categories).The former interpretation is perhaps understandable given Whitehead’schoice of language, even if it is very distant from his arguments andfrom the logical structure of his metaphysics.10 The latter interpretation,however, must bracket off Whitehead’s work on God in the latterchapters of Science and the Modern World (1927), Adventures of Ideas

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(1948) and Process and Reality (1978), in order to emphasise his searchfor metaphysics consistent with his contemporary sciences.

Following Jorge Nobo’s work (Nobo 1986), George Lucas makes thefollowing important points against the conflation of immanence andnaturalism in the non-theistic, naturalistic interpretations of Sherburne,Lowe and Ford11:

Such an account of the ground of final causation ultimately reducesWhitehead’s category of creativity either to an account of mere randomnessor to a mere reiteration of the past. In either case, no non-theistic rationale forthe selective dominance in the present of some certain and specifiable elementof the past seems apparent – whence the would be Whiteheadian naturalistcannot offer a satisfactory or coherent account of the origin of the novelty indiscrete experience, which is the hallmark of Whitehead’s own metaphysicalsystem. (Lucas 1989: 164)

This understanding of the crucial role played by a transcendent realmcompleted by an immanent one in creativity and novelty is of coursejust as essential to an understanding of Deleuze’s account of the thirdsynthesis of time and the role of Nietzschean eternal return in Differenceand Repetition. Equally though, this leads to the criticism that there isstill too much transcendence in both philosophers as seen in critiquesof Deleuze on creativity reminiscent of the early Marx’s worries aboutFeuerbach and religion: ‘Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion intothe essence of man. But the essence of man is not an abstraction inheringin isolated individuals’ (Marx 2006: 117).

Commenting on Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, Peter Hallward thusmakes the following critical point: ‘Rather than distinct facets of oneand the same substance, the being-together of absolutely divergentmodes can again only be thought via the pure affirmation of thatunthinkable plane upon which their aberrant creating or deviantdiffering “consists” ’ (Hallward 2006: 156). The key terms seeking tore-establish a transcendent reading of Deleuze via the idea of a lackof relation in his philosophy of creativity are ‘absolute’, ‘pure’ and‘unthinkable’. This breakdown of relations then allows Hallward todraw the following conclusion:

Deleuze knows perfectly well what ‘unifies’ the field of being or creationin Spinoza isn’t the idea of substance per se but the notion of God, thatis, the idea of an infinity and perfection of essence. Nowhere in his workdoes Deleuze put in question such infinity or perfection; on the contrary hisphilosophy presupposes them at every turn. (Hallward 2006: 156)

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Yet, if we turn to Whiteheadian arguments about this insidious returnof the transcendent in a philosophy of creation, we find the counter thatGod (or Ideas, or the virtual or pure difference) is as much created ascreating:

The result of these truncated, one-sided interpretations of creativity,according to Nobo, has been a failure to appreciate Whitehead’s fullcommitment to the active, creative ‘power of the past’ (as Whitehead himselfdescribes it), of causal efficacy and of ‘settled fact,’ and of the radicalsubordination (from Hartshorne onwards) of efficient to pure final causalityin a manner that transforms Whitehead’s critical realism into a species ofidealism or Kantian phenomenalism.12 (Lucas 1989: 174)

I will show below how this argument also applies in defending Deleuzeagainst the same charge.13

I want to draw on three ideas from Whiteheadian scholarship in tunewith Lucas’s points to show how this argument plays out in detail. Thefirst is from a recent interpretation by Pierfrancesco Basile where heargues, completely at odds with Hallward’s steps with respect to Spinozaand Deleuze, that Whitehead’s metaphysics of God and world is one ofessential relation and mutual dependency:

[Whitehead’s six antitheses] formulate a novel world view in which God andthe world, although distinct, are essentially related, mutually dependent uponeach other. This involves a significant revision of the traditional philosophicaltheology derived from Aristotle – Whitehead’s God is still a mover, but notan unmoved one. (Basile 2009: 143)

The second idea comes from a more traditional source in the scholarshipthrough Ford’s critique of Neville’s reading of Whitehead on God14:

This creator God must be transcendent to all experience and its categories,and thus be quite unknowable. Such a God is akin to the ‘causal nature’behind the scenes that Whitehead has rejected in his earlier books onthe philosophy of nature. Whitehead’s whole effort to achieve maximumcoherence takes the form of trying to conceive of all actualities, includingGod, within one set of common categories. (Ford 1983: 272–3)

The use of maximum coherence fits with my earlier insistence oncompleteness in Whitehead and Deleuze. It is a point often missed inreadings of Deleuze, such as Hallward’s, because they take ‘absolute’,‘infinity’ and ‘perfection’ as applying to the whole metaphysical picturewhen in fact thinkers such as Deleuze and Whitehead15 are seeking tomaximise coherence across different processes where one side may bedefined as absolute or pure or unity yet nonetheless be incomplete in

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relation to other processes, thereby requiring a maximisation againstthe background of creative antitheses (Whitehead 1978: 348) or creativeparadoxes (Deleuze 1990: 100).16

So, to move to the third idea taken from Whitehead scholarship, thepoints about relations, mutual dependency and coherence mean thatwhen we have a term such as potentiality it must never be seen as a pureand untouched reserve of possibility or as a creative fount or, to useWhitehead’s term from earlier in this paper, as a form of eminence. Thisis Leclerc’s careful statement of this point, where we can see why Rortywas inspired by Leclerc for his own account of the complex relation oftranscendence and immanence in Whitehead’s thought:

Such potentiality is not a mere abstract possibility. It is a specific determinatepossibility as potential for the subject in question. ‘Potentiality’ includes‘possibility’ in its connotation, but potentiality in this sense is a determinateselection from pure abstract possibility [. . . ] the purpose and function ofactualization is to contribute to subsequent achievement as the potentialityfor that subsequent actualisation. (Leclerc 1983: 63)

The key argument here turns on the use of ‘subsequent’ because it setspotential within a circle rather than at the high point of a ladder, evenone that permits vibrations up and down it. Reciprocal determination ina circular motion means that there is never a pure origin in creation, ora privileged realm, all is subsequent, since were we to define this realmas absolutely primordial we would miss the fact that it is so only whenit is incomplete and shorn of an essential relation that determines it asconstituted rather than constituting.

To conclude then with Deleuze’s own discussion of immanence inrelation to transcendence in his short paper ‘Les plages d’immanence’,written in honour of his teacher at the Sorbonne, Maurice de Gandillac.The first thing to note is the correspondence of themes between the paperand Whitehead’s reflection on transcendence and immanence studiedhere. Like Whitehead, Deleuze contrasts transcendence as ‘eminent’and ‘emanation’ with immanence as a ‘coexistence of two movements,complication and explication’ (Deleuze 2003: 244). Complication andexplication would be Whitehead’s two processes of creation in relationto God: complication for the consequent creation of God; explicationfor the creation in the world through the pull of the primordial natureof God. Two movements whose resulting relations Deleuze describes inexactly the same words chosen by Whitehead: ‘The multiple is in theone which complicates it, as much as the one is in the multiple thatexplains it’ (Deleuze 2003: 244; my emphasis). There is then a ‘play’ of

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immanence and transcendence where the immanence of the earth (of theworld for Whitehead) pushes through celestial hierarchies banishing anythought of a pure or absolute realm, yet also mixing world and God inthe two processes. This is an ‘adventure’ of immanence in transcendence,where immanence in reflections and geneses form ‘the two bases ofan expressionist [and hence a Deleuzian] philosophy’ (Deleuze 2003:245). Of course, these short comments are more strongly in tune withDeleuze’s early work and pertain to Gandillac, yet what I want to havesuggested in this paper is that Deleuze’s work is open to an interpretationwhere immanence and transcendence are never treated as fully separable,but rather must be considered as essentially and indivisibly related asprocesses. Neither term should be treated independently of the other.More importantly, as Whitehead teaches us, a great risk lies in treatingone as a mere subset or as an eventually dispensable illusion within theother. I would suggest that Deleuze was always aware of this risk andthat in praising Gandillac he is also adopting his measure and carefulbalancing of transcendence and immanence in their difficult yet lifeaffirming relations. Should it still be said that this leads to an abstractionfrom life, the last word should be with Deleuze in his description ofa valued individual human life in relation to all others through itscreations:

Philosophical concepts are also, for their inventors and those who releasethem, modes of life and modes of activity. To recognise the world ofhierarchies, but at the same time to make planes of immanence pass throughit, bringing it down more than any direct engagement could; that is an imageof life inseparable from Maurice de Gandillac. (Deleuze 2003: 245–6)

Notes1. This reciprocal relation or dialogue of immanence and transcendence, or one

and many, is often seen as the core of Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics. Itunderpins the reading set out here, and can be supported, for instance, througha reading of Leclerc’s interpretation of Whitehead: ‘The being of an ousia is itsbecoming, its becoming actual. And it becomes actual in order to be potentialityfor further ousiai. Whitehead sees the universe as in rhythmic pulsation, frompotentiality to actuality, and from actuality to potentiality, from the many tothe one and from the one to the many. For him the universe is to be understoodas in the process, and not statically’ (Leclerc 1983: 66–7). Keith Robinson hasalso drawn my attention to William Christian’s work for a similar emphasis ontranscendence and immanence in Whitehead’s work (Christian 1959). I thankhim for this and other illuminating remarks.

2. For a helpful discussion of the necessity of this valuation over and aboveother relations, see Rose’s treatment of the issue: ‘[. . . ] while all “things” areconstituted by their relations, all relations are further defined as value-relations,

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that is, relations of some positive or negative character’ (Rose 2002: 2). Fora related account in terms of a leap into transcendence, see Whitehead (1948:335).

3. Note how the versions of these arguments about immanence and transcendenceare much more sophisticated in Process and Reality than in Science and theModern World, for instance in the way the distinction between primordial andconsequent nature expands greatly on the idea of God as ‘principle of concretion’and ‘principle of limitation’ in Science and the Modern World (Whitehead 1927:216–21).

4. For a particularly interesting account of this logical aspect of Whitehead’s work,see Martin’s rigorous reconstructions: ‘[W] wishes to elucidate “somewhatexceptional elements in our conscious experience – those elements whichmay roughly be classed together as religious and moral intuitions.” Theextraordinary appeal of Whitehead’s approach is that it seeks to accommodatethese exceptional elements in the same categorical framework that it seeks toaccommodate logic mathematics and empirical science, and not just superficially,in a telling phrase or two, but with a reasonably full delineation of basic notions,definitions, and fundamental principles’ (Martin 1974: 44).

5. Wilmot gives a full theological as opposed to philosophical reconstruction ofthis relation of immanence and transcendence; see Wilmot (1979: 165–7).

6. For a defence of the use of metaphysics when referring to Whitehead andDeleuze, see Robinson (2009: 132–3); see also Code (2007: 187).

7. Martin gives a good account of this mutual completion in terms of the primordialand consequent nature of God: ‘God “creates” the World in the sense ofproviding items in it with the initial valuations or subjective aims, but the Worldcreates God in the sense of providing the physical data for those valuations’(Martin 1974: 58).

8. See Whitehead’s discussion of materialism in Process and Reality (Whitehead1978: 78–9) and his definition of historical materialism in The Concept ofNature (Whitehead 2004: 70).

9. For an example of the use of Whitehead’s thought as consistent with Christianmonotheism, see Pittenger (1969: 54). For a much more developed account ofthe necessary move to a transcendent God based on freedom as a condition forcreation and on the importance of explanations for evil, see Eisendracht: ‘Thistheology, however triumphant, cannot be entirely sustained, for it would denyfreedom and deal inadequately with the problem of evil. If God supplies theinitial subjective aim of each occasion, and if He integrates all occasions into theperfection of His vision, how can Evil persist in the world?’ (Eisendracht 1971:201).

10. Wolfe Mays supports this point in drawing out the concern with religion inWhitehead’s discussion of the eternal: ‘We have already seen that Whitehead isconcerned in his account of the concept of God’s functioning in the universe,with indicating the elements of permanence or eternality in the world, withwhich, he claims, religion has essentially concerned itself’ (Mays 1977: 130).Nonetheless it remains very important not to make the rapid step from concernwith the religious drive and its value to an attunement with this or that religionand even less with this or that form of religious transcendence.

11. For an alternative critique of this reductive naturalistic reading of Whitehead,we find the perhaps surprising essay by Rorty (in his early pre-linguisticturn phase) on Whitehead where he distinguishes Whitehead from Aristotle,defending Whitehead’s realist but not reductionist view of matter: ‘If time istaken seriously, however, and it is thus recognised that “actual world” and“actuality” are token reflexive terms, then one can escape the first horn of

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the above dilemma [that forms are indistinguishable from their actualisation]by distinguishing between the definiteness of an entity’s characterisation (its“objective” reality) and the decisiveness of its concrescence (its “formal” reality).The latter is actual, and therefore non-repeatable. The former is repeatable,and therefore potential, in the sense that it is related (externally to it, althoughinternally to each entity which prehends it) to a potentially infinite number ofsubsequent actualities by being “present in them” [. . . ]. Its second horn [thatmatter and form are so different that the latter cannot characterise the former] isescaped by replying that the difference between the characterisation of the actualand the actual entity is no greater, though no less great, than between past andpresent – which, if one takes time seriously, is precisely the difference which onewould expect’ (Rorty 1983: 95–6). Rorty’s fine analysis, indebted to Leclerc, isparticularly acute in focusing on the role of time: an argument as important for areading of Deleuze as anti-Aristotelian and non-reductionist. For an illuminatingdiscussion of the relation of Whitehead to Rorty, see Hall (2004). Rorty wrotean MA thesis on Whitehead at the University of Chicago under the supervisionof Hartshorne (Ramberg 2007). For an interesting discussion of the kinds ofcareer pressures that led Rorty away from work on Whitehead, see Rorty’s owncomments in ‘The inspirational value of great works of literature’: ‘But it wasdear to me that if I did not write on some such respectably analytic problem Iwould not get a very good job’ (Rorty 1998: 130).

12. There is no space here to go into the relation of Whitehead to Kant and totranscendental philosophy and deductions. For a study of this in relation to Godin the context of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, see Derek Malone-France(2007: 158–72). For an excellent discussion of Whitehead, Deleuze and Kant inrelation to creativity and aesthetics, and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism inparticular, see Shaviro (2009: 33–7).

13. There is no space here for a full reading of Isabelle Stengers’ work on thisquestion around the concept of God in Whitehead, but many of the insightsin that discussion are the starting points for this study (Stengers 2002: 520–8;Williams 2009a: 156–9).

14. See Neville (1983: 267–71).15. In no way should this rapprochement of the two thinkers be seen as a conflation

of their terms; see for instance the very different treatment of the concept ofmultiplicity in Process and Reality (Sherburne 1966: 230) and Difference andRepetition (Williams 2003: 146–9).

16. For a fuller account of paradox in this context, see Williams (2008: 68–76).

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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Christian, William (1959) An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, New

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Eisendracht, C. (1971) The Unifying Moment: The Psychological Philosophy ofWilliam James and Alfred North Whitehead, Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress.

Ford, Lewis (1983) ‘Neville’s Interpretation of Creativity’, in L. Ford and G. Kline(eds), Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, New York: Fordham UniversityPress.

Hall, David (2004) ‘Whitehead, Rorty, and the Return of the Exiled Poets’,in J. Polanowski and D. Sherburne (eds), Whitehead’s Philosophy: Points ofConnection, New York: SUNY Press.

Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,Verso: London.

Jones, Judith (1998) Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology, Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press.

Leclerc, Ivor (1983) ‘Being and Becoming in Whitehead’s Philosophy’, in L. Fordand G. Kline (eds), Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, New York: FordhamUniversity Press.

Lucas, George (1989) The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytical and HistoricalAssessment of Process Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press.

Malone-France, Derek (2007) Deep Empiricism: Kant, Whitehead, and the Necessityof Philosophical Theism, Lanham: Lexington Books.

Martin, R. M. (1974) Whitehead’s Categorical Scheme and Other Papers, TheHague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Marx, Karl (2006) Early Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Mays, Wolfe (1977) Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics: An

Introduction to his Thought, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.McHenry, Leemon (1992) Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis,

Albany: SUNY Press.Neville, Robert (1983) ‘Whitehead on the One and the Many’, in L. Ford and

G. Kline (eds), Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, New York: FordhamUniversity Press.

Nobo, Jorge Luis (1986) Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity,Albany: SUNY Press.

Pittenger, Norman (1969) Alfred North Whitehead, London: Lutterworth Press.Ramberg, Bjørn (2007) ‘Richard Rorty’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy’, ed. E. N. Zalta (online) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/[accessed 28 December 2009].

Robinson, Keith (2009) ‘Deleuze, Whitehead and the Reversal of Platonism’, inKeith Robinson (ed.), Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections,Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Rorty, Richard (1998) ‘The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature’, inAchieving our Country, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rose, Philip (2002) On Whitehead, Belmont: Wadsworth.Shaviro, Steven (2009) Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead and Aesthetics,

Cambridge: MIT Press.Sherburne, Donald (1966) A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Chicago:

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Stengers, Isabelle (2002) Penser avec Whitehead: une libre et sauvage creation deconcepts, Paris: Seuil.

Whitehead, Alfred (1927) Science and the Modern World, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Whitehead, Alfred (1948) Adventures of Ideas, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Whitehead, Alfred (1978) Process and Reality, New York: The Free Press.Whitehead, Alfred (2004) The Concept of Nature, New York: Prometheus.Williams, James (2003) Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical

Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Williams, James (2008) Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and

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Péguy, Whitehead and Deleuze on Time and History’, in Jeff Bell and ClaireColebrook (eds), Deleuze and History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000851

Interstitial Life: Subtractive Vitalism inWhitehead and Deleuze

Steven Shaviro Wayne State University, Detroit

Abstract

Deleuze and Whitehead are both centrally concerned with the problemof how to reconcile the emergence of the New with the evidentcontinuity and uniformity of the world through time. They resolve thisproblem through the logic of what Deleuze calls ‘double causality’, andWhitehead the difference between efficient and final causes. For boththinkers, linear cause-and-effect coexists with a vital capacity for desireand decision, guaranteeing that the future is not just a function of thepast. The role of desire and decision can be seen in recent developmentsin biology.

Keywords: Whitehead, desire, biology, decision, causality

The deepest affinity between Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuzeis that they both place creativity, novelty, innovation and the New at thecentre of metaphysical speculation. These concepts are so familiar tous today that it is difficult to grasp how radical a rupture they markin the history of Western thought. In fact, the valorisation of changeand novelty, which we so take for granted today, is itself a novelty ofrelatively recent origin. Philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is largelyoriented towards anamnesis (reminiscence) and aletheia (unforgetting),towards origins and foundations, towards the past rather than thefuture. Whitehead breaks with this tradition, when he designates the‘production of novelty’ as an ‘ultimate notion’ or ‘ultimate metaphysicalprinciple’ (Whitehead 1978: 21). This means that the New is one ofthose fundamental concepts that ‘are incapable of analysis in terms offactors more far-reaching than themselves’ (Whitehead 1968: 1). Deleuzesimilarly insists that the New is a value in itself: ‘the new, with itspower of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new’. Thereis ‘a difference . . . both formal and in kind’ between the genuinely

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new, and that which is customary and established (Deleuze 1994: 136).Deleuze and Guattari therefore say that ‘the object of philosophy is tocreate concepts that are always new’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 5).Philosophical concepts are not for all time; they are not given in advance,and they ‘are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies’.Instead, they must always be ‘invented, fabricated, or rather created’afresh; ‘philosophers must distrust . . . those concepts they did not createthemselves’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 5–6). For both Whitehead andDeleuze, novelty is the highest criterion for thought; even truth dependsupon novelty and creativity, rather than the reverse. And it is becauseDeleuze and Whitehead alike take the New as the highest value, thatthey are both committed to process rather than result, or to Becomingas the highest expression of Being.

Of course, Whitehead and Deleuze are not entirely without precursorsin their affirmation of the New as an ultimate value. Deleuze explicitlyinvokes Nietzsche’s call for a ‘revaluation of all values’ and for thecontinual ‘creation of new values’ (Deleuze 1994: 136). And Whiteheadand Deleuze alike are inspired by Bergson’s insistence that ‘life . . . isinvention, is unceasing creation’ (Bergson 2005: 27). Whitehead andDeleuze, like Nietzsche and Bergson before them, denounce the way that,in traditional European philosophy, ‘changeless order is conceived as thefinal perfection, with the result that the historic universe is degraded toa status of partial reality, issuing into the notion of mere appearance’(Whitehead 1968: 80). But appearance should never be qualified as‘mere’, because the contents of appearance cannot be prescribed inadvance. The ways in which things appear may well be limited, butappearances themselves are not. They cannot be known in advance,but must be encountered in the course of experience. This means thatexperience is always able to surprise us. Our categories are neverdefinitive or all-inclusive. Being always remains open. ‘The whole isneither given nor giveable . . . because it is the Open, and because itsnature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short,to endure’ (Deleuze 1986: 9). ‘Creative advance into novelty’ (Whitehead1978: 222) is always possible, always about to happen.

The problem, for Whitehead and Deleuze alike, is how to reconcilethe emergence of the New with the evident continuity and uniformityof the world through time. In a sense, this problem is the opposite ofthe sceptical paradox introduced by David Hume, and which has beenthe primary focus of epistemological discussion for the last 250 years.Hume asks how causality is possible, given that the only ground for ithe is able to discern is subjective expectation, or habit. That is to say,

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Hume takes causality out of the physical world, and places it insteadwithin the observing subject – an assumption that Kant continues toendorse, when he gives his transcendental solution to Hume’s paradox.But isn’t the problem of validating causality really just one, as Deleuzesays in a different context, ‘for the abstract thinker? And how could thisthinker, with respect to this problem, not be ridiculous?’ (Deleuze 1990:156). The real problem is not to validate causality against scepticism; it israther to find a way out from causality, an exception to the universal gripof what Whitehead calls ‘causal efficacy’ (Whitehead 1978: 116). Howcan the future avoid being predetermined by the past or by the relentlesschain of causes and effects? How is it possible, in the world describedfor us by physical science, for anything genuinely New to emerge?

Deleuze takes up this problem in The Logic of Sense, by proposing alogic of ‘double causality’ (Deleuze 1990: 94–9). He reverts to what hedescribes as the ancient Stoics’ ‘cleavage of the causal relation’ (Deleuze1990: 6). On the one hand, there is real, or physical, causality: causesrelate to other causes in the depths of matter. This is the materialistrealm of ‘bodies penetrating other bodies . . . of passions-bodies and ofthe infernal mixtures which they organise or submit to’ (Deleuze 1990:131). On the other hand, there is the idealised, or transcendental, ‘quasi-causality’ of effects relating solely to other effects, on the surfaces ofbodies and things (Deleuze 1990: 6). This quasi-causality is ‘incorporeal. . . ideational or “fictive”’ rather than actual and effective; it works,not to constrain things to a predetermined destiny, but to ‘assur[e] thefull autonomy of the effect’ (Deleuze 1990: 94–5). And this autonomy,this splitting of the causal relation, ‘preserve[s]’ or ‘grounds freedom’,liberating events from the destiny that weighs down upon them (Deleuze1990: 6). An act is free, even though it is also causally determined, to theextent that the actor is able ‘to be the mime of what effectively occurs, todouble the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identificationwith a distance’ (Deleuze 1990: 161). That is to say, Deleuze’s counter-actualising ‘dancer’ makes a decision that supplements causal efficacyand remains irreducible to it, without actually violating it. The dancerthereby preserves ‘the truth of the event’, in its potentiality, from thecatastrophe of ‘its inevitable actualization’ (Deleuze 1990: 161).

Whitehead also argues for a doubling of causality, in a way thatpreserves both necessity and freedom. Adapting to his own use atraditional philosophical vocabulary, he distinguishes between, but alsoseeks to reconcile, efficient and final causes. These two modes ofcausality can be correlated, to a certain extent, with the two modes ofperception recognised by Whitehead: causal efficacy and presentational

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immediacy. They can also be aligned with what Whitehead calls the‘physical’ and ‘mental’ poles of any entity (Whitehead 1978: 239).Efficient causality refers to the naturalistic chain of causes and effects,or the way that an entity inherits conditions and orientations from‘the immortal past’ (Whitehead 1978: 210). On this level, the causaldependency of a given entity upon its predecessors, its status as an effect,cannot be distinguished from that entity’s prehension (its reception,or non-conscious perception) of those predecessors. ‘The problems ofefficient causation and of knowledge receive a common explanation’(Whitehead 1978: 190). An entity feels its precursors, and is therebyboth affected and caused by them.

All our physical relationships are made up of such simple physical feelings . . .the subjective form of a physical feeling is re-enaction of the subjective formof the feeling felt. Thus the cause passes on its feeling to be reproduced by thenew subject as its own, and yet as inseparable from the cause . . . the cause isobjectively in the constitution of the effect. (Whitehead 1978: 237)

Efficient causality is a passage, a transmission (Whitehead 1978: 210), aninfluence or a contagion. This objective inheritance constitutes the phys-ical pole of the affected entity, its embodiment in a material universe.

However, as this process of causality-as-repetition unfolds, ‘the re-enaction is not perfect’ (Whitehead 1978: 237). There’s always a glitchin the course of the ‘vector transmission’ of energy and affect from pastto present, or from cause to effect. There are at least two reasons for this.In the first place, nothing can ever purely and simply recur, because ofthe ‘cumulative character of time’, its ‘irreversibility’ (Whitehead 1978:237). Every event, once it has taken place, adds itself to the past thatweighs upon all subsequent events. No matter how precisely event Bmimics event A, B will be different from A simply due to the ‘stubbornfact’ that A has already taken place. The pastness of A – or whatWhitehead calls its ‘objectification’, or ‘objective immortality’ – is aconstitutive feature of B’s world, a crucial part of the context in which Boccurs. Thus, by the very fact that B repeats A, B’s circumstances must bedifferent from A’s. ‘Time is cumulative as well as reproductive, and thecumulation of the many is not their reproduction as many’ (Whitehead1978: 238). The effect is subtly different from the cause whose impulsionit inherits, precisely to the extent that the effect prehends (or recognises)the cause as an additional factor in the universe. Whitehead thus extendsLeibniz’s Principle of Indiscernibles. Not only can no two occasions everbe identical, but also ‘no two occasions can have identical actual worlds’(Whitehead 1978: 210).

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In the second place, the causal reproduction of the past in thepresent is imperfect, because no inheritance, and no feeling, is entirelyneutral. The ‘subjective form’, as an element in the process of reception,differentially evaluates the data it receives, and thereby selects amongthese data. Every prehension, every causal connection, involves a‘valuation’ on the part of the receiving entity: a valuation that does notjust take the transmitted data as given, but ‘values [them] up or down’(Whitehead 1978: 241). As a result, ‘the actual world [is] selectivelyappropriated’ (Whitehead 1978: 233), according to the ‘qualities of joyand distaste, of adversion and of aversion, which attach integrally’ toevery experience (Whitehead 1978: 234). This affective response, withits selective and gradated ‘conceptual prehension’ of the qualities (eternalobjects) implicit in the data, constitutes the mental pole of the affectedentity, its potential for change or novelty.

Whitehead insists that every entity is ‘essentially dipolar, with itsphysical and mental poles; and even the physical world cannot beproperly understood without reference to its other side, which isthe complex of mental operations’ (Whitehead 1978: 239). Everyentity’s simple physical feelings are supplemented by its conceptualfeelings. Of course, these ‘mental operations’, or conceptual feelings,‘do not necessarily involve consciousness’; indeed, most of the time,consciousness is entirely absent. But in every occasion of experience,both physical and mental poles are present. This means that everythinghappens according to a double causality. A final (or teleological) cause isalways at work, alongside the efficient (mechanistic) cause. If ‘transition[from the past] is the vehicle of the efficient cause’, then concrescence, orthe actual becoming of the entity – its orientation towards the future –‘moves toward its final cause’ (Whitehead 1978: 210). As with Deleuze’squasi-cause, so with Whitehead’s final cause: it does not suspend orinterrupt the action of the efficient cause, but supervenes upon it,accompanies it, demands to be recognised alongside it.

For Whitehead, the final cause is the ‘decision’ (Whitehead 1978:43) by means of which an actual entity becomes what it is. ‘Howeverfar the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination ofcomponents of a concrescence . . . beyond the determination of thesecomponents there always remains the final reaction of the self-creativeunity of the universe’ (Whitehead 1978: 47). This ‘final reaction’ isthe way that ‘the many become one, and are increased by one’ (White-head 1978: 21) in every new existence. The point is ‘that “decided”conditions are never such as to banish freedom. They only qualifyit. There is always a contingency left open for immediate decision’

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(Whitehead 1978: 284). This contingency, this opening, is the point ofevery entity’s self-determining activity: its creative self-actualisation or‘self-production’ (Whitehead 1978: 224). And this is how novelty entersthe universe. The decision is always a singular one, unique to the entitywhose ‘subjective aim’ it is. It cannot be categorised or classified: forthat would mean returning the decision to the already decided, to theefficient causes at the point of whose conjunction it arose.

To be sure, much of the time, this decision or final cause is ‘negligible’in scope, and can safely be ignored (Whitehead 1978: 115, 245).In many inorganic physical processes, the space of ‘contingency leftopen for immediate decision’ is vanishingly small. Novelty is nearlyinexistent, and linear, efficient causality can explain (almost) everything.Nonetheless, even physical science is obliged to recognise that incertain limit-cases – those involving quantum processes on the onehand, and processes of higher-order emergence on the other – linear,mechanistic causality is inadequate, and an explanation in terms ofpurpose, ‘subjective aim’ or ‘decision’ becomes necessary. Both quantumprocesses and emergent processes remain controversial among scientiststoday, and obviously I cannot pretend to know what the eventualscientific consensus will be. Nonetheless, it is worth at least mentioningthe ‘Strong Free Will Theorem’ of John H. Conway and Simon Kochen,which

asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementaryparticles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity.More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in whichto orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response(to be pedantic – the universe’s response near the particle) is not determinedby the entire previous history of the universe. (Conway and Kochen 2009)

In this sense, even subatomic particles make a ‘decision’ of some sort,one that is radically undetermined or self-determined.

In any case, the role of subjective ‘decision’ becomes especiallyimportant, so that it can no longer be dismissed as ‘negligible’ –when we get to those emergent processes of self-organisation knownas living things. It is precisely in the case of living entities that therecourse to efficient causes is most inadequate, and that ‘we requireexplanation by “final cause” instead’ (Whitehead 1978: 104). Indeed,Whitehead defines ‘life’ itself (to the extent that a concept with suchfuzzy boundaries can be defined at all) as ‘the origination of conceptualnovelty – novelty of appetition’ (Whitehead 1978: 102). By ‘appetition’,

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Whitehead means ‘a principle of unrest . . . an appetite towards adifference . . . something with a definite novelty’ (Whitehead 1978: 32).Most broadly, ‘appetition’ has to do with the fact that ‘all physicalexperience is accompanied by an appetite for, or against, its continuance:an example is the appetition of self-preservation’ (Whitehead 1978: 32).But experience becomes more complex when the appetition pushesbeyond itself, and does not merely work towards the preservation andcontinuation of whatever already exists. This is precisely the case withliving beings. When an entity displays ‘appetite towards a difference’,Whitehead gives the simple example of ‘thirst’ – the initial physicalexperience is supplemented and expanded by a ‘novel conceptualprehension’, an envisioning (or ‘envisagement’) (Whitehead 1978: 34)of something that is not already given, not (yet) actual. Even ‘at a lowlevel’, such a process ‘shows the germ of a free imagination’ (Whitehead1978: 32).

This means that it is insufficient to interpret something like ananimal’s thirst, and its consequent behaviour of searching for water,as merely a mechanism for maintaining (or returning to) a stateof homeostatic equilibrium. ‘Appetition towards a difference’ seekstransformation, not preservation. Life cannot be adequately defined interms of concepts like Spinoza’s conatus, or Maturana and Varela’sautopoiesis. Rather, an entity is alive precisely to the extent that itenvisions difference, and thereby strives for something other than themere continuation of what it already is. “‘Life” means novelty . . .A single occasion is alive when the subjective aim which determines itsprocess of concrescence has introduced a novelty of definiteness not tobe found in the inherited data of its primary phase’ (Whitehead 1978:104). Appetition is the ‘conceptual prehension’, and then the making-definite, of something that has no prior existence in the ‘inherited data’(i.e., something that, prior to the appetition, was merely potential).But if life is appetition, then it cannot be understood as a matter ofcontinuity or endurance (for things like stones endure much longer, andmore successfully, than living things do), nor even in terms of responseto stimulus (for ‘the mere response to stimulus is characteristic of allsocieties whether inorganic or alive’ (Whitehead 1978: 104). Rather, lifemust be understood as a matter of ‘originality of response to stimulus’(emphasis added). Life is ‘a bid for freedom’, and a process that ‘disturbsthe inherited “responsive” adjustment of subjective forms’ (Whitehead1978: 104). It happens ‘when there is intense experience without theshackle of reiteration from the past’ (Whitehead 1978: 105). In sum,Whitehead maintains ‘the doctrine that an organism is “alive” when

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in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of purephysical inheritance’ (Whitehead 1978: 104).

Of course, contemporary biology is not prone to speak of final causes,or to define life in the way that Whitehead does. According to themainstream neo-Darwinian synthesis, ‘pure physical inheritance’, whencombined with occasional random mutation and the force of naturalselection, is sufficient to account for biological variation. Innovationand change are not primary processes, but adaptive reactions toenvironmental pressures. Life is essentially conservative: not orientedtowards difference and novelty as Whitehead would have it, butorganised for the purposes of self-preservation and self-reproduction.It is not a bid for freedom, but an inescapable compulsion. The imageof a ‘life force’ that we have today is not anything like Bergson’s élanvital; it is rather the virus, a mindlessly, relentlessly self-replicating bitof DNA or RNA. Even the alternatives to the neo-Darwinian synthesisthat are sometimes proposed today – like Maturana and Varela’s theoryof autopoiesis (1991), Stuart Kauffman’s exploration of complexityand self-organising systems (2000), Lynn Margulis’ work on symbiosis(Margulis and Sagan 2002), James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (2000),and Susan Oyama’s Developmental Systems Theory (2000) – sharemainstream biology’s overriding concern with the ways that organismsmaintain homeostatic equilibrium in relation to their environment, andstrive to perpetuate themselves through reproduction. It would seem thatorganic beings only innovate when they are absolutely compelled to, andas it were in spite of themselves.

Nevertheless, when biologists actually look at the concrete behaviourof living organisms, they encounter a somewhat different picture.For they continually discover the important role of ‘decision’ in thisbehaviour. And not only in the case of mammals and other ‘higher’animals. Even ‘bacteria are sensitive, communicative and decisiveorganisms . . . bacterial behaviour is highly flexible and involvescomplicated decision-making’ (Devitt 2007). Slime moulds can negotiatemazes and choose one path over another (Nakagaki, Yamada andToth 2000). Plants do not have brains or central nervous systems,but ‘decisions are made continually as plants grow’, concerning suchmatters as the placement of roots, shoots and leaves, and orientationwith regard to sunlight (Trewavas 2005: 414). In the animal kingdom,even fruit flies exhibit ‘spontaneous behaviour’ that is non-deterministic,unpredictable, ‘nonlinear and unstable’. This behavioural variabilitycannot be attributed to ‘residual deviations due to extrinsic randomnoise’. Rather, it has an ‘intrinsic’ origin: ‘spontaneity (“voluntariness”)

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[is] a biological trait even in flies’ (Maye et al. 2007). In sum, it wouldseem that all living organisms make decisions that are not causallyprogrammed or predetermined. We must posit that ‘cognition is part ofbasic biological function, like respiration’ (Lyon in Devitt 2007). Indeed,there is good evidence that, in multi-cellular organisms, not only doesthe entire organism spontaneously generate novelty, but ‘each cell hasa certain intelligence to make decisions on its own’ (Albrecht-Buehler1998).

Thus, biologists have come to see cognition, or ‘informationprocessing’, at work everywhere in the living world: ‘all organisms,including bacteria, the most primitive (fundamental) ones, must be ableto sense the environment and perform internal information processingfor thriving on latent information embedded in the complexity of theirenvironment’ (Ben Jacob, Shapira and Tauber 2006: 496). Organismswould then make decisions – which are ‘free’, in the sense that they arenot pre-programmed, mechanistically forced or determined in advance– in accordance with this cognitive processing. This fits quite wellwith Whitehead’s account of ‘conceptual prehension’ as the ‘valuation’(Whitehead 1978: 240) of possibilities for change (Whitehead 1978: 33),the envisioning of ‘conditioned alternatives’ that are then ‘reduced tocoherence’ (Whitehead 1978: 224). But it is getting things backwardsto see this whole process as the result of cognition or informationprocessing. For ‘conceptual prehension’ basically means ‘appetition’(Whitehead 1978: 33). It deals in abstract potentialities, and not justconcrete actualities; but it is emotional, and desiring, before it iscognitive. Following Whitehead, we should say that it is the very act ofdecision (conceptual prehension, valuation in accordance with subjectiveaim, selection) that makes cognition possible – rather than cognitionproviding the grounds for decision. And this applies all the way frombacteria to human beings, for whom, as Whitehead puts it, ‘the finaldecision . . . constituting the ultimate modification of subjective aim, isthe foundation of our experience of responsibility, of approbation orof disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of freedom, ofemphasis’ (Whitehead 1978: 47). We don’t make decisions because weare free and responsible; rather, we are free and responsible because –and precisely to the extent that – we make decisions.

Life itself is characterised by indeterminacy, non-closure and whatWhitehead calls ‘spontaneity of conceptual reaction’ (Whitehead 1978:105). It necessarily involves ‘a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment’,together with ‘self-creation’, defined as ‘the transformation of thepotential into the actual’ (Whitehead 1968: 150–1). All this does not

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imply any sort of mysticism or vitalism, however; it can be accounted forin wholly orthodox Darwinian terms. In fruit fly brains no less than inhuman ones, ‘the nonlinear processes underlying spontaneous behaviourinitiation have evolved to generate behavioural indeterminacy’(Maye et al. 2007: 6). That is to say, strict determinism no longerapplies to living things, or applies to them only to a limited extent,because ‘freedom’, or the ability to generate indeterminacy, has itselfbeen developed and elaborated in the course of evolution. As MorsePeckham speculated long ago,

randomness has a survival value . . . The brain’s potentiality for theproduction of random responses is evolutionarily selected for survival. Asevolutionary development increases and more complex organisms come intoexistence, a result of that randomness, the brain’s potentiality for randomnessaccumulates and increases with each emerging species. (Peckham 1979: 165)

The power of making an unguided, and unforeseeable, decision hasproven to be evolutionarily adaptive. It has therefore been forwarded bynatural selection. Some simple life processes can be regulated throughpre-programmed behaviour; but ‘more complex interactions requirebehavioural indeterminism in order to be effective’ (Maye et al. 2007: 8).Organisms that remain inflexible tend to perish; the flexible ones survive,by transforming themselves instead of merely perpetuating themselves.In this way, the ‘appetition of self-preservation’ itself creates a counter-appetition for transformation and difference. Life has evolved so as tocrave, and to generate, novelty.

Such is Whitehead’s version of double causality. Whitehead remindsus again and again that we never simply transcend efficient causality.Every experience ‘is concerned with the givenness of the actual world,considered as the stubborn fact which at once limits and providesopportunity for the actual occasion . . . We are governed by stubbornfact’ (Whitehead 1978: 129). We are impelled by the accumulation ofthe past, and by the deterministic processes arising out of that past.Nothing can ever violate the ‘ontological principle’, which asserts that‘there is nothing that floats into the world from nowhere. Everythingin the actual world is referable to some actual entity’ (Whitehead 1978:244). But at the same time, these deterministic processes themselves openup an ever-widening zone of indetermination. In this way,

efficient causation expresses the transition from actual entity to actual entity;and final causation expresses the internal process whereby the actual entitybecomes itself. There is the becoming of the datum, which is to be found in

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the past of the world; and there is the becoming of the immediate self fromthe datum . . . An actual entity is at once the product of the efficient past, andis also, in Spinoza’s phrase, causa sui. (Whitehead 1978: 150)

In this way, decision or self-determination subsists alongside, andsupplements, linear, effective causality. This is a tricky argument, ofcourse, and one that ‘the popular positivistic philosophy’ (Whitehead1968: 148) will not accept. How can a subject that is entirely determinedby material causes also be said to freely determine itself? Whiteheadanswers this by positing, not an originary subject, but rather a ‘subject-superject’ that is both a producer and a bearer of novelty, and thatexpires in the very movement by which it comes into being. Creativity, orthe Category of the Ultimate (Whitehead 1978: 21), is the inner principleof freedom. It is unavoidably the case that ‘whatever is determinable isdetermined’ according to efficient causality; but at the same time ‘there isalways a remainder for the decision of the subject-superject’ (Whitehead1978: 27–8). And yet this decision or final cause is itself entirelyimmanent. The entity that makes this decision, and that is determinedby it, is evanescent or ‘perpetually perishing’. It fades away before it canbe caught within the chains of deterministic causality. Or more precisely,its so being caught is precisely the event of its ‘satisfaction’ and passing-away. Thus,

actual entities ‘perpetually perish’ subjectively, but are immortal objectively.Actuality in perishing acquires objectivity, while it loses subjective immediacy.It loses the final causation which is its internal principle of unrest, and itacquires efficient causation whereby it is a ground of obligation characterizingthe creativity. (Whitehead 1978: 29)

Freedom, or the ‘internal principle of unrest’, is superseded by causalnecessity, or the external conformity of the present to the past. Theinitiative that created something new in the moment of decision subsistsafterwards as an ‘obligation’ of ‘stubborn fact’, conditioning andlimiting the next exercise of freedom.

Although Whitehead finds the agency of decision to be at workmost prominently in living organisms, his position is not that of anytraditional vitalism. For

there is no absolute gap between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ societies. For certainpurposes, whatever ‘life’ there is in a society may be important; and for otherpurposes, unimportant . . . a society may be more or less ‘living’, accordingto the prevalence in it of living occasions. (Whitehead 1978: 102)

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In addition, if ‘life’ is a locus of appetition and decision, it is morean absence than a presence, more a vacuum than a force. Thus ‘lifeis a characteristic of “empty space” . . . Life lurks in the interstices ofeach living cell, and in the interstices of the brain’ (Whitehead 1978:105–6). Life involves a kind of subtraction, a rupturing or emptying-outof the chains of physical causality. As a result of this de-linking, ‘thetransmission of physical influence, through the empty space within [theanimal body], has not been entirely in conformity with the physical lawsholding for inorganic societies’ (Whitehead 1978: 106). These emptyspaces or interstices are the realm of the potential, of a futurity thatalready haunts the present – or of what Deleuze calls the virtual. For,just as the past remains active within the present by means of the ‘vectortransmission’ of efficient causality, so the future is already latent withinthe present, thanks to the ‘multiplicity of pure potentiality’ (Whitehead1978: 164) that can be taken up by the living actual occasion. ‘Thepast is a nexus of actualities’ (Whitehead 1978: 214); it is still actual,still a force in the present, because it is reproduced as a ‘datum’,physically prehended by each new actual occasion. On the other hand,the future is available, without having yet been actually determined:it takes the form of eternal objects, or ‘pure potentials’, that may beconceptually prehended (or not) by each new actual occasion. Whiteheadsays therefore that, ‘the future is merely real, without being actual’(Whitehead 1978: 214). Strikingly, this is the same formula that Deleuze(borrowing from Proust) uses to describe the virtual (Deleuze 1994:208). Where Deleuze describes novelty or invention as the actualisationof the virtual, Whitehead says that ‘reality becomes actual’ (Whitehead1978: 214) in the present, or in the decision of each living occasion. Theprocess of actualisation is the hinge, or the interstice, not only betweenpast and future, but also between the two forms of causality.

ReferencesAlbrecht-Buehler, Guenter (1998) ‘Cell Intelligence’, http://www.basic.

northwestern.edu/g-buehler/cellint0.htmlBen Jacob, Eshel, Yoash Shapira and Alfred I. Tauber (2006) ‘Seeking the

Foundations of Cognition in Bacteria: From Schrödinger’s Negative Entropy toLatent Information’, Physica A, 359, pp. 495–524.

Bergson, Henri (2005) Creative Evolution, New York: Cosimo Classics.Conway, John H. and Simon Kochen (2009) ‘The Strong Free Will Theorem’,

Notices of the AMS, 56:2, pp. 226–32.Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia

University Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. HughTomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.

Devitt, Susannah Kate (2007) ‘Bacterial Cognition’, Philosophy of Memory,http://mnemosynosis.livejournal.com/10810.html

Kauffman, Stuart (2000) Investigations, New York: Oxford University Press.Lovelock, James (2000) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, New York: Oxford

University Press.Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan (2002) Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the

Origin of Species, New York: Basic Books.Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela (1991) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The

Realization of the Living, Berlin: Springer.Maye, Alexander, Hsieh, Chih-hao, Sugihara, George and Björn Brembs (2007)

‘Order in Spontaneous Behavior’. In: PLoS ONE 2.5, May 2007, e443.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000443

Nakagaki, Toshiyuki, Hiroyasu Yamada and Agota Toth (2000) ‘Maze-solvingby an Amoeboid Organism’, Nature, 47.6803 (September 2000), September 28,p. 470.

Oyama, Susan (2000 [second revised edition]) The Ontogeny of Information:Developmental Systems and Evolution, Durham: Duke University Press.

Peckham, Morse (1979) Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Trewavas, Anthony (2005) ‘Green Plants as Intelligent Organisms’, Trends in PlantScience, 10:9, pp. 413–9.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1968) Modes of Thought, New York: The Free Press.Whitehead, Alfred North (1978) Process and Reality, New York: The Free Press.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000863

Back to Life: Deleuze, Whiteheadand Process

Keith Robinson University of South Dakota, Vermillion

Abstract

In this paper I argue that Deleuze’s ‘thinking with’ Whitehead givesaccess to a range of novel conceptual resources that offer a route outof phenomenology and back to life, a movement beyond intentionalityand back to things ‘in their free and wild state’. I lay out four conceptualand methodological markers (there are many more) – creativity, event,prehension, empiricism – that characterise Deleuze’s metaphysics andprovide a guide for showing how these develop through a sustainedbecoming with Whitehead. I conclude by looking at Deleuze andGuattari’s use of the term most famously associated with Whitehead:the concept of ‘process’.

Keywords: Whitehead, process, metaphysics, phenomenology, the new,creativity, event, prehension, empiricism, life

In what follows I will try to develop some ideas to show how and whyWhitehead’s later thought functions as a central source for a good deal ofwhat motivates Deleuze’s entire philosophical project. The main strandof my argument will be that Deleuze’s ‘thinking with’ Whitehead givesaccess to a range of novel conceptual resources that offer a route outof phenomenology and back to life, a movement beyond intentionalityand back to things ‘in their free and wild state’. I’ll begin by lookingat the commitment to metaphysics in Deleuze’s work and suggest thatDeleuze’s metaphysics, like Whitehead’s, is a metaphysics of the new.I lay out four conceptual and methodological markers (there are manymore) – creativity, event, prehension, empiricism – that characterise thismetaphysics and provide a guide for showing how Deleuze developsthese through a sustained becoming with Whitehead. I’ll finish with someremarks, somewhat critical, about Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the termmost famously associated with Whitehead: the concept of ‘process’.1

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I. Metaphysics and Creativity

To begin then, firstly, I take it as given – or should be – that frombeginning to end Deleuze is doing metaphysics. There still doesn’t seemto me to be much recognition of this. I know some are smuggling itin by using the word ‘ontology’, but there’s really no need to giveup this rich term and there may be good reasons for abandoning talkof ontology in Deleuze. In my view, with Deleuze and Whitehead wemove towards ‘that remarkable point of modern metaphysics which allpreceding discourse had indicated like a flickering compass’ (Descombes1980: 136). The ‘remarkable point’ of modern metaphysics referred tohere is the achievement of an immanent or fully differential metaphysicsthat returns to ‘life’ and the concrete world: a thoroughgoing effortto renew metaphysics in the wake of Kant and then Heidegger. Thisis what Deleuze recognised in Whitehead, and this is also no doubtone of the reasons why Whitehead, like Bergson, became marginalisedby professional philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century.Deleuze didn’t have a problem using the term; as he declares, simply,‘I am a pure metaphysician’ (Deleuze 2007: 42). I agree with ArnauldVillani that Deleuze’s affirmation of metaphysics is crucial to his entirephilosophy, just as it is for Whitehead.

There is much that one could say about this affirmative transfor-mation of metaphysics. Perhaps one of the more important aspects ofDeleuze’s Whiteheadian inflected renewal of metaphysics is that it op-erates on the basis of a new, yet incomplete, system of categories (witha new understanding of ‘system’ and ‘category’). These are categories,as Deleuze says, that are ‘not in the style of Kant, but in the style ofWhitehead’ (Deleuze 2007: 41), and which are drawn and ‘transposed’from various disciplines and elements of experience. It is directly fromWhitehead that Deleuze finds the means to retain and employ a newtype of category, a ‘problematic’ or ‘virtual’ sense of category ‘so that“category” takes on a new, very special sense’ (Deleuze 2007: 41). Thesenew categories are no longer tied to structures of rational necessity thatrepresent an essentially complete and unchanging real that inevitablysuppresses the different, the contingent and the anomalous. If much ofmodern philosophy after Kant, and culminating with Heidegger, simplyabandons categorical thinking, Whitehead’s singular response is to‘reform’ or reinvent the category not as a structure of being or of cogni-tion, but as the unique act or event of the self-differentiation of things.Indeed, when Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition that ‘[White-head’s] Process and Reality is one of the greatest books of modern

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philosophy’ (Deleuze 1994: 284–5), it is because Whitehead’s categoriesor ‘empirico-ideal notions’, as Deleuze calls them, are precisely an effortto move beyond Aristotelian categories of being and Kantian categoriesof possible experience in the development of something completely new.Categories of the Aristotelian-Kantian type, although very different inthemselves, belong for Deleuze to the world of representation, wherethey distribute and partition being according to the laws of ‘sedentaryproportionality’. By contrast, Deleuze-Whitehead’s own ‘descriptive’,‘nomadic’ or ‘phantastical’ notions are said to be ‘really open’ becausethey preside over a distribution of difference that is not governed byrepresentational rules. Such notions are said to betray an empiricistor pluralist sense of Ideas that collapse the ‘transcendent’ distinctionbetween existence and essence, thought and being. Thus, rather thanpresupposing the validity of categorical thinking in the Kantian modeas the epistemological conditions for all possible experience, these ‘no-tions’ are the conditions of real experience. Deleuze invokes Whitehead’s‘empirico-ideal’ notions, then, as examples of a non-representational,differential and metaphysical structure or ‘open’ system of categorieswhere the Kantian map of critical reason is displaced and reworked.Here categories ‘in the style of Whitehead’ become the immanentdifferences and intensities of the ‘nomadic’ movement and processualdistribution of being itself. It is in this sense that Deleuze can say ‘to mymind, the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus is a table of categories(but an incomplete, insufficient one). Not in the style of Kant, but in thestyle of Whitehead’ (Deleuze 2007: 41).

This dynamism and becoming of the real in Deleuze and Whiteheadis essentially a movement of creativity and so we could say thatcreativity is the ‘first’ and general category of this new metaphysics.It seems to me that Peter Hallward’s basic claim in his book Out ofThis World (2006) that Deleuze offers a metaphysics of creativity isjust about right, although I think he gets a good deal of the detailswrong.2 For Deleuze, being, thinking and creativity are one. Deleuzegives us a metaphysics of creativity. If there is one designation thataccurately characterises Whitehead’s later philosophy, it is that it is alsoa metaphysics of creativity in which being, thinking and creativity areone. For Whitehead, the category of the ‘Ultimate’ is ‘creativity’. It is, hesays, ‘the Universal of Universals characterising ultimate matter of fact’(Whitehead 1978: 21). We could claim that Whitehead’s metaphysics isin fact the first metaphysics of ‘creativity’ since he actually invented theconcept, the English word ‘creativity’.3 At the very least I think we canclaim that Deleuze, in appealing to creativity and ‘creativeness’ (which

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Deleuze writes in English), was thinking with Whitehead (as well asBergson).

II. Event

Deleuze’s metaphysics of creativity has a number of importantconstitutive elements or associated special categories. Perhaps the firstsuch element or category to mention is the ‘event’. Deleuze, of course,discusses the concept of the event explicitly with detailed attention inseveral books. ‘I’ve tried in all of my books’, Deleuze says, ‘to discoverthe nature of events. It’s a philosophical concept, the only one capableof ousting the verb “to be” and attributes’4 (Deleuze 1995: 141). Inhis Leibniz and the Baroque Deleuze even uncovers a ‘secret school’devoted to answering the question ‘What is an Event?’ Of course, thesuccessor to this secret school, the diadoche as Deleuze calls him, whoinherits the question of the event is none other than Whitehead (Deleuze1993: 76). Think of all the philosophers that Deleuze could have namedhere. Heidegger immediately springs to mind. Why is Heidegger notthe successor, or Derrida, or even Foucault, who devoted a number oftexts to the idea of what he called ‘eventalisation’? But Heidegger isafter all the thinker of ‘ereignis’, the veiling–unveiling as the event ofBeing. It seems to me that Deleuze naming Whitehead as the successorto the question of the event is important, and it’s related precisely toWhitehead’s metaphysics of creativity. I’ll come back to Heidegger later.In any case, it’s true that Whitehead also, like Deleuze, spent a goodpart of his career writing about the event. I want to suggest that whatWhitehead offered Deleuze here was a model or ‘logic’ for thinking theevent in relation to creativity and the new that would come to informDeleuze’s own conception of the event.

So, for Deleuze it is Whitehead who is the successor to the question ofthe event, a question that reaches back, according to Deleuze, at leastto the Stoics who first elevated the event to the status of a concept.The second ‘great logic of the event’ comes with Leibniz for whom theevent is a relation, a relation to time and existence. What, for Deleuze,constitutes Whitehead’s unique contribution to this school, and the thirdgreat logic of the event, is to show precisely how the event can be thoughtin terms of the question of the new. Whitehead’s creative advance overLeibniz’s event, and as we’ll see over phenomenology and Heidegger,is to lay out the conditions for thinking novelty and the new in itself.Such a thinking of the event would reveal the best of all worlds: ‘not theone that reproduces the eternal, but the one on which new creations are

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produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity. . . ’ (Deleuze 1993: 70).

What are the conditions for the event of the new? In The Fold Deleuzeattributes four conditions or components to Whitehead’s event andI want to suggest that each component finds an equivalent correlatein Deleuze’s own event.5 Whitehead initially conceived of events as‘extending over’ each other in an infinite relation of continuity betweenwholes and parts. The unique novelty of an event is given by its ‘passage’into another series of events either as part or whole. Deleuze makes thisconcept of ‘extension’ the first condition or component of Whitehead’sevent. Extensive series have intrinsic properties, ‘for example height,intensity, timbre of a sound, a tint, a value, a saturation of color’(Deleuze 1993: 77). If extension gives us something rather than nothing,then ‘intension’ gives us ‘this’ rather than ‘that’. Matter, or what fillsspace and time, always has characters, properties, degrees or ‘intensities’of value that determine its texture in relation to other materials that area part of it. The second component of the event, then, is ‘intension’.A further condition of the event for Deleuze-Whitehead is the‘ingression’ of eternal objects. Eternal objects are thoroughlyindeterminate ‘pure possibilities’ and express a general potentialityunconstrained by any states of affairs, but when actualised or ingressedthey instantiate fully determinate facts or forms of definiteness.However, in addition to these three components there is another. Onecrucial factor in the structuring of the event or ‘actual occasion’, asWhitehead came to call it, is its appropriation and creative use of thepast in the formation of the new individual. This leads us on to ournext special category and the final condition of the event of the new:prehension.

III. Prehension

The creation of the new is achieved through what Whitehead called‘prehension’. Next to creativity, and the three other conditions of theevent, this is another element that converges with Deleuze’s ontology andit is perhaps one of Whitehead’s most important concepts. Prehensionis a non-cognitive ‘feeling’ that guides how the occasion shapes itselffrom the data of the past and the potentialities of the future. Prehensionis an ‘intermediary’, a purely immanent potential power, a relation ofdifference with itself, or pure ‘affection’ before any division into formand matter. Prehension, for Deleuze, is a passage or folding ‘between’states, a movement of pure experience or perception that increases or

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decreases its potential through interaction and communication withthose states. As Deleuze says, ‘everything prehends its antecedentsand its concomitants and by degrees prehends a world’ (Deleuze1993: 78). ‘All prehension’, Deleuze remarks, ‘is a prehension ofprehension, and the event a nexus of prehensions’ (Deleuze 1993:78). The event of prehension is double-sided and ‘rhythmic’ in thatit is the objectification of one prehension and the subjectification ofanother. In What is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari describethe rhythmic movement of prehension in the context of Whitehead’spublic/private coupling: ‘The (“public”) matter of fact was the mixtureof data actualised by the world in its previous state, while bodies arenew actualisations whose “private” states restore matters of fact fornew bodies. Even when they are non-living, or rather, inorganic, thingshave a lived experience because they are affections and perceptions’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 154). Deleuze turns to Whitehead’s theoryof prehensions here to describe the creative ongoing rhythm of ‘livedexperience’ as a unity with two sides or aspects. There is no ontological‘gap’ or separation in the sides, only a gathering of things into a‘prehensive unification’, and as the many become one so the manyare increased by one. In The Fold Deleuze describes this two-sidedrhythm of prehension through the process of perception in Leibniz.For Deleuze each distinguished or clear perception emerges through agenetic process from the dark depths of the world that is containedwithin each monad. Deleuze describes this double process in terms ofthe ‘microscopic’ and the ‘macroscopic’, terms that Deleuze borrowsfrom Whitehead’s Process and Reality where they are used to refer bothto the two meanings of ‘organism’ and to the two forms of ‘process’.6

However, for Deleuze the essential difference between Whitehead andLeibniz here is that Leibniz’s monad operates, famously, accordingto a condition of closure, whereas for Whitehead ‘a condition ofopening causes all prehension to be already the prehension of anotherprehension’ (Deleuze 1993: 81). This condition of prehensive openingonto incompossibilitites, divergences and bifurcations – the openingonto the new in itself – is a key feature of the event in Deleuze andWhitehead that Deleuze doesn’t find in Leibniz or phenomenology or, aswe’ll see, in Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology.

Deleuze refers to prehension in several of his books. In addition tothe explicit remarks on prehensions in The Fold (1993) and in What isPhilosophy? (1994), especially the important concluding pages of thatbook, further references can be found in various places in A ThousandPlateaus (1987) and in the Cinema (Deleuze 1996a, 1996b) volumes.

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It wouldn’t be at all out of place in Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon(Deleuze 2003) because prehension, or its synonyms, forms the core ofDeleuze’s own ‘theory’ of perception or logic of sensation.

IV. Beyond Heidegger

So, we have creativity, events, prehensions. I want to suggest thatone way of measuring the significance of these ideas in Deleuze,and Deleuze’s thinking with Whitehead generally, is the extentto which they provide a conceptual route out of phenomenology,and beyond Heidegger in particular.7 Although Heidegger challengesHusserlian phenomenology at least, as Deleuze says, ‘in the “vulgar”sense of the term: with intentionality’ (Deleuze 1988: 108) movingphenomenology towards ontology, Heidegger ‘refounds’ intentionalityin a new dimension that does not allow for a fully differential relationin which difference differs from itself. This can be seen, Deleuze claims,by the way in which for Heidegger the Lichtung is the Open not onlyfor light and the visible, but also for voice and sound. The Open inHeidegger, Deleuze declares,

does not give us something to see without also providing something tospeak, since the fold will constitute the Self-seeing element of sight only ifit constitutes the Self-speaking element of language, to the point where it isthe same world that speaks itself in language and sees itself in sight. (Deleuze1988: 111)

For Deleuze this re-establishes an intentional relation, albeit betweenontological forms rather than consciousness and its object, and if thecorrespondence between forms gives us the ‘same world that speaks itselfin language and sees itself in sight’, then for Deleuze the Heideggerianontological difference has not reached the being of difference andcreativity. For Deleuze it appears that even recourse to the differentiatedopening of the fourfold in later Heidegger restores an intentionalfield, however radicalised, that falls short of providing the conditionsrequired for the complex and paradoxical expression of the new. Deleuzewill challenge the Heideggerian ereignis with a new conception ofthe event as a pure ‘differentiator’ and he will look to Whiteheadfor the conceptual resources to construct a path beyond Heidegger’sphenomenological ontology. Creativity, events and prehensions providethe outline of that path. For Deleuze Whitehead’s prehension surpassesintentionality and Whitehead’s event is a passage beyond being. Deleuzesubordinates intentionality to prehension because the latter reaches

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further back into the genetic order of experience, antecedent to anyintentional relation. Prehension is an event but not of the order of theHeideggerian ereignis since, outside of an intentional relation, it providesthe conditions for the purely creative and differential unfolding of thenew.

V. Empiricism

Where does this Whiteheadian inflected path beyond Heidegger andphenomenology lead? If not back to the things themselves exactly(Deleuze says ‘things in themselves in their wild state’) then back tomultiplicities and the radicalisation of empiricism. It was Foucault, infact, who recognised very early on that empiricism was Deleuze’s wayout of phenomenology. As Deleuze says of his own metaphysics, it is‘inspired in its entirety by empiricism’ (Deleuze 1990: 20). Deleuze’sempiricism presides over the movement from being to event, intention toprehension, or rather the move from ‘Is’ to ‘And’ that Deleuze calls ‘Life’.The path out of phenomenology and ontology leads back to life, backto ‘erewhon’ and things in their wild state. This is the heart of Deleuze’smetaphysics. But Deleuze’s empiricist metaphysics, or ‘metaphysics ofthe concrete’ to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, is obviously not any simpleappeal to lived experience nor is it an aversion to concepts. Rather, the‘secret of empiricism’, for Deleuze, is that it is the most insane creationof concepts in which, as we have seen, the concept becomes the thing initself in its free and wild state. How do we find the conditions of a life,or the conditions of a novel experience in-the-making? Philosophically,it is possible by following a multiplicity long enough to create a conceptthat corresponds to it. This is precisely the demand of a metaphysicsof creativity: it is an experiment with the ‘outside’, Deleuze would say,in which he ‘never renounced a kind of empiricism that sets out topresent concepts directly’ (Deleuze 1995: 88–9). What is the source ofthis empiricism in Deleuze? Rather than classical British empiricism,the source of this empirical metaphysics is deeply Whiteheadian. In thepreface to the English translation of his Dialogues, Deleuze says:

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what doesthis equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from thetwo characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract doesnot explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover theeternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which somethingnew is produced (creativeness). (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: vii)

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Why doesn’t Deleuze refer to Hume or Bergson here? One answeris that Deleuze’s Whiteheadian ‘empirical pluralism’ is more attunedto dispelling the illusions (the eternal, universal, etc.) and ‘images ofthought’ that prevent us from thinking the creativity and novelty ofexperience in itself. With the illusions dispelled, the conditions underwhich something new is produced can be made visible, enabling theconstruction of a plane of immanence that is a ‘radical empiricism’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 47). Radical or ‘transcendental’ empiricismwill not only reveal the extent to which phenomenology still participatesin these illusions but, as an innovative thinking of the conditions of realexperience, it enables a decisive break with the ultimate illusion: the verb‘to be’ and its attributes, so that finally ‘is’ yields to ‘and’. As Deleuzesays, ‘empiricism has no other secret: thinking with And instead of Is. Itis quite an extraordinary thought, and yet it is life’ (Deleuze and Parnet1987: 57).

VI. Process

To summarise so far, Deleuze offers an empirical metaphysics whoseungrounded ‘first principle’ is creativity. Creativity creates events and isitself an event. Events are prehensions of prehensions, experience in themaking. So we have creativity, events, prehensions, all little conceptualpaths or ‘lines of flight’ out of phenomenology, out of ‘being’, and backto life. These are the concepts that Deleuze constructs with Whitehead inorder to lay out and populate a plane of immanence. Perhaps this is evenenough to believe in the world again. But there is one other conceptI’d like to add, one other crucial Whitehead element that convergeswith Deleuze’s ontology and that is, of course, the concept of ‘process’.Creativity, events, prehensions: they are all processes. To shift into amore critical mode for this final section I want to ask whether processin Deleuze and Guattari fully reaches the conditions of the new andpasses through the ‘empiricist conversion’ that creativity, events andprehensions undergo.

Although it is widely used throughout Deleuze and Deleuze andGuattari’s work, I want to suggest that process is a concept that theynever really explicitly theorise or ‘create’. Yet, they use it as a neutralconduit or vehicle for discussions of many of their own most importantconcepts, including ‘difference’, ‘desire’ and ‘becoming’. ‘Process’ inDeleuze, and in Deleuze and Guattari, always appears as subordinateto ‘difference’, ‘becoming’ or ‘desire’. ‘Process’ is always in a relationof dependence, and it is never given its ‘own’ concept, never thought

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‘in-itself’. For Deleuze and Guattari there appears to be no philosophicalschool, secret or otherwise, devoted to answering the question ‘what isa process?’

Indeed, just as the concept of process tends to be a necessary yetinvisible support to the primary terms of the Deleuzian conceptualrepertoire and process philosophy is overlooked as a positive traditionin Deleuze himself (a kind of ‘anxiety of influence’ since he prefers theinvention and creation of his own schools and ‘traditions’, for example,the school of the event, the tradition of ‘univocity’), recognition ofprocess thought, and the idea that it might play a key role in Deleuze’sown intellectual formation, is almost completely absent in the receptionof his work. A few readers of Deleuze have invoked the concept of‘process’ – most notably Manuel De Landa – in their reading of his texts,but this is only to include the concept as an empty placeholder withintheir descriptions and commentaries on Deleuze without ever subjectingthe concept to a detailed explication or critical analysis. Thus, Deleuze,Deleuze and Guattari and some of their most well-known interpretersappropriate and rely upon a concept of process for their own theoreticalpractices and procedures without engaging in a ‘genealogy’, genesis or‘immanent critique’ of this concept or tradition.

This claim would need to be elaborated at length and given detailedsupport, which I can’t do here. But let me give just one example: inAnti-Oedipus process is used ubiquitously and deployed as a synonymfor the sub-representative order of temporalisation and its expressionas the three syntheses of time (developed in Deleuze’s Difference andRepetition). This takes the form of a three-fold concept of univocalprocess as production (present), as ‘producer-product’ (past) and as aprocess without a goal or end in itself (future): the three synthesesof process. Desire is the process of passive syntheses (connective,conjunctive and disjunctive), the primary order of process, workingthemselves out in the secondary order of the real as product. Thus,production as process is the immanent principle of desire accounting forthe movements and activity of the unconscious syntheses. For Deleuzeand Guattari, whether we invoke social (political, economic or labour)processes on the one hand, or libidinal processes on the other, desiringproduction is one process of reality. In my view process does a lot ofwork in these distinctions and discussions, but that work – preciselyas a process – is not examined as such. They discuss the process ofdesire but not process itself. In Deleuze and Guattari, process is alwaysimmanent to desire or difference, immanent to something other thanitself. Another way of putting this point is to say that process in Deleuze

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and Guattari risks being reduced to a dependent state or condition ofsomething else and not an act in itself, especially since processes arealways ‘of’ schizophrenia, difference or becoming.

My worry, then, is that process in Deleuze and Guattari is in dangerof failing what Deleuze calls the ‘empiricist conversion’, in danger offunctioning as an abstract (and transcendent) substratum that differencesor becomings move along or undergo, identical with its manifestationas difference, becoming and so on. One suspicion here is that Deleuzeand Guattari’s use of process is effectively a ‘blind spot’ in their workresting on unquestioned assumptions about process embedded in thetradition of Western philosophy. One main assumption of that traditionis that process can only be admitted into ontology, if admitted at all,if it functions as a predicate dependent upon particulars like things orpersons. It is precisely this assumption that Whitehead had rooted outin Process and Reality by developing a concept of the event as actualoccasion in which being gives way to the reality of process. Process isof course not predicated of things and persons in Deleuze and Guattari,but it is arguably functioning as a silent predicate of events, differencesand becomings. Roughly, what Deleuze said about the relation betweensubstance and modes in Spinoza I want to say about the relation betweendifference and process in Deleuze. Did Deleuze and Guattari let theirguard down when it came to process?

For process to achieve immanence in Deleuze it would require a fullontological ‘destruction’ or, in Deleuze and Guattari lingo, a thoroughdestratifying and ‘empirical conversion’ of its traditional sediment sothat it may be turned towards its creative potential. Process must beshown ‘processing’. Rather than make difference turn around anothersubstance substitute, perhaps one of the real potentials of the Deleuze-Whitehead encounter lies in making process coalesce with and turnaround difference. Only then will process be fully differential anddifference fully processual.

Notes1. This is a longer version of a paper presented at the session on ‘Deleuze,

Whitehead and Process’ at the 1st International Deleuze Conference, Universityof Cardiff, Wales, August 2008. I’d like to thank James Williams for valuablecomments on an earlier draft.

2. I don’t have space to properly defend this here but I can’t agree with Hallward’sinsistence throughout his book Out of this World on a ‘unilateral configuration’of creativity such that creativity divides into an ‘active creans’ and a ‘passivecreaturum’ (27). For Hallward creating is active and virtual and the created is

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actual and passive. In my view there are indeed different modes of creativity inDeleuze but it is as true to say that the virtual is active and the actual passive as tosay that the virtual is impassive and the actual active. In fact, just like Whitehead,each half of reality in Deleuze has two sides and one can only begin to accountfor Deleuze’s thought when justice is done to the constant movement, exchange,translation, tension, struggle, displacement and conversion between both ofthese halves and their sides. In one way or another the effort to attribute simplehierarchical dualisms to Deleuze, and the determination to polarise his thought,characterises not only Hallward’s book but also the books on Deleuze byBadiou and Žižek. Whereas Badiou insists that Deleuze choose (and has alreadychosen) between animal or number, one or multiple, Plato or Aristotle (and abunch of other dualisms) in accordance with a formally determined ‘axiom ofchoice’, Žižek claims that Deleuze’s work rests on ‘two conceptual oppositions’that are incompatible: the logic of effect and the logic of production. Žižekuses this distinction to divide Deleuze’s texts: ‘The Logic of Sense versus TheAnti-Oedipus’ and to separate Deleuze from Guattari. Although a number ofcommentators have objected, rightly, to these reductionist and divisive strategiesand to their sometimes narrow and misleading emphases (e.g., Hallwardon the ‘theophanic’, Badiou on the ‘One’), one virtue (among numerousothers) is that both Hallward and Badiou situate Deleuze under the sign ofmetaphysics.

3. I thank Steven Meyer who persuaded me of this. See his introduction toConfigurations 13(1) Winter, 2005.

4. The idea that, as Deleuze says, the event ‘ousts’ the verb ‘to be’ is important formy claims here since it suggests an overturning of ontology, or the subordinationof ‘is’ to ‘and’. In other words, I’m suggesting that Deleuze offers a metaphysicsthat, after Difference and Repetition, attempts to ‘twist free’ of ontology,a metaphysics of the creative ‘and, and, and . . . ’ where the creative eventsupersedes being. In this respect Heidegger, for Deleuze, remains tied to ontologyand never really breaks with the ‘isness’ of things and the verb ‘to be’. ThatDeleuze’s model of the event and its folds is informed by Whitehead, notHeidegger, is explored in more detail in my ‘Towards a Political Ontology ofthe Fold: Deleuze, Heidegger, Whitehead and the Fourfold Event’ in Deleuzeand The Fold: A Critical Reader (Robinson 2010a).

5. Deleuze’s concept of the event receives various formulations in his work butthe basic structure is well known: on the one hand a state of affairs thatrelates to actualised bodies and individuals and, on the other, an incorporealreserve of infinite becoming and virtual movement. Treating this structure as asimple hierarchical dualism has been used to give a distorted image of Deleuze’sthought (see note 2 above). I suggest that a better image is the ‘between-two’or ‘fourfold’ where each component is internal to and completed by the other.In terms of the Deleuze and Whitehead event extension, intension, prehensionand ingression each have a virtual/actual side and the process of conversionbetween them is carried out by different modes of creativity. Deleuze describesthis in his own terms when he refers in both Difference and Repetition andLogic of Sense to ‘two dissymmetrical halves’. In Difference and Repetitionhe says that ‘everything has two odd, dissymmetrical and dissimilar “halves”,. . . , each dividing itself in two’ (p. 279–80). The dissymmetrical halves thenbecome the ‘entre-deux’ or fold between two that informs his reading of theevent in Whitehead. For more on the event and the need to think it in termsof ‘two multiplicities’, see my “Between the Individual, the Relative and theVoid: Thinking the ‘Event’ in Badiou, Deleuze and Whitehead” in Event and

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Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze and Whitehead (Robinson2010b).

6. That Deleuze is borrowing these terms from Whitehead is confirmed by afootnote in The Fold. See Chapter 7 note 7 in The Fold: 154.

7. Deleuze studies still do not tell us that much about how to situate Heidegger inrelation to Deleuze. Nor for that matter do Heidegger scholars. One exceptionis Miguel de Beistegui in his Truth and Genesis (2004). I suggest that Heideggeris Deleuze’s primary philosophical rival and that Alain Badiou, in his book onDeleuze, is quite canny when he suggests that Deleuze himself didn’t recognisehow close he was to Heidegger. Difference and Repetition is one of the primarytexts where Deleuze’s indebtedness to and rivalry with Heidegger is playedout and the conspicuous absence of Heidegger in Logic of Sense suggests thatit is Deleuze’s first ‘post’ Heideggerian book in which being is no longer thehighest term, giving way to the event. The path beyond Heidegger is developedsubterraneously in many of Deleuze’s books but surfaces again explicitly inFoucault and The Fold (and to a lesser extent in What is Philosophy?), albeitin a highly compressed set of claims and arguments.

Referencesde Beistegui, Miguel (2004) Truth and Genesis, Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, London: Athlone Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale,

New York: Columbia University Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley,

London: Athlone Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London:

Athlone Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughlin, New York: Columbia

University Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1996a) Cinema, Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam, London: Athlone Press.Deleuze, Gilles (1996b) Cinema, Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam, London: Athlone Press.Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel Smith,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Deleuze, Gilles (2007) ‘Responses to a Series of Questions, an exchange

between Arnauld Villani and Gilles Deleuze’, in Robin Mackay (ed.), Collapse,Vol. 3, Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. BrianMassumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. HughTomlinson and Graham Burchill, London: Verso.

Descombes, Vincent (1980) Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox andJ. M. Harding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,London: Verso.

Meyer, Steven (2005) ‘Introduction’, Configurations, 13:1, pp. 1–33.

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Robinson, Keith (2010a) ‘Towards a Political Ontology of the Fold: Deleuze,Heidegger, Whitehead and the Fourfold Event’, in N. McDonnell andS. Van Tuinen (eds), Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader, Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan.

Robinson, Keith (2010b) ‘Between the Individual, the Relative and the Void:Thinking the “Event” in Badiou, Deleuze and Whitehead’, in R. Faber (ed.),Event and Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze and Whitehead,Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Whitehead, Alfred [1929] (1978) Process and Reality, corrected edition, David RayGriffin and Donald Sherburne (eds), New York: The Free Press.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000875

Book Reviews

James Williams (2008) Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Intro-duction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 219pp.

Originally published in 1969, Logic of Sense has an ambiguous placewithin Gilles Deleuze’s work as a whole. Along with Difference andRepetition, which appeared the year before Logic of Sense came out,it is arguably one of his two most important single-authored books, butit is often overlooked by Deleuzians. This may have something to dowith the fact that it has a rather hybrid quality: it is highly philosophical,drawing powerfully on Stoicism and having an ambivalent but importantrelationship with Husserl, but it is also steeped in structuralism,semiotics and psychoanalytic theory. The latter are the main reason forthe relative neglect of Logic of Sense: they are often seen as the ‘old-fashioned’ ideas that Deleuze was soon to be ‘freed’ from by Guattari.However, it could be argued that there are genuine links with the laterjoint work, in particular the division of Logic of Sense into séries, whichis very similar to the way in which A Thousand Plateaus is structured,but it is also a very valuable book in its own right. It engages withstructuralism, semiotics and psychoanalytic theory in as fertile a wayas Deleuze does elsewhere with earlier philosophers. There is a tendencyto assume that the later joint work left such writers as Lévi-Strauss andLacan behind, but there continue to be fresh interpretations of thesewriters as thinkers, so it is still worth exploring the boundaries betweentheir ideas and those of Deleuze and Guattari.

Logic of Sense is also probably closer to critical theory than anyother extended work by Deleuze, mainly because it explores languageand meaning in such detail and with such richness. It is closer toa complex hermeneutics than the concentration on affect and howthe arts ‘do’ philosophy within their own material terms that oneassociates with Deleuze. There is also an affinity with the fascination ofFrench philosophers such as Derrida and Marin with performatives andlinguistic pragmatics, although there is a compelling mix of meaning,being, event and change that goes beyond textuality in Logic of Sense.

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Even if Deleuze and Guattari ‘left behind’ performatives and pragmatics,there is a peculiar mystery of immanence in language in Austin’s ideasthat can still be explored in relation to their work. It is well known thatLogic of Sense uses Alice in Wonderland as a key text for developingits arguments, but there is another dimension behind this: as CharlesDodgson, Lewis Carroll was a professor of mathematics at Oxford andcontributed to the analytic tradition’s work on logic and paradox. Thesections of Logic of Sense devoted to meaning, nonsense and paradoxare much closer to this tradition than one might think, even if Deleuze isconcerned to go behind propositionality and has a more embodied senseof paradox, which partly explains the use of Alice in Wonderland.

In general, what Deleuze has to say about being, event and processwithin a wider context of creative connectivity deeply challenges receivedapproaches to the world and brings one closer to reality. There are alsorich implications for a different model of social justice. Deleuze has avisionary quality as a writer, and he can produce powerful surges ofaffect in a sympathetic reader, but it is sometimes good to rein in thatresponse and engage in a sober way with the astonishing power of hisphilosophical engineering: the architecture of the future can be as muchabout new building materials as it is about new ways of imagining space.The key to Deleuze’s concepts lies more in the relational tools that bindand do not bind them together than in the concepts themselves. In asense this is only to be expected in a philosophy that is about a shiftfrom identity to an evanescent but semi-solidifying and individuatingconnectivity.

James Williams’ remarkable Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A CriticalIntroduction and Guide deals very sustainedly with the philosophicalengineering, which makes it a demanding but extremely valuable book.Williams has already produced a comparable – and excellent – book onDifference and Repetition (Williams 2003), a work that is primarilyconcerned with ontology, although Deleuze’s ontology is more aboutbecoming than being as it is normally conceived. Perpetual variation inthe universe comes from the interaction of an asymmetrical, reciprocallydetermined binary pair, the virtual and the actual. This ontology,with certain additions and minor changes in terminology, appearsagain in Logic of Sense, but the binary structure is applied to otherareas, producing new pairings: language and sense, human action andthe unconscious, and two different conceptions of time. These pairsinterconnect and overlap in very complex ways. Sense is also closelyassociated with the event, a concept drawn from Emile Bréhier’s classicwork on incorporeals in Stoicism.1 The event is not the physical

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happening itself, while sense contains the difference between the beforeand after of the physical happening. What is fascinating about Logicof Sense is how becoming and meaning are intertwined: a rich fabricof different latent forces is woven around the actual and a bridge isestablished between the personal wound and the universal.

Williams does not give a line-by-line commentary: indeed he oftenjumps intelligently around the séries that make up the main body ofLogic of Sense in order to construct his arguments. Nevertheless, hemore or less follows the overall movement of Deleuze’s text acrosshis central four chapters: ‘Language and event’, ‘Philosophy as event’,‘Morals and events’ and ‘Thought and the unconscious’. These chaptersare framed by an introduction and a short conclusion. Williamsexplains the philosophical engineering in great detail, tries to showhow a philosophy that can seem very abstract is relevant to real-world situations, defends that philosophy against possible objections,in particular from the analytic tradition, and is sensitive to the moreaesthetic and psychologically complex sides of Logic of Sense, whichmay reflect some of Deleuze’s own vulnerabilities: he lived as a youngman in the shadow of his older brother, who had been killed in theResistance, and he had a lung removed in the very year the bookcame out. Williams deals excellently with the treatment of moralactions, especially the way in which three literary figures with vulnerablequalities – Péguy, Bousquet and Fitzgerald – are used as part of thattreatment. He also has a good understanding of the general relationshipbetween Deleuze and psychoanalysis, although he is less assured withsome of the more detailed arguments, and he does not quite convey howessential the presence of a subtly modified psychoanalysis is to the overallvision of Logic of Sense.2

However, what is superb about Williams’ book is its exposition ofthe philosophical engineering of Logic of Sense: numerous concepts,all fascinating and specific to Deleuze (his philosophy was very muchabout the creation of novel exploratory concepts), are examined inan extended, highly detailed and rigorous way. They include thefollowing: event, series and disjunctive synthesis; sense as infinitives andits relationship to nonsense and meaning in the proposition; paradox;the interplay of the series of the signifier and signified; the three imagesof philosophers; height, depth and surface; singularities; the nature ofproblems; static and dynamic genesis; ‘higher empiricism’ (there is agood discussion of Deleuze’s response to Husserl); ‘quasi-cause’; timeand counter-actualisation. All these concepts are made fully available tothe reader as tools for his or her own use.

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The chapter on ‘Language and event’ is particularly good, witha thorough and extremely clear treatment of Deleuze’s ideas onsignification, sense, paradox and nonsense. Here, fruitful parallels aredrawn with the analytic tradition. Deleuze’s very profound conceptionof time is dealt with in a number of places, and there is an interestingcomparison between his approach to it and that of Badiou.3 Williamsalso explains the concept of the three images of philosophers very well,showing how it can be a tool for avoiding the binary oppositions thatbeset the way in which the history of Western philosophy is structured.Throughout the book, the position of Deleuze in relation to such binaryoppositions as transcendental-immanent or empiricist-metaphysician isnegotiated with exceptional subtlety. There are also occasional butilluminating references to quite a few other works by Deleuze. Williamsis also sensitive to Deleuze’s style in French and communicates thecomplex mixture of rigour, sensibility and energy that is to be foundin Logic of Sense.

One slight quibble might be that Williams does not always succeedin communicating how the asymmetrical binary pairs and the individualconcepts fit together and function as a whole. This is partly because heis trying to avoid oversimplification but also because Deleuze himselftends to employ the exceptionally plastic quality of his language andimagination rather than pure argument to conjure a more holisticimpression of how the universe is for him. It is also possible that thestructuralist elements in Logic of Sense give it a symmetrical quality, butthis makes it all the more useful for exploring a potential disjunctionbetween what could be binary or dialectical human thought and ‘cosmicthought’, which would be very different.4

Any minor faults should not detract from the fact that Williams hasdone something comparable to producing the first commentary on one ofKant’s Critiques and that he has done so in an intellectually formidableand deeply passionate way: he has been worthy of the event.

Guy CallanIndependent practitioner and writer, London

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000887

Notes1. For an excellent discussion of the influence of Stoicism on Deleuze, see Alain

Beaulieu (2005).2. For a good reassessment of Deleuze’s relationship with psychoanalysis, see

Monique David-Ménard (2005).

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3. For an extended study of Deleuze’s conception of time, see Yann Laporte (2005).4. Williams mentions the mathematician, Albert Lautman, who had a particular

interest in the underlying primacy of anti-symmetry within his subject, in anintelligent, more general account of how mathematics is relevant to Deleuze’sideas. For a worthwhile recent book on Lautman, see Emmanuel Barot (2009).

ReferencesBarot, Emmanuel (2009) Lautman, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.Beaulieu, Alain (2005) ‘Gilles Deleuze et les Stoïciens’, in Alain Beaulieu (coord.),

Gilles Deleuze, héritage philosophique, Paris: PUF, pp. 45–72.David-Ménard, Monique (2005) Deleuze et la psychanalyse: l’altercation, Paris:

PUF.Laporte, Yann (2005) Gilles Deleuze: l’épreuve du temps, Paris: L’Harmattan.Williams, James (2003) Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical

Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Adrian Parr (2009) Hijacking Sustainability, Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 209pp.

As a poststructuralist who teaches Deleuze and Guattari in a School ofArchitecture, Planning and Landscape, I seized the opportunity to reviewHijacking Sustainability. ‘Sustainability’ has become an important tropein many space-related narratives and has produced such a range oftruth effects that it may now be regarded as international orthodoxy forgovernment-led spatial planning. ‘Sustainable communities’ are all therage, from eco-towns in the UK, to eco-villages in Europe and the USA.The much-vaunted ‘triple-bottom-line’ of sustainability adds economicand social sustainability to that of eco- or environmental sustainability,implied above. As Hijacking Sustainability clearly demonstrates,however, the three elements often conflict, with economic ‘sustainability’(also known as corporate viability or shareholder profit) dominant.

Adrian Parr is interested in applying Deleuzian ideas in the context ofpolitics, transcultural studies and ethics. In her previous work, Deleuzeand Memorial Culture (Parr 2008), she suggests that trauma, given atranscendent meaning, produces a despotic connective synthesis. Herargument in Hijacking Sustainability is not dissimilar: sustainability hasalso achieved transcendent meaning and despotic connective synthesis,as her transcultural examples illustrate. Parr concludes HijackingSustainability by seeking a more socially and environmentally just ethicalconnective synthesis.

Parr demonstrates clearly how sustainability is a cultural construct:an empty signifier, meaning everything and nothing. Sustainability has

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become a buzzword, evocative of a ‘good thing’, which carries – indeedhijacks – universal acceptability when attached to a wide range of things,from housing to burgers, celebrities to warfare.

Deleuze and Guattari (1994) characterise philosophy as the creationof concepts through which knowledge can be generated. They usethe term ‘order-word’ (mot d’ordre) to describe a linguistic functioncompelling obedience: order-words ‘tell people what to think’ (Conley2005: 193). The word mot d’ordre also means a slogan or a militarypassword in French: highly relevant to Parr’s case illustrations of themilitarisation of life in the name of ‘sustainability’. Order-words – suchas sustainability – are not commands as such, but rather terms whichrelate implicit presuppositions and speech-acts to social obligations,and which produce tangible effects (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 79).If we understand sustainability as an order-word, we ask, not whatit means, but, like Parr and her examples in Hijacking Sustainability,how the power-laden term ‘sustainability’ works and what it producesin practice.

Several of Parr’s examples demonstrate the strong ideological powerof sustainability when combined with the signifier ‘development’. Yetthe two signifiers often contradict and negate each other: their rhetoricalacrobatics creating merely illusion – language without possibility(Gunder and Hillier 2009). The sustainable development of eco-villages(Chapter 3), for instance, purports to be grounded in scientific ‘fact’(of lower carbon footprints, of social bonding and so on) even ifsustainability is itself indefinable and unachievable (as in a reality ofcar commuting to work and parochial neighbour conflicts). Yet suchforms of violence are legitimated by the sublime truth of an unknowabletranscendental ideal.

In Hijacking Sustainability Parr illustrates how sustainability hasbecome ‘a political attitude of the multitude’ (4): a non-dualisticsocial practice which largely masks economic ‘business-as-usual’, withassociated ‘usual’ disproportionate negative impacts on the poor.Parr’s provocative interrogation of examples – including the provisionof culturally appropriate disaster shelters in Asia (Chapter 7) andthe ‘greening’ of the US White House (Chapter 4) – indicates howsustainability is akin to a Trojan horse, outwardly seen as ‘good’, whileobscuring the corporate interests, government and military ‘bads’ hiddeninside. The book discloses the voids and illusions of situations andsupports activation of agency for the currently disenfranchised.

Sustainability pulls together assemblages of strange bedfellows, suchas BP oil, Wal-Mart (Asda), the North American Sustainable Use

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Specialist Group, the US Military, UNCHR and even, I would add,Prince Charles. Parr traces how sustainability has been coded in varioussituations, with various results. For instance, US President Jimmy Carterinstalled solar heating panels on the White House roof in the name ofenergy efficiency. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, removed the panelsto demonstrate America’s ‘abundance of resources’ (72). Bill Clinton, inturn, wanted the White House to symbolise ‘a model of efficiency andwaste reduction’ (73). He ordered the replacement: of the White Houseroof to maximise thermal integrity; of incandescent light bulbs withfluorescents; of old air-conditioning units, refrigerators, windows and soon, and so on, saving some 845 tonnes of carbon a year. The presidenciesof the two George Bushes, however, saw sustainability recoded as beingan individual, voluntary choice. Neither Bush volunteered to publicisethe presidential residence as a ‘Green’ House, when espousing policiesof militarism and neo-liberalism, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocolor creating a ‘midnight rule’ to bar consideration of global warming asrelated to the predicted extinction of polar bears. Parr’s examples unveilthe violences which make such enunciations and actualisations possiblein the name of ‘sustainability’.

Resonating more with Félix Guattari’s (who is not mentioned inHijacking Sustainability) writing (see especially 1995, 2000) than withthat of Gilles Deleuze, Parr demonstrates how sustainability cultureis not only a response to perceived ‘problems’, but also helps tocreate them in the first place. Dominant modes of valorisation aretranslated into political and economic programmes newly labelled as‘sustainable’, such as General Motors’ Hummer O2. Dominant valuessubordinate everything under the imperative of a worldwide market andput social relations under the power of police and military machines.The ‘double-sway’ of the market and military-industrial complexes, andtheir bracketing of problems such as poverty, racism, social justice andso on, is clearly articulated.

In Part 1, Parr traces the conditions of possibility of five caseexamples. She demonstrates the popularisation of sustainability culturesuch that everyone wants to be associated with its feel-good brand.Consumption of ‘junkspace’ is increasingly greenwashed (Chapter 1),so that driving one’s Hummer to shop in urban fringe Wal-Martsbecomes environmentally and socially sustainable. Hollywood and itscelebrities have enjoyed similar make-overs (Chapter 2), from the Oscarsto celebrities pictured in proximity to cute, endangered species (thoughnoticeably not endorsing campaigns such as Save the Slug!1).

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As a scholar of cultural studies, Parr cannot explore the depthsof sustainability which a planner, architect or sociologist might. Ipersonally disagree with aspects of the, somewhat idealist, analysis ofeco-villages (Chapter 3), as embodying ‘real’ social and environmentalsustainability compared with sub/urban gated communities. I wouldargue that eco-villages, as lines of flight from urbanisation, also harbourpotentialities to perform as control societies, excluding ‘others’ whoseviews and behaviours do not fit the norm. Research into eco-villagessuggests that there are potential problems: of engaging ‘neo-primitivism’,of extensive use of land, of cultural and social homogeneity, of car-travel to services and facilities, and so on (Barton 1998; Cummings1999; Sizemore 2004; Sullivan 2008). Eco-villagers tend to opt out of themainstream. While I do not criticise them for doing so, I would ratherattempt to change the mainstream; to think transversally and to embracemore eco-sustainable ways of living, perhaps along the lines suggested byFélix Guattari’s ecosophy and Three Ecologies (1995, 2000): ‘ecologymust stop being associated with the image of a small nature-lovingminority’ (2000: 52).

Like eco-villages, military sustainability represents striated space(Chapter 5). The idea of greening the military would seem a difficultconcept to accept when related to agencies which count land minesand cluster bombs, depleted uranium and phosphorus in their arsenals.Yet the US Army now has goals of sustainability, including actingwith integrity (79). As Parr indicates, however, sustainability becomeseven more of an empty signifier in military usage. Traditionally anoppressive structure of domination, military ‘sustainability’ tends tobracket issues of environmental and social justice in favour of equatingsustainability with US national security in broad terms. Recentlyintroduced techniques, such as those of urban warfare, including humantechnology mapping (HTM), while ‘badged’ as sustainable, take violentconflict directly into the homes, for instance, of Iraqi and Palestiniancitizens, as armed military personnel blast holes through walls betweenadjoining houses and regard men, women and children as suspectedterrorists (see Weizman 2006). Meanwhile, in the US and UK, thosebranded as merely ‘potential’ environmental activists are arrested inpolice swoops legitimated by anti-terrorism legislation (Taylor and Vidal2009).

Ironically, as Weizman points out, military institutions’ reading listsoften include texts by Deleuze and Guattari, whose work on rhizomesand assemblages, smooth and striated space and war machines has

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influenced military thinking. In this way, Parr’s picture of the ‘increasingmilitarisation of life’ (4) illustrates a relation between Deleuze’s andGuattari’s theory and practice which all the authors would surely findabhorrent.

Hijacking Sustainability interrogates practices of sustainability andraises critical questions about subjectivity, power and desire. In Part 2,particularly, Adrian Parr challenges orthodox thinking (the Deleuzianimage of thought) on sustainability and indicates how such doxa mustbe resisted and replaced with new socio-ecological concepts if things areto change.

Chapter 6 on waste/trash indicates not only how a culture ofconsumerism is accompanied by a culture of disposability, generatinghuge volumes of ‘rubbish’ (another social construct) which must behidden from view, but also how the poor are often themselves regardedas trash within the social fabric. Garbage dumps, incinerators andshiploads of toxic waste are thus located or dumped by the powerfulon the world’s poor: ‘power, as used in environmental discourse, entailsthe privilege to decide whose communities are polluted and whose arespared, to define what constitutes a recyclable material on the soil ofa developed country, and in turn to choose which environments canbe sacrificed like common waste’ (102). Parr argues that the ‘key’ is‘to create a sustainable connection with the environment by attendingto the processes of change implied within that connection’ (107). Indoing so, we need to recognise that sustainability culture is a Westernsocial construct within a Western plane of reference. We risk furthersubordinating other economic, social and cultural practices, both athome, and especially in the Global South, if we fail to break down thedominant framework and develop a more communal ethic.

Hijacking Sustainability tackles the idea of urbanism as a process ofsignification with relation to disaster relief shelters and slum dwelling(Chapters 7 and 8). While I am unsure that ‘disaster is indiscriminate’(110), as some people are always more affected and disadvantaged thanothers, who may even benefit from disaster situations, I agree thatthere should not be universal solutions, copy-pasted across differentcircumstances. There is a need to examine the materialities andexpressivities of disaster relief and slum clearance alike, to unpack theforce relations between elements, to trace and map potential trajectoriesand to stimulate creative opportunities, or lines of flight, as appropriate.

Parr mentions the importance of informality in Latin American slums.She tends to regard informality rather negatively, however, comparedwith authors such as Ananya Roy (2009) who challenges what she

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regards as such a traditional, hegemonic view of binary opposition. Roydemonstrates how and why informality is both far from unregulated andan internally differentiated mode of spatial production. Roy transcendsthe debate by reconceptualising informality as an oblique mode ofpower, or ‘making do’, which can be simultaneously legal and non-legal,regulated and deregulated, the rule and the exception.

Sustainability is concerned with the not-yet, with ensuring thatsomething remains for the people-to-come. As such, Parr advocates aform of ‘machinic urbanism’ in which planners and designers would‘experiment with the material movements of life in all its variation’(141). Machinic urbanism would produce connections and relationsbetween elements to stimulate challenges to traditional economic,environmental, social and cultural doxa, to create lines of flight andalternative discourses from which to imagine, or fabulate, differentfutures (see also Hillier (2007, 2009) for a spatial planning perspective).Parr’s machinic urbanism aspires to create conditions of agency withoutstructural constraints. This would involve overturning traditionalcapitalocentric values, in favour of new forms of social innovation,such as social businesses in diverse economies (see also Gibson-Graham1996) which have the potential to release the dynamic materialityof life.

Hijacking Sustainability is a book for cultural geographers andcultural studies students. It successfully lifts the veil on crucial issueswhich lurk beneath sustainability culture. Adrian Parr clearly illustrateshow sustainability rhetoric performs as a veil or smokescreen to coverthe often-violent business-as-usual of economics and politics. The keyquestion is how might we reimagine and rearticulate sustainability, notas a justification mechanism for yet more pro-market consumption,but as a means to displace economic and militarist imperatives fromtheir domination of the wicked issues of class, social and environmentaljustice. Making progress requires a massive change of political, socialand cultural mindset: one which reorients the objectives of material andimmaterial production (Guattari 2000) and one which is sufficientlystrong to resist co-optation by vested interests, as happened with‘sustainability’.

Students will find this a provocative and stimulating book, as Idid, though I fear the extremely brief index is of little value. Thecase examples are Americas-dominant and it would be good if furthereditions could incorporate not only some non-Western cases from theGlobal South, but also some of their different views and approaches tosustainability.

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I congratulate Adrian Parr on Hijacking Sustainability, a text whichlays bare the problems of the sustainability culture and offers us thebeginning of a Deleuzian- (and Guattarian) inspired escape forwardwhich the planet so badly requires.

Jean HillierNewcastle University

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000899

Note1. Save the Slug is a campaign by International Slugfest against the use of toxic

insecticides to kill garden slugs, such as the endangered Canadian DromedaryJumping Slug (EUT, 2007).

ReferencesBarton, Hugh (1998) ‘Eco-neighbourhoods: A Review of Projects’, Local

Environment, 3:2, pp. 159–77.Conley, Verena (2005) ‘Order-word’, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary,

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 193–4.Cummings, Michael (1999) ‘Eco-villages and Sustainable Communities’, Utopian

Studies, 10:2, p. 223.Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) [1980] A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press.Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) [1991] What is Philosophy?, trans.

Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso.Endangered Ugly Things (EUT) (2007) ‘Might as well jump’, http://endangered-

ugly.blogspot.com/2007/04/might-as-well-jump.html [accessed 05/05/2009].Gibson-Graham, J.-K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Cambridge,

MA: Blackwell.Guattari, Félix (1995) [1992] Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans.

Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Guattari, Félix (2000) [1989] The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul

Sutton, London: Athlone Press.Gunder, Michael and Jean Hillier (2009) Planning in Ten Words or Less, Farnham:

Ashgate.Hillier, Jean (2007) Stretching Beyond the Horizon: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial

Planning and Governance, Aldershot: Ashgate.Hillier, Jean (2009) ‘Spatial Planning as Strategic Navigation’, paper presented at UK

Planning Research Conference, Newcastle University, April 1–3 (copy availablefrom author).

Parr, Adrian (2008) Deleuze and Memorial Culture, Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.

Roy Ananya (2009) ‘Why India Cannot Plan its Cities: Informality, Insurgence andthe Idiom of Urbanisation’, Planning Theory, 8:1, pp. 76–87.

Sizemore, Steve (2004) Urban Eco-villages as an Alternative Model to RevitalizingUrban Neighborhoods, Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press.

Sullivan, Rachel (2008) ‘Inside Ecovillage Life’, Science Alert, 30/10/2008, http://www.sciencealert.com.au/features/20083010-18378.html [accessed 05/05/2009].

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Taylor, Matthew and John Vidal (2009) ‘UK Police Raid Dozens ofHomes as Climate Change Activists Arrested’, The Guardian, 14/04/2009,http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/14/police-raid-climate-protest[accessed 14/04/2009].

Weizman, Eyal (2006) ‘The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, and Debordand the Israeli Defense Force’, http://info.interactivist.net/node/5324 [accessed11/05/2009].

Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.) (2009) Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology,Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 290pp.

In his contribution to Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology, Hanjo Berressemsuggests that Felix Guattari’s later texts, which contain his moreexplicit dealings with ecology, were ‘a fallout of his general project . . .[Guattari’s] ecosophy is more comprehensive than the more visible andmainstream versions of ecology’ (60). This also suggests a helpful wayin which to conceptualise the aim of Bernd Herzogenrath’s collection.Certain disciplinary histories of ecology indicate that this field ofstudy devoted to organisms, environments and their interactions hasitself evolved into something of a fallout without a general project.For instance, Dana Phillips’s The Truth of Ecology (2003) highlightsa self-alienating tendency that has crippled ecology as an academicenterprise. On the one hand, scientists in ecology push forward withoutbeing able to sustain their own body of theories and methods fromdismantling critiques by physicists and biologists who enjoy a traditionof well-established facts and core concepts; on the other hand, scientificresearch in ecology often gets skewed into a utopian holism bypopular environmental movements and oversimplified by the pastoralassumptions besetting most ecocriticism. Ecology, apprehended in thisrestricted and isolating manner, is in need of structural couplings witha generalised ecology towards which Herzogenrath’s collection gestures.Together, the essays inaugurate the productive syntheses that becomefrom mapping the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in proximity tocontemporary ecological concerns.

Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology incorporates a broad array ofperspectives that divide fairly equally between the sciences and the arts;indeed, one could categorise the essays along these two predominatelines. Yet Herzogenrath chooses not to divide any of the essays intothematic groups and his sequencing of the volume appears to be withouta governing agenda. That said, I believe this (dis)organisational schemereinforces the various ‘ecologics’ theorised by the contributing authorsand makes the collection especially suitable for non-linear or affective

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readings, which Deleuze himself promoted in texts such as A ThousandPlateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy(Deleuze 1998). In this way, the collection enacts Manuel DeLandaand Roland Bogue’s ideas on ecosystems: it is extremely complex anddemands that one be knowledgeable in (or at least willing to engagewith) a cacophony of disparate fields, and it plays host to a multitude ofopen-ended, autopoietic becomings and transversal encounters betweenauthors whose diverse foci produce many innovative connectionsbetween Deleuze and Guattari, science and art, environmentalism andecology.

In the volume’s opening essay entitled ‘Ecology and Realist Ontology’,Manuel DeLanda attempts to rethink realist ontology so that, amongother things, we can properly understand the immense complexityinvolved with ecosystems. While DeLanda claims that (a combinationof) scientific fields are better equipped to study ecosystems thansemiotics or hermeneutics, he insists that philosophy must fill a numberof vital vacancies neglected by scientists, many of whom are over-specialised positivists concerned only with ‘directly observable entities’and with predicting or controlling the phenomena in question (23).He contends that our understanding of ecological processes must treat‘entities like hydrogen atoms or electrons . . . every bit as real aslarge animals and plants’ and ‘grant reality full autonomy from thehuman mind’, but such ontology must avoid the naïve essentialism thathas previously turned intellectuals against realism (24). This Deleuze-inspired ‘reconstruction’ of realism, following modern evolution theory,starts by substituting ‘an open-ended becoming based on individual anduniversal singularities’ for the ‘static and closed’ categories associatedwith the classification system of general essence and particular instance(40). What is ultimately at stake here, according to DeLanda, isthe proposition that individuation processes are responsible for the‘identity of each individual entity’ and that one must then lookto ‘immanent (nontranscendent) abstract structure[s]’ for an accountof ‘any regularities in the [individuation] processes themselves’ (27).A more nuanced grasp of this proposition would require venturesinto DeLanda’s lengthy interpretations of Deleuze’s use of the terms‘intensive’ and ‘virtual’. Suffice it to say, in terms of its impacton ecological thought, DeLanda’s essay affords a substantial, hard-earned confidence boost to those who have posited or hypothesised anintuitive significance to unconventional ecological phenomena in spiteof the intellectual haziness that, as he suggests, inevitably stigmatisestraditional ontological commitments rooted in idealism and positivism.

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By situating Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about the mechanospherewith reference to recent technological advancements, Luciana Parisi’s‘Technoecologies of Sensation’ helps us cope with and unpack thedense writing found in, for example, the Guattari of Chaosmosis (1995)(especially the chapters ‘Machinic Heterogeneities’ and ‘SchizoanalyticMetamodelisation’). Important to her argument is Guattari’s assertionthat machines, in contrast to structures, are self-organising processes andshould therefore be regarded as a prerequisite for technology rather thanits subset or expression (Guattari 1995: 33). Working from the premisethat ‘changes in technical machines are inseparable from changes inthe material, cognitive, and affective capacities of a body’, Parisi setsout to examine how the ‘bionic tendencies of new media technologies’leads to changes in sensation or modes of feeling (182). Beyondthe taxonomy of form and content, Parisi conceives of new mediatechnologies as ‘technoecologies of sensation’ that usher in domainsof sensation marked by an unprecedented contact with virtual forces.Thus, not only is sensory-motor perception extended, but technologiessuch as biochips become linked to what Parisi calls ‘symbiosensation:the felt experience of a nonsensuous relatedness between organic andinorganic matter, adding on a new gradient of feeling in the thinking-flesh’ (192). If, as Deleuze insisted, the cinema presents a challengeto thinking, then Parisi’s analysis of digital media architecture drivestowards a related insight: bionic technologies evoke emergent nexusesbetween ‘organic and inorganic milieus of information sensing’ that‘engender an extended proprioceptive sensation whereby movement orspatiotemporal orientations have become ecological’ (193). Scholarswith a broader interest in this line of inquiry should consult the workof Gregory Ulmer, whose theory of electracy addresses the implicationsof digital media from a poststructuralist, often Deleuzian perspective.‘Technoecologies of Sensation’, although environmentalists would likelyoverlook it, constitutes a difficult expedition into the ‘more vague yetmore real’ ecological phenomena that become accessible when we thinkbeyond standard categories and subsets, as proposed by DeLanda earlierin the collection. (It is helpful to read DeLanda and Parisi together.) Bothauthors write in the spirit of Deleuze in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,building on his preference for thought over consciousness in a questto ‘acquire knowledge of the power of the body in order to discover,in a parallel fashion, the powers of the mind that elude consciousness’(Deleuze 1998: 18).

Scholars of literary and cultural studies who work on globalisationissues will undoubtedly find value in the Guattari-oriented essays

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by Jonathan Maskit and Verena Adermatt Colony. For Maskit,globalisation or integrated world capitalism names a nightmare ofhomogeneity in which mass-media circulate a dominant subjectivity that‘produce[s] desires and pleasures that are concordant with the productsand services that can be provided through the marketplace’ (138).Maskit’s discussion of the problem of consumption penetrates right tothe core of integrated world capitalism. There is much more to our desirefor commodities than a sterile, rationalist approach would like to admit,and Maskit admirably complicates the issue beyond the reductive workin environmental philosophy that he criticises. Rather than attemptingto control consumer desire and waste in a moralising fashion, Maskitessentially calls for what Guattari terms a ‘value-system revolution’,whereby a (processual) resingularising subjectivity generates new valuesthat make an ecological mode of living achievable by affirmation (asopposed to negation and lack). Although the recommended practiceslisted in the conclusion of Maskit’s essay would have benefited fromengagements with Deleuze and/or Guattari beyond just The ThreeEcologies (2008), Maskit lays the groundwork for others to pick upwhere he leaves off by using their philosophy for the reshaping ofsubjectivity, in addition to critiquing capitalist subjectivity. Guattariwould not be satisfied by the current omnipresence of ‘green’ listsprescribing to readers how they should live and what they should orshould not buy in order to be eco-friendly. Maskit is then right to qualifycontemporary ecological concerns as opportunities for ‘a rethinkingof what it means to be human’, but this realisation will be of littleconsequence if, in the end, we fail to generate the transversal toolsnecessary to facilitate such a rethinking (140). Guattari’s later writingson the shift from mass-media culture to what he calls a post-media ageseem especially relevant here, if we are to truly ‘move in the direction ofco-management in the production of subjectivity’ (Guattari 1995: 12).

Conley’s essay ‘Artists or “Little Soldiers?” Felix Guattari’s EcologicalParadigms’ has much to say in relation to Maskit’s. After Conleyspends much of the first half paraphrasing and elaborating on passagesfrom The Three Ecologies, the essay takes on new life as it moves toexamine the potential for ‘affirmative creative resistance’ that buildsas advances with the internet provide more and more people a venueto publicise cultural work (123). If we accept Maskit’s proposition torethink subjectivity in the light of environmental crisis, then Conley’spiece asserts ‘the importance of singular and collective enunciation as aperformance’ integral to processes of resingularisation (124). In otherwords, acts of creativity (including ‘new forms of militantism’) are

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central to the nascent subjectivity that Guattari prioritises at the endof The Three Ecologies (126). Furthermore, Conley does a remarkablejob of constructing an exciting dialogue between poststructuralist theoryand current events, as does John Protevi in a brilliant and far-reachingessay on Hurricane Katrina, wherein Protevi performs an astonishingamount of historical research to tease out an urgent ‘political lesson’about government and solidarity (180).

What alternatives can we turn when surrounded by that all toohuman face of the integrated world capitalism denounced here? Essaysby Herzogenrath, Halsey, Abrioux, Fuller and Zepke each speak tothe belief, paramount to Deleuze and Guattari, that the ‘non-humanpre-personal part of subjectivity is crucial since it is from this that itsheterogenesis can develop’ (Guattari 1995). These five essays, whichtraverse an impressive blend of ethological and aesthetic objects, areperhaps best read in the context of Gary Genosko’s essay on subjectivityand art. According to Genosko’s extensive treatment of Guattari’slater texts, art should always be of interest to those concerned withecological or environmental problems – including creative works thatdo not explicitly valorise trees, flowers, prairie dogs and so on.Heterogeneous exploration of the refrains of subjectivity, the conditionsof its production, is what conjugates the arts with a generalisedecology. Genosko successfully emphasises the ‘esthetic dimension ofeco-praxis’ and shows how ‘ecosophic activism “resembles” the workof artists’ (110). Herzogenrath’s essay searches for relations betweennature and music that extend beyond representation. Thus, rather thanthe routine ecocritical study of how nature is depicted in selectedworks, Herzogenrath boldly asks: can weather itself be music, and canmusic itself be meteorological? Through a comparative analysis of threecomposers (Ives, Cage, Adams), via a surprising mix of Deleuze andThoreau, Herzogenrath puts us in an excellent position to appreciate thefull significance of John Luther Adams’s claim: ‘As we listen carefully tonoise, the whole world becomes music’ (228). While each of the authorsmentioned above contribute innovative readings of ‘off-beat’ genres(‘Intensive Landscaping’ and ‘Art for Animals’ are prime examples),Herzogenrath’s originality is the most poignant.

Essays by Roland Bogue and Hanjo Berressem shift the focus awayfrom Guattari’s explicit ecosophy and redirect our attention to ecologicalleanings of the collaborative works, namely both volumes of Capitalismand Schizophrenia. This move seems very pertinent given Deleuze’s claimin the late 1980s that he and Guattari wanted to write a (last) bookon their philosophy of Nature. Bogue’s essay ‘A Thousand Ecologies’

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seeks to discern what this (eco)philosophy might have looked like, whileBerressem stages an epic interrogation of key concepts (e.g. autopoiesisand structural coupling) Deleuze adapted from systems theory andsecond-order cybernetics, ultimately showcasing the influence ofDeleuze’s ‘radical philosophy’ on Guattari’s ‘radical ecology’ (57).Indeed, both essays prove that Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is quiteapplicable and enriching to ecological discourse, ‘especially given theiropposition to any definitive separation of the social, cultural, andtechnological world of humans from the non human world’ (50). Finally,in the pivotal moment of Bogue’s essay (arguably the book’s mostimportant moment), the question of philosophy’s readiness to help usthrough ecological crisis doubles back on itself: what does philosophystand to lose in an era of environmental degradation and endangeredspecies? Bogue’s answer is subtle, distinctive, and chilling:

Modes of existence that destroy habitats, induce pandemics, or fosterpathogenic disequilibrium inhibit a creative exploration of the possibilitiesof bodies and decrease the options for a reconfiguration of humans and theearth. The fewer the life forms available for becoming-other, the fewer thetrajectories available for creative transformation. (54)

It should be noted that the sheer breadth of concepts mobilised in thiscollection renders it useful to a wide range of Deleuze scholars, but lessso to ecologists who have never read Deleuze and/or Guattari (althoughthe book could function as an inspiring point of departure to guide suchreaders). With the growing, international interest that now more thanever surrounds questions of environment and ecology, both establishedDeleuze and/or Guattari scholars, and younger ones first encounteringtheir work, are signalling an ecological turn that, ten years ago, was allbut absent from studies of these two landmark thinkers. Of this recentpublication trend, Maskit writes, ‘there has been a slow trickle that is,perhaps, ready to become a stream’ (131). If it becomes a stream, expectHerzogenrath’s collection to be cited many times along the way.

John TinnellUniversity of Florida

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110000905

ReferencesDeleuze, Gilles (1998) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, San

Francisco: City Lights.Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis,Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guattari, Félix (2008) The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton,London: Athlone.

Phillips, Dana (2003) The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, Literature in America,Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.