The Incomplete Project of Schizoanalysis: Collected Essays on Deleuze and Guattari 9781474487900

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The Incomplete Project of Schizoanalysis

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The Incomplete Project of Schizoanalysis Collected Essays on Deleuze and Guattari

Ian Buchanan

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Ian Buchanan, 2021 Cover image: iStockphoto.com Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Bembo by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 8788 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8790 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 8789 4 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8791 7 (epub)

The right of Ian Buchanan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Before Deleuze and Guattari Studies

viii 1

Part I: Method 1. A Brief History of Schizoanalysis 2. Desire and Ethics 3. The Structural Necessity of the Body without Organs

11 26 39

Part II: Film 4. Five Theses for an Actually Existing Schizoanalysis of Cinema 5. Schizoanalysis and The Birds 6. Symptomatology and Racial Politics in Australia

57 69 90

Part III: Space 7. Treatise on Militarism 8. Occupy without Counting 9. Schizoanalysis and Postmodern Space 10. Space in the Age of Non-Place 11. The Disappearance of Boredom 12. Architecture and Control Society

109 135 145 158 173 181

Part IV: Analysis 13. Schizoanalysis and the Internet 14. Deleuze and ‘Life’

193 209

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CONTENTS

15. Deleuze and American (Mythopoeic) Literature 16. Schizoanalysis and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed 17. Schizoanalysis and Literary Criticism

223 234 246

Part V: Assemblages 18. The ‘Clutter Assemblage’ 19. The Little Hans Assemblage 20. The Self-Help Assemblage

261 275 282

Notes Bibliography Index

292 320 332

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For Tanya Buchanan

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Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of more than twenty years of work in the field of Deleuze and Guattari studies and in that time I have – happily – accumulated more debts to others than I can hope to recall here. I hope I will be forgiven by everyone I have forgotten to mention. First and foremost, I want to offer my thanks to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press who published my first book, Deleuzism, and helped me to establish what would become the Deleuze Connections series. When Jackie moved to a different role at EUP her place was ably taken by Carol Macdonald. Thanks would never be enough to acknowledge the amazing work Carol has done to create the field of Deleuze and Guattari studies. She commissioned the Plateaus series I edit with Claire Colebrook which has so far published more than twenty wonderful monographs (many of them by first-time authors) on Deleuze and Guattari and is still going strong. Carol also attends our conferences and works with authors to help them realise their publishing goals. The field of Deleuze and Guattari studies would not exist without Carol’s vision and tireless efforts. One of my most inspired ideas (even if I do say so myself) was to start a summer school focused on the work of Deleuze and Guattari. I called it ‘Deleuze Camp’ – I took the idea of the name from the American Pie movies, ‘one time at band camp’ – because I didn’t want it to be a summer school. I wanted it to be an opportunity for scholars at every stage of their career to come together and talk about Deleuze and Guattari. And that is precisely what it is. I will admit, too, that I rather selfishly wanted to teach Deleuze and Guattari to a group of people who wanted to be taught Deleuze and Guattari (unlike my undergraduates). I want to thank Claire Colebrook, Dan Smith, Gregg Lambert and Paul Patton for volunteering their time way back in August 2007 in order to make that first camp happen and help launch a wonderful tradition.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Then there are the conferences. Here I would like to note for the record and offer my thanks to the conference convenors who have, in the years since I hosted the inaugural event in Cardiff in 2008, transformed it into an international scholarly institution and annual family union: Hanjo Berressem (Cologne, 2009), Patricia Pisters (Amsterdam, 2010), Bent Meier Sørensen (Copenhagen, 2011), Jeff Bell (New Orleans, 2012), Catarina Pombo Nabais (Lisbon, 2013), the late Hanping Chui (Tamkang, 2013), Emine Görgül (Istanbul, 2014), Tatsuya Higaki (Osaka, 2014), Hélène Frichot (Stockholm, 2015), Manoj Ny (Manipal, 2015), Daniella Angelucci (Rome, 2016), Taek-Gwang Lee, Woosung Kang and Jae-Yin Kim (Seoul, 2016), Jane Newland and Markus Bohlmann (Toronto, 2017), Tony See (Singapore, 2017), Roland Gannicus Flor (Naga City, 2018), Antonio Amorin and Marcus Novaes (Campinas, 2018), Nathan Widder (London, 2019), Koichiro Kokubun (Tokyo, 2019), Petr Kouba (Prague, 2020, which had to be cancelled due to Covid-19) and Jing Wu (Nanjing, 2020, which was held as an online event due to Covid-19). In addition, I want to thank George Varghese who established the Deleuze Studies in India collective, Patricio Landaeta Mardones who established the Latin American network of Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and Chantelle Gray van Heerden and Aragorn Eloff for establishing the Deleuze and Studies in Africa collective. I would like to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to David Savat, Greg Thompson, Patricio Landaeta Mardones, Marcelo Svirsky, Chantelle Gray van Heerden and Janae Sholtz for their many years of friendship and unstinting support and for believing in the schizoanalytic project I was working on even when that project was just a mad set of ramblings over beers in some pub or other. Here’s to many more such conversations. Although she never joined me for beers, I have for many years benefited from the clear thinking of Claire Colebrook and I cannot thank her enough. I must also note that I could never have put this book together without the superb assistance of Dipali Mathur. Lastly, I dedicate this book to my wife Tanya Buchanan, who has been there every step of the way and despite being completely uninterested in anything Deleuze and Guattari have to say has encouraged me in my mad passion of making their work my life’s work. *** I would like to acknowledge the prior publication of the following chapters: 1. Ian Buchanan (2013), ‘Schizoanalysis: An Incomplete Project’, in Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 163–88.

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2. Ian Buchanan (2011), ‘Deleuze and Ethics’, Deleuze Studies, 5:4, pp. 7–20. 3. Ian Buchanan (2015), ‘The Structural Necessity of the Body without Organs’, in Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 24–42. 4. Ian Buchanan (2008), ‘Five Theses of Actually Existing Schizoanalysis’, in Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–14. 5. Ian Buchanan (2002), ‘Deleuze and Hitchcock: Schizoanalysis and The Birds’, Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics, 15:1, pp. 105–18. 6. Ian Buchanan (2012), ‘February 13, 2008, or, the Baleful Enchantments of an Apology’, Cultural Politics, 8:1, pp. 45–60. 7. Ian Buchanan (2005), ‘War in the Age of Unintelligent Government’, Australian Humanities Review, 36, pp. 1–12. 8. Ian Buchanan (2015), ‘September 17, 2011: Occupy without Counting’, in Andrew Conio (ed.), Occupy: A People Yet to Come, London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 191–202. 9. Ian Buchanan (2006), ‘Practical Deleuzism and Postmodern Space’, New Formations, 57, pp. 26–38. 10. Ian Buchanan (2004), ‘Deleuze and Non-Place’, Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, 1:3. 11. Ian Buchanan (2017), ‘Disappearance of Boredom’, Lo sguardo – revista di filosofia, 23, pp. 277–84. 13. Ian Buchanan (2007), ‘Deleuze and the Internet’, Australian Humanities Review, 43. 14. Ian Buchanan (2006), ‘Deleuze’s “Life” Sentences’, Polygraph, 18, pp. 129–47. 15. Ian Buchanan (2001), ‘Deleuze and American (Mythopoeic) Literature’, Southern Review, 34:2, pp. 72–85. 16. Ian Buchanan (2014), ‘Deleuze and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, in Matthew Carlin and Jason Wallin (eds), Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 12–27. 17. Ian Buchanan (2001), ‘Deleuze’s “Immanent Historicism”’, Parallax, 21, pp. 29–39. 18. Ian Buchanan (2011), ‘The Clutter Assemblage’, Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, 8.1. 19. Ian Buchanan (2013), ‘Little Hans Assemblage’, Visual Arts Research, 40, pp. 9–17.

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Introduction: Before Deleuze and Guattari Studies

[If ] it is a question of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning, if it is a question of recognising, of bringing to light or into the conceptual or the explicit, what was simply known implicitly without concepts – whatever the complexity of this process, whatever the differences between the procedures of this or that author – the fact remains that all this is still too simple, and that this circle is truly not tortuous enough. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition That there was a time before Deleuze and Guattari studies is hard to believe now, when their work is so thoroughly mainstream there is scarcely a branch of the humanities or social sciences which has not been influenced by them in some way. My own collection of books about their work numbers in the hundreds of volumes. This is a far cry from the early 1990s when I wrote my dissertation. In those days, the only book about Deleuze and Guattari I was able to lay my hands on was Ronald Bogue’s indispensable guidebook Deleuze and Guattari which first appeared in 1988 and was for several years the only book in any language written with beginners in mind. Brian Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari and Michael Hardt’s Gilles Deleuze: An Apprentice in Philosophy appeared in 1992 and 1993 respectively, when I was in the middle of writing my dissertation. They arrived like comets from outer space, blinding in their brilliance. They helped me to see that Deleuze and Guattari’s work is a universe unto itself. I knew, too, that I wanted to explore it further for myself and dive into the spaces not covered by Bogue, Massumi or Hardt. Their work gave me the confidence to continue with a project that in those days quite frankly seemed like a bad career move because Deleuze and Guattari were still very much an unknown quantity, particularly in cultural studies. You could comfortably read everything that had been written about them in a week. And Derrida

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and Foucault were so dominant it felt like there was no place yet for any other critical voices. I came to Deleuze and Guattari’s work largely by accident and from the kind of background that does not prepare one well for dealing with some of the most complex philosophical thinking ever produced. I was writing a dissertation about the concept of everyday life and I was interested in the question of why people do the things they do. My starting point had been the work of Michel de Certeau, but several people – fellow graduate students for the most part – recommended that I read Anti-Oedipus, particularly for its focus on desire, which was obviously pertinent to the question I was asking. I’ll admit I decided to read it only grudgingly, suspecting that it was going to be faddish nonsense. I fully expected to read it and cast it aside; indeed, I only decided to read it so I could cast it aside knowingly. But that’s not how things turned out! It is hard to convey the excitement I felt reading Anti-Oedipus for the first time. I knew I understood almost none of it, but somehow that didn’t deter me from wanting to understand it. It made me painfully aware of how inadequate my education (to that point) had been, and I was determined to remedy that state of affairs as best I could. I remember creating long lists of books I had not read and checking them out of the library one by one and ploughing my way through them. Initially, my reading was anything but systematic, but that did not seem to matter because it was all so new to me. I was both intimidated and fascinated by Anti-Oedipus and it started me down a scholarly path that I continue to journey along today. After my initial surge of enthusiasm, I realised I couldn’t possibly read everything all at once and that I needed to be more disciplined in how I approached my self-education, so I focused my reading on three areas: (1) psychoanalysis, (2) literature, and (3) anthropology. In practice this meant working my way through the Penguin Freud library, thousands of pages of Proust and Kafka, and several volumes of Lévi-Strauss. Every reader needs to find their own way in, of course, but for me this route took me to the heart of what I found compelling about Anti-Oedipus: namely, the fact it offered a new way of thinking about behaviour. In interviews they gave following the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, the sequel to Anti-Oedipus, which I read immediately upon finishing the first part, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge as much. Deleuze said that he and Guattari were ‘trying to substitute the idea of the assemblage for the idea of behaviour: whence the importance of ethology, and the analysis of animal assemblages, e.g. territorial assemblages’.1 This explains, too, my interest in the concept of the assemblage: it is, in my view, the most sophisticated attempt to articulate social and cultural behaviour available to us in the human and social sciences.

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INTRODUCTION

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I completed my PhD in 1995 and, as every newly minted PhD does, I sent it off to a publisher in the hope of becoming a ‘real’ author. I was fortunate enough to have my thesis accepted for publication, but when I set out to revise it, I soon came to realise I was not happy with it. In a burst of unbelievable naïvety I emailed my publisher and said I wanted to withdraw my thesis and (I quote) write them a better book. Equally unbelievably they assented. That book was Deleuzism. When it was published, it was (I think) only the eleventh monograph on Deleuze and Guattari in English. It was preceded by the aforementioned books by Bogue, Massumi and Hardt as well as the equally pioneering On Anarchy and Schizoanalysis (1990) by Rolando Perez, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (1993) by Eugene Holland, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (1996) and Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (1996) both by Philip Goodchild (it was a banner year for Philip – I, for one, still smile at the memory of him selling copies of those books out of his suitcase at a conference I organised), Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism (1998) by James Brusseau, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (1998) by Charles Stivale, and Gilles Deleuzism: Vitalism and Multiplicity (1998) by John Marks. When Deleuzism appeared, it was part of a breaking of a wave in Deleuze and Guattari studies. It really was the case that after Deleuzism, the deluge. In the years that followed, my decision of a decade earlier to write a dissertation on Deleuze and Guattari began to seem very canny indeed as dozens upon dozens of books about their work were published in practically every field of the humanities and social sciences. Ironically, the least influenced field in this regard is philosophy which seems to regard them as Johnny-comelatelies, or not at all. I’ll never forget being told by the head of the philosophy department at the University of Western Australia that they didn’t read any French philosophers more recent than Descartes! This was in 1996 when I was trying to get interdepartmental support for a Deleuze conference I was organising in the English department. The conference went ahead without philosophy’s support and that has largely been the pattern all over the world. Philosophy departments everywhere have tended to ignore two of the most exciting philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century. It was in this regard fitting that Fredric Jameson was the keynote speaker, though many didn’t think so at the time, because it was the comparativists like him, not the philosophers, who did the hard work of bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s work to the people (the evidence is there in the list above – with the exception of Goodchild who came to Deleuze and Guattari via religious studies, all the others are comparative literature scholars). This is as true in France as it is in anglophone countries; it is also true throughout Latin America and most of Asia, where it has been the foreign

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languages and literature programmes that have been the most avid readers of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The fact that the reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been strongest outside of philosophy departments has, I think, had two noteworthy effects on how they are read and understood today. Scholars from outside of philosophy programmes do not read their work as a contribution to the history of philosophy. So instead of asking whether their use of Nietzsche or Bergson is cogent, or whether their conceptualisation of ontology is robust, they ask what can we do with their concepts? This explains the incredibly creative variety of applications their work has been put to. But it has come at the price of a tendency to try to read them for the suggestiveness of their ideas rather than the systematicity of their thought. Along the way assemblage theory, affect theory and new materialism have been spawned as the bastard children of their work, which can perhaps be regarded as ‘strong misreadings’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s work (to borrow Harold Bloom’s useful idea). If I have one complaint to make about the current state of Deleuze and Guattari studies, it is that we seem to have lost the ‘right’ to ask whether any given reading of them is valid or not. It often feels this question – indeed, this way of looking at things – has been thoroughly delegitimated. Yet if there are no wrong readings of their work, other than those readings which try to say what a wrong reading might look like, then there is no way of defining what a ‘good’ reading would look like either, and that is more or less how things have been for the last twenty odd years. I have always been ambivalent about this state of affairs. On the one hand, I have benefited from it inasmuch as it meant that I felt able to engage with their work, despite the fact I was not a philosophy major. For that I am grateful because Deleuze and Guattari’s work opened an entire world to me, not just intellectually, but actually, in the real world of jobs, careers and friends. And I would never want to deny another budding scholar that same opportunity. But on the other hand, I have also found it difficult to know what to say about interpretations of their work that seem wrong to me. I have been in many situations where to even raise the idea that a particular reading of Deleuze and Guattari might be inaccurate is treated as impolite. My whole career has been spent trying to find a midway point between these two extremes that I could live with. My guiding motto, quoted at the start of this introduction, has been this: if all we do is bring to light what we already know, then what is the point of what we are doing? Critical analysis has to do more than this, especially in these times, which are dark, confusing, and beginning to feel a lot like end times, because to do otherwise amounts to nothing other than the reproduction and perpetuation of the status quo. This is the standard Deleuze and Guattari held themselves to and it goes a long way towards explaining the complexity of their writing. It also

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explains why it is both valid and useful to think of their work as incomplete: by its very nature, the status quo cannot be permanently disrupted; it always reasserts itself even after the most violent of disruptions. It may be a changed status quo, but nonetheless it is still a status quo, meaning it is still a tendency toward things remaining the same rather than changing. What we call ‘the new normal’ is simply the reappearance of the status quo following a period of disruption. Disrupting the status quo in an ongoing way thus requires what old school Marxists refer to as a permanent revolution, which is to say a revolution that cannot be completed or ended without compromising the values underpinning the revolutionary process. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is constitutively incomplete. Thus, it is no denigration of schizoanalysis to describe it as an incomplete project. Indeed, it joins some very illustrious company in this regard – Walter Benjamin’s arcades project is incomplete, as is Karl Marx’s capital project and so too Hegel’s philosophical project, at least according to Fredric Jameson, who is something of a connoisseur of the incomplete project. The incompleteness of these projects owes nothing to the premature deaths of the respective authors – the projects are incomplete because they are intrinsically ‘unfinishable’. How, for instance, could one ever be done analysing the inner workings of capital when capital itself continues to live and breathe and evolve? Having said that, each of these unfinished projects is, in some paradoxical way, the richer for being unfinished and unfinishable, because they have inspired countless attempts to finish them and, in the process, have given rise to productive reworkings that keep the projects alive for new generations of readers. By their own admission Deleuze and Guattari did not bring their project to completion. ‘Guattari and I have only begun’, Deleuze once said, ‘and completing this logic [of schizoanalysis] will undoubtedly occupy us into the future.’2 In this light I am even tempted to say that schizoanalysis is almost the poorer for the fact that it is not widely regarded as an incomplete project. To say schizoanalysis is an incomplete project is to acknowledge, first of all, the glaring fact that nowhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings do they explain exactly how one should do schizoanalysis. While it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari intend their work to be a resource to action – in interviews they describe it as an exercise in pop philosophy, by which they mean it should be treated as a kind of self-help apparatus – it is not clear just what kind of a resource it is. The conclusion to Anti-Oedipus defends its failure to offer a model or programme to follow on the grounds that it is not speaking for anyone or anything. If schizoanalysis is a revolution, and Deleuze and Guattari patently want us to see it as such, it is nevertheless a revolution without either a name or identity or even a specific goal, save that we should ‘liberate’ ourselves. But that does not mean we should give

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up trying to develop a schizoanalytic methodology because paradoxically – and this is the other sense in which it is important to say schizoanalysis is an incomplete project – no matter how difficult it is to extrapolate a method for doing schizoanalysis from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, without the constant attempt to do so their thought is literally inert. By failing to try to complete schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari scholars are missing an opportunity to realise schizoanalysis and are thereby condemning it to live on in a ghostly and increasingly insubstantial way (to adapt Theodor Adorno’s famous pronouncement on the fate of philosophy itself).3 Schizoanalysis’s potential is unrealised, in other words, precisely because it is assumed that its theoretical development is complete; conversely, the more we consider schizoanalysis to be incomplete in its development, the better the position we are in to actually realise its potential. It follows, then, that this collection of essays does not have a central theme or overarching argument, but it does have consistency (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) in the form of an extended and interrelated series of attempts to develop an applied form of schizoanalysis for the purposes of cultural analysis. These attempts range across several disciplines – cultural studies, film studies, education studies, literary studies, visual studies, and architecture and urban studies – reflecting my lifelong fascination with all things cultural. As the essays collected here make apparent, the assemblage, the body without organs and the abstract machine form a conceptual matrix that can be found at the core of everything Deleuze and Guattari write, both separately and together. All their other conceptual inventions are subclasses or synonyms of these three, e.g. body without organs, plane of immanence, plane of consistency and earth all refer to the same concept; likewise, neither territory nor rhizome is conceivable without the prior invention of the body without organs. This is true even of the work Deleuze did before he met Guattari – his books on Hume, Proust, Masoch, Nietzsche and Spinoza as well as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense are ample testament to this. The origins of all Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts can be traced back to Deleuze’s earlier work. This is not to say Guattari did not contribute to their collaborative works, but to observe that when they met, they were evidently already in tune with each other. Guattari had published very little before he met Deleuze, so we have no way of tracing his ideas to a time before their collaboration, but we do know he was working on the notion of a machinic unconscious and that obviously chimed with what Deleuze was interested in. It is my sense that they both knew that the concepts they had invented by themselves were incomplete (a word I generally prefer to ‘lack’ because they are very different states of being), because they knew that they did not yet answer the problems they had set for themselves. This is demonstrated,

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I think, by the fact that the concepts they were each working on seemed to gain a new life when they were brought together. Deleuze gives an example of this in Dialogues, explaining how he was working on an idea about a white wall and Guattari was fascinated by black holes, and that when they brought them together, they realised that what they were really talking about was a face, or rather a face-machine. Neither notion was lacking in itself, but each was incomplete inasmuch that when they were combined it yielded a stronger, more encompassing concept.4 I suspect I will never find the time or the motivation to return to any of these fragments of incomplete projects collected here and try to bring them to completion. Not because they do not interest me, because they do, but because they are all in their own way the surface manifestations of a deeper project that I have never stopped working on. The attempt to create a workable methodology for doing cultural and social analysis from the work of Deleuze and Guattari connects all my work like a volcanic chain, to borrow an apt image from Deleuze.5 This project is incomplete and will probably remain so because the object of analysis – contemporary culture and society – is incomplete too and must necessarily remain that way until the world ends. Despite the phrasing I do not mean to imply a teleological worldview here – in saying something is incomplete I do not mean to say, nor do I think it necessarily implies, that that something can be completed or is in any way progressing towards completion. Incomplete is a state of being, not a Hegelian form of becoming.

A note on the text With the exception of Chapters 12 and 20 every chapter in this volume has previously been published (a full publishing history is given in the acknowledgements section). The chapters have been arranged thematically, not chronologically, reflecting a series of incomplete projects of my own captured for posterity in the section titles. The previously published chapters are largely unchanged from the original published forms. I have resisted the urge to update them and with the exception of a handful of footnotes I have added nothing new. I have, however, removed a few passages here and there that were either repetitious or not well phrased in the interest of making the chapters as readable as possible.

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Chapter 1 A Brief History of Schizoanalysis

There is no straightforward way to say what schizoanalysis is. The problem is not so much that the question is not answered by Deleuze and Guattari or that it is somehow unanswerable; rather the problem is that it has several answers. Unwilling to provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’ that would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything relates inexorably to one single factor (e.g. the family), which is what they thought psychoanalysis had become, Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the questions their work raises. Guattari’s insistence that schizoanalysis is a form of meta-modelling makes it clear that this supple approach is quite deliberate. Meta-modelling is something like the ‘scenario planning’ utilised by ‘risk managers’ in complex organisations who try to foresee and ‘manage’ the variety of possible transformations an institution such as a university might undergo if circumstances changed (e.g. how would it cope with an earthquake? Or a pandemic – something no university saw coming or was adequately prepared for when Covid-19 hit in 2020). Meta-modelling tries to grapple with the realm of ‘what might happen’ that constantly dogs the realm of ‘what is happening’. Deleuze and Guattari’s elaborate system of new terms and concepts (many of them contrived from obscure literary sources) is of a piece with this strategy of providing multiple answers to basic questions and should be seen as deliberately guarding against the reductive tendencies of the ‘practically-minded’. This is not to say schizoanalysis is either incoherent or impractical, as many of its detractors are quick to claim, but to insist that its practice cannot be divorced from its theory and that to engage with one it is necessary to engage with the other. Schizoanalysis is the result of one of the most productive collaborations of the twentieth century. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began corresponding with one another in April 1969, but didn’t actually meet until June that same year when they were introduced by Deleuze’s former student from the University of Lyon Jean-Pierre Muyard, who now happened to be working as a psychiatrist at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, where Guattari worked. Deleuze was in touch with Muyard because he was interested in

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following up on the theoretical speculations he’d made in The Logic of Sense about how schizophrenics use language, and as fate would have it Guattari had recently given a lecture on that topic for Jacques Lacan’s seminar (later published as ‘Machine and Structure’1), drawing on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s biographer François Dosse, ‘Guattari and Deleuze immediately connected. Guattari’s conversation was full of topics that interested Deleuze, such as mental illness, La Borde, and Lacan.’2 Both men were at turning points in their lives – Guattari was restless and dissatisfied with Lacanian psychoanalysis, while Deleuze was casting about for his next project. In their different ways, both felt that psychoanalysis had made a fundamental wrong turn when Freud ‘discovered’ Oedipus. And it was on this basis that they agreed to work together despite their very different professions and very different backgrounds. Because Deleuze was already a well-established full professor of philosophy, he is generally credited with the ‘senior’ role in their collaboration, with Guattari consigned to some junior helpmeet role when not ignored altogether. The truth was very different to this, which is not hard to see if one simply reads their work attentively. There are two clichés about the collaboration. The first, spouted by the likes of Alain Badiou, Manuel DeLanda and Slavoj Žižek, is that Guattari’s ‘wild thought’ contaminated the purity of Deleuze’s sober philosophy. Against this obvious injustice, Deleuze offers two quite beautiful images that put their working relationship into its proper perspective: first, he describes Guattari as a diamond miner and himself as a diamond polisher; second, he compares Guattari to the ocean, characterised by endless movement, and himself to a hill that appears like an island amidst the sea.3 No one can fail to notice that the works Guattari wrote with Deleuze are superior in style to those that he wrote alone (the diamond polisher at work). Yet it must also be said that the pieces Guattari wrote on his own are in many ways more inventive and more experimental than anything co-signed by Deleuze (the restless ocean at work). The second widely held cliché is that Guattari politicised Deleuze, the implication being that before he met Guattari he was somehow apolitical. That this is patently untrue can be gleaned from his writings about Palestine, among other topics, which show a long awareness of and keen concern for day-to-day political issues. Along the same lines, it is often said that Guattari was the activist while Deleuze was the passive mandarin, aloof where the other was engaged. But this misunderstands activism, making it seem that the only form of political engagement is that which takes place in the streets, which is not only false but also fundamentally anti-intellectual. It implies that thinking, making new concepts, creating new ideas and modes of being are not in themselves revolutionary acts!

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Of the two, Guattari seems to have been the more prolific in terms of the invention of new concepts. As Deleuze explained to his Japanese translator Kuniichi Uno: ‘I have never met anyone who is so creative, or who produces more ideas. And he never stops tinkering with his ideas, finetuning them, changing their terms. Sometimes he gets bored with them, he even forgets about them, only to rework and reshuffle them later.’4 For example, the concept of the desiring-machine, which was abandoned in the writing-up of A Thousand Plateaus, returns without explanation or clarification in Chaosmosis.5 As one might expect of someone described as being like the ocean, ‘always in motion’, Guattari’s work is studded with new concepts, not all of them as successful or coherent as those he produced in collaboration with Deleuze.6 Some of these less successful concepts appear to be experimental sketches for concepts that would be worked out more satisfactorily in the collaborative work. Others – and these are the most problematic – appear to be attempts to take existing concepts in new directions; here I’m thinking of the way Guattari uses the concept of the body without organs in his diaries.7 But as Deleuze himself notes, even those moments where they seem to be at cross-purposes are instructive in their own way. As Deleuze puts it: ‘From time to time we have written about the same idea, and have noticed later that we have not grasped it at all in the same way: witness “bodies without organs”.’8 Other concepts, meanwhile, particularly those created in Chaosmosis, offer fresh perspectives on old concepts as well as entirely new trajectories. The fact is, some of Guattari’s experiments evolve into workable concepts and others do not. We have to be prepared to set aside those concepts which either confound the conceptual matrix at the core of schizoanalysis or – what amounts to the same thing – fail to add to it in any meaningful way. Guattari’s political activism was informed by his clinical practice. He was of the view that psychiatry cannot be regarded as a standalone discipline, or practice, and that it must incorporate everything that makes life the complex reality that it is. And he did mean literally everything – one of the things that makes reading Deleuze and Guattari so difficult is the astonishing scope of the materials they pull together, which ranges from philosophy and literature to biology, physics and higher mathematics. This is especially true of A Thousand Plateaus which bears the traces of the active involvement of the dozens of participants in the seminars Deleuze and Guattari taught together in the mid-1970s. Guattari seems to have been a kind of intellectual vortex, constantly drawing in new ideas, new materials, new concepts and so on, with an almost relentless appetite and capacity for ‘the new’. The concepts Guattari would go on to invent, such as the assemblage and the rhizome, reflect this approach to the world of inquiry and they aim to give us the analytic means of describing the way the sub-

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ject is a product of multiple forces both internal and external, conscious and unconscious. However, while it is clear that Guattari’s work is keenly informed by his own practical experience – and Dosse tells us that it was his practical experience with schizophrenics that intrigued Deleuze, although he was apparently horrified at the idea of meeting an actual schizophrenic himself – we know very little about Guattari’s day-to-day practice as a clinician. Unfortunately, even with the aid of François Dosse’s generally quite detailed biography, we are still very much in the dark with regard to the actual practice of schizoanalysis. He provides only the scantiest details of Guattari’s clinical career, which is a real pity because it would be extremely interesting to know how Guattari treated his patients. What Dosse does tell us raises some quite important questions that one hopes future research in the area will be able to settle. There are, I think, two questions in urgent need of clarification. Firstly, Dosse informs us that Guattari worked as an administrator at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, founded by Jean Oury, which specialised in the treatment of schizophrenia. Opened in 1953, La Borde aimed to provide a radically new form of care which in the jargon of the times attempted to ‘de-institutionalise the institution’. Sometimes associated with the so-called ‘antipsychiatry’ movement led by the UK-based psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, La Borde was much more cautious in its approach and tended to view many of the reforms advocated by ‘anti-psychiatry’ as both dangerous and irresponsible. Guattari’s review of Mary Barnes’s autobiographical account of her treatment in Kingsley Hall, which like La Borde was an experimental de-institutionalised institution for schizophrenics, makes apparent the theoretical and practical differences between his own thinking and that of Laing and Cooper. In Guattari’s view, the situation at Kingsley Hall remained all too Oedipal, all too locked into psychoanalysis’s familialist framework, which constantly seeks to explain the significance of present actions by reference to a particular account of childhood and which focuses exclusively on the libidinal interactions between a child and his or her parents. Guattari also observes that the approach of Kingsley Hall did not consider the matter of money and for him this is decisive: one cannot get away from Oedipus, he argues, if one does not interrogate the nexus between psychoanalysis and capitalism.9 These kinds of comments seem to indicate a profound practical knowledge on Guattari’s part concerning the treatment of schizophrenics, yet Dosse says nothing about this aspect of Guattari’s professional life. We learn nothing at all about Guattari’s interaction with patients from Dosse. Indeed, he almost makes it seem as though he did not have any clinical interaction with patients, which contradicts Guattari’s own presentation of his career.

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The second area calling for clarification is Dosse’s claim that Guattari maintained a separate private practice as a psychoanalyst. What he does not clarify is whether Guattari followed his Lacanian training or utilised his own schizoanalytic ideas. If the latter is the case, then it would be invaluable to know exactly what those ideas were and more particularly how they were applied in a clinical setting. What did Guattari actually say to his patients? This, it seems to me, is an incredibly important question and it is quite surprising that Dosse does not pursue it, though it may be that there is no way of recovering this information. What we know is this: Guattari received formal training in psychoanalysis from Jacques Lacan, France’s most important interpreter of Freud, achieving the status of analyste membre (member analyst) licensing him as a psychotherapist. Although he remained a member of Lacan’s school, the École Freudienne de Paris, from its inception until its dissolution in 1980 shortly before the master’s death, Guattari’s relationship to Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis was at best ambivalent. The publication of Guattari’s notebooks, Écrits pour L’anti-Œdipe (The Anti-Oedipus Papers), has made it clear just how strained relations were between them, especially after the publication of AntiOedipus (even though that work was, in the words of its authors, designed to save Lacan from the Lacanians). Guattari wanted to work with Deleuze precisely because he thought Deleuze could help him resolve a number of theoretical impasses he found in Lacan’s work.10 In particular, Guattari rejected the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language, which is the cornerstone of Lacan’s structuralist reinterpretation of Freud. This is why Deleuze’s book The Logic of Sense interested him so much; it offered a much richer account of the relationship between language and the unconscious than Lacan’s work did. When he met Guattari, Deleuze had recently completed his Doctorat d’État at the University of Lyon, which consisted of two book-length works, both published in 1968 – Différence et repetition (Difference and Repetition) and Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza). Some measure of the impact of these works can be gleaned from the fact that it was in his review of Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense that Foucault made the infamous pronouncement that perhaps one day the twentieth century would be known as Deleuzian. Deleuze himself did not take Foucault’s prophecy too seriously; he saw it as a joke, an attempt to provoke enemies. But even before this, Deleuze had already gained widespread attention with a sequence of short but incisive monographs on David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Baruch Spinoza that established him as a thinker to be reckoned with. He is often credited with bringing about a wholesale revival of Nietzsche, an author very much out of favour in post-war France because of the way

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his work was appropriated by Nazi ideology. Deleuze would later add to this already impressive oeuvre two books on cinema as well as monographs on Gottfried Leibniz, the artist Francis Bacon, and one on his close friend Michel Foucault. Deleuze specified that the presiding aim of his work was to overturn Platonism, a project he adopted from Nietzsche. He meant that philosophy should seek the conditions of real experience in simulacra (or what he would later call affects and becomings) not simulations (or what he would also call representations).11 After their first meeting, Deleuze and Guattari agreed to work together and over the next several months they met and shared ideas and developed a work that was simultaneously a critique and a rethinking of both Marx and Freud (and more particularly the Marx-Freud synthesis fashionable at that time) culminating in a new methodology they proposed to call ‘schizoanalysis’. Guattari’s notebooks provide a partial but nonetheless illuminating picture of the actual logistics of their collaboration. They would meet and talk, usually for hours at a time, then after several weeks of this Deleuze cut himself off from the world – including Guattari – and wrote. He showed Guattari work-in-progress drafts of the manuscript, which the latter commented on, but without the expectation that Deleuze would necessarily incorporate his comments. The trust implicit in this process is quite amazing and speaks to the depth of not only their friendship, but also their intellectual connection. Essentially, then, Deleuze wrote their books on his own, having soaked up as much of their preparatory dialogue as he could. This perhaps accounts for their consistency of tone, and seamlessness of style and argument, but what really amazes (and in many cases infuriates) Deleuze’s readers is just how radically different that tone and style is when compared to his previous works. That the argument remains essentially the same is lost on most readers. The philosophical purists tend to object to both its extensive use of literature and its foray into contemporary politics, as though to say Deleuze’s philosophical thinking had somehow been corrupted as a consequence. On its publication in 1972 Anti-Oedipus was an immediate sensation, but it divided opinion quite sharply between those like Fredric Jameson who heralded it as a radical intervention and those like Perry Anderson who dismissed it as irrationalist nonsense. What we know today as schizoanalysis was conceived by Deleuze and Guattari over the course of the next decade, beginning with the already mentioned Anti-Oedipus and ending with A Thousand Plateaus. In between they wrote a book on Franz Kafka, which despite its many merits as an intervention into Kafka studies is ultimately a transitional work that departs from Anti-Oedipus in significant ways but does not arrive fully at where A Thousand Plateaus begins. Like the book Dialogues, which Deleuze wrote with his friend Claire Parnet as a kind of anti-interview interview and

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published a few years before A Thousand Plateaus appeared, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature is best read as a kind of route map that guides the reader in how to approach the conceptual labyrinth of A Thousand Plateaus. In addition to these three books, Deleuze and Guattari also gave several interviews on their work, some of which are collected in Negotiations, as well as dozens of lectures and seminars, many of which can now be found on the internet.12 A decade after A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari wrote another book called What Is Philosophy?, but it doesn’t mention schizoanalysis and instead speaks of something they call ‘geophilosophy’, and though it isn’t a negation of schizoanalysis – as Isabelle Stengers implies – it is nevertheless a very different kind of project from their previous collaborations.13 It may well be (as Dosse’s biography claims) that Guattari had very little hand in it, in which case it should perhaps be read as Deleuze’s own attempt to settle accounts with the discipline of philosophy.14 Guattari was not purely practical in his contribution to the development of schizoanalysis any more than Deleuze was purely philosophical in his. It could perhaps be said he was a theorist who worked with practical problems, but even that must be taken on faith because nowhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s work does one find actual clinical case histories or case studies. In Dialogues Deleuze cites a couple of examples of clinical cases he knew of through Guattari and it seems clear that these actual cases did factor in their thinking (they are mentioned in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus as well, usually without any indication of their source).15 Beyond this, though, there is no direct evidence of the influence of Guattari’s clinical work anywhere in their collaborative writing, nor are there any detailed case analyses in Guattari’s own writings which one might draw on to supplement their collaborative work and fill in the missing pieces. The resulting impression that schizoanalysis is somehow detached from the actual world of ‘madness’ is compounded by Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated exclamations that they’ve never met a schizo. It may be that they were being ironic in saying this, but the fact is it fits the evidence. The bulk of the case material Deleuze and Guattari refer to is drawn from written sources, predominantly diaries, letters, memoirs and fiction (poetry, prose and drama). There are also multiple references to Freud’s case histories, particularly Little Hans, the ‘Wolf-Man’ and Schreber, as well as references to Melanie Klein’s cases and Lacan’s. Either way, it is still written and not ‘live’ examples they mostly work from, which raises questions about their referential or empirical value. It would be difficult, for example, to determine whether Artaud’s poetry can be said to prove the existence of the clinical entity referred to as a body without organs in the schizoanalytic literature. Our knowledge of schizoanalysis is in fact very limited. Deleuze and Guattari have not been all that well served by their commentators, who

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for the most part seem incapable of seeing the forest for the trees (I do not exclude myself from the charge). Most attempts to simplify Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and there have been many, tend to focus on the tantalising new concepts, some of which have become veritable slogans of our time – becoming, lines of flight, deterritorialisation, body without organs, to mention only a few – and ignore or fail to see what is truly original in their thought. In large part this is because most readers take at face value Deleuze and Guattari’s often vituperative rejection of Freud’s writing and (seemingly) of psychoanalysis, as though that were somehow even possible in a critical age that was in many ways invented by Freud. The fact is, though, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject either the whole of Freud or the whole of psychoanalysis, nor indeed do they reject parts of Freud or parts of psychoanalysis. They speak against that very practice. They propose rather to re-engineer psychoanalysis, and until it is grasped what exactly that entails, their work will never be fully understood and schizoanalysis will continue to be poorly understood.16 What exactly did Deleuze and Guattari want to re-engineer in Freud’s work? There is a simple answer to this question, which holds the key to schizoanalysis and explains why they lambasted Freud. It has to do with association, which is to say the connections or links we make in our minds between ideas, thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations and all other forms of stimuli both internal and external. Understanding how Deleuze and Guattari’s model of association differs from Freud’s is the key to understanding their entire project. All their most important concepts pertain to association. Freud used the term ‘binding’ (Bindung) rather than ‘association’, but the issue is the same: why does one thought, feeling, memory or sensation seem to go with or somehow belong to another? For example, the whole of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu unspools as it does because of the seemingly endless loops of associations that Marcel finds himself entangled in when he dunks his madeleine into his lime-blossom tea. Why does the narrator draw together the images, the ideas, the reflections, the memories that he does? Is there an underpinning logic to their selection? Deleuze’s hypothesis is that Proust should be read as a kind of Egyptologist, someone who sets themselves the task of learning a discourse consisting of signs whose meanings are known only to those capable of using them, to those select few who have been initiated into their mysteries.17 The figure of Marcel is that of the analyst, but of a type superior to Freud because he does not assume there is an external key to the coded ways of Paris’s upper classes. He is not, in this sense, a hermeneuticist in the way Freud was. Deleuze’s unspoken implication is that Freud was not the Egyptologist he thought he was. Marcel is not a semiotician, strictly speaking, though many of Deleuze’s readers seem to want to read his book that way, as though it

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were an account of a theory of semiotics. He is not that because, as Deleuze makes clear from the first pages, Marcel’s interpretation of the worlds in which he moves is pathological – his logic of reading is the symptom of that pathology and it is the pathology that Deleuze is interested in. It is a kind of semiotics, to be sure, but it is a semiotics that is premised by the idea that the psyche would have to be organised in a very particular kind of way for it to make the types of associations it does. In subsequent work, Deleuze and Guattari would use the concept of the ‘regime of signs’ to theorise the relation between the organisation of the psyche and the kinds of interpretation of signs it can make, providing us with a catalogue of five basic types of what we might call association-machines (Deleuze and Guattari called them abstract machines).18 To see how schizoanalysis differs from psychoanalysis one must first grasp what psychoanalysis understood by ‘association’. The clichéd scene of the patient on the therapist’s couch ‘free associating’ – i.e. allowing their mind to drift from one thought to the next regardless of logic or sense and sharing that with their analyst without inhibition – provides a ready-made image of what association means, but does not tell the whole story. At a minimum it means that no thought exists in isolation; it is always intimately tied to another thought that came before it and is always capable of laying siege to thoughts that come after it. Hence Deleuze’s claim that Proust’s work is not about memory at all, but rather the way thoughts as signs are bound to one another across time.19 Freud’s foundational hypothesis is that ‘free association’ works as a therapeutic tool because there is no such thing as a purely random thought or statement; everything is connected according to its own peculiar logic. This logic is both singular and universal in that it will have a unique permutation for every individual but will nevertheless follow pathways that are common to all humans. That this logic is not always known or indeed knowable to us is proof, Freud reasoned, of the existence of an unconscious, a part of the psyche that produces thoughts affecting our self without us being aware of its processes.20 This is why it is possible for us to be angry, sad, upset, depressed or even happy without apparent cause or reason. Freud’s hypothesis was that the unconscious can explain why we feel as we do, even if the conscious cannot. The entire theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis is erected on this platform and what it essentially offers is an explanation of our muddled and confusing thoughts and in doing so it reduces their psychic ‘charge’. Aptly enough one of Freud’s first patients described psychoanalysis as a ‘talking cure’ because its central therapeutic idea is that if we can come to a conscious understanding of the logic of the associations we make unconsciously then even if we are unable to stop making those associations, we won’t be so troubled by them.

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The essential problem Freud had to solve was this: why are some thoughts more significant than others? His basic answer was that everything in our psychic life revolves around the formation of our individual selves as sexual beings compelled by biology to want and need interaction with other sexual beings. At the height of the Victorian era, a period in Western history renowned for its prudishness, Freud proposed that human interaction of every type can only be fully understood if humans are grasped as sexual beings. Indeed, he used that very Victorian prudishness to make his case: the fact that as a culture, if not as individuals, we are so uptight about sexual matters is proof, he argued, both of sexuality’s centrality to the psychic life of human existence and of its inherent complexity. He positioned sexuality as both that which we have difficulty talking about and that which we must talk about if we are to attain a healthy attitude towards it. He shifted attention away from the cataloguing of sexual practices of the type pioneered by Krafft-Ebing to the more complex issue of sexuality, the underlying set of ‘reasons’ why particular sexual practices seem necessary and not merely desirable or pleasurable. Psychoanalysis matured as a theory when Freud realised that sexual ideas are as significant as, if not more significant than, sexual practices. His first breakthrough as a theoretician came when he recognised the importance of sexual fantasy. Sexuality refers, then, to a particular organisation of desire, one that does not simply have to do with attaining orgasm or producing children but goes to the very heart of what might usefully be called our existential being in the world. More generally, it refers to a system of association between ideas, thoughts, practices and acts whose connections we find both psychically and physically pleasing for which Jung invented the useful term ‘complex’. Freud’s genius was to see that a single form of complex – the infamous ‘Oedipal complex’ – was common to all of humanity. Freud observed that childhood sexual development appears to follow the same narrative pathway as Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex and concluded that the play still resonates today as it did two thousand years ago because it contains a universal truth. According to the theory of the ‘Oedipal complex’, as it came to be known, ‘normal’ heterosexual desire is formed by the transformation of incestuous desire. First the child forms a ‘love’ attachment to his mother and in so doing comes to think of his father as a deadly rival. In the child’s eyes, the father wields the power of castration, evidence of which is to be seen in the example of his mother’s apparently missing genitals. Unable to defeat his father in reality, the child symbolically ‘kills’ his father by turning away from the mother and (after a period of latency of a decade or more) attaches instead to another woman who is in effect a substitute for the mother, and in doing so assumes the same structural position as the father. On this model of desire, every new attachment is a repetition of the

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child’s original attachment to their mother; every problem and difficulty the child might have had with that original attachment to their mother is then played out in variation with every new love attachment, which is effectively what is meant by neurosis. Of course, the basic cause of these real or potential difficulties in forming love attachments tends to derive from the presence of the father as a kind of permanent obstruction to desire, the eternal ‘No’ that reverberates in every neurotic’s head like the sound of thunder. Every love attachment is also a variation on this original relationship with the father as the voice of the Law. With Oedipus, then, Freud found a remarkably adaptable answer to the question, why are some thoughts more significant than others? This was Freud’s worst mistake, according to Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that psychoanalysis went badly wrong when it enshrined the Oedipal narrative as the universal of human sexual formation. In Dialogues Deleuze states that he and Guattari only ever had two objections to psychoanalysis: ‘that it breaks up all productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances’.21 These two objections to psychoanalysis chart a very clear course through the whole corpus of writings on schizoanalysis: on the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari develop a new theory of desire around the notion of production, and on the other hand, they develop a new hermeneutic model for analysing the utterances or products of desire. This latter statement will surprise many since Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of interpretation has virtual folklore status in critical theory. Their famous claim that one should not ask what things mean, only how they work, has been widely taken up as a slogan among those scholars and critics wanting to liberate themselves from the tyrannies of tradition. But this misunderstands Deleuze and Guattari’s project – what they say is that the unconscious cannot be interpreted, not that interpretation per se is impossible. Indeed, it would be a nonsense for them to claim interpretation is impossible because their own work is full of interpretations. When they say Freud crushes utterances, they mean Freud does not listen to his patients, whereas in contrast they do and consequently their analyses of Freud’s cases are better than the master’s.22 To make sense of both of these diagnoses – that Freud breaks up the productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances – we need to return to the issue of association. Here it will be helpful to look at one of the key examples that preoccupied Deleuze and Guattari, namely Freud’s case study of the five-year-old Viennese boy known as ‘Little Hans’ who had a fear of horses and was as a consequence agoraphobic.23 Freud did not treat the boy himself but relied on Hans’s parents for information about his condition and advised them on how to proceed. Of all Freud’s case studies, it is this one that seems to incense Deleuze and Guattari the most because of the many quite blatant

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instances where both Freud and the boy’s parents fail to listen to Hans, and to make matters worse insist on putting words into his mouth. For example, at the train station Hans tells his friend Lizzi not to touch the horses in case they bite her, and his father responds by saying to Hans, ‘Do you know, I don’t think you’re talking about horses really, but about widdlers that shouldn’t be touched.’ Hans very smartly replies: ‘But widdlers don’t bite.’24 As this brief exchange illustrates, Hans’s statements are crushed beneath the weight of psychoanalytically inflected judgements about what he’s really talking about. In a wonderful counter-study, Deleuze and Guattari (with the assistance of Claire Parnet and André Scala) list Little Hans’s statements side by side with what Freud says he ‘hears’, making it abundantly clear just how at odds the analyst and analysand really are in a clinical regime governed by the dictates of Oedipus.25 Schizoanalysis can be understood, then, as an attempt to correct this situation and create a space in which the patient’s utterances can be heard for themselves. Deleuze and Guattari are only partly successful in this enterprise, however, because while they make it clear that it is highly problematic to trace every utterance back to some primal Oedipal fantasy, they do not solve the bigger problem of why certain associations are more important than others. In their own analysis of Little Hans Deleuze and Guattari argue that Hans’s fear of horses and associated agoraphobia needs to be understood in terms of what they call a streetassemblage, by which they mean a symptomal complex consisting of Hans, the street, horses and the station across the road. The street-assemblage stands in the place of Freud’s Oedipal complex, naming a very particular organisation of desire, but in contrast to psychoanalysis’s account of things it does not actually explain that organisation: Little Hans’s horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the individual assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker . . . etc.26 They move away from Freud by shifting the domain of analysis from representation to affect – the horse no longer stands for something other than itself (i.e. it no longer represents the father); it is now the name of a particular kind of ‘feeling’. That feeling is not defined by ‘horsiness’ or the sense that one is somehow horse-like; rather, it is defined by the affects we associate with having one’s eyes blocked, by being restrained with bit and bridle, the sense of pride one is nevertheless able to maintain despite such restraints, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘affect’ to designate

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these feelings because they occur at a level beneath or perhaps before ideation. If they call Hans’s feelings ‘becoming-horse’ it is not because Hans is thinking about horses or is in danger of becoming one, but rather because the affects he is experiencing are those we associate with horses, such as being restrained. And while this seems to make more sense as an account of Little Hans’s neuroses than Freud’s suggestion that everything can and must be traced back to an Oedipal relation between Hans and his parents, it does not explain at all why these particular affects and not some others are so central to his sense of self. Of the various definitions of schizoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari give, the most useful in my view is the one given by Guattari in The Machinic Unconscious (1979). He defines schizoanalysis as a ‘pragmatics of the unconscious’, by which he means a mode of analysis whose purpose is to understand how the unconscious works.27 Work is meant in the most literal sense here – ultimately Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious is a factory (and not a theatre, which is how Freud conceives it) and they draw heavily on Marx’s work on labour in the elaboration of their newly minted discourse of the machinic unconscious. But this discourse can be misleading because although Deleuze and Guattari frequently use the language of machines to describe the operations of the unconscious, their model is not mechanics but pragmatics. The only time they make a direct comparison between the unconscious and actual machines is when they compare it to the absurd machines of the Dadaists, surrealists, as well as the infernal machines imagined by Buster Keaton and Rube Goldberg.28 And on these occasions what is crucial is that these machines do not work. As Deleuze and Guattari observe in a postface they wrote for the second edition of AntiOedipus, Man Ray’s collage ‘dancer/danger’ doesn’t work, inasmuch as its working parts, its cogs and wheels and so on, do not turn or intermesh with one another in a mechanical fashion, and it is precisely for that reason that it works as a piece of art.29 It works by creating an association (i.e. refrain) between the human dancer and the inhuman machine and thereby brings them into a new kind of relation which Deleuze and Guattari would later call the assemblage, but in their first works they called the desiring-machine. Desiring-machines are the working parts of the machinic unconscious; it is their operation that the pragmatics of the machinic unconscious is tasked to understand. If dreams are Freud’s ‘royal road’ to the unconscious, then it is desiring-machines that provide Deleuze and Guattari with their sovereign superhighway to the machinic unconscious. If schizoanalysis is the discourse of the desiring-machine, as it were, then to understand schizoanalysis we must first of all understand the desiringmachine; in fact, though, we must go further back because the desiringmachine is a product of a still more primary process. The true primary

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process is desiring-production, which is the process of producing associations, that is, the connections and links between thoughts, feelings, ideas and so on. But desiring-production only becomes visible in and through the desiring-machines it forms. And while both these terms are abandoned by Deleuze and Guattari in subsequent writing on schizoanalysis, the thinking behind them remains. This is by no means as straightforward as it might seem because they cast their discussion of production in language drawn from Marx, which has the effect of making it seem as though they are talking about the production of physical things. And all their talk about a material psychiatry simply reinforces this impression. However, that is not what they are talking about at all, yet they make it quite difficult to decipher what it is they are driving at by framing their discussion of the desire in this way. One must start by asking the very simple question: if desire produces, then what does it produce? The answer is not physical things, at least not in the way Marxism would understand that notion. So why use the Marxist language? For the same reason Freud uses economic language in his account of libido: to create a model. The correct answer to this question, then, is objects in the form of intuitions, to use Kant’s term for the mind’s initial attempts to grasp the world (both internal and external to the psyche). That is what desire produces: objects, not physical things. Arranging – i.e. creating and moving through and with assemblages – is the basic operation performed by the unconscious, or indeed the mind as a whole.30 There are several sub-operations of arranging that Deleuze and Guattari consider, but for present purposes it suffices to say that arranging is what the mind does. In this respect arranging should be thought of as a mode of cognition. Deleuze and Guattari quite explicitly link arranging to Kant’s synthetic judgement and state that the ‘synthesizer has replaced judgement, and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance’.31 Synthesisers are like judgements; they are the specific operations of cognition which give the understanding both coherence and consistency, but differ in that their object is not intuition, but the molecular forces that give rise to intuition. If there is a critique of Kant implicit in this move, it is that he does not go far enough in his critiques. Having said that, Deleuze and Guattari do not argue that the synthesiser is a theoretical improvement upon synthetic judgement, or that it is a necessary corrective of Kant; rather, their position is that the synthesiser supersedes synthetic judgement in a historical sense. Although they accuse Kant of conforming to a State form of philosophy, their argument for leaving him behind is staged on world-historical not philosophical grounds.32 Whereas ‘romantic philosophy still appealed to a formal synthetic identity ensuring a continuous intelligibility of matter (a priori synthesis), modern philosophy tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in themselves.

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This is Cosmos philosophy, after the manner of Nietzsche.’33 It is in music, rather than philosophy, however, that one finds the clearest articulation of how synthesisers work, according to Deleuze and Guattari. The great French modernist composer Edgard Varèse’s work is seen as exemplary by Deleuze and Guattari because through his experiments with electronic instruments he creates ‘a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy’.34 If Guattari’s definition is ultimately too narrow in scope to do justice to the schizoanalytic project as a whole, because it ranges well beyond the strict confines of the unconscious to include not only the psyche as a whole but beyond that social system in which it comes into being, it is nevertheless a useful starting place because it enables us to think more concretely about the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project. This is a necessary step in the process of coming to grips with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought because it is only by being clear about the macrostructure of their project that one can resolve the myriad difficulties of deciding how one should interpret their often quite eccentric-seeming concepts such as the body without organs. What Guattari’s definition tells us is that their principal concern was to understand how the psyche works – this forms the macrostructure of their project taken as a whole. What we can infer from this, I want to argue, is that they were not particularly interested in devising either a new ontology of things (which is one of the main ways they are read) or a new politics (which is the other way in which they are read). Rather, what they gave us is a new topography of the psyche.

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Chapter 2 Desire and Ethics

The question [of revolution] has always been organisational, not at all ideological: is an organisation possible which is not modelled on the apparatus of the State, even to prefigure the State to come? Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues There is a certain irony in this statement because one would look in vain in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s writings, whether alone or together, for any attempt to deal with the specific organisational difficulties of bringing about social and cultural change, much less a full-scale revolution. But then their position is that changing the composition of desire is itself revolutionary and they argue, rightly enough, that the transformation of the way desire is configured on both an individual and a collective level (however it is accomplished and whether for progressive political reasons or not) is not something that necessarily requires planning. Often, as was the case with May ’68, or more recently the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, changes occur spontaneously and in a manner that no one could have predicted.1 As such, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim themselves to be against both revolution and reform, where either is a structured or planned event, a fact that would seem utterly inconsistent with the idea that social and cultural change is ultimately organisational. They also warn constantly that something can always go wrong, that planning is no guarantee of success. They are also wary of aligning themselves with any particular political or ideological position and tend to view all established political positions with a high degree of ambivalence, thus making it very difficult to determine what kind of a political organisation they would actually support.2 For example, they are clearly anti-capitalist as well as against the idea of the State, yet it is by no means clear what their preferred alternative economic and political models would be. We might thus content ourselves by saying that their politics is ultimately undecidable, but I want to argue that this is precisely what we should not do. I do not mean to imply by this that I agree with Peter Hallward that we should simply dismiss Deleuze and Guattari’s work as ‘out of this world’, as

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though their work has nothing concrete to offer political activists engaged in the ongoing struggle to develop more effective strategies for reshaping the contemporary world. I think Hallward misreads Deleuze and Guattari, but even if I thought his reading was accurate, I would still refuse his position because it seems to me that the task of critical theory is to constantly invent new ways of engaging with the world, which itself is constantly changing. In this sense, I tend to agree with Deleuze and Guattari when they reject critique as a rather bankrupt mode of philosophy because it offers us nothing more interesting or enriching than a catalogue of errors. But this does not mean we should not read them critically; it means simply that we should read them – and indeed all philosophers – creatively as well as critically, always with an eye to bringing forward something new and useful to our own purposes, even if the authors in question would not recognise themselves in what we do with their thought. I must add the caveat that this does not mean all creative responses to Deleuze’s thought are thereby beyond critique. This was essentially what Deleuze meant when he famously said that he saw his readings of other philosophers – Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant and Leibniz – as producing monstrous progeny. This is why he spoke of Bergsonism, for example, because his reading of Bergson was intended to create an application of Bergson’s thought, or better an apparatus that could be deployed to give thought to problems and circumstances Bergson did not and perhaps could not have considered himself. It was thus simultaneously faithful to Bergson and a departure from him without also being a negation of his thought. Deleuze’s two books on cinema exemplify this achievement – they simultaneously claim Bergson was wrong about cinema and that his work is perfectly adapted to thinking about the specificity of cinema as an art of the moving image. There are a great many questions such an approach to Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) work might want to address, but the one that will concern me here is this: how would one decide what the ‘right thing to do’ is from a Deleuzian perspective? This is of course a rather clichéd question, but it is not therefore an invalid question. Indeed, it is in many ways a very productive question because in answering it one is forced to think through in a very precise way what one would mean by ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in a given situation, and whether or not one would want to stipulate that a particular ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is universally ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or in some way dependent on context or situation. For example: is abortion right or wrong? If it is wrong, are there exceptions? If it is right, are there exceptions? Is it possible for abortion to be right sometimes and wrong at other times? The difficulty one has in answering the many practical permutations of this question from a Deleuzian perspective in any precise way is, I think, indicative of how little work has been done with respect to Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics. The

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secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari has not ignored the moral and ethical dimension of their work, but the approach is (for the most part) rather vague. I do not mean to be unkind in saying this, and I certainly would not exclude myself from this charge, but the fact is it is rare to find anyone speaking in the kind of practical and prescriptive terms one finds in contemporary moral and ethical philosophy – here I’m thinking of the work of people like Dworkin, Nagel, Rawls, Sandel and Scanlon. No doubt this is because it seems an anathema to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought to speak in prescriptive terms, a notion that I want to challenge. Consequently, it is impossible to find a concrete account anywhere in the secondary literature that asks how one should live as a Deleuzian, and perhaps more importantly how one should treat others if one is a Deleuzian. This is a significant problem because it leaves us unable to respond to practical questions. As I said, there is a considerable amount of work out there concerned with Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics, particularly in gender studies. The trouble is it tends to make the classic error (first identified by David Hume) of trying to argue ‘ought’ from ‘is’.3 There is a tendency to take Deleuze and Guattari’s account of how desire functions and use that as a baseline for determining how things ought to be. So, if desire is said to be rhizomatic in its operation then commentators tend to take the position that that means desire ought to be rhizomatic and that anything which interferes with this or somehow disrupts it must therefore be unethical. I am simplifying only very slightly in parsing this position in this way. The most egregious instance of this error is Michel Foucault’s famous preface to the English translation of Anti-Oedipus. Foucault writes that he thinks Deleuze and Guattari’s work can best be thought of and read as an ‘art of’ or ‘how to’ book and not as either a new theory or a new philosophy (‘Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel’). His claim is that it is an exegesis on the question of ‘what is the right thing to do?’. But in laying out his reading of AntiOedipus Foucault clearly makes the error of basing his conception of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics on their ontology of desire and extrapolates ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Ultimately, the real problem is that this approach leads to a dead end. Foucault’s reading of Anti-Oedipus starts as follows: I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular ‘readership’: being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour?4

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Foucault proposes that we read Anti-Oedipus as a contemporary version of Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life and rechristens it Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life. He lists seven principles of this new mode of devout life, which will ideally be an ‘art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending’:5 • Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia. • Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization. • Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna). . . [and] prefer [instead] what is positive and multiple. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. • Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality that possesses revolutionary force. • Do not use thought to ground political practice in Truth or political action to discredit thought. Use political action instead to intensify thought. • Do not demand of politics that it restores the ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. • Do not become enamored of power.6 If we accept Foucault’s framing of Anti-Oedipus as a kind of philosophical manual for how not to be a fascist, then we are presented with a substantial problem that has largely been ignored in Deleuze studies. In contrast to Francis de Sales’s work, Foucault’s instructions specify what we should not do, but say nothing at all about what we should do. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Foucault’s framing of Anti-Oedipus ultimately only amounts to a strangely negative set of injunctions. Non-fascist living is surely a virtuous mode of living, but it is a virtuous mode of living for which no precise programme or model exists. On the basis of Foucault’s guide alone, it is literally impossible to say what would constitute a virtue, that is, an action which is not merely non-fascist, but good in and of itself. We cannot assume that non-fascist is good in and of itself. It is very difficult to even describe what being non-fascist in this affirmative sense would be like, since all the characterisations of it that Foucault gives are themselves couched in the negative: don’t be paranoid, don’t be hierarchical, don’t be sad, don’t ground thought in truth, don’t demand the restoration of rights, and don’t become enamoured of power! If we reverse these various injunctions into their affirmative opposites, it soon becomes clear just how vacuous they are: what is the opposite of paranoid? Stable? What is the opposite of hierarchical? Flat? Equal? What is the opposite of

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sad? Happy? Joyous? And so on. Even if we stay with the negatives, one is still forced to wonder, just what kind of a person would have all these attributes? Can one think of a single historical figure that could live up to this set of prescriptions? I do not say this in order to dismiss Foucault. Far from it. To my mind, Foucault’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari as enjoining us to lead virtuous lives is both bold and necessary. However, it is also unusually timid. Foucault is either unable or unwilling to specify the set of beliefs, practices and thoughts that would count as virtues in a life that was free from fascism. I want to suggest therefore that Foucault’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari is ultimately not demanding enough. In beginning this way, I want to make two points. First, I think we need to re-evaluate the way we read Deleuze and Guattari. I do not just mean we should try to read them more carefully or more rigorously, though I’m not against that; rather, I mean we should re-evaluate the modality of our reading. I think we let Deleuze get away with too much by going along with his insistence that a philosopher must be allowed to ask their own questions. In interviews, he often cites this principle as his reason for not wanting to give interviews in the first place and to excuse, I suppose, his failure to answer adequately the questions he is asked. But if one looks at the interviews, it is also clear that he is never asked questions that aren’t in some way commensurate with his own thinking, leaving him at liberty to respond to them in his own terms. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze evidently never agreed to speak to interviewers he knew would be either hostile or unsympathetic – one thinks here of Foucault’s interview with the young Maoists and their heated disagreement concerning the role and nature of people’s courts in the establishment of popular justice. Deleuze was never subjected to this kind of grilling – not in print anyway. And in one respect, Deleuze is clearly right to take the stance he does because philosophy gains little, if anything, if it does nothing more than go over old ground, repeating the same old questions again and again. But that doesn’t mean philosophy is better off constantly seeking new coordinates, as Deleuze and Guattari appear to be doing with their battery of new concepts, because in doing so it isolates itself from the intellectual history and tradition that gives it both its depth and interest. For example, it would be very interesting to hear Deleuze’s thoughts on the concept of freedom, or, even more pointedly, his thoughts on justice. Deleuze has no hesitation in saying, for example, that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is an injustice, but nowhere does he explain what in his view ought to be done to rectify the situation.7 But to accuse Israel of acting unjustly he must have some notion – however inchoate – of justice in mind, and that is precisely my point: we need to force Deleuze’s work to disclose answers to these kinds of implicit questions.

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Second, in addition to asking Deleuze and Guattari new questions, questions Deleuze and Guattari have not generated for themselves, I think we also need to ask ourselves new questions. We need to be bold enough (and for those of us who have been working on Deleuze and Guattari for quite a while, humble enough) to re-examine all the established readings of Deleuze and Guattari and see whether or not they hold up. I think Deleuze studies as a field has reached the moment when it needs to go back over its early attempts to understand difficult concepts like becoming, the body without organs, desiring-machines and so on and see whether or not the working definitions we have for these terms are sound. This may seem to contradict my point above that I think we should read Deleuze both creatively and critically, so some further clarification may be in order. I do not subscribe to the view that there are ‘no wrong readings’ of Deleuze – on the contrary, I think there are plenty of wrong readings out there, and not just of Deleuze obviously. And I think it is important that these wrong readings be identified and challenged because poorly formulated concepts lead to poorly formulated judgements. I’m fine with those readings of Deleuze that take creative licence with his concepts and take them off on their own line of flight, just so long as they don’t claim to be anything other than what they are, namely, appropriations, or what Harold Bloom usefully calls ‘strong misreadings’. Having said that, I do think there needs to be a much clearer distinction drawn between these two ways of handling Deleuze’s concepts because I can think of several instances where the strong misreading has taken the place of the close reading (DeLanda’s so-called ‘Deleuze 2.0’ is a perfect case in point). But as I said above, I also think our readings of Deleuze should challenge the weaknesses and gaps in his work, but instead of simply pointing out these weaknesses and gaps I think we should try to create our own solutions. To further illustrate my main point here, that it is difficult to determine what the right thing to do is from a Deleuzian perspective, let me give you an example of a practical question of the kind that I think Deleuze and Guattari’s work should be able to help us answer. Dutch journalist Linda Polman opens her recent book on international aid with the following thought experiment: Imagine. You’re an international humanitarian aid worker in a war zone and faithful to the principles of the Red Cross, as any good humanitarian should be. In other words, you’re impartial, neutral and independent. It’s your responsibility to relieve human suffering, irrespective of the people involved and the situation on the ground. This time your mission has taken you to a refugee camp in Darfur. You do what you can for the victims, but soldiers exploit

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your efforts. They demand money for every well you dig and levy sky-high taxes, thought up on the spot, on all sacks of rice and tents and medicines you arrange to have flown in. They consume a slice of your aid supplies and sell another slice. Among the items they buy with the proceeds are weapons, which they use to drive yet more people into your refugee camp or even to their deaths. What do you do?8 I know there are numerous questions one could raise at this point about whether the Red Cross is a good humanitarian organisation, or whether international aid is a good or bad thing, and so on. For example, Dambisa Moyo in Dead Aid makes a convincing case that international aid not only doesn’t work but also helps to sustain the very regimes whose kleptocratic style of government creates the very crises aid is supposed to relieve.9 But given that Foucault casts Anti-Oedipus as an art of living directed at the individual subject (two words he forces us to place under erasure, as it were), we are entitled to think that Deleuze and Guattari can and should be able to tell us what to do in a complex situation like this. To put it another way, what would it mean in these circumstances to, as Foucault says we should, withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the negative and prefer instead what is positive and multiple? If the choice is as simple as staying and trying to do the best one can for the victims or deciding that the situation is hopeless and leaving, can Deleuze and Guattari help us to make that decision? Is doing the best one can the positive and the multiple and leaving a hopeless situation the negative? I do not think there is any way we can answer this question using Foucault’s prescriptions. This is not because it is a bad question; indeed, I would say it is a vital and necessary question – what is the point of having an art of living if it cannot help us to decide what the right thing to do is? Moreover, if Foucault is right in saying that Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics then by that very definition it should empower us to decide – or, at the very least, empower us to begin a discussion about the best way to go about deciding – which is the most ethical way to act in all situations, even complex and indeed fraught political situations like the one Polman imagines. If the question is not bad, then why can’t we answer it using Foucault’s framework? The short answer is that Foucault misunderstands and misapprehends the concept of desire. This is evident in the way he collapses two planes – the virtual and the actual – into one and uses ideas and concepts drawn from each of these levels interchangeably, perhaps unaware that there are two rigorously distinct systems at work in Anti-Oedipus. We need to develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchisation – action,

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thought and desires do not all belong to the same plane; therefore, they are not commensurate concepts in the way Foucault assumes them to be and cannot be used interchangeably. One set of terms refers to the internal processes of the psyche, while the other refers to the external processes of micropolitics, and while the two processes are interlinked, they are nevertheless distinct. Deleuze and Guattari’s principal grievance with psychoanalysis is that Freud confuses these two systems when he claims that the unconscious is formed in the image of Sophocles’ Oedipus (Lacan makes the same kind of error when he claims the unconscious is structured like a language). Foucault is hardly alone in making this kind of error with regard to Deleuze and Guattari’s work; in fact, I am tempted to say this type of misreading of Deleuze and Guattari is the rule rather than the exception. But there is a bigger problem here, which is the very premise of Foucault’s reading: he uses Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of desire to construct his art of non-fascist living. He takes their analysis of how things are and turns it into a statement of how things ought to be. He thus turns the ontology of desire into an ethos, or programme for living. There are two problems with this move; the first, as I have already mentioned, is that it is false reasoning to move from how things are to how things ought to be. The fact that desire functions in the way it does is not reason enough to stipulate that that is how desire ought to be, or rather should be allowed to function. The second and perhaps even more obvious problem with this move is that it flies in the face of virtually the entire history of Western philosophy, which has always argued, in one form or another, that it is impossible to conceive a model of ethics on the basis of ‘desire’ because insofar as desire is thought of as an urge or impulse (whether conscious or unconscious), it exists outside, or at least at the extreme border of, the realm of rational judgement and thought. All too often, in Deleuze and Guattari studies, desire is presented as intrinsically good and virtuous, while the restriction of desire by whatever means is presented as intrinsically bad and unethical. As simplistic as this is, it is not hard to find examples of this kind of thinking in the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, not least because they themselves seem to be saying exactly this. But this amounts to saying that the only ethical position with respect to desire is one in which desire is given everything that it wants. This position, which we may identify as sadistic (remember de Sade’s immortal phrase that the only wrong he knew of was the wrong of denying one’s desire!), is clearly an impossible position for any ethical discourse to take.10 This is the basic problem Deleuze and Guattari studies faces insofar as it operates – as it frequently does – from the standpoint that one cannot advocate any kind of a restriction on desire and remain true to Deleuze

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and Guattari’s thought. Yet even if we found our way around this particular problem and conceived of a way of using the ontology of desire as the basis for an ethics, we would still be brought undone by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire is not inherently ethical – they do not conceive of desire as a virtue. Deleuze and Guattari make it clear that as they see it desire can be either ‘empty’ (bad) or ‘full’ (good) and is usually some mixture of the two. In other words, desire is not inherently good or bad, but has the potential to be both at the same time. One thinks here of the stories of the concentration camp guards who murdered thousands of people by day and were good, loving family men or women by night. Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s evocation of Primo Levi’s concept of the ‘gray zone’ to describe such ethical conundrums. So how do Deleuze and Guattari conceive of desire? The most straightforward answer I can give is that desire refers to the operation of the unconscious in conjunction with what Freud called the perception system, which includes both external and internal modes of perception – as such it refers to what is essentially involuntary and therefore cannot form the basis of either an ethical or a moral discourse. Everything hinges, in this regard, on how one understands the notion of production because that is the real key to understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire. It would not be wrong to say that desire and production are synonyms; in fact, one could say the basic hypothesis of Anti-Oedipus is that desire should be conceived as production (hence the concept of desiring-production). But that still begs the question of what they mean by desire. I want to answer this question in four ways. First, in the negative, so to speak: Deleuze and Guattari are quite clear that desire should not be thought of as an undifferentiated instinctual energy.11 Here I must add a complaint that the English translation is utterly misleading when it translates the opening passage as ‘What a mistake to have ever said the id’12 as though to say the problem all along was that there are many ids, not just one. It is not an error of translation, or if it is an error it is a reasonable error (an example of what translators refer to as a false friend) because the same French word ‘ça’ is used for both ‘it’ and ‘id’, but it is a tendentious translation because it presumes that id is in fact what Deleuze and Guattari are talking about and it therefore tries to give the poor reader a signpost to help them on their way. In doing so, however, it blinds the reader to the real significance and meaning of this opening, which is precisely the opposite of what is implied by the English translation: the problem isn’t that there are several ids and not just one id, rather the problem is with id itself. It is a poor concept because it reduces desire to a kind of animalistic urge that can only be present in either the conscious or the unconscious in representative form (i.e. the drive). It is precisely this formulation of desire that the concept of desiring-production is designed to replace.

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Second, we have to look to delirium to understand desire as production. Delirium is the royal road to understanding desire because it shows us what the unconscious is capable of producing – a set of visions, feelings and so on that, however false, are utterly real. This point is crucial. Deleuze and Guattari insist over and over that if desire produces then its product is real and not, it goes without saying, either imaginary or symbolic.13 Deleuze and Guattari reject Lacan’s compartmentalisation of the psyche into three separate spheres of production – the famous triad of the imaginary, symbolic and real. [The] real truth of the matter – the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium – is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement) without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production.14 In place of Lacan’s model, Deleuze and Guattari offer instead a unified model of the psyche whose operation consists of three types of interrelated syntheses: the synthesis of production, the synthesis of registration and the synthesis of consumption. By synthesis of production Deleuze and Guattari mean the work of the unconscious to produce what Kant refers to as intuitions. My reference to Kant here is by no means accidental – Deleuze and Guattari themselves point us in this direction. Kant, they argue, was one of the first to conceive of desire as production, but he botched things by failing to recognise that the object produced by desire is fully real (Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that superstitions, hallucinations and fantasies belong only to the realm of ‘psychic reality’ as Kant would have it).15 If the synthesis of production refers to the production of intuitions, then by extrapolation we can deduce that the synthesis of registration (recording) refers to the mind’s uptake of these intuitions, or the imagination, while consumption is the transformation of these intuitions into concepts, or the understanding.16 If this Kantian reading seems surprising, it is nevertheless confirmed by Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Lacan, which brings me to the third point. Lacan makes essentially the same mistake as Kant, Deleuze and Guattari argue, in that he conceives desire as lacking a real object (for which fantasy acts as both compensation and substitute). Deleuze and Guattari describe Lacan’s work as ‘complex’, which seems to be their code word for useful but flawed (they say the same thing about Badiou). On the one hand, they credit him with discovering desiring-machines in the form of the objet petit a, but on the other hand they accuse him of smothering them

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under the weight of the Big O.17 As Žižek is fond of saying, in the Lacanian universe fantasy supports reality. This is because reality, as Lacan conceives it, is deficient; it perpetually lacks a real object. Deleuze and Guattari see the same fault in Baudrillard’s work – hence their cryptic snipe that the concept of fantasy does not ‘compel psychoanalysis to engage in a study of gadgets and markets, in the form of an utterly dreary and dull psychoanalysis of the object: psychoanalytic studies of packages of noodles, cars, or “thingumajigs.”’18 If desire is conceived this way, as a support for reality, then, they argue, ‘its very nature as a real entity depends upon an “essence of lack” that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis.’19 That is not how desire works, according to Deleuze and Guattari, because otherwise it would mean that all desire does is produce doubles of reality, creating dreamed-of objects to complement real objects. This way of thinking subordinates desire to the objects it supposedly lacks, or needs, thus reducing it to an essentially secondary role. Nothing is changed either by correlating desire with need. ‘Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social.’20 This rejection of Lacan confirms what might be termed the neo-Kantian reading of desire I have proposed because it means that we cannot define desire in a transitive fashion: any attempt to define desire as the desire for something immediately puts us back into the realm of lack. Productive desire cannot be the desire for something; it must produce something. This brings me to the fourth point I want to make about desire. If desire is productive and what it produces is real, then desire must be actual and not virtual. Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit on this point. Referring to the formation of symptoms, such as hallucinations, Deleuze and Guattari write ‘The actual factor is desiring-production’,21 to which they add the following important clarification: ‘The term “actual” is not used because it designates what is most recent [which is its usual meaning in both French and German], and because it would be opposed to “former” or “infantile” [which is how it is used in Freud’s texts]; it is used in terms of its difference with respect to “virtual.”’22 I doubt there is a more important or consequential statement in the whole of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Its importance becomes clear in the next sentence: ‘And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor.’23 This reverses the way we are taught to

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think about the relationship between the actual and the virtual; indeed, it runs counter to a great deal that has been written about Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the terms ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’. On this rendering of it, that which stems from the unconscious and therefore has no tangible form is treated as the actual, while that which flows from outside the unconscious, whether from the conscious or the perception system, and therefore has some possibility of having a tangible form is treated as the virtual. Freud’s biggest mistake, Deleuze and Guattari claim, which demonstrates his failure to grasp this truth about desire, was to think that the unconscious is constructed in the image of Oedipus, which would mean that the unconscious is merely a shadow theatre for the conscious and not a productive system in its own right. My point is that there is nothing at all within Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire that can tell us either how we should live or how we should treat others. And this is perhaps as it must be. As Dworkin says: ‘The fact of desire – even enlightened desire, even a universal desire supposedly embedded in human nature – cannot justify a moral duty.’24 And yet, this is precisely what Foucault attempts to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s work. He takes statements that have to do with the functioning of desire as the productive unconscious and turns these into moral and ethical statements. This is, in effect, a category mistake because it treats Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of how the psyche operates as the basis for a radical politics; moreover, it prioritises aspects of the functioning of the psyche that are described by Deleuze and Guattari as pathological (as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly say, the schizo is not a model – Deleuze and Guattari don’t romanticise the schizo, it is their readers who do that). Foucault is very far from being the only one to misread Deleuze and Guattari in this way. Desire is widely treated as an ethos in Deleuze and Guattari studies. But as a consequence of his misreading of desire – and I do believe it is a misreading (Foucault’s comments on his preference for the concept of pleasure over desire make it clear he does not understand desire as a productive force) – Foucault transforms Deleuze and Guattari’s quite practical thoughts on political transformation into a series of more or less empty slogans: free political action from paranoia, develop action by proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction, prefer the positive and multiple, don’t be sad, don’t be enamoured of power and so on. These slogans combine to form an image of Deleuze’s thought which obscures what is original and interesting in it, namely the concept of productive desire. Even more problematically in my view, it creates an image of Deleuze’s thought that is all too easily dismissed by scholars whose philosophical formation leads them to expect straightforward answers to straightforward questions such as ‘what is the right thing to do?’.

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This is not to say that we should abandon any thought of deriving either an ethical or a moral discourse from Deleuze and Guattari’s work. There is ample reason to think that the opposite is the case. But it is to suggest – insist, even – that we cannot build such a discourse from Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of how the desire operates. Indeed, no workable ethical or moral discourse could be constructed in this way because, as Kant shows, determining the right way to live and the right thing to do cannot be a matter of what the individual wants or thinks. My desires, sovereign though they may be to me, do not confer or justify the right to do as I please, no matter the cost to others. And while it is true that Deleuze and Guattari’s rhetoric is flamboyantly in favour of throwing off the manifold shackles that keep our individual desires in check, nowhere do they suggest – à la the Marquis de Sade – that the liberation of our desire should take priority, no matter the cost to others. So while we may think of Deleuze and Guattari as anarchists or liberationists, take your pick, we also have to assume that they accept the necessity that something other than desire must form the basis of our ethical or moral discourse; moreover, I think it is also safe to assume that they accept the necessity for the elaboration of some kind of ethical or moral discourse. This flies in the face of a great deal that has been written about Deleuze and Guattari, but I would make the simple point that the fact that Deleuze and Guattari are critical of existing ethical and moral discourse (and there can be no question but that they are highly critical of a great many types of ethical or moral discourse) does not mean they reject the need for it; it merely means that they think we need to continue to work at constructing new forms of ethical or moral discourse. In other words, we cannot take the easy way out of the problem, as many do, and simply say that Deleuze and Guattari reject all forms of ethical or moral discourse. I’d suggest that they reject all existing forms of ethical or moral discourse in favour of one still to be constructed (an ethics to come, in other words).

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Chapter 3 The Structural Necessity of the Body without Organs

[The body without organs] is the only practical object of schizoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus The body without organs is one of the most important concepts in the schizoanalytic framework Deleuze and Guattari invented. Yet one would struggle to answer the basic question: ‘what is the body without organs?’ In large part, this is because there is more than one answer to this question. Not only does the concept of the body without organs have several dimensions, not all of them entirely consistent with each other, it is also inconstant. The body without organs evolved continuously as a concept (and I am aware that Deleuze and Guattari insisted that it wasn’t a concept – I will deal with this issue below). Its first iteration in The Logic of Sense is different in crucial ways from the later versions that appear in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. It is strangely absent from both Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and What Is Philosophy?. Yet one does not have to search very hard to find its avatars in these works as well – I take this as but one of many signs of its indispensability to Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. The way the body without organs changes from its first iteration to the next raises in turn a fresh set of questions about whether we should periodise it and speak of an early and late body without organs, or assume that the last permutation was meant to supersede all others as the final form. To add complexity to an already confusing situation, Deleuze and Guattari even admit that they weren’t sure themselves if they each meant the same thing when they used the concept. They also pursued a deliberate policy of using new words for old or existing concepts to prevent them from becoming ‘fixed’ (or perhaps ‘fixated’ is the better way of putting it). The body without organs thus has a number of synonyms in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the plane of immanence, the plane of consistency, the earth and the plateau being the most obvious and well known, but there are others as well, which also need to be taken into account. Not surprisingly, then, the

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secondary literature on the body without organs is extremely inconsistent in its handling of the term. There is little to no agreement amongst Deleuze and Guattari scholars as to what exactly this concept refers to, a fact that – as I have argued elsewhere – cannot but hold the field back.1 How can schizoanalysis take root as a methodology in the human and social sciences if its basic terms are still subject to guesswork and surmise? If we cannot locate, describe and define a set of common points of reference for the body without organs then it has no philosophical value, it is simply an adjective. That is what is at stake every time we open the debate about what Deleuze and Guattari ‘really meant’, regardless of how much of an anathema to their work that type of question might seem. Deleuze and Guattari are often presented by their commentators as being uninterested in precision and unconcerned whether people grasp their ideas and concepts correctly or not. On one level this is true enough because they do encourage their readers to be creative in their application and development of concepts. But that does not mean their work lacks rigour or that they were sloppy in the construction of their concepts and would be willing to accept conceptual sloppiness in others. Being given the freedom to modify concepts, to keep them alive by making them evolve, is not the same thing as being told concepts can be made to mean whatever we as readers choose. If ideas and concepts don’t have some kind of cutting edge, some line of thinking or reasoning that circumscribes them, defining what is included within their ambit and what is not, then quite simply they cannot be concepts. At best they are adjectives; at worst, they are empty assertions, or opinions. Either way, attentive readers of Deleuze and Guattari would know that is not how they thought ideas or concepts function. Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit in saying both that they regard concepts to be rigorously distinct from opinion and adjective (the fate of ‘fallen’ concepts) and that concepts have sharp edges. I want to suggest that the reason we – and I very much mean to include myself in this ‘we’ – have struggled to understand the concept of the body without organs is that we have failed to heed one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most basic interpretive principles. Instead of asking what something means, we should ask how it works.2 Put simply, if we want to know what the body without organs is, then we should first ask how it works. The body without organs is what it does. I will add the following crucial caveat: to understand how the body without organs works we have to take a systemic view of it and recognise that it does not work in isolation. It is just one element, albeit a highly crucial element, in a larger analytic apparatus which Deleuze and Guattari very loosely refer to as schizoanalysis. We must, as Laplanche and Pontalis say of the ‘death instinct’ (another of the body without organs’ cognates),

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discover the body without organ’s ‘structural necessity’.3 Why, in other words, was it necessary for Deleuze to invent it? Why was it necessary for Deleuze and Guattari to modify it as they did over the course of their long collaboration? This approach follows Deleuze’s edict, set down very early in his career and insisted upon countless times throughout his work, that we should always start with the problem. Putting these two methodological principles together, I want to suggest that the first question, asking how the body without organs works, is isometric with the second, asking what problem it answers.

How does the body without organs work? This question is less clear-cut than it first appears because neither of the basic points of reference – neither the ‘body’ nor the ‘organs’ – is deployed in anything like a straightforward manner. The body it refers to is not the physical body, and the organs it refers to are not necessarily bodily. Both may be ‘material’, as Deleuze and Guattari often maintain, but that does not mean they are physical, or actual empirical entities, because for Deleuze and Guattari almost anything, including words, thoughts, ideas and so on, can constitute ‘matter’. If we were to locate the body without organs at all, in a spatial or topographical sense, we’d have to say it was in the unconscious, but this isn’t quite right because for Deleuze and Guattari (in contrast to Freud) the unconscious is not a pre-existing entity or agency of the mind.4 Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that the unconscious is only revealed in the slips of the tongue, errors of memory and assorted other tics and faux pas that have come to be known as ‘Freudian slips’. As they rightly point out, this is a highly degraded conception of the unconscious that says nothing at all about its true function as a behind-the-scenes organiser of our conscious lives. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the unconscious isn’t simply a dark force constantly threatening to undermine and betray our performance of our self or indeed selves; it is, rather, a capacity or capability of the mind whose limits are constantly tested. If we return to the source of the phrase ‘body without organs’ in the work of French poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud, it is obvious that it does not refer to a state of being. It is neither physiological nor ontological. ‘No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No oesophagus. No belly. No anus.’ The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The

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death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine.5 There are several points to note in this analysis of Artaud that can help us to answer more concretely the twofold question of what the body without organs does and what the body without organs therefore is: first, it is synonymous with Freud’s death instinct, which means the body without organs is what desire desires; second, it follows that it is not an object, it is not something desire lacks; third, it is how desire desires; last, it is the degree zero of desire, it is what desire desires when it no longer wishes to desire. ‘It is nondesire as well as desire.’6 This is what this formation of desire desires the most, not to desire; or, more accurately, to be in a state in which desire is unable to exert any pressure. What Artaud longs for, what he desires, and what he finds in the body without organs, is a blessed moment of relief from desire’s incessant demands. From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through.7 For Artaud, the organs – the mouth, the tongue, the anus and so on – are importunate parasites, or interlopers, or invaders, constantly seeking his attention, demanding action of him, and ultimately driving him ‘crazy’ (in the vernacular rather than clinical sense). Obviously, if Artaud had been literally without his mouth, tongue, teeth, larynx, oesophagus, belly and anus, he would be dead. So these organs Artaud names, and the body that rejects them, cannot be taken literally.8 Nor should we assume Artaud meant it literally, any more than we assume when someone says ‘my mother will kill me for staying out late’ it is meant literally. And just as ‘my mother will kill me for staying out late’ is not a metaphor, so Artaud’s statements are not metaphors either. They are best understood as performatives. The simple point I want to make here is that language cannot be construed as a binary system with literal meaning on the one hand and metaphorical meanings on the other – this has long been understood in language philosophy, but many of Deleuze and Guattari’s readers seem not to have grasped that language is vastly more complicated than this and that there is a wide range of ways in which meaning can be made. Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, which is where the concept of the body without organs first appeared, is an extended argument for the existence of precisely the kind of sense in which Deleuze thinks Artaud’s work ought to be understood as yielding. It is a mode of sense that falls outside of the literal/metaphor binary.

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Sense, as Deleuze defines it, is ‘the expressed of the proposition, . . . an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition’.9 It is therefore ‘irreducible to individual states of affairs, particular images, personal beliefs, and universal or general concepts’.10 It is supplementary (in Derrida’s sense) to words, things, images and ideas. ‘For we may not even say that sense exists either in things or in the mind; it has neither physical nor mental existence.’11 Sense inheres or subsists inside the proposition and has no existence outside or beyond the proposition. It is nevertheless quite distinct from the proposition. It does not dissolve into or otherwise disappear into the proposition. Deleuze equates sense with Husserl’s concept of the noema (the perceived as such, or, better, the perceived for itself independent of either the perceiver or the object perceived) and even goes so far as to ask whether phenomenology could be the science of surface effects.12 ‘The noema is not given in a perception (nor in a recollection or an image). It has an entirely different status which consists in not existing outside the proposition which expresses it – whether the proposition is perceptual, or whether it is imaginative, recollective, or representative.’13 We must distinguish between green as a sensible colour or quality and green the attribute (i.e. noematic colour). The proposition ‘the tree is green’ contains a dimension, which Deleuze calls sense, which amounts to saying the ‘tree greens’, or to put it another way ‘the tree is in a constant state of becoming green’. Deleuze thus proposes that the noema be grasped as a ‘pure event’: ‘Green’ designates a quality, a mixture of things, a mixture of tree and air where chlorophyll coexists with all the parts of the leaf. ‘To green’, on the contrary, is not a quality in the thing, but an attribute which is said of the thing. This attribute does not exist outside of the proposition which expresses it in denoting the thing.14 Sense is at once the event and the boundary line or membrane separating propositions and things.15 The event is ideal in both of its forms, Deleuze insists, and therefore ontologically distinct from its realisation in a state of affairs. He reserves the term ‘accident’ for the actualised event, for the event that takes place between bodies in the living present. The ideal event is composed of ‘singularities’, the ‘singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centres; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, “sensitive” points [points dits sensibles].’16 In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari introduce the term ‘haecceity’, borrowed from Duns Scotus, and use it in place of ‘singularity’, though they continue use of that term as well. They define

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the haecceity as ‘a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance’.17 The body without organs must belong exclusively to the psychical apparatus rather than the physical world because its attributes are impossible anywhere else. It is the realm of pure intensities, which is to say it is incapable of extension. This does not mean the body cannot be a source of stimulus for the productions that take place on and through the body without organs, but it does mean that the body is not a useful reference point for trying to understand the body without organs.18 Deleuze and Guattari are explicit about this. They say it ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image.’19 They perhaps confuse matters when they go on to speak about the anorexic building herself a body without organs via starvation, as though to say her emaciated body is the literal embodiment of the organless body. But this is not what they mean. Anorexia is not a refusal of the body, it is a refusal of the organism, or more specifically a refusal of what the organism imposes upon the body.20 The theme of refusal is central to the notion of the body without organs. What it is refusing in this case, namely the organism, is coextensive with the body but not identical to the body. Deleuze and Guattari never actually define what they mean by the organism. However, it seems clear that they mean some kind of ‘organ system’ in which ‘organ’ is code for any kind of internal psychic stimulus, stimulus originating from within the psychic apparatus itself, and not a response to stimuli from the external environment. When the alcoholic says they need a drink, to refer to an example Deleuze and Guattari use, it is the body without organs speaking. It may be that external circumstances – marriage break-up, job loss, too much or too little success, and so on – drove the alcoholic to look for a solution in a bottle in the first place, but that doesn’t explain why the particular effect of alcohol is desirable. It is easy to assume that the alcoholic’s purpose in drinking is to render themselves insensible to these external shocks to their conscious selves. But in saying that we are also saying there is an agency or power greater than the sensate self that is willing and able to drive the self to sacrifice itself for the sake of its own comfort. Deleuze and Guattari call this agency, this power, the body without organs. It is an immanent power, however, not an overarching figure, like the superego, that the poor benighted self, the ego, feels it must answer to and whose edicts it must obey. Suicide, for example, is theorised by Žižek as the subject’s attempt ‘to send a message to the Other, i.e., it is an act that functions as an acknowledgement of guilt’.21 But this is not how Deleuze and Guattari view things. Indeed, in A Thousand Plateaus they treat the Other or superego, which they refer to as ‘the face’, as a pathological symptom of

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psychic disturbance.22 Instead of an authority figure like the superego riding roughshod over the ego and determining its actions by coercion and injunction, Deleuze and Guattari imagine a synthesising figure, the body without organs, which operates by giving consistency to things in a way that ‘makes sense’. It does not elicit guilt from the subject; on the contrary, it empowers it. This is the key point to Artaud’s cry – being without organs ‘made sense’ to him, it is a solution he can live with. As Deleuze and Guattari emphasise throughout their work, the body without organs does not pre-exist desire. It is not an ultimate or primordial gatekeeper. It comes into being as an effect of the desiring-production process. For example, when schizophrenic desire goes into a kind of productive hyperdrive, firing off thoughts and associations faster than the subject can process and put into perspective, the body without organs arises as a counterweight, as a force of anti-production, slowing things down, and eventually bringing them to a halt. Deleuze and Guattari find an instructive example of this process in the ‘schizophrenic table’ observed by Henri Michaux in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, which is rendered nonfunctional as a table by years of ‘useless additions, supplements to supplements – the sign of an irresistible tendency to elaborate without ever being able to stop’.23 The subject of endless production, the table is paradoxically incapable of producing anything itself; it cannot even perform its basic function as a table. It is unproductive in and of itself, it cannot produce anything, but more importantly it sets a natural limit to production, eventually becoming so overly elaborate it cannot be augmented any further. Just as importantly, it achieves this unproductive state without anyone intending for it to happen.

Death instinct The death instinct, as Freud conceives it, has two dimensions, both of which are crucial to our understanding of the body without organs. First, the death instinct manifests itself as an apparently irrational or obsessive compulsion to repeat a particular set of ideas, behaviours or rituals in apparent defiance of the pleasure principle. The ideas, behaviours or rituals it obsessively repeats are not obviously in and of themselves pleasurable (the masochist’s desire to be struck being the most obvious and well-known example of this).24 But, Freud reasons, this behaviour is in fact consistent with the demands of the pleasure principle providing we grasp that it is the repetition process itself that gives rise to pleasure and not the specific set of ideas, behaviours or rituals. As Freud argued with respect to his grandson’s ‘fort-da’ game, repetition is the unconscious’s means of obtaining mastery over discomforting stimuli; as such it is both a mechanism of defence and

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an attempt at self-cure. The masochist turns the uncontrolled violence of the disciplining parent into a source of pleasure and control. The compulsion to repeat occurs at a level below conscious or even preconscious thought – it belongs to the order of the drives and is therefore experienced by the subject as an inexorable pressure, something they are helpless to avoid. It is machinic inasmuch as, like all machines, it operates regardless of how we feel about it. Just as our car engine continues to turn over irrespective of how we feel, so the drives spur us from within irrespective of how we feel about them. For instance, at a certain point in our lives (typically pre-pubescence) we may feel a set of affects that we will later learn to identify with sexual arousal without being emotionally ready for or even interested in sex as an idea, much less a set of behaviours, in any of its possible permutations. We experience these affects, these unfamiliar feelings, because like the car’s engine our sexual instincts know nothing of the emotional readiness of the self in the driver’s seat and would not be affected by it even if they did. We feel sexual urgings even if we are not able to interpret them as such. This is precisely why the drives can be a source of emotional conflict for us: they push us in a direction we do not necessarily want to go, but nevertheless feel unable to refuse. Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic discourse is largely devoted to understanding the various and often highly creative psychological compromises we reach with our drives. But, Freud asks, ‘what is the nature of the connection between the realm of the drives and the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot help thinking that we have managed to identify a universal attribute of drives – and perhaps of all organic life – that has not hitherto been clearly recognized . . . A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state’, that of their inorganic origin.25 This brings us to the second, and from the point of view of the body without organs ultimately more important, dimension of the death instinct. Freud’s hypothesis is that this drive to repeat is historical rather than mechanical in nature. It archives evolutionary change in the organism but seems not to have any specific biological purpose. His examples are the spawning patterns of certain fish and the migration of some birds, which appear to have no other purpose than to return the creatures to a previous domain. What intrigues him is the ‘pull’ this previous domain continues to exert on the creature, long after it has evolved away from and in a completely different direction from its origins. Why must salmon spawn in fresh water even though they live most of their life in salt water? There does not seem to be any good reason for this. When Freud speaks of death, then, it is this ‘other domain’ that he is referring to, the domain before life, rather than the domain after life. His conclusion that the goal of life is death does not mean death is something we long for. Freud’s point is not

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that deep down we want to die. He is not saying that in the midst of life all we want is death. Rather, what we as a species want – and this explains the purpose of the life drives – is to die in our ‘own particular way’.26 The death instinct ‘is charged with the task of safeguarding the organism’s own particular path to death and barring all possible means of return to the inorganic other than those already immanent’.27 The death it seeks is not the end of life as such, but a return to the inanimate state that preceded life. The so-called life drives, by contrast, aim to preserve and extend life to enable us to realise our ultimate goal of dying in our own way, which is not to say by our own hand. What we seek in effect is the peace and quiet of the inanimate state ‘we’ (as a species) were in before we took our first breath. Insofar as the death instinct is concerned, what we want is to never have lived at all. Freud’s death instinct clarifies our understanding of the body without organs in two ways: firstly, as we have just seen, the whole impetus of the death instinct is to prolong a prior state, an inorganic ‘before’ the body and mind sense without being able to know – it is not imagined so much as felt, at some level well beneath both the conscious and the unconscious; secondly, the death instinct manifests as a compulsion to act, often, indeed usually, without any sense of why we should or must act in a particular way, and frequently in the face of common sense and reason. This is precisely the point of Artaud’s demand for a body without organs. Besieged by demands from within, demands which are like so many extra and as it were unneeded organs, Artaud longs for the peace of an organ-less body.

The degree zero of desire In most instances, then, at least in its earliest materialisation in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, the body without organs manifests itself as a refusal, or even more strongly as a repulsion (not to be confused with repression). Not in the conscious sense of an ‘I’ put off or disgusted by something external to it. But in the deeper and dare I say more visceral sense of an unconscious and essentially defensive response to stimuli produced by the unconscious system taken as a whole, which is by no means limited to the stimuli produced within the confines of the skull, but includes the entire sensory apparatus. Deleuze and Guattari initially referred to these internal stimuli as ‘desiring-machines’, but would later term them ‘affects’ and ‘becomings’ (having grown uncomfortable with the narrowly sexual reading many of their commentators made of ‘desiring-machines’). I will say more about desiring-machines in a moment, but first I want to emphasise that the body without organs belongs to the order of what Freud referred to as the primary processes (i.e. desiring-production or the passive syntheses), the

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realm of the drives, which he contrasts to secondary processes, the realm of waking life. There, as Freud explains in his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, an essential touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘cathexes can easily be transferred, displaced, [and] compressed’ in a way that would be impossible in either the preconscious or the conscious.28 Desire is both infinitely mutable and utterly mercurial, subject to constant change and ceaseless transformation. Freud goes on to suggest that the primary process is the equivalent of Breuer’s ‘free-flowing’ cathexis. In Freud’s view the psyche has very little, if any, defence against primary processes: ‘the excitations that come from the deeper layers carry over into the system directly and without diminution, whereby certain features of their mode of progression generate successive sensations of pleasure and/or unpleasure’.29 The body without organs arises as an indirect response to stimuli generated from within the unconscious system and not in response to external events and circumstances, no matter how troubling or perplexing they may be. Internal stimuli do not directly cause the body without organs to come into being but their existence, or rather their insistence, requires its presence. The body without organs is, in this precise sense, structurally necessary. The practical operation of the body without organs is selective, even though that is not its true function: it erects a membrane where Freud thought no barrier was possible and determines which psychic material may pass through. In effect, then, the body without organs acts as a kind of censor (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term). It operates in the midst of desire, alongside it or beneath it, recoding it and passing judgement on it. The body without organs determines when a particular mode of desire, or particular way of desiring, is undesirable. In contrast to Freud’s censor, though, the body without organs is not a near-sighted gatekeeper easily duped by the cunning disguises desire is apt to wear. Its function is not merely to protect the conscious from the blushing feeling of self-reproach we experience when we are confronted by our desires in their naked form. It is more powerful than that. Not only that, its operations tend to be allor-nothing campaigns. It is a force of anti-production, where production refers to the processes of the unconscious as it formulates the objects (the intuitions, ideas, thoughts, fantasies and so on) central to the subject’s sense of self and well-being. In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound.30

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The body without organs does not regulate the flow of good and bad unconscious thoughts, as the censor does in Freud’s work. It actively – and aggressively – seeks to drown out and bring to a halt the production of thought. The imagery Deleuze and Guattari use here of counterflows of amorphous undifferentiated fluid and so on to describe how the body without organs functions is drawn from Deleuze’s discussion of Melanie Klein’s theory of partial objects in The Logic of Sense. Artaud is brought into this discussion as an example of what Klein means. It is worth reminding ourselves of this fact because it means Deleuze was already working on the concept of the body without organs before he met Guattari (Guattari has said that it was this concept, particularly, that drew him to want to meet Deleuze), which is to say he was already thinking about schizophrenia and its particular affects and effects before his collaboration with Guattari would make that the focus of his work for more than a decade. This is important because it means we have to reject the tired and utterly clichéd image of Deleuze as the ‘pure’ philosopher only interested in ‘purely’ philosophical ideas who was ‘corrupted’ by his contact with Guattari touted by both Badiou and Žižek, both of whom ought to know better. Second, it reminds us that the origins of the term ‘body without organs’, and the thinking behind it, are heterogeneous, meaning that we cannot simply look to Artaud as the defining authority capable of providing the first or last ‘word’ on the subject. There is perhaps a third reason, too, which is that as one charts the movement from Deleuze’s first use of the term ‘body without organs’ in The Logic of Sense through to its later iterations in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, it becomes clear that the concept of the body without organs evolved constantly and considerably. This underscores my previous point, namely that Artaud cannot be used as the final arbiter of what the body without organs means. At best, he opens a window onto its existence. One can also say that Melanie Klein sensed its existence independently of Artaud, though perhaps she didn’t quite grasp its clinical significance, as evidenced by her reluctance to develop the term, as did several other artists and theorists important to Deleuze and Guattari. What particularly interested Deleuze about Klein is her ‘geography and geometry of living dimensions’, that is, her distinction between the so-called paranoid-schizoid position of the infant and the depressive position which is supposed to succeed it.31 One can see in this the precursor to Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in maps and diagrams. The paranoid-schizoid position Klein speaks of is the product of the splitting of the object, that which the child first attaches themselves to both as a matter of practical necessity and out of love, namely the maternal breast. For Klein, all subsequent attachments, meaning all subsequent investments of the libido, follow this path

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of latching onto and in the process separating off an object. The ‘invested’ breast is dissociated from the maternal body as is the child’s mouth from its own body; in the process, both take on a life of their own, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s language they become machinic. This process is highly fraught, however, because the object/machine is ambivalent, prone to being both good and bad. The maternal breast is good when it delivers milk to the hungry child, but becomes bad in the child’s eyes when it is withdrawn or its milk withheld. On top of that, the objects are not merely ambivalent, they are also highly mobile and completely unstable. ‘Not only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good and bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into crumbs and alimentary morsels.’32 The good partial objects are adopted by the child as central to their sense of self (introjection), while the bad objects are expelled (projection), but the good objects do not stay good, as it were, and continue to split apart, thus creating new good and bad objects to be absorbed/expelled (reintrojection/reprojection).33 Klein’s object relations theory is subsumed in Deleuze and Guattari’s work by the concept of desiring-machines. They retain, and indeed refine, the ambivalence central to Klein’s theory. The body without organs is in a certain sense a mechanism of defence against this ambivalence. At the micro level, the breast and the mouth, for example, are machines because they constitute an effective relationship. The breast supplies the child with the nutrition it requires to live and the child’s suckling stimulates the production of milk in the breast, while the nursing process is said to facilitate the formation of the child-mother bond. At the macro level, the breast and the mouth are machines because they begin the process of forming the child as a subject by organising his or her body in a particular way. The mouth of the infant is for eating and breathing, but it is also used for crying and vomiting and so on, but over time it is also used for speaking, and eventually this function becomes dominant, with even breathing consigned to the nose. At that point the mouth ceases to be machinic. What matters now are the words and sounds that issue from it; its machinic quality is displaced on to language. Pathology makes its appearance when this ordering of the machines is undone, or becomes somehow intolerable, as in the example of the anorexic.34 This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say desiring-machines ‘only work by breaking down [Les machines désirantes ne marchent que détraquées]’.35 Their effect is always (potentially) as disordering as it is ordering, particularly when, as in this example, the machinic possibilities appear endless. Desiring-machines are not in and of themselves pathological, but they do nevertheless have a pathological modality, which is characterised by what I will term the eruption of immanence. ‘Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very

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production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all.’36 As Deleuze and Guattari clarify in the following paragraphs, the body they are referring to here is the body without organs. When this body rebels, it overturns all the existing hierarchies, all the established benchmarks, and to a greater or lesser degree induces chaos. If the mouth acquires the status of speaking-machine, its purpose becomes transcendent inasmuch as it lays outside of itself, the production of words, a function that can be subsumed by other machines (we can write, make films, music and so on). To put it another way, when the mouth starts to speak it must give up its other functions – eating, vomiting, crying and so on – and enter a realm in which it is relatively unimportant. Now what matters are the words that flow from it, not the mouth itself. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe this process as deterritorialisation. When immanence is restored, however, the mouth regains its vital, machinic ability to form new connections, but at the cost of its ordered place in the world. It becomes machinic in itself when it ceases to speak and instead utters gasps and cries and other unarticulated sounds; it enhances this power by reasserting its bodily ability to bite and chew and spew and so on. These are not regressions, in Freud’s sense, because they do not constitute a return to childhood as such; rather, what is at stake is an eruption of immanence and a corresponding loss of transcendence.37 Chaos and disorder reign when the desiring-machines become autonomous, when they break free from the necessary constraints of the organism as a whole. This eruption of immanence is, I want to stress, pathological – it is a schizophrenic effect signalling the onset of psychosis. I stress this because the material Deleuze and Guattari cite as examples of the eruption of immanence is often quite charming, bucolic even, as for instance the seemingly beautiful scene they extract from Büchner’s account of Lenz’s mountain strolls: Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines – all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whir of machines. ‘He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.’38 As conditioned as we are by more than two centuries of nature-driven Romanticism, it is difficult for us to see this passage as anything but beautiful. It seems to betoken everything we strive for in this hypercultural age that constantly bemoans its disconnection from the natural environment.

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Here is someone who is fully in touch with and connected at the deepest levels to the one thing we post-postmodernists no longer know how to know, namely nature itself. For precisely this reason we should be cautious. It is true, Deleuze and Guattari do at times – and this is clearly one of those times – make it seem as though the eruption of immanence is liberating, but one has to read them very carefully because what they are saying is that it is liberating for the schizophrenic, who finds the pressure of staying within the confines of the transcendentally organised body and universe impossible to sustain. Lenz enjoys his mountain stroll precisely because it enables him to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of his home and his church, his father and his pastor. This does not mean it is in and of itself liberating, that it should be treated as an image of freedom. In fact it should be understood as a falling into illness. Schizoanalysis is the attempt to understand this illness for itself.

What problem does the body without organs answer to? In the foregoing, we have only seen the body without organs in its ‘negative’ light as an agency of repulsion and anti-production. Although this was how the ‘concept’ began life, it is not the whole story. The decade between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus saw Deleuze and Guattari rethink the body without organs as a multidimensional concept with both ‘negative’ and ‘affirmative’ capabilities. As part of this shift in their thinking, they also came around to proposing that the formation of the body without organs could be influenced by the subject’s actions. While they still maintained that the body without organs was unengendered, they now allowed that it was also possible to act in such a way as to give rise to ‘affirmative’, or what they now termed ‘healthy’, bodies without organs as opposed to ‘negative’ or ‘cancerous’ bodies without organs. As an unengendered ‘state’, one can only achieve either of these outcomes – healthy or cancerous – through a process of experimentation, the difficulty being that at first glance the two look very much the same. To the alcoholic, the perfect state of drunkenness, in which their consciousness has been dulled significantly but hasn’t yet been extinguished altogether, is ‘healthy’ inasmuch as it enables them ‘to be’ in the world in a way they find ‘peaceful’ (in Artaud’s sense of being free from the persecution of the organs). The trouble is, this state of being isn’t sustainable. This discussion of the drugged state, which Deleuze and Guattari associate with the body without organs, is important because at bottom it is animated by the singular problem, which we’ve barely touched on, namely the problem that the very concept of the body without organs is conceived as an answer to. And that problem, quite simply, is what makes a drugged

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state, but by extension any state of being, desirable for itself? Deleuze and Guattari’s answer is that it is the body without organs that makes a particular state desirable. In so doing, they are identifying a hitherto overlooked agency of the mind. The key to what I’m trying to say here is to be found in a short passage in Anti-Oedipus whose profound implications I want to explore briefly in closing. Referring to schizophrenia, which is just one manifestation of the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari say it ‘is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as “the essential reality of man and nature.”’39 If we wanted to grasp the proper texture or character of the body without organs then we could do no better than to think of it as a psychic phenomenon of the same order as love: one does not decide to fall in love, nor does one decide how one will love, one just loves and thrives or suffers as fate dictates. And when one is in love, that feeling, if we can call something so profoundly altering as love a mere feeling, colours everything we do. This is why Proust can fill so many pages trying without ever fully managing to capture all of its effects and affects. This is not to say the body without organs is synonymous with love because clearly it has a great many other modalities. Rather, what I want to say is that love is one of the possible forms the body without organs can take. But it can just as easily take the form of rage or depression or any other feeling that arises without our willing it to do so and thereafter influences everything else that we think and do until a new feeling takes its place. To call this type of feeling a body without organs is a way of constructing a new topography of the psyche and that is its core purpose conceptually speaking. It is, however, a topography of the transversal line, that is to say, the line that brings together disparate elements without actually joining them. The sparkle in the eye, the hint of a smile, the soft notes of the perfume and the gentle music are joined by love but not in the manner of putting pieces of a puzzle together and discovering either a lost unity or what might be termed a prospective unity. No, love itself is the ‘whole’ that sits alongside these elements, uniting them yet leaving them separate too. The body without organs works in this way – it is a semiotic force, if you will, pulling together the disparate elements of our experiences, and giving them consistency. The manifold ways this process occurs requires a work at least as long as Proust’s, which is why both Deleuze and Guattari, in separate works and together, have no hesitation in describing Proust as a master clinician.

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Chapter 4 Five Theses for an Actually Existing Schizoanalysis of Cinema

The only people capable of thinking effectively about cinema are the filmmakers and film critics or those who love cinema. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness It is reasonable, I suppose, to think that in his two volumes on cinema Deleuze said all that he wanted to say about film and that if he left anything out it was because it was beyond the scope of the strictly philosophical project he legislated for himself. But even if this is true, and I suspect in a certain way it is, that does not mean we have to follow Deleuze in ignoring the questions he left unasked and unanswered, which were neither small nor inconsequential. I’m thinking particularly of the interrelated questions of why we watch certain films and, just as significantly, why we’re willing to pay money to do so, which are central to any understanding of cinema from what Deleuze himself would call a materialist point of view. Deleuze tends to take both these questions for granted, undoubtedly (and quite reasonably, I hasten to add) because his interest lies elsewhere. Consequently, though, his account of cinema is for all its brilliance rather dry, more a catalogue of effects than a full-blooded explanation of how the cinematic machine works. Ironically, perhaps, the expectation that it should or could have been otherwise is aroused by the books on schizoanalysis he wrote with Félix Guattari just prior to his treatises on film. It is in many ways surprising that Deleuze did not draw on this work himself in writing his cinema books because they are a rich resource for thinking through and working out questions to do with the cultural significance and indeed function of cinema. It may be, as Deleuze himself implies, that he needed not to do that, in order to ‘catch his breath’ again after the self-annihilating intensity of his collaboration with Guattari, but it was also in a certain sense unnecessary.1 There is nothing to stop us as readers from joining the dots ourselves and putting these apparently separate projects into ‘communication’ with one another,

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to use Guattari’s phrase.2 This is, in effect, the gambit of this chapter: it offers a provisional sketching out of a something x that can be called a schizoanalysis of cinema. What is a schizoanalysis of cinema? There is no simple answer to this question. In trying to think through what such a thing as a schizoanalysis of cinema might be, I take inspiration from one of the great pioneers of film studies, Christian Metz, who was amongst the first to try to demonstrate the plausibility of applying both psychoanalysis and Marxism to the analysis of film. Metz argues that under the conditions of capitalist production cinema contrives to produce itself as a love object (i.e. something we would willingly pay money to see) and therefore psychoanalysis – as the discourse of the constitution of love objects – is perfectly suited to the task of analysing film. The question of why we pay money to watch films can only be answered, Metz thought, in terms of film’s effect on audiences. Metz assumed this effect was the production of meaning and it is this that he set out to explain, using all the resources then available to him (i.e. Lacanianinflected, structuralist semiotics). While it is true Deleuze distances himself from psychoanalysis and semiotics (as well as Metz) in his cinema books, the problem of how films affect us is not alien to his project. His taxonomy of image types is simultaneously a catalogue of cinematic effects; the difference is that rather than conceive these effects in terms of meaning as Metz does, he conceives them in terms of affect and sense. Unlike Metz, though, Deleuze refuses to draw any conclusions from his analysis of the sense of cinema about issues that in his view do not pertain directly to cinema as a specific form of art. He quite explicitly rules out any approach to cinema that borrows concepts developed in other fields or attempts to go beyond what he regards as the discrete realm of film. Deleuze admits that one can ‘link framing to castration, or close-ups to partial-objects’, for example, but rejects such moves because he cannot ‘see what that tells us about cinema’.3 I disagree with Deleuze on this point and as I will show I do so from the perspective of Deleuze’s own work, particularly his work with Guattari. Metz is an inspiration to me precisely because he refuses to treat cinema in so isolated a fashion and approaches it as a stratified art form indissociable from its technical, industrial and ideological support. If I uphold Metz as a model for the kind of analysis of cinema that I favour it is not with a view to suggesting that Deleuze should somehow have been more like Metz, nor indeed to suggest that we ought to go back to Metz and forget about Deleuze. The former would be absurd and the latter regressive. Regardless of the actual deficiencies of his method, improvised as it was from a not always happy combination of Marxism, psychoanalysis and semiotics, Metz’s work remains valuable as a model, I think, because he is one of the few film theorists (and probably the first)

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who tries to engage with cinema as a whole, as an industry and an aesthetic. It is that ambition – to engage with cinema as a whole – which a schizoanalysis of cinema should, in my view, try to fulfil, even at the cost of doing violence to Deleuze’s purist approach to film. As is well known, Deleuze’s cinema project obeys the self-imposed dictum that the ‘concepts philosophy introduces to deal with cinema must be specific, must relate specifically to cinema’.4 From this perspective, it might be thought that a schizoanalysis of cinema is possible only to the extent that Deleuze’s own views on how cinema should be theorised are ignored. This is only partly true. Deleuze was never under any illusion as to the truly heterogeneous nature of cinema and was quite willing to concede that cinematic aesthetics cannot be divorced from what he regarded as ‘complementary’ questions (e.g. the problem of the ongoing cretinisation of cinema, particularly exemplified by rock videos in Deleuze’s view).5 If he rejected Metz, it wasn’t because Metz concerned himself with such issues, but because his methods weren’t sound in Deleuze’s view. Deleuze clearly decided at the outset of his project that in order to come to grips with what is specifically filmic about film he had to bracket out such questions as being essentially peripheral to his principal concern. And that may explain, too, why he didn’t work on it with Guattari. Yet, if Deleuze’s own work is taken as a whole, it is difficult to see how such questions as why we desire to watch particular films and willingly pay money to do so are alien to his project. Thus, the first proposal I want to make concerning the schizoanalysis of cinema is that in order to engage with cinema as a whole we need to take Deleuze as a whole. The idea of taking Deleuze ‘as a whole’ is of course consistent with his own way of doing philosophy, as his comments on how to read Foucault readily attest, but what this means in practice is by no means straightforward.6 So, I want to make a second proposal: Deleuze’s exclusion of questions to do with audience reception, technical development, industrial and commercial process, should be seen as enabling. It is the price he has to pay in order to be able to say something precise about how the filmic image functions. My question is whether or not Deleuze pays too high a price for this precision. There is evidence to suggest Deleuze feared as much himself. Like so many returns of the repressed, issues to do with technical development (especially the advent of sound, but also the transition from black and white to colour), the studio system (particularly with respect to Orson Welles – e.g. his loss of artistic control over the final cut of The Magnificent Ambersons), censorship, even money and politics, crop up periodically throughout the two volumes of the cinema books, making it clear Deleuze was both aware of the complexity of cinema as an ‘industrial art’ and to a certain extent anxious about it as well.

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Despite his occasional unease, Deleuze never swerves from his determination to extract cinema’s concepts and he never permits any of these complementary concerns to take centre stage. The price he pays for this consistency, however, is that he is unable to explain why this movie and not that movie got made, why this actor and not that one got the lead, why this movie made money and that one didn’t, and so on and so on. Sparing himself any such concern, he rules that these questions are irrelevant from the perspective of the filmic object as such. ‘The cinema’, Deleuze says, ‘is always as perfect as it can be, taking into account the images and signs which it invents and which it has at its disposal at a given moment.’7 In one breath he effectively consigns to the dustbin all questions to do with advances in movie-making technology (e.g. the development of special effects), studio bureaucracy, film-financing, the advent of new distribution systems such as the internet, and so on. He not only throws a blanket over the realpolitik of film-making, but also excludes from consideration the vast majority of films made, which in Deleuze’s highly ascetic view are drowned in nullity.8 Focused on the exceptions to this rule of a generalised nullity, Deleuze’s anatomy of cinema confirms this judgement by making apparent the real degree to which this art form (above all others, perhaps) is reliant on what he disparagingly referred to in a previous book as ‘bare repetition’, a kind of mechanical repetition which does not yield difference but returns over and over again to an originating structure (Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle is a typical example).9 This is precisely his concern when he asks, worriedly: ‘What becomes of Hitchcock’s suspense, Eisenstein’s shock and Gance’s sublimity when they are taken up by mediocre authors?’10 Although it is relatively little emphasised, this dualism structures Deleuze’s entire account of cinema – everywhere he looks he sees bland or bare repetition interrupted by occasional flashes of genuine originality. Indeed, his entire aesthetics is similarly constructed.11 His interpretation of the works of Francis Bacon is exemplary in this regard. The artist’s primary task, Deleuze argues, is to make a space for art by creating the means of dealing with the manifold givens awaiting them in their heads and on the canvas itself. ‘We are besieged by photographs that are illustrations, by newspapers that are narrations, by cinema-images, by television-images. There are psychic clichés just as there are physical clichés – ready-made perceptions, memories, phantasms.’12 This is why Bacon has to blank out significant portions of the images he paints; it’s his way of dealing with the perennial problem of cliché.13 Philosophy itself, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is confronted with a comparable obstacle in the form of opinion, which it has to find the means of circumventing or else wind up similarly mired in the gelatinous

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morass of the given.14 Opinion, I would venture, is their code word for commodification in Debord’s sense of the word in which its final form is that of the image itself. ‘The philosophy of communication’, they write, by which they mean the work of Habermas, but also people like Rawls and Rorty, ‘is exhausted in the search for a universal liberal opinion as consensus, in which we find again the cynical perceptions and affections of the capitalist himself.’15 Like the Frankfurt School authors before him – and this isn’t the only point of similarity, as we’ll see in a moment – Deleuze holds that the normal condition of both art and philosophy is defined by the overwhelming presence of the commodification process, but in contrast to them he concentrates on those works which somehow ‘escape’ that process and determine their own path. This brings me to my third and, to my mind, most important proposal: we need to read Deleuze in reverse and emphasise those works which do not escape the commodification process, thus making the schizoanalysis of film a matter of the rule rather than the exception. But having said that – and this is my fourth proposal – I also want to suggest that Deleuze’s exceptionalist anatomy of the cinematic image is the condition of possibility for just such a schizoanalysis of cinema. This may appear counterintuitive, but Deleuze’s emphasis on the unique is not merely a matter of aesthetics, his way of determining the difference between good and bad works of art and indeed good and bad philosophy, it is the basis of his politics too. However, as a formalist, his first instinct is always to identify the machinic elements that enable as well as constitute a particular work of art. Deleuze is well aware that the shock of an innovation never endures; its force is inevitably appropriated by imitators who give it a second life as ‘technique’. But, Deleuze and Guattari insist, ‘a work of art is never produced by or for the sake of technique’.16 Technique concerns materials, not composition, and in that respect lies outside of Deleuze’s conception of the aesthetic. It may be the case that every auteur constructs his or her action-image in his or her own way, but the end result is nonetheless yet another action-image, each repetition a little more banal than the previous. Cinema, in this sense, is more often mechanical than it is machinic, inclined more towards reproduction than production, this being – as Walter Benjamin argued – what distinguishes it as a twentieth-century art form. Deleuze’s inspired abstractions enable us to see this recurrence at the level of form by cutting through the clutter and clamour of the concrete differences between films. What he offers in effect is a kind of ethology of the image, the image reduced to its minimum number of ‘affects’ or operative elements.17 But it is an ethology of a very restricted variety since it does not take into consideration what might be termed the image’s ‘habitat’, namely the practical reality of film-making – advances in technology, availability of finance, distribution

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networks. Yet having said that, it is an ethology focused on the effect of the image and that is its strength. For Deleuze, cinema is mediocre in its output compared to its potential, as glimpsed in the all too infrequent flashes of brilliance found in the works of the great auteurs like Bergman, Hitchcock, Kurosawa and Welles. This judgement is not primarily aesthetic, even if it manifests itself as such, but political. But that, he insists, is no reason to abandon this line of thinking. ‘One cannot object by pointing to the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematographic production – it is no worse than anywhere else, although it does have unparalleled economic and industrial consequences.’18 What concerns Deleuze is whether or not cinema as an art form is capable of realising socially progressive ends – to put it even more bluntly, whether by power of its ability to shock and jolt us it is capable of changing the world for the better as its first theorists and practitioners were certain that it could. But he is also a realist on this matter. ‘Everyone knows that, if an art necessarily imposed the shock or vibration, the world would have changed long ago, and men would have been thinking for a long time. So this pretension of the cinema, at least among the greatest pioneers, raises a smile today.’19 Ultimately, it is not the mediocrity of cinema that worries Deleuze most, but rather – and here we hear the echo of the Frankfurt School once more – its descent into ‘state propaganda and manipulation, into a kind of fascism which brought together Hitler and Hollywood, Hollywood and Hitler. The spiritual automaton became fascist man.’20 As Goebbels himself is reputed to have said, fascists obey a law they are not consciously aware of but can recite in their dreams.21 It was this development, more than any other, which in Deleuze’s view sounded the death knell for cinema’s chiliastic ambitions. The production in us of a spiritual automaton – which might be defined simply as an awareness of the power to think, provided it is understood that it is not ‘us’ who thinks but an ‘other’ ‘at the back of our heads whose age is neither ours nor that of our childhood, but a little time in a pure state’22 – is one of cinema’s special powers, according to Deleuze.23 Therefore, its corruption, its seemingly helpless degeneration into fascism, is for Deleuze a problem of world-historical proportions, but he nonetheless holds cinema to a higher standard and believes it is capable of better things. It is true that bad cinema (and sometimes good) limits itself to a dream state induced in the viewer, or – as has been the subject of frequent analysis – to an imaginary participation. But the essence of cinema – which is not the majority of films – has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning.24

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Psychoanalysis oscillates between these two options and thus, in Deleuze’s view, never comes into contact with the real of cinema; it either pretends that what’s on screen is a pseudo-dream or it assumes that to enjoy a film the viewer must somehow insert themselves into the drama by identifying with one of its protagonists, but either way it emphasises the imaginary and the symbolic at the expense of the real. More generally, looking at cinema from the schizoanalytic view of things I’ve sketched so far, there are three problems with the psychoanalytic approach, which I’ll briefly list: firstly, it fails to treat film as a whole, it concerns itself only with the image on screen; secondly, it treats the relation to film as transactional, it assumes cinema gives us something, usually pleasure, in exchange for our money; thirdly, it assumes that we do not know why we like cinema – save for the most obviously voyeuristic aspects of it – because it operates on our unconscious, not our conscious. My implication is of course that schizoanalysis can and does satisfy the demands this critique of psychoanalysis makes, but first we have to attend to the issue of the nature of the cinematic object. This brings me to my fifth and final proposition: cinema is delirium.25 Essentially, what Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus is this: the schizophrenic, in the full flight of delirium, reveals to us the true nature of desire as a synthetic process. Delirium, then, is Deleuze and Guattari’s model of how desire works. ‘Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines.’26 Cinema, by extension, is the production of desiringmachines. But Deleuze doesn’t say this in so many words. Rather, he argues that cinema’s purpose as an art form is the engendering of ideas, but I want to argue that his implication is that when it fails to produce ideas it leaves us with a heterogeneous muddle of desiring-machines. According to Deleuze, cinema doesn’t make thought visible; instead it brings us face to face with thought’s impossibility and in that way induces thought in the very place it had been absent. But it is only able to do this to the extent that it breaks with the structures of what Deleuze calls the movement-image, which in this context might be defined as cinema’s power of common sense, but it can also be regarded as its innate tendency towards fascism.27 Deleuze’s ‘natural history’ of the cinema is divided into two distinct phases in which two very different image-regimes hold sway.28 The first phase, designated the movement-image because cinema’s distinctiveness as an art form derives from the fact that it is a self-moving image, takes us from the birth of cinema to the end of World War II, when in Deleuze’s view it was aesthetically exhausted; the second phase, designated the timeimage because at this point cinema realised its true vocation, namely the production of segments of pure time, takes us from World War II until

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the present. In cinema’s first phase, what was seen on screen was organised according to the dictates of what Deleuze calls the ‘sensory-motor scheme’, which orients the image around a perception-action couplet. Its primary effect is to contain the inherent delirium of the cinematic image, which Deleuze implies stems from the way the ‘screen, as the frame of frames, gives a common standard of measurement to things which do not have one – long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single drop of water – parts which do not have the same denominator of distance, relief or light. In all these senses the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image.’29 Outside of the darkened confines of the theatre only the seriously deranged could make the kinds of global comparisons routinely constructed by the cinematic image. By imbuing the image with a logical causality it acts as a kind of ‘shock defence’ (to use Benjamin’s adaptation of Freud’s term) against the deterritorialising power of the image, which is not de-realising, as psychoanalysis suggests, but its opposite, the opening up of a space in which the impossible becomes the merely improbable.30 The distinctiveness of the ‘sensory-motor scheme’ as an image-regime, and indeed its limitations, became apparent – in true Hegelian fashion, I might add – after the owl of Minerva had taken flight, when its successor, the time-image, first made its appearance in the work of the Italian neo-realists, particularly De Sica and Rossellini. Now the full potential for the delirium of the image was exploited. The bombed-out landscapes of Rossellini’s early films Open City (1945) and Germany: Year Zero (1947) presented a new kind of cinema in which setting was no longer directly invested by action, but instead imparted its own kind of affect. Moreover, Rossellini populated his films with strange characters with no bearing on the central drama, further weakening the hegemony of the sensory-motor scheme. ‘In the old realism or on the model of the action-image [one of three main avatars of the movement-image], objects and setting already had a reality of their own, but it was a functional reality, strictly determined by the demands of the situation, even if these demands were as much poetic as dramatic.’ But with neo-realism, ‘objects and settings [milieux] take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an importance in themselves.’31 Now, for viewer and character alike, the setting is invested by the gaze, and the very notion of what constitutes a situation changes – it becomes purely optical and auditory. Perception no longer automatically connects to action; the glint of light off a knife’s edge no longer means a stabbing is about to occur, but might have a more metaphorical or even lyrical purpose. This new type of situation is not induced by an action, nor can it be resolved with an action. Instead, it ‘makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable’.32 Life on a knife’s

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edge. This intolerable something isn’t a matter of brute violence or terror, but rather ‘something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful’.33 Deleuze goes on to draw an ethical distinction between the two different image-regimes: The important thing [in the time-image] is always that the character or viewer, and the two together, become visionaries. The purely optical and sound situation gives rise to a seeing function, at once fantasy and report, criticism and compassion, whilst sensory-motor situations, no matter how violent, are directed to a pragmatic visual function which ‘tolerates’ or ‘puts up with’ practically anything, from the moment it becomes involved in a system of actions and reactions.34 Philosophy itself, in Deleuze’s view, has no higher calling than this, the identification of the intolerable. I would go so far as to say that for Deleuze philosophy exists for no other purpose, as is patent in his interest – most directly articulated in Anti-Oedipus – in the matter of voluntary servitude, the apparently inexplicable willingness on the part of many to put up with and indeed tolerate the intolerable. Paradoxically, then, cinema’s exceptionalism when it is achieved is expressed in its ability to make apparent the rule, that which is customary rather than that which is unusual. When it fails, however, it gives us nothing but fantasy, the million and one private exceptions to the rule that lack both truth and reality. Here Deleuze anticipates Badiou’s critique of postmodernity, which similarly rejects particularity (the merely different) in favour of singularity (genuine difference).35 But Deleuze is less pessimistic than Badiou, who regards contemporary cinema as a form of sterile neo-classicism that does nothing except recycle old stories, old images and old ideas.36 Deleuze would probably have no qualms about rejecting the bulk of contemporary cinema as cretinising schlock, as Badiou does, but would no doubt want to add that such judgements are of little use. They don’t help us to understand cinema any better. So rather than moralise about the vacuity of Hollywood, I expect Deleuze would instead have us continue to sift the dross in search of that rare nugget of innovation. In this sense, Jameson is surely correct to describe Deleuze as a modernist, but it is for precisely that reason that we need to reverse Deleuze and look not at the exceptions to the rule of a generalised nullity in cinema he identifies, but at that nullity itself – sexploitation films, blaxploitation films, direct-to-video shockers, sequels and prequels, remakes and rip-offs, blockbusters and stinkers, the bread and butter of Hollywood, the stuff on which the industry was founded and sustains itself.37 Nowhere does Deleuze write about Hell Behind the Bars, Shaft, Night of the Living Dead, The Birds II,

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or even Star Wars (which when he wrote his cinema books was the highestgrossing film of all time), yet this is the real Hollywood. The question before us, clearly enough, is what does this kind of cinema do? How does it work? Not only does Deleuze not answer this question in his cinema books, he constructs an aesthetic binary that places such (to him uninspiring) cinema beyond the pale. Cinema produces a spiritual automaton, that is, the one universal ‘effect’ of the medium Deleuze allows. Spinoza calls this anonymous something, this ‘it’ that thinks in us, the soul. When it is working well, when it is good, that spiritual automaton has a liberating effect on our subjectivity, but when it isn’t working well, when it is bad, then that spiritual automaton tends to be enslaving. If the spiritual automaton is an awareness of the power to think, then liberation means an increase in the power to think, which could be defined as a power of differentiation; enslavement clearly means the opposite, a diminution in the power to think, which could be defined as a tendency towards sameness or, what amounts to the same thing, bad non-differentiating repetition. What this means philosophically becomes clearer if we connect it to Deleuze’s account of the Spinozist origins of the concept of the spiritual automaton. ‘What was lacking in the ancients, says Spinoza, was the conception of the soul as a sort of spiritual automaton, that is, of thought as determined by its own laws.’38 The spiritual automaton is an idea, or mode of thought, that is caused by and in thought itself. It is thus a ‘true’ idea, or an ‘adequate’ idea, because it knows and expresses its own cause. Its opposite is the ‘sad passion’, the thought or idea that doesn’t know its own cause. Sad passions obstruct our ability to act.39 If we react to what we see on screen, if we are affected by what we see, then by definition our response cannot be considered an adequate idea because it was caused by something outside of thought. Our laughter or tears in response to a film are ‘sad passions’ because they are unaware of their own causes. It is only when cinema induces thought, when it yields an idea, suggested but not caused by what occurs on screen, that we can consider it to have produced a ‘truth effect’ (to borrow Badiou’s useful term). Deleuze’s entire ‘natural history’ of cinema can be understood, then, as charting a passage from a cinema of ‘sad passions’ – that is, a cinema driven by the aim of producing an affect – to a cinema of ‘adequate ideas’.40 There is a twofold problem with this approach to cinema. Firstly, if – as Deleuze readily admits – the bulk of cinema doesn’t realise the art form’s true purpose of producing ideas, then an analysis that is only interested in ideas isn’t going to tell us all that much about the majority of films made. Secondly, if we accept Deleuze’s thesis that only rarely do films produce ideas of the spiritual automaton type, it doesn’t necessarily follow that those films which fail in this endeavour are either cretinising or, worse, fascisising,

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yet these are effectively the only options Deleuze’s cinema aesthetics leaves us with. Deleuze’s decision to treat film philosophically means he treats it as an art form constructed in his own image. He finds philosophy in film because that’s what he is looking for, which isn’t to say that film cannot contain philosophy, but it is to question whether or not philosophy should be the principal focus of analysis. I’m not suggesting we need to abandon the philosophical approach to cinema Deleuze advocates, but I am saying it needs to be supplemented by an analysis – a schizoanalysis – of the dimensions of cinema that do not pertain to the production of ideas, namely those that pertain to desire and to interest. And this, I want to argue, is the signal advantage of a schizoanalysis of cinema over existing forms of film analysis: by mobilising the problematic of desire it enables us to inject fresh life into old questions, namely those relating to what I’ve called the real conditions of production, which for the most part seem to be stuck permanently on the plane of self-evidence known as ‘marketing’ wherein it is known that movies like the X-Men series get made because it is a fact that teenage boys are the predominant audience demographic – by a large margin – in both the cinema-goer and video-renter markets.41 Therefore it is their tastes that dictate what is deemed marketable and worth spending a couple of hundred million dollars to make and what isn’t.42 But this doesn’t explain why teenage boys appear to desire movies of that type; nor, indeed, given the vast number of box-office bombs made in pursuit of this particular market, does it reliably tell us what they actually desire.43 In the final section of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari specify that in establishing schizoanalysis there are three tasks that must be performed: one negative task, and two positive tasks. To begin with, ‘schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction – a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage’.44 What must be destroyed? Nothing less than the entire psychoanalytic inheritance, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view. Oedipus, the ego, the superego, guilt, law, castration, all these things must be rooted out at the source and dispensed with as so much trash. But hyperbole aside, what they mean in analytic terms is this: we need to set aside the idea that desire has an intrinsic script it is supposed to follow and that all pathologies can be attributed to a failure to adhere to its dictates. We are neither sick from our childhood, nor essentially stuck in our childhood. Desire is a synthetic or machinic process with a multiplicity of operating parts and a tremendous power of association or connection which we’ll never understand if we think only in triangular terms – desire is much more complicated than mummy-daddy-me. It follows, then, that the two positive tasks of schizoanalysis should concentrate on trying to get a grip on desire as it actually is. ‘The first positive task consists of discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or the functioning of his desiring-machines, independently

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of any interpretations. What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?’45 The second positive task of schizoanalysis consists of reaching ‘the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also of coexisting with them in opposite modes’.46 What they mean by this, simply put, is that desire works by creating mental matrices to trap, interrupt and divert libido and that these matrices (which they call desiring-machines) can encompass matters and flows of every type. That is to say, contrary to Freud, desire can invest the social field directly, and no art form shows the truth of this more clearly than cinema. How these three tasks should be fulfilled in the context of cinema studies is an open and to my mind extremely interesting question. The five propositions I have offered here are my way of fulfilling these three tasks in relation to Deleuze’s own work on cinema. My hope is that this will help clear the way for the bigger task of rethinking cinema studies in general.

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Chapter 5 Schizoanalysis and The Birds1

Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavours to fix a fragile point as a centre. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus I doubt one could find an area of research more thoroughly blighted by what Deleuze and Guattari only half-jokingly call ‘interpretosis’ than Hitchcock studies. Yet Deleuzians have so far been comparatively silent on the matter, perhaps because Deleuze himself did not see fit to challenge the hegemonic hold psychoanalysis has on Hitchcock. In this respect, one cannot but rue the fact that he did not collaborate with Guattari on the film books as well. It is difficult to believe Guattari would have been able to resist so ripe a target. His complaints against Freud – that he did not listen to his patients, that he saw Oedipus everywhere he looked, that he reduced everything to mummy, daddy and me – would be redoubled with respect to certain of Hitchcock’s critics. Likewise, his complaint against Lacan, that he attributed everything to lack as the fundamental cause, would be redoubled with respect to certain of Hitchcock’s critics. In this regard, the task for schizoanalysis today is clear: overturn the psychoanalytic readings of Hitchcock. Taking Slavoj Žižek’s reading of The Birds as my focal point, I shall attempt to blaze a path for what must ultimately be an enormous labour of rereading, by sketching out a few of the basic coordinates for a schizoanalysis of Hitchcock. For Žižek, the basic problem with The Birds is that the birds get in the way of us seeing that the film is really just a humdrum Oedipal drama played out between Mitch Brenner, his mother Lydia Brenner, and socialite Melanie Daniels. What is so interesting about the way the birds function in this film is the fact that without ever pushing the Oedipal drama into the background, they nevertheless obscure it from view: in effect, it gets lost in the foreground, in the tumult of the attacking birds. But if we perform the mental experiment Žižek suggests and erase the birds from view, it instantly becomes clear that in reality The Birds is just another one of those tedious North American melodramas about a guy who can’t relate to

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women because he has never properly worked through all his issues with his mother.2 And who for the want of a proper father figure just can’t seem to get his act together enough to form a proper relationship with a woman – remember, in the Lacanian universe, ‘the deficient paternal ego-ideal makes the law [of the Father] “regress” toward a ferocious maternal superego, affecting sexual enjoyment’.3 When we permit ourselves to see the birds again, what we have to do is see them as an ‘embodiment in the real’ of this ‘unresolved tension’ in the ‘intersubjective relations’ between Mitch and his mother, Mitch and women in general (Melanie Daniels and Annie Hayworth), as well as Mitch’s mother and Mitch’s girlfriends.4 Žižek says the decisive thing, if we are to properly understand the figure of the birds, is to perceive the connection between the disturbing maternal superego issuing from Mitch’s mother and the birds without at the same time seizing on it. The birds do not symbolise the maternal superego, they embody it. As such, they are functionally equivalent to the plague that besets Thebes in the wake of Oedipus’s indiscretions with his mother; they incarnate the disorder that has erupted in the heart of the familial structure: when the paternal function is suspended a wicked maternal superego reigns in its place. The diegesis of the film is so shaped by the action of the birds that their looming presence completely overshadows this domestic scene and effectively drains it of significance. Worse still, in those terrifying moments when the birds are actually attacking, we tend to forget about the family drama altogether! But not the psychoanalyst who, with the patience and guile of the sphinx, simply awaits the moment of its return. Sure enough, return it does, right at the end of the film. That this was after all just another (boring?) Oedipal melodrama is confirmed in Žižek’s view by that enigmatic sequence in the last minutes of the movie wherein Mitch’s mother smiles benignly at Melanie and the two seem to embrace in the car. Žižek interprets this as Mitch’s mother accepting Melanie, thus abandoning her superego role. This explains why the birds stop – their role is finished.5 What it does not explain, however, is what exactly brought about this so-called acceptance. Even if it is simply a standard American melodrama about a mother, her boy and the girl he brought home, one still wants to see how the reversal of the initial hostility is effectuated. If it is simply the trial of shared adversity that brings them together, an element The Birds has in common with any number of sci-fi thrillers and Westerns of the period – from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Fort Apache – then there is no structural reason why the birds should be connected to the mother at all. They might just as well stand for Communism, as both aliens and Indians have, a reading that is not at all implausible given the film was released in 1963 when the Cuban Crisis was still fresh in everyone’s memory and the spectre

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of Vietnam was already looming menacingly on the horizon – the flocking together of the different species, the supposed moment of true terror in the film, would then be nothing less than a figuration of the so-called ‘domino theory’. In which event, the reason the birds stop at the end is because they have won, the haunting final image recalling perhaps those famous dark photographs of Soviet soldiers hoisting the hammer-and-sickle flag over the burnt-out shell of the Reichstag at the end of World War II. If we look at that last scene in this way, then we start to think that perhaps by acceptance Žižek really meant annihilation. Now that would mean the superego role was in abeyance, not over and done with, a point that would upset Žižek’s serial reading of Hitchcock (in which The Birds functions as the logical culmination of the so-called Hitchcock matrix), but not fatally because it could be accommodated in a precisely Deleuzian fashion by arguing that the matrix necessarily implies the coextension of all outcomes as so many of its modalities. Yet even if one did interpret this scene in this way – and certainly it functions in this way for me – there is still nothing in the narrative to compel us toward the reading Žižek suggests, namely that the birds embody a deranged maternal superego. The fact that he invokes a transformation in Lydia, which is a narrative event, prevents us from reading him as claiming that what Hitchcock does is create something like a dramatic figuration – a rendering visible, as Deleuze would put it – of the deranged maternal superego invisibly at play in the standard North American melodrama; this is the reading that sees The Birds as a filmic adaptation of Munch’s The Scream.6 Since Žižek adopts a narratological framework to support his argument, he must comply with its demands, which means if the essential question concerning The Birds is, as he rightly points out, ‘why do they attack?’, then whatever answer one comes up with must connect the onset of the attack to some kind of a ‘crisis’ or ‘trigger’ in the intersubjective relation between Lydia and Melanie. And this, it seems to me, is precisely what cannot be done. The reason Žižek cannot connect the onset of the attack to some kind of a ‘crisis’ in the intersubjective relation between Lydia and Melanie is structural: the narrative trigger is elsewhere, which can be seen in the very first shot of the movie. The birds are already gathering forebodingly over Union Square before Melanie has even met Mitch, indeed before either could have known they would meet, much less strike a chord. Now, maybe we could dismiss this as prefiguration, since the birds haven’t actually attacked at this point, but it is still difficult to see how the finger could plausibly be pointed at Lydia because at the time of the first attack she is still unaware of Melanie’s existence. We can surmise from the conversation at the first meeting that Mitch hasn’t told his mother about Melanie before this, so if it is Lydia’s maternal superego rage embodied in

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the attacking birds there is no reason for it to be inflamed at the time of the first actual attack. If the attacks had started right after Lydia met Melanie and learned that her son was somehow interested in her, then it might be possible to read them as stemming from Lydia. Since that is not the case, it takes an act of faith to see this connection. Žižek, of course, does not deal directly with what initiates the action; he infers it as the ‘exciting cause’ from what he takes to be the therapeutic moment that leads to the dissolution of the symptom, namely Lydia’s acceptance of Melanie. Here, though, one must take issue with Žižek’s timing. In my view, this moment does not come at the end, as Žižek says, with Lydia and Melanie huddling together in the back of Melanie’s roadster like shell-shocked Blitz victims, but rather in the middle in that quite strange scene in Lydia’s bedroom when they find themselves alone together for the first time.7 Lydia, who has just returned from the Fawcett farm shattered by the sight of her neighbour’s eyeless corpse, is lying in bed almost catatonic. Traumatised not by grief, as might be expected, but rather by self-pity, as we soon learn, she laments not the loss of a friend or neighbour, but her own weakness – ‘I wish I was stronger,’ she says over and over. Because Mitch has been called away by the police to attend the Fawcett farm, Melanie offers to comfort Lydia in his place by taking her some tea. Now, it must be noted that when Lydia first got back from the Fawcett farm and was running hysterically toward the house she was in fact greeted by Mitch and Melanie, who just happened to be loitering in the front yard at the time, but rather than collapse into her son’s arms, as she initially seemed tempted to do, she pushed him away. Given how clinging and possessive a mother we know her to be, this is at first surprising, but I imagine she drew the same inference from the way Melanie was dressed (a fur coat over a nightdress!) that we did, namely that her son had lately, that is, just this morning, consummated his relationship with her. This effectively doubles her trauma – not only can she not be properly comforted by a son still so manifestly post-coitally aglow, but it is all the evidence she needs that her worst fear has come true: she is going to lose Mitch. Perhaps it is this that pitches her into catatonia? The point not to be missed here, as Žižek would say, is that far from being enraged, she is crushed, which is why she wishes she was stronger, so she could cope better with being on her own. It is this weary resignation that she is going to be abandoned that is in my view decisive. Not merely because it demonstrates that Lydia was incapable of rage at this point, but because it provides the grounds for a reconciliation between Melanie and Lydia. Melanie bringing her tea is a kind of peace offering, but more importantly it is an expression of solidarity – it is clear to them both that they are equally subject to Mitch’s whims, and just as he may abandon his mother, so he may leave Melanie.8 In this respect, it is a mistake to

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think Mitch abandoned Annie Hayworth for his mother, or because of his mother; rather, one must say he lacked the depth of commitment needed to withstand the pressures daily life places on any relationship. That he is something of a cad is made perfectly clear in the scene outside the Brenner house after Melanie’s first visit there for dinner. Mitch makes it clear to Melanie that his attraction to her is not motivated by anything so grand or noble as love, by telling her that his sole reason for wanting to see her again is that it ‘might be fun’. In other words, his interest in her is sparked by the very same stories of licentiousness that concerned his mother, that seem to make her the kind of girl his mother would not approve of. That she drives away rather angrily at this point tells us a lot about Melanie’s character – she may appear to be a dizzy socialite type, also only interested in fun, but this is not what she’s looking for right now. Yet her prankster behaviour would seem to suggest otherwise, which leads us to wonder why she uses practical jokes as her way of communicating with people when in fact she wants them to take her seriously. My point is that in the bedroom scene between Melanie and Lydia, Melanie forges a relationship with Lydia that is independent of Mitch and, more importantly, independent of the mother-son relation. The pact is sealed by Melanie offering to retrieve Cathy from school. In Deleuzian terms, one might say it initiates a new series: it spawns a Melanie-LydiaCathy series that then runs parallel to the Melanie-Mitch-Lydia series, draining it of significance. But it is the inter-relationship between these two series that is the crucial thing to consider: in the first series, Melanie displaces Mitch from the familial triangle – big brother is given up for a big sister, a wayward son is given up for a girlfriend; in the second, perhaps even more interestingly, Melanie displaces Cathy – girlfriend displaces sister, friend displaces daughter. Here it is the potential equivalences that are striking: in the first series, a son can be replaced by a girlfriend; in the second, a sister can be replaced by a girlfriend. In other words, the more we try to cling to a subject-centred reading, the more complicated things get. On Žižek’s reading, the birds should stop attacking once Lydia has accepted Melanie, but if I am right in saying that acceptance comes now, in the middle of the film, rather than at the end as Žižek says, then obviously enough the birds do not cease attacking when Lydia has accepted Melanie; indeed, the violence escalates. Now, while this means that it is difficult to attribute the cause of the birds’ attack to Lydia’s maternal superego, even retroactively, that doesn’t mean the intersubjective relation between them is completely irrelevant. On the contrary, Lydia’s acceptance of Melanie not only leads to a concord between them, it charges the whole familial dynamic with a new intensity. And it is this intensity that the birds render visible.

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While there is little to connect the menace of the birds to Lydia directly, there is a great deal to suggest that they should be connected to Melanie – from the beginning, they are literally a dark cloud over her head. As Jameson says, the birds are libidinalised from the outset, making it clear they can be read as ‘spilling out of Tippi Hedren’s psyche’.9 He points to the pet shop scene as evidence of this, but I would argue the libidinalisation has already occurred before then, and, indeed, that it must have, if the pet shop scene is to be properly suspenseful. Here, though, one must take note of something Jameson says elsewhere about the credits sequence, for it seems to me the libidinalisation of the birds occurs then – that is, even before we see the gulls gathering ominously over Union Square. Speaking of films in the postmodern era, which for him begins in the early 1970s, Jameson says the credits ‘have become an inconspicuous yet crucial space in which the desired perceptual habits of a viewer’ are programmed in.10 The credits sequence in The Birds is neither connected directly to the diegesis itself (which includes prolepsis – e.g. the cymbal crash in The Man Who Knew Too Much) nor completely outside the realm of the film as it is in the very early films, where its role is purely functional. Rather, it seems to operate in a manner that Deleuze and Guattari might describe as decoding, because while there is no obvious allegorical reading to be made of it, it nevertheless prepares us for what follows by relating the birds to the humans in a very particular way. The juxtaposition of mindlessly fluttering birds with the flickering in and out of the names of the players suggests one of two things: either the self-destruction of the names gives rise to the birds, or the sheer presence of birds is enough to bring about the auto-destruction of the names. What one cannot say, however, is that the birds actively destroy the names, since it very clearly occurs spontaneously. Above all, it is this spontaneous self-destruction that leads me to reject Žižek’s linking of the birds to Lydia because it attaches them too strongly to a particular subject and introduces a causal link where there plainly is not one. On my reading, we are encouraged to see the birds not as libidinalised, for which an attachment to a subject is required, but as intensely libidinal in themselves, which means precisely detached from and therefore potentially destructive of a subject. Deleuze and Guattari’s term for this free-floating libido is ‘desire’. This is why I have described the credits as ‘decoding’: they destroy the grounds for a reterritorialisation on the familial series. Now, however, we have a different problem: if by definition desire cannot be attached to a particular subject then there is just as little reason to associate the birds with Melanie as with Lydia. This is what makes narratology so important; it is narrative that renders the birds consistent if not with the actions of certain characters then with the composition of the film as a whole. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the intersection or convergence

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of heterogeneous elements is first of all a problem of consistency – every artwork, they say, whether it is a film, sculpture, novel or rock opera, has a plane of consistency, where the sense of that film, sculpture, novel or rock opera is in fact to be found.11 In their view, narrative is primarily a power of consistency: in effect, it is the text’s unconscious, or at least Deleuze and Guattari’s version of it. Sense and consistency are more or less the same thing. Both are properties of the event; as such, sense cannot be thought in terms of some pre-existing, always already there, dictionary-like meaning. It is rather a contemporaneous production – ‘where consciousness goes, there the unconscious shall be’.12 For Deleuze and Guattari, sense-making, as it might be better to say, is an ongoing process, but that doesn’t mean it is ineffable, like some wild and dark night when all cows are black; on the contrary, what might usefully be called its mode of production can always be precisely known. Deleuze and Guattari’s word for this knowable sensemaking process is ‘abstract machine’. The abstract machine is not the same thing as the unconscious, but as their play on Freud’s famous phrase makes clear enough, Deleuze and Guattari want it to be understood as taking the place of the unconscious. Its essential job is to hold things together. This, I would argue, is the basic aesthetic problem posed by The Birds – what holds it together? ‘If we ask the general question, “What holds things together?”, the clearest, easiest answer seems to be provided by a formalising, linear, hierarchised, centralised arborescent model.’13 The very question ‘why do the birds attack?’, which is at the centre of practically every reading of The Birds, has precisely this problem at the forefront of its concerns. Its fundamental expectation, which it is the genius of this film to thwart to the very end, is that eventually the apparently senseless alteration in the behaviour of the birds will be made meaningful to us: we expect the narrative to resolve the enigma of their changed conduct either by turning them into symbols or by providing some semi-rational motivation we’d previously overlooked in the form of a discovery. Almost as though he were baiting us, effectively defying us not to reterritorialise on the first thing offered, Hitchcock gives us both of these ways out, but in doing so makes it clear that to take the bait is to short-circuit the drama. This all takes place in the crucial diner scene just before and just after the first major attack on the township itself, which results in the petrol station going up in flames. Beforehand, the strange gathering of the birds and their apparently unnatural behaviour – discussed in much detail by the ornithologist who just happens by the diner to buy a packet of cigarettes – is blamed on storms at sea, as though to say their behaviour really was natural after all, in a freakish kind of way. Afterwards, a hysterical woman accuses Melanie of bringing the birds with her, as though she were some kind of evil entity and the birds her minions. But neither rationale is meant to be very convincing, which is the difference

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between Hitchcock and, let’s say, Stephen King.14 Unlike Hitchcock, who delights in making nothing (i.e. the proverbial MacGuffin) seem like something, King always provides an explanation – in The Shining inanimate objects like fire hoses turn nasty because the Overlook Hotel is possessed by evil, while in Maximum Overdrive they go haywire because of the presence of a spaceship in the outer atmosphere. Our expectation that the narrative will resolve the enigma of the birds’ behaviour is never satisfied. Finding the abstract machine is not a matter of discovering some strange new thing that has got itself lost amidst the dense clutter of the various complexes that constitute the psychopathology of everyday life; rather, it is a matter of pragmatics. In effect, it amounts to unlocking the perhaps unique logic by which the actions in the narrative are rendered consistent, for which task a new kind of hermeneutics is needed – one oriented by questions of function rather than meaning (interpretosis sets in when hermeneutics forgets itself and chases after the phantasm of meaning). Žižek’s discussion of the work done by the dream itself (even before the dreamwork has begun) offers striking evidence of this. As he explains, what is truly revolutionary in Freud’s work is not so much the mechanism he created for explaining how one kind of thought can wind up being represented by another, but the fact that he takes the sheer process of dreaming itself to be essential to the functioning of the organism. Freud’s first question was not what do dreams mean, but how do they work? In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, Freud betrays his own genius when he lets himself think the problem of function is at one with the problem of meaning and that solving the problem of the meaning of a dream will unlock its function. In this respect, their work is an even more assiduous return to Freud than Lacan’s. They want to return Freud himself – and not merely wayward Freudians – to Freud’s original insights, the most important of which is his uncanny perception that all neuroses including the one we call normalcy are pragmatic. A striking instance of this need for a return by Freud to Freud is to be found in his discussion of Schreber’s ‘end of the world’ delusions. We tend to assume delusions are a pathological product, Freud says, but, he reasons, they are in fact an attempt at recovery. Despite his passion for Wagner, Schreber’s ‘end of the world’ fantasy is not that ‘tragic’ glorification of death Nietzsche denounced; it is rather the occasion for the imagining into being of a fresh new world, which even if it isn’t more splendid than the world destroyed it is at least a world he can live in.15 Insofar as we focus exclusively on the pragmatic dimension of him creating a world in which he can live, I do not imagine Deleuze and Guattari would find much to disagree with. What they would take issue with, however, is the perception that it is a delusional formation, rather

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than a profound alteration in the real itself, or what Schreber himself calls a ‘profound internal change’ in the world.16 The problem is that for Freud delusions are merely passing episodes in the life of the mind, which if properly understood can be cleared away like so much fog or smoke, allowing everything to return to the way it was. The problem for Deleuze and Guattari is that this idea of a return to normalcy – on which, it must be said, Freud’s entire therapeutic practice is staked – is premised by what they regard as an untenable conception of the unconscious. For them, there is no return: one can only go forward. This is the profound implication of their slogan ‘the unconscious is there where consciousness goes’ – it means the unconscious, or rather its replacement, the abstract machine, is coextensive with consciousness: any change to consciousness is automatically a change to the unconscious. The unconscious is not, in other words, a reservoir of primitive memories of how things used to be that we can tap into – with the help of a therapist, of course – in order to get our lives back on track and return things to the way they used to be. So, what is the abstract machine? ‘The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance juncture when you are falling asleep, or into a twilight state or hallucinating, or doing an amusing physics experiment . . .’17 For instance, in Kafka’s novella ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’, a man returns home from work in the evening to find ‘two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes jumping up and down side by side’ on the floor.18 In such a situation it is futile to ask what do the balls mean – even if that is the question weighing heaviest on our minds – because their appearance receives neither of the two forms of motivation we are accustomed to in the face of fantastic occurrences: there is no mention of evil, the balls are not treated as in any way symbolic; nor is there any attempt at a rational explanation, the balls aren’t magnetic or isotopically unbalanced or anything like that. They are simply there, bouncing mindlessly. From the moment Blumfeld steps into his apartment, everything in his life is different and even if he could get rid of the infernal balls, and it is by no means certain he can, his life will not return to how it used to be. Whatever could have happened for things to have turned out this way? Certainly Blumfeld’s loneliness, his tiredness unto death, his longing for a companion, his desire to own a little dog (in spite of his fastidiousness about cleanliness) are all important, but there is no clear reason why any of it should – much less could – be connected to the inexplicable appearance of two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes jumping up and down side by side on the floor. One could imagine Žižek interpreting their appearance as the intrusion of the real into symbolically organised reality, which subsequently leads to the breakdown of that reality. Deleuze and Guattari

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would fundamentally disagree with this separation of the real from reality. To their way of thinking, the real and reality are one and the same thing. At least, that’s how it is for schizophrenics, which is why psychoanalysis has not proven all that effective in either understanding or treating the illness.19 As Freud’s brave but misguided interpretation of Schreber’s memoirs illustrates, the only way psychoanalysis can deal with a schizophrenic reality is to treat it as a delusion-formation and impose a predetermined symbology. Using the Oedipal model, Schreber’s Gods, his psychiatrist, and his many other antagonists are all turned into stand-ins for the father by Freud. Yet for Schreber himself, the Gods were no more representative of his father than his psychiatrist was; the Order of Things was very clear on this. The point is, nothing in Schreber’s previous life directly explains how things function in his capacity as Margrave of Tuscany and Tasmania.20 Very far from romanticising schizophrenia, as they are often accused of doing, what Deleuze and Guattari are really trying to do in their work is figure out how to deal with a situation in which the real has not merely intruded into the symbolic dimension of reality, but has cracked right through its defences and swallowed it up completely. Schizoanalysis begins where psychoanalysis leaves off, namely the point where reality collapses into the real – the crack. Taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s autobiographical account of his alcoholism and the decline of his powers, the crack is that moment when suddenly it becomes clear that even though nothing has actually happened, everything has changed. Nothing is how it used to be, yet the change itself went unfelt. Effectively, what the crack indicates is the advent of a new abstract machine, that is to say, a new power of consistency has suddenly been brought into play and it is the job of the schizoanalyst to figure out its inner logic. For this task, as I’ve said, we need a new kind of hermeneutics, and right in the middle of the oft-overlooked and criminally underrated chapter on the novella, that is exactly what we get. There Deleuze and Guattari make the following stipulation, which effectively defines their entire hermeneutic project: ‘Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations or structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals.’21 The lineaments at issue are drawn across the body without organs, which Deleuze and Guattari explicitly say is ‘the only practical object of schizoanalysis’.22 Schizoanalysis therefore involves a twofold task: first of all, find the body without organs; second, map the lines that cut across it like footprints in the desert, all the while being careful to observe the differences between them. All of which is easy enough to say, I know, but impossible to do if one does not know how to reliably tell the difference between a desert that is just a desert, and a desert that is a body without organs. The crucial thing to bear in mind, however, is that although the body without organs

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is fully real, it is not actual; indeed, it is not even properly virtual inasmuch as it can never be reached. It is a limitrophe (as Deleuze and Guattari call it), namely the precise point at which a certain kind of thing, namely the abstract machine, suddenly changes in kind. In effect, to speak of the body without organs is to speak of an uncrossable boundary that one is nevertheless constantly hurtling towards. So why do Deleuze and Guattari call the body without organs an egg?23 It isn’t because it looks like one; rather, it is because there are certain movements, certain levels of dynamism, that are only possible on an abstract virtual plane. Yet even to call it an egg is to objectify it and give it a form it doesn’t have. The body without organs is not an egg, it is not even the elastic membrane encasing the embryo; it is, rather, the precise tensile strength of that membrane, the precisely calculable point at which it would tear if it were to be stretched further. That said, it is, however, the narratological implications of the chapter on the novella that we need to focus on for our purposes here, namely the elaboration of a schizoanalytic hermeneutics. Primarily, what Deleuze and Guattari conclude in this chapter is that there are only two kinds of narrative, the tale and the novella, and that they differ according to the question they pose: the first asks ‘what is going to happen?’ while the second wonders ‘whatever could have happened?’. (The novel is a sophisticated hybrid of the two that dwells in a perpetual living present.) ‘You will never know what just happened, or you will always know what is going to happen: these are the two reasons for the reader’s two bated breaths, in the novella and the tale, respectively, and they are the two ways in which the living present is divided at every instant.’24 The first form, the tale, doesn’t excite much interest from Deleuze and Guattari – it is too safe, nothing changes in the tale (its precise function is to defer the event for as long as possible). The novella, on the other hand, excites a great deal of interest from Deleuze and Guattari because it highlights a crucial therapeutic problem – radical but unfelt change. The situation of the novella, as they see it, is basically that of the schizophrenic in the full tumult of their illness: it dramatises a moment in which things can definitely be said to have changed, yet one can neither determine when or how it happened, nor indeed what has happened. ‘It may even be that nothing has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us say, Whatever could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I mailed that letter, etc.?’25 The point at which one starts asking this question one can safely say that a kind of ‘laying bare’ (to use a Russian formalist notion) of the body without organs has been accomplished. But that is only the first step. Next, we have to chart the lines zigzagging across the smooth surface of the body without organs so as to produce a diagram of the relative

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intensities populating it. It is in view of this later problem that one can say that Deleuze and Guattari’s formal analysis of the novella is as near as they ever come to providing us with a set of procedural notes for their technique because here we learn just how to analyse these lines. The premise of this analysis is as follows: Not only is there a specificity of the novella, but there is also a specific way in which the novella treats a universal matter. For we are made of lines. We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writing. Perhaps the novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining these lines, which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre.26 There are a great many different types of lines possible; indeed, if one were to consider them solely in terms of differences in degree, their number could doubtlessly be stretched all the way to infinity. But, however uniquely interesting such a vast catalogue might prove, differences of this order are not at all useful for analytic purposes; rather, what one needs are differences in kind. Deleuze and Guattari’s formal analysis reveals three such different lines: the line of segmentarity, the line of molecularity and the line of abolition. Deleuze and Guattari take an almost Bauhaus view of things when it comes to the analysis of lines. Schizoanalysis insists on seeing the line in its starkest purity, which is to say in purely functional terms. The line of segmentarity controls identity and functions according to a law of conjugality: ‘I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conjugate.’27 Connection, determination or judgement, something is always about to happen on the line of segmentarity. On the line of molecularity, by contrast, something has always already happened, but below the threshold of perceptibility; it manifests itself in the form of barely perceptible fissures and flaws, ‘fine segmentations distributed in an entirely different way, unfindable particles of an anonymous matter, tiny cracks and postures operating by different agencies even in the unconscious, secret lines of disorientation’ and so forth.28 The segments no longer seem to fit together, or properly differ from each other. Now, instead of sharply defined particles snapping together in a logical sequence, one has black holes that threaten oblivion. The line of flight (abolition) affords some relief, but at the cost of a complete transformation: ‘Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any longer.’29 These three lines are not distinct phases, they are coextensive.

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At first glance The Birds seems to be a tale, rather than a novella, that is to say, a matter exclusively of the order of ‘what is going to happen?’ – from that first moment when the carefully coiffed Melanie saunters into view, we are literally spellbound waiting for something to happen to her, to that woman, the one who is wolf-whistled at and doesn’t seem to mind. Yet her sexy insouciance is also tellingly contrasted by a sombre shadow of gulls hanging over her head like her own private black hole, making it evident that something has already happened, although we do not know what. So even before the idea that The Birds is a tale can properly be formed, we are already uncertain about it thanks to the darkly looming seabirds; this uncertainty soon turns to certainty in the pet shop scene when Melanie somewhat unexpectedly and not a little scandalously responds to an apparent stranger – Mitch – inquiring after a pair of love birds for his sister’s birthday by pretending to be a sales assistant herself. From this moment on, our attention is shifted with increasing urgency toward the other question: ‘Whatever could have happened for her to be behaving like this?’ It may look as if something has passed between Mitch and Melanie, but to assume they have fallen in love is to take a too obvious bait and succumb to the ready reterritorialisation of romance. But this isn’t a romance, or if it is, it has a peculiar twist, a sting in the tail. It might all begin rosily enough – boy definitely meets girl, they maybe even fall in love – but they don’t live happily ever after: she winds up catatonic and he skips town in a hurry. Already, in this first scene, all three lines have materialised. The first to appear, dauntingly enough, is the line of abolition, in the credits sequence – birds juxtaposed with dissolving names.30 The next to appear is the line of molecularity – the dark cloud of gulls overhead, the black hole that threatens to consume Melanie. And lastly, the line of segmentarity – that wolf-whistle pigeon-holes Melanie as effectively as any name could. Anyone can see she is frivolous, spoilt and obviously used to getting her own way, and yet we sense a certain sadness too. Tippi Hedren’s acting has been much criticised, but her brittle posture is perfectly done. Fragile and precious, but always too stiff, she is like a porcelain figurine seesawing on a knife’s edge. We fully expect her to crash and shatter at every instant, but cannot help marvelling at the fact that she manages to hold it together for so long. This, it seems to me, is precisely Melanie’s situation. Why else does she respond to Mitch the way she does? She seizes his misrecognition of her as a shop assistant as an opportunity to escape, to be otherwise for a while. For a minute, there, she can believe she has fooled the system of segmentarity that ceaselessly positions her as that woman, that Melanie Daniels, that favourite of the gossip columns and society pages. When Mitch reveals that it was precisely because he knew her to be that Melanie Daniels that he decided to make fun of her, she is not merely humiliated, she is set adrift.

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He sees her as a prankster and responds in kind – in other words, she is not even that woman anymore, she is just some irresponsible socialite who thinks she can get away with any kind of behaviour. In that instant, then, her old identity is destroyed: she asks herself, whatever happened to me such that I am reduced to this? Being a prankster is like a black hole, but one that she thinks she can get out of only by correcting Mitch’s perception of her, which, tellingly enough, she intends to achieve via another prank. Her compulsiveness is that of the alcoholic or drug addict – she seeks that one last prank (last drink, last hit) that will bring an end to the remorseless need that gnaws away at her insides.31 This is the line of flight that opens up: if she can do this one last prank, then she’ll be like everybody else, then she’ll be imperceptible. This is why she so impetuously pursues Mitch to Bodega Bay (when she could simply have arranged to have the birds delivered as she did with her aunt’s mynah); her drive there is like Hamlet’s journey to England, something in her changes in the course of the voyage.32 She left San Francisco a fully formed socialite but somehow arrives in Bodega Bay a fledgling of indeterminate species – perhaps a wife, maybe a sister, could be a friend, who knows? As Robin Wood points out, much of the scenery for the drive down the coast road is done as an ‘ugly backprojection’, even though it could obviously have been done on location.33 This is further confirmed by the eerie soundtrack which eschews almost all natural sounds – the bird’s cries are produced by a synthesiser and there is a great deal of voice-off used.34 This irreality – by which I mean more real than reality itself, or, better yet, the collapsing of reality into the real – explains what to me is one of the most curious moments in the whole film: her switching of the cards at the Brenner house. Why does she decide not to revenge herself on Mitch? When she arrives in Bodega Bay, her mind is already made up: she is not going to aim her gag at Mitch directly. Instead she is going to approach him sideways, via his sister. She doesn’t abandon the form of the prank, yet she empties it of its content: while she still delivers the birds stealthily, so as to preserve the voyeuristic thrill she gets from watching a good prank come off, she does so in a way that will produce an authentic thrill in the recipient (they are the birds she wants, and they are specifically for her). She does not empty the gag of its content completely; she retains its fetishistic element, namely the birds. Bear in mind that her whole reason for being in the pet store where she met Mitch was, as we learn later, to buy a mynah bird for an aunt who is just too proper for Melanie’s taste. So, at the moment of truth, as it were, a gesture of malicious fun is impulsively converted into a vehicle for initiating friendship, if not with Mitch then perhaps with Cathy. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that Mitch himself is the only object of her concern. Now, what is particularly

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noteworthy about this scene, of course, is the fact that it is right after this that the first bird attacks. Melanie is dive-bombed by a gull metres from the jetty on the return leg of her jaunt across the bay. Why do the birds wait until then to attack? This, it seems to me, is the key question we must ask because, truth be told, we always knew they would attack (we always knew what was going to happen); what we didn’t know was what would set them off (that is, the something x that has always already happened); now we know: the trigger is the card switch, the one element in this scenario we could not have anticipated. They attack because while Melanie has changed, the transition has not been without its costs. It is as though she cannot quite shake the habit of being the Melanie of old. Her first encounter with Mitch in Bodega Bay is begun with a lie, from which she moves to half-lies and then finally to something approximating the truth. Likewise, she is never exactly straight with Annie Hayworth. Why can’t she tell the truth? Perhaps it is because she does not know what it is. She drives to Bodega Bay with no intention of doing anything more than dropping off a couple of birds and scooting right back to the city, yet she winds up spending the night. This brings us to the second rather curious element: why do the birds attack in waves? It is because Melanie’s line of deterritorialisation, as the line of molecularity is also known, is unstable: on the one hand, she seems to long for a return to the security of segmentarity, which is why she cannot help lying about her identity and her motives; on the other hand, one can detect a certain driving towards oblivion in her actions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the devastating final scene. Why does Melanie go upstairs? It is surely to find a way out, a line of flight, yet what she finds there is nothing other than a black hole – an enormous gaping hole in the ceiling through which the birds rush inwards and attack her.35 Here one must resist the temptation to read this scene as nihilistic, as a desire for annihilation, as Wood puts it.36 In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, there is nothing stupider than the death drive (we do not desire death; it desires us).37 It is more accurate, I believe, to view this scene as Melanie’s crushing realisation that she cannot live up to the demands of the new character she has fashioned for herself. In this regard, it is perhaps Cathy’s response that is the most poignant: she turns away, she cannot watch as Melanie sinks into oblivion.

Addendum: Coincidence in North by Northwest 38 Coincidence looks like a matter of chance, but this impression is false because in narrative there is never any chance that two characters who must meet might not meet. For instance, there was never any chance that Scottie wouldn’t see Judy in Vertigo (1958) and discover that his Madeleine

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(i.e. not the real Madeleine) is still very much alive; by the same token, there was never any chance that Roger Thornhill wouldn’t be mistaken for George Kaplan in North by Northwest (1959); in other words, Hitchcock’s infamous MacGuffin, the nothing that always leads to something, is anything but a simple matter of chance. It is no exaggeration, nor indeed denigration, to say Hitchcock’s art is an art of the coincidence. But if it isn’t a simple matter of chance, neither is it a straightforward case of necessity; for the encounter to be a true coincidence there must always remain the possibility of it not occurring, of Scottie not seeing Judy and somebody besides Roger Thornhill being mistaken for George Kaplan. However necessary the encounters are between Scottie and Judy and Roger Thornhill and his alternate identity George Kaplan, it is equally true and indeed equally necessary that they remain improbable. A true coincidence is a paradox, but there are many kinds of paradoxes each with their own special significance. The coincidence is an inevitable encounter that seems to occur by chance. In this sense, one cannot even say the encounter is ‘necessary’ since strictly speaking there is nothing in either the terms of the encounter nor the situation of the encounter that guarantees it will take place. Anyone – at least any man of a certain age – who stood up at the precise moment George Kaplan was called to the telephone could have been apprehended as embodying that fictional entity; by the same token, given how busy the lobby is, if the observers had been differently positioned, they might not have seen Roger Thornhill, but somebody else, as George Kaplan. Yet if the story is to progress, the unlikely must happen and duly does. From nowhere, the name ‘George Kaplan’ surfaces and abducts the body of Roger Thornhill. All at once, his pleasantly purposeless life, which to that point had been unfolding without much thought to the future, is seized by a fully formed totality whose place in the social grid is quite different from his own. Scottie was not looking for Judy, yet he discovered her all the same; Roger Thornhill could not have contrived to be mistaken for George Kaplan even if he wanted to, yet it happened all the same. As viewers we want these meetings to take place, albeit after the fact (as must be the case with North by Northwest), and know they must take place, but it is essential to our enjoyment of them that they remain contingent, accidents of time rather than accidents befalling particular characters. This is obvious in the second example – if Roger Thornhill was knowingly impersonating or pretending to be George Kaplan the film would be completely different – but the same must be said for Vertigo too: it is because Scottie doesn’t expect to find her that his discovery is shattering. Scottie was not looking for Judy because he didn’t know she existed: every woman and of course no woman was Madeleine to him. To see Judy he had to fail to

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see Madeleine, he had to realise that he had been deceived, that Madeleine was really Judy, and hadn’t died as he had assumed. In effect, he never sees Judy, just Madeleine a couple of steps removed from her true self, easily correctible with the application of peroxide, costume jewellery and a new dress. Coincidence comprises two interlocking components, what, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze calls a mobile empty place and an occupant without a place. The woman who was the Madeleine Scottie knew, but not the real Madeleine, wants to be known for who she really is, but can only be known to Scottie in the guise of Madeleine. Her ‘lost’ identity is an occupant without a place. Every woman is Madeleine, and no woman is Madeleine – Madeleine is always in excess, she is always the next woman in the series or the one we just missed. Scottie is always too soon and too late in his search for Madeleine. By contrast, Scottie’s Madeleine is a mobile empty place. The true coincidence – that is, the true event of sense – in Vertigo, then, is not Scottie’s discovery of Madeleine’s real identity, but rather the impossible convergence of the mobile empty place of Madeleine and the occupant without a place of Judy. At this moment, the first series – every woman and no woman is Madeleine – becomes the sense of the second series – Judy can only be known by Scottie as Madeleine – and vice versa; the second series – Judy can only be known by Scottie as Madeleine – becomes the sense of the first series – every woman and no woman is Madeleine. Judy’s loss of identity is confirmed at the moment when her true identity is discovered, as is Scottie’s lack of real interest in her. That he was chasing a phantasm all along is confirmed when he asks Judy to assume that form for him. The truth of the situation serves only to fuel his fantasy-production. Coincidence brings together what had previously been separate, but not in order to bring about their confluence. On the contrary, the distance between the two series remains indivisible: no woman, not even Judy, is Madeleine. George Kaplan is a mobile empty place – everyone and no one is George Kaplan. Roger Thornhill is an occupant without a place. The coincidence in this instance is that a louche character like Roger Thornhill, who is so ambivalent about his own identity as to hide behind the ridiculous, false acronym of R.O.T., should be captured by an empty space in such a way as to press him to forge a more concrete sense of himself precisely by adopting this other fictional persona. Roger Thornhill is more himself when he is George Kaplan than he ever was as R.O.T. Now, perhaps more fully than with the previous example, we see the full ambivalence of this system. As we discover early in the film, the ‘O’ in R.O.T. stands for nothing, the nothing that by his own estimate is Roger Thornhill himself. This ‘O’ is obviously a mobile empty space. Meanwhile, the identity of George

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Kaplan lacks only a body to fulfil it and must be regarded as an occupant without a place. As the first series becomes the sense of the second, so in turn the second becomes the sense of the first, and so on in a clasp of mutual presupposition. In neither case, though, does the one answer the other in such a way as to cancel it out, as is evidenced by the fact that when the truth is discovered – when it is learned that not only is Roger Thornhill not George Kaplan, but George Kaplan never existed – it does not alter the course of events. The mobile empty space and occupant without a place do not complete each other; the one does not long for or lack the other. Rather, the mobile empty space and occupant without a place resonate together. Coincidence is an art of the involuntary. In this respect, Deleuze’s analysis of Proust’s notion of involuntary memory is central to an understanding of his work as a whole because it is an analysis not only of the specific phenomenon of involuntary memory, but of the generality I am calling the art of the involuntary. For Deleuze, as for Proust, thought has to be produced, and can only be produced via a violent encounter with a contingent object, the sign. Truth, Deleuze says, has to be betrayed. It is not communicated, it is interpreted. It isn’t willed, it is involuntary.39 Insofar as they rely on the goodwill of thought and remain ignorant of the dark regions and forces of thought, truths are arbitrary, which is why Deleuze sets aside what he terms the ‘philosophical illusion’. The jealous lover and unfaithful beloved know more about truth than the philosopher because they are either constantly on the lookout for any sign that will give the truth away, or similarly constant in their bid not to display any tell-tale signs. Moreover, the truth they seek cannot be met with equanimity; there is nothing idle, or purely academic, about it. No matter how well prepared the intelligence is in advance of the revelation, the truth when learned will hurt. Intelligence, as both Deleuze and Proust insist, always comes afterwards, which is the second formula of Deleuze’s anti-Platonism. Our prejudice against coincidence in narrative can obviously be explained in psychoanalytic terms as a reality principle-led reaction against gratification that comes too easily and too quickly. But perhaps there is another explanation to be had, one which takes us in the direction of what might be discouragement rather than disappointment since what is at stake is our sense of the political rather than our personal pleasure. Coincidences remind us of the arbitrariness of the law and more particularly the uncanny way in which its many manifestations beset us and impose an ironclad necessity on that which we want to think of as open. They open up a gap between the river of time we think of as our life and the timeless black holes of the social institutions which punctuate it, creating countless gulfs and rifts. In this way, the use of coincidence in Dickens and Hitchcock

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recollects something Deleuze refers to as both Lévi-Strauss’s paradox and Robinson’s paradox. Lévi-Strauss’s paradox is: In whatever manner language is acquired, the elements of language must have been given all together, all at once, since they do not exist independently of their possible relations. But the signified in general is of the order of the known, though the known is subject to the law of progressive movement which proceeds from one part to another – partes extra partes. And whatever totalisations knowledge may perform, they remain asymptotic to the virtual totality of langue or language. The signifying series organises a preliminary totality, whereas the signified series arranges the produced totalities.40 Robinson’s paradox is: It is obvious that Robinson, on his desert island, could reconstruct an analogue of society only by giving himself, all at once, all the rules and laws which are reciprocally implicated, even when they still have no objects. The conquest of nature is, on the contrary, progressive, partial, and advances step by step. Any society whatsoever has all of its rules at once – juridical, religious, political, economic; laws governing love and labour, kinship and marriage, servitude and freedom, life and death. But the conquest of nature, without which it would no longer be a society, is achieved progressively, from one source of energy to another, from one object to another.41 In both cases, what is at stake is the unstable union of a fully formed virtual entity and an essentially unformed actual entity. The system of language rises up fully formed and in an instant our inchoate vocalisations and gestures are rendered meaningful. The localising of specific meanings or ranges of meaning attaching to particular sounds or gestures occurs much later and indeed is a progressive and ultimately arbitrary process. But the eruption of meaning as the inescapable condition of all vocalisations and gestures occurs in an instant regardless of how delayed its appearance was. It is, in this sense, fated. Similarly, when, by chance, Robinson happens upon Friday on his island and saves him from his fate at the hands of his attackers, it is as an ‘uncivilised savage’ that he perceives him. In this way, too, a fully formed virtuality captures an unfolding, unformed actuality, namely Friday’s life. Deleuze’s interest in the scene from Our Mutual Friend can be explained in terms of the Lévi-Strauss/Robinson paradox as follows: ‘Life’ appears in

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the moment when the actual unfolding life of Rogue Riderhood is separated from the virtual but fully real judgements society has passed on him and he wears like a cloak. It presents itself as the possibility of those judgements being varied – it brings them to the surface, briefly, so they can see the light of day. At the surface, where there are neither heights nor depths, no standards by which good and bad can be judged, there is only life, not as it is lived, but as pure thought, a little ray of sunlight. The significance of this is witnessed in the next moment when, as Riderhood seems to regain his breath, thought retreats to the depths and resumes its deformed state as an admixture of principles, opinions, morals and ressentiment. Deleuze’s interest in this precise passage probably stems from the way it anticipates Nietzsche’s critique of those philosophers who tear down God only to replace Him with the false depths of the human, thereby putting Man in His place. Riderhood’s rancour, his absolute ingratitude, which gives us our biggest laugh, also stops us from being sentimental – our laughter signals that we would not want Riderhood to be different. This passage has the quality of a primal scene for Deleuze. It adumbrates, at once, his method, his passion and his politics. For Deleuze the possibility of revolution resides in the disequilibrium between the progressive unfolding of social life and the solid state of its social rules. Revolutions that favour either one of the two poles of this paradox – either history as the progressive unfolding of social life or History as the always already written destiny of society – wind up making either the error of reformism or the error of totalitarianism. The former ‘aspires to promote or impose partial arrangements of social relations according to the rhythm of technical achievements’, while the latter ‘aspires to constitute a totalisation of the signifiable and the known, according to the rhythm of the social totality existing at a given moment’.42 The ‘make poverty history’ campaign being waged by wealthy white nations today is an example of the former, while neo-liberalism, the political doctrine of those wealthy white nations, is clearly an instance of the latter: a poverty-alleviating campaign that does not address the iniquities of the system itself can only be so much windowdressing (the same must be said for current campaigns to inoculate the children of Africa against diseases they wouldn’t have to contend with if they had clean water, adequate food and decent housing); likewise the attempt by the very rich to generalise a model of capitalism that has made them rich is painfully ignorant of the conditions of actual history (as many commentators have said, the only truly totalitarian system is that of the market).43 The technocrat [i.e. reformist] is the natural friend of the dictator – computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribes

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there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.44 The gap between technical progress and social totality is the passage of pure thought – as Deleuze might say, only thought can grasp these two things in the abstract. Pure thought assumes its revolutionary form when, as Deleuze tirelessly argues, it forms its own problems, not as a function of an insufficiency of knowledge, but as an imperative of the mind. A contemporary formulation of this idea is to be found in Fredric Jameson’s concept of utopia – for him it takes the form of an impossible demand, such as the demand for universal employment, which as soon as one tries to think through what it would take to make that happen necessitates a radical shake-up of everything that we had presupposed about both social life itself and the social totality underpinning it. On the one hand it challenges us to rethink what economists call structural unemployment, that is, unemployment the system itself deems necessary, whether to discipline the workforce or open up other avenues of realisation elsewhere; on the other hand, it opens up questions to do with the right to laziness and the implicit undesirability of most forms of labour.45 Jameson’s point, which is precisely Deleuze’s point too, is that the demand itself is an ‘effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about’. As Jameson argues, it does so precisely by bringing about what he calls a ‘suspension of the political’. This should not be understood to mean it stops politics; on the contrary, it enables a renewal of politics precisely by opening up a gap between social progress and social totality in which the two series can begin to ramify one another rather than impede and stall one another. Deleuze is constantly on the lookout for these moments, when the revolutionary gap – the mobile empty space and occupant without a place – makes itself felt. In the examples I have given above, what I have wanted to emphasise is the way time seems to be put out of joint by coincidence and that in turn opens up a space for the ‘I feel’ of a revolutionary politics. This, I take it, is what Deleuze means when he says desire invests the total social field. We do not respond to Dickens or Hitchcock because of the kitchen-sink Oedipal crises, but because they put thought itself in motion. This is the importance of all the arts for Deleuze; it is why in his later works he would substitute the term ‘war machine’ for what in his earlier books he simply called pure thought or thought without image. It returns in his cinema books under the heading of the ‘powers of the false’. In his last work it appears simply as ‘Life’.

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Chapter 6 Symptomatology and Racial Politics in Australia

The world is a set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical

Deleuze’s ‘clinical’ method In this one tantalising sentence Gilles Deleuze sets forth an entire programme of study and though he would turn to it again and again he never tackled it in anything like the same systematic manner he approached his other projects.1 I would argue Essays Critical and Clinical, which appeared two years before his death, is more a tacit admission of an inability to complete a project than it is the summation of a project. The essays it collects, which were written over the span of a couple of decades, make two things very clear: first, the notion of ‘the clinical’ preoccupied Deleuze for a long time – it underpins his early books on Proust and Masoch and is central to his interest in Kafka (his passion for Proust and Kafka was shared by Guattari, an important point of commonality between them rarely if ever mentioned); second, despite several attempts to deploy the notion of ‘the clinical’ for critical purposes, Deleuze never succeeded in overcoming the project’s principal theoretical problem, namely the problem of causation. Perhaps like the clinicians he mentions, such as Roger and Parkinson, who identified diseases but never solved the question of their causation, it is enough for him that literature is able to make us aware of certain cultural ‘syndromes’ and there is no need or indeed any expectation that they should also disclose the causes of these syndromes.2 But my sense is that Deleuze was interested in the problem of causation – there are several passages on it scattered throughout his work, particularly his collaborative work with Guattari – but he just didn’t figure out how to solve it to his satisfaction.3 Problems are not necessarily flaws. As Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition, problems are not simply there to be solved, after which they disappear. He describes this view of problems as illusory and argues it

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reduces problems to phantoms. This has a pernicious effect on the whole of thought, he argues, because it casts thinking (together with the truth and falsehood that thinking adduces) as an activity that only commences with the search for solutions. According to this infantile prejudice, as Deleuze calls it, the master sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is certified true or false by a powerful authority. It is also a social prejudice with the visible interest of maintaining us in an infantile state, which calls upon us to solve problems that come from elsewhere, consoling or distracting us by telling us that we have won simply by being able to respond.4 In saying this, Deleuze’s aim is to establish the notion that problems are neither provisional nor contingent; they are not some arbitrary hurdle that the solution magically dissipates, there only to prop up the solution that never budges from centre stage. Instead, Deleuze wants to position problems as the source of truth in philosophy – they are at once both the site of an originary truth and the genesis of a derived truth.5 The fact Deleuze posed an interesting and remarkable problem he could not solve does him no discredit. The onus is on us as inheritors of his legacy to continue with this project and see if the problem cannot be made to yield a solution and still more truth.6 Deleuze’s ‘clinical’ hypothesis is that the literary text can be read as a kind of symptomatology of the world in which it is produced. Rather than revealing an author’s neuroses, which is how psychoanalysis generally treats literature, Deleuze’s hypothesis is that the work is the writer’s diagnosis of the world – Deleuze will even go so far as to say it is their indictment of the world.7 The writer does not use the work to represent the world’s neuroses; that’s not how art is made according to Deleuze. The artist does not make their art by trying to say in a direct way what is wrong with the world – this would lead to bad, conceptual or programmatic art in Deleuze’s view. Neither the writer nor the work can be treated as ‘patients’, Deleuze argues, and in that sense they cannot be ‘psychoanalysed’. Texts and authors have nothing to tell us about themselves, or how they were formed; they have no history (in the psychoanalytic sense). They can only speak to us about how they function and the world which produced them. Texts have surface, but no depth. ‘For authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients. We mean that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists.’8 The work of art doesn’t exhibit symptoms in the manner of a patient or a ‘case’; rather it isolates, identifies and tabulates symptoms in the manner of a clinician or – what amounts to the same thing for Deleuze – a cartographer.9 Symptoms are the contours of the world, its grooves, its hills and valleys, its diagram, as Deleuze also puts it.10 This is especially true of authors like Masoch and Sade, whose work appears to be merely the outgrowth of their own peculiar sexual fantasies. To fail to

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appreciate that these authors, to focus on them for a moment, have something essential to tell us about Masochism and Sadism is, Deleuze argues, to neglect ‘the difference between the artist’s novel as a work of art and the neurotic’s novel’.11 Deleuze never discussed how symptoms are produced. I want to suggest that Fredric Jameson offers an answer to this question: history. In The Political Unconscious, which he explicitly acknowledges is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Jameson proposes that all literary works are allegories of their time, by which he means it is only by reconstructing the historical context in which the works are produced that we can fully understand them. By ‘context’ Jameson means the intellectual currents of the times as well as the particular events and day-to-day circumstances.12 History, as Jameson sees it, is an active force that every writer has to confront, so the choices they make in confronting that force – choices to do with how they construct their characters, the shape of the narratives, down to the style of their sentences – are symptomatic of the times. Jameson’s authors are thus every bit as much clinicians as Deleuze’s; they are constantly producing symptomatologies, tabulating syndromes and taking the temperature of their times (to borrow Jameson’s own analogy), the difference being that Jameson does not shy away from the question of causation. In what follows, I splice Deleuze’s clinical hypothesis with Jameson’s and explore the critical possibilities of that fusion in relation to the Australian film Jindabyne (2006), which (in my view) is one of the most interesting and underrated films dealing with race relations in Australia. It is important, in my view, because it examines the casual racism of both Australian-born Australians and recent migrants assimilating themselves to Australian ways of living. Casual racism, as I would define it, is racism without a conscious antipathy towards the racial other. It is the racism of those people who declare ‘they’re not racists, but . . .’; it is the racism of those people who think ‘race isn’t an issue for them, but . . .’; it is the racism of those people who, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, don’t see others, they just see people who are not like themselves but should be.13 This is not a lesser form of racism, in the sense of it being a lesser evil; it is rather a very specific type of racism which seems to leave its adherents oblivious to the fact that their views are racist. It is undoubtedly the most prevalent and virulent form of racism in Australia.

Symptoms and allegory It cannot be a coincidence that Jindabyne should give prominence to the cultural problematic of the apology at this moment in Australia’s history. Although this aspect of the film is scarcely mentioned in any of the reviews

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that accompanied the film’s premiere, the timing can be regarded as symptomatic because the apology was a topic that (as Deleuze once said about difference) was very much in the air in Australia in the early 2000s. Produced only two years before the official national apology the Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd made to the Indigenous peoples of Australia on 13 February 2008, Jindabyne responds to a complex assemblage of cultural problematics that have been on the national political agenda ever since the release in 1995 of Bringing Them Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report on its national inquiry into the so-called ‘Stolen Generation’ of Indigenous people who as children were removed from their families and placed with white foster families. For over a decade and a half, and still today, the issue of whether the government should issue an apology to these children and what that would mean was the subject of widespread public debate in Australia, at all levels of society. A national apology was one of the key recommendations of the report, but it took more than a decade – effectively the length of time Prime Minister John Howard was in power – for it to be acted on. Howard’s rationale for refusing to offer an apology was that the present generation could not be expected to apologise for acts they themselves were not directly responsible for and did not themselves commit, though perhaps the real reason was that he simply did not want to expose the government to possible reparations claims. Rudd’s apology did not confront the questions of blame or responsibility and quite deliberately steered clear of any suggestion that it was the precursor to reparations. As welcome as the apology was, it did nothing material to alter the living conditions of Indigenous Australians. The reason for this is obviously complex, but central to it is undoubtedly the fact that it did not confront the foundational ‘crime’, if you will, that enabled the removal of children from their families, namely the act of dispossession that occurred when the putative First Settlers planted their flag at Sydney Cove and claimed the land as their own. The legacy of this dispossession continues to inform and give shape to the lives of all Indigenous Australians in ways that are both obvious and not so obvious. As has been amply documented, the Australian government’s treatment of Indigenous people since the occupation began in 1788 has been nothing less than appalling. While statistics can never do justice to the actual pain and suffering endured by the victims, it is nevertheless sobering to confront the stark reality that today, as Tatz puts it, Indigenous people are at the very top, or bottom, of every social indicator available: top of the medical statistics for diseases they didn’t exhibit as recently as thirty years ago – coronary disease, cancer, diabetes, respiratory infections; bottom of the life expectancy table, at fifty to fifty-five years or less for males and around fifty-five for females; with much greater rates

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of unemployment, much lower home ownership and considerably lower per capita income; an arrest and imprisonment rate grossly out of proportion to their numbers.14 Although things are changing and the actual living conditions and opportunities to flourish for Indigenous people are improving, their position at the top and bottom of all such metrics hasn’t altered. Against this background, then, I want to suggest that Jindabyne can usefully be read as a national allegory (in Jameson’s sense of the word).15 It maps or diagrams the cultural and political tropes of the present moment in history. Jindabyne was the third feature film by the decidedly non-prolific Australian director Ray Lawrence, whose other credits include Bliss (1985), from a Peter Carey novel, and Lantana (2001), from Andrew Bovell’s awardwinning play Speaking in Tongues (1996). Adapted by Beatrix Christian from Raymond Carver’s short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ (1981), Jindabyne is a slight departure from Bliss and Lantana in that it is the work of an American writer rather than an Australian, but its focus is as keenly Australian as Lawrence’s previous works.16 The film transposes Carver’s story from ex-urban California to Jindabyne, a resort town in rural New South Wales. The location is significant or – to use a word not much in fashion these days – overdetermined because in the 1960s the original town of Jindabyne was relocated to make way for a dam (as part of the Snowy River hydroelectric scheme). Now almost completely forgotten, the old town of Jindabyne lurks beneath the water as an obvious metaphor for the uncertain way the present and the past coexist in contemporary Australia.17 Like the Carver story, Jindabyne is about a group of four men (played by Gabriel Byrne, John Howard, Stelios Yiakmis and Simon Stone) who go on a fly-fishing trip which takes an unexpected turn. The men discover the half-naked body of a young Aboriginal woman floating in the river, but decide not to report it to the police straightaway because to do so would interrupt their plans for a relaxing couple of days of sport. When the men return from their weekend away and finally report their grisly find, word of what they did – or, more precisely, failed to do – leaks out and they find themselves being called to account by family, friends and indeed the whole town, but are unable, at least in the first instance, to recognise that what they did was wrong. The resonance here with Australia’s response to the national apology to the Indigenous peoples is unmistakable. The film’s symptomatology is brought into view in four key moments: the first is the opening scene of the film in which we see a young Aboriginal woman abducted and, we presume, murdered (we don’t see the actual murder, but it is obvious that is what happened); second, the discovery of the body and the failure to act; third, the denial that a wrong occurred and the refusal to accept that there is any need for an apology; fourth, recognition that a wrong did occur and the offer of an apology. The whole story

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turns on the second moment and our shock at the fact that the four men choose to do nothing, but in some ways the first moment is more significant. It is not drawn from the original Carver story, so it is clearly intended to give the film a very specific kind of foundation. As with the discovery of the body, the significance of the first moment lies more in what did not happen than in what did happen. Obviously the murder of a young Aboriginal woman is not unimportant, but what is noteworthy about this scene is the way it seems to set up a generic murder-mystery narrative in which the guilty are located and brought to justice. But this does not eventuate – the murderer is not brought to justice; indeed, there is not even an attempt to identify or locate him. One can imagine that the reason the creators of the film did not incorporate this storyline into the film was precisely to avoid turning it into a murder-mystery. It sets up a very interesting allegorical frame for the film inasmuch as it situates the whole story in the context of a foundational act of violence against an Indigenous person that, like the founding of the nation itself, is placed outside the realm of justice. It is in that sense that it is a national allegory: its meaning can only be read against the background of the shameful history of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. When the four fishermen discover the body, we expect them to call the police immediately. This is as much a generic expectation as a cultural expectation: in movies and in life, the discovery of a body is supposed to initiate action. But in this case the opposite happens. The discovery of the body is met with a powerful inertia, which is resonant of the way most Australians responded to the call for an apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The inaction of most Australians in the face of the appalling living conditions of Australia’s Indigenous peoples attracts little or no moral reprobation, whereas when the four fisherman decide not to act we automatically judge them to be morally and ethically culpable. But on what grounds do we make this judgement? Why does it matter so much that they fail to contact the police? To put it another way, what is the nature of the obligation on them to act that they fail to fulfil? The answer to this question is not immediately obvious, but our sense of indignation at the men’s inaction and their apparently callous disregard for the needs of the dead suggests quite strongly that culturally we assume in whatever inchoate form that the dead impose an obligation on us to grieve or mourn the extinction of a life. In Western culture, grieving is supposed to take the form of an interruption of one’s daily activities, one’s plans, particularly if they are leisure oriented, to mark the passing of a life, and this is of course precisely what the four men fail to do. They observe none of the expected ‘rites’ that we are supposed to perform in the face of death. Not only do they not report the death as we expect them to, they also continue to enjoy their day, indeed their

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weekend, as though death had not touched them in any way. Undoubtedly this is what is most troubling about their response – death does not seem to touch them. The body is seen simply as a problem, right down to whether it should be left in the water or not. Ultimately, they decide not to remove the body because it is less likely to putrefy in the cool river water, but they tie it down so it does not float away. They treat the dead young woman, then, as a mere corpse, a body without a face.

The face of the other What does it mean to say the corpse lacks a face? We can only answer this question by first asking what it means to have a face. According to Lévinas18 the face signifies the presence of the Other, namely, that which reminds us that we are social beings unable to survive alone on this planet and, as such, obliged to consider how we may preserve their life. More than that, the face calls upon us to meet our ethical obligations to the Other. Its call, Lévinas argues, is unignorable. Given that the men seem unmoved by the corpse – yes, they are shocked, but no, they aren’t moved by it, they do not perform any of the expected rituals in response to their discovery – we might conclude that in Lévinasian terms the dead Aboriginal woman lacks a face, or, to put it even more strongly, she somehow lacks alterity. Paradoxically, then, it is as though she is not other enough. Her presence seems not to impose any immediate or strongly felt ethical demands on the four fishermen. One cannot help but think that Lawrence’s decision to make the victim Aboriginal (and not white, as in the original Carver story) was intended to make us ask whether the men would have acted differently if the corpse had not been black. That this question is even conceivable is itself an indictment on the state of race relations in Australia because it assumes that there is a profound schism in Australia between the hegemonic ‘white’ or ‘non-Aboriginal’ population and the Aboriginal people, and that this schism has unspoken moral and ethical dimensions. We cannot know if the men would have acted differently if they’d found a white corpse, but we can say that they do not appear to grieve the loss of life that they are witness to and appear not to have any sense that they ought to grieve, where grieving would mean interrupting their daily routines and plans in order to take time to feel the loss of life and to perform the socially prescribed rituals of mourning. As it turns out, feeling is the last thing they want to do – they respond by rendering themselves insensible with alcohol. They are shocked by their discovery, but they react to it in the same way that one might react to the news that one’s flight has been cancelled – it is an inconvenience rather than an occasion for grief.

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This absence of grief is, as Judith Butler’s recent work argues, ethically and politically significant because, as she puts it, it is only when the loss of life matters that the value of life becomes apparent. ‘Only under conditions in which loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.’19 This is what is so striking about this moment in the story – the men do not apprehend the life that was lost as grievable, as mattering. Butler puts it even more strongly: Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, ‘there is a life that will never have been lived’, sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life.20 Following Butler’s logic here, we may speculate that the dead Aboriginal woman is not grieved because she is not perceived to have had a life; because she is Aboriginal her life is invisible to the white men who discover her lifeless body. Her identity is her face which is featureless to them, incapable of inciting an ethical response. ‘An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.’21 The men’s inaction says nothing so clearly as this: the dead Aboriginal woman did not count to them – she was dead to them before she died. Lawrence amplifies the poignancy of this moment by giving one of the four men (Stelios Yiakmis) an Aboriginal girlfriend (Leah Purcell), as though to say he at least should have felt something, even if the others didn’t, and this is certainly how his girlfriend responds. In Butler’s terms, the men’s response is significant because as she conceives it moral responsibility presupposes affect – it is only because we are moved emotionally that we act ethically, she argues. If we are not moved to act ethically by our grief for the plight of the Other, then we will not do so. Her hypothesis, which she acknowledges is not entirely new, is that ‘whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms, how we articulate political analyses, depends upon a certain field of perceptible reality having already been established’.22 We have to ‘see’ the Other in order to be moved by them. Blindness to the Other is not merely unethical in this respect, but the absence of the very possibility of ethics. But this blindness is never purely personal; it is a product of social and cultural framing. The fact that the four men fail to respond to the discovery of the corpse in the manner we might expect of them cannot be put down to a sheer quirk of character, then, but has to be treated as symptomatic of the frame – the society – that produced them. The four men responded as they did because the Aboriginal woman was not perceptible in their field

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of vision – she was not alive to them in any sense of the word. How we respond to the world, the kinds of moral and ethical choices we make, is conditioned by what Butler refers to, drawing very loosely on Goffman, as the ‘frames’ in which our own lives are situated. The frame is a social and cultural formation like Bourdieu’s habitus that the individual subject internalises without ever being aware of having done so. This amounts to saying that in a certain sense our affect is not our own, it is socially conditioned, or to use Butler’s preferred term, it is framed.23 Understanding how this frame is constituted, then, becomes central to any understanding of ethics for Butler. She writes: In particular I want to understand how the frames that allocate the recognisability of certain figures of the human are themselves linked with broader norms that determine what will and will not be a grieveable life.24 Butler stipulates that compassion is the wellspring of ethics, which poses insuperable problems for the construction of an ethics whose principles could, in the best Kantian sense, be applied universally and uniformly. What should we do, for example, in the case where our sense of compassion deserts us, as it apparently does for the four fishermen? Butler’s way around this problem is to try to determine how and under what conditions compassion fails, but this is not a solution so much as the opening of a different kind of problem. Asking why people are not compassionate is not the same kind of project as determining what would count as compassionate: the former is an anthropological inquiry (that may well be inflected by both sociology and psychology), while the latter is a philosophical project. From a philosophical perspective, ethics cannot (and should not) be based on the presence or absence of compassion because it rules out the possibility of constructing an ethics on the basis of purely intellectual or ‘affectless’ abstract grounds. The main reason for this is that there are plenty of situations one can imagine when affect might fail us, at least insofar as the elaboration of an ethics is concerned. For example, I may feel very compassionate towards animals but nevertheless have no problem eating meat in the full knowledge that an animal had to die to provide my meal. My compassion does not guarantee or even necessarily lead to an ethical reaction or response on my part. And more importantly, from a cultural and social point of view, there is no perceivable flaw in my ‘frame’ for acting in this way. The same impossible problem is raised by the issue of abortion: my compassion for all human life is contradicted if I accept the necessity of abortion. If, by the same token, I am compassionate about the needs of the individuals whose lives are affected by unwanted pregnancy then I might

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want to make an exception to my ‘rule’ regarding compassion for all life. At this point affect ceases to be of any use and the ethical decision must be arrived at by reason. As such, we must call into question the so-called ‘corporeal turn’ in cultural studies and ask whether it is really taking us in a direction that we want to go. Having said that, I am obviously in agreement with Butler that the absence of an ethical response can and should be treated as the symptom of a particular kind of cultural or social problem.

The ethics of the apology This brings us to the third narrative moment of the film, which is in many ways the most interesting and the most troubling. When the men return from their fishing trip and finally report their discovery, their inaction is met with shock and disbelief, particularly from their friends and families. At this point of the story, in both the Carver and Lawrence versions, the point of view of the story switches over to Stewart’s wife, Claire (Laura Linney), who is literally disgusted by her husband’s inaction. This disgust is sexualised inasmuch as Stewart informs Claire of what happened on his fishing trip only after they have had sex. In the Carver story she is haunted by thoughts of the dead girl and in some strange way identifies with her, thus doubling her anger towards her husband. She wonders if Stewart was thinking about the dead girl whilst making love to her and all but accuses him of necrophilia. Her response suggests that there are two quite different dimensions to the national apology: on the one hand, there is the socio-psychological dimension, the felt need to expiate guilt, selfreproach and shame; on the other hand, there is the political dimension, the acceptance of responsibility and the offer to make amends. Claire’s response to her husband’s inaction takes both routes. By contrast, Rudd’s apology was very much of the first variety – it very carefully steered a course that kept it clear of the political dimension and played up the sociopsychological dimension. The fact that a substantial number of Australians did not share the feelings of remorse Rudd expressed on their behalf raises the question of how they might have responded to a more straightforward political mea culpa. Claire is ashamed of her husband. She attempts to atone for that shame by trying to make contact with the dead girl’s family and then, more concretely, by raising money to pay for the funeral. Her fundraising efforts are viewed with suspicion by the town, who would generally prefer that she let matters lie. Her husband Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), whose decision it was to continue fishing, is seemingly incapable of understanding that what they did was wrong, and is baffled and incensed by her actions: ‘Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen.’25 Crucially the Claire character is an immigrant,

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as though to say only someone from outside of the frame of Australian cultural and political life is capable of seeing the truth and feeling the shame of it. Perhaps, too, it is meant to remind us that all Australians, except the Indigenous peoples, are immigrants. Importantly, it is the actions of her husband and his friends that shame her, actions that she is not personally responsible for but nevertheless feels responsible before (to use Deleuze’s important distinction). Shame is in this sense a necessary complement of grief – there where grief was, so shame should follow. Shame is what grief becomes when we take responsibility for the loss of life that grieves us. Shame transforms the socio-psychological into the political. Without this transformation, grief is always at risk of becoming melancholia, an indulgence in the pleasure of being sad (as Victor Hugo memorably defined it). Butler’s work spans this spectrum from grief to mourning, but omits any consideration of shame as a philosophical concept. She treats shame as the conservative’s weapon against the culturally marginalised. Shame on this view is a destructive emotion that leaves people feeling unable to enjoy their life or feel secure in being who they are. Her examples, drawn largely from the experiences of people who have been persecuted because of their gender, race, sexuality or religion, do tend to bear this out. Her most telling example in this regard is the US military’s utilisation of shame as an instrument of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.26 Yet, one might also say that it is precisely because of the absence of shame on the part of the perpetrators that these hurtful acts of shaming can occur. It is in fact the power of shame that finally compels the four men to acknowledge that they had in fact committed a wrong for which making some form of amends was necessary. The difficulty the men have in recognising that what they did was wrong mirrors Australia’s own difficulty in accepting that its actions toward Indigenous people constitute a wrong. The major cause of their difficulty is the fact that they themselves were not responsible for the woman’s death – yes, they neglected her dead body when they discovered it, but ultimately that is unimportant in the face of the larger crime, namely her murder, and they had no part in that. The logic here is similar to what Roland Barthes described as the ‘inoculation’ strategy which consists of admitting to a ‘small’ crime so as to conceal a ‘big’ crime.27 Of course, the men did not commit the murder, so they cannot be expected to confess to this, but the woman’s murder is not the only wrong at issue here. There is the wrong implicit in the very ‘frame’ in which the men find themselves; their utter disregard for the life of the Aboriginal woman, evidenced by their inability to grieve for her, is testament to a much greater prior wrong, namely that of racism itself. Not only do the four men not grieve the death of the Aboriginal woman whose body they have found, but they do not notice their lack of

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grief, and it is this absence that is the more telling of the two. It is against this standpoint that former Prime Minister John Howard’s insistence that the present generation cannot be expected to take responsibility for the actions of previous generations must be rejected as both unjust and, more importantly, false. This brings us to the fourth narrative moment of the film, the apology itself. The four men attend the funeral of the murdered woman, which is conducted by the family in what appears to be traditional fashion (i.e. a smoking ceremony). Stewart attempts to make an apology on behalf of the group and a young Aboriginal man confronts him and spits on him. From a national allegory perspective this moment is the most crucial – two years before the official apology was made it anticipates how Indigenous peoples might be expected to respond to an apology that is in reality too little too late. Of course, the apology was important and many within the Indigenous community welcomed it, but that does not mean we should not criticise it. The national apology when it was finally given was addressed specifically to the ‘Stolen Generations’ for the treatment they had suffered. And while there can be no question that they were owed an apology, at the very least, they were not the only ones owed an apology, nor were their experiences the only experiences the Indigenous peoples suffered for which an apology might conceivably be owed (the loss of their land, forced displacement from their land, genocide and so on – the list of crimes is long). As wrong as the Australian government was in removing children from their families, behind that wrong there is an even greater wrong, which like the proverbial elephant in the room has been studiously ignored by all Australian governments. I want to suggest that the apology to the ‘Stolen Generations’ was hollow without an accompanying apology for the act of dispossession that created the conditions under which it could have occurred. As Agamben shows in his discussion of Nazi Germany’s extermination of European Jewry, it is the act of dispossession – which should be understood to mean dispossession from the realm of rights and law – which creates the conditions of possibility for the latter in all its actual brutality. As Agamben writes, It is impossible to grasp the specificity of the National Socialist concept of race – and, with it, the peculiar vagueness and inconsistency that characterize it – if one forgets that the biopolitical body that constitutes the new fundamental political subject is neither a quaestio facti (for example, the identification of a certain biological body) nor a quaestio iuris (the identification of a certain juridical rule to be applied), but rather the site of a sovereign political decision that operates in the absolute indistinction of fact and law.28

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The sovereign political decision he is referring to is the proclamation, on 28 February 1933, of the so-called ‘decree for the protection of the people and the State’ which set in place a permanent state of exception in which all the previously existing laws protecting personal liberty, freedom of expression and so on were suspended indefinitely. It was this suspension of laws protecting the rights of citizens, and indeed the right to citizenship, that opened the way for the creation of the concentration camps – as the head of the Gestapo noted, no official decree was needed to bring the camps into existence since there was no law to impede their creation. The camps effectively gave a specific spatial arrangement to what had become (since 28 February 1933) a generalised state of affairs affecting the whole of Germany.29 The paradoxical status of the camp as a space of exception must be considered. The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space. What is excluded in the camp is, according to the etymological sense of the term ‘exception’ (excapere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion. But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself. Insofar as the state of exception is ‘willed’, it inaugurates a new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception. The camp is the structure in which the state of exception – the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power – is realised normally.30 I have quoted this at length because what I want to propose is that the declaration of terra nullius should be considered in the same way: it too declares a state of exception in which the sovereign gives themselves the right to determine who is to be included and who is to be excluded. By declaring the land ‘empty’ or ‘vacant’ the colonialists gave themselves the right to occupy land they could see was ‘owned’ by somebody else; the casuistry concerning the definition of ‘occupied’ was simply their way of bringing the ‘facts’ into alignment with the ‘law’, but obviously had no influence on their actual decision to occupy the land. It created legal dispossession as an organising frame. The issue concerning the right to occupy the land was determined after the fact and was only an issue at all to the occupiers because they did not want to have to share their territorial booty with other European nations who might happen along and decide to stake out a claim as well. The right to occupy was from the start a right to exclude. The colonialists imposed the same model of right on foreign lands that was exercised over their own – the sovereign has the absolute right to declare an exception to any laws that they have previously upheld. This perhaps

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explains why it didn’t trouble the consciences of the men who conjured this juridico-political foundation stone out of thin air. Terra nullius did not so much deny the prior ownership of the land by its Indigenous peoples as exclude them from the State that established itself on their land; to put it another way, it determined that henceforth they would only be part of the State as its excluded. As Agamben might put it, following the declaration of terra nullius the Indigenous peoples of Australia were included in the State that established itself on their land through their exclusion. And that is how the Indigenous peoples of Australia have been treated ever since Captain Phillip planted his flag at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788.

Terra nullius This is why the apparent overturning of terra nullius by the High Court judgement in Mabo v. Queensland in June 1992, while important, did not change the excluded status of Indigenous people as much as has been claimed. To put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, terra nullius is the content of the form – it is the particular shape the state of exception took in the establishment of Australia as a sovereign, colonial nation, not the formative, originary instrument it is often taken to be. That distinction must be reserved for the sovereign right to declare a state of exception, and as the years since Mabo have shown, that right is as intact now as it ever was. The state of exception is the form of the content in other words. Contrary to the standard view of things, then, I am arguing that terra nullius is the expression of sovereignty, not its basis.31 It was a convenient means of legitimating at law (by suspending the ‘existing’ law of the land) what was already accomplished in fact. As is the case with most declarations of a state of exception, it is the facts on the ground that demand the suspension of law. Confronted by the need to justify their act of occupation, the colonial powers declared the land terra nullius in order to retain their entitlement to the land by suspending their own laws regarding the right to occupy another person’s land. This is clear in the judgement that so-called Native title can coexist alongside Crown title, but the Crown reserves the right to extinguish it. The judgement is in effect yet another case of an exception being made under the auspices of an already existing state of exception. This is confirmed by the fact that the judgement also found that the previous failure to recognise Native title, as regrettably and egregiously racist as it undoubtedly was, did not constitute the legal basis for any future compensation claim. It amounts to saying that while terra nullius was wrong as law, it was not a wrong at law. The Australian government has shown itself to be profoundly unwilling to treat the Indigenous peoples as ordinary citizens, or indeed as individuals,

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with the same rights and needs as other Australians. Instead, in a manner that stands comparison with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, it insists on treating the Indigenous peoples as a race apart. It justifies its stance with a duty-ofcare rhetoric, but as the ‘Stolen Generations’ make plain, its model of care is largely unconcerned by the plight of the individual. The policy of removing ‘half-caste’ children from their Aboriginal families and placing them with white foster families, which created the ‘Stolen Generations’, was in its own way well-intentioned inasmuch as it was designed to address a specific cultural ‘problem’, a problem that the government felt it had a responsibility to address. As neither fully white nor fully black, it was thought by the white policy-makers that ‘half-caste’ children had no ‘proper’ place within the caste system of (post-)colonial society.32 But such a policy idea could only have been enacted because the Indigenous peoples were literally non-citizens.33 More than that, it could only have happened because the policy-makers viewed things from the perspective of some notional ‘greater good’ – the good of the nation and the good of the race. The misery endured by the children was thus regarded as so much collateral damage. The historical sleight of hand here is the presumption that the situation of the ‘half-castes’ was exceptional, thus requiring and legitimising exceptional actions. But one has only to try to imagine a similar policy being framed for use on the hegemonic ‘white’ Australian population to realise that the reality is that such exceptional action could only be taken because as ‘half’ Aboriginal people they were ‘always already’ locked into an exceptional situation. Putting it bluntly, it was only because they were already members of ‘the excluded’ part that has no part that they could be treated in the way they were. The government intervenes in the lives of Indigenous Australians not only because it has the right and the wherewithal to do so, but because ever since the First Settlement the Indigenous peoples have been regarded as ‘bare life’. The persistence of this viewpoint – that the government has the right to intervene in the lives of Indigenous Australians – was amply demonstrated by the extraordinary events of June 2007 that have become known simply as ‘The Intervention’.34 Prompted by the release of the Little Children Are Sacred report prepared by the specially convened Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (2007), the ‘Intervention’ refers to former Prime Minister John Howard’s ill-fated decision to send military personnel into several Indigenous communities and impose what amounted to martial law in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election. Howard argued that the government had not only a right but also a duty to intervene, likening the situation to a national emergency of the order of Hurricane Katrina. The comparison might not have sounded so misplaced if it had also come with the admission that if the problem is a national emergency then it is so because

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the federal government has systematically failed to heed all warnings of an impending crisis and diverted the funds necessary to address the issue elsewhere. As Rebecca Stringer explains, Howard deflected criticism of his policies by saying that the children in Aboriginal communities were living in a Hobbesian nightmare that must be remedied by the imposition of ‘social order enforced by legitimate authority’.35 While the report was unequivocal in finding that the incidence of sexual abuse in some Aboriginal communities was at crisis level and that the matter should be treated as one of national significance, nowhere in the report was there a recommendation calling for an immediate and militarised intervention – and yet that is precisely the course Howard chose in formulating the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (NTNER). On the contrary, the report specifically recommended extensive consultation with Indigenous communities and a systematic attempt to end the chronic, real material deprivation these communities endure by improving government service levels to them. If the NTNER proved politically toxic for Howard, I would argue that it wasn’t because he asserted the government’s right to intervene in the affairs of Indigenous people and both curtail their rights and deny them their livelihoods; rather, I would suggest it was because it exposed too openly the depth of the government’s responsibility for their plight. It made all too apparent what had otherwise been forgotten, namely that the founding of the nation was an act of violent dispossession. Rudd needed to offer an apology not only to distance himself from Howard, but also to foreclose debate about the government’s right to decide the fate of the Indigenous peoples of Australia. And it is noteworthy that his apology makes no mention of this – he apologises for the wrongs done to the Indigenous peoples, but not for the dispossession of their land that not only led to these wrongs being committed, but also gave the perpetrators the sense that they had the right to commit these wrongs. What makes Jindabyne so interesting, to me at least, is the way it exposes and explores this schism in the core of the national apology. The apology contains a double refusal: first, there is a refusal to accept that a wrong has occurred; then, as the evidence mounts and it becomes impossible to deny that a wrong has occurred, there is a refusal to accept any blame for the wrong. The apology that follows is thereby rendered worthless in advance because it fails to meet its own minimum conditions of possibility, as defined by Derrida – namely that it follow both an admission that a wrong occurred and an acceptance of responsibility for that wrong.36 The national apology to the Indigenous peoples has taken precisely this course too – first, there was a refusal to accept that a wrong had occurred; when the ‘Stolen Generations’ report made that position untenable there was a steadfast refusal to accept

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responsibility for the wrongs documented in the report. And in this sense the apology that was offered by Rudd was basically worthless, irrespective of its supposed symbolic value, because it did not acknowledge the founding violence that for many continues to underpin the government’s right to commit these wrongs, as the NTNER demonstrated all too clearly. Viewed as a national allegory, Jindabyne is asking us to look at the countless instances where Aboriginal people have been treated as the socially dead, as the non-living, as leading lives that do not count as lives. Bringing Them Home catalogued hundreds of actual examples and only scratched the surface. The point I want to make here in conclusion is not simply that the hegemonic white people of Australia treat the marginalised black people of Australia very poorly; that is obviously the case. There is, however, an even more disturbing point to be made and that is that the hegemonic white people of Australia are for the most part unaware that there is anything ‘wrong’ in the way they act. Like the four fishermen, they do not think they have anything to apologise for and are awaiting someone to tell them what they’ve done wrong. One wonders if they will listen.

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Chapter 7 Treatise on Militarism

I Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus The 2004 US election caused hearts to sink everywhere in the world. The bloody insurgency in Iraq only strengthened the position of George Bush II as the ‘War President’, despite the fact he had declared the war to be effectively over five months earlier on 1 May 2004. ‘Mission accomplished’ the banner said, fluttering in the wind, but everyone on board that warship, parked safely off the coast of California, knew that hostilities were far from over. At the time of the election, half a year later, the death toll of US soldiers was nearing 1,000, with the number injured seven times that – to which toll one must add the haunting fact that of the 500,000 plus US servicemen and women who served in the first Gulf War, some 325,000 are now on disability pensions suffering a variety of acute maladies generally attributed to the toxic cocktail of radiation and other chemicals they were exposed to during their tour of duty. Those who fight in Iraq today can scarcely look forward to a healthier future given that it is effectively twice as irradiated now as it was in 1991.1 Yet still the minority who vote voted in the main for the man who put these soldiers in harm’s way – but then it isn’t as though John Kerry was promising to bring the troops home. As important as Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? is as an explanation of conservatism in the heartland of the USA, it doesn’t answer this question – why did the war on terror fail to ignite anti-Bush sentiment?2 More to the point, why was it impossible to vote against the war? This is militarism at its peak – you cannot decide between going to war or not, only which is the most desired way of handling the conduct of the war.

Problem I: Is today’s militarism really new? Militarism has always been with us, like a dark shadow, but its history is not continuous. The idea that war should be considered a logical and necessary

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extension of politics was given expression by Clausewitz, but he was merely putting into philosophical form what was already accepted thinking in government: arms are a legitimate means of achieving political goals. Militarism is not always as unabashed about its existence, not to say its intentions, as it is now when – as Debord so presciently put it – it has ‘its own inconceivable foe, terrorism’ to bedazzle a frightened, confused and misinformed public.3 But out of the limelight does not mean out of the picture; militarism has not been officially questioned since the end of the First World War when disarmament had its last genuine hurrah. World War II, which caught the US and the UK, in particular, underarmed and underprepared for conflict, eliminated at a stroke the very concept of disarmament – strategic arms limitation and force reduction are essentially fiscal notions, decisions made in the interests of preserving a militarist posture in the face of rising costs, not disarmament. Neither should we delude ourselves that anti-war is antimilitarism. As we shall see, the very opposite is true. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, it is generally thought that a paradigm shift in the nature of militarism has occurred, and as the violence in the Middle East continues with no sign of abatement in sight (the running sore that is the Israel/Palestine conflict, the smouldering fires of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the gathering storm in Iran all forebode ill for a peaceful future), any doubt that a new era of ‘hot’ war has been ushered in tends to vanish. What is less certain, however, at least from a philosophical perspective, is the conceptual nature of the change. Those who demur that the present era is substantially different enough to warrant the label ‘new’ do so on the grounds that what we are seeing today is merely the continuation of an older struggle – or struggles, as it might be better to say given the tangled mess of multiple rivalries and resentments on both sides. Obviously, many of the struggles fuelling the present war are legacies of the Second World War, the Yalta summit in particular (many of course pre-date that by hundreds of years).4 On this score, I am persuaded by Immanuel Wallerstein’s thesis that the First and Second World Wars should be treated as a single thirty-year struggle for global hegemony between Germany and the USA, but it seems to me the militarism we are faced with today is different from the one spawned in 1945 in the aftermath of victory; the militarism of today no longer thinks in terms of winning and losing – it has another agenda.5 Even if the origins of the present crisis are to be found in the wash-up of WWII, as Wallerstein and many others have rightly argued, the nature of the response to this crisis is not similarly located there. Historians generally agree that the Vietnam War put paid to that ‘victorious’ mode of militarism the US knew following WWII when it was briefly the lone nuclear power.6 Following its demoralising defeat at the hands of a comparatively puny Third World country, however, even

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the idea that it was a superpower was questioned. Amongst the decisionmakers in Washington there took hold a moribund and risk-averse mentality that came to be called the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. This syndrome allegedly explains the US’s failure to act on a number of occasions when it might have been prudent – or, as perhaps would have been the case in Cambodia, humanitarian – to do so, culminating in the embarrassing mishandling of the Tehran Embassy siege in the last days of Jimmy Carter’s administration. It also explains the tactics used on those occasions when the US has acted, as in Clinton’s decision to initially restrict the engagement in the Balkans to airpower and use aerial bombardment where deft geopolitical negotiation was needed. On this occasion, as has now become routine, an alleged ethical imperative combined powerfully with a rhetoric of ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘smart bombs’ to stall protest and garner support from even those who ought to have known better.7 Taken at face value, this would seem to confirm the existence of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, but when in political analysis is it sensible to accept something at face value? I would argue the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ is a convenient cover story, not a genuine explanation of US foreign policy. What makes anyone think, for instance, that a peaceful settlement to the Israel/Palestine conflict (as much a potential Vietnam as Iraq) is on the US agenda? Countless commentators have pointed out that the US backing of Israel can but inflame the Middle East situation, as though this was news to the ones responsible, or, more to the point, as though winning or losing, peace or war, are the only options open to US foreign policy. Is not the answer staring us right in the face: perpetual unrest is the solution that present action is achieving. The ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ is an optical illusion, a wish-fulfilment on the part of those who would like to see an end to US imperialism.8 In philosophical terms, the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ was the negative needed by militarism to resurrect itself. What the military realised in Vietnam is that the US public will not tolerate a high casualty rate amongst its own troops unless there is a pressing need. While saving freedom might be construed as a pressing need, stopping communism in a country most people had not heard of before the war started couldn’t. Lacking ideological support, the US military publicly adopted a zero-casualty approach to its ‘elective wars’ (to continue with the surgical trope) and banked on technology to achieve it. The anti-war sentiment ignited by the Vietnam conflict played a large part in securing public acceptance for this strategy in spite of the escalating costs it entailed. The US showed it was anti-war only to the extent that war put its people in harm’s way, but had no strong opinion on the matter when it was merely a question of unloading deadly ordnance from a high altitude on faceless peoples far from the homeland. Whatever the eventual cost – and the figures for military expenditure are always astronomical (consider the 2004 budget of

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$400 billion a year to wage war in Iraq) – technology was to become the solution to what is essentially an ideological problem: the US population isn’t willing to commit its body to the US’s military causes.9 After Vietnam, no administration of the future could afford to be soft on military spending (if they lost spending $30 billion a year, they could hardly afford to spend less in the future is the presiding logic).10 The spin-doctoring that has gone into talking up the capabilities of the new class of so-called ‘smart’ weapons is worthy of Madison Avenue.11 Its effect has been to persuade the American people that technology has made them invulnerable. War has entered the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent government.12 The present conflict proves that the US will not hesitate to embroil itself in a potentially Vietnam-like conflict if the conditions are ripe. I have read reports that US soldiers based in Iraq are writing ‘Is this Vietnam yet?’ on their helmets; sadly they are not asking the right question. Given the admission that the insurgency problem may never be resolved, it plainly is another Vietnam. If this isn’t the view of the hawks in Washington who orchestrated the war – and I don’t believe for a second that it is – then it begs the question: what makes the present conflict not another Vietnam in the eyes of its architects? What are the conditions under which the US will engage in a potentially protracted foreign war? To answer this, we have to ask, what were the lessons of Vietnam? Behind the smokescreen of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, the US has taken on board two hard lessons learned in Vietnam which shape its foreign policy: (1) it can win battles, but it can’t necessarily win wars; (2) it can afford battles, but it can’t pay for wars. Both of these lessons were heeded by Bush the elder, who pointedly decided not to take Baghdad because he didn’t want an expensive quagmire. It is tempting to think Bush the younger is simply Bush the dumber and that is the reason why he felt emboldened to go where his daddy dared not, but I believe there is an even more sinister explanation. Whereas daddy figured out how to get someone else to pay for the battles that needed to be fought to dislodge Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, he didn’t solve the problem of how to pay for a long war so he avoided it. Neither did the son, but he figured out how to get the loser to line the pockets of the victor and transform a costly war into a privateer’s mother lode.13 The father’s expensive quagmire is the son’s reconstruction goldmine. Reconstruction is the surplus value of war. If, as Chalmers Johnson suggests, the US military has gone Hollywood, then war has gone Wall Street.14 Profit is put before everything.15 But we still have not articulated what turned out to be the greatest change to militarism. This occurred in the late stages of the Vietnam War, past the point where anyone – not even the President of the United States – could say there was any worthwhile military reason to continue the fight, apart from the need to defend the credibility of the fighting forces. The last years of the war saw the first outing of what has now become standard procedure: the use

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of airpower as a substitute for diplomacy. At the time it was narrated as being a necessary complement to diplomacy to ensure proper attention at the bargaining table, but its effect was to make the North Vietnamese dig their heels in harder. And yet the US persisted in spite of its obvious failure as a tactic, convinced no doubt that there had to be a limit to the willingness of the people of North Vietnam to endure the terrible toll of death its B52s were able to lay upon them. Ho Chi Minh’s bravado in claiming that Vietnam had struggled against China for a thousand years before winning its freedom, and had carried the fight to the French for one hundred and fifty years, and therefore felt unthreatened by the US, who had only been on their soil a mere fifteen years, plainly fell on deaf ears in Washington. The cost in lives of this tactic has never been officially totted up, but doubtless it was considerable. It is generally assessed as a military and diplomatic failure, but this is where I think history is being overhasty. The determination that it was the credibility of the fighting forces that was at stake in the final years of the war is no doubt correct, but as with all political manoeuvres it should not be taken at face value. For Wallerstein, the Vietnam War represented a rejection by the Third World of the ‘Yalta accord’, the less than gentlemanly agreement between the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, to divide the planet into spheres of interest (the USA grabbing two-thirds and the USSR a third). He treats America’s willingness to invest all its military strength into the struggle and more or less bankrupt itself in the process as testament to the felt geopolitical significance of the conflict. And yet, as he puts it, they were still defeated. While I accept the first part of his thesis, I disagree with his conclusion because I think the very premise on which it rests lost its validity in the course of the war. A pragmatically conceived intervention designed to stop the spread of revolutionary communism became the US military’s own equivalent of a ‘cultural revolution’ as it underwent a profound rethinking of its mode of acting in the world.16 I do not mean to claim, as military revisionists have done, that Vietnam was actually a victory for the USA (the right-wing rhetoric on this, so resonant of the early days of the Nazi Party, is that the government and the people back home betrayed the soldiers on the front line and didn’t allow them to win).17 With Baudrillard, I want to argue that during the course of that protracted and bitter struggle there occurred a paradigm shift which resulted in the concepts of victory and defeat losing their meaning. Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place.18

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Baudrillard’s answer to this question is that war ceased to be real, it ceased to be determined in terms of winning and losing, and became instead ‘simulation’, a pure spectacle no less terrifying or deadly for its lack of reality. The consequences of this metaphysical adjustment are shocking and go a long way towards explaining the rise of terrorism in recent years. As Andrew Bacevich writes, it is not only the superpowers like the US that have relinquished the concept of victory. It is as though war itself has jettisoned it as so much extra baggage: The typical armed conflict today no longer pits like against like – field army v. field army or battle fleet v. battle fleet – and there usually is no longer even the theoretical prospect of a decisive outcome. In asymmetric conflicts, combatants employ violence indirectly. The aim is not to defeat but to intimidate and terrorise, with women a favoured target and sexual assault often the weapon of choice.19 The B52 pilot unloading bombs on an unseen enemy below knows just as well as the suicide bomber in Iraq that his or her actions will not lead directly to a decisive change, that in a sense the gesture is futile, but he or she also knows, as does the suicide bomber, that their actions will help create an atmosphere of fear that, it is hoped, will one day lead to change. Deprived of teleology, war thrives in an eternal present. Terror is not merely the weapon of the weak, it is the new condition of war, and no power can claim exemption. For Clausewitz and his spiritual tutor Machiavelli the only rational reason to wage war is to win where winning means achieving a predetermined and clearly prescribed goal. Britain’s colonial wars are an obvious case in point. The self-serving claim that Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence owes its sense to the fact that it never set out to gain its eventually quite considerable empire (it was at least geographically true, albeit not historically true, that the sun never set on the British Empire, encompassing as it did territories in virtually every region of the world) all at once as Hitler and Hirohito were later to do, but built it one territory at a time over a two-century-long period. Through a sequence of limited wars it was able to deploy its limited means to obtain colossal riches. The First World War essentially started out in the same way. Germany’s goal was to secure a European empire before it was too late, but the machine-gun put paid to that ambition and instead of a quick war returning a specific prize there erupted a global conflagration that was to consume the wealth and youth of Europe. As Wallerstein argues, the true victor of the First World War was not Britain or France, but American industry, and by extension the true loser wasn’t Germany

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and its allies but Europe itself. Eric Hobsbawm has defined the twentieth century as the age when wars of limited means and limited aims gave way to wars of limited means and unlimited aims.20 The twenty-first century appears to be the age of wars of unlimited means and no precise aim. This, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is the point at which Clausewitz’s formula is effectively reversed’. When total war – i.e. war which places at its centre the annihilation of not only the enemy’s army but its entire population and economy too – becomes the object of the Stateappropriated war machine, ‘then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction’.21 In the first instance, the war machine unleashed by the State in pursuit of its object, total war, remains subordinate to the State and ‘merely realises the maximal conditions’ of its aims. Paradoxically, though, the more successful it is in realising the State’s aims, the less controllable by the State it becomes. As the State’s aims grow on the back of the success of its war machine, so the restrictions on the war machine’s object shrink until – scorpion like – it effectively subsumes the State, making it just one of its many moving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for the failure of the war machine precisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Its inability to adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, but in effect cost it its sovereignty too. Since then the State has been a puppet of a war machine global in scope and ambition. This is the status of militarism today and no one has described its characteristics more chillingly than Deleuze and Guattari: This worldwide war machine, which in a way ‘reissues’ from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still.22 It is undoubtedly Chalmers Johnson who has done the most to bring to our attention the specific make-up of what Deleuze and Guattari call here the worldwide war machine.23 His description of a global ‘empire of bases’ is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s uptake of Paul Virilio’s concept of the ‘fleet in being’. This is the paradoxical transformation of the striated space of organisation into a new kind of ‘reimparted’ smooth space ‘which outflanks all gridding and invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States’.24 Bases do

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not by themselves secure territory, but as is the case with a battle fleet their mobility and their firepower mean they can exert an uncontestable claim over territory that amounts to control. This smooth space surrounding the earth is, to put it back into Baudrillard’s terms, the space of simulation. The empire of bases is a virtual construct with real capability. Fittingly enough, it was Jean Baudrillard who first detected that a structural change in post-WWII militarism had taken place. In Simulacra and Simulation he argues that the Vietnam War was a demonstration of a new kind of will to war, one that no longer thought in terms of winning or losing, but defined itself instead in terms of perseverance.25 It demonstrated to the US’s enemies, clients and allies alike its willingness to continue the fight even when defeat was certain, or had in a sense already been acknowledged (the US strategy of ‘Vietnamising’ the war which commenced shortly after the Tet Offensive in 1968, and became official policy under Nixon, was patently an admission that the war couldn’t be won – in the short term it was Johnson’s way of putting off admitting defeat until after the election so as to give Hubert Humphrey some chance of victory; in the longer term it was a way of buying time for a diplomatic solution).26 It was a demonstration of the US’s reach, of its ability to inflict destruction even when its troops were withdrawing and peace talks (however futile) were under way. It also demonstrated to the American people that the fight could be continued as the troops were withdrawn, a factor that as I’ve already pointed out would become decisive in reshaping militarism as an incorporeal system. It was also a demonstration to the American domestic population that the country’s leaders were willing to continue to sacrifice lives to prove this point.27 The contrary view, that Nixon wanted to end the war sooner but was unable to do so because domestic politics didn’t allow it, in no way contradicts this thesis. If anything it confirms it because if true it would mean, as Deleuze and Guattari have said of fascism, ‘at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions’, the American people wanted Vietnam, and, as they add, ‘it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for’.28 While there can be no doubt Vietnam was an unpopular war that was eventually brought to a halt by popular pressure, it is a sobering thought to remind oneself that it was a war that lasted some ten years. If one takes 1967 as the decisive turning point in popular opinion, the moment when protest against the war became the prevailing view and support for it dwindled into a minority murmur, then one still has to take stock of the fact that it took a further six years for US troops to be fully withdrawn.29 The kind of sustained popular pressure that brought the Vietnam War to a close has not yet even begun to build in the US in spite of the fact that the death toll has passed 1,500 (as of March 2005).

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Wars are spectacles in the traditional sense of being events staged to convey a specific message, but also in the more radical or postmodern sense that spectacle is the final form of war, the form war takes when it takes peace as its object. Hence the military’s facilitation of the media (this backfired to a large degree in Vietnam, but the lessons learned then are put to good use today). Ultimately, though, as Baudrillard rightly argues, the ‘media and official news services are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts’.30 Chomsky’s analyses of current trends in US imperialism confirm this thesis. As he argues, ‘preventive’ wars are only fought against the basically defenceless.31 Chomsky adds two further conditions that chime with what we have already adduced: there must be something in it for the aggressor (i.e. a fungible return, not an intangible moral reward) and the opponent must be susceptible to a portrayal of them as ‘evil’, allowing the victory to be claimed in the name of a higher moral purpose and the actual venal purpose to be obscured.32 At first glance, waging war to prevent war appears to be as farcical as fucking for virginity, but that is only if we assume that the aim of the war is to prevent one potential aggressor from striking first. Or rather, given that it is alleged that the putative enemy, Al-Qaeda and its supposed supporters, took first blood (the Rambo reference is of course deliberate), we are asked to believe the current war is being fought to prevent a second, more damaging strike. The obsessive and suitably grave references to Weapons of Mass Destruction by the various mouthpieces of the Bush regime (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, but also Blair and Howard) are plainly calculated to compel us to accept that any such second strike will be of biblical or, worse, Hollywood proportions. As one joke put it, the Americans could be certain Iraq had at least some Weapons of Mass Destruction because they had the receipts to prove it. I am speaking metaphorically here, but the fact is Iraq is a client of the US; it purchases arms and consumer goods and sells oil at a carefully controlled price. Why this arrangement suddenly became so unsatisfactory is subject to a great deal of speculation which centres on two basic theories: (1) when Iraq switched from the dollar to the euro it posed an intolerable threat to the stability of the US currency; (2) the US is positioning itself to monopolise oil ahead of growing Chinese demand. Either way, if one wants a metaphor to describe US imperialism it would not be McDonald’s, a comparatively benign operator, but the predatory retail giant Wal-Mart.33 Today’s wars are fought to demonstrate the will to monopolise.34 When war changed its object, it was able to change its aim too and it is this that has saved ‘real’ war from itself. Baudrillard’s later work on the spectacle of war misses this point: through becoming spectacles the fact that real wars (i.e. territorial wars) are no longer possible has not diminished their

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utility – the US isn’t strong enough to take and hold Iraq in the face of an endless insurgency, but it can use its force to demonstrate to other small nations that it can inflict massive damage and lasting pain on anyone who would dare defy it. Baudrillard’s lament that the real Gulf War never took place can only be understood from this viewpoint. Although he does not put it in these words, his insight is essentially that war in its Idealised form is much more terrifying than peace. The conclusion one might draw from the paradigm shift in war’s rationalisation enumerated above – from pragmatic object (defeating North Vietnam) to symbolic object (defending the credibility of the fighting forces) – is that war has become ‘postmodern’.35 This shift is what enables the US to ideologically justify war in the absence of a proper object and indeed in the absence of a known enemy. The Bush regime’s ‘War on Terror’ is the apotheosis of this change: the symbolic (terror) has been made to appear instrumental (terrorism), or more precisely the symbolic is now able to generate the instrumental according to its own needs. This is the moment when the war machine becomes militarism, the moment when doxa becomes doctrine. What is a war machine? The answer to this question must always be, it is a concept. But because of the way Deleuze and Guattari create their concepts, by abstracting from the historical, there is always a temptation to treat the war machine as primarily descriptive. More importantly, the war machine is only one element in a complex treatise which is ultimately a mordant critique of the present. Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis proceeds via a threefold hypothesis: (1) the war machine is a nomad invention that does not have war as its primary object, war is rather a second-order objective; (2) the war machine is exterior to the State apparatus, but when the State appropriates the war machine its nature and function changes, its polarity is effectively reversed so that it is directed at the nomads themselves; (3) it is only when the war machine has been appropriated by the State that war becomes its primary object.36 Deleuze and Guattari are careful to clarify that their main purpose in assigning the invention of the war machine to the nomads is to assert its historical or ‘invented’ character. Their implication is that the nomadic people of the steppes and deserts do not hold the secret to understanding the war machine. We need to look past the concrete historical and geographical character of the war machine to see its eidetic core. Clearly, it is not ‘the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics’; on the contrary, ‘it is this constellation that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine’.37 In its nomad origins, the war machine does not have war as its primary objective. Deleuze and Guattari arrive at this conclusion by way of three questions. First, they ask, is battle the object of war? Then they ask if war is the object of the war machine. Finally, they ask if the war machine is the

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object of the State. The first question requires further clarification, they say, between when a battle is sought and when it is avoided. The difference between these two states of affairs is not the difference between an offensive and a defensive posture. And while it is true that at first glance war does seem to have battle as its object, whereas the guerrilla has nonbattle as his object, this view is deceiving. Dropping bombs from 10,000 metres above the earth, firing missiles from a distance of hundreds of kilometres, using unpiloted drones to scout for targets, using satellite-controlled and guided weapons – these are the actions of a war machine that has no interest at all in engaging in battle. The truism that the Viet Cong frustrated the US Army in Vietnam by failing to engage them in battle should not be taken to mean the US Army sought battle and the enemy did not. The Viet Cong frustrated the US Army by failing to succumb to its nonbattle strategies and forced them into seeking battles with an elusive army with a better understanding of the terrain. If operation ‘Rolling Thunder’ – or any of the many other battle-avoiding stratagems the US attempted – had worked, they would not have sought battle at all.38 Ironically, too, as Gabriel Kolko points out, the more strategic the US tried to make its offensive operations, i.e. the more it tried to disengage from face-to-face encounters on the battlefield, the more passive its posture became because of its escalating logistical support requirements and increasing reliance on high-maintenance technology.39 The guerrilla armies of the Viet Cong did seek battle, but always on their own terms. As Mao said, the guerrilla strikes where the other is weak and retreats whenever the stronger power attacks; the guerrilla is constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to engage the enemy.40 Battle and nonbattle ‘are the double object of war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare’.41 For this reason the question has to be pushed further back to ask if war is even the object of the war machine. Too often the answer to this question is automatically ‘yes’, but this reflects a precise set of historical circumstances and not an essential condition. It is true, throughout history the nomads are regularly to be found in conflict situations, but this is because history is studded with collisions between war machines and the states and cities which would grind them into the dust. War is thrust upon the war machine, but its actual occupation is quite different; it could even be said to be peaceful were we not suspicious of that term. And as I have already argued, it is when the war machine takes peace itself as its object that it enters its most terrifying phase. In what follows, then, I try to set out in treatise form the set of axioms and propositions that underpin what I have argued is the new militarism. I conclude with a second obvious and complementary problem – namely, how will it end?

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Axioms Axiom I: Militarism is exterior to the State apparatus. Axiom II: Militarism has three aspects: (1) spatiogeographic – ‘empire of bases’; (2) peace more horrible than war (creates its own enemies); (3) neo-liberalism (economic neutron bomb – destroys people but leaves buildings untouched). Axiom III: Militarism is the form of expression for which fear is the form of content.

Propositions Proposition I: Militarism is a substitute for governance – impose a military hierarchy rather than establish a good society. Trust the weapon not the man. Proposition II: Militarism lends itself to single-issue electioneering, porkbarrelling and fearmongering (it is hard to get elected by taking a stand against any of these things). Consolidation of the ownership of press has stifled diversity and made bargaining with the press much easier – the press isn’t a force in its own right, it extracts a surplus from the flow of information and can be curtailed by controlling access. Militarism is visually arresting, utterly telegenic, easy to craft a story about, so lends itself to validation through news services. Proposition III: Militarism privileges relationships above everything and will look the other way if a foreign partner violates the human rights of its own people. Militarism is unmoved by genocide. Proposition IV: Militarism offers upward mobility and social approbation to the working poor as its most potent recruitment strategy. Proposition V: We clamour to be surveyed (and work through the related anxiety via TV). Proposition VI: Militarism hides behind globalisation. Proposition VII: Militarism is the ultimate paradigm of affective labour. It harnesses belief in the country, care for one’s comrades, dispassion for one’s enemies. Proposition VIII: The corporatism of universities jibes with the secrecy requirements of the military – thought is becoming instrumental. Proposition IX: Immiseration of the Third World – kicking away the ladder? Proposition X: Militarism is a parasite on the global economy. Proposition XI: Militarism retards the uptake of new technology – militarism manufactures stupidity. Militarists buy expensive hardware but don’t invest in the human capital to maintain it. But, paradoxically, militarists rely on technology to avoid human casualties.

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Proposition XII: Militarism is anti-production: massive investment in objects that cannot be used. Proposition XIII: Capitalist-induced jealousies, inequalities and iniquities foment war.

Problem There are (it seems to me) seven ways in which militarism will come to an end; sadly at least two are consonant with the end of the world itself. Happily, two or three, depending on how you do the counting, are consonant with the birth of a radically new kind of world. The uncertainty here concerns the first option, namely the breakdown of capitalism – while that will result in a radically new kind of world, whether we would welcome that world is uncertain. Not because we may harbour a lingering affection for capitalism, although that is doubtless true too, but quite literally because we have no way of knowing whether capitalism’s end will be with a bang or a whimper. The last remaining option is effectively status quo with a slight reshuffling of the deck. 1. Capitalism will sow the seeds of its own destruction and the system will break down 2. Multitudes 3. Eco-death 4. Thermonuclear war 5. Imperial overstretch – local wars escalate into global confrontation 6. Historical supersession – India and China outgrow US 7. Utopia – spontaneous outburst of multilateralism

II In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze says that you can never know a philosopher properly until you know what he or she is against. To know them at all, you have to know what puts fire in their soul, what makes them take up the nearly impossible challenge of trying to say anything at all. Too many people are content to say Deleuze, like Nietzsche, was against Hegel without ever asking why. And those who do trouble themselves to ask this question are too often satisfied with a merely philosophical answer. But if Deleuze found Hegel’s philosophy intolerable it was not simply because he thought that the dialectic was a badly made concept, or that he objected to a metaphysics predicated on negation. These are the complaints of a sandbox philosopher and Deleuze was certainly not that. Hegel’s philosophy was intolerable to Deleuze because in his eyes it offers a slave’s view of the

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world.42 Worse, it is a model of thought that seems to participate in the legitimation of the very system that enslaves us by installing the master-slave dialectic at the centre of our ratiocination, making it seem like this is the only choice we have, effectively denying us in advance the option of asking our own questions and forming our own problematics. But this critique is only meaningful (i.e. authentically critical) to the extent that it is read in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of philosophy’s purpose, which is precisely Marxian to the extent that, like Marx, they hold that the point of philosophy is not simply to understand society, but to change it.43 One answer to the question of what Deleuze and Guattari are against, then, is this: the axiomatic. The axiomatic is the latest form of social organisation, which for Deleuze and Guattari always means the organisation of the flows of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is a kind of cosmic energy that is constantly being deformed into the desire-for-something, but in their view its true form is that of production itself.44 It is, in other words, a process rather than a thing. Desire is the force in the universe that brings things together, but does so without plan or purpose and the results are always uncertain. It may lead to the formation of new compositions, but it might also lead to decomposition. As such, desire is an ambivalent force – without it, we shrivel up and die, but if it isn’t carefully harnessed it can tear us apart. Deleuze and Guattari’s handling of the concept is similarly ambivalent: on the one hand, they are constantly demanding that desire be unbound from the various shackles of guilt, repression and shame, but on the other hand they caution that this process needs to be done slowly and with care. We need just enough of those shackles of guilt, repression and shame to keep us human. The organisation of desire occurs on all levels of society, from the mundane to the world-historical. Obviously, at the mundane level, desire is subjected to literally countless constraints, most of them quite innocuous. And as the example of the extremely mundane activity of handwashing will illustrate readily enough, the molar can always be discerned in the molecular. Insofar as we wash our hands because of a concern for hygiene, or in deference to a religious ritual, that mundane activity is the means by which we express our fidelity to the social matrix we think of ourselves as belonging to. Whether it is because we accept the scientific rationale for washing our hands or because we are obedient to the edicts of faith, our actions signify belonging. By the same token, we don’t hesitate to castigate others for failing to follow the routine; indeed, it provokes feelings of disgust and rage if we learn, for instance, that someone hasn’t washed their hands after using the toilet, especially if they are handling our food. On the macro scale, however, desire has been subjected to relatively few worldhistorical types of organisation. Throughout history, there have been only three main types of social organisation: (1) the primitive tribe or band, (2) the state, and (3) the axiomatic. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate these

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organisations according to the different ways in which they codify the objects and practices of everyday life to channel desire into socially useful activities and corporate entities. If it is true that we are not using the word axiomatic as a simple metaphor, we must review what distinguishes an axiomatic from all manner of codes, overcodings and recodings: the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realised in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion.45 Axioms are operative statements of a primary type; they do not derive from or depend upon other statements. They function as the component parts of the various assemblages of production, circulation and consumption that comprise the capitalist system in full. Their principal function is to regulate flows – of money, people, raw materials, commodities and so on. Flows can be the subject of several axioms at once, but they can also lack axioms of their own, whereby they are either contained by the consequences of other axioms, or they remain ‘untamed’. Axioms may take the form of laws, but more often they appear as contracts, trade agreements, policy statements, governance protocols and so on. The Marshall Plan for the post-war reconstruction of Europe is an example of an axiom, as is Brazil’s import-substitution programme of the 1970s and the seemingly perennial Global War on Terror. Axioms are in effect order-words by another name; they are the slogans that underpin and give reason to the heterogeneous raft of laws, policies and regulations that give daily life in the contemporary world its structure, its consistency and its essential nature. In what they refer to as a ‘summary sketch’, Deleuze and Guattari identify seven ‘givens’ that taken together constitute the axiomatic universe.

Addition, subtraction Axioms can be added and withdrawn at will. The general tendency in capitalism is to add axioms in response to changing circumstances, but in certain cases, particularly in totalitarian regimes, the opposite tendency is the rule. What makes the axiomatic vary, in relation to States, is the distinction and relation between foreign and domestic markets. There is a multiplication of axioms most notably when an integrated domestic market is being organised to meet the requirements of the foreign market.46

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These opposing tendencies converge in crisis form in the Third World when debt-ridden totalitarian regimes try to reorganise in order to stave off redlining by First World credit agencies. If totalitarianism is defined by the withdrawal of axioms, or what might also be conceived as the reduction of the state to its bare minimum, then developments in the Third World suggest that not only are the conditions ripe for a massive proliferation of totalitarian regimes, but in a real sense they are in the grip of a totalitarianism from without. The austerity conditions imposed by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and indeed the White House itself have the hallmarks of classic totalitarianism. At the behest of these allegedly benevolent agencies domestic markets are forcibly deregulated, government spending slashed, wages pared to the bone, to create structural conditions (disproportionately) favourable to foreign investment (the axiom of ‘access’) from whence salvation is supposed to come. The effect of the loss of these internal structures is that Third World nations are denied the very same supports First World nations such as Japan and Germany but also the US, a notoriously protectionist market, used to claw their way forward. The First World effectively uses its financial muscle to kick away the ladder the Third World might use to get out of its infamous poverty trap.47 As Mike Davis notes, the principal cause of the continued downward spiral of pauperisation in the Third World is precisely the retreat of government.48 The domestic economy is sacrificed for the sake of foreign profit-taking. In the twentieth century, it was internal dictators that created these conditions; today it is globalisation. The gap separating totalitarianism and fascism is narrow. The latter uses war to rescue its economy. The US policy of giving credit to needy countries so they can buy arms is already pushing a number of countries in this direction. When not pointing the finger at demography, these agencies, the World Bank and WTO in particular, tend to blame poverty on bad governance rather than the structural inequalities of globalisation, citing lack of trust and reciprocity at a grassroots level as the major impediment to growth.49 Under these auspices the concept of ‘social capital’ has known an unparalleled rise in fortune. The fiction underpinning this thinking is that communitarian attitudes, if they are properly fostered, will stem rapacious profit-taking and enable social justice to flourish. What should be obvious, but seems to have escaped notice, is that social capital is effectively a form of social and labour discipline: its precise aim is to create conditions safe for foreign investment. Community development is really a code word for what financial analysts call risk treatment, that is, it identifies and tries to attenuate the ‘human factor’ as the principal cause of the failure of aid programmes. If villagers were more community-minded they would be less likely to embezzle aid funds, so this reasoning goes, the irony being

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that it creates a paradoxical situation in which laissez-faire capitalists find themselves promoting socialism to protect their investment, all while singing the praises of the ‘free market’. The creation of cooperative markets in peasant villages is then taken to be a sign of success rather than yet another instance of micro-exploitation and informalisation of labour rampant in the Third World.50 As important as the emergence of the various ‘fair trade’ and ‘trade not aid’ initiatives have been in ameliorating the impoverishing structural inequality between First and Third World countries, their very existence stands in the way of a clear-eyed view of the universality of this situation. It effectively amounts to an instance of what Roland Barthes astutely described as rhetorical inoculation, the small concession that immunises against a more systematic criticism.51 By admitting that in certain circumstances the market system isn’t always fair, those who benefit most from this system try to duck the fact that it is the system itself that is iniquitous. Starbucks’ agreement to pay slightly over-market for its coffee beans blinds us to the reality that this situation – the Third World as market garden for the First – is the cause of the problem in the first place. The lack of diversity in the domestic sectors of the coffee-growing nations places them in a very vulnerable position, their livelihood hinging on the whim of First World consumers. It also prevents them from expanding their agricultural (much less their industrial) base because they cannot afford to grow less lucrative but ultimately more nutritive crops. So countries like Brazil have to import food, despite having an enormous primary industries sector.52

Saturation ‘Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. It would like for us to believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the extreme limit of resources and energy.’53 But the reality is that the only limits it confronts are of its own making. And even as it confronts these limits it repels them, or displaces them, thus avoiding the moment when the system would actually have to change. The oil industry offers an instructive case in point. In spite of scaremongering, from both the Left and the Right, there is no shortage of oil. Oil shortages – or at least the threat of oil shortages – are expedient political weapons for both sides: the green-hued left use it as leverage to foster a more eco-friendly outlook and to encourage greater investment in research and development to find a replacement energy source; meanwhile the hawkish right use it to argue that imperialism is necessary to protect ‘energy security’ and the First World lifestyle. And there are a plethora of positions in between. Yet, the fact is, even if China and India continue to escalate their rate of

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oil consumption, oil is not going to run out in the short or medium term. Current estimates are that proven reserves are sufficient to last us another 150 to 500 years (one hopes that this will be time enough for a replacement energy source to be standardised). Some theorists, like Yeomans, have argued that what there is a shortage of is cheap oil. Cheap oil is oil that can be extracted and processed at low cost. If one looks at the various potential oil sources in the world, from Canadian shale oil, to North Sea oil and gas, to Texas and the Middle East, it is Middle East oil that is cheapest by a big margin. Whereas extracting oil from oil sands can cost upwards of $14 a barrel and is environmentally messy, Iraqi oil costs a mere $1.50 a barrel and is relatively clean – or at least far enough away not to attract much attention from the NIMBY set. The difference in profit potential is obvious. While this puts the Middle East oil-producing countries in a strong position in the marketplace, if they do not keep oil prices down then they make presently uneconomical oil reserves attractive and risk losing market share, which is effectively what happened in the years following the ‘oil shock’ of the early 1970s. As Saudi oil minister Sheik Yamani said in 1981, ‘If we force Western countries to invest heavily in finding alternative sources of energy, they will. This will take them no more than seven to ten years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardise Saudi Arabia’s interests.’54 In most of the West this is precisely what happened in the 1970s. Fuel efficiency suddenly became a watchword everywhere, even in the US with its notorious lack of energy thrift. By the same token, the so-called ‘oil shock’ was in fact a boon for producers and retailers alike, so from the point of view of the accumulation of capital it was anything but a disaster.55 As such, this version of the oil shortage argument is not, finally, persuasive. The inverse – the oversupply argument – is more compelling. ‘The history of oil in the twentieth century is not a history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace – for the industry and the oil states – of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut.’56 In other words, the real oil crisis is not an external crisis or ‘extreme limit’ of vanishing resources, but an entirely internal crisis or ‘imaginary limit’ of the volatility of prices. On this argument, the Gulf Wars have been fought to stabilise prices and regularise profit-taking. Blood is not being spilled for oil as such, which at least has a certain materiality, but for the utterly nebulous, and by nature completely ephemeral, base points on the stock exchange. In the end, as Retort have argued, it is not even the price of oil that matters so much as the sustainability of the triangular trade of arms sales, and military base

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construction, that has grown around the oil industry – fighting over oil concessions, and building military bases to protect oil interests, are ultimately just as profitable as dealing in oil, at least when viewed from the perspective of the domestic US market. With so many new players in the oil and guns business, it has become impossible to regulate the market by the old-fashioned oligarchic means. Hence the necessity of war. War is the last resort of the axiomatic, which usually has much more powerful instruments at its disposal.

Models, isomorphy In principle, insofar as all states are domains for the realisation of capital within a single, integrated world market, they are isomorphic. Although this isomorphy implies a degree of homogeneity between the states, at least on an operational level (‘the highway code, the circulation of commodities, production costs, etc.’), this only holds true insofar as there is a general ‘tendency toward a single integrated domestic market’.57 At a deeper level, however, there can be a real heterogeneity between states without them ceasing to be isomorphic because the fact of the worldwide market leaves them no option but to conform. The general rules regarding this are as follows: the consistency, the totality (l’ensemble), or unity of the axiomatic are defined by capital as a ‘right’ or relation of production (for the market); the respective independence of the axioms in no way contradicts this totality but derives from the divisions or sectors of the capitalist mode of production; the isomorphy of the models, with the two poles of addition and subtraction, depends on how the domestic and foreign markets are distributed in each case.58 Deleuze and Guattari identify three kinds of isomorphy corresponding to three bipolarities that constitute the contemporary world. The first refers to the states in the centre of the capitalism world-system: the US, the member nations of the EU, Australia, Canada and so on. Although their various models of governance are different when compared in strict detail, they are isomorphic with respect to the capitalist world-system. Obviously, too, organisations like the WTO, NAFTA, WEF and so on have as their precise goal the machining of this isomorphy. The nations in the centre do not become homogeneous via this process – indeed, the opposite is true: in the guise of tourism and niche marketing, the cash-value of difference has long been recognised – but their relations of production do become increasingly well integrated. The second bipolarity is of fading significance in the

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contemporary world: the grand bureaucracies of what used to be known as the Second World, namely the USSR and the PRC, have effectively relinquished what Deleuze and Guattari call their heteromorphy in favour of a more streamlined isomorphy. Even so, one can still find countries whose mode of production and relation of production do not conform to the Washington ‘consensus’, but who continue to integrate themselves with the world market all the same. One could point to the planned economy of North Korea or the bizarrely feudal economy of Saudi Arabia as instances of this. The third bipolarity is the familiar distinction between centre and periphery (North-South), which Deleuze and Guattari describe as a polymorphy; here capital acts as the relation of production in noncapitalist or not necessarily capitalist modes of production.

Power Whether the US is the only superpower is not the crucial issue – militarism defined as a peace more terrifying than war amounts to a single smooth space of war reigning over the globe and it doesn’t matter whether there are opposing parts or not. It is not whether the US is at loggerheads with North Korea or Syria that is the issue, but rather that diplomacy between states is defined by the presence or absence of a ‘credible threat’. For the US, withdrawing a trade agreement is just as devastating, perhaps more so, than sending in the marines; likewise, OPEC nations can do more damage by driving up oil prices than by blowing up tall buildings in New York. States no longer appropriate the war machine; they are a component of it. The San Francisco-based ‘gathering of antagonists to capital and empire’, Retort, have argued that the invasion of Iraq can only be properly understood in light of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ and, more especially, the troubling display of Third World insubordination at Doha and Cancún, where ‘an in-house insurgency of twenty nations refused to endorse the massive US-EU subsidies to North Atlantic agriculture and the WTO rules crafted to prevent the South from protecting itself’.59 Commentators who have drawn comparisons between the second Gulf War and the Vietnam War generally do so on the basis of outcomes, real and predicted. The lack of gratitude on the part of the liberated Iraqis and their failure to spontaneously Americanise, coupled with uncontrolled insurgency in most parts of the country, has led many to mutter the fateful word long associated with Vietnam, namely ‘quagmire’. To put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the US – but by this one really means the entire integrated being of First World capital – has been thrust up against a limit-point. The whole world is holding its breath waiting to see if it is a real or absolute limit.

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The included middle The operation of the axiomatic and its restless search for new models of realisation creates problems it cannot solve. The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialised agriculture at the periphery, provisionally reserving for the centre the so-called postindustrial activities (automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, overarmament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the centre, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths.60 In search of new sources of capital, capitalism willingly invades the underdeveloped regions of the world so it can build and operate factories unburdened by high taxes and labour and environmental restrictions; equally willingly, it consigns to the scrap heap entire industries and the jobs and lives dependent upon them in the First World if the profit and loss statement no longer appeals to the shareholders. Capitalism has never had any interest in enriching all – indeed, unequal exchange is indispensable to its functioning. ‘Even a social democracy adapted to the Third World surely does not undertake to integrate the whole poverty-stricken population into the domestic market; what it does, rather, is to effect the class rupture that will select the integratable elements.’61 Today, in the First World, we can witness this strategy at work behind the rhetoric of the so-called ‘deserving poor’. The included middle refers to the rump of citizens capitalism deems it unnecessary to save.

Minorities What is a minority? It certainly is not an affair of numbers – indeed, those who number among the minority are frequently in the majority if we take a purely numerical view of things. The world’s poor outnumber the rich by an extremely wide margin, yet theirs is the minor voice. The combined wealth of the 500 richest people in the world exceeds the GDP of the entire continent of Africa, and is greater than the combined incomes of the ‘poorest half of humanity’.62 A handful of people whose total wealth has to be measured in the trillions are numerically speaking quite obviously in the minority; they are a very select group indeed. Yet the power they wield in consequence of their tremendous wealth makes it a nonsense to describe them as minor. In contrast, the three billion people constituting the poorest half of humanity have so little power singly or collectively that it is no error of judgement to describe them as minor. So

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why do Deleuze and Guattari speak of the minor as being vested with the power of the nondenumerable? For Deleuze and Guattari, the nondenumerable refers to the power to ask one’s own questions, to form one’s own problematics, and, more particularly, to define the conditions under which a satisfactory answer or response to these questions and problems might be obtained. Today, after so many centuries of suffering and silence, it is the Indigenous peoples of the world who are showing the rest of us how potent this power can be. If the 1960s took inspiration from Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, as Jameson records in his capsular cultural history of the period, then the 1990s took its inspiration from Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas. For many, the road to Seattle began in the mountains of southeast Mexico when the Zapatistas launched their movement.63 The figure of Che as militant and utopian was a potent one for the Left in the 1960s, but as Jameson argues the failures of the guerrilla movements in Peru and Venezuela effectively robbed it of its utopian energy. The guerrilla lost its appeal and there followed a profound ‘disinvestment of revolutionary libido and fascination on the part of the First World Left’.64 The headline-grabbing violence of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Gang disillusioned many on the Left and the very idea of militancy was jettisoned. Subsequently, the figure of the guerrilla fighter was appropriated by the Right and transformed fatefully into the image of the terrorist, effectively depriving the Left of its ideological claim on the right to bear arms.65 Thus a new figure was needed: the Zapatistas. In an interview with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo, Subcomandante Marcos put it in these terms: A soldier is an absurd person who has to resort to arms in order to convince others, and in that sense the movement has no movement if its future is military. If the EZLN perpetuates itself as an armed military structure it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it, apart from that, would be to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army. For us it would be a failure.66 The Zapatistas’ movement began with eleven demands – work, land, shelter, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace – that eventually expanded to fifteen with the addition of security, anti-corruption, information and environmental protection. They claimed the right of dissent and rebellion, but chose to practise democracy rather than wage war for it.67 Using the electronic media to full advantage, the Zapatistas sowed powerful slogans of the password type into the global political subsoil. Among the many rallying slogans the Zapatistas have put

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into circulation, the phrase that has gained the most traction in the First World is undoubtedly the one Naomi Klein has made the centrepiece of her recent utopian cry to reclaim the commons: ‘one world with many worlds in it’. This, for Klein, defines the stakes of the present struggle. It means fighting against the logic of centralisation, consolidation and homogenisation dear to what she calls McGovernment, those purveyors of the ‘happy meal of cutting taxes, privatizing services, liberalizing regulations, busting unions’.68 It means giving local communities ‘the right to plan and manage their schools, their services, their natural settings, according to their own lights’.69 As charming as this picture of a world freed from the predatory claws of capitalism is, it misses its target inasmuch as it defines capitalism as denying us the right to plan and manage our schools and so on. In fact, the sad truth is most neo-liberal governments would be quite happy to hand over management of schools to local communities, seeing this as one easy way of cutting overheads and appearing to do something good at the same time. The real problem is that the axiomatic is able to treat all forms of organisation as its model of realisation. This is something it has only lately perfected, as Naomi Klein’s book on the rise of the logo documents. We did not lose control of our schools so much as give them up in the name of profit. Education, health, life – these are the nondenumerable in their very essence, yet we have seen the neo-liberals transform them into denumerables, for which a balance-sheet approach can be taken. If one must frame this discussion in the language of rights, then it is the right to determine what can and cannot be a model of realisation that must first be obtained. The lesson the Zapatistas have passed on to us is that we should start with government itself!

Undecidable propositions The Left’s response to Seattle and Porto Alegre has been mixed, ranging from the fervent enthusing of anarchists like David Graeber to the cooler considerations of Michael Hardt. These two positions, which by no means exhaust the range of responses or even map out its extremes, typify the responses Seattle and Porto Alegre have been met with: either their sheer existence is deemed to be enough because it represents a potent symbolic victory, or, in the manner of the old-fashioned, revolutionary Left, it is argued that symbolic victories don’t really count and that more organisation is needed to take power and really make things change. How would Deleuze and Guattari respond? One can speculate that they would have approved of the collective spirit of these events, albeit with reservations concerning fascist reterritorialisation. The anarchism evident in Seattle

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would no doubt have pleased them. As is evident in their remarks on ‘Saturation’, Deleuze and Guattari do not view the potential development ‘of a worldwide labour bureaucracy or technocracy’ as an improvement on capitalism.70 Indeed, they list it as a danger to be warded off by focusing on precise and highly localised struggles. There is no consensus on what to call the flashpoints of dissent we associate metonymically with Seattle and Porto Alegre – the media-applied label ‘anti-globalisation movement’ has stuck, despite being an obvious misnomer (these movements are global in their outlook and in their range of concerns and make use of all the available globalising technology at their disposal). But as Emir Sader puts it, new formations are difficult to recognise in the new contexts they create for themselves (as Borges might have said, revolutionaries, like all great artists, create their own precursors) and to continue to try to read them against the background of former movements misses the point of their very existence.71 The overwhelming complaint about Porto Alegre is that it is difficult to see how it will coordinate its efforts. By contrast, following Deleuze and Guattari, we might equally argue that it is their lack of organisation and their spreading of disorganisation that capitalism cannot tolerate – what it wants is for dissent to be organised. The ‘Turtles and Teamsters’ catchcry of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ neatly summarises Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis concerning the revolutionary – connections not conjugations: ‘Every struggle is a function of all these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic.’72 As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in their report on the ‘Battle of Seattle’, it was a triumph despite what latter-day doomsayers said in the months that followed the ‘five days that shook the world’ (28 November to 3 December 1999) because it placed the protesters’ ‘issues squarely on the national and indeed global political agenda’.73 Until then international trade meetings were relatively inconspicuous affairs whose agenda were reported, if at all, in the dry tones of economists. After Seattle, this changed. The first casualty was their physical invisibility – following Seattle, meetings of the WTO, IMF, NAFTA, WEC and so on became extremely high profile. Subsequent meetings in Washington, Prague, Genoa and Melbourne were similarly disrupted, though none nearly as effectively as Seattle. The security forces learned from Seattle. DC spent $1 million in new riot equipment and $5 million in overtime to secure the city for the April 2000 meeting of the IMF and the World Bank. Unlike Seattle, the protesters weren’t able to halt the meeting, much less shut the city down. Yet in its own way this was a victory for the protesters because the cost of providing security at these meetings escalated so sharply that it became almost impossible to contemplate staging them. By the same token,

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the meetings did not continue to go unanswered, the World Social Forum being the most important response. Most importantly, though, the agenda of these trade talks ceased to be reported and indeed thought about in purely economic terms – the economic gained a face and a body. The axiomatic was shown to be the cruel, callous system that it is and though this did not bring it to a halt it created a landscape in which hitherto silenced minorities could begin to pose new problems. As Cockburn and St. Clair acknowledge, the effects of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ can be compared to the long summer of the ‘events of May’. You can take the state by surprise only once or twice in a generation. May/June, 1968, took the French state by surprise. The French state then took very good care not to have that unpleasant experience repeated. The same reaction by the state’s security apparat happened after Seattle, which represented a terrible humiliation on a global stage for the US government.74 The heady optimism of this activist moment which stretched from late November 1999 to September 2001 is difficult to recollect in the present era, and that is perhaps the most damaging after-effect of the collapse of the Twin Towers. As John Sellers, the director of the Ruckus Society, one of the more active organisations present in Seattle, commented: People all over the world were so inspired by Seattle, partly because it was the most heavily televised protest in history . . . but also because most people had no idea that there was real dissent here in the United States. But when they saw tens of thousands of people in the streets, and the facade of democracy peel away to reveal the armed storm troopers with shields, grenades and gas, wielding chemical weapons against unarmed crowds, it really drove home the fact that there are all kinds of different opinions in this country, and that there can be a true, sweeping social movement in the United States.75 Since 9/11, however, such molecularising images of political dissent have effectively vanished, to be replaced by the molarity of mourning. What is most striking about the global mood change is that whereas the images of US brutality towards its own citizens were shocking in 1999, they now seem pallid in the face of its brutality towards the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan.76 But that isn’t quite right either because it misses the fact that then it was still possible to think in terms of police action as a violation of civil liberties. And although they had already taken a severe belting during the so-called war on drugs which peaked under self-confessed pot-smokers

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Clinton and Gore, civil liberties suffered an even greater thrashing under Bush in the name of homeland security. The images of Seattle were also shocking because, as Cockburn and St. Clair point out, it gave the world its first glimpse of America’s highly militarised police force.77 Visored black helmets, Kevlar body armour and assault rifles replaced the thin blue line as the image of peaceableness, which is as eloquent a testimony to the change in temperature of the times as one could hope for. A Cold War abroad and a Hot War at home.

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Chapter 8 Occupy without Counting

The events of September 2011 will probably go down in history in much the same way as have the events of May 1968, with no one being able to decide what, if anything, actually happened.1 Zuccotti Park in New York City briefly flickered in the global consciousness as the spark that threatened to ignite a global revolution, just as the Latin Quarter of Paris had four decades earlier.2 Within a month over 150 Occupy events were taking place all over the world, and as one expects these days the movement was even more prominently and diversely represented on a variety of social media platforms. The message the ‘Occupiers’ (as I will call them) wanted to relay was both simple and complex. We are the 99 per cent, they said, the part that in Rancière’s terms effectively has no part because the other 1 per cent control a profoundly disproportionate share of national – global – wealth (the top 1 per cent in the US have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 per cent).3 They demanded nothing except to be noticed. Although they received support from a number of labour unions, including teachers and health workers who marched in solidarity with them on 5 October and 17 November, they were on the whole chary of being too closely identified with established political groups. Partly this was out of a fear of being co-opted, but largely it had to do with the collective desire to create a new kind of political organisation that was ‘leaderless and directionless’.4 The Occupiers confounded virtually every attempt the mainstream media made to understand what was going on. Their silence about what they wanted made the point that there is no democratic agency in the US that their concerns could be addressed to because all of them are in some way or another beholden to the corporate world. And it was this basic fact of American – global – life that they wanted to draw attention to and initiate a change in what environmental activist Bill McKibben usefully refers to as ‘the political consciousness’.5 To frame the problem in this way is perhaps more radical than meets the eye because it overturns, or, rather, questions, the longstanding Marxist perspective which holds that the key to initiating collective political action is awareness and understanding of the actual economic and

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political situation. The basic starting point was Marx’s hypothesis that if people only knew their real situation they would rise up against it; the fact they did not rise up against their situation could only mean they were not fully aware of how exploited they were. In the 1960s dissident political action generally took the form of campaigns to raise ‘consciousness’ about issues such as gender inequality, racial inequality, sexual inequality and so on; these campaigns were on the whole highly successful, not only in raising awareness about gender, racial and sexual inequality, but also in addressing these issues through changes to legislation and cultural behaviour. Today the political landscape for women, gays and lesbians, and non-white peoples is significantly better than it was midway through the twentieth century and one expects it to continue to improve because (despite localised setbacks and high-level resistance by foot-dragging governments), in the Western world at least, it is now more or less accepted as ‘natural’ that all people regardless of gender, sexuality, race or faith ought to be accorded the same rights. However, because of the very success of the countless consciousness-raising campaigns of the past fifty years or so it is now debatable whether lack of awareness can any longer be regarded as an impediment to action. Who today is – or, indeed, can be – unaware of the fact that global capitalism is both highly exploitative and profoundly iniquitous? As Deleuze and Guattari say, the people already know who the repressors are. Occupy Wall Street faced two different kinds of problems, which set it apart from its radical predecessors, including its near contemporaries such as the environmentalist movement. First, it could not start from the position that people are largely ignorant of the true nature of global capitalism and thereby seek to bring about change by raising awareness. The movement was never one of the ignorant seeking enlightenment. The people who decided to occupy Wall Street were extremely well informed about the state of global capitalism. They were exasperated and angry about the state of things, but by no means ignorant. Occupy Wall Street had to start from the position that people are aware of how things are but nevertheless do little or nothing to change things. The question they asked themselves was whether this inaction was because there is nothing anyone can do to change things. The second problem was related to this point because in contrast to the environmental movement, for example, Occupy Wall Street didn’t have an obvious, localised target it could point to, or a set of actions it could prescribe, thereby enabling people to become part of a change movement without necessarily interrupting their daily life. The environmental movement is both an astounding success and a miserable failure in this regard. Many of us recycle, reuse and reduce, as we have been taught to do, but then do nothing to tackle the bigger issues, such as our global dependency

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on oil. Doubtless the reason for that failure is the strong sense that there is nothing we as individuals can actually do to change things. And it seems to me that it is this situation – the all-pervading feeling that there is nothing that can be done to change things – that Occupy Wall Street wanted to address. It took a stand and said consciousness is action only when you are prepared to interrupt your daily life and do things differently. It set in motion a great disruption (to use Jameson’s useful concept) whose rippleeffects continue to be felt today.6 Occupy Wall Street and the corresponding Occupy movement that sprang up in its wake was premised on the idea that change is not achieved by violence or extortion, but rather by presence and permanence. The Occupiers put their bodies on the line in order to make their point. Situated in Lower Manhattan, literally on the doorstep of the Ground Zero of 9/11, Zuccotti Park is anything but a park, if by that we mean lush green spaces like New York’s own Central Park or Hyde Park in London. It is rather just over 3,000 square metres of concrete interspersed by a few sapling trees that in time may give it at least the appearance of a park. There are no toilet facilities, or any other basic amenities needed to sustain life in a reasonable degree of comfort, so the Occupation called for hard living and ingenuity. They were fortunate that the weather remained mild for the first couple of weeks but by late October, when the first snows had fallen, life became very uncomfortable indeed. Because generators were not permitted, electricity had to be produced using pedal power. It was the drive in the legs of determined Occupiers that heated frozen bodies and kept the media centre going, recharging all the mobile phones and laptops. Amplifiers were not permitted either, so public meetings were facilitated via a call-and-response process in which the speaker’s words were relayed from the front of the audience to the rear via a Chinese whispers-style repetition. The Occupiers were aided by the fact that Zuccotti Park is a private park (controlled by Brookfield Properties, who were far from supportive) because this meant it was exempt from curfew laws that would have applied in a public park. Occupying Zuccotti Park was never easy and the City of New York did everything it could to make it as difficult as possible. It directed homeless people towards the park, dropped off recently released prisoners there, infiltrated the Occupiers and spied on them, with the result that several were put on charges. Then, on 15 November 2011, the police cleared the park and brought the Occupation to an end.7 The Occupiers produced a manifesto of sorts, The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, as well as a kind of newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, which published ideas put to and ratified by the General Assembly, an ad hoc group of Occupiers who listened to and voted on proposals presented to them by anyone with the interest to do so. Some of

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the proposals were practical – such as Adbusters editor Micah White’s call for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which from 1933 until 1999 separated commercial and investment banking, thus protecting America from precisely the kind of speculative lending that led to the global financial meltdown of 2008 – but many were not, at least not in a straightforward sense. Calls for an end to corporate influence on government cannot easily be enacted.8 But the manifesto was never really that important as far as the wider public was concerned. It functioned simply as a chronicle of what the people were thinking in those heady weeks of the Occupation, rather than a carefully thought out and precisely articulated position statement, much less a blueprint of the future. The true legacy of Occupy Wall Street will not be found in its pages. It was the process of putting the manifesto together that was important, not the end result. Its production was an example of participatory democracy in action – the set of principles the Occupiers wanted to live by was created and embraced by the Occupiers themselves. All proposals required the support of at least 90 per cent of the General Assembly in order to be ratified, which is far more onerous than parliamentary democracies require. And of course that was precisely the point: it demonstrated that democracy as we know it – that is, democracy as it is practised in the United States and elsewhere – is a pale shadow of ‘true’ democracy, which is open to all and premised on the notion that only near-consensus can be regarded as representative of the will of the people. As impractical as this model of democracy might be, its symbolic value should not be underestimated. It bespoke a powerful hunger for social justice, for a political and economic system that represents the needs of the many, not the greed of the few, that not even President Obama could fail to perceive.9 One may put it even more strongly than that. The Occupiers’ staging of ‘real’ democracy revived the idea that, as Rancière argues, political society is at its core, in its very foundation, consensus driven. [B]efore becoming the reasonable virtue of individuals and groups who agree to discuss their problems and build up their interests, [consensus] is a determined regime of the perceptible, a particular mode of visibility of right as arkhê of the community.10 Consensus is not the goal of politics, but its starting point, its possibility, because it stipulates that everyone has the right to be counted, to count, in the formation of political ideas and decisions. But as Rancière also argues, consensus is in some ways the end of politics precisely because it demands/ assumes that everyone is, has been, counted, and therefore leaves no place for the part who have no part. It obscures, then, the place of dissent.11 The

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staging of a regime of consensus within a political environment such as the twenty-first-century USA that does not even pretend to be motivated by or interested in consensus as a political ideal escapes this double bind because it simultaneously performs consensus as an Idea but does so in a context in which the performers continue to be viewed as belonging to the part who have no part. Occupy Wall Street was in this sense a highly complex piece of political theatre, but it was also more that because the effects of its performance were not purely symbolic, but completely real. There are of course obvious political reasons why certain commentators would want to deny that anything takes place in these kinds of events in which a populace suddenly and without warning or obvious provocation decides to express its dissent, and does so in a way that isn’t aimed at either bringing down a particular regime or taking power. It is hardly surprising that pundits who generally identify with the hegemonic regime would tend to claim that events like Occupy Wall Street are ultimately inconsequential; that is more or less their reason for being. It is a bread and butter move – his bread and butter – for someone like Niall Ferguson to claim that Occupy Wall Street is a giant, misguided waste of time because the real issue of the day isn’t the fact that the top 1 per cent control the bulk of the nation’s wealth, it is the fact that there are so many baby boomers around getting ready to hoover up all that free money from social security and government health insurance.12 What is surprising, though, is the number of basically sympathetic observers, including Michael Greenberg, who otherwise does such a marvellous job of reporting on Occupy Wall Street for The New York Review of Books, that find the movement wanting. In an article that documents the way the New York police infiltrated and harassed the Occupiers, Greenberg describes the Occupiers as corrupted by their own ‘inviolable purity of principle (“We don’t talk to people with power, because to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of their power”)’. I do not want to suggest that the Occupiers should somehow be seen as immune to criticism. But I do want to suggest that the political frameworks in place today are in many ways conceptually inadequate to deal with events like Occupy Wall Street, which falls outside of most people’s standard paradigms for understanding political interactions between the manifestly powerful and the apparently powerless.13 Usually power is equated with violence and more especially the control of the right to violence. The fact that non-violent movements like Occupy Wall Street challenge that very idea, indeed that basic assumption, that politics ultimately boils down to who has the best weapons and the most troops, is in many ways the most overlooked (in the media, I mean) aspect of political activism today.

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Conceptual advances are, in this sense, political acts in themselves, because they open a space or, more precisely, create the form of the expression for new political ideas (as the content of the expression) and thereby enable political voices to be heard that would otherwise be presumed silent or adjudged irrelevant. This is one of the key reasons why the concept of the event has been so central a preoccupation for critical theory for the past decade or more; it is a starting point for any inquiry about ‘what happened?’. Of the several philosophers who have given thought to the concept of the event, the most influential – in critical theory, at least – are undoubtedly Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. The event is a crucial concern for both, but they each approach it quite differently. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying their respective arguments, I will try to generalise the difference between them. For Badiou the event gives rise to truth (it is truth’s condition), whereas for Deleuze it gives rise to sense (it is sense’s condition). Badiou’s event, as a truth-event, demands our commitment – it therefore hovers on the border between conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, that which we choose to do and that which we feel compelled to do. Our commitment to a particular truth is not so much a rational decision based upon the weighing up of evidence as a lightning strike, an epiphany that hits us and instantly reshapes our view of the world. Badiou tends to give mathematical examples to explain what he means by truth because for him the real quality of a truth is its inarguable nature: a triangle has three sides, a square has four, and so on. Similarly, one could look to physics, and the various laws formulated there: gravity means everything must fall. It is an open question, it seems to me, whether any political idea can attain a comparable status, but for Badiou this is what conviction would mean in a political context: the unshakeable belief in the rectitude of a particular idea and the concomitant clarity of perception this conviction affords.14 For Deleuze, the event is also a kind of lightning strike, but it demands only that we adapt to it. It does not demand our conviction, or even our belief. The event for Deleuze is an eruption of immanence, if you will, a bursting forth of a kind of immanent time-space continuum in which something transcendent (sense) appears. In a late essay, published after his death, Deleuze even called this type of eruption of immanence ‘life’.15 In his work with Guattari, space was usually referred to as smooth space (but it had other names as well – the body without organs, the plane of immanence, the plane of composition, the plateau and so on). This life-sense, as we may perhaps call it (to distinguish it from its ordinary or semantic sense), has a structuring effect inasmuch as it gives shape to the world as we live and experience it. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of ‘the crack’ is, for Deleuze and Guattari, something of a touchstone example of what they

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mean by the event. It is a kind of mental ‘clean break’, a ‘brain snap’ as some people say, after which nothing is the same. Examples of cracks might include the realisation that your job is worthless and not deserving of the effort you put into it, or that you aren’t as talented as you once thought (which was Fitzgerald’s feeling), and so on.16 This is by no means at odds with anything Badiou says about the event, except that for Deleuze this eruption of immanence (the opening up of a smooth space, in other words) does not necessarily correlate with an idea of truth. It is also worth noting that the event for Deleuze and Guattari is not measured by a change in the state of things – a large crowd gathering in a public square in Cairo or camping out in New York City is not intrinsically an event in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. It only becomes recognisable as an event if it brings about a transformation of thought itself, if it yields a new idea, a new way of acting.17 And I would argue that is precisely what Occupy did: it opened up a new space of thought. In contrast to Badiou’s truth-event, Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth space of thought, or life-sense, is not universal or universalisable. The crack Fitzgerald experiences is a truth for him, but not for anyone else, not even Zelda Fitzgerald, who experienced her own truth. It is his sense of his world, not anyone else’s. Even if we empathise with his outlook on things and feel that it somehow describes our world too, that it has something to say about our own life, it is not a truth we can be faithful to in Badiou’s sense (as he applies it to ideological worldviews like communism, for instance). I can believe in the existence or occurrence of the crack (‘clean break’, ‘brain snap’, etc.) in someone’s life, but only in a formal sense. The specific content of someone else’s crack will always elude me because, as Tolstoy said (more or less), we are all broken or cracked in our own way. What pushes me over the edge does not have to be the same as whatever pushes another person over the edge for us to both say we have experienced a crack. Yet for that very reason our respective experiences of cracking are only comparable in an abstract way. This is not to say that for Deleuze and Guattari there are no such things as collective events, or events that affect more than one person, but it does mean that universality cannot be one of its defining criteria, as it is for Badiou. The other difference is that for Deleuze and Guattari the life-sense event is involuntary – Fitzgerald doesn’t choose to accept or adhere to the crack; it comes up upon him without him knowing about it in advance and leaves him a changed man in its wake. For Badiou, in contrast, the event requires our fidelity; we have to choose to believe in it and place it at the centre of our lives. The event for Deleuze and Guattari is a radical break with the normal continuity of things that at once interrupts the usual flow of daily life and initiates its own counterflow.18 This was precisely what Occupy Wall

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Street did: it brought about a radical break with the normal continuity of daily life, not just in Lower Manhattan, but globally, as the whole world stopped to see what was happening there. That it could do so without violence or even the threat of violence is remarkable, particularly in an era that is in many ways defined by the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which had its beginnings – ‘Ground Zero’ – a short distance from Zuccotti Park. Having said that, it is important to see that Occupy Wall Street’s nonviolent approach, the so-called passive resistance it exercised, is anything but passive. It is a misnomer that robs the non-violent approach to protest of its core, namely the galvanising effect of a desire for change. As Perry Anderson writes, Gandhi himself translated satyagraha as ‘truth-force’ rather than passive resistance. Inspired by Tolstoy, Gandhi coined this neologism himself to conceive a vision of non-violent resistance infused with a religious idea of transcendence.19 For Badiou, this is precisely how an event like Occupy Wall Street works. It ignites what he calls a ‘truth process’ – it makes apparent to all that ‘human animals are capable of bringing into being justice, equality, and universality (the practical presence of what the Idea can do). It is perfectly apparent that a high proportion of political oppression consists in the unremitting negation of this capacity.’20 The fact that people take the trouble to interrupt their own lives to commence and participate in an Occupy movement and do so in substantial numbers is living proof that, in the words of the anti-WTO protesters from the decade before Occupy Wall Street, ‘another world is possible’. What counts is the act, the willingness to disrupt one’s own life and beyond that the lives of others, and beyond that the life of the social machine itself. As Badiou puts it, speaking of the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January 2011, one of the events of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, even if the occupiers ‘are a million strong, that still does not represent many of the 80 million Egyptians. In terms of electoral numbers it is a guaranteed fiasco! But this million, present in this site, is enormous if we stop measuring the political impact (as in voting) by inert, separated number.’21 Deleuze and Guattari call this space one occupies without counting ‘smooth space’, which they contrast to ‘striated space’. In what follows I will argue that Occupy Wall Street can usefully be thought of as having created a new kind of smooth space. Ironically, it is perhaps Badiou who, while severely critical of Deleuze’s attachment to the concept of the virtual, gives us the most useful illustration of precisely what is meant here by smooth space. Speaking of Spain’s Indignados, the loose social movement which arose in response to the ‘austerity measures’ the Spanish government was forced to impose by the European Central Bank as a condition of its debt relief (following the global financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting meltdown of the euro), Badiou argues that as noble as their cause is, because it is fuelled only by negative

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emotions – a desire for ‘real democracy’ to replace the ‘bad democracy’ they have to live with – their movement isn’t as powerful or as sustainable as it would be if it were underpinned by an ‘affirmative Idea’.22 The Idea, Badiou says, is blind to the self-evidence of what is before it – the local defeats, as in the case of Occupy Wall Street, which was rousted out of Zuccotti Park after only two months – and far-sighted concerning the future that no one else has eyes to see. It isn’t concerned with results, with counting in the here and now; what it awakens is the force of history itself, the certainty that nothing – not even capitalism – is forever.23 Now, I would not want to say that smooth space is identical with Badiou’s conception of the Idea, but I do want to make the point that it is both conceptual and historical in nature. Take for example Deleuze and Guattari’s key exhibit, Paul Virilio’s concept of the ‘fleet in being’. At a certain point in history, naval commanders arrived at the idea that the ocean could be dominated by the superior mobility of forces and the power to interdict the mobility of others rather than through the control of fixed positions. This idea, which was fully an event in both Badiou’s and Deleuze’s terms, was communicated from sea to land to air to space. Now war in all its modalities is informed by this idea. There have been moments when this idea has seemed out of step with history. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan to sweep across Western Europe came horribly unstuck in 1914 when their planned war of mobility was unseated by the twin powers of the machine gun and barbed wire and turned into a standstill war of attrition claiming the lives of millions. But almost as soon as the first trenches were dug, the opposing forces began scheming to regain the power of mobility and within the space of a few years solutions were found: tanks and aeroplanes rendered the gridlocked space of the battlefield smooth all over again. In this way a new pattern of action was set in motion: striated space was to be defeated by technological advancement. But within a few decades, by the time of the Vietnam War, if not sooner, this model also came unstuck. Today, the incredible mobility of high-tech weapons is countered by the fluidity of the identity of the enemy. The unseen and unknown enemy compels the one who seeks them to give up at least some of their mobility for the apparent security of checkpoints and surveillance procedures. In each instance, the Idea of space dominated by mobility remains very much alive.24 It is this power – the power of an Idea as a force that shatters or cracks the status quo and lets in a new kind of light, one that hasn’t shone there before – that is the key to understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth space. Let me offer a different example that will hopefully bring it into even sharper relief. I would claim that smooth space is comparable to David Harvey’s conception of the urban commons. He argues that the

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2011 occupations of Syntagma Square in Athens, Tahrir Square in Cairo and the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona transformed these public places into latter-day variations of the medieval idea of the commons. Importantly, although these spaces are all physical places that one can go and visit, the urban commons itself is not; it is a social relation, and that is precisely how smooth space should be understood, I believe. Harvey writes: The common is not to be constructed, therefore, as a particular kind of thing, asset or even social process, but as an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular well-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/ or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood. There is, in effect, a social practice of commoning.25 The key to commoning, as Harvey sees it, is that it removes the relation between a group and a space from commodity exchange: the commons is off limits to the market. This amounts to saying the commons is a virtual space, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, and that the virtual space of the commons is produced by the occupiers of that space, which is an important clarification of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by smooth space. Virtual does not mean unreal, as Deleuze and Guattari often remind us. The virtual is fully real, as real as an idea, an image and an innovation is real. It is real because its effects are real. Here one might think of Jameson’s frequently made point about the need to keep alive what he calls the utopian imagination: without bold ideas for the future, that is, ideas which envisage a break – a disruption, as Jameson calls it – with the present state of affairs, we are condemned to simply let things continue as they are. And this, as Walter Benjamin rightly said, is the real emergency. The smooth space may not suffice to save us, as Deleuze and Guattari caution, but it does at least apply the handbrake to history and that may just be enough.

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Chapter 9 Schizoanalysis and Postmodern Space

‘We pay a heavy price for capitalizing on our basic animal mobility,’ writes Edward Casey and that price is ‘the loss of places that can serve as lasting scenes of experience and reflection and memory’.1 This loss is usually blamed on the proliferation of generic spaces – or, to use Marc Augé’s phrase, ‘non-places’ – like malls, airports, freeways, office parks and so forth, which prioritise cost and function over their look and feel. Even so, Casey still wants to argue that transitory spaces like airports retain a certain ‘placial’ quality that gives meaning to contemporary existence. In contrast, writers like Augé (he is by no means alone – Augé himself attributes the key elements of his idea of non-place to Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault) have in much recent writing on space sought to elucidate this new type of generic space’s distinct lack of placiality. These two positions are, however, simply two sides of the same conceptual coin – Augé does not conceive of a new type of place, he uses a traditional model of place to decry the seemingly soulless transformations to the built environment he witnesses everywhere in the developed world. By the same token, Casey acknowledges that these new spaces appear placeless, but that is only because one is not looking at them in the right way. His work then seeks to restore their seemingly lost placiality. Deleuze and Guattari ask us to rethink and where necessary reinvent place as a concept.

The emergence of an ‘any-space-whatever’ aesthetic ‘The modern fact’, as Deleuze put it, ‘is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.’2 The world Deleuze is speaking of is post-war Europe, a world of rubble, housing shortages, refugees and bold reconstructions. He is also speaking of the cinematic or virtual worlds created in this period, signalling their radical difference in construction and operation from the cinema that preceded this moment. Pre-war cinema was a cinema of belief or, better, a cinema that could be believed

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in; in the post-war period this was no longer true. The cinema had to confront a world that exceeded what cinema up to that point could contrive to present; it went beyond its limits. Why is the Second World War taken as a break? The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were ‘any spaces whatever’, deserted but uninhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.3 It is a world that has been emptied out, a world in which the people are missing. A world of any-space-whatever, not place. While it is true American cinema did not go down the same pathway as European cinema, it nevertheless confronted its own differently configured type of placelessness, or, rather, it generated its modulation of the same anxiety: that place had been destroyed. At this point in his history of cinema, Deleuze gives centre stage to the European directors. But even if Deleuze’s implication is true that no new aesthetic developments were occurring in Hollywood at this point, that does not mean that nothing of interest was happening. Indeed, it is widely agreed that the films Hitchcock made in this period are among his best, to which judgement I want to add that these films are also films about a very different kind of landscape. As Joan Didion put it: It was a peculiar and visionary time, those years after World War II to which the Malls and Towns and even Dales stand as climatecontrolled monuments . . . The frontier had been reinvented, and its shape was the subdivision, the new free land on which all the settlers could recast their lives tabula rasa.4 Hitchcock’s cinema helped shape the unsettling ‘feeling tone’ of this new unhomely era by perfecting what Deleuze calls a cinema of the ‘mental image’, that is, a cinema of the closed universe of the monad and the bunker.5 The worlds Hitchcock constructs in his films, especially the later ones, do look like ‘bad films’, but in that precise sense they anticipate the postmodern landscape of glitzy but standardised façades. It is a cinema of a ‘global style’ that could be anywhere and, as Rem Koolhaas puts it, has spread everywhere like a virus.6 Hitchcock’s films operate within highly contrived and closely observed buildings: the apartment block, the motel, the mansion, the terrace house

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at the end of the street (the ensuing claustrophobic atmosphere of constant surveillance is doubtless the element of his work that retains the most potent resonance in contemporary society). Hitchcock’s famous preference for sound stages over locations, back-projections and mattes instead of the ‘real’ thing, created a cinema of what (after Eco and Baudrillard), in contrast to Rossellini’s neo-realism, might be termed ‘hyperrealism’.7 It is an aesthetic of the ‘realer than the real’. There are any number of examples one could point to, but one of the more ironic (because of its ‘ruse of history’ undertone) is The Trouble with Harry (1955). According to Donald Spoto, Hitchcock deliberately set it in Vermont to capture the striking autumn colours. However, when he got to East Craftsbury in October 1954 to photograph it, he found he had been preceded by a storm and had to film indoors in a converted school gym prepared in case of inclement weather. The finishing touches were done on a sound stage in Hollywood using East Craftsbury leaves hand-pasted on to plaster trees.8 The outside world in Hitchcock is literally a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Hitchcock’s disdain for actors (he notoriously used to fall asleep during the actual filming of scenes), which Deleuze charitably describes in terms of an opposition to the Actors Studio, is clearly of a piece with this.9 If one must speak of a break between Hitchcock and Rossellini it is because Hitchcock could not reconnect the severed link between humanity and the world; his characters persist ‘in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation’.10 His worlds, like shopping malls, are interiors whose aim is to eliminate the desire for the outside by reproducing it in facsimile: everything within is related at the price of there being no relations without.11 This closed-off world is difficult to sustain and as Deleuze argues some of Hitchcock’s best films give us a glimpse of the ways in which the mental image would be pushed into a crisis. Vertigo [1958] communicates a genuine image to us; and, certainly, what is vertiginous, is, in the heroine’s heart, the relation of the Same with the Same which passes through all the variations of its relations with others (the dead woman, the husband, the inspector). But we cannot forget the other, more ordinary, vertigo – that of the inspector who is incapable of climbing the bell-tower staircase, living in a strange state of contemplation which is communicated to the whole film and which is rare in Hitchcock.12 The Bates motel is a relic of an older ‘placial’ mode of spatiality, one that is nostalgically filled with all the qualities supposedly lost to us now that motels belong to freeways not towns, now that they are part of a spatial network, which may span the globe, rather than places in their own right. Chain

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motels like Howard Johnson’s began to take a hold of the American landscape in this period too, precisely by promising an end to particularity, to place-specific motels with idiosyncratic characteristics. The new chain motel guaranteed an end to the variations in motel fittings and fit-out old-style travellers like Humbert Humbert speak of, at once knowingly and ironically. We came to know – nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation – the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as ‘shaded’ or ‘spacious’ or ‘landscaped’ grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of fried-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except ‘good beds’), and unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (‘. . . well, I could give you . . .’) turned down.13 Lolita (1955) is, among other things, an ironic paean to a rapidly disappearing kind of place, namely the kind of place the Bates motel is, a spatial native, a highly localised, albeit still generic, species of place. At least part of the thrill of Psycho is the familiar fear it evokes of the unexpected that dominated travel in the age before chain motels. It confirms the suspicion ‘we moderns’ have been taught to harbour that such unbranded places are at best uncongenial and at worst unsafe. Humbert is in this respect perfectly modern: he is not the least sentimental about the out-of-the-way places he goes to, although he is occasionally moved to regret not really remembering where exactly he’d been, nor what he’d seen – ‘We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.’14 He is not a tourist as such, but a nomad moving ceaselessly in order to stay put in the smooth any-space-whatever of the cloistered motel room. Like Norman Bates, he has a horror of the family home because he knows full well his particular fantasy cannot be enacted there. Not surprisingly, Humbert expresses a strong preference for the streamlined spaces that were even then replacing the eccentric places described above: ‘To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel – clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love.’15 What he looked for were spaces where the idiosyncrasies of place (noises, smells and assorted other discomforts and distractions) did not intrude on his designs. As Deleuze narrates it, then, what emerges in the years following World War II are two separate but dialectically connected cinematic traditions: a European tradition of any-spaces-whatever and (by implication) a Hollywood tradition of non-places – or, to put it another way, a neo-realism

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of the bombed-out city and a hyperrealism of suburban monoculture. This hyperrealism should not be read as a kind of intensified verisimilitude or the cinematic equivalent of photorealism. I’m not suggesting that Hitchcock’s cinema captures the truth of postmodern space in a representational sense. On the contrary, I’m suggesting his cinema has helped create the unthought recording surface on which much writing about, and indeed film-making in response to, postmodern space takes place – it was his cinema that taught us to think of the motel, the suburban family home and so on as places of anxiety; he did so precisely by showing us that these places aren’t as homely as we’d like to assume. Of course, Hitchcock didn’t act alone, but we find encapsulated in his work the potent feeling that place isn’t placial anymore; it is unsettling, unhomely, fearful, empty, lacking human dimension.

Abstract machine At least part of the shock of Fredric Jameson’s programme essay on postmodernism stemmed from its willingness to pronounce this new space of hotels and malls uninhabitable.16 His entire argument can be understood as an attempt to describe a new kind of space that puts the old or received spatial sense in question, leaving us unsure of how to act or feel in the face of such radical transformations in the built environment as the Bonaventure Hotel appeared to betoken. While much of his discussion of this space centres on its architectural attributes, which are to him in equal parts striking and banal, it is the emergence of a total space of shopping that he is at most pains to document.17 The Bonaventure Hotel, which sits on top of a sixstorey shopping mall, plus ubiquitous food court, offers a telling example of the way in which the built environment follows the postmodern dictate that all aspects of everyday life can and should be made to generate surplus value. Every aspect of life – eating, sleeping, shitting, fucking and so on – can take place within its confines for a price. As Sharon Zukin argues in her history of this transformation of the American landscape, the spread of the suburban shopping mall previewed the post-boom landscape inasmuch as – as we now know – spaces of consumption (rather than manufacturing, growing or indeed simply living) would dominate and indeed determine our sense of place.18 In Deleuze’s terms, the mall is an abstract machine – it is an ideal form that is actualised in a variety of assemblages. Central to the abstract machine is the distinction between form of content and form of expression Deleuze and Guattari draw from Hjelmslev.19 Deleuze and Guattari refer us to Foucault’s analysis of the prison for an example of how this kind of analysis works. The prison is a form of content and is related to other forms of

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content (schools, barracks, hospitals, factories and so on). But this form does not refer to the word ‘prison’ for its sense, but to an entirely different set of statements to do with the discourse of ‘delinquency’. Delinquency is a form of expression articulating a new way of translating, classifying, stating and ultimately even committing criminal acts. The form of expression cannot be reduced to words – it refers to statements arising in the social field. By the same token, the form of content is not reducible to a thing, or set of things; it refers to a machinic assemblage (rather than to a state of affairs) comprising architecture, discipline and so on. Ultimately, we can say that there are two constantly intersecting fields here, one a discursive multiplicity of expression, and the other a non-discursive multiplicity of content. But ‘it is even more complex than that’ because these two terms each have their own microhistories, but they also make other kinds of connections to other kinds of formalisations. At most, Deleuze and Guattari say, they share an implied state of the abstract machine.20 Writing about postmodernism has tended to concentrate on the form of expression – the very word ‘postmodernism’ is an example par excellence of a form of expression. Expression refers to the production of what Deleuze and Guattari (following Foucault) call statements. Theorists as diverse as Meaghan Morris, John Fiske, Rob Shields and Anne Friedberg, as well as many others, have tended to focus the debate on the question of what is the proper statement for the mall – banality, resistance, panopticism and so on. What makes Jameson’s approach different is that he not only discusses the form of expression, he also attempts to isolate the form of content of the mall, namely the creation of a new total space of consumerism that not only seeks to incorporate everything under one roof, but actively seeks to exclude or denigrate the world beyond its walls. The mall is a supreme example of what Rebecca Solnit has aptly described as the propagation of monoculture.21 Her analogy is derived from agriculture and essentially depicts a situation in which a single ‘cash’ crop is grown to the exclusion of all other crops and ruthlessly defended using every available means. All the available evidence now suggests that in spite of its appearance of high productivity the monocultural approach is not only ecologically disastrous, it is also commercially disastrous: it is highly prone to bacterial and insect infestation and therefore reliant on increasingly expensive pesticides, and it is at the constant mercy of commodity prices without a plan B. As a form, the mall promotes a single objective: the sale of consumer goods and services. Unlike the city, the mall is not a shared space – it has a single governing body reporting to a corporation which in turn reports to shareholders; unlike the city, it is not a mixed-use space – it is a single-use space, shopping and not-shopping are simply opposite sides of the same coin; unlike the city, the mall has no residents – it is a space for customers and

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employees only; unlike the city, the mall does not command our love and pride, it only wants our business. It is the proliferation of this form that I am suggesting has been a primary shaping force with respect to the shape and feel of contemporary space. Despite the naïve celebrations of the ‘pleasures’ afforded ordinary citizenry by shopping malls, and the still more naïve accounts of the possibilities of resistance to be found within their windowless walls, the reality is that their triumph came at the expense of previous models of coherent connection between population and place. They are not the organic product of economic growth in a community, but transplants from afar that settle into an area with no more care for the local than any foreign invader has. The regional shopping centre looks in retrospect like the inevitable outcome of mass automobile ownership and suburban growth, but its emergence in the 1950s was a dramatic event. Newspapers wrote glowingly about the advantages of ‘markets in the meadows’: places totally planned for the consumer that made more sense than the helter-skelter competition of the average Main Street.22 As Baudrillard astutely observed, the mall-form functions as a nucleus around which the new, still-to-be-built suburb eventually settles like so much kipple.23 Wal-Mart, currently the largest corporation in the world (its 2003 net worth was a staggering $US258 billion, its revenues amounting to 2 per cent of US GDP), took this strategy a step further in the 1950s and concentrated on towns with populations under 5,000, effectively turning them into satellites of its superstores.24 With no other competition in sight, these stores effectively sucked the life out of the town’s commercial districts, small and fragile as they were, and refocused the flow of traffic and funds in the direction of an ugly bunker situated in an airfield-sized car park at the outer edge of the town. The advent of the freeway system brought an end to point-to-point travel; journeys no longer plotted a route from town to town, but instead pursued a transversal line of pure speed. The mall was an integral part of this system, displacing the town centre almost completely within a few years, only for it to reappear in fantasy form in Walt Disney’s homage to a vanishing America, Disneyland. Malls occupy those spaces in the city where the factors we associate with place either have ceased to operate or (more usually) are vulnerable to predatory reinterpretation. The mall took the beating heart of the city – the crowds, the big variety stores, the small speciality stores, the eclectic eateries – and transplanted it in greenfield and brownfield sites sure in the knowledge that the people would come. But not all people, since one of its most potent attractions was and continues to be its promise

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of social homogenisation. As a privately owned space, the mall is selective about who it permits to use its space. Although it may appear public in character, the mall is not given to the public to use; it is rather ‘open’ to the public, providing they agree to abide by its rules – no skating, no chewing gum, no smoking, no drinking, no loitering and so on. Its commercial success is built on a series of what Zukin calls ‘abstractions’.25 She has in mind both architectural abstractions – visual adumbrations of the city’s iconography – and what might be thought of as abstractions of some, at least, of its more typical sensual pleasures, particularly those of the palate. I specified the visual here because the mall’s real breakthroughs in architectural terms lay elsewhere.26 Rem Koolhaas claims the mallapparatus hinges on three innovations for its efficacy: air-conditioning, the escalator and the automatic fire-sprinkler – to which one may add the barcode and the brand, which although not architectural in themselves have had an enormous impact on the architecture of the mall. The barcode revolutionised inventory control, while the brand means products display themselves – the old idea of the department store, modelled on the museum, was that spaces had to be created to display goods in an attractive light. The buildings themselves had to be magnificent to compensate for the shabby mercantilist dealings within (e.g. Harrods in London, Magasin du Nord in Copenhagen). This is patently not the way of postmodern supermarkets, which stack products floor to ceiling. Their display occurs in the virtual space of TV and billboards, their branding functioning, then, as a synecdoche of these images. The mall’s success as an apparatus of consumption hinges to a large degree on the canny way in which it has created a form that can be decorated in such a way as to recollect the city minus its actual grittiness, smells, noise – in short, any of its typical characteristics. In this sense, it is perhaps more precise to say it recollects a movie of a city, rather than an actual city, and doubtless part of its appeal lies in the fact that to walk through a mall is like walking through not a movie set as such, but the virtual world the movie projects as a necessary condition to its cognition. Abstraction, of the type Zukin talks about, can be seen in the Trafford Centre mall that John Urry discusses in The Tourist Gaze. As can clearly be seen in the image he reproduces, it encases within its featureless walls a facsimile New Orleans streetscape replete with iron balustrades, French windows, gas lamps and ivy cascading from balcony planter boxes, but without the litter, horse dung, stale urine, drunks passed out in doorways, panhandlers and prostitutes of the actual French Quarter. One cannot help but note in Urry’s photo the ubiquitous presence of Starbucks, also very much at home in the real New Orleans.27 If one were to revive an outmoded critical discourse and ask which of the two spaces – the mall

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or the city – is the more authentic, the answer wouldn’t be as easy to determine as one might expect. The French Quarter, today, although it continues to exude many of the same smells as it did when it was playground to the thousands of boilermakers and stevedores labouring in its shipyards and wharves, is nevertheless a Disneyfied facsimile of itself – an ‘adults only’ theme park. Indeed, these days Jackson’s Brewery is literally a shopping mall. The waterfront has been converted into a bicycle path and the eateries in the Quarter have gone so far upmarket none but the middle class can afford an ‘authentic’ po’ boy. Now that the Quarter is girded by the postmodern equivalent of the Maginot Line, a vast grey curtain of dour concrete superbunkers variously kitted out as a convention centre, casino, this or that chain hotel, and last but not least the superdome, the only people who visit the Quarter these days are middle-class tourists of that peculiarly American kind: conventioneers, sports fans and retirees. In this sense, New Orleans represents the apotheosis of the logic of the mall.

Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation What follows is an attempt to show how the concepts of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ might be used to understand, for example, that what makes the Bonaventure a postmodern building is precisely the fact that it was built as part of an earnest programme to transform Los Angeles into a business centre to rival San Francisco, and not simply its architecture.28 It isn’t the look of the building that is postmodern so much as the willingness to displace the ‘wild’ city in favour of a ‘monoculture’. Although Jameson doesn’t put it this way himself, his later reading of the transformation of New York City’s downtown makes essentially this argument: it is not the buildings, finally, that are postmodern; what is postmodern is the willingness to transform a city (creatively destroy it) as a whole in order to revitalise it as a source of surplus value. While it is customary to celebrate the architects for their creative work, it is not the architects but the city-planners (the regulators who make and police zoning laws, land taxes and so on), and behind them the financiers who reap value from these laws, who are the real visionaries, the true mechanics of space, for they are the ones who create the context in which the new structure will work.29 In spite of what many people (Deleuzians among them) seem to think, reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation are not a binary pair: reterritorialisation is not the opposite of deterritorialisation. As such, one must be wary of shorthand attempts to define them with reference to a logic of either opening and closing or detachment and reattachment because, intended or not, this cannot but instil the idea that they are a binary pair after all.30 It is true Deleuze and Guattari do say that every deterritorialisation is followed

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by an accompanying reterritorialisation, but the one (deterritorialisation) does not spontaneously give rise to the other (reterritorialisation) as Keith Ansell Pearson implies.31 Similarly, territory, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation do form a ternary structure as such.32 Also to be resisted, even though it is in fact very close to the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari’s intent, is Jameson’s claim that ‘its first and as it were foundational meaning lies in’ the emergence of capitalism itself; this was, he continues, ‘the first and the most fateful deterritorialisation’.33 This definition hypostatises deterritorialisation as an event, when it is an ongoing, continuous process, a constant force (to use the not unrelated Lacanian language of the drives).34 Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is ‘the thing, the unnameable, the generalised decoding of flows that reveals a contrario the secret of all [social] formations’ that stands at the end of history enabling us to read history retrospectively in its light. It is not the first deterritorialisation, but the last. The first was in fact the coming of the State form, but in one respect Jameson is right in saying capitalism was the first because, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, it ‘cannot be said that the previous formations did not foresee this Thing that only came from without by rising from within, and that at all costs had to be prevented from rising’.35 Before Derrida coined the word ‘hauntology’ the concept was already – albeit namelessly – operating in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.36 Capitalism is synonymous with the breakdown of the social conceived as a ‘territorial machine’ which connects a people to an earth (body without organs) by means of inscription, but not the actual cause. Capitalism was able to come into being because of the propensity for deterritorialisation inherent in every social system: it is in effect the product not the cause of deterritorialisation. ‘In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as a terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that eludes their code.’37 In this respect, Jameson is also correct to describe it as fateful, for in its dissolute, decoded state, it is the end primitive societies feared and worked consciously to avoid. The coding of desire and the fear of decoded desire ‘is the business of the socius’.38 The ‘essential thing is to mark and be marked,’ Deleuze and Guattari say, and what they mean by this is that all ‘organs’ (anything capable of producing or interrupting a flow – signs, status, women, children, herds, seeds, sperm, shit and menstrual blood can all be conceived as ‘flows’) must be subject to a collective investment that ‘plugs desire into the socius and assembles social production and desiringproduction into a whole on the earth’.39 Territoriality is not a ‘placial’ concept. Deleuze and Guattari quite explicitly rule this out. If territoriality ‘is taken to mean a principle of residence or of geographic distribution, it is obvious that the primitive social machine is not territorial’.40 The territorial machine does not divide land,

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it divides people, ‘but does so on an indivisible earth where the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive relations of each section are inscribed’.41 The earth, a great, immanent, unengendered unity, is the space where our soul (in Foucault’s sense of the term) circulates; it is the thing to which we pledge allegiance and attach ourselves and more especially our organs by means of ritual and bodily marks, but it also appears to us as our origin, where we came from, our mother, our memory. ‘These are the two aspects of the full body: an enchanted surface of inscription, the fantastic law, or the apparent objective movement; but also a magical agent or fetish, the quasi cause.’42 Let me try, then, to give deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation a more concrete meaning: land value and ground rent create a powerful, contradictory motor for urban development. Zoning laws are designed to protect land values, but their efficacy is dependent upon ground rent, which is where the problem lies. If ground rent is a form of value mortgaged on the future surplus value of the labour performed on that site, it is essentially a highly coded form of value dependent upon a structure of equivalence that in an era of such rapid technological change as we are in now is a very uncertain proposition indeed. Futurists are constantly predicting that most or all of the jobs we will be performing two or three decades from now have yet to be invented. But if that is not risky enough, ground rent also faces competition from land value itself, which isn’t tied to labour in any determinate fashion and may rise or fall according to its own inner logic. It is, in this sense, the classic example of a deterritorialising force – if it is allowed to run free it can literally destroy a city, whereas ground rent is a steady engine of growth (the shopping mall is the example par excellence of this, and for this very reason its rapid rise to prominence as a new cultural form was largely financed by pension funds in search of stable, non-speculative investments).43 Capitalism has at its disposal two means (axioms) of ‘overcoding’ the free flow of ground rent: (1) zoning laws, and (2) land tax. Zoning laws exert pressure on land value by regulating the supply (increasing the residency rating of a suburb increases the number of houses or dwellings that may be located there – the effect of this on price varies because in a poor suburb it may provoke the view that it is tending towards a slum, whereas in a middle-class suburb it will increase the value of the land because it enables ‘development’), while land taxes exert pressure on land value by regulating demand (reducing the taxes generally increases demand, while raising taxes will tend to slow demand). These two instruments are used in combination by city governors to at least preserve value, but more importantly to maintain structural equilibrium. If production is profitable and property values fall, this can be a serious problem if the production

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process is underwritten by loans guaranteed against the land value of the factory site itself. By the same token, if land values appreciate too much the economics of production itself ceases to make sense – if the land turns a profit without producing anything, why continue to produce? In both instances, the company involved may choose to exit the city, which if the company is big enough or it occurs on a sector-wide scale can be disastrous for the city. The point I want to make here is that deterritorialisation isn’t a placial concept, but rather an inherent property of the notion of value itself. But more importantly, the example above brings to our attention the essential matrix of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking: on the one hand, property value in isolation is an intensity, it moves up and down a sliding scale seemingly of its own accord; on the other hand, when viewed in the context of a city as a whole, its effects are felt in extension, even though it remains an intensity. Supply and demand are tensors of value, not creators of value. Value is like wind velocity, air pressure, temperature and so on – indivisible. If a bucket of water is forty degrees Celsius and you tip half out, you’ll have half a bucket of water left, but it will still be forty degrees Celsius. Or, to give a different example, if you take a five dollar note and tear it in half you won’t get two times two fifty; indeed, if you set fire to it, you don’t necessarily end up with zero either. The value of money is an intensity. This doesn’t mean, however, that intensities are not subject to change or somehow protected from the effects of their environment. Water can obviously be heated up and cooled down by a variety of means and likewise one can heat up an economy and thereby affect the value of money. Hot water in an airtight container isn’t dangerous, but spilled on unprotected flesh it can scald and even kill; money in a closed economy (such as China used to have) is similarly benign, but when placed in an international exchange context it becomes vulnerable to fluctuation and in turn jeopardises the livelihoods of the people who rely on it – if the value falls too far or, worse, too fast, it leads to impossible trade deficits and debt burdens, yet if it rises too far or too fast it can cripple exports and trigger an import bonanza.

Schizoanalysis and the city We are still a long way from being able to say what a Deleuzian analysis – that is, schizoanalysis – of space might, much less should, look like. We need to return to Deleuze in the Lacanian sense, that is, return to the analytic situation itself. This gesture is not at all foreign to Deleuze. His frequent insistence that we should start with problems, that philosophers must be allowed to ask their own questions, and so on, means nothing

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other than this: the analytic situation of the philosopher is precisely the creation of problems and their associated concepts. The parallel with Lacan can be brought a little closer too. In his book on Bacon, Deleuze writes of the clinical underpinnings of concepts, thus nudging us in the direction of the analytic situation as Lacan conceives it. Is this not what Guattari brought to the collaboration? Many readers of Deleuze object to the very idea that some kind of analytic programme of action might be elaborated in his name. While I am sympathetic to the anarchic spirit underpinning this view of Deleuze, it is not supported in Deleuze’s own work. He is quite explicit in saying that he wanted to create a practical, useful form of philosophy. This is what he meant when he said Anti-Oedipus is an experiment in writing Pop Philosophy.

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Chapter 10 Space in the Age of Non-Place

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Swimming through In Critique de la vie quotidienne 1: Introduction, published in 1947, Henri Lefebvre drew together two concepts which are now effectively inseparable in studies of the human environment, namely space and everyday life. He conceived this relation dialectically such that the everyday and space are never in step but always somehow out of kilter, either because the built environment has not taken account of history (‘Notes on the New Town’) or because as modern subjects we have forgotten how to connect to history (‘Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside’).1 In the several decades since, a number of scholars have followed Lefebvre both in maintaining the link between these two concepts and in their essential estrangement, albeit with quite different ideological agenda in mind. Jean Baudrillard (Lefebvre’s former research assistant), Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord and Marc Augé all owe an obvious debt to Lefebvre. Deleuze and Guattari are sometimes taken to be part of this lineage too, but their fit is not an easy one. Discussions of Deleuze and Guattari’s place in this particular canon are to be found in the work of cultural geographers such as Nigel Thrift, Derek Gregory and Edward Soja, philosophers like Edward Casey and political scientists like William Connolly, but by pathologising the everyday in the way they do, Deleuze and Guattari stand apart from the majority of theorists interested in the nexus between the everyday and the built environment who are, for the most part, not even prepared to use a term like schizophrenia as a metaphor. Fredric Jameson is a notable exception to this rule, but he nonetheless very cautiously frames his deployment of schizophrenia as ‘description rather than diagnosis’.2 For the most part, contemporary human geography quite willingly embraces the first part of

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Lefebvre’s critical dyad, namely that built space has eroded our connection with history (on this score Rebecca Solnit astutely argues that memorialisation is the most pernicious form of urban erasure since it pretends to preserve the formerly living-breathing thing it now symbolises), but has been much slower in grappling with the second pole, except in quite banal ways.3 I suspect the reason for this is that no one is willing to make the former the cause of the latter, yet cannot see how to think the connection differently. In the context of this problematic Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that the schizophrenic lives history, but has lost the luxury of the distance of historicity, is an important advance in thinking about space and everyday life in contemporary society. The persistence of the notion of historicity as a kind of distance that enables the self to perceive itself in the third person can be seen even in those texts such as Anthony Giddens’s highly influential The Consequences of Modernity (1990) and Fredric Jameson’s equally seminal Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which are premised on the loss of historicity. It recurs in the form of a delirious ‘I feel’. Giddens’s narrative describes a process of ‘disembedding’ whereby ‘we’ have been evicted from the world, making it impossible to experience it in the same way as our (allegedly) more autochthonous forebears. The fresh produce with which we provision ourselves is no longer grown by us; indeed, even if we buy it from the local village market it is unlikely to have all been grown locally. At my own supermarket I can buy imported Mexican mangoes, New Zealand kiwi fruit, dates from Israel and bananas from Brazil. What we take for granted as our everyday is the result of an incredible and historically recent process of globalisation. For good or ill, without it, even something so mundane as a mango salad for my evening meal would not be possible. And although most of us embrace the opportunities globalisation affords us, we nonetheless continue to sense and long for a past none of us has actually known when the connections were local, not global, and when the food on our plate was the result of our own toil in the garden. This is the world, as imaginary as it obviously is, that we have been evicted from by our own success in transforming our habitat. The longing underpinning this feeling of exile manifests itself in the form of an existential disorientation; we cannot seem to get our bearings in this brave new world without borders. Disorientation brought on by the disembedding process requires in its turn a compensating process of re-embedding to accommodate us to the alienatingly ‘faceless’ world of modernity. These processes, which Giddens collectively refers to as abstract systems of trust, are effectively what holds postmodern society together in the absence of stronger, more communal bonds. For Giddens, then, ‘we’ have scarcely changed at all in spite of the momentous shifts that have occurred in historical terms (new technology,

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new social structures, new modes of production, etc.); it is only our dayto-day circumstances that have changed, and although these changes have effectively redrawn the landscape of our everyday existence, they do not impinge on our constitution as subjects. They affect how we relate to ourselves, to our environment, and to each other, but at some fundamentally human level, we are not so very different from our pre-Industrial Revolution forebears in Giddens’s view. This can be seen in the persistence of our desire for modes of social bonding that social and historical change has rendered impossible.4 The disorientation we allegedly feel in the face of so much and such rapid change is evidence of our own stolidness, but also of the survival of historicity. It is as though we have stood as still as statues as the ground beneath our feet lurched into the new millennium. Jameson captures this paradox with unusual economy in his attempt to describe the effect of the Bonaventure Hotel as an instance of a new form of hyperspace – it calls on us, he says, to grow new organs.5 It’s like climate change – if you don’t adapt, you die – but just what changes are needed isn’t clear. Cyberpunk writers like William Gibson conjecture we’ll need more memory space to cope with the sensory overload, while bleaker prognosticians like Philip K. Dick see adaptability itself (whether to nuclear holocaust or alien invasion) as the key trait. Jameson too argues that we have not changed to keep pace with the times and that is why we find the contemporary world so dizzying. We were formed in an age whose coordinates were different, he argues, and because the changes are so rapid this continues to be true even of that marvellous generation unaware of a time before mobile phones and email. In both Jameson and Giddens, then, but in a range of other writers too, the existential quality of everyday life in postmodernity is theorised in terms of what it feels like to be trapped in a hallucinogenic space which in its newness seems literally other-worldly and for which no existing vernacular seems appropriate. As Jameson himself puts it, he is ‘at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself’ because the old language of ‘volume or volumes’ no longer applies. Rather, the language of immersion seems better suited to this paradoxically depthless space which he goes on to proclaim ‘has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself’.6 Elsewhere in his work (in an essay on Robert Stone, as it happens, not particularly concerned with space), he returns to the theme of immersion and shows it offers ‘a new kind of opening onto the ontology of earthly space’ for which the Heideggerian term Stimmung no longer seems either apposite or robust enough.7 In its place, he offers ‘sensorium’, a concept which canvasses a field Deleuze articulates in terms of sensation and affect. Jameson suggests the new space, like new machines, can only be represented in motion – but the fact he focuses on a hotel and

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narrates that experience as kind of swimming through (an image that recurs in Deleuze and Guattari8) perhaps indicates our analyses should extend in a different direction: it is rather the postmodern subject who has to be represented in motion, not postmodern space.9 We are doing the lurching, not the earth. Jameson’s description of his Bonaventure visit recollects those marvellous moments in science fiction (which obviously draw on travel literature of all types) when humans land on another planet and blithely describe it as strange and alien and never once think it might be them who is out of place.

Not a plane wreck, exactly, but . . . Obviously, it would be inaccurate to say that space hasn’t changed at all, but the focus on the mobility of the subject is, I want to suggest, the necessary key to understanding the ways in which it has changed. If it is finally true that space has transcended our capacity to get our bearings in it then that is because we have taken the logic of passing through to its logical extreme and created smooth, frictionless spaces that hurry the postmodern subject onward like a slippery slope.10 It has ‘geared you to keep you mobile’, as Michael Herr puts it in the section from his Vietnam memoir Jameson quotes to give us a sense of how postmodern space needs to be thought about.11 The essential lesson of one of the inaugural texts on postmodern space, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), is not so much architectural as existential, or rather the architectural lessons it has to offer derive from an existential standpoint which accepts the new space has its own authentic logic, albeit one not immediately apparent. Rather than bemoan the tacky, crass commercialism of the Strip, which is easy to do but scarcely instructive, the authors recommend a more autodidactic approach: ‘Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.’12 To begin with this means setting aside preconceptions about the urban habitat. The Las Vegas Strip is not a chaotic sprawl but a set of activities whose pattern, as with other cities, depends on the technology of movement and communication and the economic value of the land. We term it sprawl, because it is a new pattern we have not yet understood.13 The dominant mode of movement is obviously the car, but the question that should be asked at this point is whether (as is commonly assumed) the car has destroyed the city or, on the contrary, made it what it is. Speaking only of its architecture (they explicitly rule out making any judgements about what goes on in Las Vegas), Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s

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point is that the buildings in Vegas are designed to be perceived by an automobile culture. As such, the city’s architecture is, as they carefully calculate, built to a scale suited to being seen by a subject moving at speed. In this respect, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour echo and extend Reyner Banham’s summation of Los Angeles as a city monumentalised in its freeways. Freeways, he says, not buildings, define Los Angeles’s character spatially and existentially.14 Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch series of crime novels make this clear – all movement about the city is dictated by the rhythm of its freeway system. Its urban and architectural vernacular is a language of movement. The city will never be understood, Banham says, ‘by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life’.15 But one might still object that the automobile has ruined the city because priority has been given to the needs, but also the capabilities, of the car, when it could quite easily have been otherwise. Where Los Angeles is concerned, such remarks are usually the occasion to lament the passing of its streetcars, which disappeared in 1961 amid a great furore, and to denounce the scandalous lack of a workable public transport system despite the billions poured into the subway project.16 As Banham shows, it was the public transport system, the railways in particular, which in fuelling real estate speculation gave the city its shape. With the advent of the car, this design matrix did not have to be altered, and indeed many of the major thoroughfares sit atop the urban palimpsest of defunct rail lines.17 My implication is, from a design point of view, complaining about the car is a waste of breath. Los Angeles is a city of the automobile age – I’ll leave aside the question of whether or not that makes it an ‘autopia’ as Banham suggests, except to say I do not find much to disagree with in Rebecca Solnit’s suggestion that ‘what’s terrifying about these new urban landscapes is that they imply the possibility of a life lived as one long outtake’.18 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s argument is that the car made Las Vegas, so decrying its deleterious effects (as Mike Davis quite rightly does, speaking from an environmental sustainability perspective rather than an urban design point of view) is to forget the city’s origins. Las Vegas owes its very existence to movement. Although the Strip and adjoining freeways are now experiencing the seemingly inexorable law of diminishing returns suffered by all freeways and know the kind of congestion that results in such frustrating ironies as it taking longer to get from McCarran Airport by taxi to the Strip than it does to fly there from Los Angeles, the fact remains that at its inception it was a parking lot, a place to stop for soldiers and truck drivers on transcontinental journeys.19 Davis describes its urban design as having ‘the apparent logic of a plane wreck’.20 Hyperbole aside, this captures at least the spirit of the place. No one would have thought of stopping in Las

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Vegas – unless their car broke down, or they needed fuel – before the casinos were built, when it was just heat, dust and cacti. And even then, in the beginning at least, the stops were unplanned, impromptu, if not accidental. There where nothing was expected to be there were gaudy neon signs and the promise of air-conditioning, cold beer and, if not a good time, then at least not restless, empty time in a neither-here-nor-there roadside motel. Las Vegas has never been a walkable city. Walking is done indoors in barn-sized casinos and super-sized shopping malls that replicate other places in a manner that has become synonymous with Las Vegas itself. Not a plane wreck exactly, but still unexpected, unplanned for, built for the moment without much of a thought for the future.21 Like flies complaining that the flypaper doesn’t have the same hold it used to, critics seem only to be able to write about postmodern space in terms of its failure to engage them. Whether the point of reference is Los Angeles, widely championed as the city whose present most closely resembles the planet’s imagined overpopulated, hyper-consuming, cardominated future, or Las Vegas, the Ginza or Potsdamer Platz, descriptions of postmodern spaces are invariably generated via the matrix of a confusion about what it feels like to live in them, or more often the conviction that such places are essentially unliveable.22 Indeed, one could go so far as to suggest the defining characteristic of a postmodern city, that is to say, precisely what sets it apart as postmodern, is not its decorated-shed architecture or plane-wreck urban design, but rather its intractability to habitation, or better yet dwelling (in Heidegger’s sense). These cities are, from an existential point of view, made of Teflon – they repel old-fashioned attempts to put down roots, ways of being that sink into the earth in search of a sturdy foundation on which to erect a new life. What is postmodern about this, as opposed to modern or classical, is that they resist dwelling not because they are too different, but on the contrary because they are too familiar, their lack of difference disconcerting us because after having travelled so great a distance as from Sydney to Los Angeles, say, we feel we deserve an encounter with otherness of the same intensity as Flaubert’s visit to the Orient. This, I gather, is what underpins Virilio and Lotringer’s claim that such journeys are ‘empty’ and ‘without destination’.23 The proliferation of sameness installs a blank, standardised, onelogo-fits-all opacity where one expected a deeply significant enigma. The Flauberts of today express their Orientalism not by fervidly fantasising about what goes on behind closed curtains, but in marvelling that ‘they’ve got McDonald’s’ too. Frictionless space designed to accelerate throughput will obviously not have the same affect as a more consciously arresting space, but that doesn’t warrant the conclusion it is either affectless or ineffable. Yet this view has a wide currency as is evident in the

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often evoked complaint that although generally attractive to tourists, postmodern cities (as opposed to iconic postmodern buildings) are frequently characterised as leaving their visitors disappointed because they do not bestow a lasting sense of having been there. We can sense the fear of disappointment in the hyperbole of the promotional literature which invariably promises an experience that will last a lifetime. But why we should be disappointed is not clear. Indeed, exactly what the feeling of having been there should be like is unclear. Most mysterious of all is the prejudice against speed (witness the comments from Virilio cited above) which is frequently decried as ruining travel even though it is obvious that it is the speed of jet travel that makes it possible in the first place. Speed is blamed for a disappointment spawned in all likelihood from the unrealised desire to have become Parisian for having visited Paris, however briefly, or a Berliner for having spent a night or two in Berlin, or a Melbournian for having holidayed there. I will return to this theme in a moment, but suffice it to say for now that I do not think this expectation is unreasonable or implausible, except that these life changes are meant only to add a layer of cosmopolitan varnish to an already wellwrought urn of subjectivity. Yet if a label like ‘Parisian’ has any substance, it must mean something more diverting than simply acquiring a chic veneer expressed as a taste for croissants or baguettes; it must imply a radical transformation of subjectivity for which Deleuze and Guattari’s term ‘deterritorialisation’ is obviously apt.

Postmodern Orientalism Although such transformations are often narrated as a discovery of oneself, it would be more accurate to think of them in terms of loss, or becomingimperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, by which they mean ceasing to stand out, ceasing to be perceived as different, looking like everybody else, merging with the landscape.24 The conclusion one might reach from the foregoing is that postmodern cities do not deterritorialise us in the way modern or pre-modern cities once did, but in fact the contrary would be true – even in his most rapturous moments Flaubert wasn’t deterritorialised by the Orient. It did not change him or open him to change. This was essentially Said’s point in Orientalism. Flaubert took his assumptions and fantasies about the Orient to Egypt and returned with them not only fully intact, but thoroughly affirmed. Said describes Flaubert’s Orientalism as ‘revivalist: he must bring the Orient to life, he must deliver it to his readers, and it is his experience of it in books and on the spot, and his language for it, that will do the trick’.25 Said rightly describes Flaubert’s writing as cliché ridden and filled with grotesquerie (the lingering hospital scenes Said quotes being especially overripe) but all importantly operating according to

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a discernible logic or, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, code. Flaubert writes in the expectation that his account of the Orient will be understood in a very particular manner; veils, hookahs, dates – the most mundane items betoken a fantasy world Flaubert is confident his readers will recognise and want to share. Effectively Said’s purpose in Orientalism is to explain how this coding was formulated, disseminated and ultimately naturalised. It is instructive to compare Said’s account of nineteenth-century Orientalism with Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality written in 1975, still a couple of years before the term ‘postmodern’ gained the currency and particular valence it has today.26 Flaubert, as have many travel writers before and since, approaches the Orient as a layered space, a space that has a surface which is visible without being legible; it can be seen but its significance escapes the untutored or unsympathetic eye, and it has a depth which is invisible, but nonetheless legible to the cognoscenti. The surface is blank unless you know how to decipher its code.27 The hospital scenes that so repel and fascinate Flaubert are, to him at least, signs of an inglorious, dangerous, but clearly voluptuous oriental decadence. The clinical precision of his description, repressing as it does any expression of sympathy or sentiment which might betray his desire, deliberately condemns significance to the depths of the unseen. In this respect, one might venture the hypothesis that Orientalism is to travel what Oedipus is to psychoanalysis; it presupposes and at the same time makes legible a subterranean other world of significance. But if this is so then, as Deleuze and Guattari say of Oedipus, attacking it is pointless since it is merely a screen behind which real desiring-production goes about its business. This blank surface/legible depth dualism is reproduced in the various theories of travel and travelling that try to distinguish between travellers and tourists, the latter portrayed by the former as unenlightened souls unable to detect the deeper meaning of things.28 Evidently this dualism is becoming more and more difficult to sustain. Postmodern space does not seem to yield the depth of meaning its antecedents did. This is what makes Eco’s book such a fantastic artefact; it is perhaps the last of its kind, a genuine but ultimately failed attempt to read the space of postmodernity. Eco approaches America as a country with two faces, or rather two places – one well known and public and another one hidden in plain sight. The depth is only just below the surface in Eco’s appraisal of America, but it is hidden all the same. Cultivated Europeans and Europeanized Americans think of the United States as the home of the glass-and-steel skyscraper and of abstract expressionism. But the United States is also the home of Superman, the superhuman comic-strip hero who has been in existence since 1938.29

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Revealing his versatility, Oedipus takes on the guise of Americanism in Eco’s writing; it is that which he must explain, but also presuppose, in order to enlighten his cultivated European and Europeanised readers. His writing, too, observes a kind of clinical detachment, both to ensure the accuracy of his observations, and to secure him from the charge of having somehow crossed over and become the thing he describes: American. Superman is not chosen at random, however; he is not simply a ubiquitous item of Americana in Eco’s hands of a piece with apple pie and football. It is Superman’s mountainous hideaway the Fortress of Solitude, where the man-of-steel goes when he needs to be alone and ‘work through’ his Kryptonian otherness, perhaps, that attracts Eco’s keen eye. ‘For Superman the fortress is a museum of memories: Everything that has happened in his adventurous life is recorded here in perfect copies or preserved in a miniaturised form of the original.’30 Resembling a baroque Wunderkammern, the fortress is the one place where Superman can be himself, an alien whose past has been obliterated. Eco suspects the average American reader, in contrast to himself, cannot see the significance of this private museum and doubtless would have difficulty connecting it to American tastes and sensibilities. And yet in America there are many Fortresses of Solitude, with their wax statues, their automata, their collections of inconsequential wonders. You have only to go beyond the Museum of Modern Art and the art galleries, and you enter another universe, the preserve of the average family, the tourist, the politician.31 Outside the museums where European culture is kept in quarantine, contained as much by the label ‘high art’ as by the walls, there are other places, quintessentially American or rather Americanist places that Americans themselves cannot see as such. In Eco’s work there is the same expectation as in Flaubert’s that space be coded, but in its frustrated form. There seems not to be any depth to American culture. Eco’s theory of the hyperreal is an attempt to articulate the logic of the code he assumes must be there but can’t ever quite convince himself actually exists. His suspicion is that it is simply and only hollow commercialism. ‘Baroque rhetoric, eclectic frenzy, and compulsive imitation prevail where wealth has no history.’32 Hyperreality does not finally disclose the hidden depth of the America Eco wants to convey in the same way that Orientalism functions for Flaubert. The difference is obvious. For a start, Flaubert did not have to invent Orientalism to explain himself; it was ready-to-hand and already widely accepted and understood. By contrast, Eco is trying to explain a new kind of affect generated by a new kind of space for

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which commercialism is perhaps an already adequate explanation, but it is one that as Deleuze and Guattari might put it cannot be avowed. Eco feels compelled to invent something that can be believed in; the original American title of his volume of essays – ‘Faith in Fakes’ – is telling in this regard. Ultimately, the biggest piece of fakery one encounters in Eco’s text is this theory, which is not to say he was not sincere in elaborating it. Hyperreality, like Oedipus, is what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘dishonoured representative’ – it is a construct whose sole purpose is to attract our guilt and bile, to seduce desire into throwing in its lot with interest. The postmodern traveller like Eco – but more especially Marc Augé, as I will show in a moment – who complains that new spaces are not as meaningful is essentially complaining that these spaces aren’t coded. That is why the schizo is a better model than the neurotic on the couch; the latter dwells in coded space (in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, everything in psychoanalysis reduces to a mummy-daddy-me code, so little Richard’s toy train has to be daddy, the station mummy, and so on). Augé’s work is not only emblematic of the way thinking and writing about contemporary society has (since the early 1980s) produced descriptions of space that derive from a professed inability to connect to or properly describe the experiences the space itself makes available, it also offers a glimpse of the ‘abstract machine’ at work in such descriptions. While the hypermobility of the postmodern subject has, as I have argued above, changed the way we experience space, our accounts of space do not yet reflect an awareness of this mobility. In Augé we perhaps see the reason behind this lag or disconnection between space and everyday life: mobility functions as an abstract machine, influencing thinking without being itself thinkable. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the abstract machine materialises when we least expect it – its signal feeling (I use this term deliberately, as for Deleuze and Guattari ‘I feel’ rather than ‘I see’ or ‘I think’ is the form taken by delirium) is: whatever could have happened for things to come to this?33

Non-place I like to imagine that on the fateful morning of 20 July 1984 which Marc Augé narrates with such careful introspection in La Traversée du Luxembourg, the author experienced what his former teacher Michel de Certeau called a ‘shattering’ (éclatement), or what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘cracking’ (craquement). He rolls out of bed at 7am, taking care as usual not to put the wrong foot forward, then wanders slowly, and, frankly, a little painfully, into the kitchen to make coffee. There, still a little sleepy, he muses dreamily about the day ahead, a lecture to be given in Palermo, while in the background, his bedside radio conveys in blank tones the news of the

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day – catastrophes in the Middle East, the Tour de France leaderboard, a recent Gallup poll, and so forth. At some point, maybe while he is showering, it occurs to him that contemporary life is truly marvellous in the old-fashioned sense of the term, something literally to be marvelled at. Brazilian coffee fuels a mind half-asleep in Paris but already half-way to Sicily. Although he is yet to leave the house, he is up to date with the latest goings-on in Parisian politics and the Far East. But, he thinks to himself, it is getting harder each day to decide where the near ends and the far begins; inside and outside, too, have lost most of their meaning, as has public and private, owing to the well-nigh ‘divine invasion’ (to use Philip K. Dick’s phrase) of the mass media, which transgresses all the old boundary lines. What he is starting to realise, perhaps only dimly at first – he has only just woken up, after all – is that the everyday, even at its most banal levels, is in fact utterly remarkable. He is not the first to have had this thought, by any means; after all, it is at the centre of everything the surrealists and the situationists did. But its effect on his thinking is perhaps more shattering than it was for any of his predecessors (Lefebvre, Debord and de Certeau) because of the apparently fatal implication it betokens for his profession, anthropology, which even to the trained eye appears suited only to the analysis of carefully circumscribed villages in faraway places. Since today it no longer seems possible to either de-link oneself from the network of relations we call globalisation or find a place out of the way enough not to have been penetrated by it (in the guise of either tourism or finance capitalism, or both), it is a mode of inquiry whose object has for all intents and purposes vanished. We live in a world without others, Augé suddenly thinks, and it is a world in which anthropology will find it hard to retain a place. If the truism that one is defined by one’s professional expertise holds fast, then in noting that anthropology’s object has all but disappeared, Augé could scarcely have avoided wondering just where that left him. What may have begun as an idle reverie must suddenly have taken a shattering turn. The intensity of La Traversée du Luxembourg we can now understand is that of a man no longer certain of his existence – it minutely records the thoughts and reflections of a man who has begun to feel he isn’t quite there anymore. In the manner of Joyce’s Ulysses, then, it attempts to avert a descent into nothingness, that is, the abject meaninglessness of the everyday in its most mundane detail, even as it embraces it as its necessary condition, by elevating the notion of the day into an epic construct in its own right. The paradox here is that by focusing on this day, this day which in fact is just like any other becomes an elected day, the full implication of which is that any other day could similarly be redeemed. This, in effect, is the fantasy of the diarist: the fullness of their diary competes with the emptiness of

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their lives as they themselves perceive it. For that is the precise task of the diary: to imbue emptiness with meaning, to give it a body we might also say. Augé woke up an anthropologist, only to find that his anthropological way of thinking about the world has led him to the conclusion that anthropology no longer exists because the transformations of late capitalism have rendered it a discipline bereft of a proper object. One can readily sense the prickling here of an ‘I feel’ of a familiarly postmodern kind – I feel that this situation in which I find myself, rather late in life, is strange. It is in this sense, too, that the schizophrenic is a better model than a neurotic on a couch; it allows us to move outside the realm of the coded to the delirious. I cannot adjust to the fact that I can have Brazilian coffee in the morning and that it isn’t exotic or rare, but perfectly staple. I cannot get used to the idea that I can take breakfast in Paris, give a lecture in Palermo at midday, and still be home in time for dinner. It is almost like being in two places at once – or, nearer to the truth, perhaps, it feels like being in neither place at once. Somehow the sheer fact of being able to be in Palermo at midday and still get home for dinner diminishes – in ways he is yet to qualify – the existential quality of his dwelling (in Heidegger’s sense) in Paris and similarly makes light of his being in Sicily. Can one really say with honesty that one has been to a city if one has merely touched down there for an hour or two? Such – not entirely idle – thoughts remind me of a game my friends and I used to play as kids. It was essentially a game of braggadocio: we used to count up all the countries we’d been to and of course the most travelled won, but fights always broke out as to whether a ‘stopover’ (e.g. at Changi Airport on the way from Australia to England) counted. We generally agreed that you had to at least leave the airport for it to count, but still we could never quite dismiss the legitimacy of the claim to having been somewhere such global pit-stops entail. I would later come to think of these stopovers as a kind of travel that has to be written under erasure – one has gone there, without having been there. Augé’s point, I think, is that jet travel has lightened our step on earth; we no longer dwell as heavily as we once did. We swim through places more than we dwell in them and consequently a new type of social space has emerged whose precise purpose is to facilitate a frictionless passage – airports, train stations, bus terminals, fast food outlets, supermarkets and hotels. Because they do not confer a sense of place, Augé calls these places non-places. The poet, if not the philosopher, of this space is Baudrillard, whose later books (America, Cool Memories, Paroxysm) only make sense if you read them as the feverish, inspired jottings one makes in hotel rooms in strange cities in the lonely hours between arriving and departing. He does not write about places – places write him. He writes about where he is,

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right now, without looking forward or back, unless there happens to be a TV in the room in which case ‘elsewhere’ is beamed in live and contextless. For this reason, he stops writing when he leaves a place. The abrupt gaps in his text between each aphoristic paragraph stand in the place of a deixis deemed irrelevant – postmodern space is neither here nor there, or rather neither here nor there have meaning except, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, as opposite poles of ‘an indivisible, nondecomposable distance’.34

Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation The new space, which Rem Koolhaas aptly terms ‘junk space’ (the residue of capitalism), does not confer on us any sense of ‘place’, as Augé and countless others have argued.35 It is space as mass-manufactured good, as Rebecca Solnit argues. ‘Starbucks are scariest of all, because they impersonate the sensibility of the nonchains, while McDonald’s is at least honest about its mass-production values.’36 We might ask, then, why these chain stores like Starbucks, but also Borders and Barnes & Noble (both of which have subsequently vanished from high streets and malls), which combine ruthless corporate trading practices with cornerstore ambience, have been so successful. Eco’s answer as we have seen is that we have faith in fakes, we are in the grip of a logic of hyperreality which willingly embraces the copy as the higher form of originality. This should not be confused with Žižek’s position, adapted from Mannoni, namely that we know it is fake but treat it as real all the same. Although there is an obvious degree of sympathy between these two positions, the difference is that ultimately Eco sees no false consciousness in the logic of hyperreality. But without getting into the complex shift in the structure of the business environment in the Western world that has favoured the rise of chain stores, perhaps even necessitated them, one can still see the limitation of any attempt to read these spaces as coded. The decor of a Starbucks cannot be read, in the sense of finding layers of significance to its carefully chosen rough hewn wood panelling or its dye-free recycled cardboard cup holders. If we have moved into a space that is not coded and therefore cannot be read, then as Jameson narrates in his account of the Bonaventure it would indeed be impossible to navigate. He is no doubt correct in his estimate that putting up signposts is a retrograde step. Yet however much those of us who liked cities like San Francisco before gentrification set in might bemoan the effects of its postmodernisation, the reality is that these cities, smooth as their space might have become, do continue to yield a place-conferring affect, albeit one that cannot completely eradicate the feeling of having lost something we never possessed.37 It is the mode of place-conferring that has changed. In Flaubert’s age, the mode was ‘Oedipal’ (of which Orientalism is

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but one of the better-known strains), but now its mode is deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. These two processes go hand in hand, Deleuze and Guattari always insist, but that does not mean they are of the same order or somehow reciprocal – one cannot think of it as the left hand returning what the right hand takes away. In clarifying how these terms operate I hope to better explain how chain stores function to confer upon us a sense of place (in a place-less world) and in the process answer what Jameson describes as an ‘embarrassing question’ raised by this process, which in his view does not seem very different ‘from classical existentialism – the loss of meaning everywhere in the modern world, followed by the attempt locally to re-endow it, either by regressing to religion or making an absolute out of the private and contingent’.38 As Jameson rightly says deterritorialisation is absolute, therefore it would be embarrassingly illogical to conceive reterritorialisation as some kind of restorative process that can, albeit on an extremely localised scale, reverse its effects and give rise to a feeling that would have to be described along the lines of pre-territorialisation. Reterritorialisation is not a retreat into the vestigial system of ‘private gardens’ and ‘private religions’ of Jameson’s reckoning; it is rather the transposition of the affect of territorialisation from a spatial arrangement that can usefully be thought of as a home on to tokens of varying kinds which henceforth can be said to have a ‘home value’. There is literally no restriction on the kinds of things – tokens – that can be imbued with this value; as such it is a distortion to relegate the effects of reterritorialisation to the private. In fact, the most obvious instances of it occur in public. The homely ambience of Starbucks decried by Solnit could well be attributed to the way in which its decor has been made to take on a ‘home value’. Indeed, this is precisely what I would argue, but that still leaves unanswered the question of how this might be made to happen. This is not to rule out private reterritorialisation effects, however, but to qualify that refracting territorialisation through the lens of a binary distinction such as public and private is to make it into something it decidedly is not, namely a binary. Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are separate and distinct processes that cannot be fully understood in the absence of the primary term, territory, which has a very complex history in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.39 What then is reterritorialisation? ‘Reterritorialisation must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality; it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialised, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well.’40 Anything ‘can serve as a reterritorialisation, in other words, “stand for” the lost territory; one can reterritorialise on a being, an object, an apparatus or system . . .’.41 This new object which has been made to ‘stand for’ the lost

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territory is said to have ‘home value’; it is a compensation and substitute for the home that has been lost. Rebecca Solnit’s comment that memorialisation is paradoxically one of the most pernicious forms of urban erasure might be rewritten in these terms. In practically every gentrified city in the world, new apartments stand in the place where old-style manufacturing, warehousing or stevedoring businesses once thrived. Often these apartments are simply warehouse conversions, but just as often they are brand new structures built from scratch on cleared land from which every surface trace of the previous usage has been removed (I specify ‘surface trace’ because these so-called ‘brownfield’ sites can often contain an invisible legacy of decidedly unhealthy traces of past use such as heavy metals and toxic chemicals). These latter types of constructions are generally regarded as ‘soulless’ even by the people who buy them precisely because they seem to lack a history, by which is meant a kind of organic attachment to the fabric of the city. As de Certeau argued, speaking of the destruction of Les Halles in Paris and the subsequent conversion of the site, far from wanting to exorcise the past, we long to be haunted by it.42 It is the city’s ghosts that make it inhabitable. This is where memorialisation steps in – it positions relics of the past as tokens that ‘stand for’ the lost territory.

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Chapter 11 The Disappearance of Boredom

We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project No other public building – no other space – is as thoroughly contaminated with what Jean Baudrillard wisely calls the virus of boredom as the airport.1 Consequently, no other public building exemplifies more acutely Sartre’s cruel judgement that hell is other people. It is a leviathan space in which everyone fights tooth and claw for a smooth passage. Now that the online universe of working, shopping, banking and living has created hyperreal smooth spaces for us to conduct our lives without ever having to encounter another actual human being, the airport is one of the last places in the Western world where crowds are still encountered and queuing is still a necessity (entertainment complexes such as art galleries, cinemas and theme parks are the only other places where one is likely to queue). And it was of course the queue that denoted the disintegration of society into seriality for Sartre. But we must ask, what does it say about a culture if it loses the art of waiting? Does that not mean we who make up ‘this’ culture no longer know how to amuse ourselves with only our inner selves for company? More importantly, if we lose the art of boredom do we not then lose our resistance to the present? Fatigue, depression, neurosis are always convertible into overt violence, and vice versa. The fatigue of the citizen of post-industrial society is not far removed from the ‘go-slow’ or ‘slowdown’ of factory workers, or the schoolchild’s ‘boredom’. These are all forms of passive resistance; they are ‘ingrowing’ in the way one speaks of an ‘ingrowing toenail’, turning back towards the flesh, towards the inside.2 Consumer capitalism cannot tolerate boredom if it means we thereby become immune to its endless blandishments, which is doubtless why airports have transformed themselves into malls. Waiting is not boring if you

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are shopping. The net effect is to envelop the traveller in a seamless bubble of consumption. To journey from Heathrow Terminal 5 to London Westfield is to change location without changing place. As Marc Augé might put it, it is to experience the very absence of place or what he called nonplace.3 In fact, a similar experience can be had visiting almost any major city, literally anywhere in the world. Admittedly it is more challenging in the mega-cities like Delhi and Mumbai, or São Paulo, shot through as they are with vast slums, but even there, if one has sufficient means, one can travel in a protected sphere from airport to hotel to mall to office park and never set foot in the ‘real’ city, never breathe in its dust and smells, never see its dark and dilapidated side. The standardising influence of capitalism has been much remarked upon, but the process is now so far advanced that we’re in danger of forgetting how cities used to be. George Ritzer wittily coined the term ‘McDonaldisation’ to describe the process whereby cities everywhere seem to be shedding their distinctive local characteristics in favour of mass-produced global characteristics.4 But perhaps Jameson was nearer the mark with his caustic description of the spread of corporate bland as being like an outbreak of toxic moss.5 McDonald’s is very far from the only culprit; nowadays, all brands long to be global. Fast food, coffee, clothing, jewellery, cars, electronic goods – all aspire to an ‘international’ style that heralds from some imaginary and perpetually ‘cool’ place that may or may not actually exist and most importantly never seems out of place anywhere. As Baudrillard’s essay on the hypermarket makes clear, this is the true face of Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. It is not merely the simulation of reality, it is in fact a vast, multilayered consumerist dreamscape in which everything you can imagine yourself wanting can be had in commodity form, even if that wasn’t what you originally wished for.6 If you want to float like a butterfly and rise above it all, then fly this airline, and if you want to be desirable then wear this fragrance. However, to see an advertisement for perfume in China featuring a blonde Scandinavian woman is to be viscerally reminded of the truth of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality and the omnipresence of the ‘white man’ standard.7 Yet if anything can stop the ‘malling’ of the world (to use Kowinski’s phrase8) it will be the smartphone, the hyperreal device par excellence. It is transforming how we use and experience space and at the same time shaping the kinds of spaces we need, which ultimately may not be the kinds of spaces we want. The huge increase in online shopping that has occurred over the past decade or so has placed enormous pressure on bricks-and-mortar retail of all kinds, in some cases driving even big-box stores like Borders out of business altogether. No one can predict where this trend will end, but it is clear that there will be more casualties as global

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shopping practices change. One effect of this that is having a noticeable impact on the urban environment, particularly in the suburban fringe areas, is that warehouses are replacing malls. Hypermarkets are literally becoming hyperreal as online retailers like Amazon, who don’t need or want a shopfront, build immense distribution centres (Amazon calls them ‘fulfilment centres’) capable of processing thousands of orders per day. They’re also making increased use of robot technology to ‘fulfil’ these orders, thus further reducing the ‘human’ presence in these dour places. If all or even most of our shopping moves online the city will disappear (to use one of Baudrillard’s favourite words). Those who despair at the dreary uniformity of the strip mall will find themselves nostalgic for their tasteless exteriors when they’re replaced by the vacant grey walls of warehouses. The city remade as distribution centre will be the final triumph of the image because it will mean that the image of the thing has replaced the thing itself. We would only tolerate this if we weren’t paying attention, if our gaze wasn’t directed elsewhere, and that is precisely what is happening: the smartphone’s small screens have enacted a vast capture of attention. Smartphones are not just reshaping space; they’re also transforming time, most noticeably in our apparent loss of the ability to wait. The Siren’s song of consumer capitalism, which disguises itself as entertainment, grows louder in our unstopped ears with each passing day. Like the great traveller Odysseus, we do not try to avoid the Siren’s fateful music, but unlike him, we assume our freedom – our sense of our ‘self’ as an autonomous agent – will protect us from its deadly melody.9 In contrast to the benighted schizophrenic unable to stop the voices in their head, we invite them in, we let them crowd out our heads to such an extent we forget our ‘self’ and we’re grateful for the loss, as though it was our ‘self’ that is tedious and not the place we’re trapped in. That is the reality and the tragedy of contemporary life. Nowhere is that ‘truth’ felt more keenly than in airport departure lounges where waiting is widely considered torture. But contrary to the popular view, it isn’t torture because it is boring – it is torture because boredom is no longer possible. We embrace our electronic thralldom and thank the gods for the fact we’ve conquered boredom once and for all, forgetting that this means we can now never be, as Siegfried Kracauer once put it, ‘as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves’.10 By conquering boredom consumer capitalism has extinguished its most potent critic. Boredom is our defence against the present. Kracauer’s diagnosis was made in 1924 when newspapers and magazines were the dominant media forms and cinema and radio were still in their infancy, albeit maturing rapidly. TV had yet to be invented, and the internet was more than half a century away, but already the idea of an unbearable form of ‘bare’ or non-mediated time was being promulgated. Already

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there was ‘too much’ going on.11 Looking back, we might think this early period in the history of mass media was much less intense in its effects than our own media-saturated universe is today, but that fails to grasp just how radical the media form was to those who encountered it then, many for the first time in history.12 Kracauer’s contemporary Walter Benjamin was especially clear-eyed in this regard. He argued that the form of newspapers, particularly the way news stories render the flow of the experience of events as a punctuated sequence of ‘things that happened’, i.e. as pure information, was such that it could not be assimilated as experience by its readers. Today the ‘crawl’ of seemingly random headlines that trace their way across the bottom of the TV screen during a news bulletin is a powerful reminder of the truth of Benjamin’s thesis. Watching the crawl cannot by itself give rise to experience: its very structure is alienating. ‘The principles of journalistic information (freshness of news, brevity, comprehensibility and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper’s style.’13 The net effect was something he bluntly called ‘shock’. Benjamin frames his discussion of ‘shock’ in two ways, both of which are relevant today as we try to think about the impact of digital media on our daily lives, that is, not as a source of (mis)information, or distraction, but as a formative agent shaping our very subjectivity. To begin with, he frames it historically, arguing that each new mode of communication competes with the one that came before and in doing so accelerates the atrophy of experience by moving further and further away from ‘original’ story forms. Although Benjamin doesn’t specify what kind of story form he has in mind here as the putative original form (and to be clear he never refers to it in this way either), his subsequent comments suggest that he is referring to myth, particularly oral myth. He charts a shift from narration to information to sensation and suggests that it is only narration – the story form – that can be assimilated as experience. This is because the storyteller has already embedded what they want to say in their own life, thus rendering it as experience from the outset.14 The second frame is drawn from Freud, specifically Freud’s essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (though he’s careful to say his purpose in turning to it is to test the fruitfulness of Freud’s concepts rather than confirm their correctness). He also draws heavily on Bergson and Proust, particularly the latter’s concept of involuntary memory. Freud helps to explain an apparent anomaly in the history of media, as Benjamin maps it, namely its increasing propensity to ‘shock’ as each new media form distances itself from storytelling. One may wonder why each new media form should want to follow this trajectory since at first glance it would seem as though this would be increasingly off-putting to its

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potential audience. Benjamin doesn’t address this issue directly, strangely enough, but one may suppose that it has to do with the needs of advertisers, who have an obvious vested interest in producing ‘shock’. They want their products to be memorable, which as I’ll explain shortly means they have to penetrate the veil of the conscious, but more than that they want to insinuate the desire to buy at a level below or somehow beyond the reach of the conscious mind. Their ultimate goal, not to put too fine a point on it, is to programme the unconscious so that buying something – in fact, one can just say shopping, which as Jameson has argued has been divorced from buying so as to become a fantasy activity in its own right15 – is regarded as a pleasurable end in and of itself. And in this regard they have been spectacularly successful. Shopping is the dominant cultural activity today.16 It also calls into question the current vogue (initiated by the scarcely disinterested CEO of Google Eric Schmidt) of referring to digital as the ‘attention economy’ because – if we follow Benjamin – the goal of this particular mode of capitalism is in fact a somewhat deeper layer of the mind. What interests Benjamin is Freud’s hypothesis that that which becomes conscious cannot also become a memory trace. ‘In Freud’s view, consciousness as such receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: protection against stimuli.’17 In Freud’s view, protection against stimuli is just as vitally important as the reception of stimuli and his whole theory of dreams turns on the hypothesis that their essential purpose is to manage excess stimuli by repeating it and ‘working’ it until it can be ‘experienced’ and mastery over it thus obtained. Similarly, in everyday life, as Freud’s discussion of his grandson’s cotton reel game explains, we use rituals to gain control over otherwise uncontrollable thoughts and feelings. In effect, repetition is a form of training, or what Benjamin called ‘shock defence’, that enables us at the level of the unconscious to internalise the hitherto indigestible stimulus and ‘make sense’ of it without ever having to think about it. This, Freud suggests, is what his grandson did – it was his way of dealing with his mother’s uncontrolled presences and absences and behind that the loss of his father who was ‘at the front’. At the extreme edge of this spectrum of behaviours is the schizophrenic, who is bombarded by so many stimuli, from both within and without, that they are eventually forced to abandon even the attempt at mastery. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language, the schizophrenic then retreats to their body without organs (a notion they borrow from the schizophrenic French poet Antonin Artaud), sealing themselves off from the world and effectively making themselves ‘shock proof’.18 Boredom is something like this. It is simultaneously a walling off from external stimuli and a negation of internal stimuli; it is in this sense that it is a defence against the present. It is both a rejection of a situation and

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a protection against it. To be bored waiting for a plane (to update and simplify – a great deal – Heidegger) means that time has reasserted itself in a paradoxical way: on the one hand, it has lengthened – the moment seems never to pass, it becomes bloated, expanding without end – but on the other hand we do nothing to shorten it – indeed, we refuse to pass the time and thus make time pass. In such a state we are, as Kracauer avers, impervious to the blandishments of capitalism. No commodity, however bedazzling, can entice us out of this funk once we’ve sunk into it, and no entertainment is sufficiently entertaining to force us to relent and make time pass again. As Heidegger’s brief discussion of waiting at train stations suggests, we fall into the funk of boredom because we feel time has been stolen from us by a space that seems to have let us down. But what more could we expect of the station? Heidegger’s answer is very much of his own time (1929/30). The empty platform, as miserable as it is, is all one can expect because it does precisely what it is supposed to.19 Today, this line of thinking makes no sense to us because we’ve been taught to expect that the last thing a train station or airport should be is purely functional, a place to do nothing more than wait. We’ve learned to think the absence of our train or plane is a welcome opportunity to relax, to shop, to eat, to be entertained. And if all else fails, we have our smartphones to keep us company. How could we be bored? In the screen age boredom has been as thoroughly delegitimated as the welfare state. Any moment or place where boredom might creep in is saturation-bombed by media-messaging – TVs, radio, canned music, billboards, electronic message boards, not to mention our own personal devices, which do the same thing under the guise of ‘social media’ so we don’t even notice that we’re being blitzed by marketers. Behaviour that passes for ‘normal’ today is in many cases indistinguishable from the key clinical symptoms of schizophrenia. We ‘listen’ to the disembodied voices of advertisements all day long and happily do as they instruct us – buy this, buy that, think this, think that – without questioning how weird this really is. Our digital devices bombard us with messages and stimuli and we think nothing of it, but the reality – as research is beginning to show – is that it is transforming ‘us’ individually, culturally and socially in ways that haven’t been fully mapped. Not only that, we put in headphones so as to block out the rest of the world and give our fullest attention to the disembodied voices on our phones and other devices. Should someone try to talk to us when we’re thus engaged it’s thought rude and inconsiderate that one should have been interrupted, which is to say it is no longer rude or impolite to actively ignore one’s fellow humans. In the space of only a handful of years, less than an evolutionary blink of the eye, the mobile digital device has gone from being present-at-hand,

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in Heidegger’s sense, to fully ready-to-hand, meaning it has passed from being something that is merely of interest, as perhaps an idea or concept might be, to being something that is a practical tool we use intuitively, without conscious thought. Not only do we use the mobile digital device without thought, now, as Heidegger said of hammers, it has in many ways supplanted thought, thus rendering large parts of our minds redundant. So long as we have Google Maps we don’t need to remember the way home or know how to read a map in order to get somewhere – our device can tell us. Nor do we need to remember to pick up groceries – our device can remind us to do that, or else enable us to order them to be home-delivered. Our device can also translate all languages into English or any other language we choose. Similarly we can programme our TVs no matter where we are and we can connect with friends via social media no matter where they are. And since practically everyone has a mobile digital device – and not just in the Western world, either – these days we don’t even need to concern ourselves with such old-fashioned questions as to whether so-andso has a phone. Of course they do! This trajectory is of course the one mapped out for us by the designers and manufacturers of digital technology. The great technological revolution of the early 1970s, when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were just geeky university drop-outs, not billionaire gurus, came about because innovators like Gates and Jobs could see that computers had the potential to be machines that people used in their homes and in their everyday lives. The prevailing view until then had been that computers were both too complicated and too expensive for anything but commercial, military or enthusiast (i.e. geek) applications. And even then they had no idea of just how pervasive digital technology could and would become once they let the genie out of the bottle. Digital technology is, to say the least, a profound new kind of distraction, one that amplifies all the previously existing distractions ‘consumer society’ could throw at us – cinema, magazines, radio, TV and commodities themselves – and effectively forecloses on the possibility of escaping its clutches. There is literally nowhere one can go these days that isn’t somehow in the thrall of commodity capitalism. There has been no device in the history of technology more efficient than the smartphone when it comes to capturing ‘our’ attention. So much so it has made time itself seem unbearable in its absence. One can hardly imagine waiting for a bus or a plane or a coffee without the distraction of one’s phone. It’s as if seconds and minutes stretch into hours and days when not contained by a digital device of some kind. Adults and children, young and old, men and women, are all equally afflicted. No one sits and contemplates the world anymore. Our eyes are glued to our screens, checking email, checking in with our social media or watching a video. It no longer

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seems rude or impolite to check one’s phone while talking with someone else. Unmediated time, or what I have called ‘pure time’ because it is time experienced without the mediation of a digital device (in any of its manifestations), has all but vanished from our lives. And let’s not kid ourselves – this has been the goal of every new piece of information technology since the invention of writing. As Fredric Jameson argued more than two decades ago, the final frontier of capitalism was always consciousness itself and that moment has arrived.

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Chapter 12 Architecture and Control Society

We’re told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ The influence of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in the humanities and social sciences cannot be overstated. Its core (essentially architectural) theses, that (1) sites of confinement and (2) practices of surveillance define our era, are largely treated as both factually correct and inarguably true. In the four decades since its publication, the consensus view seems to be that evidence of the continuing pertinence of Foucault’s theses can be seen with the naked eye in the built environment of practically every city in the world. However, while it is true that sites of confinement are proliferating (there are literally more prisons today than there were when Foucault wrote his book) and practices of surveillance have attained a level of intrusiveness and scrutiny that Foucault himself (regarded by many as a gloomy pessimist on this issue) could not have imagined, that does not mean our age is unchanged from the one Foucault documented. In his essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (‘Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’) Deleuze argues that contrary to appearances things have indeed changed – sites of confinement are breaking down even as they are proliferating and surveillance practices, although they have increased in intensity, no longer follow the old pattern. Testament to the extent to which Foucault is seen to have grasped something essential about our time, Deleuze’s challenges to the received status of Foucault’s theses have either been ignored or simply batted away as mistaken because, to put it bluntly, any fool can see that sites of confinement and practices of surveillance are as much a part of today’s society as they were in Foucault’s time, if not more so. In what follows I want to suggest, firstly, that this response is wrong inasmuch as it stems from a misreading of both Foucault and Deleuze, and secondly, that it is a missed opportunity to cast a weather eye over our current situation, and more particularly the state of contemporary architecture.

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My real starting point, though, is the observation that when you read Foucault and Deleuze side by side there is an obvious gap in Deleuze’s essay. While Deleuze argues against the view that the architectural categories of confinement and surveillance are the defining categories of our era, he offers no thoughts on the transformations the built environment has undergone since the disciplinary forms Foucault identified began to break down. The question that interests me, then, is precisely the one Deleuze neglects to ask: has control society given rise to its own architectural forms? In order to answer this question, I will try to do two things – I will try to explain how (according to Deleuze) control society differs from disciplinary society; then I will try to determine which (if any) new architectural forms have arisen as a direct result of the transition from discipline to control. I will go through the specific empirical differences between the two modalities in more detail below, but first I want to spell out the main conceptual difference because it appears from the arguments against Deleuze that this is not generally well understood (it is often Foucault as much as it is Deleuze who is misunderstood). The key to both of their positions is this: discipline concerns the correct training and placement of individuals, whereas control is concerned with the maximum exploitation of what Deleuze calls dividuals (nameless, faceless data points) regardless of their formation or placement. While it is true that sites of confinement and practices of surveillance continue to shape contemporary existence, they do not function in the same way as they did in disciplinary society. The title of Deleuze’s essay offers a useful albeit cryptic clue as to how it should be read, because while he titled it ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ he did not explain what it was a postscript to. The fact it is appended to his book Negotiations makes it seem it was intended as a discursive addition to a collection of his interviews, but I think this is just a matter of publishing convenience. It had already appeared in L’autre journal so it clearly wasn’t written for Negotiations. In my view, it makes more sense to read it as a postscript to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and not his own book, because its aim is quite obviously to speculate about what his late friend might have said. This is not an idea I am going to try to defend with either biographical or bibliographical information. I will note, though, that Dosse gestures in this direction in his biography of Deleuze and Guattari.1 I merely offer it as a thought experiment (if you will) that reframes the way we think about the relation between the two pieces of work, which despite their differences cannot really be thought in antagonistic or polemical terms. Deleuze’s essay functions more as a continuation of Foucault than a critique, albeit a continuation that begins by drawing a definitive line under what went before. One could say that it is tributary in both senses of the word – it flows from Foucault as the original source, and it

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is offered in homage to a great thinker. It is important to stress, too, that Deleuze does not claim that Foucault is wrong; his claim is that during the course of the twentieth century the world entered a new epoch, one that is differently organised to disciplinary society, and he insists that Foucault himself knew this and was already saying that the disciplinary society he had written about had ended and that a new kind of society was emerging to take its place. Foucault has thoroughly analysed the ideal behind sites of confinement, clearly seen in the factory: bringing everything together, giving each thing its place, organising time, setting up in this space-time a force of production greater than the sum of component forces. But Foucault knew how short-lived this model was: it succeeded sovereign societies with an altogether different aim and operation (taking a cut of production instead of organizing it, condemning to death instead of ordering life); the transition took place gradually . . . But discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind.2 In a more critical voice, Byung-Chul Han agrees that Foucault ‘recognized that disciplinary society did not reflect the times in every respect’, which is why he turned to questions of biopolitics and population (which Han thinks are implicitly post-disciplinary in their construction).3 In doing so, however, he failed to grasp what is distinctive about neo-liberalism in Han’s view because in contrast to biopolitics, neo-liberalism ‘is not primarily concerned with “the biological, the somatic, the corporal”. It has discovered the psyche as a productive force.’4 Here I think one can agree with the conclusion, that neo-liberalism is focused on the psyche, without necessarily accepting the premise because it is false to say that biopolitics concerns the body in the same way discipline did. As Agamben has clarified biopolitics is interested only in the bare fact of life itself, not the body.5 Its aim and function is to reduce the subject not merely to a body, but to a set of attributes that can be quantified and ranked.6 Public health campaigns targeting obesity, to take a contemporary example of biopolitics in action, are not concerned with whether or not bodies are fat or thin, but only whether they are at increased risk (which is calculated statistically rather than by any actual assessment of actual bodies) of particular diseases, which are expensive to treat.7 As Deleuze puts it, the new medicine will have neither doctors nor patients, just cases and subjects at risk.8

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I mention Han here because despite his misdirected criticisms of Foucault and Agamben his theses are not only compatible with Deleuze’s account of control society, they update and clarify Deleuze’s insights in a number of quite useful ways. He argues persuasively that our situation now is very different from disciplinary society because (1) it concerns the psyche rather than the body – it is our imagination not our body that is subject to capture; (2) it is permissive rather than inhibitive – we are constantly exhorted to be ‘ourselves’; (3) the panopticon is perspectival – it relies on an embodied viewer, whereas control does not; (4) disciplinary society lacked the means of keeping records, whereas control society records everything, down to the most trivial; and (5) it is business rather than the state that controls surveillance.9 It is surprising, therefore, that even though he acknowledges Deleuze’s concept of control he does not embrace it in his account of the effects of contemporary forms of surveillance but instead refers to it as a form of digital panopticon.10 This is a regressive step, it seems to me, because it blurs the very distinction he – and more importantly Deleuze – is trying to make between two very different specular regimes. In point of fact, as Han seems to be aware, the panopticon is child’s play compared to the digital technology we are immersed in today, which is unprecedented in history in its surveillance capacity. In disciplinary society surveillance was coercive, hence the need for confinement, but we willingly carry surveillance technology (as Han notes) with us at all times, allowing it to record our every movement, our conversations, our financial transactions, our health data, and even how we feel about a wide variety of subjects. Not only that, we willingly pay for the privilege of giving all our data to private corporations.11 This is the true face of control society. We have entered an era in which surveillance is desired rather than feared and privacy has lost most if not all of its meaning as an organising concern. One key difference between Foucault and Deleuze, which is essential to understanding the latter’s formulation of control society, is that whereas Foucault tended to shy away from speaking directly about capitalism, Deleuze did not. Control society is explicitly defined as a mutation in capitalism: nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed toward production, and proprietorial. Thus it made the factory into a site of confinement, with the capitalist owning the means of production . . . But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production . . . It’s directed toward metaproduction . . . Thus it is essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses.12 I would argue Deleuze does not go far enough here in his account of the transformation of capitalism and he doesn’t adhere closely enough to his own insights. In Anti-Oedipus, he and Guattari complain that not enough

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importance is attributed ‘to banking practice, to financial operations, and to the specific circulation of credit money – which would be the meaning of a return to Marx, to the Marxist theory of money’.13 Deleuze’s essay is guilty of the same failing inasmuch as he focuses on changes to manufacturing – the shift from production to metaproduction, which can be grasped simply as the movement away from in-house production towards outsourcing, and even more so as the shift from local production to offshoring – rather than changes to the structures of ownership, which are more far-reaching in their effects. Today corporations are owned by shareholders; those shareholders are very often other corporations such as hedge funds and pension funds that are themselves owned by shareholders who purchased the shares using money borrowed from credit institutions. What matters now is not who owns the means of production (the pivotal factor in Marx’s analyses), but rather who controls the platforms.14 Ours is the age of bankers, derivatives, hedge funds and debt, but above all it is the age of data and its crucial complement the algorithm. Deleuze identified three paradigmatic differences between disciplinary society and control society. 1. Confinement is an analogical system, whereas control is digital. In disciplinary societies one is constantly starting over, as one moves from school to the army to work and so on, but in control societies one is never finished – lifelong learning has replaced the idea of graduation with a perpetual cycle of training. In disciplinary society, school, the army and the factory were analogous inasmuch as they were organised along similar lines and according to similar principles but remained essentially different – the student was not a soldier, the soldier was not a worker, and so on. But in control society, the school, the army and the factory, along with virtually every other aspect of society, have become businesses, measured in terms of their financial bottom lines rather than their outputs. Success in education, to take only one example, is measured in economic not pedagogic terms. What matters is not whether the student has learned their curriculum and graduated with specific capabilities and genuine expertise, but whether that curriculum was delivered in a cost-efficient manner and according to protocols recommended by employers. 2. Confinement is a form of moulding, whereas control is modulation. Deleuze says this can be seen most clearly in the breakdown of trade unions, and the corresponding breakdown of the wage-bargaining process which has been replaced by individual workplace contracts (i.e. the ‘gig economy’ beloved of platform corporations like Uber and Deliveroo) that pit worker against worker in a situation of infra-class antagonism rather than infra-class solidarity. As he puts it, ‘If the stupidest TV game shows are successful [and let’s not forget that it was literally a stupid TV game show that helped put Trump into the White House], it’s because they’re a perfect reflection of the way

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businesses are run’ today. In contrast to the old duality of management and trade unions, today’s businesses ‘are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself’.15 Competition for its own sake is affect driven; it lives and thrives on the intermittent highs of transitory victories (e.g. employee of the month), and never concerns itself with whether or not these victories add up to something meaningful like competency or a vocation. Not even education, to continue with my previous example, is immune from this trend, Deleuze laments. Schooling has been replaced ‘by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment’ – to which he adds, showing uncanny prescience: ‘It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.’16 3. Control mechanisms have replaced disciplinary apparatuses. Disciplinary society is organised by the signature (of the individual) and the number (one’s place in a social hierarchy), whereas control society is organised by codes (algorithms, metadata, GPS and so on) and takes no interest in either individuals or social entities. Control society is far more advanced in its development today than it was when Deleuze first penned his essay. The more we come to understand the power of the major platforms like Google and Facebook, the more we realise that there is still so much they could and probably will do to infiltrate, shape and ultimately monetise our daily lives.17 If confinement has broken down it is because new technology has facilitated vastly more intrusive and exploitative forms of what I will call open capture. This amounts to a new iteration of primitive accumulation that treats culture – or more specifically cultural practices – in the same way extractive capitalism treats nature.18 As Zuboff argues, Google’s co-founder Larry Page understood that human experience could become (as indeed it has) Google’s natural resource, which it could extract at almost no cost. ‘For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour . . .’19 How have these changes been reflected in the built environment? In a necessarily preliminary way, and aggregating the work of several theorists, I will suggest that control society has yielded four key types of building.

The mall The mall is arguably the first architectural form control society gave rise to in the immediate aftermath of WWII when the commodity-led boom began in America. It inaugurated a new kind of space that is, as Chun puts

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it, public but privately owned. People are encouraged to enter the space, but most do so according to the terms laid out by the mall’s owners.20 The mall has been theorised as a panopticon by Mike Davis, among many others, because of the tight security measures many of them deploy both to keep out so-called ‘undesirables’ (i.e. poor people) and to prevent theft.21 But these measures were not part of the original design idea which sought to combine the galleria (Milan’s famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is the prototype), the department store (which is modelled on the museum) and the piazza to create a self-contained space that functioned as a city within a city in which people could mingle freely with commodities. In contrast to the panopticon, the primary purpose of the mall is to facilitate ‘looking’. As part of this it fosters the kind of display (by both its vendors and its customers) that encourages the look. Covert surveillance is in this sense anathema to its central organising premise. Mall-goers want to be seen! The mall is essentially a machine and its day-to-day operations are utterly dependent on machines too – it cannot function in the absence of the transport networks that connect it to its customer base, which is implicitly greater than the immediate vicinity can supply; it also depends on long logistics chains which invariably stretch around the globe; and it depends on air-conditioning, escalators and barcodes for the comfort and convenience of its customers.

The theme park Related to the mall and born at almost the same time, the theme park is nevertheless distinct because it is predicated not on physical commodities, but rather on the intangible commodities of film and television. If the mall was built to enable people to mingle with commodities, then the theme park was built to enable people to enter the imaginary space of their favourite films and TV shows and mingle with the characters. The extension of this idea into every aspect of daily life was accomplished when it was realised that the imaginary space did not need to originate with a movie, it could build on fantasised notions of the past and the future and in a sense fantasised versions of films that have not yet been made, as was the case with Disney’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, which was a ride long before it was a movie, but was clearly built as though it replicated a movie. Other examples include Starbucks coffee shops, which have spread their fantasised simulacrum of an American corner café that probably never existed all over the world. This style of architecture and design has been theorised as hyperreality by Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. It can be understood as an absolute reversal of Benjamin’s notion of aura because its key principle is precisely that the replica triumphs over the original, not merely as its

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replacement or substitute, but as the preferred object. The pinnacle example of this is perhaps the franchised ‘fake’ Irish pub which was invented outside of Ireland but has lately been imported there, doubtless because the tourists expect to see such places and not the actual more modern pubs that have evolved in the decades since the ‘fake’ version was fixed as the image of what a pub should look like.

The cloud Platform capitalism is enabled by computer technology, which far from being weightless and frictionless as techno-utopians like to proclaim actually sits rather heavily on the earth. As Bratton puts it, the cloud is a ‘terraforming project, covering the globe in subterranean wires and switches and overhead satellite relays, simultaneously centralizing and decentralizing computing and data storage and the social relations that depend upon them’.22 It has very specific infrastructure demands too. Among other things it needs ‘cheap energy, cheap space, proximity to ocean passage, lax regulation on data storage, earthquake and flood avoidance, perimeter security, ideal temperature control’ and so on.23 In many ways, the server farm is the most typical architectural form of control society. Undoubtedly, it is also the least noticed. In part this is because it is usually hidden from view, built into old coal mines, ice caves, disused shopping malls and office buildings, but it is also because it is often very drab and looks like an ordinary warehouse. But there can be no question that these structures are among the most important buildings on earth: global communications would collapse without them. If they look like ordinary warehouses it may perhaps seem wrong to suggest they are a new form. In one sense this is obviously true, but only if we look at them from the outside. When we consider what goes on inside these buildings it is clear they are a very new form and one that is going to proliferate as our global use of the internet and data-processing services increases.24 Their most important characteristic, which perhaps makes them unique, is that they are not designed with humans – or indeed any living creature – in mind, yet they contain within them a vast record of human activity. They are windowless, airless, dark (‘lights out’ is their dream), soulless places where machines hum and whir and humans are on hand solely to attend to the needs of the computers. Control spaces are ultimately ahuman spaces.25 I include under this category so-called fulfilment centres (Amazon’s word for its distribution and warehouse centres; it’s perhaps worth adding that Amazon is also one of the largest providers of cloud services, which constitute nearly a third of its business), because they are similarly designed for robots, even if

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they still employ humans, and offer nothing but blank walls to the outside observer. If the mall was the first form of control architecture, then the cloud may well be the last because it is the single most powerful threat to the urban fabric yet produced. People who shop online, work online, entertain themselves online and so on do not need or want malls, theatres, stores or even high streets.

The camp The commodities boom underpinning the aforementioned spaces has a dark but nonetheless ‘open secret’, which is the fact that it is premised on camps. Contemporary society exhibits several varieties of camp – refugee camps, asylum camps, workers’ camps, sweatshops, slums and so on. As Deleuze puts it, ‘One thing, it’s true, hasn’t changed – capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined: control will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushrooming shantytowns and ghettos.’26 Camps are not recent inventions – as Agamben notes, historians debate whether the first concentration camps appeared in Cuba (1896) or South Africa (1899–1902) – but they have become ubiquitous in the period since the Second World War, and as Mike Davis documents with care in his book Planet of Slums they are proliferating. They are defined by their hostility toward life. In most cases they barely meet the minimum requirements for sustaining life. What sets them apart, though, from the slums and prison camps in times gone past is the fact these places exist amidst absolute abundance – we have more than enough wealth, food and resources on a planetary scale for all people to live well (this does not mean to a so-called ‘American standard’ necessarily, but it does mean to a standard capable of sustaining a good life). We might blame religion and racism and geopolitics, but ultimately it is simply a failure of hospitality toward the other. It is the ultimate form of the closed door.

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Chapter 13 Schizoanalysis and the Internet1

I’ve found myself more and more wary of Google out of some primal lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source. John Battelle, The Economist, 1 September 2007 There can be no doubt that the internet has transformed practically every aspect of contemporary life, especially the way we think about the body and its relation to identity and to place, once the twin cornerstones of social existence: in social life you are always someone from somewhere, the son or daughter of so-and-so from such-and-such a town. These details of our existence – which are essentially historical, although they may sometimes take a form biologists think belongs to their domain (that is, gender, race, body shape) – segment us in different ways, slicing and dicing us this way and that so that we adhere to the conventions and demands of the socius itself. We are segmented in a binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women, adultschildren, and so on. We are segmented in a circular fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce’s ‘letter’: my affairs, my neighbourhood’s affairs, my city’s, my country’s, the world’s . . . We are segmented in a linear fashion, along a straight line or a number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or ‘proceeding’: as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in the school, in the army, on the job.2 These segmentations penetrate our being, they appear and even feel bodily, especially the apparently natural attributes of gender and race, but they are not for all that visceral. Deleuze and Guattari are very specific about this. They describe these socially orchestrated captures of the body – gender, race, class, work, family and so on – as ‘incorporeal transformations’. If, today, as Deleuze foresaw with typical acuity in his short paper on what he

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labelled ‘the society of control’, our credit card and social security numbers are more significant identity and place markers than the colour of our skin or where we went to school, that isn’t because the ‘meat’ of our bodies has lately been superseded in its cultural significance by our bloodless digital ‘profile’. Rather, what has happened is that one incorporeal ‘apparatus of capture’ has been succeeded by another – the segmentations of gender, race and class have been supplanted by the segmentations of debt and credit: ‘A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.’3 In effect, our body has been replaced as the principal site of power by our profile. But this does not mean that the age of the body has been succeeded by the age of the body without organs as many internet pundits have argued because the disciplined or segmented body was just as much a body without organs as is the ghostly profile government agencies and banks make of us and store in their databases for referral whenever we want a loan, a driver’s licence, or to leave the country for a vacation. It will no doubt come as a surprise to many that the clearest confirmation of this point, that the disciplined body is already a body without organs, is to be found in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which is often read as a history of the body.4 Referring to Kantorowicz’s influential thesis that the King effectively has two bodies, one that lives and dies and another that is immortal, Foucault writes: If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given rise to another type of duplication? That of a ‘non-corporal’, a ‘soul’, as Maby called it. This history of this ‘micro-physics’ of the punitive power would then be a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern ‘soul’. Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonised, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.5 The soul is the body without organs seen in its disciplined aspect, but it is not the whole of the body without organs. Foucault’s vision of the duplication of the body is an impoverished one in comparison to Deleuze and Guattari’s, and he pays the price of this conceptual diminishment by depriving himself of any plausible means of explaining how or why one

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might adhere to the conventions and demands of the socius itself except through coercion. The full body without organs is the soul animated by desire. Foucault’s description of the modern soul is instructive nonetheless because it points up the degree to which the body without organs is a social rather than an individual concept: we all have our own body without organs, but it is plugged into a larger entity that is the body without organs of all bodies without organs, or the plane of consistency. This larger entity that all our individual bodies without organs are plugged into is society’s own body without organs, and it is my contention that we can only properly understand this particular concept if we apprehend it at this level.

The priority of Marx As a first measure in standing this concept back on to its feet, then, it has to be recognised that although Antonin Artaud is the source of the phrase ‘body without organs’ his work plays only a very small part in its theorisation as a concept. This is not to say Artaud is unimportant to Deleuze and Guattari, but the truth is they tend to treat his work as pre-philosophical, as a source of symptoms or ideas rather than concepts. Moreover, focusing on Artaud reinforces the misperception that the body without organs is the exclusive preserve of individuals.6 Correcting this view requires that we look to the concept’s more important conceptual sources: Lacan, Spinoza and Marx. This list is in either ascending or descending order of importance depending on how you look at things: Deleuze and Guattari attribute the invention of the concept to Lacan, but this seems to be of significance only inasmuch as they can use it against Lacanians; they suggest that the architecture of the concept was foreshadowed by Spinoza, and they take from this source the notions of longitude and latitude which they use to map the body without organs’ components; they reserve for Marx, however, the special distinction of showing us how this concept works in everyday life at the level of the mode of production. In light of this, I want to argue for the priority of Marx in any reading of the body without organs on the grounds that, to follow a Jamesonian logic, the Marxian position subsumes the other two.7 On its first or Lacanian approximation, the body without organs is simply the constellation of partial objects constituting our desire in its transitive mode. It is described by Deleuze and Guattari as the ‘real inorganisation’ of desire such as one finds on the reverse side of the Big O. [There] desire is shifted into the order of production, related to its molecular elements, where it lacks nothing, because it is defined as the natural and sensuous objective being, at the same time as the Real is defined as the objective being of desire.8

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Desire, on this understanding, constantly surpasses the neat triangle of mummy-daddy-me imposed by psychoanalysis. On its second or Spinozist approximation, the body without organs is: the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; the partial objects [that is, Lacan’s petit a] are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another.9 But the significance of this insight can really only be seen when it is rewritten into a Marxian discourse, as Deleuze and Guattari do for us in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus. If we want to have some idea of the forces exerted by the body without organs, then we must first establish a parallel between desiring-production and social production. To put it another way, we have to establish that desire functions on the same level as the real. However, Deleuze and Guattari then go on to say this parallel is to be treated as strictly heuristic, at least in the first instance. Its one purpose is to point out the fact that the forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labour, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition.10 This is the body without organs in its social aspect: It falls back on (il se rabat sur) all production constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appointing for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause.11 In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari transform this insight into an analytic principle – the body without organs has two phases: an initial phase of construction and a subsequent phase of making things circulate.12 Judith Butler has demonstrated that the concept of gender – not the actual experience of gender – follows precisely this course. What she effectively claims, without using this terminology, is that gender is an incorporeal transformation: the very labels ‘man’ and ‘woman’ seize us and transform us. Gender is an attribute – an effect – that penetrates our

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bodies and functions there as ‘quasi cause’ of everything we do. We are not born into our gender, we assume it, but once it has taken hold we act in its name. This effect interacts with other effects, such as race and class. As Butler points out, even if one accepted that it was possible to choose one’s gender, it is nevertheless impossible to choose not to have any gender at all. You thus desire on your gender because it is part of your body without organs. And all desiring takes place on the body without organs. Gender is a rigged game – you can choose to be man, woman or transgendered, but you cannot choose to be nongendered because the very notion of ‘sex’ as some neutral biological (that is, non-cultural) given is simply the other half of the equation. Gender and sex work together in a manner Deleuze and Guattari describe as biunivocal. Each effect functions as the concrete proof of existence of the other – this is what it means to say they are quasi causes. We oscillate between the two, jumping from one circle of hell to the other. Gender, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is the mechanism power needs to exert itself. Part of the difficulty Butler has in explaining how gender and sex differ from one another (yet operate together) stems from the fact that these terms have the appearance of being unengendered or naturally occurring. But, as she effectively wants to argue, but doesn’t quite have the vocabulary to do so, these terms are very far from naturally occurring – they are engendered but in such a way that they seem to fall back on themselves and smother their origins from view and thus appear unengendered. This is how the body without organs operates. Its chief operation is to ‘fall back on’ itself and create a smooth plane for desire. This example points to what is perhaps the key feature of the body without organs: it functions as pure presupposition, that is, the thought or idea which thought cannot grasp. It is like our soul, always there, always in need of work, and always unreachable. The body without organs is not a ‘feedback loop’ as Bard and Söderqvist suggest because what occurs on the body without organs is not the same thing, and isn’t constructed in the same way, as the body without organs itself.13 Because the body without organs is a virtual entity, Katherine Hayles’s complaint that it doesn’t pay enough heed to physical constraints is without foundation.14 Conceptually the body without organs should be understood as our way of coping with physical constraints. It is our means of fabricating a mental position from which to view the conditions of our everyday life as making sense.

The internet’s body without organs Presuppositions can sometimes be brought to light by asking: what ought to be? In the first years of the internet, that is, the early 1990s, when it was

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still small enough to be contained on a single mainframe computer, the key permutation of this question was (according to Bill McKibben) whether it would be like TV, just another distraction, or would it really allow for the kind of connectedness it seemed to enable? He thinks the answer ‘is still not clear – more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes’.15 Setting aside the moralising tone, the contrast with TV is instructive because in its early days TV was subjected to considerable scrutiny and regulation by government – though the kind of scrutiny and regulation it was subjected to varied quite widely from nation to nation. The Australian government, for instance, regarded it as a service and placed it in the same policy category as health and education. TV was thought to be too important and too dangerous (they immediately grasped the propaganda power of the new medium) to leave in private hands and policy was developed accordingly. The basic tenets of its policy were that it should be free, available to all (the infrastructural cost of this is staggering when you consider the dispersed nature of the population) and informative (all stations were required to provide news services as well as educational programming for children). It did not opt, however, for complete State control as Britain did, but neither did it leave it all to the market as the US did, although even there the government placed severe restrictions on content. Australia aimed for a kind of middle ground that allowed for commercial applications, but kept a close eye on what those applications were. TV was essentially a national technology and the issue of what it could and should be a matter of national debate. By contrast, the internet has never been a national technology in this sense so its development has not been overseen by a governmental body, except in the most ad hoc way via band-aid legislation which, in the case of child pornography, say, can do nothing more than ban certain practices and create the legal conditions needed to punish the offenders – it cannot actually stop it. And that is how things should be according to the majority of internet pundits, whether e-business billionaires or left-wing academics: internet equals freedom.16 This is the internet’s body without organs: the great and unquestioned presupposition that it is an agent of freedom. The ‘material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether’ the bodies without organs we have are any good or not, or, more to the point, knowing whether we have the means of determining whether they are any good or not.17 The body without organs is an evaluative concept which, as Guattari instructs in his last book Chaosmosis, should be used dialectically, which is to say with a view towards an understanding of how it is produced.18 In other words we should ask two basic questions: how is a particular body without organs produced? And what circulates on it once it has been produced?

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Just how enfeebled a concept of freedom the internet rhetoric implies was exposed by the press reaction to the story of Google’s attempted entry into the Chinese market, which is said to be growing by twenty million users a year and was already worth an estimated $US151 million per annum in 2004 (a figure that is tiny by US standards, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the potential for growth is huge, and with everyone predicting that China is going to be the next superpower, one can understand why Google would want a foothold). To be allowed to set up servers on mainland China and create a google.cn service, which will be faster and better suited to purpose than the regular US version Chinese people already have access to, Google had to agree to adhere to the Chinese government’s regulation and control of internet content. This means complying with its three Ts rule: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen are all off limits, as are such search categories as human rights, Amnesty International, pornography and of course Falun Gong. It is believed that there are 30,000 online police monitoring chatrooms, blogs and news portals to ensure that these topics aren’t discussed and these kinds of sites aren’t accessed. Although this isn’t the first time Google has agreed to cooperate with government and effectively censor its search results (in Germany it restricts references to sites that deny the Holocaust, while in France it restricts access to sites that incite racial violence), the scale of its compliance with the Chinese government’s censorship requirements far exceeds anything it has done before.19 That Google chose to make these compromises as the necessary price of doing business in the world’s fastest-growing economy was read by many as a betrayal of the values of freedom Google is supposedly an emblem of. The fact that these jeremiads were largely confined to the business pages of liberal papers suggests that the notion of freedom they had in mind was largely of the freedom-to-do-business kind wrapped up in the rhetoric of freedom of speech. This obviously self-serving acquiescence to censorship is defended by the company on the grounds that ‘providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent’.20 What this case demonstrated is that Google isn’t really concerned about our access to content at all. All the blustery talk about compromised values was really just a verbal smokescreen trying to cover up this one glaring truth: Google’s priority is its access to new markets and it will not hesitate to compromise its putative ethic of ‘do no evil’ in order to achieve that goal. If we regard Google as a gigantic multinational corporation – which with a net worth in excess of $US80 billion (making it bigger than Coke, General Motors or McDonald’s) it in fact is – and not simply a search tool, then there should be little to surprise us in its aboutface in China.21 It is only if we continue to buy into the fantasy that it, and somehow the internet as a whole, is a bastion of freedom that we find these

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events dismaying. If the internet was ever a ‘commons’, to use the word anti-corporate commentators like Naomi Klein have made fashionable, then there can be no doubt that it is rapidly being ‘enclosed’, the implication being that Amazon, Google and eBay are still only the ‘primitive accumulation’ stage. Information is in effect a natural resource like oil that Google exploits without regard for the environment (as oil companies do when we are not watching, and sometimes even when we are watching). Nowhere is this more evident than in the Google-led hype surrounding the convergence of internet and mobile phone. In an op-ed for the Financial Times Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on record saying that internetenabled mobile phones would effectively solve the problem of how to gain access to emerging markets in underdeveloped countries where the absence of landline infrastructure would otherwise have proved an impassable obstacle. He does not put it like that, of course. He is never so indelicate as to mention the dirty word ‘market’. His rhetoric is liberatory and egalitarian. The internet has democratised information, Schmidt claims,22 or at least it has for those who have access to it. And that, he says, is the problem: not everyone has access! In sub-Saharan Africa, Schmidt laments, less than 1 per cent of households have a landline. If that statistic wasn’t bad enough for a business that presupposes the existence of such basic utilities as a functioning telephonic network, then there is the even worse news that if broadband was available to every household it wouldn’t change things all that much because very few people in this region of the world can afford computers. Mobile phones will liberate this technologically dark part of the world by overcoming these twin obstacles to online access. On the blessed day when everyone has internet-enabled mobile phones, a ‘schoolchild in Africa will be able . . . to find research papers from around the world or to see ancient manuscripts from a library in Oxford’.23 Until then, however, the ‘digital divide’ prevents this democratising magic from having its effect. According to Schmidt, thanks to the internet we don’t have to take what business, the media or politicians say ‘at face value’ and this is empowering.24 Schmidt’s view is that what is actually said online isn’t as important as the ‘freedom’ to say whatever one happens to want to say. Thus, he says, governments should stop focusing on how to control the Web and ‘concentrate on how to give internet access to more people in more countries’.25 Government should, in other words, help Google to expand its market. By the same token, as Google’s negative response to requests for assistance in tracking down users of child pornography from US law and enforcement agencies illustrates, Google thinks the government should not be allowed to impinge on its market. Although Yahoo, MSN and AOL have been willing to help out, Google has held fast, citing the

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right to privacy as its rationale. But Google patently speaks with a forked tongue on this subject. The co-founder of Google, Larry Page, defended the company’s refusal to help identify child pornographers by saying, rather tellingly, that the company relies on the trust of its users and that giving out data on users would break that trust. His implication is obvious: if Google gave out data on its users it would effectively turn customers away and eventually lose its pre-eminent place as market leader. Protecting market share is how we should understand Google’s frequent demand for legislation that stops government from being able to ask for such data in the first place. But this doesn’t mean Google actually respects the privacy of its users, if by that one means it doesn’t keep them under surveillance; on the contrary, it is constantly gathering data on users, individually and collectively, and even publicises this fact (under the innocuous sounding rubric of Google Trends) by releasing ‘maps’ of most frequently searched topics broken down by region. Eschewing any pretence to scientificity, these search maps make for titillating reading as one ponders what it means in culturalgeographical terms that the most frequent Google searches in the city of St Albans in Hertfordshire were for gyms, weight loss and the Atkins diet. Does this make it the ‘most self-absorbed city in Britain’, as claimed by The Sunday Times in a half-page piece studded with such titbits of spurious psycho-social information gleaned from Google Trends?26 Obviously more of a lifestyle puff than hard news piece, although it was in the news section, what is particularly striking about this article is its complete lack of sensitivity to the fact that such maps are the product of electronic surveillance (that is, precisely the kind of thing The Sunday Times normally rails against). That a liberal paper like this doesn’t see Google Trends as surveillance is evidence of just how little critical attention is paid to this dimension of the internet in the public sphere.27 But I don’t want to give the impression that this is some kind of conspiracy because the fact is Google is very open about its snooping – one Google executive, Marissa Mayer, has even said we should expect it.28

The rhizome Is the internet a rhizome? All the straws in the wind say ‘yes’, it is. Whereas mechanical machines are inserted into hierarchically organised social systems, obeying and enhancing this type of structure, the Internet is ruled by no one and is open to expansion or addition at anyone’s whim as long as its communication protocols are followed. This contrast was anticipated theoretically by Gilles Deleuze and

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Félix Guattari especially in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), in which they distinguished between arboreal and rhizomic cultural forms. The former is stable, centred, hierarchical; the latter is nomadic, multiple, decentred – a fitting depiction of the difference between a hydroelectric plant and the Internet.29 There are of course excellent grounds for thinking that the internet meets some if not all of the basic criteria of the rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari list as follows: • The rhizome connects any point to any other point (connections do not have to be between same and same, or like and like). • The rhizome cannot be reduced to either the One or the multiple because it is composed of dimensions (directions in motion) not units. Consequently no point in the rhizome can be altered without altering the whole. • The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture and offshoots (not reproduction). • The rhizome pertains to an infinitely modifiable map with multiple entrances and exits that must be produced. • The rhizome is acentred, nonsignifying, and acephalous. • The rhizome isn’t amenable to any structural or generative model.30 So, how well does the internet map against these six principles? At the ‘bare machine’ level it seems to agree with the first principle very closely. The ideal of the internet is that any computer can be connected to any other computer. How well this works in practice is another matter altogether, as anyone who has experienced the frustration of trying to access ‘big’ sites using low bandwidth connections (such as dial-up) or has had to rely on servers clogged by high volumes of traffic can readily attest. But the more interesting philosophical question here, which applies as much to Deleuze and Guattari as the internet, is the premium we place on intention: until the advent of search engines of the capability of Google, it was extremely difficult to implement one’s intent in relation to the internet. The phrase ‘surfing the internet’ reflects this: using the internet used to be (and in some cases still is) like looking for a needle in a haystack, and basically what one did in order to find something was ‘surf’ from one site to another until one found it (hence the proliferation in the early 1990s of books listing ‘useful’ websites, which themselves tended to be indexes or directories enabling you to find other sites; by the same token, little attention was given to domain names at this time, with the result that many of them looked like nightmarish calculus equations rather than the user-friendly mnemonics

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we’re accustomed to now). You moved from one web address to another as though from one fixed point in space to another, which interestingly is not at all what surfers do.31 This brings us to the second principle: here the match is a little less straightforward. For a start, the practical reality of the internet is nothing at all like the multidimensional sensorium envisaged by William Gibson when he first used the term ‘cyberspace’ in his groundbreaking novel Neuromancer, but then again he famously didn’t even own a computer at the time. Gibson’s vision of cyberspace has had lasting influence and many people do think of the internet as the realisation of the Deleuzian ideal of multiplicity. But the incredible proliferation and constantly expanding number of websites does not by itself mean that the internet can be classed as a multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. Are websites dimensions or units of the web? There is a simple way to answer this question – what happens when we add or subtract a site? The answer is that it is not clear that the addition or the subtraction of any one site actually affects the whole. If several million sites were to vanish then that would clearly make a difference, but the loss of a few hundred or even several thousand might not. If sites were dimensions then according to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the rhizome their removal would alter the whole, so we have to conclude that individual websites are units of the internet, not dimensions. Empirically we know that the number of websites is important; there is for example a vast difference between the internet of today, which has hundreds of millions of specific sites, and trillions of pages to go with them, and the internet of 1990, which had fewer than two hundred sites and could be contained in its totality on a single PC. But this does not mean we have to abandon the idea that the internet is a multiplicity because there is another way we can come at this problem. Thus we come to the third principle, that the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture and offshoots (not reproduction), which is essentially a matter of population, which in contrast to the numbering number can be grasped in dimensional terms. Darwin’s two great insights were, according to Deleuze and Guattari, that the population is more significant than the type in determining the genetic properties of a species, and that change occurs not through an increase in complexity, such as the proliferation of individual websites or multiplication of weblinks entails, but rather the opposite, through simplification. Internet usage certainly bears this point out, as recent trends confirm. The internet is the standard source of product information – everything from details of the latest designs to replacement user manuals is lodged there; it is also becoming the preferred point of sale as more and more business is conducted online; it is steadily taking over from its rivals TV and radio the role of content provision, as podcasts and downloads

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become more the rule than the exception. In the process the internet is changing how we understand ‘media’ – on the one hand, it is steadily displacing the variety of media that used to exist (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and cinema) on to itself; on the other hand, it is absorbing new interactive functions, such as data searches and direct online sales, that other media can’t offer. Paradoxically, then, from the perspective of the user the internet is without doubt the most powerful homogenising and standardising machine invented since money. First of all, all pre-existing media have been compelled to adapt to suit the internet environment; second, having stripped the media of its exclusive preserve to make and distribute news, movies or whatever, the internet has ‘enabled’ a whole new kind of media production, from the so-called ‘citizen journalists’ we hear so much about today, to bloggers, home-movie makers and amateur pornographers. Viewed from the perspective of the media as a whole (that is, from a population perspective), the internet has simplified what media means and in the process set off a massive expansion of media operations into virtually every corner of existence. It is having the same effect on retail. The fourth principle – that the rhizome pertains to an infinitely modifiable map with multiple entrances and exits that must be produced – is, I would hazard, the most important. But its implications are neither obvious nor fully explained by Deleuze and Guattari. In effect, however, what it means is this: the rhizome is not manifest in things, but rather a latent potential that has to be realised by experimentation. This can be linked to the sixth principle, namely that the rhizome isn’t amenable to any structural or generative model because basically what Deleuze and Guattari are saying is that you can’t either prescribe the internet into existence or expect to find it naturally occurring. It has to be invented. The rhizome is the subterranean pathway connecting all our actions, invisibly determining our decision to do this rather than that. Insofar as we remain unaware of its existence and indeed its operation we do not have full control over our lives. The rhizome is in this sense a therapeutic tool. For both statements and desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.32 The rhizome of the internet cannot simply be the pre-existing network of connected computers. Rather, we have to conceive it in terms of the set of choices that have been made concerning its use and determine the degree to which the resulting grid is ‘open’ or ‘closed’.

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The fifth principle – that the rhizome is acentred, nonsignifying and acephalous – appears to be one that could be left unchallenged. Yet, if we were to grant that the internet is acentred, nonsignifying and acephalous in appearance and indeed in its very construction, the reality of its day-to-day use still does not live up to this much-vaunted Deleuzian ideal. Here we have to remind ourselves that Deleuze and Guattari regard the rhizome as a tendency rather than a state of being. It must constantly compete with an equally strong tendency in the opposite direction, namely towards what they term the ‘arboreal’. The internet exhibits arboreal tendencies as well as rhizomatic tendencies and any balanced assessment of it would have to take these into account too and weigh up their relative strength. To begin with, one still moves from point to point through the internet – there is no liberated line of flight in cyberspace. Moreover, Google searches are very far from disinterested, as John Battelle’s pathbreaking book The Search makes abundantly clear. Now that retailers can pay Google to link certain search items (what Google calls AdWords33) to their business name, so that a search for a book, for instance, will always lead to Amazon or AbeBooks or whoever, the minimal conceptual distinction that used to separate Google from the Yellow Pages has basically vanished.34 The operating premise of Google searches may not be that whenever we are searching, no matter what we are searching for, we are actually looking for something to buy, but its results certainly appear to obey this code. Insofar as we rely on Google as our user’s guide to the internet, the internet we actually see and use is thus ‘stable, centred, hierarchical’, that is, the very opposite of rhizomatic. Google searches are conducted on a ‘stable’ electronic snapshot of the internet, not the living breathing thing itself, which it indexes very precisely; the search engine is patently a centring system, de facto and de jure, and what could be more hierarchical than PageRank? This is not to say that Google isn’t an extremely useful tool, because plainly it is, but it is to insist not only that it has its limitations, some of which are quite serious, but also that it isn’t the only means of searching for information available.

A new problematic? If we were to follow Deleuze’s watchword, that philosophy has the concepts it deserves according to how well it formulates its problems, then we would not start from the idea that the internet might be a body without organs or looks like a rhizome or indeed any other pre-existing point of view. Instead we would try to see how the internet works and develop our concepts from there. In its first flush, the internet seemed to be about connectedness, but that idea has since been exposed as a perhaps necessary but nonetheless impossible

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ideal (like the Lacanian conception of sexual relations) that we are at once compelled to try to realise and destined never to succeed in doing. Now, though, Battelle’s work has made it clear that the internet is much more about searching than connecting. Although connecting people – strangers with strangers, friends with friends – is a major feature of the internet’s cultural role, it is predominantly used to search for objects, that is, commodities, and in the case of pornography and celebrity gossip one may well say it is searching for people in their guise as commodities. A lot of quite utopian claims have been made on behalf of the internet, the strongest being that it has so changed the way people interact it has created a new mode of politics. But it now seems clear that it is just another ‘model of realisation’, Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the institutions capitalism relies on to extract surplus value from a given economy. That business couldn’t immediately figure out how to make money out of the internet – that is, turn it into a ‘model of realisation’ – meant that in the early years of its existence the utopian image of it as an affirmative agent of cultural change was able to flourish, giving the internet a powerful rhetorical legacy it continues to draw on as it is moulded more and more firmly into a purely commercial enterprise. Google is effectively the commonsense understanding of what using the internet actually means, both practically and theoretically. It is at once our abstract ideal of searching and our cumulatively acquired empirical understanding of it. But more importantly, searching is what we think of as the proper practice associated with the internet – one writes with a pen, makes calls with a phone, and searches the internet. When our searches don’t yield the results we’re after we tell ourselves it is because we don’t properly understand Google, that we don’t have enough practical experience with it, or sufficient competence to use it fully, rather than dismiss the search engine itself as fundamentally flawed. It is in this precise sense that Google has become, in noological terms, the ‘image of the search’.35 Google’s significance is clearly more cultural than technical because it determines our view of internet technology itself, deciding for us – in advance and without discussion – what it is actually for. If the problem in the early days of the internet was that no one could foresee the range of its applications and government seemed to stand around waiting for history instead of putting in place the appropriate legislation and policy to guide its development some now think of as missing, the problem today is that everyone thinks they know what its application should be – the facilitation of sales – and any sense that it might have a more progressive use has been consigned to the dustbin of fantasy. If there is something the matter with the internet it is that its utopian beginnings block critical thoughts about its future, as though somehow its starting point was already the fabled end of history when the concrete and abstract become one.

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John Battelle says he wrote The Search because it was his belief that Google and its rival search engine companies had somehow figured out how to ‘jack into’ our ‘culture’s nervous system’.36 His account of the seemingly inexorable rise of the search engine giant, which is largely a standard corporate biography, is by turns alarmist and infatuated; he is in equal measure amazed by Google’s power and disturbed by it. It is, however, Battelle’s attempt to use Google’s history to say something about contemporary culture that makes for the most fascinating reading, and whether we agree with his prognosis or not I think we have to take it seriously. There can be no doubt that the internet is going to play an increasingly significant role in shaping cultural attitudes, behaviours and practices in the future. His decision not to write a book about Google per se but rather something like a Google-effect is undoubtedly wise. As much of a behemoth as Google is, there’s no guarantee that it will be around forever. It may disappear, as AOL appears to be doing as its business model founders in the face of Google’s, or it may be swallowed up by an even more aggressive predator such as Microsoft (presently three times the size of Google measured in terms of market capitalisation), which virtually wiped out its one-time competitor Netscape Navigator in the so-called ‘browser wars’ of the 1990s. By the same token, none of the other major corporations – not eBay or Amazon or even the venerable Microsoft – can be considered immune to such forces of change. The internet seems to engender a kind of restlessness in us to always want to see what’s just over the horizon, one click away. The success of Amazon, Google and eBay (amidst the blaze of spectacular dot.com failures of the early 2000s) is intimately related to the way their sites facilitate searching. Google’s strength in this regard is obvious, but we should not overlook just how good Amazon and eBay are in their own highly localised domains. What these companies have cottoned on to is something we might call ‘search engine culture’. The internet thrives not because it can be searched, but because the search engines we use to navigate it respond to and foster the desire to search by constantly rewarding us with the little satisfactions of the unexpected discovery. A potent search engine makes us feel that the world really is at our fingertips, that we are verily ‘becomingworld’. One can find objective evidence of the intensifying influence of ‘search engine culture’ in the constant consumer demand for increased bandwidth and memory capacity to facilitate it. Most households in the West possess vastly more computing power than they could hope to use, except for such activities as searching the Web. It may be that online business is only just now starting to take off and show genuine profits because it has only lately developed an appreciation of the architecture of the desire called ‘searching’. As John Lanchester puts it, Google ‘has a direct line, if

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not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its wishes’.37 I believe the same is true of Amazon and eBay and indeed a range of other internet services such as online dating and grocery shopping that are yet to produce corporations of the same gigantic proportions as these icons.38 But I don’t accept that Google is the global id, as Lanchester puts it, because to do so is to accept that our deepest atavistic desire is to buy something, and there could be no more dystopian outlook than that. Neither is it the global body without organs, though with a bit of work it could be, and who knows what changes that might bring?

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Chapter 14 Deleuze and ‘Life’

It would be naïve to think that the problems of life and death, love and the difference between the sexes are amenable to their scientific solutions . . . Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition We are not physicists or metaphysicians; we must be Egyptologists. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs While many commentators have observed the importance of ‘Life’ to Deleuze’s work, few have been prepared to say what its function in his work actually is, save for a couple of half-hearted efforts here and there to read it as the basis for a new form of ontology and/or ethics. Where it is considered, the general tendency is to treat it as Deleuze’s rationale for doing philosophy, making him either a ‘Life’-philosopher or a philosopher-of-‘Life’. ‘Life’ has been accorded a metaphysical status in Deleuze’s work by some of his commentators in spite of the fact that this is anathema to his whole project. If ‘Life’ is to be freed from the isolation chamber of inverted commas I have felt it necessary to impose at the outset of this discussion, then it must be accounted for from within Deleuze’s philosophy. In this regard, we can summarise how things must be if they are to be consistent with Deleuze’s philosophy: ‘Life’ may be transcendent in his system of thought, but it cannot be transcendent to his system of thought. Of the few commentators who have been prepared to state the function of ‘Life’ in Deleuze’s work, one may legitimately single out Giorgio Agamben as being the most influential.1 He is also, I will argue, the most unreliable. Through a series of sleights of hand, Agamben attempts to position Deleuze’s work on ‘Life’ as his legacy, as his last great unfinished work that defines his philosophical project as a whole. Agamben’s rationale for this reading is, as I will show, a rich compost of coincidence and recondite word-sleuthing that is not finally convincing. His word-sleuthing, as I have called it, includes short disquisitions on the punctuation of the title of Deleuze’s essay, thus in addition to speculations on Ladino grammar we get

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notes on the significance of the colon and the ellipsis points. As interesting as this is, it is of secondary importance, more rationalisation than argument, and I will not dwell on it here. Suffice it to say, it is of a piece with Agamben’s broader attempt to align Deleuze’s conception of ‘Life’ with his own interest in ‘bio-power’ and its concomitant, ‘naked’ or ‘bare’ life, and create a space for a philosophy to come predicted by both Deleuze and Foucault and realised by none other than Agamben.2 Agamben’s essay opens as follows: By virtue of a striking coincidence, the last texts published by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze before their deaths have at their centre the concept of life. The meaning of this testamentary coincidence (for what is at issue in both cases is something like a will) goes beyond the secret solidarity between two friends. It implies the statement of a legacy that clearly concerns the coming philosophy, which, to make this inheritance its own, will have to take its point of departure in the concept of life toward which the last works of both philosophers gesture. (Such, at least, is the hypothesis guiding this inquiry.)3 Agamben wants us to believe that because Deleuze’s essay ‘Immanence: A Life . . .’ is his last known piece of published work it can be treated as a scholarly last will and testament; he corroborates this claim with the coincidental fact that Deleuze’s friend Michel Foucault also happened to present as his last published work a short disquisition on ‘Life’. Both produced these pieces when they were dying: Foucault presumably corrected the proofs of his piece (actually a modification of something written, as Agamben himself notes, several years earlier in 1978 as an homage to his mentor Georges Canguilhem) from his hospital bed at La Pitié-Salpêtrière, while Deleuze must have composed his, if indeed this is when he wrote it (we don’t actually know for sure), at a time when he was already mortally ill, and thoughts of suicide were perhaps weighing on his mind. But two coincidences do not create a truth. There is nothing in the texts themselves to suggest that it is anything but a coincidence that these essays happened to be the last thing either Deleuze or Foucault worked on, and it is certainly nothing but a coincidence that these essays happened to be the last both Deleuze and Foucault happened to work on. Agamben reinforces the illusion that ‘Immanence: A Life . . .’ can be treated as a bequest note with the further prestidigitation of captioning this essay – as well as an indeterminate number of Deleuze’s other works – as ‘late Deleuze’. However, neither a specific date corresponding to a particular life event – such as the diagnosis of a fatal illness, say, or perhaps a decisive

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encounter such as Deleuze describes his meeting with Guattari as being – nor a specific work, save for this final piece, is offered to give substance to this delicious phantasm of a ‘late Deleuze’. Consequently, the effect of its usage is rhetorical rather than analytical. But one only has to survey the vast literature on Foucault to see the insidious effects such distinctions as ‘early’ and ‘late’ can have on the reception of an author’s oeuvre. It is noteworthy in this respect that Deleuze himself felt it necessary to weigh in against the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘late’ Foucault, if by that we mean there is a rupture or return in his work, as many scholars have said of the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality.4 Deleuze’s own ethos of taking an author as a whole would in any case preclude him from taking this approach to a body of work. But having said that, it is obviously not the case that Deleuze himself was in principle averse to using the description ‘last work’, or ‘late work’, although for him it always refers to projects that were cut short by an untimely death or were knowingly too large for a single life to accommodate (both of which could apply to Deleuze of course). He was even willing to consider his own work in this way, describing the questions with which What Is Philosophy? opens as questions only old men could ask. Such references obviously give body to the illusion of the testamentary. In this respect, it is advisable, I would suggest, to treat Deleuze’s own use of such phrases as ‘last work’ (as he says of Fichte and Maine de Biran in the essay in question) in the manner of Edward Said’s concept of ‘late style’.5 This describes a certain confidence to experiment writers and artists attain when they sense they are in their twilight years, rather than a maudlin concern for legacy. If we concede that there is such a thing as a ‘late style’ in Deleuze, which might be dated with the writing of his final collaboration with Guattari, we still cannot take the leap that such work is by its very nature testamentary. Agamben’s forced association of this essay with the author’s death has the effect of making it seem that in those lonely hours before he took the fateful decision to end his life all Deleuze could have been thinking about is his life and by extension his philosophical legacy. The step from this assumption and the decision to read ‘Immanence: A Life . . .’ as a suicide note evinces no pause or hesitation from Agamben, although it should because the textual evidence offers little support for his interpretation. If anything, it reads more like an attempt to sketch out a new project. It is conclusive in the way only an untested hypothesis can be. This would not trouble Agamben, of course, since by his own lights it is precisely its preliminary and indeed peremptory nature that confirms his opinion that it is a bequest of a work to come. It is Nietzsche’s arrow waiting to be fired again by an eager new mind. Still, if we grant Agamben that this is indeed one

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last gesture to secure a legacy, we nonetheless cannot share his confidence in thinking that Deleuze’s intent here is to promulgate ‘Life’ as either the essential substance of his life’s achievement or even his fantasised gift to future generations of a work still to come. It is telling, I think, that of these two alternatives, Agamben chooses the latter as a more speculative option. Only the worthy, though, will benefit from this gift. ‘To assume this legacy as a philosophical task’, Agamben stipulates, we shall have to pass through two trials: first, modern philosophy will need to reconstruct its genealogy so as to distinguish between what might be termed the immanence phratry and the transcendence phratry; then, it will need to undertake a genealogy of the very term ‘Life’ to confirm what Agamben states we already know, namely that it isn’t a medical or scientific notion, but a philosophical, political and theological concept.6 But by treating it this way as an impossible/sought-after object, Agamben transforms ‘Life’ into a ‘Thing’ in the Lacanian/Žižekian sense. It turns ‘Life’ into an empty form or vessel in need of content. This gives ‘Life’ an unwarranted spectral cast, making it a philosophical equivalent of Derrida’s ‘hauntology’: it lives in what might be, rather than what is, or has been. In this manner (as with all ghost stories) that which was left undone outgrows in significance that which was actually done, thus supplanting the actual philosophical concept with a phantasmatic other. But this just begs the question: is ‘Life’ Deleuze’s primary focus or concern? Agamben’s claim that ‘Life’ defines Deleuze’s philosophical legacy rests on the conviction that ‘Life’ is the specific focus of this essay, but from the very first sentence – ‘What is a transcendental field?’ – Deleuze makes it clear that this is not the case. His concerns are elsewhere. If it is a matter of legacy, which remains an open question, then it is not ‘Life’ that determines that legacy. In some regards, his last work takes up the task that by rights belongs to his first work. Yet such questions are always the most arduous and it is perhaps for this reason Deleuze reserved them for his later years. Knowing where to start is always difficult, Deleuze says, because one has to start with one’s presuppositions.7 In contrast to the presuppositions of scientists, which have a purely objective character and can be eliminated via the rigours of scientific method itself, philosophical presuppositions are as much subjective as they are objective. Objective presupposition refers to those concepts which our attempts to define something explicitly presuppose. In Descartes’s case, to use Deleuze’s own example, he did not want to define ‘man’ as a rational animal because that would presuppose a certain agreement as to the meaning of the concepts of rationality and animality, both of which are obviously troublesome. Presuppositions are not always as apparent as this. Deconstruction thrives on discovering less obvious forms of this conceptual dependency

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and has enhanced our sensitivity to its myriad presentations. Sometimes, though, as Judith Butler’s work has shown, we can forget all about the existence and operation of presupposition and allow a naturalised – i.e. nonconceptual – form, like ‘sex’, to stand uncontested as the point of definition for a concept, like ‘gender’, and thereby convince ourselves it is grounded in the true. What Butler shows is not that ‘gender’ presupposes ‘sex’, but that they presuppose each other, an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari call mutual or reciprocal presupposition. A similar process is at work in the case of ‘Life’, which some readers want to match with a nonconceptual, naturalised form called life, using all the resources of scientific description to conjure a nonsubjective vitalism of genes and innumerable subatomic particles to give it legitimacy. By subjective, then, Deleuze means presuppositions of the ‘everybody knows’ and ‘no one can deny’ variety – ‘sex’ is one such example, ‘Life’ is clearly another. Both are terms whose meaning flourishes independently of philosophy in the tumultuous realm of ‘opinion’.8 Everybody knows and no one can deny there is a biological life that thrums along regardless of what the philosophers and political scientists say about how life ought to be lived or is lived. Caught between the double pincers of objective and subjective presupposition, it might seem that philosophy can never truly begin because it can never find an authentic point of departure: [If] it is a question of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning, if it is a question of recognising, of bringing to light or into the conceptual or the explicit, what was simply known implicitly without concepts – whatever the complexity of this process, whatever the differences between the procedures of this or that author – the fact remains that all this is still too simple, and that this circle is truly not tortuous enough.9 ‘We would do better to ask’, Deleuze continues, ‘what is a subjective or implicit presupposition?’10 Its form is that of common sense in its philosophical variant. In philosophy, the one thing ‘everybody knows’ and ‘no one can deny’ is that ‘thought has an affinity with the true; it formally possesses the true and materially wants the true. It is in terms of this image that everybody knows and is presumed to know what it means to think.’11 This image of thought, as Deleuze refers to it in the abstract, is not only true of this or that philosophy, but of the general condition of philosophy as a whole. That is to say, it is not a particular trait of one philosophy and not another, of Kant or Hegel say, and not Nietzsche, but common to Western philosophy as a whole, at least since Plato. Deleuze’s anti-Platonism, his famous desire to overturn Platonism, which is such a persistent theme in

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the literature on Deleuze, can be traced to this one essential claim: thought does not naturally yearn for truth and therefore philosophy cannot begin from this presupposition. Deleuze’s concept of the ‘image of thought’, first proposed as an attempt to explain the artistic rationale of Proust’s writing and later developed into a fully fledged concept in Difference and Repetition, follows from this claim that thought doesn’t naturally long for truth. It is an attempt to name and begin to theorise presupposition as something like the philosophical equivalent of predisposition. That is, it theorises our acquired, but innately functioning, sense of what thought ought to look like and tries to explain our preference for certain types of argument over others as the consequence of a cultivation of philosophical habit rather than the product of ratiocination. For Deleuze, there is no more pernicious nor persistent habit of thought than the one he refers to as the ‘natural illusion’, which traces problems from propositions – ‘we operate upon unknown quantities as if they were known: this is how we pursue the hard work of reducing problems to propositions capable of serving as cases of solution’.12 Those readers of Deleuze who act as if biological life is in fact a ‘known known’ (to use Rumsfeld’s barbarous phrase) are clearly prey to this illusion. If we assume the biological is the living and that ‘Life’ is merely the abstract form, we effectively treat ‘Life’ as the solution to the problem of what distinguishes the biological or organic from the inorganic. This treatment does not yield an affirmative understanding of ‘Life’, it simply positions it as an ineffable something other, which lands us right back in the realm of metaphysics. Deleuze’s main objection to both Hegelian dialectics and Freudian psychoanalysis is their willingness to accept explanations relying on such heterological devices. His insistence on a philosophy of surfaces, rather than heights and depths, is precisely directed against the deployment of ‘an ineffable something other’ as a means of solving the problem of how to begin. For Deleuze ‘Life’ is neither the originating question nor the terminating answer to his inquiry. Deleuze does not ask, ‘What is Life?’, he asks, ‘What is a transcendental field?’, and he answers – admittedly with some difficulty – that it is a pure plane of immanence. He then proposes to call the immanence of this pure plane of immanence ‘Life’. ‘Life’ answers the question of what constitutes the immanence of immanence. It can only be understood in its Deleuzian sense – it has other senses, of course – insofar as it is enveloped within its originating question, not as its terminating answer but as its motivating force: without its question, the answer is hollow. ‘Life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.’13 What begins as the answer to a complex question seems to trail off into a flight of fancy. But in a sense, it is this flight of fancy that provides the best clue as to the meaning of ‘the immanence of immanence’

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because it is only in such a system that universals like ‘complete power’ and ‘complete bliss’ are thinkable. The actual world does not permit such notions because there are too many prevailing counterforces that could and would disrupt the completeness of one’s power or bliss. But in a virtual world these counterforces can be set aside. The thinkability of ‘the immanence of immanence’ is an issue that directly concerns Deleuze. I said above that Deleuze answers his question ‘What is a transcendental field?’ ‘with some difficulty’ because the transcendental field, as Deleuze conceives it, is not immediately available to thought; rather, the form in which it becomes available to thought, or appears to be thinkable, is already somewhat less than purely immanent, which is to say already grasped as transcendent to something. ‘Must we then define the transcendental field by a pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor self, as a movement that neither begins nor ends?’14 The problem with this formulation, and the reason we cannot use a pure immediate consciousness as our theoretical anchor point, Deleuze continues, is that ‘the relation of the transcendental field to consciousness is only a conceptual one’.15 He means by this that consciousness without some form of reflection could not be visible in the transcendental field – in a related footnote he cites Bergson to the effect that it is like trying to see a beam of light reflected back on to its source. Consciousness, Deleuze writes, ‘becomes a fact only when a subject is produced at the same time as its object, both being outside the field and appearing as “transcendents”’.16 As I have noted already, Deleuze does not ask, ‘What is Life?’ This is not his question. But neither does he ask, ‘What is a pure plane of immanence?’, which still would not have brought us to the answer ‘Life’. That requires the further question, ‘What constitutes the immanence of the immanence of the pure plane of immanence?’ Deleuze does not ask this question either. He moves (without pause) from asking ‘What is a transcendental field?’ to telling us that a transcendental field is a pure plane of immanence, and from there to stating that the immanence of this pure plane of immanence is ‘Life’. If we are confused by this apparent non-asking and non-answering of questions, it is because we expect questions to lead to answers and answers to extinguish questions. The foregoing is reminiscent of the scene from Lewis Carroll Deleuze uses to exemplify Frege’s paradox of the proliferation of verbal entities. Poor Alice is confounded by the Knight, who announces that the name of the song he’s going to sing is ‘Haddock’s Eyes’ only to qualify, when Alice bemusedly replies ‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’, that no, that is what the name of the song is called. The song’s name in fact is ‘The Aged Aged Man’, but it is called ‘Ways and Means’; the song is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’.17 At which point, Alice gives up, completely bewildered. The song

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is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’, its name is ‘The Aged Aged Man’; it is, however, called ‘Ways and Means’, but its name is called ‘Haddock’s Eyes’. Alice’s problem is that she can never seem to pose the right question to get the answer she is actually seeking. The song has a name, but it is called something else; the song’s name is one thing but called another; and so on. Our confusion above, by contrast, arises from the fact that ‘Life’ is apparently given in answer to a question not yet asked, the effect of which is that since we do not know the nature of the question, we cannot grasp the answer as answer. Our Western philosophical heritage does not prepare us for the possibility that answers are not simply the missing pieces of a puzzle that once supplied neutralise that question completely, but extra-beings with a vitality and substance of their own. Conditioned as we are by a mathematical viewpoint, we find it practically impossible to see that questions are not the products of a lack. They do not arise from the perception of lack but correspond to the real movement of the unconscious. At issue, as Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition, is the image of thought itself. Deleuze himself nominates this concept, the image of thought, and the corresponding discussion of it, as ‘the most necessary and the most concrete’, and yet its significance does not seem to have been understood by many of Deleuze’s commentators, least of all by those who pursue a course of trying to validate Deleuze’s questions with answers drawn from scientific sources.18 What Deleuze wants to do in this chapter is first of all overturn the calculus of problems, that is, the misapprehension that problems arise from lack and that answers supply a missing plenitude. This is what he means when he says he wants to overturn Platonism; this is the specific version of the dialectic he objects to. In Deleuze’s view, the dialectic is precisely a calculus of problems, but when it traces its problems from propositions it loses its power. A philosophy sensitive to the dynamic relation between question and answer, problem and solution, such as Deleuze’s own is, should accordingly be referred to as dialectical.19 Deleuze aims, then, to install a new image of thought that does not demand that ideas and concepts be subject to a trial. His ideal is a form of thought without image, but such a form is, like ‘Life’, essentially impossible to present. What is obvious from the foregoing is that the distinction between biological life – whether the life of the author himself, or life itself as a scientific given – and ‘Life’ as a concept is exceedingly difficult to preserve. Constant references to Deleuze’s own life do not help matters. The failure to attend to this obvious difficulty of presentation, to the rhetorical difficulty as well as the philosophical difficulty of presenting ‘Life’ in its philosophical purity, has meant Deleuze’s commentators have read him with one eye shut. It is as though they have been reading his words without

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any sense of his meaning. The insistence on reading him through the lens of biology is a symptom of this failure because it (knowingly?) goes against the grain of one of the key aims of the piece which is precisely to enunciate a conception of ‘Life’ that is not enveloped by its proximity to and inevitable confrontation with either bare life or sheer death.20 The more biological life is foregrounded as the conceptual anchor point, the harder it is to see the nonpersonal form of ‘Life’ Deleuze was in fact trying to theorise. It is not for nothing that Deleuze finds his examples in the work of poets, novelists, film-makers and artists. In contrast to philosophers, they are content to put ‘Ideas’ into the wind without a rope securely tying them to a grounding Idea. It is not just Deleuze’s biological life that we must be wary of confusing with ‘Life’; the notion of biological life itself, shorn of all biographical associations, is, if anything, even more problematic because it is very difficult to break the habit of assuming that ‘Life’ must at some point intersect with life in its commonest usage. A final refutation of Agamben’s focus on ‘Life’ as the philosophical legacy of these two thinkers can be found, I think, in what was undoubtedly the most passionate intersection of their work, namely Deleuze’s reading of a short extract from L’Usage des plaisirs (its ink barely dry, the book having been published only a month or so earlier) in place of a eulogy on 29 June 1984, in the courtyard outside the La Pitié-Salpêtrière mortuary, to a crowd of several hundred gathered in mourning to view Foucault’s body one last time before it was consigned to the earth in Vendeuvre-du-Poitou: What is the point of striving after knowledge [savoir] if it ensures only the acquisition of knowledges [connaissances] and not, in a certain way and to the greatest extent possible, the disorientation of he who knows? . . . What is philosophy today – I mean philosophical activity – if not the critical work of thought upon thought, if it does not, rather than legitimising what one already knows, consist of an attempt to know how to and to what extent it is possible to think differently?21 This passage could not be more in tune with Deleuze’s own thoughts on the role of philosophy as he would make definitively clear in What Is Philosophy?, published seven years later in 1991. We may infer, too, that if Deleuze himself were to articulate what he thought Foucault’s singular legacy was it would be the effort he made to think differently, not his concept of life. His book on Foucault, completed as an homage to an absent friend, makes this point abundantly clear. But lest we think it is a judgement he reserved for special cases, it needs to be observed that this was Deleuze’s measure of all philosophies and philosophers. Perhaps the most compelling statement on

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this matter is to be found in his vivid description of Francis Bacon’s practice of seemingly destroying his pictures. This, Deleuze argues, is what the artist needed to do in order to cancel out cliché, opinion, expectation and the ‘givens’, the countless images with which our media-soaked universe has flooded our consciousness. Beyond that, there are ‘psychic clichés just as there are physical clichés – ready-made perceptions, memories, phantasms’ which must also be stamped out whatever the cost.22 Philosophers, too, must battle against cliché in its equally nefarious guises of presupposition and opinion, as Deleuze first argued in Difference and Repetition. In other words, it is not what Deleuze (or for that matter Foucault) has to say about ‘Life’ with his dying philosophical breath, but the effort to think differently about it, that constitutes his legacy. We fail to see this if we put ‘Life’ on a pedestal. How, then, does Deleuze describe ‘Life’? No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree he comes back to life, his saviours turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a ‘Homo tantum’ with whom everyone empathises and who attains a sort of beatitude.23 It is this description that Deleuze’s commentators – including Agamben, who even troubles himself to read the original passage from Dickens – have been reading with one eye shut. Here we need to draw on all the resources of textual analysis to challenge Agamben’s conclusion that Deleuze’s attempt ‘to clarify the vertigo of immanence by means of “a life” leads us instead into an area that is even more uncertain, in which the child and the dying man present us with the enigmatic cipher of bare biological life as such’.24 What is consistently overlooked, by Agamben as much as anyone else, is the fact that Deleuze’s first, and by his own estimate best, illustration of ‘Life’ is drawn from fiction. This does not invalidate it, by any means, but as Deleuze would himself be the first to admit, it does place certain interpretive obligations on us, which to date Deleuze’s philosophical readers have avoided. That obligation, simply put, is to read it in context.

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To begin with, no one has mentioned the humour of this passage, yet surely that is its most remarkable feature. The solemnity with which this scene and Deleuze’s exegesis of it has been attended by Deleuze’s commentators is misplaced. It is riotously funny! The whole passage is a mordant satire of the manifold pieties and hypocrisies surrounding such notions as charity, forgiveness and rebirth. Deleuze appears not to show any interest in its ironic intent; however, it is hard to believe he did not relish it. I can easily imagine Deleuze thinking of this scene in his last days and it bringing tears of laughter to his eyes as he contemplated the hypocritical way his philosophical bones would be picked over. Why else choose this passage? If it was only a matter of a scene depicting a character hovering between life and death, he could surely have pointed to other scenes in literature and film of a similarly exemplary kind. To my mind, Rutger Hauer’s death scene in Blade Runner offers an equally but – and this is precisely my point – quite differently valenced disquisition on ‘Life’.25 Is not our pity, our pathos, our concern, provoked in that scene by the sense that even cyborgs can contain a ‘spark of life’ and arrive at their deaths which have long been foretold with a sense of sadness that their memories will not outlive them? That Deleuze is quite willing to use literary references in this ironic fashion has already been demonstrated by Gregg Lambert, who shows the uncanny way Deleuze uses a discussion of Melville’s ‘Bartelby, the Scrivener’ to articulate his critique of Derrida.26 That Derrida was cognisant of this critique and mindful of its subtle sting is confirmed by his eulogy for Deleuze, which quite explicitly tries to turn the tables on his philosophical rival and return Deleuze’s message to its sender. This in itself has to be seen as an ironic gesture – is not Derrida the one who has taught us to think messages never arrive at their destination? If Deleuze’s choice of this particular scene from Our Mutual Friend is indeed indicative of his philosophical temper, if it is his way of characterising himself, then I think it has to be said that Derrida was wrong to say Deleuze is (also) Bartelby. In this instance, the message definitely does not arrive. It further suggests that Badiou’s judgement that Bartelby was one of Deleuze’s heroes (his implication is clearly that this is sufficient reason by itself to reject Deleuze) should be set aside as a category mistake that confuses the subject of enunciation for the enunciating subject.27 It is true Deleuze often states his personal preferences in the negative – he prefers not to travel, he prefers not to cut his fingernails, he prefers not to eat, and so on – but his conceptual persona, expressed in his philosophical works as an anarchic delight in treachery, is in fact nearer to that of Rogue Riderhood, the man who thanks no one for saving his life.28 Although it describes a near-death scene, the charmless Rogue Riderhood pulled apparently drowned from the Thames, Dickens makes us laugh at our disregard for the living by juxtaposing it with our inflated evaluation of life. ‘Neither Riderhood in this world, nor Riderhood in the other,

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could draw tears from them; but a striving human soul between the two can easily do it.’29 Even rough fellows, as Dickens describes the watchful denizens of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters (the Thameside pub presided over by Miss Abbey Potterson, who only moments before, and unwitting of the events that were about to unfold, had been moved to pronounce that ‘Rogue Riderhood is a villain’), find themselves choking up at the prospect of a soul trapped between two worlds. But when he revives, the rough fellows gathered round his bedside cannot bring themselves to feel joy at his resurrection, even though they had ardently longed for it moments before. His life does not seem worthy of it, and though they wouldn’t go so far as to wish him dead, they nonetheless feel cheapened by his pulling through. As if in consolation for succeeding, the redoubtable Miss Abbey stands drinks for all the fellows involved in his rescue. His daughter, too, gives into the ‘sweet delusion’ that her father will come out of his near-death experience cleansed, somehow purified, reborn even, thanks to his watery trial. And for a brief moment she allows herself to believe that he will be forever changed for the better. His lack of character, or rather his bad character, is further contrasted by the picture of her evident saintliness that Dickens constructs. Her beatific countenance makes Riderhood’s roguishness seem all the worse, since apparently he doesn’t even have the good grace to spare his daughter’s feelings. By the same token, if his daughter can be good, then we must say good can come of bad, so Riderhood has no excuse for his lack of reform, but also that his blood cannot be blamed for his bad character, since that would have affected his daughter too. Our pity, which we extend to the near-dead man, is, as his life returns, steadily withdrawn and redirected towards his daughter. The ‘sweet delusion’, not unsurprisingly, does not last past the first flicker of life returning to Riderhood’s body, although clearly the desire remains, but becomes twisted and transmuted into bitter regret. Rogue he was and Rogue he remains. Humour, Deleuze says, is ‘an art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls’.30 We are moved to laugh firstly by the way hard hearts seem to melt not, as pity might demand, at the prospect of Riderhood dying, but rather in view of some entirely metaphysical entity, ‘the spark of life’. Their impious hearts soar with tender recognition of this sublime element – miraculously untainted by its vile possessor – they presume themselves to be blessed with too, and momentarily they seem to ascend above their station. They hover like Angels in a rarefied air that isn’t theirs to breathe. They have no qualms about judging the life of the victim unworthy of the ‘Life’ they exalt. Meanwhile, Dickens twists his knife a little further by treating the slowness with which Riderhood comes to life as an occasion to further confirm his bad character by describing him as ‘instinctively

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unwilling to be restored to consciousness of this existence’, as though he were shirking work or duty rather than struggling against death!31 His spirit is lazy. The Angels are fallen, mocking creatures. Our smirks become smiles and uproarious laughter once again, though, at the moment when these dutifully maudlin souls, the rough fellows of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, suddenly turn against pity and once more harden their hearts. The Angels do not smile upon Riderhood’s recovery, but rancorously turn their backs. Ressentiment replaces the hopeful tender sentiments beating in their burly breasts but moments before. Our final laugh comes when Riderhood revives and not only displays none of the hoped-for transformations his sweetly deluded daughter dreamt might come to pass, but quite uncharitably derides his saviours for failing to rescue his hat! If ‘Life’ had lifted him up to the heavens, life itself brings him thudding back to earth. Deleuze’s interest in this scene stems from the way Dickens elucidates a notion of life that does not depend on the actual possessor of that life – it is a moment of pure immanence. But the humour of this passage derives from the fact that the possessor of this life is deemed unworthy of the pure immanent form of life animating him. The pure immanent form of life is a height created so that Riderhood can be made to fall. Perhaps the biggest laugh comes from the impossible, but utterly Dickensian, chain of chance and coincidence contained in the scene.32 The neardead Rogue Riderhood just happens to be brought to the very place where moments before he had been denounced. It is the one place where his life or death can be greeted with genuine ambivalence of feeling. Elsewhere, pity or indifference is all that could be had. To strangers his life is bare life and nothing more. But at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, where his reputation is established and his distraught but hard put-upon daughter is near at hand, Riderhood’s fate extracts a very different kind of response. At first it is met with surprise that the bedraggled figure is known. What appeared a bare life is suddenly transformed into ‘his’ life; this is soon followed by the ‘bare’ hope that ‘his’ life will be saved. In this moment the feeling for (if not the consciousness of) ‘Life’ emerges and flutters its wings like an ethereal creature, temporarily cancelling out all feelings for the quality of ‘his’ life, but, as hope is rewarded, so ‘Life’ and indeed ‘bare’ hope start to recede, becoming, finally, dismay and resentment. If it had been strangers who revived him, they would not have known of Riderhood’s poor character and would not have been in a position to judge him. So the dialectical shift between ‘his’ life and ‘bare’ hope could not have occurred. Consequently, the pure immanent form of ‘Life’ could not have been brought into view, at least not this particular modulation of it. ‘Life’ is reflected in the movement between ‘his’ life and ‘bare’ hope and it is for this reason that I have argued that the passage needs to be read

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in context. Further to this goal we need to shift our attention from matters of content to issues of form. As I have stated already, it is the formal device of coincidence that enables the humour.33 It brings about the necessary but improbable meeting of a dying stranger with fellows who know him well enough to recognise him and to have opinions as to his character. The whole passage can be described as utterly Dickensian because coincidence is one of Dickens’s key formal devices. Indeed, one can scarcely think of a Dickens novel that does not rely on it, either for the farcical intricacies of his set-piece comic sketches, or for the dramatic irony of his denouements (the conclusion to Our Mutual Friend is an excellent case in point). His realism is concentrated in his ‘thick description’ avant la lettre of the everyday life of Londoners in particular, and the English more generally, of virtually every class. It does not, however, extend to his plotting, which has the hallmarks of the adventure novels he gently satirises several of his characters for reading.

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Chapter 15 Deleuze and American (Mythopoeic) Literature

Every great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style; in contrast to what is done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social movements crossing America. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus At the close of What Is Philosophy?, having just divided thought, and with it the brain, into three rigorously distinct planes (philosophy, art and science), Deleuze and Guattari conclude that the single most important problem remaining, which they apparently did not have the strength or perhaps the health to confront themselves, is the one of interference between them.1 What happens, for instance, when a philosopher tries to use the resources of art to create concepts? Or, to take the reverse view, what happens when an artist tries to actualise concepts in their art? A kind of auto-deconstruction ensues, they suggest, in which concepts fall into an ineffectual undecidability and planes vanish into a shadowy indiscernibility. For even if it is true that philosophy knows itself only by rubbing against its limit, an elastic but impermeable perimeter of nonphilosophy, it is also true – and in What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari say as much – that philosophy is comprehended by nonphilosophy, which is to say affirmed by it. Here, then, is the most fundamental challenge Deleuze poses to philosophy: the need to be nonphilosophical at the same time as one is philosophical without ever deciding in favour of one or the other, or seeking to supplant both by another supposedly ‘higher’ form. The key question then is what is his starting point? His rejection of Hegel, the most noted of dialecticians, via Nietzsche, is of course well known, but this should not blind us to his sympathy for Adorno (Adorno’s concept of ‘utopia’ is Deleuze and Guattari’s untheorised bridge between philosophy and the milieu), probably last century’s greatest dialectician. There are clear grounds, I believe, for arguing (without necessarily proving) that What Is Philosophy? is a late reinvigoration of the necessarily incomplete project of formulating a negative dialectics begun by Adorno inasmuch as it is also an

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attempt to theorise the essentially untheorisable.2 Adorno, too, advocated that the transcendental can only be thought in the empirical. Adorno similarly challenged the strictly transcendental practices of Husserlian (and Heideggerian) phenomenology by according sensation autonomy.3 But more important than either of these considerations is Deleuze’s extensive use of literature not only to illustrate and amplify his philosophical ideas and arguments, but to in fact state his case. Yet, while Deleuze’s love of literature is well known, it is also seldom examined in any really thoroughgoing way.4 One reason for this – and this is precisely the aspect of Deleuze’s affinity with literature that I want to explore here – may be his strange mythopoeic take on the subject (his attachments to Fiedler, Canetti and D. H. Lawrence spring immediately to mind, but think also of his regular recourse to Hesse, Artaud, Castaneda and Miller). Although this approach to literature is largely outmoded, if not discredited, it is perfectly consistent with Deleuze’s philosophical system, which to many is the cutting edge of critical theory. The question of course is whether or not this is an aporia in Deleuze’s work, or still another case of his idiosyncratic transformation of a minor trend in thinking. In order to determine whether we have found a fault line or a rich mineral seam running through the centre of the Deleuzian corpus we need to decide not merely whether the mythopoeic view of literature that Deleuze holds is in fact consistent with his philosophy, which in actuality is quite easily shown to be the case, but whether his philosophical thought and nonphilosophical thought are mutually supporting. This determination can be made by examining the primary sources of this approach. I will focus on the work of Leslie Fiedler because of all the authors Deleuze relies on, Fiedler’s role seems to me the least recognised. I aim to show how Deleuze uses literature to advance philosophy and at the same time uses philosophy to demystify the mythopoeic. Fiedler, Deleuze claims, lays bare the structure of the American dream, and by doing so reveals something essential about American culture.5 Fiedler’s work thus constitutes a set of percepts that enable us to see the working parts of the American dream. The set of percepts a particular author, painter or musician is able to fashion is what individuates them as artists: percepts make artists out of dabblers, not the other way round. ‘Percepts can be telescopic or microscopic, giving characters and landscapes giant dimensions as if they were swollen by a life that no lived perception can attain.’6 Fiedler fills his work with such astonishingly swollen asseverations that no philosopher would ever claim him as their own, which leaves us to conclude that to Deleuze and Guattari he is an artist, not a theorist (philosopher). Therefore, to understand their reading of him we must substitute percept wherever we might have been

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tempted to place concept. While this reassures us that there is no inconsistency in what Deleuze does with literature, it exacerbates the problem indicated above because it puts any examination of Deleuze’s use of literature beyond the scope of philosophy. In the Deleuzian scheme, the percept is a vivid yet aconceptual articulation of a state of affairs, referring not to something perceived but to something that perceives, or as Deleuze and Guattari themselves put it, ‘not perception of the moor in Hardy but the moor as percept’.7 This means its apprehension of the world is not susceptible to philosophical inquiry. On what basis would one challenge the assertion ‘the landscape sees’? On realist grounds? The fact is, you cannot ask of a particular percept whether it is good and rigorous or not, only whether it can stand alone or not, a task which philosophers are neither trained for nor inclined to carry out. Standing alone is a matter of endurance, or preservation, and cannot be measured simply in years, for what it refers to is sensation, not materiality. This means there is no way of testing or somehow falsifying a percept: either it works or it doesn’t. It is not a matter of resemblance, or verisimilitude either. ‘As percepts, sensations are not perceptions referring to an object (reference): if they resemble something it is with a resemblance produced with their own methods; and the smile on the canvas is made solely with colours, lines, shadow, and light.’8 Criticism is thus reduced to impressionism: it cannot discuss truth (neither the New Critical truth of the artistic vision kind nor the classical truth of the image kind applies) or aesthetic merit (since that too would be to measure its rigour); it can only record its effect, or, in other words, ask: does it work? My concern here is with the unstated but nonetheless necessary presuppositions of Deleuze’s approach to literature. I want to examine the extent to which certain of his concepts are explained by percepts or, to put it another way, depend for their rigour on percepts. ‘It is possible’, Deleuze says, ‘that writing has an intrinsic relationship with lines of flight.’9 But this does not tell us very much except – and this is what is crucial – that writing (which for Deleuze means literature) is not the same as lines of flight. There are many other equally interesting – not to say vexing – examples, of course, but this one is particularly intriguing to me because of the fact that it draws so heavily on the mythopoeic resources of literature. My suspicion is that it is only by being mythopoeic that one can stave off the lure of metaphor when confronted with a statement like ‘To leave, to escape, is to trace a line’.10 Also, although it is obviously a concept constructed in a necessary relation to a percept, the percept itself is for the most part ignored by commentators on Deleuze. I think this is a problem because percepts, just as much as concepts, do things, which means we need to develop just as acute an awareness of perceptual shifts as we have for conceptual ones.

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The difficulty, of course, is that we have no pre-existing criteria by which we could judge percepts, nor an apparatus, besides Deleuze’s own, which would enable us to test them in another setting (i.e. prove by duplication). This leaves us with few options but to return to the source material itself and read it for ourselves. Fiedler’s essential and most enigmatic claim in The Return of the Vanishing American, which will henceforth be treated as a percept, is that ‘America equals the West’.11 For Fiedler ‘the West’ has two distinct implications which combine to produce the equation, America equals the West.12 Both implications are geographical in origin, but of a mythopoeic rather than strictly topographical kind. Their key difference is their relative orientation. The first is locally determined, or internal, and it refers to the West of the USA (the other side of the Rockies), while the second is globally determined, or external, and it refers to the West of Europe and Africa (the other side of the Atlantic). Fiedler’s contention is that the global view gave rise to the local view, or at least provided the conditions of possibility for such a westerly percept. So that is where I will begin, with westward-looking, westwardlonging, westerly pre-Columbian Europeans. Until Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the furthest west the European imagination could travel and still be on dry land was an island off the coast of either County Kerry or Galway, in Ireland (in this mythopoeic geography, Iceland and Greenland belong to the North). Accordingly, it is the Irish ‘who, from their home on the very verge of the West, have dreamed most variously and convincingly of that other Place’, the fabled Avalon ‘where Good King Arthur sleeps and waits his second coming’.13 Indeed, it is from the stony shores of Ireland that ‘the mind of Europe’ set off on its ‘first American trip in the fictional Voyage of Bran, a poem probably composed somewhere around the year 700 A.D.’.14 But Europe, generally, had been preoccupied with westerly longings since the time of Herodotus at least. His ‘poetic cosmogony’, along with the various and equally fantastical mythologies of his peers and successors, was passed along to the first Christian authors, ‘who, finding it symbolically apt, converted it into an article of faith’.15 The Magi, representing the principal regions of the earth, were only three in number; before them, Noah had only three sons to inherit the known planet; and of course there is only three in the Holy Trinity itself. Thus Fiedler is probably correct in saying that for a long time ‘Europeans thought of themselves as inhabiting a world without a West’.16 In ‘discovering’ America, Europe did not discover the West itself, but only found its expression. And this is exactly what the line of flight designates: a pure expression that has affect, but not content. That the West is without content but suffused with affect may be seen by tracing its path. Once the hitherto impassable obstacle of the Atlantic yielded to the gritty

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and probably foolhardy persistence of ocean-going explorers and adventurers, ‘the name West was transferred, step by step, to whatever part of the continent lured men on just over the line of settlement, to the unexplored space behind the next natural barrier’.17 The conclusion that follows is that it is not geography that gives us ‘the West’, but ambition; or, as Deleuze puts it, ‘geography is no less mental and corporeal than physical in movement’.18 A liminal zone long postulated by European thought, ‘the West’ is a horizon beyond which anything is possible. The various mythologies of ‘the West’ spatialise present limitations on life and liberty and thereby make them seem somehow attainable (e.g. ‘if only that mountain range could be crossed, then everything would turn out right’). More a structure of perception or feeling, then, than an actual place, what does ‘the West’ mean in America itself? In other words, how did America and ‘the West’ come to be one and the same thing? It may simply have been the promise of alluvial wealth that persuaded people to risk everything and venture beyond the safety of ‘home’ into the dark woods. Given the enormous magnetic power gold-rushes and land-rushes alike proved to have, this is a very likely explanation indeed. Yet, even allowing that it is at best a partial answer, does avarice really begin to explain why people stayed once their fortune was made? Why those otherwise shiftless Europeans that journeyed west in such huge numbers settled down and became Americans? The short answer is no it doesn’t.This is why the mythopoeic approach taken by Fiedler, among others, is so appealing. In place of the cumbersome cause-and-effect scheme dear to traditional historians, it offers inner necessity, a kind of inhuman momentum (or line of flight) that propels people into action in spite of themselves. Why did they stay? There are two possible answers. On the one hand, for a variety of reasons all amounting to inertia, they might simply have stayed and by a slow process of osmosis become Americans. On the other hand, it might be that these immigrants had somehow already become Americans and therefore could not even think of leaving. They stayed in America because they were Americans (by the same token, there are those, such as one finds in Kafka and Céline for example, who cannot stay in America precisely because they can never be American). National character emerged in synchrony with the nation itself. This latter explanation is more plausible, though not less enigmatic, than the other because that would be to say that America is the product of immobility, which is plainly wrong. Not only does it contradict the simple reality that America as a colonial nation is overwhelmingly populated by immigrants, it also ignores the crucial fact that these immigrants deliberately and self-consciously came to America in search of something their own homeland could not provide. The millions that left

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Europe were well on the way to becoming Americans when they booked their passage across the Atlantic; already, they were looking westward. In D. H. Lawrence’s view, ‘the West’ is where Europeans went to ‘get away’, which meant finding transforming-difference. This, Lawrence felt, was the real reason why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America in the first place, their idea of freedom of worship being a poor cousin to what already existed in Britain. ‘Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything.’19 The keenness of this insight can be seen in the way ‘the West’ – as an idea and ambition – survived the rapid shifts of the frontier further and further west, past the Rockies to the Pacific Coast. With the shifting of the frontier, so the other cardinal points moved on to American soil too, and the North American continent itself came to have its own compass point mythology. Now, it could be defined locally. ‘Correspondingly,’ Fiedler claims, ‘there have always been four kinds of American books: Northerns, Southerns, Easterns, and Westerns, though we have been accustomed, for reasons not immediately clear, to call only the last by its name.’20 Each type of novel portrays a different and distinct moment in the development of the American psyche, but it is only the Western that is truly American, for it is only the Western that captures the moment of transformation when the European immigrant finally sloughed off the Old World and became the New. Therefore, to answer the question posed above, ‘What kept them?’, we need to answer D. H. Lawrence’s much more astute question. Speaking of the new American, Lawrence asked: ‘Why isn’t he a European still, like his father before?’21 Fiedler’s answer is that adventures into ‘the West’ involved a particular kind of confrontation that could be had nowhere else in the world, namely encounters with Indians.22 Fiedler does not follow the dominant line of thinking on this matter which gives prominence to the landscape. But, since the success of the Western in captivating the American imagination, and, as it were, in capturing the American spirit, is in part due to the failure of the other topoi, let me first of all outline the principal features of the Northern, Eastern and Southern. The first to appear was the Northern, and though it dates back to the earliest times it does not deal, as one would expect, with issues arising from the day-to-day struggles of setting up a new colony.23 Doubtless this explains its comparative mythopoeic weakness. But as Richard Slotkin points out, these first writings, mostly by Puritans, had important sociopolitical work to do. It had first of all to assure its readers, both at home in the colonies and abroad in the homeland, that civility had not been lost, that the colonists had not been tarnished by their encounter with raw nature. It had also to assure its readers that life in the colonies was indeed as

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good and prosperous as promised, or else no new settlers would follow in their wake and the precarious toehold on the North American continent they had secured at great personal cost would be lost, reclaimed by the wilderness and the Indians.24 Little wonder, then, that the Northern tends to be, as Fiedler puts it, ‘tight, grey, low-keyed, underplayed avoiding melodrama where possible – sometimes, it would seem at all costs’.25 Yet, it is in precisely this drab context of tightly drawn domestic dramas that ‘the first American mythology took shape – a mythology in which the hero was the captive or victim of devilish American savages and in which his (or her) heroic quest was for religious conversion and salvation’.26 The defining motif, though, was the obduracy of the old, not the ferment of the new. Next came the Eastern. It too is tied to the old, but unlike its predecessor it also expresses an awakening of a properly American consciousness via a confrontation with Europe. As such, Fiedler suggests ‘cultural pretension is as essential to it as tourism’.27 ‘Customarily, the Eastern treats the return of the American to the Old World (only then does he know for sure that he is an American).’28 Henry James is the obvious ‘High Priest’ of this ‘cult of the Eastern’ if not its actual inventor, Cooper and Hawthorne having better claim to that title.29 Essentially, it tells the tale of the American who has made it on his or her own turf but nevertheless longs for the validation that he or she thinks can only come from the old country. So he or she journeys home – which may in fact encompass all of Europe (The Portrait of a Lady) – only to find it crusty and stiff, nearly dead. An exciting trip to ‘the continent’ unexpectedly becomes a stifling trip to the museum (The Buccaneers). Sure, it is full of great art, but it is still a dull, lifeless place. Thus there is a great ambivalence at the heart of the Eastern: it is more than a little self-satisfied by its own superiority over what it encounters abroad; then again, it is also sorely disappointed, and bitterly confused (a late example is Tender Is the Night). If Europe is not able to validate one’s achievements, then America must, but as yet no entity or institution exists which is quite capable of that. The Southern, too, admits of this failing of the Old World. The failure is more acutely felt in the Southern because it leads to decadence. The chief failing of the Old World in the new world of the Southern is its inability to provide continued moral guidance and direction in the face of the manifold temptations of the shadier sides of life. Its season is ‘the long hot summer’, its time the period of ruin and slow reconstruction following the Civil War, and its mode Gothic, American Gothic. There is a ghostly mansion at its centre, a hot-house where sexual melodramas are played out, and a blanketing darkness all around it where fear swells into white terror, the unceasing dread (tinged with guilt) of a slave-uprising. ‘What the Church and feudal aristocracy were for European Gothic, the

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Negro became for the American variety.’30 He, through paradoxical myths of exceptional virility and mulish passivity, stood for everything the Southerners loathed and feared: on the one hand, their own masculinity was questioned by his evidently superior physique, but on the other, they saw defeat in his eyes and exalted in it even as they secretly feared the same fate awaited them should they ever be ousted from the ‘big house’. This ambivalence is usually dramatised in veiled but nevertheless potent language, and the emphasis is always on loss – Tennessee Williams (loss of potency), Truman Capote (loss of decency) and William Faulkner (loss of memory). But because it inhabits a miasmal world still haunted by the spectre of a glorious European past, the Southern is not truly American. It was only when America felt secure in itself, that is, comfortable with all the elements of its everyday existence that differed from what had been left behind, that a truly American narrative could flourish. This, according to Slotkin, meant coming to terms with the doubled-edged trauma of leaving one home and trying to create another, and the deep-seated fear of assimilation, the worry of becoming too American.31 Hence the profound conservatism (which undoubtedly functioned as some kind of mechanism of defence in the Freudian sense), and the absolute horror of any kind of intimacy with Indians, expressed in early attempts to articulate life in the New World.32 The two tendencies went hand in hand. The Indian represented atavism, an ongoing seduction which could only be countered by strict adherence to the old ways. ‘Looking at the culture of the New World in which they had come to live, the Puritans saw a darkened and inverted mirror image of their own culture, their own mind.’ And, terrifyingly, for ‘every Puritan institution, moral theory and practice, belief and ritual there existed an antithetical Indian counterpart’.33 A truly American literature could not emerge until a safe means of encountering Indian ways of life could be found. This did not prove to be an easy task. For while it was the frontiersman (real, fictional and fabulous), like Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo, who eventually came to fulfil this role, they were initially treated with hostility and suspicion. Perhaps their close and long association with Indians had tainted them? In the minds of some Puritan commentators, people ‘who ventured voluntarily beyond the pale of settlement were to be directly equated with Indians’.34 Before the myth of the hunter, embodied in the frontiersman, could be settled on, a number of prior experiments were made. Slotkin identifies three that were particularly crucial: (1) conversion, (2) sacred marriage, and (3) exorcism. None of these were as successful as the fourth, the myth of the hunter, which as an explanation of an initiation to a new continent, and a new way of life, amounted to, as Slotkin puts it, ‘regeneration through violence’.35 Whereas the previous myths had tried

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without success to develop and foster a rapprochement with the Indigenous peoples, this last myth, speaking from an only very recently attained military dominance, treated them as worthy opponents, foils against which national heroism could safely be tested and proved.36 In its archetypal form, the Western is, then, ‘a fiction dealing with the confrontation in the wilderness of a transplanted WASP and a radically alien other, an Indian’.37 This confrontation has only two outcomes: the transformation of the WASP (his rebirth as hero) and the annihilation of the Indian. The Indian is of necessity killed by the frontiersman, who cannot relieve himself of the taint of nature in any other way. Killing the Indians who taught him how to be an effective woodsman is his path to redemption, or rather rehabilitation into the community he left behind.38 The moral crisis this causes is resolved via an ethical system that is in many ways quintessentially American: pragmatics, wherein an ‘action is valuable only insofar as it is a useful response to real conditions’.39 Cruelly pragmatic, the hunter-myth divides the world into hunter and hunted. Shedding no tears for the latter, it exalts the former to the extent that he or she is successful – that is, an actual killer.40 Though he may have been a friend and teacher, perhaps even a life-saver, the Indian was still, finally, seen as prey. This meant that the only possible reconciliation between the invaders and the indigenous population was that which exists between a hunter and his kill. The fight may be seen as noble, but its end is inevitable: the hunter must triumph. The bitter but unspoken truth of this hunting-inspired mythology is that the talismanic tales of frontiersmen-as-heroes which dominate Westerns emerged only when the Indians were all but conquered. Before that, horror stories of captivity amongst the savages were the rule. Unfortunately, as Slotkin argues, these stories continued to infect and inflame the American imagination long after the threat had passed, thus preventing a reasonable and rational modus vivendi between conqueror and conquered from ever being worked out.41 There is, then, deep in the heart of every Western a terrible darkness: the unspeakable guilt of not only genocide, but its exculpating justification. The hero is as much a source of shame as of inspiration. A variety of debunking histories (such as Dee Brown’s pathbreaking Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest) have not yet eradicated the nostalgic core of the American myth of creation, that understanding of the past through which the Nation understands its present.42 By the same token, a wealth of mythifying literature has not erased from living memory the terrible deeds of these putative heroes. Today, this mythopoeic fabrication of savage ‘Indians’ and heroic ‘Indian-fighters’ continues to inform the cinematic comprehension of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Its ghosts are accommodated in the same way.

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From the outset, the Vietnam War was understood and justified in terms familiar to readers of Westerns. According to President Johnson, who was responsible for the escalation of Kennedy’s police action into a full-scale war, it was a rescue mission.43 The rescue mission combines two of the most powerful myths of the frontier: (1) the captivity myth, and (2) the myth of the hunter. The first dates right back to the earliest times when the settlers literally were hostages to the Indians: without their help, through trade, in procuring food, they would have starved; without their peaceability they would have perished in a war they could not have won. This intolerable dependency was remediable only by adopting, with due modification, certain of the Indian’s ways and means of living. And so the frontiersman, the hunter, was born. In mythopoeic terms, the Vietnam veteran is the post-contemporary frontiersman. The war necessitated peculiar changes in its soldiers, changes that enabled them to survive the deadly conditions of a jungle war, but rendered them inept at being suburbanite Americans. As did the frontiersman before them, they had to become like their enemy, to become other. Still more vilified than valorised, the veterans have, in the cultural imagination at least, been put through the same cultural reclaiming process that the frontiersman had to endure. Mostly this rehabilitation has been conducted by cinematic means, using precisely those percepts sketched above. In the Vietnam veteran, and the Vietnam War, America has rediscovered the West it thought it had lost when the last Indigenous warriors threw down their weapons. If, as Fiedler claims, the presence of an Indian is essential to the Western – and the West is America – and the last Indian had died, then there could be no more Westerns, and no more West. The very survival of America depended, then, on the discovery of new Indians, or at any rate a new source of Indian-ness, meaning violent opposition. But not just any alien could work; they had to be redeemable, finally, as real Americans. Nowadays, Hollywood’s encounters with otherness are of a singular type: its interest is solely in revealing the varied ways in which one can be an American. The storyteller in the Hollywood fold has two fundamental problems to solve: first of all, he or she has to find new and essentially more subtle ways for characters to express their national zeal; second, he or she has to find new and less galling ways for the idea of the great nation to be treated, which is to say touted. The Academy Awards are an annual reminder of how central these two story-values are to American cinema and national storytelling. The all too obvious Forrest Gump, but Braveheart and Schindler’s List too, pit a little, basically non-heroic, man (occasionally a woman) against an unjust system, which despite all the odds he manages to beat. America admires nothing so much as the little, big man, which shows the extent to which percepts like concepts do things; this is probably why

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America has taken so long to forgive its Vietnam veterans for not decisively winning the war – it was not a matter of hurt national pride at all, rather it was a case of the perseverance of an antiquated percept. Getting beaten by a small nation is not the primary fault the Vietnam veterans have been expected to atone for. The really unforgivable sin was the failure to triumph in spite of the odds, and the blatant disregard for the noble examples of Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, even Custer, it implied. None of these characters paid much heed to rules and regulations, much less public opinion, and in the popular mind would have done whatever it took to get the job done. That is what America expected of its sons. So, the war had to be refought: this time against America itself. Although later examples of the Rambo story would take place in Vietnam, where the Vietnamese were taken on again and this time beaten because the gloves were finally off, the really crucial battle was the one John Rambo fought against the home nation. It was this battle that enabled him to slough off the acquired taint of otherness and be accepted back into society and allowed to fight its battles again. In First Blood II Rambo is an always already accepted weapon of the American consciousness – hence its immense popularity. The vet had been brought in from the cold and could now get down to some serious ‘war-winning’, which is what he should have been allowed to do in the first place. In First Blood American cinema found a way for the Vietnam veteran to redeem himself. There have indeed been Vietnam War Northerns (The Deerhunter), Easterns (The Quiet American) as well as Southerns (Apocalypse Now), but it was, once again, only the Western that succeeded in capturing the popular imagination. Does any of the foregoing prove a connection between Adorno and Deleuze? Perhaps not, but it does illustrate the need to clarify the relation between percept and concept. For if the concept does not refer to an object or subject for its sense but is in fact auto-referential, then unless it develops – or at any rate provokes – some kind of association with another text it will be incomprehensible to us, an empty formalism. How else can the notion of line of flight, as well as the many other nonphilosophical notions Deleuze uses, be made useful if not by connecting it to its literary origins and thinking through its peculiar percepts? Is this not what Deleuze had in mind when he said art thinks just as much as philosophy does, but in a different way and in a different language?

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Chapter 16 Schizoanalysis and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze suggests that in order to understand a thinker properly one has to know who they were against.1 In the case of Deleuze, both on his own and in collaboration with Guattari, the received wisdom is that he was against Hegel. In part this is because of the way in Nietzsche and Philosophy he positions Hegel as Nietzsche’s enemy. But this ‘meme’, if you will, which is reproduced in the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari with such monotonous regularity it can justly be termed a cliché, obscures more than it reveals, giving us an image of thought (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s own useful concept for clichéd thinking) in the place of what was actually thought. However, it is not just Deleuzians who are guilty of this. Hegel is frequently painted as a dark figure in French thought, particularly by the generation of thinkers loosely known as post-structuralists, such as Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. But this depiction of Hegel as a kind of philosophical wrong turn overlooks the fact that he was also a profound inspiration to some of the keenest and most radical minds of the generation before the post-structuralists, such as Sartre and Beauvoir, and the many thinkers they inspired such as Fanon, Memmi and the great Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire. In other words, in the span of a single generation Hegel went from being the potent ally of politically motivated philosophers to the arch-enemy of the same, despite the fact that the later generation of philosophers were, politically speaking, largely in sympathy with their predecessors, sharing their concern for justice, equality and the need for critical thinking. This scission needs to be explained. The key issue here, I will argue, is not – or not only – why were Deleuze and Guattari opposed to Hegel, but rather why were they opposed to Hegel at this particular moment in history? I tend to follow Perry Anderson, one of the most reliable guides to the history of Western Marxism, in thinking that contrasting ‘Hegelian and anti-Hegelian schools is wholly inadequate to define the exact locations of the different schools within Western Marxism [in contrast to Anderson, though, I would very much include Deleuze

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and Guattari within the ambit of this history], or the inter-relations between them. The very multiplicity of the philosophical filiations . . . – including not only Hegel, but Kant, Schelling, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Schiller, Rousseau, Montesquieu and others – precludes any such polar alignment.’2 Against this point, though, I also agree with Jameson that anti-Hegelian assertions in this period were always something other than mere announcements of philosophical disagreements; rather, they were statements of position and of personal allegiance in a rather closeted post-war academy. I doubt Anderson would disagree with this since he also makes the point that post-war Western Marxism was shockingly insular, compared to its first incarnation in the years before the First World War and more especially the Russian Revolution. He describes Adorno, Althusser, Colletti, Della Volpe and Sartre, and many others too, as ‘utterly provincial and uninformed about the theoretical cultures of neighbouring countries. Astonishingly, within the entire corpus of Western Marxism, there is not one single serious appraisal or sustained critique of the work of one major theorist by another, revealing close textual knowledge or minimal analytic care in its treatment.’3 What one finds instead is a near-constant search for ‘worthy’ philosophical precursors to Marx, which Anderson reasons became necessary when – as I’ll explain below – Western Marxism jettisoned the practical dimension of Marxism in favour of its more purely theoretical dimension. Anderson’s observations hold true today, over four decades later: it is still the case that critical theorists of Deleuze’s generation do an extremely poor job of reading each other’s work, as is amply demonstrated by both Badiou’s and Žižek’s books on Deleuze (Deleuze’s book on Foucault is no exception; it is also partisan and partial, but in an affirmative rather than negative direction). And they are still obsessed with the question of the ‘worthy’ precursor, as the countless books on Deleuze can testify. Instead of trying to figure out what can be done with Deleuze and more especially what can be done with Deleuze and Guattari, the field of ‘Deleuze and Guattari studies’ seems to be altogether stuck on the questions of whether Deleuze was Bergsonian, Nietzschean, Spinozist or, even more esoterically, whether Deleuze and Guattari were inspired by or somehow rely on evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, higher mathematics and so on. Consequently, as Anderson put it, speaking of Western Marxism, ‘Deleuze and Guattari studies’ is in danger of becoming ‘a prolonged and intricate Discourse on Method’.4 The issue of whether Deleuze and Guattari are anti-Hegel is of a piece with this and for that reason the question should be refused in that form. To reorient the question in a historical way, in the manner I have suggested, is really to ask why in that particular period it seemed necessary to Deleuze and Guattari to perform anti-Hegelianism. And I use the term ‘perform’ here quite deliberately and not as a provocation. As many commentators have pointed out, there is no general critique

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of Hegel to be found anywhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. All we have to go on is the scant pages explaining why Nietzsche opposed Hegel in Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche and the various and far from coherent pronouncements they both made in interviews. Guattari was largely silent on the subject of Hegel, but Deleuze famously said he loathed dialectics because of its altogether too mechanical one-two simplicity. My point, though, is this hardly constitutes a philosophical argument against Hegel. Nor does it even begin to do justice to the complexity of Hegel’s thought. In saying that Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism was a performance I am suggesting, with Jameson, that we should ask: who or what did Hegel stand for in Deleuze’s eyes? Fredric Jameson has proposed that for French thinkers of Deleuze’s generation Hegel became a kind of code word for Stalin; it was a way for Marxists to use theoretical fights as a cover for deeper political disagreements. This certainly rings true for Althusser and the Althusserians, but I’m not so sure it holds for either Deleuze or Guattari because neither of them was all that interested or engaged in the internecine wars being played out on the French Left in the 1950s and 1960s. Neither was part of any recognised ‘schools’ and both were in any case quite scathing of such factionalism. The other obvious possible explanation is of course that Hegel was the ‘arch’ enemy of the Spinozists and that being anti-Hegelian was simply the flipside of being pro-Spinozist. However, this is just factionalism of a different and possibly even meaner kind and for that reason should also be rejected. I think we have to look for an explanation elsewhere. This isn’t to say, however, that Marxism doesn’t provide an important clue, and not just because Spinoza was a beardless Marx according to Plekhanov, because I cannot but think we have to look in the direction of a political problematic rather than a philosophical problematic in order to satisfactorily resolve this issue.5 While I do think Hegel functions as a kind of code word for Deleuze and Guattari, as a particular kind of ‘image’ of thought, or performance, I don’t think it is Stalin or any other factional figure that they have in their sights. I want to suggest rather that they saw the recourse to Hegel as a blockage on the road to answering the key political and theoretical problem of the era. In responding to this theoretical problem, Deleuze and Guattari reunite theory and practice, long since divorced according to Anderson. In the 1950s and 1960s the key political problem for the Left was why hadn’t the great socialist revolution Marx predicted taken place in Western Europe? According to classical Marxist theories, the socialist revolutions in China and Russia were historical anomalies because they were peasant-led and not proletarian-led revolutions as they were supposed to be. Marxist doctrine held that the revolution(s) should have taken place in France, England or Germany. The bigger problem though was that once the spark

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was lit in Russia the fire didn’t spread west. This led Western Marxism as a whole to see itself, in Perry Anderson’s words, as the ‘product of defeat. The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia . . . is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period. Its major works were, without exception, produced in situations of political isolation and despair.’6 Paradoxically, the socialist victories in Russia and China did not leaven this despair, nor energise Western Marxism as one might have expected, because they brought with them their own problems. Firstly, in both Russia and China the needs of the party were prioritised over and above all other considerations, with the effect that Marxism became, in some circles at least, synonymous with authoritarian bureaucracy (later, as news of the Gulags became common knowledge, this image soured further to the point where high-profile Marxists began to leave the party in protest – the so-called ‘nouveau philosophes’, despised by both Deleuze and Guattari, were only the most prominent). Secondly, as the geographical axis of Marxism shifted from the West to the East Marxism lost its meaning on the ground in its former strongholds in Paris and Berlin – where once it had been part of working-class culture, now it was simply an ideological cover for the power of the party.7 In the process, Marxism became separated from mass struggle; theory lost its mooring in praxis. This situation created a problem that Marxists writing in the latter part of the twentieth century were largely unable to resolve. The party steadily assumed the position of central organising pole, thereby cornering Marxist theorists into having to decide whether to join the party or not. If they did, their prestige and authority was greatly enhanced, and they gained a constituency in effect, a body of readers who looked to them for guidance, but it came at a price. They had to accept the discipline and control of the party, which meant that in some circumstances they would have to remain silent about both the conduct and the actions of the party. ‘No intellectual (or worker) within the mass Communist Party of this period, not integrated into its leadership, could make the smallest pronouncement on major political issues, except in the most oracular form.’8 If they made the opposite choice and turned their back on the party the gain in freedom was more than offset by the corresponding loss of what Anderson usefully refers to as ‘anchorage’ in the very class of people who were supposed to benefit from their theorising. Thus the great Marxist scholars of the 1950s and 1960s – Adorno, Marcuse and Sartre in particular – tended to be silent on the issues that had given Marxism its initial impetus, namely the study of economics, the analysis of political machinery, revolutionary strategy and so on. It was under these conditions that so-called ‘cultural Marxism’ emerged and with it the dominance of philosophy as the primary area of interest.9 Hegel’s prominence in this period is a symptom of this fading

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away of the materialist side of Marxist thinking. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Marxism thereby went into an idealist free-fall, as many said at the time (Althusser and Colletti in particular), but it does point to a strange lacuna in a theory that at its outset chastised philosophy for merely trying to understand the world when the real point of such work was to try to change the world. This failure of history to unfold according to the script became even more perplexing for Western Marxists when they turned their eyes southwards and gave their attention to decolonisation, which swept through Africa, Asia and South America in the post-war years with varying effect. Most of the liberation movements were socialist inspired – Cuba, Indonesia, Kenya and Vietnam, to name just a few of the most important. These revolutions no doubt radicalised people in ‘First World’ countries, particularly students, some of whom went so far as to identify as Maoists (most notably Badiou and his circle).10 But for all its high points, and there were many (huge advances were made in the battle for gender, racial and sexual equality), 1960s radicalism didn’t amount to much in the way of a revolution. The structures of power in the West survived unscathed and were in many cases strengthened because it created the perfect conditions for its naked expression. Indeed, on the bleakest view of things, 1960s radicalism, in all its counterculture glory, simply paved the way to a still more complete capture of society as a whole by capitalism by setting aside all the social and cultural impediments that had hitherto blocked its expansion.11 Neo-liberalism is the effective result of these transformations. The government’s mishandling of various crises through the 1960s became the justification for the rolling back of the ‘welfare state’ – that is, the very idea that the state’s primary purpose is to oversee the welfare of the people – and the subsequent privatisation of services hitherto deemed the preserve of the state, such as healthcare, but also key infrastructure (roads, sewage, telecommunications, water and so on), and even elements of both the military and the police.12 Moreover, in the US in particular, the state responded to the civil unrest generated by 1960s radicalism by declaring ‘war’ on its own people – the war on poverty saw the steamrolling of entire neighbourhoods deemed ‘slums’, only for them to be left as vacant lots because the state lacked the resources to rebuild them; the war on drugs that followed was even more devastating because it resulted in extraordinarily high and utterly disproportionate levels of incarceration, particularly among the Black and Latino populations.13 There was no obvious historical answer to the problem of the failure to revolt in Western Europe. According to all the indicators Marxists generally relied on, the circumstances were in fact ripe for revolution. A large and well-organised working class existed at least until the early 1960s and

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although it had suffered several defeats it was still more than willing to flex its muscles to obtain better conditions, as May 1968 demonstrated in Paris when more than ten million blue-collar workers went on strike and brought the whole country to a standstill. This, for Marx at least, was the essential precondition for revolution and yet it had not happened. Why not? Western Marxism’s answer to this rather perplexing problem, which it used Hegel to theorise, was that although the economic conditions were primed for revolution, the social and cultural conditions were not. The problem was that the people – understood in the broadest possible sense – lacked not just revolutionary spirit, but revolutionary consciousness, the sense that the position of the oppressed is in fact powerful. But more than that, it is the sense that it is in the people’s interest to revolt. As Freire puts it, ‘what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms’, adding that ‘true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these “beings for another”’.14 Education is the royal road to revolutionary consciousness, according to Freire; not only that, it is also the springboard to a successful revolution, which is to say a revolution that endures beyond the initial storming of the barricades and the firing of the first shot. In Freire’s view, it is the task of revolutionary leaders to begin critical education prior to the firing of the first shot so as to ensure the revolution’s sustainability. Taking power is but a single moment, an event, albeit decisive, in the revolutionary process which is meant to transform both oppressor and oppressed.15 In a brief essay on Lenin, Jameson makes the useful suggestion that one could even read event and process in this context in dialectical terms. The event is the moment of rupture in which power is taken, while the process is the accompanying long, often tedious work of transforming a society so that the original revolution does not get forgotten, nor dwindle into a sad charade of power passing from one oppressing group to another.16 This dialectic stands at the heart of Freire’s entire enterprise. As Freire argues, utilising a perfectly Hegelian logic, if oppressor and oppressed simply swap places then it cannot be counted as a genuine liberation. ‘This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.’17 This task cannot be completed without education because it is the only way of ensuring that the newly empowered oppressed do not simply become oppressors themselves. Originating in objective conditions, revolution seeks to supersede the situation of the oppression by inaugurating a society of women and men in the process of continuing liberation. The educational, dialogical quality of revolution, which makes it a ‘cultural revolution’

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as well, must be present in all its stages. This educational quality is one of the most effective instruments for keeping the revolution from becoming institutionalized and stratified in a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy; for counter-revolution is carried out by revolutionaries who become reactionary.18 Freire’s educational philosophy is very straightforward and perhaps surprisingly inconsistent with Deleuze’s. He specifies two kinds of education, or, really, two ways of thinking about education; the first kind, which he disapproves of, he calls ‘narration’ or ‘banking’. On this model the educator ‘deposits’ knowledge in the minds of students but does not listen to the students, so the knowledge they impart is lifeless and sterile; it does not waken the revolutionary consciousness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalised and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to ‘fill’ the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated and alienating verbosity.19 The ‘banking’ model of pedagogy has two main effects, both of which are deleterious in Freire’s view: firstly, by spoon-feeding students information it actively discourages – one might even say ‘starves’ – the critical consciousness, which for Freire is the ability not only to see reality for the way it really is, but more importantly to see reality’s underlying causes; secondly, students who do not have to produce knowledge and understanding for themselves tend to see the world as fixed rather than malleable, as something they must adapt to instead of something they can transform. The ‘banking’ model thus serves the interests of the oppressing class by promoting the status quo as how things should be.20 In contrast, ‘libertarian’ education, as Freire calls it, ‘consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information’.21 It is facilitated via a process Freire refers to as problem-posing, which aims to turn the students into ‘co-investigators’, thereby eliminating the distinction between teachers as purveyors of knowledge-content and students as passive consumers of knowledge-content. ‘The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.’22 Whereas the ‘banking’ model renders students critically inert and fosters an

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adaptive response to objective reality, the problem-posing method compels the opposite attitude: students are positioned not merely as co-investigators in a project of finding out something they didn’t know before, but as active agents in whose hands the shape of the world actually rests. The latter point is particularly crucial because the ultimate goal of consciousness-raising is not the acquisition of new knowledge as such, but a heightened awareness of one’s class interests. Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming – as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality . . . In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.23 And though with Anderson we may question the degree to which Western Marxism’s educators were in fact in solidarity with their students and the oppressed more generally, inasmuch as their personal situations had little in the way of common cause with the world’s oppressed, the objective of Western Marxism as a whole was nevertheless perfectly consistent with Freire’s: it, too, wanted to transform the consciousness of the people so that they in turn would begin the process of transforming their objective reality. Given Freire’s allegiance to a Hegelian worldview it is likely that Deleuze and Guattari would not have seen eye to eye with him. But what exactly would they have objected to? We can sharpen this question further by first of all noting that they actually have much in common. To begin with, Deleuze’s own model of pedagogy, as he articulated it in a couple of fleeting passages in Difference and Repetition, is problem-posing. ‘We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do.” Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.’24 This matches precisely Freire’s image of student and teacher as co-investigators working side by side on problems and issues of mutual interest in all but one respect. It is a clear rejection, too, of the banking model of pedagogy. For Freire consciousness is consciousness of something pre-existing – it could be an object in the world or an object of thought (such as the fact of economic and political exploitation) – whereas for Deleuze consciousness is the production of an object, which is necessarily an object of thought that does not pre-exist this moment of its production. As we’ve seen, Freire’s brand of Marxism depends on the idea of consciousness, and Deleuze and Guattari reject this on what might be termed

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empirical grounds, or perhaps it would be better to say historical grounds, but also on theoretical grounds, as I’ll explain below. Basically, their position, which I will expand upon in what follows, is that consciousnessraising, the catchcry of the radical 1960s, did not work in the way Marxists thought it would. People became conscious of their oppression and more importantly their interests but did not rise up. No doubt this was in large part because, in contrast to Freire’s Latin America, people in the West generally did not see themselves as the oppressed, and in many ways they were not. For a start, they were vastly better off materially than at any other time in history. Thus the pedagogic task of Western Marxism’s educators was doubly hard – before they could discuss the strategies and tactics of revolution they had first of all to convince their respective constituencies that a revolution was in fact required. This was despite the fact that it could readily be shown that a change to a socialist model of government such as that which Western Marxism envisaged was in the interest of the great majority of people (this line of thought persists in the recent treatises on Communism for our time by Badiou, Bosteels and Dean).25 But as the ‘Obamacare’ case demonstrated all too well, interest is very far from self-evident to the majority of people. This was undoubtedly Western Marxism’s biggest stumbling block. How do you foster revolutionary consciousness in a population that has ceased to think of itself as ‘the oppressed’ and no longer thinks of its interest in collective terms? Marx thought that once people saw the true nature of their situation, their actual, objective reality, they would rise up against their oppressors and bring forth a new era of world socialism. But history didn’t follow this script. At first it was thought that this was because the people were not fully aware of their situation and that with the proper education this could be changed. But it soon became clear, in the West at least, that the problem was different from and more pernicious than simple ignorance. The people were not unaware of their true situation – how could they not know? – and yet somehow they did not see that their interests would be better served by a change in the mode of production. In Freire’s language, they adapted themselves to their oppressive environment. This latter position has come to be known as cynicism and for most contemporary left critics (particularly Žižek, who lifts the idea from Sloterdijk) it has replaced false consciousness as the standard explanation for the perennial problem of the oppressed’s failure to revolt. But cynicism simply means the failure to see one’s interests in collective terms. It is the view that allows one to recognise that the planet would be better off if climate change were halted or even reversed but to continue to prioritise one’s self-interest, which would not be so well served inasmuch as it would necessitate giving up on certain key aspects of life as we presently know it.

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From a Deleuzian perspective, the problem with both false consciousness and cynicism is that neither takes desire into account. In the case of false consciousness, it assumes that people have somehow been duped into wanting or tolerating something they would not otherwise wish for were they more clear-eyed about the true nature of their circumstances. But if one takes an extreme case like Nazism, can one really say the German people as a whole were deceived? Was fascism an unknown quantity they were unknowingly seduced into following without ever being fully aware of what it was? Did the millions of people who voted for the Nazis really have no idea what kind of a regime they were electing? Did not the blood and iron flags, the torchlit marches, the operatic uniforms with ‘death’s head’ skulls on the collars not give them some inkling? Failing that, the undisguised brutality of the Brownshirts, and more especially the ruthless way they were dealt with, must surely have been an indication. The ‘following orders’ argument which is generally used to explain how and why ordinary Germans became involved in mass exterminations in the later stages of the Nazis’ short reign does not explain how the Nazi regime came into power in the first place. No one ordered the German people to vote for the Nazis; no one ordered them to join or support the Nazi Party. Hitler could well have remained a powerless nonentity if Germany’s business barons hadn’t got behind him in the 1920s. Thus, with Reich, Deleuze and Guattari reject the thesis that the German people were duped and instead ask how and why they came to desire fascism. But unlike Reich they are not prepared to accept that the apparently dark desire for fascism is the product of mass irrationality on the part of the German people. On the contrary, they argue, ‘the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for’.26 Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari go on to argue that this principle – that fascism has to be accounted for affirmatively, as the desire for something known, rather than as the product of either a psychological aberration or deception – is in no way vitiated by the fact of social repression, not even social repression on the scale of Nazi Germany’s infamously repressive state apparatus. Desire ‘produces reality’, they argue, which is to say, ‘desiringproduction is one and the same thing as social production. It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production.’27 So if something exists it exists because it is desired; if a state of affairs exists it exists because it is desired; if a certain kind of behaviour exists it exists because it is desired. Deleuze and Guattari test this principle against the age-old question of why people seem to fight for their own servitude.28 Ultimately they reject this question as too simplistic, but it serves to open up the question of how

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desire functions. No one really desires servitude for itself, they concede, but there are many situations in which servitude of one kind or another is the direct result of one’s desires. Putting it very crudely, every time we make use of pretrochemical products – and the number of such products is legion – we contribute to the reproduction of a global situation that literally and figuratively locks us all into a situation of actual servitude. And as the two Gulf Wars prove, this is a situation ‘we’ are willing to fight to preserve. This example is only crude to the extent that we separate ourselves as individuals from what is happening all around us on a global scale. And that is precisely what cannot be done. I may not have the power as an individual to overturn the global hegemony of oil but by my actions still contribute to its hegemony. That is the reality of our political situation today. On this Deleuze and Guattari and classical Marxists agree. The problems start when we move on to the perhaps more pressing issue of what we can do to change things – or, rather, when we ask why we aren’t really doing anything to change things. Marxism’s answer, that ‘we’ lack revolutionary consciousness, is unsatisfactory in several ways. It isn’t adequate, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, because it doesn’t resolve the following problem, which is central to the paralysed state Western Marxism has found itself in since the middle of last century: ‘why do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type? And more rarely, how do certain people whose interest is objectively reactionary come to effect a preconscious revolutionary investment?’29 Here they do not so much answer the question as lay out the foundations of a problem and point the way to a new analytic model. Ultimately, what Deleuze and Guattari want to contend here is that there ‘is an unconscious libidinal investment of desire that does not necessarily coincide with the preconscious investments of interest, and that explains how the latter can be perturbed and perverted’.30 It explains the perversion of desire – its turn towards fascism, for example – inasmuch as it offers a molecular model of desire capable of ‘desiring’ in several directions at once, including directions that are not only contradictory or mutually exclusive but also self-destructive. It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path.31 In other words, consciousness-raising that aims only to make potential revolutionaries aware of where their true interests lie, which is in substance what Marxism aims to do, is bound to fail to a greater or lesser

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degree unless it comes to grips with the fact that it is desire itself that determines what one apprehends as one’s interest. And even then it is by no means certain of success. ‘A revolutionary preconscious investment bears upon new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But it could be that a part at least of the unconscious libido continues to invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows.’32 Freire was not unaware of this, as I’ve already pointed out. Liberation of the oppressed was no liberation at all in his view if the oppressed simply became oppressors in turn, or more insidiously modelled their sense of what would constitute a victory on the oppressor’s regime. But his solution was to appeal to the ‘higher consciousness’ of ‘humanisation’ and that is where he and Deleuze and Guattari do not see eye to eye.33 Deleuze and Guattari point us in the opposite direction. Rather than aim for humanisation through consciousness-raising, they encourage us to look at the complex way the conscious and unconscious operate to subvert the conscious and propel it in directions it would not otherwise want to go. The question we are left with then is what kind of pedagogy might be employed to ignite a revolutionary attitude, let’s say, in such a situation? We have to move away from the representational model of knowledge, that is, the model of knowledge that supposes in advance that there is something already formed to know, Deleuze argues, because it is ‘modelled entirely upon propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution, but those propositions by themselves give a completely inaccurate notion of the instances which engender them as cases, and which they resolve or conclude’.34 If interests are born of desire, then to ‘change the world’, as every revolutionary educationalist surely wants to do, it is desire that pedagogy must seek to address. Desire tends to elude the investigator because it is constantly moving, like a flow, Deleuze and Guattari say. But perhaps that’s how we deal with it, too, by developing a kind of hydraulic pedagogy that is capable of working with a fluid material?

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Chapter 17 Schizoanalysis and Literary Criticism

More a physician than a patient, the writer makes a diagnosis, but what he diagnoses is the world; he follows the illness step by step, but it is the generic illness of man; he assesses the chances of health, but it is the possible birth of a new man. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical It is not often noted, but The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson is explicitly presented as Deleuzian in spirit. It is an experiment in immanent criticism which intends ‘to reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from that reduction to the merely subjective and to the status of psychological projection’.1 That Deleuze and Guattari’s and Jameson’s respective projects could be the same or even similar scarcely seems possible given that they stand on opposite sides of that yawning chasm – namely, the Hegel and anti-Hegel divide – which in the decades since World War II has split philosophy in two. And yet, here is Jameson claiming a supposed enemy as a kindred spirit. This is surely the most provocative reading of Deleuze ever offered. Certainly, to my mind, it is the most interesting, and in what follows I will try to show how Jameson’s insight can be used to enrich our understanding of Deleuze’s work. I argue that Deleuze’s ‘clinical’ method is in fact a modified form of historicism – where a theorist like Lukács, for instance, would speak of the history of forms, Deleuze speaks of permutations in the plane of composition. ‘If there is progress in art it is because art can live only by creating new percepts and affects as so many detours, returns, dividing lines, changes of level and scale.’2 By the same token, without linking the plane of composition to history in the same causal way that Lukács does with form (particularly in The Theory of the Novel), Deleuze does allow that it indicts history, and insofar as it does that, it seems to me it is useful and plausible to think of it as a new kind of historicism. That being said, it does need to be made clear that any resemblance between Lukács, say, and Deleuze is a matter of common concerns rather than conceptual identity. It is true Deleuze correlates stylistic shifts to world-historical events and

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circumstances as certain materialist (particularly Marxist) literary historians do, but his aim is not to chronicle the progress of literature itself. Deleuze’s view of things tends to be synchronic, not diachronic. When he speaks of the development of the line in easel painting, for instance, from its Gothic sources to its Bauhaus convulsions and modernist explosions in the hands of anti-line drip painters and pourers like Jackson Pollock, he does so only to catalogue the increasing number and complexity of the constraints imposed on the production of the new by contemporary artists.3 Effectively, each advance is also a reduction in the number of ways in which one could be original within a given field. These restrictions are viewed by Deleuze as opportunities for originality; they are so many more boundaries to be shifted or transgressed by whomsoever has the will and the taste for it. Jameson says something very similar: he defines postmodernism as a progressive increase in the number and strictness of artistic taboos (such as the one architects like Gehry seem to adhere to that says a building can’t look like what it is, a building, but must instead be a kind of standalone sculpture and look like a giant pair of binoculars, say). Likewise, he concludes that the true measure of creativity is to be found in the response the artist is able to make to this situation.4 The point I want to make, though, is that Deleuze’s conception of literature can still be usefully thought of as historicist even if he doesn’t conform to pre-existing models, because in his view literature has a special relation to history. Insofar as this suggestion has the effect of estranging what we thought we meant by ‘historicism’ it serves the further, even more useful purpose of renewing the very notion of historicism itself. Deleuze’s historicism is, to be sure, a historicism of an immanent rather than transcendental cast. He doesn’t charge it with the task of absolutising anything (sublating ‘history’ into History), but he does task it with deterritorialising such absolutes. Literature’s function is precisely to open absolutes up to the chaotic pulsations of the Earth and the Cosmos to enable us to live ‘history’ (the everyday) the more intensely for not having to do so under the radar of History. The aim of all literature, Deleuze says, is to generate insights – via the elaboration of percepts and affects – into our everyday lives that through being ‘beyond’ mere opinion are able to open us up to something new, something unlived and unknown.5 Percepts and affects are intense or abstract views of the world that have been resolutely purged of opinion; in this crystalline form they attain that revolutionary sensibility Deleuze referred to as becoming-minor. The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion – in view, one hopes, of that still-missing people.6

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According to Deleuze, authors able to produce such literature deserve ‘the Nietzschean name “physicians of civilisation”’.7 A constant throughout Deleuze’s work, the notion of the author-physician derives (in the main) from the early, more strictly Nietzschean period in his work, when he liked to speak of art in terms of ‘dramatisation’. ‘Dramatisation’ is the name Deleuze gave, finally, and only after a careful bracketing of all the Christian and dialectical pathos tainting the word ‘drama’, to Nietzsche’s method. This method, Deleuze says, is derived from the quintessential Nietzschean question: ‘which one wills?’ ‘Any given concept, feeling or belief will be treated as symptoms of a will that wills something. What does the one that says this, that thinks or feels that, will?’8 On the Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche, the will is only able to will qualities, not quantities; it does not hunger after objects or ends, but certain strains of intensity that enrich its power to act (the Spinozism Deleuze habitually attributes to Nietzsche is nowhere more evident). One such quality the will strives for above all others is that most modernist of modern qualities, ‘newness’. While it is true Deleuze resists calling this process of striving for newness utopian, I would argue it is not only the best word for it, it is also reactionary to shy away from it. Deleuze’s reluctance to use the term is problematic, I think, because it is not clear that it doesn’t signal a fear of it. ‘Utopia’, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘is not a good concept because even when opposed to History it is still subject to it and lodged within it as an ideal motivation.’9 Deleuze’s reluctance to endorse the concept of utopia can only be understood in the context of the times in which he wrote, and should not be taken to imply a wholesale rejection of utopian thinking. Elliott argues – rightly, I think – that fear of utopia usually springs from conservative or disillusioned sources; for instance, the tragic failings of Russian and Chinese styles of communism have tainted the very word ‘utopia’ in such a way as to turn the notion of the future into some kind of code word for tyranny (George Orwell’s ‘negative utopia’, 1984, is of course the archetype of this perversion).10 While I would defend Deleuze against a charge of conservatism, I do think it is fair to say that at a certain point he became quite disillusioned with so-called ‘actually existing socialism’ and by association all visions of ‘new societies’.11 Now, insofar as utopia is defined as a quiescent concept, as it often is, Deleuze is rightly hesitant about using such a passive term. For him, literature is anything but in the business of edulcoration. As such, Deleuze would certainly not agree with Elliott that utopia – if that indeed is literature’s true calling – is supposed to eradicate pain by lowering the intensity of our engagement with history.12 Obviously enough, he would argue the very opposite of this. But inasmuch as utopia condemns the present state of things for the sake of a better future, his claim that literature indicts the present from the perspective of the future and in so doing summons forth ‘a people

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yet to come’ can validly and usefully be called utopian. It would, at the very least, serve the valuable purpose of demystifying that chillingly apt phrase of Kafka’s, perhaps even letting it become an analytic concept instead of a mere description. There is, it seems to me, much to be gained by thinking of ‘the people yet to come’ as a code phrase for allegory (yet another term to be found languishing under the general heading ‘taboo’ in Deleuze’s private Dictionnaire des idées reçues), because it functions precisely to encourage us to read the inhuman bleakness of authors like Kafka and Beckett as an astringent ironisation of hope. The crucial point is this: that which modernists praised as new is itself symptomatic of some deeper process of willing. The question is: what is the nature of the relation between symptom and cause? Newness in Nietzsche means the transmutation and transvaluation of existing forces. The achievement of the new punctuates but in no way arrests the ongoing struggle against inertia, or what Nietzsche called the reactive forces (opinion, in literature). Literary history is a continuous assertion of this point. Every author faces the same problem: the form of their expression ages more rapidly and more deleteriously than the form of content. A poetic innovation, for instance, becomes a technique to be copied the very instant it is deployed, but worse still, it blends into the amorphous morass of opinion in the very moment of its recognition. This, as Barthes has explained, is what is tragic (in the Nietzschean sense) in modern literature’s pursuit of the new: ‘mechanical habits are developed in the very place where freedom existed, a network of set forms hem in more and more the pristine freshness of discourse, a mode of writing appears afresh in lieu of an indefinite language.’13 The tragic is to be found on two levels: both the writer’s situation and the writing itself are determined by its paradoxes. On the one hand, the writer cannot fail to perceive a ‘tragic disparity’ between what they write and what they see; on the other hand, if they do manage to close this gap by even the minutest margin through some technical innovation or other they are prohibited from reusing it by virtue of its very success, for to do so would be to risk transforming it into a ritual.14 Therefore, unless they renounced Literature, the solution of this problematic of writing does not depend on the writer. Every writer born opens within himself the trial of literature, but if he condemns it, he always grants it a reprieve which literature turns to use in order to reconquer him. However hard he tries to create a free language, it comes back to him fabricated, for luxury is never innocent: and it is this stale language, closed by the immense pressure of all the men who do not speak it, which he must continue to use. Writing is therefore a blind alley, and it is because society itself is a blind alley.15

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In Barthes’s work, then, we see all the essential constituents of Deleuze’s clinical conception of literature pushed to the brink of becoming a dialectical analysis. If we were to rewrite this in Deleuze’s terminology, we should say that literature begins with the creation of one’s own impossibilities, ‘because without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth’.16 This is as near to dialectics as Deleuze ever gets: impossibilities, but not contradictions. Thus the question must be: how does he avert the apparently inevitable dialectical step? How does he prevent the line of flight from being reread as either a higher unity or a labour of the negative and yet still find the means of progressing beyond the impasse he creates? For Deleuze, it is the notion of the tragic itself that permits him – after Nietzsche – to avoid dialectics, because the tragic is the very opposite of the dialectic: whereas the latter wants to justify life, the tragic wants only to affirm it. ‘Dialectics in general are not a tragic vision of the world but, on the contrary, the death of tragedy, the replacement of the tragic vision by a theoretical conception (with Socrates) or a Christian conception (with Hegel).’17 That is to say, dialectics resolves its impossibilities by parleying with some kind of higher authority, but the tragic does so by embracing its contradictions and treating them as constitutive not symptoms of an irredeemable lack. The tragic, then, might more usefully be seen as a repolarising of the notion of the symptom itself because now, instead of indicating a lack of health, one finds in it the lineaments of a new way of conceiving health. For instance, Deleuze says of Zola’s alcoholics and murderers that their atavistic impulses express ‘the kind of life that a body invents in order to turn to its own advantage what the environment gives, even if it has to destroy other bodies’.18 With the change in valency of symptoms, so ‘health’ too is made to evolve in a new direction. It becomes the new code word for denoting not merely the relation between the subject and their circumstances (or what we might also call the objective world), but their response to it. For Deleuze, the writer’s health, as exhibited by their work, is a kind of biological barometer measuring the pressures and possibilities of ‘a historically determined life’.19 One can read off a work the rise and fall of such determining tensions as economic security, existential stability and so on, almost as if it had so many dials and gauges, by concentrating on its formal mechanisms. This means instead of treating the often sensational content of Zola’s novels as an attempt to capture, evoke or otherwise represent the real and rating it against some imaginary scale of pure mimesis, it should rather be thought in expressive terms as being that figuration which the conditions of the times demanded, but which ultimately could not be delivered. The deeper representative task of the novel is not then to try to find a more purely mimetic language, but to create the means of folding its own

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tragic flaws into itself and render artistic its own fatal incapacities at the levels of vision and expression. For Deleuze, this is the function of the plane of composition: it creates the artistic ground needed to tell a particular kind of story, and it does so by posing and solving the problems for representation that a particular historical situation entails. In Zola, this challenge is met via something Deleuze likes to call ‘the crack’ (a term he borrows from F. Scott Fitzgerald). The crack is not the ground itself; it is rather the device needed to produce a ground. While it is the crack which gives naturalism its distinctive character, it should not be thematised, or treated as some kind of touchstone or hermeneutic key, because by itself it explains nothing. Its function is not only more complicated than that, it cannot be explained in isolation from ‘originary worlds and real milieux’. One must be wary of being carried away by Deleuze’s own enthusiastic rhetoric; he will go so far as to describe naturalism as a veritable launching of the theme of the crack, but (in my view) this is a false trail. We can get a better fix on Deleuze’s claim by contrasting it with that which it constantly risks falling into, and must sedulously avoid becoming, namely a thematisation of the crack (to use Paul de Man’s term). In effect, what Deleuze claims for Zola’s delineation of this theme is precisely some kind of hermeneutic raising-up of an indeterminate quality which might otherwise have passed unnoticed in the confusion of the naturalistic content. As Jameson explains, thematisation refers to the ‘moment in which an element, a component, of a text is promoted to the status of official theme, at which point it becomes a candidate for that even higher honour, the work’s “meaning”’.20 But, as he clarifies, such thematisation is not necessarily a function of the theme itself and could indeed be read as a degradation of it, or else the product of an internal flaw in either its execution or its imagining. While Deleuze does speak of the crack as being a theme, it seems clear that he would not wish it to be thought of in these terms. The fall into thematisation is, however, an ever-present risk, one that is especially hard to contend with because it can be triggered by both the author and the reader. On the one hand, not all authors are always able to work through their own wish-fulfilments fully enough to attain that purity of image Deleuze associates with the impersonal – the crack, as an instance of what Deleuze describes as pure form, that is, form utterly relieved of content, is an example par excellence of this impersonal mode. The crack is neither indeterminate nor determinate but the determinable, which means it is neither a precondition nor a product but that which cuts across and at the same time joins these things. It is in this respect the alter-image of Deleuze’s third synthesis of time (a connection which is confirmed by Deleuze’s correlation of the third synthesis with the death instinct).21 On the other hand, there is the

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problem of the defences of the readers themselves, which it must be said Deleuze does not overly trouble himself with. The fact is, though, readers cannot always be prevented from defending themselves against excoriating visions of the world by fetishising critical motifs. And what’s more, the work of psychoanalytic critics like Norman Holland would suggest that it is precisely the management of these defences that accounts for the pleasure people take in reading and, accordingly, are in fact built into the literary works themselves.22 Deleuze would no doubt see such built-in defences as faults, or impurities. As such, he says the greatest difficulty faced by naturalistic authors is how to keep the crack ‘alive’ once it is set in place.23 The crack, Deleuze says, is the death instinct, and the death instinct is the third synthesis of time.24 Obviously enough, we will not come any closer to understanding the crack and with it naturalism until we reckon more fully into the picture the other two syntheses of time. The first thing that needs to be noted about syntheses one and two is that they are passive, whereas the third is active, but only in relation to the others. Therefore, it does not give rise to a truly tripartite structure. Rather, it corresponds to the baroque vision of the two-storeyed monad.25 Although it is only explicitly spelled out in his book on Leibniz, the model it presupposes effectively defines Deleuze’s entire hermeneutics. This is evidenced by its insistence (to use a Deleuzian term26) in every book Deleuze wrote. Sooner or later, everything boils down to a steep slope joining two distinct but inseparable levels, which one must simultaneously ascend and descend. For me, the sublime image of this is the one Deleuze borrows from Melville, that of the theme of two books – one written in ink and the other written in blood and anguish.27 But the same logic is at work in Deleuze’s manipulation of a host of other two-tiered models, from sense and nonsense, irony and humour, virtual and actual, right through to concept and plane. Undoubtedly, the most critical of all of the two-tiered models Deleuze has recourse to is Spinoza’s distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas.28 In every case, though, it must be stressed, the crucial point of interest is the steep slope itself (also known as the ‘differenciator’ or ‘dark precursor’29) which joins the two levels, not the levels themselves. The first level, or synthesis, which Deleuze stipulates is the foundation of time, is habit; the second level, or synthesis, which Deleuze stipulates is the ground of time, is memory. The foundation concerns the soil: it shows how something is established upon this soil, how it occupies and possesses it; whereas the ground comes rather from the sky, it goes from the summit to the foundations, and measures the possessor and the soil against one another according to a title of ownership.30

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At stake here is a whole new conception of time and space, one that on Deleuze’s own say-so can be thought of as a completion of Kant’s famous Copernican revolution. This can be rewritten in literary terms as follows: habit refers to the selection of data, or semantics, while memory refers to its organisation into a sequence, or syntax. By itself this is insufficient to create literature, to give the writing the strength it needs to ‘stand up’. Something else is needed – a bolt of lightning – to galvanise the disparate components into a vigorous whole: the crack. The third synthesis of time, or the crack, is precisely this bolt of lightning. Deleuze’s explanation of it is couched in epic narrative terms. The first synthesis of time, he says, is felt as a time in which an imagined act is ‘too big’ for the individual in question (Hamlet and Oedipus are of course the ubiquitous examples). This moment refers to that eternal (and usually painful) ‘before’ which necessarily precedes all action. The second synthesis, meanwhile, refers to the present of the action itself, which is thus the present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act (this is marked by Hamlet’s sea voyage and by the outcome of Oedipus’s inquiry: the hero becomes ‘capable’ of the act).31 The third synthesis, then, refers to the moment in which the future finally appears; it signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself.32 Hamlet is annihilated in body and spirit by the very fact that he finds the inner resources equal to the task of killing his uncle, which is to say, equal to the impersonal exactions of vengeance itself.33 His actions become meaningful only at this point. In his account of film noir, Deleuze rewrites the three syntheses of time as situation (in a Western, for instance, this would refer both to the imminent threat posed to civilisation by a band of marauding cattle thieves or Indians with which every Western inevitably begins and to the hero’s fundamental unwillingness or constitutional incapacity to get involved – here the eponymous hero of Shane is the archetype), action (that is, whatever it will take to remedy the situation, which is at once the carrying out of an

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act and the becoming-equal to that act), and, lastly, the changed situation (the moment in which it is realised that the hero had somehow become inhuman and could no longer be tolerated by the society which demanded action of him).34 The changed situation, or crack, shouldn’t be confused with what on a more traditional understanding of drama might be called the third act; it is, rather, the force of dramatisation itself. Shane’s heroism only becomes patent when it is realised how fully he has condemned himself to an aimless purgatory at the exact moment when it at last looked like he might have found himself a proper home. The drama resides not in his exploits as a gunfighter, but in his inability to avert the fate he knows awaits all who would carry a gun. It is this tragic element of fate that corresponds to the crack. However, even this risks being too privative a definition because it correlates the crack with what is after all a fairly primitive means of constructing a drama, pathos. And indeed, for Deleuze, the crack is not simply a plot device; it refers rather more extensively to any practical means an author may choose to deploy in order to purge their text of pathos and opinion (the all too pathetic last scene of Shane stands as something of a monitory example of just how inadequate mere plotting can be to this task). It is therefore better understood in terms of what Jameson refers to as ‘skill’ in his account of style. If the crack is thought in these terms, as ‘skill’, what seemed like a localised generic trait, something peculiar only to naturalism, is suddenly revealed as historicist. And this, it seems to me, is the nature of the shift in Deleuze’s work from talking about the crack, or the third synthesis of time, to the plane of composition. Now, to explain a little more fully what I mean by suggesting that ‘skill’ can be thought of as a galvanising force (or synthesis) injecting life into an otherwise inert folding of a singular syntax and a determinate set of content, let me briefly sketch out Jameson’s argument as he enumerates it near to the end of Marxism and Form.35 He argues that it is a mistake to think authors deal essentially in themes, that their works are simply disquisitions – albeit of ‘another’ type – on such great concerns as love, honour and death. Even an author like Hemingway, famous as much for the books he wrote as the animals he killed and the wounds he sustained, his life experiences being the indispensable support of his art, cannot be apprehended in this way, he argues, because in reality his ‘deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style’.36 It is the sheer process of writing itself that stands out as the essential event, whether or not it proves adequate to the task it sets itself. Thus, on Jameson’s view, Hemingway’s style is like an announcement of his ability, a showing of his skill at a certain craft, and it is this that attracts our empathy, not the actual content of his stories. This skill is not exercised in a vacuum, however;

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it is conditioned by the times in which an author writes – Hemingway’s emphasis on the authenticity of experience, for instance, is only meaningful in an era that fears it has somehow lost its grip on the real. The problems writers confront are all a product of history itself; their writing, as such, is their means of dealing with the environment they have no choice but to inhabit. It is their means of counter-actualising it.37 As Deleuze says of Zola’s instinct-driven characters, their instincts designate the conditions of life and survival in general – the conditions of the conservation of a kind of life determined in a historical social milieu (here, the Second Empire). This is why Zola’s bourgeois can easily name their vices, their lack of generosity and their ignominies as virtues; conversely, this is why the poor are often reduced to ‘instincts’ like alcoholism, which express the historical conditions of their lives and their only way of putting up with a historically determined life.38 But the sheer hubbub of the instincts let loose is not enough to produce naturalism. For this one needs to introduce a tragic mechanism, such as ‘the crack’, to bring about the proper amount of degradation. The instincts by themselves could always be brought under control by the reality principle, or its equivalent molarising force, but are powerless to help themselves in the presence of a crack.39 Naturalism in literature is essentially Zola: he had the idea of making real milieux run in parallel with originary worlds. In each of his books, he describes a precise milieu, but he also exhausts it, and restores it to the originary world; it is from this higher source that the force of realist description derives.40 The real world, as it were, is converted into the medium needed to present another world, which is not fictional exactly, but more a pointed abstraction of the real. Crucially, though, neither one can be separated from the other, nor do they ever take on a distinct form.41 The originary world only makes sense insofar as it is situated, as rigorously as possible, in a geographical and historical milieu which serves as its medium and whose violence and cruelty it ultimately reveals. But, by the same token, the real milieu ‘only presents itself as real in its immanence in the originary world’. This means it, too, is a species of contrivance: ‘it has the status of a “derived” milieu, which receives a temporality as destiny from the originary world.’42 Neither the originary world nor the real milieu has existence independent of the other, and in this respect each is as ‘fictional’ as the other. Obviously

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enough, it is the juxtaposition of the two worlds that produces the celebrated diagnostic effect of naturalism. But just what are real milieux and originary worlds? ‘Take a house, a country or region. These are the real milieux of geographical and social actualisation. But it looks as if, in whole or in part, they communicate from within with originary worlds.’43 The originary worlds, for their part, can be thought of as worlds which have been emptied of all subjective and characterological content, worlds which in effect are prior even to the differentiation of animals and humans. They are diagrams, but not of the blueprint variety. Rather they are the types of life-maps ethologists contrive to produce – that is, maps of behaviour reduced to its patterns of action. For example, the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the tick sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the immense forest.44 The life of the tick is bounded by just two limits, an optimal one, the feast, and a pessimal one, the fast it endures, and taken together with its three affects this is enough to draw its diagram. When Deleuze says one of the achievements of the modern novel is to ‘rediscover, below the level of active syntheses, the domain of passive syntheses which constitute us’45 he means that it has found a means of drawing this type of diagram. It is a diagram of life as it is lived in modernity. Modernity would then be the real milieu which at once sustains this diagram and that which this diagram hollows out and thereby condemns. The diagram itself, meanwhile, is like a terrible secret that everybody knows but no one dares mention: it is that stark alienation of life all ideologies labour long and hard to paper over. It is not the figure of Oedipus, however, but Empedocles who dramatises this situation. The originary world is therefore both radical beginning and absolute end; and finally it links the one to the other, it puts the one into the other, according to a law which is that of the steepest slope. It is thus a world of a very special kind of violence (in certain respects, it is the radical evil); but it has the merit of causing an originary image of time to rise, with the beginning, the end, and the slope, all the cruelty of Chronos.46 A writer, on Deleuze’s view, is thus part ethologist (discoverer of the inhuman, or the cruel) and part anthropologist (recorder of the human, or the

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juridical). The art of writing consists in utilising anthropological material to stage ethological material in a way that causes the reader to oscillate between the two worlds. This very oscillation, this crack, can be found in the reader and the work itself. The ‘skill’ of writing consists in figuring out how the work must be composed given the conditions of the age; this is, in effect, the writer’s essential problem, and the ‘drama’ of their work is directly proportional to the quality of the solution arrived at.

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Chapter 18 The ‘Clutter Assemblage’

It is only when we turn to a consideration of actions – and not just the elaboration of thoughts and ideas – that we can see the full complexity of the distinction between actual and virtual. The physical elements in a given assemblage are not necessarily ‘actual’ from the point of view of the construction of the assemblage; they are merely the props. In this precise sense they should be considered virtual. The actual is rather the productive set of ideas – the complex, as Freud called it – that holds the props together and gives the overall arrangement – a perhaps better translation of agencement than ‘assemblage’ – its coherence and purpose. I use the term ‘complex’ here quite deliberately, too. In the glossary Guattari appended to Molecular Revolution in Brazil, he writes, ‘In the schizoanalytic theory of the unconscious, assemblage is conceived as replacing the Freudian “complex.”’1 This is an important clue to understanding the concept of the assemblage, which all too often is simply equated with the composition of a set of physical props.2 The actual is the beating heart of the assemblage, that which makes a particular arrangement of things necessary, and as the Little Joey case demonstrates it remains in place even when the things themselves are removed. In the context of artistic production, this raises some very interesting questions about the relationship between both the physical conditions in which the art is produced – e.g. the studio – and the final arrangement of the artistic object itself. The well-known British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips addresses this question directly, albeit using a very different critical language, in a short but intriguing essay entitled ‘Clutter: A Case History’. He asks what clutter – e.g. a messy bedroom, an untidy studio, a disorganised desk – might mean, or rather ‘do’, for the person doing the cluttering. For Phillips, the questions ‘what does clutter mean?’ and ‘what does clutter do?’ are related, obviously, but also distinct, and one senses that he shares Deleuze and Guattari’s view, or at least intuits the substance of their argument, that one can only properly engage the second question by first of all renouncing the first, something he finds hard to do because psychoanalysis constantly pushes his thinking in that direction.3 Psychoanalysis, especially but not exclusively its British,

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empirical strain, is, Phillips observes, curiously ambivalent about disorder, or what he prefers to call clutter. Virtually all its ‘categories of pathology’ are, as Phillips puts it, ‘fantasies of disorder’, yet its critical language ‘repudiates chaos’ as its basic duty.4 On the one hand, psychoanalysis is professionally fascinated by instances of disorder and is constantly on the alert for slips of the tongue, tics, compulsions, anything that might be construed as betraying a second order of psychical activity; yet, on the other hand, it cannot accept that disorder really is what it appears to be – it must uncover the hidden pattern, the secret order that renders the slips of the tongue, the tics, the compulsions and so on, legible. The irony of this, from a schizoanalytic point of view, is that these ‘slips’ are the only forms of desiring-production that psychoanalysis recognises and it negates them. What psychoanalysis cannot countenance is the idea that clutter might be meaningless and still purposeful. The conflict between these two questions, ‘what does it mean?’ and ‘what does it do?’, pushes contemporary psychoanalysts like Phillips in a similar direction to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Phillips offers as his paradigmatic example of what might be termed purposive clutter (i.e. an assemblage) the case of a painter in his midthirties who came to see him because he felt he was becoming ‘mildly agoraphobic’. The artist couldn’t be completely sure of his self-diagnosis because his vocation kept him indoors at an easel most of the time anyway, but he was sufficiently anxious about venturing anywhere near parks or the countryside to compel him to seek treatment. However, it was not the thought of being able to go outside again in relative comfort that drove him to the analyst’s door. His agoraphobia did not imprison him, or if it did it was not the confining nature of it that worried him. Not unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, he was more concerned with what his symptoms might mean. He wondered if his anxiety concealed an unconscious or perhaps preconscious desire not to see someone or something. Was it, in other words, a defence, or perhaps a screen? Was he afraid of going outside in case he encountered someone or something that was in fact the real cause of his discomfort? Doubtless, as an artist he was also troubled by the potential impairment of his visual apparatus such a will to blindness entails. How could he have confidence in the ‘truth’ of his art with that gnawing worm of self-doubt eating away at his sense of aesthetic integrity? Paradoxically, the prospect of treatment also caused him not a little anxiety because he sensed, or at least worried, that there was an intimate and productive connection (i.e. the assemblage manifesting itself as a complex) between his symptoms and his art, as though his not-seeing one thing was the price to be paid for acuity in other areas. Phillips also sensed a connection between his art and his symptoms, although not in quite the direct fashion the patient feared.

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So worried is the patient about the possibly positive connection between his symptoms and his art that he goes so far as to tell his analyst, ‘I will be in a mess if I come here with agoraphobia and you cure me of painting!’5 Phillips treats his patient’s presenting symptoms as a potential entrée on to a new field of virtuality (to use Guattari’s notion). He doesn’t immediately seize on agoraphobia as the problem, but waits for the patient to explain why he thinks it is a problem. This is of course standard procedure for psychoanalysis, which effects its ‘cure’ not by interpreting symptoms for the patient, but by teaching the patient how to interpret them for themselves. Its ‘talking cure’ label is well deserved because it is precisely by talking, by self-analysing, that the patient attains their cure, albeit at the price of a perpetual auto-critique. For Deleuze and Guattari this is one of the more egregious aspects of psychoanalytic practice; in their view, the psychoanalyst’s silences are more pernicious than their pronouncements.6 However, Phillips short-circuits the process by asking an exceedingly presumptive question about the connection between the agoraphobic symptoms and the patient’s vocation. In doing so he exposes the clinician’s own desire and more or less buries the patient’s, or at least traps it within a problematic not of his own choosing. Agoraphobia is the patient’s symptom, to be sure, but the connection between that and his artistic predicament is the analyst’s. That it is the analyst not the analysand who desires the connection is apparent in Phillips’s wordlessness at the moment the connection is made – ‘I had so much to say that I couldn’t think of anything to say.’7 If one were, as Phillips puts it, ‘to be a crude old-style Freudian’ for a moment, it would not be difficult to discern in his momentary aphasia evidence of cathexis.8 But can one not also see in this hesitation a certain longing for a different kind of analytic discourse, one that was capable of interrogating a symptom for itself without having to treat it as a sign of something? The patient’s first response to the question of whether he saw any links himself between his symptoms and his art was to recollect seeing a photograph of Francis Bacon’s studio and being amazed at how cluttered it was. ‘How could he find anything in all that mess?’9 The messiness of Bacon’s South Kensington studio was legendary in the artist’s own lifetime but has become even more renowned since his death in 1992. He bequeathed the studio, though not the building that contained it (which he didn’t own), to the Hugh Lane Gallery, which amidst great furore relocated it to Dublin, where a reconstruction of the surface layer of it can now be viewed through glass display windows. The full depth of the mess, however, is stored separately in an archival area. A team of ten archaeologists were employed to excavate the ‘site’ and catalogue and photograph every single component of the mess. Some 7,500 individual items were unearthed,

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identified, labelled, recorded and entered into a database, the whole process taking some three years to complete. The archaeologists found all manner of detritus, such as empty paint containers, slashed canvases, shreds of corduroy used to texture images, clippings from magazines, and empty champagne bottles. In many places the rubbish was piled several feet high and even the walls were smeared thick with paint – apparently Bacon never used a palette to mix or test his colours, he simply used any available surface, including the walls. Bacon never took out the rubbish, either, but just dropped it at his feet and let it accumulate layer upon layer in a manner that can only have been deliberate, though to what purpose it remains to be discovered. In interviews Bacon described the mess as essential to his art and for this reason this studio (one of several he utilised in the course of his long career) has been preserved with the thought that it somehow provides an insight into the artist’s process, if not the art itself. Not unaware of the importance of a good story, and always conscious of the need to build up his ‘legend’ as an artist whose work comes together by accident rather than design, through free-flowing experimentation rather than conscious purpose, Bacon himself was known to say that ‘this mess is rather like my mind; it may be a good image of what goes on inside me’.10 He claimed in effect that his studio was an outward expression (i.e. a projection in Klein’s terms) of what was going on in his mind, thus raising the question (which countless art historians have asked with regard to artists throughout the ages) of whether it can also tell us something about his art. Putting this into the language of symptomatology, the question would be: is the studio the symptom of the art, or the art the symptom of the studio? If one were strictly speaking a symptom of the other, then it should be possible either to view the art and guess the state of the studio, or to view the studio and guess the state of the art. Bacon seems to have wanted us to think there was this direct connection between his work and his workspace. For example, he told the poet and writer Anthony Cronin an anecdote about his childhood that cannot but point us in this direction. When he was a young child, Bacon’s parents used to leave him in the care of their maid, Jessie Lightfoot, who doubled as his nanny. The maid had a boyfriend who would visit when his parents were away and as can be imagined the two of them would try to spend some time alone, but being a demanding child the young Francis would constantly interrupt them, until – exasperated – the maid took to locking him in a broom cupboard. She would leave him there for several hours in complete darkness, impervious to his screams. ‘“That cupboard”, Bacon said years later, “was the making of me.”’11 It is tempting to see in this statement the biographical support for Deleuze’s impression that the scream in Bacon is nothing other than the body trying to escape itself,

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but that would be to make neurosis the basis of his art, which Deleuze constantly cautions us against. There are two other ‘vital anecdotes’ (to use Deleuze’s useful concept) that Bacon offers that reinforce the view that the cupboard was the making of him and thereby compel us to think further about the relation (or non-relation, as the case may be) between neurosis and art. First, Bacon repeatedly said he couldn’t paint anywhere else but his studio – the size of the room was important, and judging by the way he cluttered it up, it seems as if he constantly wanted it to become more not less claustrophobic, but the most interesting and surprising thing he says about the space is that its quality of light was right for him, despite it having only one very small skylight. Indeed, he found he couldn’t paint while visiting family in South Africa because it was too bright there. It is as though his artistic eye – the ‘actual’ living, beating heart of his artistic assemblage – was formed in the Stygian gloom of the closet at the top of the stairs and could only function properly in the absence of strong light. Second, Bacon repeatedly said he could not live anywhere else but this same one-bedroom flat where his studio was located. Although he became very wealthy over the course of his career and did in fact own a more comfortable flat nearby, he found he couldn’t bear it and remained in his tiny flat on Reece Mews in which the kitchen doubled as a bathroom and the living room doubled as the bedroom.12 Evidently, in his life as in his art, Bacon quite literally never left the closet, even if he was ‘out’ of it in the more usual sense. Both his choice of working space and his choice of living space can easily be read as symptomatic of the neurosis brewed in the crucible of ‘that cupboard’. Anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with psychoanalysis could see that being locked in a confined space knowing that the object of one’s affection – it could have been either the maid or her lover – is nearby making love to somebody else is a potent combination almost guaranteed to induce some kind of hysteria. There was a profound, possibly neurotic, contradiction in Bacon that made him long for another style of domestic living which, once achieved, was rejected . . . At one point he bought an impressive studio at Roland Gardens, a short walk away [from the Reece Mews studio and flat] on the other side of the Old Brompton Road. He went to considerable trouble to get it decorated and furnished to his liking and then found he could not even begin to work there. It was ‘too grand’, and he felt ‘castrated’ there because the immaculate splendour of the new space inhibited him from wiping brushes on the wall, letting paint drip and amassing the various documents and tools he liked to have scattered around on the floor.13

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Chris Stephens, co-curator of the Tate Modern’s 2008 major retrospective of Bacon, suggests that the relationship between the contents of the studio and the work produced there is viral. Speaking of the 1,500 photographs unearthed in the studio, Stephens said, ‘he didn’t necessarily paint any of those – and yet he’s sort of trying to get that feeling, that tension and apprehension, in his own images. There’s a sense that just by owning images they somehow infected him.’14 Again, what one sees here is an attempt to create a homology between the state of the studio and the work produced there. At this point, then, it is worth returning to Adam Phillips’s case history because what really struck his patient was the apparent contradiction between Bacon’s messy studio and the precision – i.e. unclutteredness – of his art. The photograph of the studio he shows Phillips induces a feeling of claustrophobia in both analyst and analysand, but somewhat surprisingly it is the clarity of the artwork rather than the clutter of the studio that gives rise to this feeling. The implication they draw from this is that the clutter of the studio is somehow necessary to the production of such lucid images, either as a kind of relief from their starkness, or perhaps as their residue. The studio would in this latter regard be something like the work’s midden mound, the product of an aesthetic abreaction displacing clutter from the canvas on to the floor and walls of the studio. It is as if to ‘unclog’ (a favourite word of Bacon’s) the virtual space of the canvas Bacon had to ‘clog’ the actual space of his studio. Either way, it was concluded by Phillips and his patient that the disordered state of Bacon’s studio was in no way incidental to the nature of the aesthetic production, and that got both of them thinking about how space works in art. The association the artist makes between his present predicament as mild agoraphobic and Bacon is soon explained, though the explanation has more to do with their respective art than their apparent neuroses. Both seem to share an affinity for clutter as an aesthetic mechanism of defence, but in Phillips’s patient’s case the connection to his art is much less direct than it is in Bacon. Bacon had been an important influence in his formative years as an artist precisely because he learned from reading an interview with Bacon about a technique that enabled him to break through the deadlock of his compulsive cluttering. Bacon described his practice of simply throwing paint at the canvas as though to break himself free from the tiresome constraints of form. ‘The painter’s problem is not how to enter the canvas, since he is already there . . . but how to get out of it, thereby getting out of cliché, getting out of probability.’15 Accidents and experiments are his way of freeing himself from the predictability of the image and the sterility of pure abstraction. In the eyes of this particular artist, Bacon’s lucidity was achieved through a kind of deliberate messiness in both his art

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and his working conditions, or what it might be useful to now call Bacon’s ‘clutter assemblage’. As Phillips puts it: Not only did this idea fit with a whole nexus of then adolescent intellectual passions – Gide’s gratuitous acts, Breton’s random writing, the chance and indeterminacy of John Cage’s compositions; in other words, a passion for loop holes, for ways of abrogating self-control in the service of contingencies – but it also fitted in with one of his own techniques for the uncalculated, which I imagine was an adolescent reworking of a childhood game.16 Here, then, life and art finally connect, but not directly since we never find out how exactly the artist deployed the insight Bacon’s technique afforded him, we only learn of the memory of a childhood game the analyst assumes it evoked. The artist’s childhood game was an invention of the patient’s own and involved piling his clothes on the floor in a disordered jumble and wearing whatever came to hand first regardless of whether it matched anything else he was wearing. New clothes were simply added to the heap, the resulting accumulation intensifying his interest in the tactic. The more chaotic his dress became, somehow the more satisfying it was, as though only in absolute randomness was his freedom from having to choose actually to be found. If he looked ill-dressed then that meant he couldn’t have chosen his clothes and therefore he was fully free from the burden of that particular regime. His ‘bohemian’ parents were at first quite tolerant, but even they cracked and eventually insisted on at least some semblance of orderliness. This ‘mess-dress’ tactic, as he called it, saved him from the tedious and in its own way troubling chore of having to decide what to wear each morning. It meant, as he tried to explain to his disconcerted mother, that he no longer had to think about what clothing he would put on. It was also an abrogation of all responsibility for how he looked, which left him impervious to criticism. Since his clothes found him and not the other way round, he did not have to concern himself with whether or not his ensemble was fashionable. Occasionally he found it disagreeable not to be able to find the clothing items he was looking for, but he felt this was more than compensated by the ‘way he could both discover things he didn’t know he was looking for and . . . find himself wearing such apparently unusual combinations of clothes’.17 By this means he stopped himself from being able to make cluttered choices and freed himself to embrace contingency not as an obstacle to be overcome but as a source of expression. This, according to Phillips, is what Bacon’s intervention aimed to achieve as well, and as we’ve seen this argument chimes well with Deleuze’s. Both agree that by

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cancelling conscious selection Bacon freed his art from an adherence to method, thereby avoiding the risk of being pushed into a black hole of formalism. But for Phillips’s patient, what worked in life did not work in art. This reveals something essential about the assemblage – it is not a technique or method; it cannot simply be adapted to meet new circumstances, new problems. Each assemblage addresses and resolves its own singular problem. Cluttering up his room worked for him in that it was the solution to nameless anxieties to do with dress, but when it came to his art, clutter seemed to be the problem not the solution. Cluttering his room seemed to free his mind from the unknown anxieties that beset him, but it did not save him (as it apparently did Bacon) from cluttering the canvas. If for Bacon cluttering his physical surrounds was the price to be paid for unclogging his canvas, then the opposite was the case for Phillips’s patient, who seemed to carry the clutter of the physical space over to the canvas. The cluttered canvases he produced induced a great deal of anxiety and effectively paralysed him artistically. What he felt he needed was a tactic like Bacon’s that could stop him from ruining – in his own eyes – his paintings. He needed a means of ‘unclogging’ his art. Although Phillips does not say it, it is not hard to imagine an interpretation of the mess-dress tactic as the embodiment of a logic of sacrifice displacing clutter from the sphere of art into the sphere of life. By deliberately cluttering his life he perhaps feels his art will be spared its nonplussing blind alleys, but it does not quite work that way. In their general discussions about art, analyst and analysand unhesitatingly recognise the significance of the frame – without it, the artist says, you would not know where to start. Yet he also admits that his own practice as an artist exhibits a strong tendency to clutter the framed space. No sooner did he fill his frame, though, than he would find he’d painted himself into an artistic impasse from which there was no way out. (Bacon complained of the same problem and tended to destroy any such work.) That he felt compelled to fill the frame as rapidly as possible was a sign to him of its possibly pathological underpinnings. His cluttering might be read as a mechanism of defence, a way of combating the intimidating emptiness of the blank canvas as though his agoraphobia could somehow be stimulated by that as well as an open field. Phillips does not read the cluttering as self-defeating, or, rather, underneath the self-defeat he detects an undiscovered victory. Phillips sees the clutter as the expression of an unconscious wish to sabotage the painting process, not to bring it to a halt so much as to unconsciously compel it to take another direction. Beneath the wish to sabotage, then, there is still another wish, which is to produce something new – the first wish is then interpreted as the means of fulfilling the latter, deeper and as it were truer

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wish. Phillips reasons that clutter ‘may not be about the way we hide things from ourselves but the way we make ourselves look for things. It is, as it were, a self-imposed hide and seek.’18 Phillips’s clinical judgement is that clutter is a problem concealing a solution. What Bacon taught the artist, which only Phillips’s intervention properly enabled him to see, was not how to unclutter his art, the goal his mess-dress had perhaps been aiming for; rather, it showed him how to clutter up the clutter and make clutter work for him and not against him. Clutter ceased to be the unwanted outcome or endpoint of his artistic endeavour and became the matter to hand, the substance or beginning of his work. ‘His coming for psychoanalysis meant we could think about – in relation to his presenting symptom – what made this new kind of clutter work for him.’19 But just what kind of work this newly conceived clutter was actually doing Phillips is evidently unable to say, save (echoing New Criticism’s standard defence of difficult poetry) that by creating a stoppage in the artistic endeavour it forced the artist to be still more creative in order to retrieve it from the abyss. Phillips does not say whether he managed to diagnose much less ‘cure’ his patient of his agoraphobia, but that was clearly never his point. ‘It was the links between his present, apparently mild symptoms and the initial dilemmas my patient found himself in when he began painting as a fourteen-year-old boy that brought the analysis to life.’20 Phillips eventually concludes that his patient was trying to construct something with his clutter, but is at a loss to say what it was. He can see that the clutter is not merely a tic, a nervous habit with no conceivable purpose, but something purposive and even constructive. It is obvious to both him and, as it turns out, the patient that clutter is effective; it is a means to an ineffable but felt end. What Phillips demonstrates with admirable economy is that clutter can relieve you of the stress of having to decide what to wear, making clothes themselves take on that particular burden; clutter can also relieve some of the starkness and anxiety of a blank canvas; by the same token, it can open an image up, get it out of its self-inflicted impasses. Beyond this point, however, Phillips’s assiduously Freudian language reaches its own limit; his revealingly half-hearted foray into an Oedipal analysis of clutter (as a response to parental authority) betrays the extent to which his Freudian analytic apparatus is similarly stretched past capacity. Indeed, midway through his analysis, Phillips appears to lose his nerve because he ceases to describe clutter in constructive terms and falls back on the psychoanalytic standby of the reaction-formation. On the one hand, he wants to describe clutter as both the obstacle and the object of desire, which obviously presents no difficulty for psychoanalysis. But on the other hand, he also wants to describe clutter as being a kind of resource to action, and here psychoanalysis is much less sure of itself because the accidental

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can never be just that, accidental. Phillips senses that clutter functions as something like a reaction-formation, but if this were true it would simply be yet another instance of it functioning as both obstacle to and object of desire. If clutter does function as a resource to action, then what exactly does it enable us to do? Here Phillips’s answer is solidly constructivist, even if his avowed theoretical position is not: clutter enables the artist to create art by giving him a way out of the black holes his impetuous beginnings propel him into. It cannot then be said that clutter is either an obstacle to or object of desire because desire neither flows toward it nor indeed around it, but through it. It is, rather, a necessary arrangement made between the artist and the blank canvas. But Phillips cannot make this leap. So at the fateful moment when his analysis might have cut free from psychoanalysis’s eternal compulsion to exchange function for meaning, and substitute representation for production, he reintroduces the concept of lack and smothers function beneath the weight of childhood memory – he argues that the artist’s clutter is not operative in itself, in its full positivity, but functions only as an obstacle to be overcome: in short, it is the proverbial nothing that gives rise to something. Phillips betrays his own intuition – instead of a symptom that is meaningless but purposive he winds up with a symptom that is meaningful but purposeless: the clutter on the canvas is merely the repetition of the sartorial clutter the artist deliberately introduced into his daily routine, only now it has been interiorised and rendered unconscious. As Deleuze and Guattari complain, it’s as if psychoanalysis has only two ways of conceiving the relation between the interiority of desire and the outside world: introjection and projection. Either everything we do has an internal introjected counterpart in the psyche, or everything we do is an externalised projection of something that takes place first of all in the psyche. In either case, the world thus described is a world of mirrors and doubles in which everything we see and act upon has always already taken place somewhere else. As a consequence, though, there is no real connection between the world outside and desire – neither can influence the other because they are reduced to mirror images of each other.21 Clutter is either the projection of an inner mental process (which seems to be the case for Bacon) or an introjection of an external set of circumstances (which seems to be the case for Phillips’s patient). While I am obviously of the opinion that this is a poor way of thinking about the artist’s use of clutter, I nevertheless want to suggest that there is something instructive in the way Phillips’s analysis oscillates between an approach that is patently Freudian in its language and its conclusions and another that is much closer to the constructivist model espoused by Deleuze and Guattari. The subtle veering towards Deleuze and Guattari’s position can be detected in Phillips’s contradictory attempt

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to describe the cluttering symptom as both meaningless but purposive and meaningful but purposeless. It is a truism of the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari’s work that they simply rejected psychoanalysis out of hand. And while their own intemperate rhetoric does tend to give rise to the impression that that is precisely what they did, it is simply not the case. Their work cannot be understood in isolation from psychoanalysis – it is not merely a critique of psychoanalysis, it is, as they themselves say, a re-engineering of psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit in saying they do not ‘share the pessimism’ that consists in thinking that psychoanalysis can only be remedied from the outside (or, what amounts to the same thing, flatout rejected); they believe, rather, in the possibility of what they call an ‘internal reversal’.22 If one ignores Deleuze and Guattari’s hyperbole and concentrates instead on the specifics of their critique of psychoanalysis it becomes clear that schizoanalysis is not so much a radical departure from psychoanalysis as the logical development of it in the face of precisely the kinds of diagnostic impasses the Phillips case presents. I would go so far as to say schizoanalysis is, like psychoanalysis, a form of metapsychology, but whereas Freud mapped the landscape of neuroses Deleuze and Guattari are cartographers of psychoses. In Dialogues, Deleuze states that he and Guattari have only two complaints against psychoanalysis: ‘it breaks up all productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances.’23 Deleuze goes on to explain that psychoanalysis is only interested in those productions of desire that it considers failures – such as slips of the tongue, or clutter – and it always assumes that these productions are sexually coded in some way. ‘Among the most grotesque passages in Freud are those on “fellatio”: how the penis stands for the cow’s udder, and the cow’s udder for a mother’s breast. A way of showing that fellatio is not a “true” desire, but means something else, conceals something else.’24 This is how psychoanalysis crushes all formations of utterances, by always insisting that desire is unable to speak for itself, that it can only speak indirectly through signs, substitutes and symbols (i.e. via introjection and projection). These two complaints are borne out in the three case histories Deleuze and Guattari draw our attention to in their schizoanalytic writings: Bruno Bettelheim’s case history of ‘Little Joey’, Melanie Klein’s case history of ‘Little Richard’ and Sigmund Freud’s case history of ‘Little Hans’. Bettelheim’s Little Joey is in many ways a paradigmatic figure for Deleuze and Guattari because his apparently pathological behaviour is so explicitly bound up with machines. A patient at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago, which Bettelheim directed for several years, Joey was classified as autistic, although his symptoms seem more consistent with schizophrenia. Joey thought of himself as a machine and

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he was only ‘present’ – that is, attentive and communicative – when his internal pistons and gears, or whatever else his mechanisms consisted of, were churning over. The rest of the time he was silent, virtually catatonic, hence the autistic label. His machines needed an energy source to function, so wherever he went he had to be ‘plugged in’. Bettelheim describes Joey’s routine as follows: Laying down an imaginary wire he connected himself with his source of electricity. Then he strung the wire from an imaginary outlet to the dining room table to insulate himself, then plugged himself in. (He had tried to use real wire, but this we could not allow . . .) The imaginary electrical connections he had to establish before he could eat, because only the current ran his ingestive apparatus. He performed this ritual with such skill that one had to look twice to be sure there was neither wire nor outlet nor plug.25 He had other machines too, such as his sleeping machine, which consisted of an elaborate array of aluminium foil, paper plates and plastic cups. Effectively, he had a different machine for each of the operations he was expected to perform in daily life – breathing, eating, sleeping, bathing, urinating and so on. These machines remained necessary and even continued to function when Bettelheim’s staff removed the props. So while they were real machines, they were nevertheless not necessarily actual machines. Bettelheim was of the view that Joey’s fascination with machinery ‘ruled out any contact with reality’, so his therapeutic strategy focused on weaning him off his machines.26 But this never proved effective because while Joey was happy to give up the props, he never gave up on his machines. Deleuze and Guattari are surprisingly soft in their criticism of Bettelheim, perhaps because in contrast to both Freud and Klein he is at least willing to entertain the idea that the machines are what Joey says they are and not substitutes for his parents’ sexual organs.27 Klein, for her part, as Deleuze and Guattari relate with unconcealed contempt, interpreted her patient Little Richard’s interest in toy trains as symbolic of his penis which in her view he wanted to drive into the tunnel, which was of course mummy.28 Klein interpreted Richard’s behaviour as regressive and saw all his actions in terms of a desire to return to the womb. In doing so she overcoded all his little machines, his trains and so on, and his statements, with a narrative framework that is nowhere to be found in anything her patient actually said. In 1977, Deleuze, along with students and friends (Félix Guattari, Claire Parnet and André Scala), conducted a seminar, later published as ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’, in which he made patent the degree to which analysts don’t listen to their patients by placing in

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parallel the actual statements made by patients and the statements of what the analysts ‘heard’. The disparity between the two sets of statements is quite striking.29 One of the test cases used is Klein’s Richard, and as one reads his statements freed from his analyst’s overcoding it seems clear that he was not schizophrenic at all. Most likely he was traumatised by the fact that his father was away at war and that he himself had been evacuated from London to rural Scotland to escape the bombing. His dark and rather harrowing pictures of warplanes, submarines, explosions, but also maps and diagrams that look like so many escape plans would seem to bear this out. In any case, for our purposes here, Klein’s analysis bears comparison with Phillips’s because it centres on an arrangement of objects and assumes that this arrangement is neither accidental nor insignificant. In contrast to Klein, though, despite the obvious debt his work owes the theory of object relations she helped initiate, Phillips does not overcode his patient’s clutter and try to give meaning to the specific objects. Rather, he attempts to see the whole assemblage as being in some way functional, but is at a loss to explain exactly how this works. This is in effect what Deleuze and Guattari urge that Klein should have done and their work is taken up with explaining how this might be made to work both analytically and therapeutically. But at least Klein was able to see that there was an arrangement of objects that was important to her patient. Freud failed to appreciate that any such arrangement existed for Little Hans. Whenever Hans spoke of horses all Freud heard was ‘your father’s penis’ because his methodology prescribed that every object encountered must be representative or in some way symbolic of another object – invariably related to the parents’ sexuality – that cannot be mentioned in this particular context. On this view of things Hans speaks of horses because he cannot or at any rate does not know how to speak of matters relating to human sexuality. In effect, this means that whenever Hans is speaking about horses he must in fact be speaking about something else. Likewise, when Freud’s other famous case study the Wolf-man speaks of wolves he must be speaking about something else. And because that something else is always presumed to be the Oedipal triangle of mummy-daddy-me, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, the horses and the wolves are never thought about for themselves. Freud never asks whether the horses or the wolves might be meaningful in their own right; he assumes that they were just available images, suitable visual material for conveying symbolic meanings having nothing to do with either horses or wolves. Deleuze and Guattari reject this view of things and in doing so create a new form of interpretive hermeneutic, one that focuses on the capacities of things (their affects, in other words) in themselves, rather than their possible symbolic referent points.30

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Deleuze and Guattari are critical of psychoanalysis for its inability to think or see the object except in terms of either introjection or projection – the train cannot but be daddy, likewise neither the horse nor the wolf cannot but be daddy. As ingenious as psychoanalysis is at making connections between images, there is also a certain predictability to its procedure that deadens the interest we might have in the connections it is able to make. If everything can be traced back to the Oedipal scenario in one form or another – whether as literal scene or abstract model – then as an interpretation of a symptom, or more importantly of a text, it lacks subtlety and ultimately credibility. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhetoric is at its most unbuttoned when they lampoon Freud for constantly bringing everything back to Oedipus, as though there were no other way of understanding the operations of the unconscious. Unlike Freud or Klein, Phillips does listen to his patients – quite attentively too, it would seem – but he is nevertheless hampered by the requirements of the interpretive framework he has inherited from them. He tries to understand clutter for itself and not as a representative of something else, yet in the end he lacks the requisite vocabulary. Deleuze and Guattari offer new resources for the kinds of diagnostic and interpretive dilemmas Phillips encounters in this case that do not demand a constant return to Oedipus.

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Chapter 19 The Little Hans Assemblage

Anti-interpretation In Dialogues, Deleuze claims that he and Guattari only ever had two things against psychoanalysis: (1) that it breaks up the productions of desire and (2) that it crushes the formations of utterances. In Deleuze’s view psychoanalysis does not allow the patient to speak for themselves – it only listens for slips, he argues, if it listens, and all too often it does not listen. Slips are the only productions of the unconscious that psychoanalysis recognises, according to Deleuze, and this leaves it incapable of apprehending, much less understanding, genuine productions when they arise. This is evident in the way it mangles the rich and vibrant articulations of desire it does encounter, reducing them all to a handful of tropes that show no appreciation for the specificity of desire’s actual way of operating. In Deleuze’s view, the most egregious examples of these two tendencies are to be found in psychoanalysis’s handling of children. Freud seemed neither to listen to nor to ‘hear’ his younger analysands. In Little Hans’s case, he simply put words into the boy’s mouth (the boy’s father was equally guilty of this). It soon becomes clear that insofar as Oedipus is taken as the starting point for all analyses, the patient is doomed never to be able to speak for themselves. Horses can’t just be horses for Little Hans and trains can’t just be trains for Little Richard; they must both represent the phallus, and if the boys say otherwise they are simply overruled. That said, we shouldn’t let it blind us to the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s own analysis of Little Hans offers very little by way of a concrete alternative to Freud. My point here is that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis is not the key issue in thinking about what schizoanalysis means but is really only a starting point; rather, what we should be focusing on is their proposed alternative to psychoanalysis. Even if one does not agree with Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud on all points, it cannot be denied that Freud had the unfortunate tendency to simultaneously ignore what his patients said to him and put words into their mouth. Analysis would then take the form of a slow wearing down of the

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patient’s resistance to the idea that they in fact know themselves, that they know their own desire. As I said above, my purpose here isn’t to raise questions about their critique of Freud; what concerns me, rather, is what comes afterwards and – to me, at least – it isn’t clear what Deleuze and Guattari’s critique leaves in its wake. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud ultimately destroys what for many of his readers is most useful in psychoanalysis: its ability to find meaning in both the most banal of phenomena (such as nervous tics and verbal slips) and the most obscure (dreams, fantasies and obsessions). This is encapsulated in the slogan most often associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s work, namely that we can no longer ask what things mean, but can only ask how they work. Critical theory has turned Deleuze and Guattari into figureheads of the anti-interpretive trajectory in contemporary aesthetics which holds that interpretation is impossible because the true ‘meaning’ of a text is necessarily ineffable, thus putting them in the same category as people like Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan (this fact alone should be enough to make us suspicious of this particular take on their work). It is useful to think about Deleuze and Guattari’s work in terms of their position with regard to interpretation because, putting things very simply, their critique of Freud ultimately boils down to them saying Freud made things too easy for himself when he decided that all psychic formations followed the path described by Sophocles in his tragedy Oedipus Rex. From that moment on he stopped seeing difference in the productions of the unconscious and instead saw only repetition, endless repetition, as though every human on the planet, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or nation, lived their lives according to the dictates of the same script. As countless psychoanalytic studies since testify, it is this facility to see repetition rather than singularity that makes psychoanalysis so attractive. The ever-expanding universe of Slavoj Žižek’s writings are a constant reminder and demonstration of just how versatile psychoanalysis can be as an interpretive tool. But as Fredric Jameson has remarked regarding Žižek’s work, one cannot help but feel that psychoanalysis deployed in this way is too formulaic, too quick somehow in its ability to detect the real meaning of actions, statements and events.1 Our marvel at psychoanalysis’s ability to penetrate the fug of things and see the truth lurking beneath or behind appearances becomes in this sense a suspicion that we have simply created a new form of self-deception. If we allow that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud is robust, then from a practical or interpretive point of view they seem to leave us with nothing at all. Not merely do they seem to wreck the psychoanalytic interpretive system that had been working so well for so long, they also appear to foreclose on the possibility of creating any alternative interpretive system, psychoanalytic or otherwise. In spite of appearances to the contrary, I want to suggest that neither of these claims can be true.

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They do not wreck the psychoanalytic interpretive system altogether, they retool it. And they do not foreclose on interpretation tout court either. There would be no point in simply destroying the very possibility of interpreting texts, if out of the ashes of that destruction some new interpretive system was not to arise. And though many readers of Deleuze and Guattari are stridently opposed to this view, I agree wholeheartedly with Jameson’s observation in The Political Unconscious that Deleuze and Guattari’s repudiation of psychoanalysis is ‘coupled with the projection of a whole new method for the reading of texts’.2 As he goes on to say, their dismantling of a hermeneutic system like Freud’s ‘amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent model’.3 Schizoanalysis, I would suggest, is precisely that: the attempt (albeit incomplete) to create a new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent model of interpretation. The task of schizoanalysts today is not to multiply the points of difference in every case they encounter, so as to build a picture of every case as being both unique and finally uninterpretable, but to figure out the new patterns of repetition (or assemblages, as Deleuze and Guattari would come to call them) and learn to understand them in an agile and flexible manner, rather than in Freud’s fixed and authoritarian fashion. The Oedipal complex on this view is simply one assemblage among many. Our job is to begin the task of sorting out that nebulous ‘many’ and start to identify and understand the variety of other assemblages at work in the world today.

Little Hans Freud frequently wrote about what he referred to as infantile sexuality, but he never treated children and he only published one full-length case study of a child, ‘Little Hans’. His other case histories, particularly the Wolf-man and Rat Man cases, deal extensively with infantile sexuality, but their perspective is always that of the adult. In the case of the Wolf-man, for example, Freud reaches right back to memories of events that most likely occurred when the Wolf-man was a mere eighteen months old. It is perhaps worth noting that Freud informs us that it took some two years of analysis to delve this far back into the Wolfman’s memory. Freud also writes about his grandson in his famous account of the ‘fort/da’ game, which was to become central to Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it is a relatively short piece, and certainly doesn’t provide the kind of depth of attention he gives to Little Hans. Little Hans is a five-year-old Viennese boy suffering from a ‘nervous disorder’ which manifests as a fear of horses, or more precisely a fear that

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if he goes out on to the street a horse will bite his penis off.4 Freud did not treat Little Hans directly, though he did have occasion to meet him and speak with him; rather, he supervised Little Hans’s ‘treatment’ (such as it was), leaving the principal analytical work to be carried out by the boy’s father, a keen disciple of Freud’s teaching and writing, though not himself a trained analyst. While it was Little Hans’s fear of horses that Freud was asked by the father to help treat, it soon becomes clear from his writing up of the case that Freud had bigger fish to fry. Freud’s interest in Little Hans’s case might be described as forensic because what really interests Freud about this case is the possibility of seeing what neurosis looks like at its origin in a child’s life. Working with adults, Freud had to uncover the infantile moment when – in his view – the seeds of all neuroses are sown by peeling away the accumulated layers of their psychic formation, starting from the present moment of their adulthood and working back through their memories to childhood. His speculation, in the case of Little Hans, was that he might be able to see that childhood moment when neuroses are formed ‘in vivo’ as it were.5 By doing so, he hoped to shore up his theory about infantile sexuality and convince sceptics of its significance by providing ‘direct evidence from the child in all the freshness of youth of those sexual stirrings and fantasies’ he holds to be ‘common to the constitution of all human beings’.6 Freud’s basic hypothesis is that the child is the father of the man, as the ancient saying has it, but since he never treated children himself, and despite having had a large family seems to have had very limited direct experience with children, he has to rely on adult memories to support this position. For obvious reasons, then, the importance of memory to psychoanalysis cannot be overstated – in many ways, Freud’s whole theory hinges on the different ways memory operates. Hence Freud’s obvious delight in discovering the case of Little Hans, which he came across in response to a call he put out to colleagues, students and friends to ‘collect observations on the sexual life of children, which is normally either skilfully overlooked or deliberately denied’.7 With Little Hans he had an instance of neurosis that coincided with the infantile stage of life and did not need to be recovered, as was his usual procedure (see for example the ‘Rat Man’ and ‘Wolf-man’ case histories), by taking his patients back through their memories from the present to their earliest recollections following a chain of more or less spontaneous associations. This therapeutic procedure commonly referred to as ‘free association’, invented by Freud, was designed to penetrate to the deepest layers of the unconscious by catching it unawares, as it were. Initially, Freud used hypnosis to recover ‘lost’ childhood memories and moments (following the teaching of Charcot), but he eventually found it was unnecessary – the patients needed only to be relaxed and to obey

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his ironclad rule that they must report to him whatever they were thinking regardless of how absurd, embarrassing or irrelevant it might seem. Freud’s working assumption was that no association, however distant, random or arbitrary, was irrelevant; it was just a matter of finding the correct perspective on it such that it did make sense. He also assumed that the patient’s history could always be relied on to provide this vantage point; one just had to know how to dig. Instead of having to start at the end of the thread and trace everything back, with Little Hans Freud thought he had chanced upon the possibility of beginning at the beginning and seeing things unspool in real time. In effect, Freud hoped to see history in the making, or, what amounts to the same thing, to see history before it is history. But instead of watching history unfold, and seeing where it takes him, Freud puts all Little Hans’s utterances in the frame of his Oedipus complex hypothesis right from the outset and assumes in advance that he knows which threads are which and where they are going to go. Coached by Freud, Little Hans’s father does the same thing as Freud and as the master himself would do immediately places the child’s utterances in an Oedipal frame, with the predictable result that no matter what the poor boy says, nothing of what he actually says is ever heard. The assumption is that he can’t really be talking about horses or giraffes, as he frequently does, because no matter what he says it must be Oedipally charged, in some way or another, so the horses and giraffes must represent something besides themselves. The horses cannot just be horses; they must be symbols of something. Because horses bite, they must be castrating, or so the father reasons, oblivious to the fact that, as his son rightly points out, ‘widdlers don’t bite’. Similarly, when Little Hans reports a dream about two giraffes in his bedroom, ‘a big one and a squished one’, Freud and his pupil are united in the view that the big giraffe is the father, or, rather, his ‘big penis (the long neck)’, and the squished giraffe is his mother, or, rather, ‘her sexual member’.8 The fact that Hans enjoys seeing the giraffes at the zoo and even has a picture of a giraffe above his bed is irrelevant except insofar as it explains the source of the fantasy material. There is nothing about the giraffes themselves that is significant, save their (flatteringly) long necks, and it is only that aspect of the animals that determines their function in Hans’s fantasy in Freud’s view. One could easily substitute flamingos or any other long-necked creature and the interpretation would be the same. This is the point Deleuze and Guattari are making when they imagine Freud’s other famous case, the Wolf-man, saying, ‘You trying to tell me my ass isn’t a Wolf?’9 Freud wants to reduce every creature in his patients’ dreams to symbols, to objects that stand in the place of something else, and as a consequence loses sight of the specificity of the symbols themselves. Why a giraffe and not a flamingo if all that matters is that its neck is

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long? Deleuze and Guattari only partially resolve this problem themselves and it is perhaps worth reflecting on this aporia in their work, which as far as I’m aware has gone completely unremarked in the secondary literature, because it goes to the heart of what schizoanalysis wants and needs to do differently from psychoanalysis.

Schizoanalysis For all their criticism of Freud for ignoring the specificity of patients’ dreams and deliria it is striking to see what short work they make of the Wolfman’s wolves. ‘The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds, temperatures, nondecomposable distances. A swarming, a wolfing.’10 The wolf is dissolved immediately into ‘matter’, the stuff of the schizophrenic’s delirium, and treated more or less indifferently. ‘A wolf is a hole [the reference here is to a dentist telling the Wolf-man his gums are full of holes], they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molar multiplicities.’11 The only aspect of the wolf significant to Deleuze and Guattari is the fact it is a ‘pack’ animal, its affinity with multiplicity in other words. They use this characteristic to challenge Freud’s Oedipalised and Oedipalising reading of the wolf as a symbol of the father. Like Freud, Deleuze and Guattari set aside the specificity of the object (wolf) as a whole and focus on one of its parts, a behavioural characteristic (for the same reason they link wolves to wasps and then to butterflies), the crucial difference being that Deleuze and Guattari highlight a functional trait rather than a representational cue.12 Deleuze and Guattari’s most stinging criticism of Freud is to be found in their lampooning of his interpretation of the Wolfman’s dream, whereby the five wolves in the tree are systematically reduced to a single wolf which cannot but be daddy.13 Even if we share their scepticism here that five wolves in a tree must necessarily refer to daddy – and I do – we must still observe that their own procedure is no less reductive; it is just reductive in a different way, or even a better way, but still reductive. They are not particularly interested in the wolves either; what concerns them is the number of wolves, which they apprehend qualitatively rather than quantitatively (many wolves, not simply five wolves). Deleuze and Guattari’s reasoning is thus: wolves travel in packs, not alone, so there is always a multiplicity of wolves and never a lone wolf whose symbolic destiny is to stand for the father (even the lone wolf of legend is always on the edge of a pack, albeit one that has forsaken it). Here we see the two key moves that underpin all of Deleuze and Guattari’s own case analyses, as restricted as those often are: first, they focus on a population of objects rather than a single object – wolves, not wolf; second, they privilege the functional

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aspects of the population – its tendency to pack, in this case – rather than its other more visually obvious genetic characteristics. The wolf is significant to the Wolf-man not because it stands in for daddy, but because it is one of several particles that ‘swarm’ in his unconscious. The same procedure is followed in the case of Little Hans. Now it is the horse’s turn to vanish from the scene. ‘When Little Hans talks about a “peepee-maker” he is referring not to an organ or organic function but basically to a material, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections.’14 Following this logic, it becomes possible to say that girls as well as boys have peepee-makers (hence no castration), and that trains can have them too (which doesn’t make them phallic). The point here is that it is the functional attribute of a particular semiotic element that enables it to combine with other elements and form an assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari’s war against Freud’s representational model of analysis does not mean they are anti-interpretation, or if it does then it is in Jameson’s sense that it is simply a prelude to the projection of some new, more satisfactory way of proceeding. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent model’ (to borrow Jameson’s phrase) is still to be adequately described, delineated and understood, and for that reason it remains to be deployed in full. The key to this work will be the assemblage, which remains to be fully understood.

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Chapter 20 The Self-Help Assemblage

A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities. As with McEnroe, it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations On the tenth anniversary of Gilles Deleuze’s death, the Centre Pompidou in Paris published a short pictorial tribute to his life entitled Deleuze, un album, bringing together all the publicly available photographs of the late philosopher. Among them is a rare picture, taken in 1935, of a youthful Gilles with his elder brother Georges (who died at the hands of the Nazis in the early days of the Second World War). Both boys are dressed in white and they are holding tennis racquets, apparently on their way to a match together. There is a friendly rivalry in their demeanour and their bodies are lean and tanned and it is clear both spend a great deal of time outdoors. It presents a side of Deleuze one doesn’t often think about, not merely boyish, but active and even sporting. It is a far cry from the later images of the gnarled old man who in his final years was reduced to a painful shuffle by emphysema and in the end took his own life because he couldn’t breathe without an oxygen tank. From his writings, it isn’t obvious that Deleuze took much of an interest in sport throughout his life, but perhaps tennis held a special place for him because he speaks knowledgeably about it in one of those rare moments in his published work when he does discuss sport.1 I was reminded of this photograph of him with racquet in hand when I happened to read Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. I was immediately struck by two things: firstly, that separating the problem of performance from competence in the way it does is a useful heuristic for thinking about how to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas to practical problems, as I will explain in what follows; secondly, and more importantly, Gallwey’s image of the intrinsic joy of successfully performing actions, which draws on Abraham Maslow’s concept of ‘peak experiences’,

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may usefully be compared to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs in its ‘healthy’ modulation as a ‘plateau’ (i.e. sustained joyful state of being). I became interested in Gallwey’s work because it was written in the same period as Deleuze and Guattari’s first collaboration and it is an example of what they would call ‘pop philosophy’. It will be recalled that they conclude Anti-Oedipus by saying that they had written it as an exercise in ‘pop philosophy’. This was perhaps tongue-in-cheek, since Anti-Oedipus is philosophically denser and intellectually more abstruse than anything one is likely to find in the ‘pop philosophy’ section at an airport bookstore, for example, where it would sit rather uncomfortably alongside the likes of Alain de Botton’s latest. I suspect though that it was not said entirely in jest. I am sure that they hoped large numbers of people would read it and take something from it that would help them to change their lives in a positive way (maybe even to eradicate the fascist within, as Foucault put it). Perhaps then they wouldn’t have minded the idea of a yuppie reading their work on a train, an image that in Žižek’s eyes indicts their work as complicit with capital. At the very least, it expresses an ambition to communicate beyond the restricted boundaries of academia. More than that, it implies the desire to provide readers of their work with a set of tools to use in their everyday lives. As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari’s writing style is too verbose, too complex for most readers to fathom – even for those readers with advanced training in philosophy, I hasten to add – so their project of creating a ‘pop philosophy’ was largely a failure, except that despite its obscurity, or perhaps even because of it, it has attracted an enormous following from literally all walks of life (artists, architects, activists, academics and so on). Subsequent books, in many ways more difficult than Anti-Oedipus, have in no way dampened this enthusiasm; if anything, they have fuelled it. Their work has inspired as many people as it has frustrated, maybe more, an achievement that is to be admired. I doubt very much that Deleuze or Guattari ever read Gallwey and as far as I can tell Maslow is not cited anywhere by Deleuze and Guattari, in either their collaborative or solo writings, so one cannot draw any direct connections between their respective ideas. But it is nonetheless striking the degree to which they all single out the notion of intensity as key. This idea, which itself owes an obvious debt to Zen philosophy and the notion that the ‘self’ (however one wants to construe that) stands in the way of achieving true happiness, peace, success and so on, was, as Deleuze once said of difference, ‘in the air’ when Deleuze and Guattari started working together.2 It was the central plank of a great deal of so-called counter-cultural writing; Robert Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is only the most obvious manifestation. There is

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a strong counter-cultural thread running throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, which has never really been dealt with in the secondary literature despite its obvious and prominent place – one thinks here of the frequent references to the Beat poets, to William Burroughs and Henry Miller, but also Patti Smith and ‘guru’ figures like Carlos Castaneda and Gregory Bateson. This raises an interesting historical question about the degree to which Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be considered a product of its time. I have argued elsewhere that to understand their work fully, one must place it in its geopolitical context, by which I mean transformations in global capital, the war in Vietnam and student unrest in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Here I’m interested in the more finegrained history of intellectual currents and especially the larger body of discourse their work drew on and contributed to. That they saw themselves as writing ‘pop philosophy’ is important because it suggests that in their eyes their work should be read alongside works like The Inner Game of Tennis and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and not just Bergson and Nietzsche and other recognised philosophical figures. This means reading it as an attempt at an intervention into the daily lives of its readers as well as an attempt to say something about the nature of the times in which they were living and writing. Reading them as philosophers of the ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ type thus functions as ‘strategic containment’ (as Jameson might put it) of their radical message. Various attempts to position their work as either postmodernist or poststructuralist (or both) are in my view far too narrow in scope. One has only to glance through the dense thicket of their footnotes to see that their work was embedded in, and drew upon, a far wider range of material than is captured by these two pseudo-epochal terms. Deleuze and Guattari reject both terms as meaningless. Like Jameson, they tend to see postmodernism, in particular, as simply a synonym (we might even say pseudonym) for capitalism. Interestingly, if one looks only at their literary references – Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Miller, Castaneda and so on – it marks them more as products of the 1950s than the 1960s. One visible effect of their 1950s formation that bears mentioning here because it is too-little mentioned elsewhere is the way Deleuze and Guattari focus on capitalism rather than the state as their ultimate target of critique. It is this more than anything that separates them from their Althusserian peers, who focused on the state. Deleuze and Guattari regard the state as a failed or obsolete model of government because it did not prevent the rise and global spread of the capitalist mode of production which, in their view, is a far more destructive force. The state, as they see it, is an instrument of capital: its sole function today is to create and maintain ‘models of realisation’ for capital.3

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It does this by churning out subjects moulded perfectly to suit the needs of the capitalist system – such subjects are neither docile nor disciplined, to borrow Foucault’s terminology, but ‘controlled’ (Deleuze took this term from Burroughs, but it is also used in cognate ways in Deci and Ryan’s self-determination version of motivation theory). This is essentially the story Anti-Oedipus tells, pointing its finger at the so-called Oedipus complex as the key control mechanism that enabled capital to capture and subjugate desire in such a way and to such an extent that it desires its own repression. And Deleuze and Guattari saw no way out of this. Not even socialist states can escape this fate, they argued. Schizoanalysis is, in effect, the analysis and critique of the ways and means in which capital captures desire and (re)constructs it in its own image. The Inner Game of Tennis is an interesting text in this respect because while it is clearly counter-cultural in the way it harnesses ideas taken from Zen philosophy, it does so in the interest of enabling the capitalist subject to succeed in a performance-driven – that is, capitalist – environment. In other words, as recent critiques of the so-called ‘happiness industry’ have pointed out, the appropriation of Zen ideas about mindfulness and well-being (boom topics in contemporary publishing) might appear ‘counter-cultural’ but has always been fully consistent with the needs and goals of capital.4 It is no accident that The Inner Game of Tennis became such a big hit in the corporate world – it speaks to an idea and indeed a fantasy of individual success under pressure that the corporate world cherishes. This fantasy underpins neo-liberalism’s ideology of the self-made man or woman who does not need welfare or any kind of state support (a fantasy the corporate world maintains regardless of the fact that all the biggest corporations rely on state support for their success). For this reason, the corporate world spends enormous amounts of money not only associating their image with successful sports men and women through advertising and endorsements, but also in speakers’ fees to listen to the winners in the worlds of golf, rugby, surfing and so on explain how they managed to reach the pinnacle of their sport despite all the obstacles in their way. If they had a ‘hard’ early life and dragged themselves out of poverty, then so much the better. In this way, they affirm their already cherished belief that wealth follows hard work and determination and has nothing at all to do with social advantages. Unsurprisingly, then, today Gallwey runs a corporate coaching business for executives using the ideas he developed for his first book to help white-collar workers achieve success in their respective fields. His clients include major corporations like Apple, AT&T, the Coca-Cola Company and Rolls-Royce. What interests me about this adoption of Gallwey’s ideas by the corporate world is the way it seems to be oblivious to the paradox at the heart of The Inner Game of Tennis (and indeed practically all self-help books).

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Gallwey portrays the ‘self’ as the problem – the cure is said to reside in silencing the self. As I’ll explain in more detail below, that is in essence Gallwey’s big ‘discovery’, if you will: the self ‘itself’ stands in the way of achieving what ‘it’ wants. Competence does not guarantee performance. Being able to play the game of tennis, even being able to play to a very high standard, does not guarantee that one will always play well, much less play to one’s capability. And no one, it seems, not even great champions like John McEnroe (one of Deleuze’s apparent favourites), is immune to this malady; there will always be moments when ‘we’ let our ‘selves’ down and play less well than we are otherwise able to do. And as McEnroe admitted later in life, it was those failures of the ‘self’ rather than the actions of others that caused him to explode with fury on the court, even if he directed that fury at hapless ball boys and umpires. All of which raises a very interesting philosophical question: how, and in what sense, can the ‘self’ stand in its own way? To put it another way, how is the ‘self’ constructed such that it can get in its own way? Schizoanalysis has its own answer to this question, namely the concept of the assemblage, but I want to foreshadow and indeed frame that discussion by first of all looking at Gallwey’s answer, which is this: there is an inner and an outer game to tennis. The outer game refers not just to the game an individual plays against an opponent, but also to the basic skills – how to hold and swing a racquet, how to move your feet and arms, where to position yourself for optimal service return and so on – needed to play the game at any degree of competency from beginner to professional. But that is only a very small part of the game of tennis, and in some respects it is the least important. There is also an inner game to contend with, which is where the real nub of the game is to be found. This is the ‘game that takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all the habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance.’5 Gallwey thus proposes that every tennis player is in fact two players at once. There is Player 1, who focuses on the external aspects of the game – the actual opposition in a particular match, but also the physical skills needed, as well as the hopes and dreams we attach to the outcome of the match. Then there is Player 2, who focuses on the internal aspects of the game – delivering the shots and moves that will ultimately decide the outcome of the match. Player 1 is a ‘thinker’ whose thoughts get in the way of what he or she is trying to do, while Player 2 is a ‘doer’ whose actions are performed unselfconsciously. Player 1 is always out of step with what they’re doing, thinking about either the past or the future, what happened and what might happen, whereas Player 2 is always perfectly ‘in the

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moment’, doing only what’s needed at any given instance, without any concern for either what has happened or what might happen. This split between Player 1 and Player 2 isn’t as simple or as Cartesian as it first appears. Although Gallwey sometimes seems to be saying that the mind gets in the way of the body, in reality he is saying something quite different. When he is speaking more carefully, what he actually does is distinguish between what he calls the ego-mind (Player 1) and the body-unconscious mind (Player 2), which is to say between two parts of the psyche, one that is externally focused and another that is internally focused and therefore more in touch with the body. It is the shift between these two states that interests me because it offers a ‘positive’ but also ‘captured’ version of transversality. Gallwey’s book is the soft edge of the management revolution that for the past four decades has sought to make our personality, our ‘self’, the problem. This way of thinking about performance in sport has become virtually standard, but in the early 1970s it was considered revolutionary. For Gallwey the revolution began with the observation, not at all flattering to him as a budding young tennis pro, that his students often improved most when he said the least. Even less flatteringly, he found that sometimes his instructions actually got in the way of his students’ learning. ‘All teaching pros know what I’m talking about,’ he writes. They all have students like one of mine named Dorothy. I would give Dorothy a gentle, low-pressured instruction like ‘Why don’t you try lifting the follow-through up from your waist to the level of your shoulder? The topspin will keep the ball in the court.’ Sure enough, Dorothy would try with everything she had. The muscles would tense around her mouth; her eyebrows would set in a determined frown; the muscles in her forearm would tighten, making fluidity impossible; the follow-through would end only a few inches higher.6 At which point the instructor would encourage the student to relax and try again. The problem, though, was that the student wasn’t able to relax and concentrate on a new physical technique all at the same time. The more she thought about what she was supposed to do with her arms, the tenser her arms got, which in turn made what she was trying to do practically impossible. In order to absorb this new dimension to her swing she had to process it – do it – without thinking about it. This is of course the ideal state known as ‘mastery’, in which one is able to perform an action without consciously having to think about it. What Gallwey found, though, is that so-called mastery – the achievement of the ‘artless art’, as the Zen masters put it – isn’t only an endpoint, something one attains after a long period of training, it is also a starting point.

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In effect, what Gallwey discovered is this: one cannot properly learn new skills unless one can do so without trying.7 Dorothy could not master her follow-through because she tried to. The frustrating illogicality of this demand that one has to learn while not trying to learn is captured perfectly in the exasperated question German anthropologist and erstwhile archer Eugen Herrigel puts to his Zen master in Zen in the Art of Archery: ‘So I must become purposeless – on purpose?’8 Interestingly, the Zen master himself admits that he has no idea how to answer this question because no one has ever asked it of him before. As Gallwey points out, if you speak to accomplished sports men and women, they all effectively say the same thing – ‘their peak performance never comes when they’re thinking about it’.9 When someone is playing well – when they’re riding the wave, as Deleuze puts it – they are not aware of themselves as the ‘origin of an effort’.10 They don’t think ‘about how to hit the ball, how to correct past mistakes or how to repeat what [they] just did’.11 In this instance, the player ‘is conscious, but not thinking, not over-trying’.12 They know where they want the ball to go and somehow that’s where the ball goes, all without any effort or conscious thought on their part. It just seems to happen. It is almost as though they have willed it so. And often that seems to be the only explanation for shots that appear impossible but happen anyway (like Roger Federer’s famous ‘under the leg’ shot at the 2009 US Open). The Zen master takes it a step further and claims that it happens because the Universe has willed it. In a beautiful passage in Zen in the Art of Archery Herrigel reports his teacher’s response to his pulling off two truly miraculous shots in which he not only managed to hit the centre of his target with his first arrow unsighted (the room was dark), he also split that arrow down the middle with his second shot. The first shot he thinks can be put down to practice. But not the second. I know, he says, ‘that it is not “I” who must be given the credit for this shot. “It” shot and “It” made the hit. Let us bow to the goal as before the Buddha!’13 The ideal image of a successful tennis player for Gallwey is a cat stalking a bird. Effortlessly alert, he crouches, gathering his relaxed muscles for the spring. No thinking about when to jump, nor how he will push off with his hind legs to attain proper distance, his mind is still and perfectly concentrated on his prey. No thought flashes into his consciousness of the possibility or the consequences of missing his mark. He sees only bird. Suddenly the bird takes off; at that instant, the cat leaps. With perfect anticipation he intercepts his dinner two feet off the ground. Perfectly, thoughtlessly executed action, and afterward, no self-congratulations, just the reward inherent in his action: the bird in the mouth.14

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It goes without saying that this is a fantastic image. Even if one sets aside the fact that we cannot know whether a cat congratulates itself or not, or thinks about how hungry it is and how important it is to catch the bird, there is still the fact that cats are not always successful. Just as tennis players don’t land every shot, so cats do not catch every bird they go after and frequently fail to catch anything at all. They’re just as capable of mistiming their leaps as tennis players are of mistiming their forehands. This image is instructive though because it begins to spell out what Gallwey really means by trying too hard or more especially thinking too much in the execution of physical skills. In Gallwey’s fantasy, the cat makes no self-judgements: it doesn’t worry about the past or the future; it doesn’t lament its errors or rejoice in its successes. It is in this respect a perfectly Zen creature, facing each moment with clear-headed equanimity.15 The Zen position in tennis is that of the umpire. When a ball goes out, the player who hit it out will frown and curse themselves for the poor quality of their shot, while the player who won the point as a result of the ball going out will probably smile, out of either relief or satisfaction, depending on how they’re faring in the overall match. Either way, though, as Gallwey explains, these are evaluations added to the event in the minds of the players, but they’re not part of the actual event itself of the ball going out. This is where the umpire’s perspective is crucial: the umpire makes no judgement about the quality of the shot or its implications concerning the outcome of the game, they simply call it as they see it. The ball is either in or it’s out and if it’s out they’ll call it out without a second thought. The umpire observes the action closely, noting everything that happens, every micro-event, but does so dispassionately, without concern for the outcome. They do not judge the quality of a particular shot, only whether it landed where it is supposed to land according to the rules of the game. For Gallwey this is the ideal perspective to have because it is free from ego, free from the interferences of the ‘self’. Judgement of this evaluative type is to be eschewed because it provokes the thinking process. Once a player judges a shot ‘bad’ rather than merely ‘out’ then he or she begins thinking about what was wrong with it and how to correct it. From there the player starts to watch each shot obsessively to see whether the corrective strategy has worked or not and before long they have tensed up and lost all their fluidity. Now instead of an artless art their tennis is a laboured artefact of uncertain worth. And things are no better if the shot is ‘good’ rather than simply ‘in’ because then the player wonders how they managed it and – worse – if they can repeat it. ‘Both mental processes end in further evaluation, which perpetuates the process of thinking and selfconscious performance.’16 The only way out of this self-defeating cycle is, as Artaud put it, to have done with judgement altogether, and that is precisely what Gallwey counsels. Artaud’s case is instructive here because

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in effect he collapsed mentally precisely because he couldn’t put himself in the position of the umpire. The judgements of God, as Artaud put it, overwhelmed him. The problem with these judgements about whether a particular shot is good or bad – what in effect turns them into judgements of God – is that ‘we’ don’t stop there. Having adjudged the individual shot ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we then generalise about the shot-maker, namely ourselves. If the shot was ‘bad’ then so must ‘we’ be. It is interesting to see how the judgemental mind extends itself. It may begin by complaining, ‘What a lousy serve’, then extend to ‘I’m serving badly today’. After a few more ‘bad’ serves, the judgement may become further extended to ‘I have a terrible serve’. Then, ‘I’m a lousy tennis player’, and finally, ‘I’m no good’. First the mind judges the event, then groups events, then identifies with the combined event, and finally judges itself.17 In so doing we subject our ‘self’ to death by a thousand cuts. All the judgements we make about our tennis, whether we are denigrating a single shot that does not land where we want it to go or denigrating ourselves for not being able to make the ball land where we want it to go, are at risk of becoming ‘so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture’.18 These nails with which we crucify ourselves are difficult to avoid precisely because they are self-inflicted – ‘we’ are the one target ‘we’ are seemingly incapable of missing. Our aim is always true when it comes to psychic self-harm. Artaud resisted this torture by erecting something he called a body without organs, a protective membrane impermeable to the barbs and arrows of ‘self’ judgement. He couldn’t stop these barbs and arrows from being generated, so he defended himself by putting up a barrier and shutting himself off from the world. These judgements don’t only take the form of criticisms. Praise can be just as wounding, just as damaging and confusing. Gallwey gives an example of a coaching session in which he avoided commenting critically on his students’ errors, but offered praise and encouragement when they got it right. To his surprise, though, he found his compliments were every bit as distracting as his criticisms. What he realised is that by complimenting his students he had activated their minds and started them thinking about their shots instead of just letting them happen. ‘Through this experience’, he writes, I began to see how Self 1 operated. Always looking for approval and wanting to avoid disappointment, this subtle ego-mind sees a compliment as a potential criticism. His reasons, ‘If the pro is pleased

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291

with one kind of performance, he will be displeased by the opposite. If he likes me for doing well, he will dislike me for not doing well.’ The standard of good and bad has been established, and the inevitable result was divided concentration and ego-interference.19 In Deleuzian terms, praise (as well as criticism) always takes the form of an order-word. The teacher does nothing but command us to approximate some ideal that is forever beyond our grasp. How then should we understand Gallwey in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms? To me – and this is the reason I became so interested in Gallwey’s work – it is a beautifully worked-out operational diagram of an assemblage. It all begins with a diagnosis: overthinking. We might even see this as a historically new kind of problem. Although it takes the form of anxiety, it isn’t the same as Freud’s notion of anxiety, except in the weak sense that ambition can stand in the place of the father. But actually it is quite different because it is an anxiety of the moment, not of the past. History only comes into it insofar as one lets it (past successes as well as past failures can weigh on the mind). One might even see it as an anxiety that arises out of the tension between intensity and extensity, something Deleuze and Guattari never explicitly discuss, though it is in many ways central to the concept of the assemblage, which functions in the passage between the feeling of expectation that the moment excites (intensity) and the need to respond to it in a practical way (extensity). Unlike Oedipal anxiety, this mode of anxiety dissipates the moment one hits the ball in the right way and arises again in the moment when one is called upon to face a new challenge.

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Notes

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Deleuze 2006: 177. Deleuze 2006: 177. Adorno 1973: 3. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 17–18. Deleuze 1990a: 345.

Chapter 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

See Guattari 1984. Dosse 2010: 3. Dosse 2010: 7, 10. Deleuze 2006: 238. Guattari 1995a: 52. Deleuze 2006: 237. Guattari 2006: 330. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 17. Guattari 1995b: 177–85. Deleuze 1995: 13–15. Deleuze 1990b: 253. Here I must pay tribute to Dan Smith and Charles Stivale and their team for the incredible work they have done in finding, transcribing and translating all of Deleuze’s lectures. It is a wonderful resource: (last accessed 12 January 2021). Stengers 2011. Dosse 2010: 456. See for example the discussion of patient x in A Thousand Plateaus; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 250–1. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 82. Deleuze 2000: 91. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 111–48. Deleuze 2000: 3. By ‘thought’ I mean ideation of any type, including somatic expressions such as emotion and affect.

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NOTES

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

293

Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 77. See for example Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 79–80. I return to this case history at greater length in Chapter 19. Freud 2002: 23. Deleuze 2006: 89–112. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257. Guattari 2011: 27. In the text Guattari refers to Julius Goldberg, but from the discussion that follows it is clear he meant Rube Goldberg (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 135). NB This essay appears as the appendix to the second French edition of Anti-Oedipus but it is not included in the English edition. The English translation can be found in the collection of Guattari’s writings entitled Chaosophy which, somewhat confusingly, attributes Guattari as sole author. In order to correct that I have listed it in my bibliography under both their names. Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 120. I use ‘arranging’ here in the sense of creating an assemblage. I avoid using the word ‘assembling’ because as I have argued elsewhere this introduces a false note into Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. See Buchanan 2020. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 109. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 376. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 342. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 343.

Chapter 2 1. This is the basic hypothesis of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude. 2. Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks about the political dimension of Jack Kerouac’s writing is typical in this respect – they say he created a vibrant, revolutionary line of flight and lost himself in dreams of a Great America and superior ancestors (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 277). The ‘and’ here is perfectly dialectical in Jameson’s sense. See Jameson 2010. 3. Dworkin 2011: 17. 4. Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xiii. 5. Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xiii. 6. Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xiii–xiv. 7. Deleuze 1998: 30. 8. Polman 2010: 1. 9. Moyo 2009. 10. It may be worth noting here that Rosi Braidotti’s work follows exactly the same move: she explicitly claims that the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire can serve as the foundation for an ethics constructed in their image. See Braidotti 1994: 202–4. 11. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 215. 12. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 1. 13. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 26. 14. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 4.

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294 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

NOTES

Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25. See Chapter 1. See Kant 1929 (particularly Book II, ‘Analytic of Principles’). Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 310. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 26. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 27. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129 (emphasis in original). Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129 (emphasis in original). Dworkin 2011: 193.

Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

See Chapter 1. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 109. Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 97. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 149. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 149. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 7. Deleuze and Guattari cite a similar remark from Freud’s analysis of Schreber: ‘Judge Schreber “lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs; he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with his food, etc.”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8). Again, this is obviously not meant to be taken literally or referentially, but neither can it be read metaphorically: the missing body parts do not stand for anything other than themselves. Deleuze 1990b: 19. Deleuze 1990b: 19. Deleuze 1990b: 20. Deleuze 1990b: 21. Deleuze 1990b: 21. Deleuze 1990b: 21. Deleuze 1990b: 28. Deleuze 1990b: 52. The haecceity is a mode of individuation suited to the individuation of events, which are eternal, not bodies, which are transient, operating in the segmented time of Chronos. It separates discrete ‘moments’ on the infinite plane of Aion, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology corresponds to both ‘Life’ (understood existentially) and the body without organs. The individuation of a life, they argue, is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads that life because the subject ‘lives’ in the living present, but their life belongs to the time of Aion. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261. Buchanan 1997. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8.

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20. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 110. 21. Žižek 2001: 44. 22. Guattari (2011: 98) makes this connection between the superego and the face explicit in The Machinic Unconscious. 23. Michaux 1974: 126; Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 6. 24. Buchanan 2020: 75–84. 25. Freud 2003: 76. 26. Freud 2003: 79. 27. Freud 2003: 79. 28. Freud 2003: 74. 29. Freud 2003: 68. 30. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 9. 31. Deleuze 1990b: 188. 32. Deleuze 1990b: 187. 33. Deleuze 1990b: 187. 34. ‘The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 1). 35. It is worth observing here that ‘détraquées’ could also be translated as ‘going off the rails’, which would be its more literal meaning. In my view this would be a better translation because it signals a going off course of desire, rather than a breakdown. See Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8. 36. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8. 37. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 5. 38. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 2. 39. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 5.

Chapter 4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Deleuze 2006: 240. Guattari 1995b: 138. Deleuze 1995: 58. Deleuze 1995: 58. Deleuze 1995: 60. Deleuze 1995: 84–5. Deleuze 1986: x. Deleuze 1989: 164. Deleuze 1994: 17. Deleuze 1989: 164. Cf. Deleuze 1995: 128–9. For a more detailed consideration of how this dualism operates in Deleuze’s thought on music see Buchanan 2000: 175–89. 12. Deleuze 2003: 87. 13. Deleuze 2003: 94. 14. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 206.

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NOTES

15. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 146. 16. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 192. 17. Virilio (1994: 14) suggests that both photography and cinema learned a great deal about the essential nature of the image from pioneering work in animal conditioning done in the 1920s and 1930s. 18. Deleuze 1986: xiv. 19. Deleuze 1989: 157. 20. Deleuze 1989: 164. 21. Cited in Virilio 1994: 11. 22. Deleuze 1989: 169. 23. For an excellent explanation of the concept of spiritual automaton and its significance to Deleuze’s work on cinema, see Rodowick 1997: 174–7. 24. Deleuze 1989: 168. 25. I have developed this point at greater length in Buchanan 2007. 26. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 24. 27. Here I equate the repetition of a certain way of making films with ‘method’, about which Deleuze says the following: ‘Method is the means of that knowledge which regulates the collaboration of all the faculties. It is therefore the manifestation of common sense or the realisation of a Cogitatio natura, and presupposes a good will as though this were a “premeditated decision” of the thinker’ (Deleuze 1994: 165). The significance of this, as should become clear in what follows, is that in Deleuze’s view the application of method is a sure-fire way of stifling creativity and with it the production of thought. Deleuze’s (1986: 155–9) remarks on the Actors Studio are instructive in this regard because he argues that their famous method style of acting was employed precisely to escape the limitations of the sensory-motor scheme in which it was formed. 28. I take the idea of ‘image-regimes’ from Rodowick (2001: 170–7). I have explored the connection between ‘image-regime’ and the ‘regime of signs’ in more detail in Buchanan 2007. 29. Deleuze 1986: 14–15. For a more detailed discussion of this point see Buchanan 2007. It is perhaps worth adding that Virilio, too, is a keen observer of the delirious qualities and powers of the image’s distortion of both dimension and proportion. See Virilio 1989: 25. 30. Benjamin 1973: 114–17. 31. Deleuze 1989: 4. 32. Deleuze 1989: 18. 33. Deleuze 1989: 18. 34. Deleuze 1989: 19. 35. Badiou 2006: 134. 36. Badiou 2005: 123. 37. Jameson 2002: 4. 38. Deleuze 1990a: 160. 39. ‘In thinking we obey only the laws of thought, laws that determine both the form and the content of true ideas, and that make us produce ideas in sequence according to their own causes and through our own power, so that in knowing our power of understanding we know through their causes all the things that fall within this power’ (Deleuze 1990a: 140).

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40. In a different place, I have tried to show that Deleuze’s oeuvre as a whole is motivated by this dialectic between sad passions and adequate ideas; see Buchanan 2000. 41. I develop this notion of the plane of self-evidence or plane of obviousness in Buchanan 2008. 42. To give only one example, its appeal to teenage boys is why the X-Men trilogy got made and Kim Stanley Robinson’s more cerebral Mars trilogy didn’t, even though the rights to it were optioned by James Cameron, who as the director of Terminator and Titanic has obvious money-making credentials. 43. Not even sophisticated versions of market analysis such as Franco Moretti’s (2001) cultural geography, which uses sales data to chart patterns in national taste, explain why desire manifests itself in the way it does, nor why it is distributed in the way it is. 44. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 311. 45. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 322. 46. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 350.

Chapter 5 1. A version of this chapter was presented at the Tate Modern in London in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001. I would like to thank the organisers of that event, particularly Barbara Kennedy, both for inviting me to present this paper and for their wonderful hospitality. 2. Žižek 1991: 105. 3. Žižek 1991: 99. 4. Žižek 1991: 99. 5. Žižek 1991: 106. 6. The first art design sketches Robert Boyle put together for Hitchcock were in fact based on Munch’s painting (Paglia 1998: 18). 7. ‘Du Maurier’s “The Birds” may have been suggested by the German air strikes that raked southern England during World War II . . . Hitchcock picked up the war analogy: of his heroine in The Birds becoming stronger through adversity’ (Paglia 1998: 9). 8. Paglia reads this scene as evidence that the battle between Melanie and Lydia is over, victory going to Melanie who by making tea shows herself to be the lady of the house. The trouble with this reading is that it doesn’t support Paglia’s later claim that it is ultimately Lydia who is victorious because it doesn’t explain Lydia’s recovery from her spell of catatonia, nor what it is exactly that Lydia does to pitch Melanie toward her end (Paglia 1998: 44, 86). By contrast, Robin Wood (1989: 164) says this scene is reminiscent of Mrs Moore’s experience in the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. 9. He goes on to suggest that this indicates a narrative of ‘taming of the shrew’ type, which although interesting isn’t persuasive, because while Melanie is certainly shrewish in her own jet-set way, Mitch is no Petruchio – he merely wants Melanie because it might be fun, not to prove his superior masculinity (Jameson 1992b: 48). See also Paglia 1998: 26. 10. Jameson 1992a: 13.

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NOTES

11. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 329; 1994: 42. 12. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 284. By deliberately paraphrasing Freud’s famous sentence ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ (which as Lacan points out is inexactly, but not wrongly, rendered in English as ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’; Lacan’s own rendering is ‘There where it was, it is my duty that I should come to being’), Deleuze and Guattari make it clear schizoanalysis is not to be construed as a radical alternative to psychoanalysis, one which operates in an entirely different domain. See Lacan 1977: 128–9. 13. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 327. 14. Indeed, it is precisely in the nature of the Hitchcock formula to keep this mysterious. See Paglia 1998: 9. 15. Freud 1979: 209. 16. Freud 1979: 210. 17. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 169. Blumfeld is Deleuze and Guattari’s own example. 18. Kafka 1992: 185. 19. In his own defence, Freud explains that the severity of the illness means that most schizophrenics require institutionalisation, therefore he doesn’t often get to treat them. In other words, schizophrenia is properly speaking outside the realm of what psychoanalysis was created to deal with. See Freud 1979: 138. 20. See Freud 1979: 194. 21. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 203. 22. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 203. 23. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 164. 24. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 193. 25. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 193. 26. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 194. 27. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 195. 28. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 196. 29. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 199. 30. Paglia (1998: 19) makes the interesting, though not all that convincing, claim that the credits sequence for The Birds is continuous with the closing scene of Hitchcock’s previous film, Psycho. 31. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 437–8. 32. Deleuze 1994: 89. 33. Wood 1989: 155. 34. Smith 2000: 126. 35. In respect to this scene, it must be noted that Paglia’s (1998: 83) Patty Hearst hypothesis is especially implausible. 36. Wood 1989: 171. 37. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 329. 38. This section was originally published with what is now Chapter 14 of this volume, but I had always intended it to be part of a larger and obviously incomplete project on Hitchcock. 39. Deleuze 2000: 95. 40. Deleuze 1990b: 48.

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41. Deleuze 1990b: 49. 42. Deleuze 1990b: 49. 43. The infamous statement by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and former President of Harvard University Larry Summers – ‘the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. There is only one set of laws and they work everywhere’ – is the apotheosis of this abuse of thought. 44. Deleuze 1990b: 49. 45. Jameson 2004: 47.

Chapter 6 1. For an extended and highly detailed examination of Deleuze’s clinical project see Tynan 2012. 2. See Deleuze 1991: 15. See also Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 120. 3. One might also argue, as I do in Deleuzism, that causation is central to Deleuze’s ethics because for Deleuze (following Spinoza) the only ethical idea is an adequate idea and the adequate idea is one that knows its own cause. See Buchanan 2000: 31–3. 4. Deleuze 1994: 158. 5. Deleuze 1994: 159. 6. See Deleuze 1994: 159: ‘A solution always has the truth it deserves according to the problem to which it is a response, and the problem always has the solution it deserves in proportion to its own truth or falsity – in other words, in proportion to its sense.’ 7. See Deleuze 1997: 3. 8. See Deleuze 1990b: 237. 9. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 127. 10. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 119. 11. Deleuze 1990b: 237–8. See also Buchanan 2020: 75–84. 12. Jameson 1981: 81. I discuss Jameson’s use of history in detail in Buchanan 2006a: 57–62. 13. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 178. 14. Tatz 2003: 104–5. 15. For a useful discussion of the concept of national allegory that separates it from debates about nationalism see Buchanan 2006b; Szeman 2006. See also Jameson’s own clarification of what he means by allegory in Jameson 2010 and more specifically his defence of national allegory in Jameson 2019: 187–215. 16. This story is also featured in Robert Altman’s movie Short Cuts (1993), a compendium of nine different Carver stories. 17. See for example Richard Flanagan’s novel and film The Sound of One Hand Clapping. But see also Cate Shortland’s film Somersault (2004), also set in Jindabyne, which similarly makes symbolic use of the town’s dislocated history. 18. See Lévinas 1969. 19. Butler 2009: 14. 20. Butler 2009: 15. 21. Butler 2009: 38.

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300 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

NOTES

Butler 2009: 64. Butler 2009: 50. Butler 2009: 64. Carver 1993: 69. Butler 2009: 89. Barthes 1972: 164. Agamben 1998: 171. See Agamben 1998: 169. Agamben 1998: 169–70. See for example Patton 2000: 125. The fact that these children were living with black families to begin with because, for the most part, their white fathers had deserted their mothers (or raped them, as was more often the case) never got taken into consideration. By the same token, the fact that these children weren’t treated as ‘out of place’ by their families was also ignored, and in spite of the policy-makers’ rhetoric about the importance of family they privileged social position over family ties. The choice of term, ‘half-caste’, rather than ‘half-aboriginal’ or ‘half-white’, was influenced by British colonial experience in India and reflected a vision of society in which every racial group had its designated place. For an excellent account of these events and their meaning within the Australian political context see Stringer 2007: n. 2. Stringer 2007: n. 2. See Derrida 2001: 39.

Chapter 7 1. By ‘twice’ I mean twice over – what the actual new level of radiation is compared to pre-invasion levels I do not know. Given that we know that more depleted uranium ammunition has been used in the second Gulf War than was used in the first, it is reasonable to assume the situation has worsened. 2. Frank’s answer is precisely that the war was not as significant to the voters in Kansas, particularly the religious right, as other more morally urgent issues such as abortion. 3. Debord 1990: 24. 4. Longue durée historians of the future may well conclude that the most historically consequential meeting that took place following the end of hostilities in Europe was the one between Roosevelt and Saudi King Ibn Saud. As Matthew Yeomans (2004: 15–18) argues, this meeting sowed the seeds of US predominance in the region. 5. Wallerstein 2003: 14–15. 6. The common consensus that Afghanistan was the USSR’s ‘Vietnam’ tends to confirm this. 7. See Anderson 2005 for a critique of the support given to the US’s military actions of the past two decades by Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio. 8. It should be clear, then, that I do not share Frances Fox Piven’s (2004: 121) optimistic view that the Iraq conflict will induce a return of the Vietnam Syndrome.

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9. Michael Mann (2003) extends this point and argues that the US is incapable of supporting an empire because it has proved much less adept than Britain in getting its ‘allies’ to fight its wars on its behalf. 10. Kolko 1994: 356. 11. As Deleuze wrote in response to the first Gulf War, ‘Did the Americans themselves believe that they could wage precise, rapid war without innocent victims?’ (Deleuze and Scherer 1998: 170). 12. Written as it is from the perspective of a robot, the complex and ambiguous element of desire is lacking in Manuel DeLanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, making it less useful for our purposes than one might have supposed from the title. For DeLanda, an arms race can be understood as a feedback loop within a closed system. But to put it this way is to take no account of desire – it does not explain why we should want to pursue that path. Deleuze and Guattari do not assume we are automata; on the contrary, as desiring individuals we have a range of choices before us. Our desire has to be rendered susceptible to capture. This was the basic purpose of the first volume: the diatribe against psychoanalysis had as its purpose the analysis of the way Oedipus operates to seduce desire into monitoring itself. DeLanda’s closedsystem approach is false in another way as well. For Deleuze and Guattari technology is the product of a lifeworld. Metallurgy is not merely a trade, or technique, it is an entire way of life. 13. As Retort have argued, the control of oil is only one of the stakes in the Gulf War conflict. Just as important are the arms sales to Third World countries and the lucrative construction contracts that go with the development of military capacity. ‘The invasion of Iraq was about Chevron and Texaco, but it was also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI and DynCorp’ (Retort 2005: 16). 14. As Chalmers Johnson (2000, 2004) has shown, the old model of the military that did everything itself (i.e. the ‘studio system’) has given way to a vast interlocking network of private enterprises (‘Hollywood’ as it is today). 15. The justification for war is brazenly Wall Street too inasmuch as the conception of freedom it propounds is only the meagre stuff entailed in its free market ideology. As the troops were preparing for war, the military’s procurements people were busily recruiting post-war reconstruction privateers. Come to Iraq, they said, and make your fortune. So far that particular promise has not quite panned out as scripted. 16. I use ‘cultural revolution’ here in the sense that Jameson has given the term, namely to describe the often painful process of changing a way of thinking. I specify the ‘spread of revolutionary communism’ because, as Baudrillard (1995: 85) points out, the Vietnam War stopped when a bureaucracy had replaced the revolution. 17. As I argue in Chapter 15, the theme of betrayal is the basis of the redemption narrative central to all of the Rambo films. It is perhaps worth adding here that the theme of betrayal is also central to Trump’s rhetoric, both when he won the election in 2016 and when he lost in 2020. 18. Baudrillard 1994: 36.

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302 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

NOTES

Bacevich 2005: 26. Hobsbawm 1994: 29–30. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421. See Johnson 2000 and 2004. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 480. Baudrillard 1994: 37. Kolko 1994: 321. That this position chimed with the government’s position on welfare, which was to become similarly hard-hearted, is hardly likely to be a coincidence. The current regime has shown the truth of this. As Frances Fox Piven (2004: 89) has recently pointed out, in contrast to the Johnson administration the Bush II regime has offered nothing to its domestic population to ease the burden of war. In fact, it seems hell-bent on brutalising the people at home too as it clamps down on welfare and intensifies surveillance. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29. In 1967 more Americans opposed than supported sending troops to Vietnam. By 1973, the ratio of opposition to support was two to one. Officially, the last US troops pulled out of South Vietnam in March 1973, but the US maintained a military presence in the form of ‘advisers’, Embassy staff and CIA operatives right up until April 1975, when the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. See Kolko 1994: 172. Baudrillard 1994: 38. By ‘defenceless’ Chomsky means not only that the country in question has less military capacity than the US, which is true of every country on earth, but also that its terrain offers no natural resistance to US weapons systems. Iraq is a perfect case in point – its empty, flat desert terrain is ideally suited to blitzkrieg tactics. By contrast, Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain is highly resistant to this kind of warfare, as the failed campaign to capture Bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 proved. Chomsky 2003: 17. Did not the Bush-Cheney campaign manager glibly describe the US action in Iraq as getting it ‘ready for Wal-Mart’? (Cited in Retort 2005: 13.) Brecht once asked who is the bigger criminal, the bank robber or the banker? In Iraq today that question would have little meaning. The bankers are the ones who do the robbing. As Private England and her colleagues were administering electric shock treatment to the genitals of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, so Paul Brenner and his were administering shock therapy to the Iraqi economy. While we pretended to be shocked about the former, we barely raised an eyebrow at the latter. As Naomi Klein (2004) has pointed out, these two forms of shock treatment are not entirely unrelated. Inasmuch as the current aim of the occupying forces is to make Iraq a safe place to do business, one may well be justified in concluding they are directly related. It is an open question as to which of these two forms of shock treatment is producing the greater amount of blowback, but one can be sure that is precisely what they are doing. In this regard, what follows can be regarded as a pendant to Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984), which

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NOTES

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

303

despite its encyclopedic grasp of its subject matter leaves out militarism. The companion essay, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, deals with some of the geopolitical issues missing from the postmodernism essay, but advances no thesis decisively connecting militarism and postmodernism. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 418. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 422–3. Christian Parenti (1999: 18) confirms this by showing how the US utilised refined techniques of nonbattle on the home front in the development of its policing of inner-city crime – control the population, control the resources are the watchwords of nonbattle. Kolko 1994: 193. De Certeau’s description of everyday life in terms of strategy and tactics bears this out: the tactical is defined by kairos, the ability to seize a moment and turn an unfavourable set of circumstances to one’s own benefit. Strategy, meanwhile, which for de Certeau is typified by Foucault’s account of discipline, is defined by its immobility. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 416. Deleuze 1983: 10. Consequently, I reject Badiou’s (2000) claim that Deleuze’s philosophy is not critical, but this is not the place to lay out in full all the arguments against this very severe judgement. However, it should be clear from what follows that the ‘problematic’ form of philosophy is explicitly conceived as a critical engagement with the present. It is not a case-by-case philosophy as Badiou claims, but an ongoing attempt to create a concept adequate to the problem of the everyday itself in all its complexity. ‘The schizoanalytic argument is simple: desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement – desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29). Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 454. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 462. Davis 2004: 19. Davis 2004: 19. Demography is not merely a Third World ‘evil’ – social security privatisation pundits use it to argue that the government can’t afford to support so many pensioners. Davis 2004: 24. Barthes 1972: 164. It is against this background that Samir Amin has suggested that ‘de-linking’ is the only option the Third World has if it wants to stand on its own two feet. By ‘de-linking’ he means putting national priorities ahead of global interconnectedness. Primarily, it means building domestic markets for needed foodstuffs so as to reverse the impoverishing situation of growing cash crops for sale in a WTO-controlled (i.e. subject to US and European subsidisation and dumping) market in order to purchase food in that same market. See Amin 2004: 107. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 463. Yeomans 2004: 105.

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NOTES

55. Peter Gowan argues that the 1970s oil shock was in fact orchestrated by the US. On the one hand, it was a means of tightening its grip around the throats of its erstwhile allies, Japan and Europe, who were far more dependent on Middle East oil than the US. On the other hand, it strengthened the position of the US dollar as the default global currency (putting an end once and for all to the idea of a return to a Bretton Woods-style financial system), and just as importantly created an ocean of petrodollars to be recycled through US banks, thus improving liquidity. See Gowan 1999: 21. 56. Retort 2005: 14. 57. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 464. 58. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 464. 59. Retort 2005: 16. 60. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 469. 61. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 468. 62. Monbiot cited in Cook 2004: 232. 63. Graeber (2002: 63) argues for a direct connection between the Zapatistas and the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle. 64. Jameson 1988: 203. 65. On this point, as Jameson (1988: 203) reminds us, it needs to be underscored that however one feels about terrorism as a political means, from an ideological perspective it is a concept of the Right and should be refused in that form. 66. Marcos 2001: 70. 67. Weinberg 2000: 201. 68. Klein 2001: 87–9. 69. Klein 2001: 89. 70. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 464. 71. Sader 2002: 94. 72. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473. 73. Cockburn and St. Clair 2000: 1. 74. Cockburn and St. Clair 2000: 9–10. 75. Sellers 2001: 85. 76. The US federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed just how little it actually cares for the domestic population. Its first response was not to try to save people, or ameliorate their situation, but to restore law and order by sending in ‘battle-hardened’ Iraq veterans, replete with APVs, Kevlar body armour and assault rifles. Meanwhile the local New Orleans government made it known that the failed levees had not been upgraded to withstand a hurricane of Katrina’s intensity, despite the obvious necessity of doing so in the wake of Hurricanes Andrew and Ivan, because the funds had been siphoned off to bolster security for the ‘War on Terror’. 77. Cockburn and St. Clair 2000: 100.

Chapter 8 1. In November 2011, Nicolaus Mills from The Guardian helpfully published a cross-section of opinions from prominent cultural and political pundits,

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

305

spanning the ideological spectrum from Naomi Klein to Niall Ferguson. See also the 2 April 2012 issue of The Nation, which similarly carried a round-up of opinion on the Occupy movement, albeit all from a left perspective. Buchanan 2008: 7–12. See also Chapter 7 for a brief discussion of the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’ of 1999, which similarly seemed to portend a global revolution. Rancière 1999: 9. Greenberg 2011. Greenberg 2012b: 47. Occupy Sandy and Debt Relief being only two of the most prominent iterations. Details of living conditions are drawn from Greenberg 2011. Examples drawn from Greenberg 2011. In a speech given on 6 December 2011 at Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama said that the issues identified by the Occupy Wall Street movement were the ‘defining issues of our time’ (Greenberg 2012b: 46). Rancière 1999: 107. Rancière 1999: 116. See Mills 2011. David Runciman’s essay on Occupy Wall Street for the London Review of Books is a clear case in point: his framework for analysing and commenting on Occupy is very traditional. His central complaint is that the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ is a nonsense and that it does not work as a rallying cry because it isn’t obvious who its constituents are or should be. Yet surely this is precisely the point: all but the richest 1 per cent have a stake in Occupy, whether they want to admit it or not. See Runciman 2012. Badiou 2012: 60–1. For an extended discussion of Deleuze’s concept of ‘life’ see Chapter 14. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 198–200. As they observe, following Gabriel Tarde, the French Revolution began when peasants stopped doffing their caps to the aristocracy, not when the heads began to roll. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 216. In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari describe this counterflow as a ‘witches’ flight’. Anderson 2012: 6. In an interesting twist of history, the Philip Glass opera based on the life of Ghandi, Satyagraha, was playing at the Lincoln Center in New York for much of the period of Occupy Wall Street’s tenancy at Zuccotti Park. See Greenberg 2012b: 46. Badiou 2012: 87. Badiou 2012: 58. Badiou 2012: 97. It is worth adding that Badiou also goes on to acknowledge that the Indignados, like the Occupiers in New York, were more or less compelled to take the position that there was no properly democratic body they could present their demands to. Badiou 2012: 98–9. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 480. Harvey 2012: 73.

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NOTES

Chapter 9 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Casey 1993: xiii. Deleuze 1989: 171. Deleuze 1989: xi. Didion 1979: 180–1. Deleuze 1986: 200–5. Cited in Jameson 2003. I take the term ‘hyperrealism’ from Umberto Eco (1986). Spoto 1983: 355. Deleuze 1986: 201. Deleuze 1989: 172. Deleuze 1986: 204. Deleuze 1986: 204–5. Nabokov 1995: 145–6. Nabokov 1995: 175. Nabokov 1995: 145. Jameson 1991: 40. For a longer discussion of Jameson’s account of the Bonaventure see Buchanan 2000: 143–74. Zukin 1991: 20. I provide a much more detailed account of this aspect of the assemblage in Buchanan 2020. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 67. Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000: 153–72. Frieden and Sagalyn 1989: 62. Baudrillard 1994: 77. Head 2004: 80. It is worth adding here that Amazon has since eclipsed Wal-Mart and in doing so may well bring an end to the mall era as it is currently understood. Zukin 1991: 20. See Jameson 2003. Urry 2002: 112. In other words, one should not read Davis against Jameson, but rather read them together. Jameson 1998: 183–5. See for example Holland 1999: 20. Pearson 1999: 177. Stivale 1998: 22–3. Jameson 1998: 152. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 35. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 153. See Derrida 1994. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 140. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 139. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 142.

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40. 41. 42. 43.

307

Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 145. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 145. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 154. Crawford 1992: 8.

Chapter 10 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

See, respectively, Lefebvre 1995 and 1991. Jameson 1991: 26. Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000: 142. In sociology, this is a longstanding problematic that was given its effective first formulation by Ferdinand Tönnies in his distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Rebecca Solnit’s account of the 1990s dot-com-fuelled real estate boom in San Francisco offers a vivid picture of a city in the process of becoming a closedin world, as Jameson describes the Bonaventure: ‘Think of San Francisco as a rainforest being razed to grow a monocrop’ (Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000: 155). I will not enter into the debate that erupted between Jameson and Davis as to whether or not Jameson paid adequate attention to the destructive effects of property development in downtown Los Angeles, except to point out that he addresses this issue in a later essay that I deal with below (see Jameson 1998). Jameson 1991: 43–4. Jameson 1993: 44–5. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 187. Norman M. Klein (2004) uses the term ‘immersion’ to connect postmodern spaces and more especially film with the baroque. What is startling about this connection is that it was staring us in the face in Jameson’s (1991: 40) description of the Bonaventure as aspiring to be ‘a total space, a complete world’ for which the baroque term of the Gesamtkunstwerk would not have been inappropriate. Decrying such spaces as ‘junk’ as Koolhaas instructs has effectively prevented us from apprehending their logic. There is a much darker side to this picture and that is the reality of cities too large and too poor to provide the necessary infrastructure for all their citizens. In these cities – e.g. Nairobi, Lagos, Mumbai – if one does not belong to the thin upper strata, one is at best permanently transient. See Davis 2004. Jameson 1991: 45. Venturi et al. 1972: 3. Venturi et al. 1972: 76. Thus Banham (1971: 183–93) famously offers only a note on downtown Los Angeles because that is all it is worth, its heart having been shrivelled by the ubiquitous freeways. Banham 1971: 5. Mike Davis (2002: 184) reports that so far the LA subway has cost a spectacular $US290 million per mile to construct. See Klein 1997: 36–8.

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308 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

NOTES

Solnit 2004: 32. Davis 2002: 98. Davis 2002: 96. As Davis (2002: 85–6) points out, Las Vegas doesn’t care much for the past either – none of the iconic hotels of the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of the ‘Rat Pack’, are still standing. Even if the names have remained the same – MGM Grand, Mirage, Dunes and so on – the buildings haven’t. It needs to be added here that this is an affluent perspective on cities. As Mike Davis’s work on slums suggests, the real future of cities is to be found in places like Mumbai and São Paulo, not Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 66. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 198–9, 279. Said 1978: 185. I take this date from that given at the end of the chapter entitled ‘Travels in Hyperreality’ in the book of the same name which was first published in 1986 under the title ‘Faith in Fakes’. According to Perry Anderson (1998: 21–2) ‘postmodern’ was first used in the way we now understand it in 1974, but it didn’t really find much traction until 1977 with the publication of Charles Jencks’s much celebrated Language of Post-Modern Architecture. We have to avoid using the term ‘decode’ in this context because in Deleuze and Guattari’s text décodage doesn’t mean decipher, or interpret. It is not the translation that is ambiguous, however, but Deleuze and Guattari’s usage. That said, its logic is clear: the prefix ‘de’ has the meaning of cutting away (as in decapitate), not reading into (as in de-cipher). A decoded text is one that cannot be interpreted because it no longer operates according to the rules of codes – surface and depth – but has instead become ‘axiomatic’, pure surface. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 482) make a similar distinction between what they call Goethe travel and Kleist travel but reverse the polarity. For them, the best kind of travel is precisely that which skates across the surface, or better yet does not move at all. Eco 1986: 4. Eco 1986: 5. Eco 1986: 5–6. Eco 1986: 25–6. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 169, 194. See also Chapter 5. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 87. See Jameson 2003. Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000: 141. In my case, this is literally true: I first visited San Francisco in 1998, long after the gentrification process had begun to ‘destroy’ the city. My model for understanding this process, though, is the transformation of Fremantle in Western Australia, a city I lived in as a student, first by property developers cashing in on the America’s Cup, then by the slow encroachment of Notre Dame University, which is buying up all the old seafarers’ hotels and turning them into classrooms and student accommodation. Jameson 1998: 150.

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39. This is not the place to investigate that history in full, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that such an investigation would have to begin with the startling sentences in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus where Deleuze and Guattari announce that the Freudian concept of the drive must be redefined in terms of territoriality. ‘There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives [pulsions], for drives [pulsions] are simply desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society and reduces all of them to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 35). 40. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 174. 41. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 508 (ellipsis in original). 42. See de Certeau 1998.

Chapter 11 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

Baudrillard 1997: 52. Baudrillard 1998: 182–3. See Augé 1995. See also Chapter 10. As Ritzer notes, conservative political pundits Thomas Friedman (Lexus and the Olive Tree) and Benjamin R. Barber (Jihad vs. McWorld) have expressed similar viewpoints to his. Interestingly, Ritzer seems not to be concerned that both Friedman and Barber depict McDonaldisation as the welcome spread of social democracy and capitalist freedom. See Ritzer 2000: 233 n. 1. Jameson 2003. See also Chapter 10. Baudrillard 1994: 75–7. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 178. Kowinski 2002. Adorno and Horkheimer 1998: 59. Kracauer 1995: 332. See Crary 1999 for an excellent account of how modernity has changed how we experience time. Those of us ‘old’ enough to remember the advent of email and the birth and growth of the internet have had a similar experience, perhaps without realising it at the time. Benjamin 1973: 112. Benjamin 1973: 113. Jameson 2003. It is against this that one should read Fredric Jameson’s polemical and frequently misunderstood proposition that late – by which he meant contemporary – capitalism is characterised by the prodigious expansion of multinational capital and its penetration and colonisation of the ‘last’ two pre-capitalist enclaves, Nature and the Unconscious, because it plainly rings true. See Jameson 1991: 49. Benjamin 1973: 115. Buchanan 2014. Heidegger 1995: 99–105.

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NOTES

Chapter 12 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Dosse 2010: 330. Deleuze 1995: 177–8. Han 2017: 23. Han 2017: 25. Han taxes Agamben (unjustly in my view) for failing to recognise that contemporary technology is no longer disciplinary in its mode of operation. Han 2017: 24. Agamben 2000: 7–8. Berlant 2011: 106–14. Deleuze 1995: 182. Han 2017: 25, 14, 56, 62, 65. Han 2017: 38. Zuboff 2019. Deleuze 1995: 180–1. By business (l’enterprise) Deleuze means what we would today refer to as a corporation, which is a very different kind of entity from the organisations that existed in the disciplinary era, for which Marx was both poet laureate and vivisector. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 230. See Srnicek 2017. I do not necessarily agree with all of Srnicek’s arguments, but there is no doubting the insightfulness of his notion of platform capitalism. Deleuze 1995: 179. Deleuze 1995: 179. Writing fifteen years ago, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that Deleuze gives too much credit to the power of control society’s capabilities (Chun 2006: 6–9). While there may be some truth in that, I would say that the issue isn’t whether control society can do the things we imagine it is capable of, but whether it would do the things it might be capable of. In other words, I think the ethical question is more important than the technical question, which is in any case in a constant state of being overcome. On this score it is clear that there are no implicit moral or ethical limits to the lengths data companies will go to in pursuit of profit. This can be demonstrated in any number of ways, so I will just offer one particularly egregious example of a drug company, Mundipharma, using Google searches to identify possible opioid users suffering from constipation by tracking their searches and then sending them targeted ads for their laxative-laced product. See (last accessed 21 January 2021). Jameson 1991: ix. Zuboff 2019 (emphasis added). Chun 2006: 38. Davis 1992: 242–3. Bratton 2015: 116. Bratton 2015: 116. In 2015 it was estimated that the world’s data centres combined used 3 per cent of the world’s electricity supply, which is greater than the total amount of electricity consumed by the UK. See Bridle 2018: 63.

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24. See ‘Why Irish data centre boom is complicating climate efforts’, (last accessed 21 January 2021). 25. For example, Amazon, which is both the largest retail company on earth and the largest provider of data services, organises its fulfilment centres according to a machine logic known as ‘chaotic storage’ which is impenetrable to the humans, though not the robots, who work there. See Bridle 2018: 114–15. 26. Deleuze 1995: 181.

Chapter 13 1. This chapter was originally written and published in 2007. To put that into perspective, Facebook was only three years old and not yet all that well known. Twitter was only a year old and Google was still very much in its infancy too. I did not know about either Facebook or Twitter when I researched and wrote this piece. At the time, social media still mostly meant ‘citizen journalism’, as it was then known, and certainly didn’t carry the freight it does today. Although a lot of the technological and indeed commercial references here have been outmoded, my sense is that what I have to say about Deleuze and Guattari remains useful because people are still using their work to talk about the internet in ways I critique here. 2. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 208–9. 3. Deleuze 1995: 181. 4. Foucault’s heartfelt acknowledgement of the importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s work to his own thinking is obviously not unimportant in this respect. 5. Foucault 1977: 29. 6. See Chapter 3. 7. Jameson 1981: 10, 47. 8. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 311. 9. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 327. 10. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 10. 11. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 10. 12. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 162. 13. Bard and Söderqvist 2002: 113. 14. Hayles 2001: 154. 15. McKibben 2006: 4. As I mentioned before, Facebook and social media more generally was in its infancy when McKibben wrote these words (and I cited them), so one would need to qualify his observation to take account of these new uses of the internet. But this does not invalidate his observation because in many ways social media has sealed the internet’s fate as the ultimate form of distraction, far surpassing TV in its capacity to absorb our attention. 16. It is perhaps worth observing that in this sense the internet is fundamentally anti-socialist: it will not accept dirigisme of any description. 17. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 165. 18. Guattari 1995a: 12.

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NOTES

19. This is undoubtedly the most outdated aspect of this chapter. Google never gained a foothold in China and probably never will. China simply replicated all the major American platforms for itself and gave them Chinese characteristics. The Chinese equivalents of Google and Facebook are similarly gargantuan corporations. See Lanchester 2019. 20. ‘Backlash as Google shores up great firewall of China’, The Guardian, 25 January 2006, (last accessed 25 January 2021). 21. Google’s market value passed $1 trillion in 2020. For the sake of comparison, General Motors’ market capitalisation in 2020 stood at $64 billion (i.e. a little over 6 per cent of the value of Google). 22. Schmidt 2006: 15. 23. Schmidt 2006: 15. 24. Schmidt 2006: 15. 25. Schmidt 2006: 15. 26. The Sunday Times, 21 May 2006, p. 13. 27. This issue has not been ignored in academic discourse – see, for example, Solove 2004 and Chun 2006 – but the emphasis there is overwhelmingly on the activities of governments. 28. The Observer, 22 January 2006, p. 24. 29. Poster 2001: 27. 30. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 21. 31. As Deleuze himself recognised, surfing is one of those sports in which the ‘key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to “get into something” instead of being the origin of an effort’ (Deleuze 1995: 121). 32. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 18. 33. As clear an instance as one could find of language ‘falling under the domain of private property’ (Poster 2001: 39). 34. But in a sense, all Google is doing is making a commercial strength out of what has always been a weakness in its operating system: Google’s famous PageRank algorithm is anything but immune to influence. Its basic premise, that the more traffic a site receives the more significant it is, has meant that it is prey to the influence of spammers who simply bombard a particular site until its rank changes. There are even companies promising that for a fee they can elevate a site’s ranking, thus enhancing its market presence (popular wisdom has it that people rarely look beyond the first page of results – a ranking of fifty or worse is basically death for an internet business relying on Google traffic). Google is alert to this and bans companies it thinks are guilty of such practices. But ultimately its best defence against this has been to abandon (albeit unofficially) the idea of ‘organic’ searches, that is, searches which aren’t influenced by the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces. 35. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 374. 36. Battelle 2005: 2. 37. Lanchester 2006: 5. 38. But having said this, it also needs to be pointed out that the online businesses other than the big three make up more than 80 per cent of the business as a whole. As Battelle (2005: 154) informs us, Amazon’s 2000 revenue was $US2.76 billion at a time when internet business was worth $US25 billion annually.

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313

Chapter 14 1. See for instance John Rajchman’s (2001) prefatory remarks to the posthumous collection of Deleuze’s essays entitled Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Rajchman reads this essay, as Agamben does, as both a comment on the state of philosophy today and an outline of a programme of work for a philosophy to come and in the process imbues Deleuze’s work with the force of a messianism he was himself always at pains to resist. 2. Agamben 1999: 238. 3. Agamben 1999: 220. 4. See Negotiations (Deleuze 1995) for the three interviews Deleuze gave on Foucault following the publication of Foucault. Deleuze acknowledges that Foucault’s work underwent a profound shift in the years between the publication of the first and second volumes of his history of sexuality, but he refutes the idea that this represents a turn – or, worse, a return – to the idea of subjectivity that his earlier work had interrogated so brilliantly. 5. Said 2004. 6. Agamben 1999: 238–9. 7. Deleuze 1994: 129. 8. Deleuze 1994: 129. 9. Deleuze 1994: 129. 10. Deleuze 1994: 129. 11. Deleuze 1994: 131. 12. Deleuze 1994: 161. 13. Deleuze 2001: 27. 14. Deleuze 2001: 26. 15. Deleuze 2001: 26. 16. Deleuze 2001: 26. 17. Deleuze 1990b: 29. See also Deleuze 1994: 155. 18. Deleuze 1994: xvii. 19. See Buchanan 2000. 20. We ‘shouldn’t enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualised in subjects and objects’ (Deleuze 2001: 29). 21. Cited in Macey 1993: 471. Details of the event itself are drawn from the same source. 22. Deleuze 2003: 87. 23. Deleuze 2001: 28. 24. Agamben 1999: 230. 25. For an extended commentary on this scene see Buchanan 2000: 127–40. 26. Lambert 2000: 85–6. If further evidence is required, one need only look at chapter 3 of A Thousand Plateaus. There Deleuze and Guattari use the persona of ‘Professor Challenger’, borrowed and adapted from Conan Doyle, to satirise themselves. What is significant about this chapter for my purposes here is that they use this as an occasion to denigrate their disciples and epigones.

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NOTES

27. Badiou 2000: 70. 28. Deleuze makes countless references to the great traitors of literature and film, praising them for their willingness to challenge all assumptions. See for instance his comments on Shakespeare’s Richard III and Herzog’s Aguirre (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 126). 29. Dickens 1997: 440. 30. Deleuze 1994: 5. 31. Dickens 1997: 440. 32. For an extended discussion of coincidence see Chapter 5. 33. See Chapter 5.

Chapter 15 1. This is in fact a ‘late’ problem in Deleuze’s work. In Dialogues, for instance, philosophy is said to be automatically produced by the artistic operation as its outside, in which case there could never be any question of interference. I would interpret the movement away from this position as a shift toward a certain kind of dialectical thinking. 2. I take the idea that negative dialectics is incomplete from Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971: 58). 3. Adorno 1973: 185–93. 4. But see Buchanan and Marks 2000. 5. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 282–3, 520 n. 18. See also Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 37. 6. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 171. 7. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 168. 8. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 166. 9. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 43. 10. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 36. 11. Fiedler 1968: 25. 12. It is exactly this conclusion that Deleuze abstracts from Fiedler and evidently accepts wholesale: ‘American literature operates according to geographical lines: the flight towards the West, the discovery that the true East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 37). 13. Fiedler 1968: 30. 14. Fiedler 1968: 31. 15. Fiedler 1968: 29. 16. Fiedler 1968: 29. 17. Fiedler 1968: 26. 18. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 38. 19. Lawrence 1971: 9. 20. Fiedler 1968: 16. 21. Lawrence 1971: 9. 22. Fiedler 1968: 21.

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315

23. One reason for this may be, as Slotkin argues, that the ‘Puritans saw their voyage to the New World as a spiritual journey’. Accordingly, the landscape, as it is depicted in their literature, ‘often seems to owe more to their concept of the spiritual features of the soul than to actual topography’. To the Puritans, the ‘Indians were emblems of external temptation to sin or of the human mind’s dark impulses to sin’ (Slotkin 1973: 39–40). 24. Slotkin 1973: 15. 25. Fiedler 1968: 16. 26. Slotkin 1973: 21. 27. Fiedler 1968: 19. 28. Fiedler 1968: 19. See also Slotkin 1973: 397. 29. Fiedler 1968: 20. 30. Fiedler 1968: 18. See also Slotkin 1973: 398. 31. Slotkin 1973: 185–6. 32. See Slotkin 1973: 95, 121. 33. Slotkin 1973: 57. 34. Slotkin 1973: 126. 35. Slotkin 1973: 179. 36. See Slotkin 1973: 189. 37. Fiedler 1968: 24. 38. See Slotkin 1973: 552. 39. Slotkin 1973: 552. 40. D. H. Lawrence was one of the first to note this bloodlust in American literature. For instance, speaking of Natty Bumppo, he asks what kind of a man he is. ‘Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer’ (1971: 62). 41. Slotkin 1973: 145. 42. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which wasn’t available when I wrote this, should be considered indispensable reading today. It shows the degree to which the American dream is rooted in violence. 43. Slotkin 1973: 562.

Chapter 16 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Deleuze 1983: 162. Anderson 1976: 73. Anderson 1976: 69. Anderson 1976: 53. Anderson 1976: 64 n. 20. As tantalising as it is, I do not think Deleuze’s famous image of a philosophically bearded Hegel and a clean-shaven Marx as the ideal of philosophical commentary really points in this direction. Deleuze 1994: xxi. 6. Anderson 1976: 42 (emphasis in original). 7. Anderson 1976: 43.

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316 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

NOTES

Anderson 1976: 44. Anderson 1976: 44. See Buchanan 2008. See Frank 1999. See Harvey 2005. See Wacquant 2009; Parenti 1999. Freire 1996: 31. Freire 1996: 117. Jameson 2007: 68. Freire 1996: 26. Freire 1996: 118. Freire 1996: 52. Freire 1996: 54. Freire 1996: 60. Freire 1996: 62. Freire 1996: 65 (emphasis in original). Deleuze 1994: 23. See Badiou 2010; Bosteels 2014; Dean 2012. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29 (emphasis in original). Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 30. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 244. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 345. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 345. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 347. Freire 1996: 26. Deleuze 1994: 192.

Chapter 17 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Jameson 1981: 22. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 193. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 575 n. 38. Jameson 1994: xv. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 174. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 176. Deleuze 1986: 125. Deleuze 1983: 78. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110. ‘Whereas for Bellamy or William Morris present society was the evil to be transcended, and the image of the desirable life was projected into the future, in the negative utopia it is the life of the future, created in response to man’s longing for happiness on earth, that is evil’ (Elliott 1970: 89). 11. Deleuze himself fends off the charge of conservatism in his letter to Michel Cressole. See Deleuze 1995: 10–12. 12. Elliott 1970: 127.

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NOTES

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

317

Barthes 1968: 78. Barthes 1968: 86. Barthes 1968: 86–7. Deleuze 1995: 133. Deleuze 1983: 18. Deleuze 1990b: 322. Deleuze 1990b: 322. Jameson 1991: 91. Deleuze 1994: 86. See Holland 1968. Deleuze 1986: 136–7. Deleuze 1994: 315 n. 10. See Deleuze 1993: 100–20. Deleuze 1994: 82. Deleuze 1997: 72. For a more detailed account of this argument see Buchanan 2000: 31–4. See Deleuze 1994: 119–26. Deleuze 1994: 79. Deleuze 1994: 89. Deleuze 1994: 89–90. ‘As Klossowski says, it is the secret coherence which establishes itself only by excluding my own coherence, my own identity, the identity of the self, the world and God. It allows only the plebeian to return, the man without a name. It draws into its circle the dead god and the dissolved self’ (Deleuze 1994: 90–1). Deleuze 1986: 178–9. See Jameson 1971: 407–12. For a more extensive treatment of this argument see Buchanan 2000: 53–4. Jameson 1971: 409. See Buchanan 2000: 77–87. Deleuze 1990b: 322. Jameson (1979: 7–8) uses Deleuze’s notion of ‘molar’ in this way. Deleuze 1986: 124 (emphasis in original). Deleuze 1986: 124. Deleuze 1986: 125. Deleuze 1986: 123. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257. Deleuze 1994: 79. Deleuze 1986: 124 (emphasis in original).

Chapter 18 1. 2. 3. 4.

Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 463. See Buchanan 2020. See Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 109. Phillips 2000: 60.

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318

NOTES

5. Phillips 2000: 62. 6. ‘It is well known that although psychoanalysts have ceased to speak, they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel interpretation on the part of the subject, who jumps from one circle of hell to the next’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 114). 7. Phillips 2000: 62. 8. Phillips 2000: 67. 9. Phillips 2000: 62. 10. Cited in Edemariam 2008. The notion that Bacon’s art is ‘accidental’ is a constant refrain in his interviews with David Sylvester (2008). 11. Edemariam 2008. 12. Edemariam 2008. See also Peppiatt 2008: 227. 13. Peppiatt 2008: 311–12. 14. Edemariam 2008. 15. Deleuze 2003: 96. 16. Phillips 2000: 65. 17. Phillips 2000: 66. 18. Phillips 2000: 63. 19. Phillips 2000: 70. 20. Phillips 2000: 63. 21. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 28. 22. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 82. 23. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 77. 24. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 77. 25. Bettelheim 1967: 235. 26. Bettelheim 1967: 243. 27. For example, they say nothing at all about Bettelheim’s now widely discredited theory of the genesis of autism, which he blames on mothers for not loving their children enough. 28. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 45. 29. Deleuze 2006. 30. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257.

Chapter 19 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Jameson 2010: 55–60. Jameson 1981: 22. Jameson 1981: 23. Freud 2002: 17. Freud 2002: 3. Freud 2002: 4. Freud 2002: 4. Freud 2002: 29. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 31. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 32.

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NOTES

11. 12. 13. 14.

319

Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 32. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 31. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 38. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256.

Chapter 20 1. Deleuze 1995: 131–3. 2. One thinks here of Michel de Certeau’s references to the I Ching. One might also mention Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. 3. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 454. 4. Davies 2015. 5. Gallwey 1974: 11. 6. Gallwey 1974: 15. 7. Herrigel 1953: 16. 8. Herrigel 1953: 48. 9. Gallwey 1974: 16. 10. Deleuze 1995: 121. 11. Gallwey 1974: 17. 12. Gallwey 1974: 17. 13. Herrigel 1953: 83. 14. Gallwey 1974: 23. 15. See Herrigel 1953: 85. 16. Gallwey 1974: 26. 17. Gallwey 1974: 26–7. 18. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 9. 19. Gallwey 1974: 36.

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Index

abstract machine, 6, 19, 75–9, 149–53, 167 Adorno, Theodor, 223–4, 233, 235, 237 affect, 4, 16, 22, 23, 46, 47, 49, 58, 61, 66, 97, 98, 160, 163, 166, 170, 186, 226, 246, 256, 273 Agamben, Giorgio, 101, 103, 183, 184, 209–12, 217, 218, 310n5, 313n1 Althusser, Louis, 236 Anderson, Perry, 16, 142, 234, 235–7, 241, 308n26 anti-psychiatry, 14 Artaud, Antonin, 41–2, 47, 49, 177, 195, 224, 289, 290; see also body without organs assemblage, 2, 4, 6, 13, 22, 23, 93, 150, 261, 265, 267, 273, 277, 286, 291, 293n30 Augé, Marc, 145, 158, 167–70, 174 Bacon, Francis, 16, 60, 157, 263–9 Badiou, Alain, 12, 49, 65, 140–3, 238, 242, 303n43, 305n22 bare life, 104, 183, 210, 217, 218, 221 Barthes, Roland, 249 Bateson, Gregory, 284 Baudrillard, Jean, 113, 116, 117, 147, 151, 158, 169, 173, 187, 301n16 becoming, 16, 23, 43, 47, 164, 207, 241, 247, 253 Benjamin, Walter, 61, 64, 144, 176–7

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Biopolitics, 101, 183 body without organs, 6, 13, 17, 18, 25, 31, 39–53, 78, 79, 140, 154, 194–201, 283, 290, 294n8, 294n17 boredom, 173–80 Butler, Judith, 97–9, 196, 197, 213 capitalism, 5, 14, 26, 58, 61, 88, 121, 123–34, 136, 154–6, 168, 173–7, 184–9, 206, 238, 284–5 Carver, Raymond, 94–6, 99 Castaneda, Carlos, 224, 284 cinema, 57–68, 69–83, 145–9, 175, 231–3 control society, 181–9, 194, 285 Cooper, David, 14 crack, 78, 140, 251–7 Davis, Mike, 124, 162, 187, 189, 307n5 De Certeau, Michel, 2, 145, 158, 167, 168, 172, 303n40 death drive, 45–7, 83 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 105, 154, 212, 219, 234 desire, 2, 20–4, 26, 28–9, 32–8, 42, 45–8, 59, 63, 67, 74, 89, 116, 122, 154, 195–7, 204, 243–5, 262, 269–72, 275–6, 285, 301n12 desiring-machine, 13, 23–4, 31, 35, 47, 50, 53, 63, 67–8, 271–4; see also assemblage

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333

INDEX

deterritorialisation, 18, 51, 64, 83, 153–6, 164, 171, 247 Dickens, Charles, 86, 89, 218–22 disciplinary society, 181–9; see also control society discipline, 150, 194, 285, 303n40 Dosse, François, 12, 15, 182 Eco, Umberto, 147, 165, 166–70, 187 ethics, 27–38, 65, 95–103, 111, 209, 293n10, 299n3, 310n17 face, 7, 96–9 fascism, 28–30, 62–3, 66, 115–16, 124, 131, 243, 283 Fiedler, Leslie, 224, 226–9, 232 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 78, 140, 251 Flaubert, Gustave, 164–6 Foucault, Michel, 2, 15, 28–30, 32–3, 37, 59, 145, 149, 150, 155, 181–9, 194, 195, 210, 211, 217, 234, 235, 283, 285, 303n40, 313n4 Freire, Paulo, 234–45 Gallwey, Timothy, 282–91 Gehry, Frank, 247 gender, 28, 100, 136, 193, 194, 196–7, 213, 238, 276 Google, 186, 199–201, 205–8 grievability, 97–9 Han, Byung-Chul, 183–4, 310n5 Harvey, David, 143–4 Hegel, G. W., 5, 7, 28, 64, 121, 213, 214, 223, 234–9, 241, 246, 250, 315n5 Hemingway, Ernest, 254 Herr, Michael, 161 Herrigel, Eugen, 288 Hume, David, 28 hyperreality, 166, 173–5 immanence, 50, 51, 52, 140, 212, 215, 218, 221, 255 incomplete project, 5–7, 223, 277

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Jameson, Fredric, 5, 16, 65, 74, 89, 92, 130, 144, 153, 154, 158, 160, 161, 170, 171, 174, 177, 235, 236, 239, 246, 247, 251, 254, 276, 284, 301n16, 304n65, 307n5, 307n9, 309n16 Jindabyne, 92–106 Kafka, Franz, 16, 17, 39, 90, 227, 249 Kant, Immanuel, 35–8, 98, 213, 235, 253 Klein, Melanie, 49, 272–4 Klein, Naomi, 200, 302n34 Klein, Norman, 131, 307n9 Lacan, Jacques, 12, 15, 33, 35, 36, 69, 157, 195, 212, 298n12 Laing, R. D., 14 Las Vegas, 161 law, 62, 66, 80, 86, 87, 101–3, 123, 137, 153, 155 Lefebvre, Henri, 158, 168 Lukács, Georg, 246 Mabo v Queensland, 103 Mannoni, Octave, 170 Marxism, 135–6, 185, 195–7, 234–47, 254 meta-modelling, 11 mythopoeic, 224–32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 6, 15, 16, 25, 27, 76, 88, 121, 211, 213, 223, 234–6, 248–50, 284 Orientalism, 166 paradox, 84, 87–8 Phillips, Adam, 261–74 plane of immanence, 6, 39, 214; see also body without organs Proust, Marcel, 18, 19, 53, 86, 90, 176, 214 psychiatry, 13, 24

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334 psychoanalysis, 2, 11, 12, 14, 18, 19, 21, 33, 36, 58, 63, 64, 69, 78, 91, 165, 167, 196, 261–5, 269–71, 274, 275–80, 298n12, 298n19 racism, 92, 100 Rambo, 117, 233, 301n17 Reich, Wilhelm, 243 rhizome, 6, 13, 201–5 Said, Edward, 164, 165, 211 sex, 20–1, 46, 47, 68, 70, 91, 99, 197, 206, 213, 271–3, 277–9 society of control see control society Spinoza, Baruch, 6, 15, 66, 195, 196, 235, 236, 248, 252, 299n3 stolen generation, 93

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INDEX

Terra nullius, 103 territory, 6, 154, 171–2 Vietnam War, 71, 110–19, 128, 143, 161, 231–3, 238, 284 Virilio, Paul, 115, 143, 163, 296n17 war machine, 115–28 Wolf-man, 17, 273, 277–81 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 284 Žižek, Slavoj, 12, 36, 44, 49, 69, 70, 71–4, 76, 77, 170, 212, 235, 242, 276, 283 Zola, Émile, 251, 255 Zuboff, Shoshana, 186 Zukin, Sharon, 149, 152

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