Literary Worlds and Deleuze: Expression as Mimesis and Event 149854438X, 9781498544382

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Literary Worlds and Deleuze

Literary Worlds and Deleuze Expression as Mimesis and Event Zornitsa Dimitrova

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-4985-4437-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-4438-2 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Surface and Depth

vii 1

1

The Reification of Expression and the Emergence of Sense

2 3 4 5 6

Transpositions Words and Worlds in a Literary Machine Machines of Movement Machines Producing Groundlessness Machines That Make Individuals

Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author

29 47 77 99 143 171 207 219 231 237

v

Acknowledgments

This book started out as a doctoral thesis defended at the English Department of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in January 2015. I thank Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer at the University of Münster for the ongoing support of the project across its various stages. I also thank Prof. Dr. Hanjo Berressem at the University of Cologne and Prof. Dr. Mirjam Schaub at HAW Hamburg for their sharp comments and excellent guidance. I would like to extend my thanks to the acquisition editor at Lexington Books, Lindsey Porambo, her team, and the anonymous reviewers for their professionalism in bringing this work to completion. My thanks cannot be complete without Sebastian J. Golla who is responsible for long discussions and cheerful suggestions. Finally, I thank my parents and my sister Snezhina for their generosity, kindness, and loving patience.

vii

Introduction Surface and Depth

In the opening of his Mimesis (1946), Erich Auerbach delineates two possible ways of describing a literary world. At first, Auerbach confronts us with an episode from the Odyssey. Here Homer summons the figure of Euryclea who, while washing the feet of a weary traveler, suddenly recognizes her long-lost master. Along with the vehicle of the recognition, a scar on Odyssey’s foot, a past hunting episode is evoked to gain an equally vivid presence. Various other evocations of past episodes and innumerable details frame the Odyssey’s scar tableau. This multiplicity is supplied at once, in a gesture of simultaneity reminiscent of the endlessness and circularity of mythological narratives. The short episode is organized in such a way that it suffices to generate the picture of a world engrossed in particularities: “Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear—wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved” (Auerbach 1946, 1–2). Everything happens in the open, thought and emotion are subjected to a rigorous account: “With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it” (5). Actions and events are presented to the epic listener in a “continuous and ever flexible connection . . . their relationships . . . are brought to light in perfect fullness” (5) without even a touch of involvement on behalf of the narrator. The epic speaker has put everything upfront, impassively connecting series of events and reporting on all doings, past and present, significant and minor, with an equal precision. The Homeric world opens up complete, seamless, fully fleshed out. Not only events of significance, but also details—tokens of realist authenticity—step forward fully foregrounded. Everything happens at once: parallel occurrences in the realms of gods and humans are presented on the same surface, without any touch of disequilibrium. Should there arise a need for an explanatory account, directions are given accordingly—by equally well-illuminated stock epithets attached to the proper names of gods and heroes. It is a world completely graspable, entirely visible, and 1

2

Introduction

enveloped in actualized pasts and futures: “Here is the scar . . . and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood . . .” (4). Homer’s style is such as to represent every item of the depicted worlds as a complete externalization, relating to a fully accountable past that consistently, and in line with all laws of causation, merges into an unproblematically open present. Spatiality has been approached with an equal explicatory zeal, and, as Auerbach remarks, “Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment” (5). The world of Auerbach’s Greeks is meticulously organized and of complete visibility. Characters extend into a continuous past and an ever-present future, becoming fully explicated. Then Auerbach provides a contrasting episode from the Old Testament. A realm of hidden relations reveals itself in the following passage from Genesis 22: 1: “And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am” (6). This excerpt strikes us as unusual, proceeds Auerbach. The sense of a secret permeates its sentences. More is concealed than revealed, as if an all-encompassing background lies in ambush and informs every actuality. An address and a response is all that is exposed. No further directions are given: as if everyone is expected to be aware of, to always already have witnessed the episode. Nothing comes as a surprise, the story evolves regardless of pasts and futures, no additional information is offered. Just as Auerbach notes, the actual doings of this world happen elsewhere, decisions have long since been made, commands have been given, and all that is left is to provide an account—a minimal story stripped to its bare essentials. When contrasted to the Greek excerpt, the Old Testamental passages become all the more unusual and removed from our received notions of what a narrative is. Deliberate scarcity replaces the lucidity of the Greek exposition. Neither “God” nor “Abraham” receives any characterization; their pasts—if any—remain hidden, epithets are lacking. The appearance of a personage within the narrative takes place suddenly, as Auerbach informs us, out of a groundless depth, without an origin or a direction to be oriented toward. Even the syntactic markers are oftentimes broken and words only emerge within larger gaps. These isolated words are just barely enough to construct a story. And all the while everything said and done is enveloped by the incomprehensibly absent presence that the Old Testamental “God” is. This reality is carved out of an invisible realm: much wider than any field of vision, much grander than any represented thought. The narrative is equally secretive. Even the appearance of “God,” Auerbach reminds us, is not а complete explication but a trace pointing toward that which is eternally inconceivable (7). Here “Abraham” is depicted as a creature of the foreground gesturing toward a beyond called “God.” It takes a tremendous hermeneutic effort

Introduction

3

to unearth what the passage communicates. The speaking voice— groundless, disembodied, sourceless, directionless, and devoid of characteristics—comes from an inscrutable background. All interaction takes place “in a few independent sentences whose syntactical connection is of the most rudimentary sort” (9). While still endowed with proper names, the personages involved in the episode remain just as nondescript as before their coming into being. The words “Abraham,” “Isaak,” and “climbing” stand in isolation. This is a world stripped of characteristics; words glare empty and separated with no syntactic markers to bind them together. Personages are summoned forth only to the extent to which they could propel a certain episode, initiate an action, or become the vessels of a command. The leisurely tone of the Greek narrative has vanished entirely and all we are confronted with is the command of a testing, demanding, unforgiving voice. The laws governing this world are kept out of sight: one has to guess, give suggestions, and summon one’s exegetic powers instead. One such arrangement retains the promise of a surplus, of something that invariably exceeds the given and is prior to its emergence. This is a region of hiddenness—a profound scarcity carved out of an invisible realm. No directions, only momentary glimpses are given within its domain. It displays minimal stories stripped to essentials while the actual doings of its world take place elsewhere—in an inscrutable beyond that has become a norm and a carrier of truthfulness. Transcendence, here, becomes genuinely imperative, a truth that “is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims” (14). There is always more than meets the eye, as any explicated externality merely speaks, and insufficiently so, of fathomless “depths.” Starting from the position of a background completeness that is always already there, yet forever stretched out of sight, transcendence is nevertheless all that there ever “truly” is. A groundless depth carries the promise of a discovery yet to be brought to light. It is a world that operates with meanings and signatures, creating a relation of separation. A background of inscrutability emerges, a default thereness descends, a beyond takes shape. 1 What is at stake here is not a mere contrast between Greek “surface” and Old Testamental “depth.” Rather, what comes to the fore is the divide between the immanent and the transcendent, the arrangement of topologically dispersed emergent singularities against partial descriptions informed by an “invisible” holistic. The “Greek” world operates within the particular wherein numerous tiny elements intertwine as if generated out of a uniform plane in a motion of claymation. Everything takes place in the open. The “Old Testamental” world, on the contrary, is always already known, yet an infinite wholeness encountered somewhere out of sight. Unlike the scenario of immanence whereby local descriptions issue from within a unified plane, it departs from a totality that is simultaneously beyond recognition and only recognizable in partial

4

Introduction

manifestations. Complete explication is set against a subtle interplay of presence and absence, actuality and background. A voice on high lurks behind the Old Testamental excerpt. An absence, the background evokes presences—character names, concatenations of episodes—inasmuch as it can conveniently point back to itself through their explication. Only this beyond remains of significance; foregrounded elements are merely tokens, gestures, pointing arrows equally insufficient in their inability to fully account for what is only present in its unified absence. Within the latter regime, we confront the logic of transcendence. As we see in the passage from Mimesis, transcendence rests upon a number of simple principles. There is the division between a foreground and a background. On the one hand, we have a visible state of affairs that is inadequate and only supplies partial explication. On the other hand, there is an inaccessible but complete “reality.” The two orders are constitutively unequal as the order of the background is conceived as hierarchically superior to that of the foreground. This background operates within the visible world by means of vestiges. The structure of the foreground order, on the other hand, is “desiring” as it is invariably oriented toward the unattainable background. While the phantasm of full explication cannot be fulfilled, the foreground nevertheless gestures toward the background region. It orients itself toward an entity that is external to its givens. Even more so, this entity is perceived as normative (“a truth that is tyrannical”). The logic of transcendence is such that a constitutive gap is needed to make the two orders distinct. The necessity of a bridging entity, such as an intermediary concept, alludes to an ontological scaffold resting upon the principles of distance and division. These principles set into motion a logic that creates an arrangement of unilateral dependence granting the prevalence of one term at the expense of another. Utilizing the terminology of Louis Hjelmslev, the latter could be said to reveal a case of unilateral determination. 2 Distance defines and makes both orders distinct. 3 Within transcendence, or what Bryant calls a regime of “vertical ontology” (2011c, 2), we shift from a truly “real” absence to an “unreal” insufficient presence, from a represented realm to its proxy (Vertretung). The absent suddenly becomes the norm and within literary representation we are oftentimes confronted with the wish to re-evoke it at least adequately. The logic of transcendence brings forth a sense of the insufficiency of the status quo, a teleological movement, and normativity. Binarism is also an effect of this regime: transcendence unlocks a process called selection 4 and a specification between the terms involved—there is always a term that is actualized and another that recedes to a background. It is here that we begin to see the practice of literary representation as an insufficiency, a struggling movement toward a finalized, adequate, truthful coverage of a human world. Throughout this book, I take transcendence to mean an arrangement that perpetually reinforces the emergence

Introduction

5

of worlds out of an ideated background. Immanence, then, would amount to an arrangement that consists solely of what Auerbach terms “a perpetual foreground.” Literary worlds, too, take shape in accordance to these two logics. Here a literary world is an emergent ontological scaffold. By saying “literary world,” then, I mean nothing concrete such as a patch of “reality” with its tables, chairs, streets, houses, and humans. Instead, a literary world is still a generalized ontological portrait of one such given reality. One is to imagine a literary world as a scaffold, as an armature carrying a reality, determining its shape and ontological commitments. The “ontology” of a literary world denotes the very particular way of being to which a literary world subscribes. In saying that a literary world pertains to an ontology, I aim to assert its very “existence” in opposition to extra-ontological entities, that is, entities that are external in their relation to being. In saying that a literary world pertains to a particular type of ontology, I speak of its particular “mode of existence” and its adherence to a relatively consistent internal logic. An ontology, then, also designates a constellatory aggregate of such regimes of adherence and their effects—all of them in a state of approximate consistency. The ontology of a literary world, then, would amount to the very ways in which a literary world arranges its generated reality. Additionally, it would amount to the various vestiges that a particular arrangement leaves on a literary world’s texture. As Auerbach’s passages show, commitments to a certain type of an ontological arrangement with its adjacent modes of existence can generate radically different worlds. Literary worlds, as shown later in the book, can be of an immanent or a transcendent cast, but can also carry a tinge of nonduality. The latter designates a co-presence of the logics of immanence and transcendence. A pre-representational region, then, is the space wherein a literary world takes shape. Within this space, the very ontological scaffold of a literary world is being formed. All we have is a process of ongoing ontological constitution and the gradual shaping of a world’s mode of existence. Representation, in turn, amounts to the already constituted literary world with its more or less established ontological commitments. Here a world’s given mode of existence already becomes clearly discernible. In view of these assertions, I present two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that literary worlds are describable in terms of two disparate ontological commitments, that of transcendence and that of immanence. These speak of the relatively consistent sets of arrangements according to which a literary world is composed, of its very ontological armature. On the one hand, we have a realm of a “perpetual foreground” carefully explicating the constituents of a narrative. On the other hand, we have a tension between a presence and an absence. In this way, we approach two paradigmatic forms of literary representation: one of univocal surfaces, and the other of height and depth, foreground and background.

6

Introduction

My second hypothesis is that it is possible to reverse-engineer the ontology behind these literary worlds and thus become witness to the ontogenesis of drama. These points of departure feed into the purpose of the present book: to show postdramatic theater as a phenomenon of emergence whereby the very motions of ontological constitution are being played out. MIMESIS But how can regimes of immanence and transcendence leave their imprint on a literary world? Nominally speaking, the ontological commitment of a literary world is to be isolated as an “underlying” entity locatable “beneath” or “behind” the given. Yet the ontology regulating the described modes of literary representation could more aptly be referred to as “pervasive.” Here we have a palimpsestic arrangement in which a “shadow” world of ontological constitution intertwines with a given literary reality. This, however, takes place in a regime of Hjelmslevian reciprocal presupposition wherein the two terms of a relation—a play’s commitment to a certain type of ontology and a play’s depicted literary world—inform one another simultaneously, without precedence of one or the other. Literary worlds, thus, are not cases of Platonic eidolon, mechanically lending themselves to this or that underlying ontological scaffold. Rather, ontological commitments are formed together with the emergence of literary worlds and vice versa. The emphasis here is on mutuality and simultaneity, and not on (ontological, historic, constitutive) precedence. In this way, each scaffold of a world within a literary work remains singular and requires separate attention. Auerbach’s passage shows how transcendence becomes a “regime” that governs the ways in which a literary world is scaffolded. But how do we become aware of this within a fully formed literary work? Christopher Prendergast says in The Order of Mimesis (1986): “Mimesis is an order, in the dual sense of a set of arrangements and a set of commands” (Prendergast 1989, 5). He sees the “set of commands” as “the imperative to submit to the set of symbolic arrangements (a mimetic plot) as if the latter corresponded to the natural order of things” (5). A “set of arrangements,” then, would amount to the mimesis-effects by virtue of which a literary work becomes available to recognition. While on the one hand we have a list of major epistemes associated with “representation” in its invariance, on the other hand, we are confronted with the various effects of mimesis as a practice. These are direct consequences of the work of transcendence. Within literary worlds, such mimesis-effects derive from the principles of division, derivation, similitude, analogy, mirror structuring, inversion, interpellation (as based on recognition), reference, and totalization. Such arrangements can be said to be organized around the

Introduction

7

antagonizing of tropes of presence and absence, and a belief in the primacy of presence. Normativity is also an effect of this regime, as representation always presupposes a ground, a source structure equalling truthfulness. Following this, I would call “representational” a literary world scaffolded around such mimesis-effects. The latter are the traces that an ontological commitment to transcendence leaves on works. The term mimesis has a Greek origin and is commonly associated with the concepts of imitation, mimicking, and representation. The dialogues of Plato contain the oldest documented account of a more or less consistent “theory” of mimesis and an assessment of its relation to the arts. Book X of Plato’s Republic (10.598a–599a) ranks mimesis—artistic imitation—as the lowest manifestation of the Good. A mimetically rendered world—in painting, poetry, and sculpture—is perceived as fictitious. It is a product doubly removed from the Idea, the one “truthful” entity informing and setting the norms of the world of phenomena, mere shadows, fleeting imperfections. The Platonic perception of mimesis is thus reminiscent of Auerbach’s background-dependent scenario. It reinforces the impression that literary representation happens exclusively via the mechanics of transcendence. This regime partitions a world into presences and absences—an absent authenticity and its present appropriation. An exercise in approximating, matching, and tracing, this activity presupposes the evocation of a normative presence. The perception of mimesis as imitation, verisimilitude, analogy, semblance, or representation is also the prevalent one in literary criticism. Discussions such as those initiated by Hermann von Koller in the 1950s have rejuvenated a supra-representational view against the treatment of literary mimesis as “imitation.” The effort has been to offer interpretations of the words of the mimeisthai group and its members—mimesis, mimema, mimetes, mimetikos—that depart from the accepted originalshadow model. According to Koller, the pre-Socratic usage of words of the mimeisthai family (ca. 400 BC) already points to a uniform tendency to perceive the practice of mimesis as something that exceeds the mere creation of copies. Koller’s Die Mimesis in der Antike (1954) points out that “representation” and “imitation” do not reflect on the exact nature of mimesis in that they do not grasp an underlying sense of the word. Mimesis, as Koller reminds us, is a term actional in character. It relates to notions of impersonation and enaction; it is also best understood in terms of Greek drama as a medium that combines dance, music, and speech. Having its origins in drama, mimesis is thus more of a performance or a transmission. In Koller’s interpretation, the mechanism of mimesis is still that of recognition based on local similarities. The model-copy scenario is intact. And yet, the focus has already shifted to the very transmission and relation between model and copy. Rather than focusing on the end product, that is, the represented reality, or on the model structure, Koller looks at

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Introduction

the ways in which the transfer between the two is being enacted. Here we have a dimension of mimesis that is both processual and relational. This dimension is lacking in the concept of representation inasmuch as in dealing with representation, we already deal with a finished product. Koller’s focus, on the contrary, shifts to the explication of the mediality as such, to the very gesture of rendering. This is one instance where we have a foregrounding of the dynamic, non-static side of mimesis. This emphasis on enaction points toward the view of the present book that mimesis, rather than pertaining to the representer or the represented, is an occurrence in-between, an intermediary that amounts to the very act of transference. In order to fully account for the generative dimension of mimesis, the present book assumes Koller’s focus “on the medium of expression inherent in mimesis rather than on the object of expression” (Keuls 1978, 11). I appropriate Koller’s interpretation to focus on the generative dimension inherent in the definition of mimesis. The reality, or mimema, that comes forth is the result of a production occurring between two orders. Namely, rather than an exercise in matching between two hierarchically divergent givens, here mimesis is a transmission. That is to say, mimesis is the very act of forming a relation. This relational middle captures the movement within which a literary world is being generated. Mimesis becomes a phenomenon of Hjelmslevian interdependence as it does not presuppose a hierarchical arrangement of the model-copy scenario but is shaped within the collision of disparate yet unformed entities (of the type of worlds and words), taking characteristics from both and transforming both. Throughout, mimesis exhibits intermediary, processual, transmissive features that make it a peculiar psychopomp: while a carrier of the order of representation, it appears to be of a different making. One could claim that, whereas constituted literary worlds with their ontological commitments are existents, mimesis—the very gesture of ontological constitution—does not have a reality of its own, nor is it a reality in its own right. It could be characterized as extra-ontological or non-existent. In the present book, “mimesis” amounts to the process of emergence of literary worlds. The composition of literary worlds becomes a genesis. Here mimesis acts not by dint of a truthful representation but by virtue of the world-making capacity of a generative procedure called expression. Within this shift, priority is given neither to the end product that a work constitutes, nor to the phantasmatic reference that representation desires. Instead, attention is paid to the in-between ground of the transmission. Mimesis, then, becomes an occurrence of the interface and the expression of a relation. It functions as a border phenomenon, a neither-nor entity on the fault lines between two orders, best described as a doubly pointed transmission. Neither a work nor its perceived reality, it is an intermediary capture of both—simultaneously pointing in two directions.

Introduction

9

SHIFTING WITHIN A WORK Auerbach shows us two modes of a literary world—one concealed in ambush, the other flat and omnivisible. By dint of the spatial metaphors “foreground” and “background,” along with their extensions presence and absence, he excavates the ontological commitments governing the two. In The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), Meyer Abrams offers a somewhat different focus by introducing two metaphors of the mind: “one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives” (Abrams 1953, vi). In this way, Abrams shows the difference between representational isomorphism (mirror) and the emanative dimension (lamp) of mimesis, the latter being incarnated in Romantic expression as “the internal made external.” Here Abrams’s “lamp” can be said to be a state between transcendence and immanence that is reminiscent of Neoplatonic emanation. If, then, one is to engage in a discussion on the ontological commitments that drive transcendence and immanence as two ways of scaffolding literary worlds, the mirror and the lamp would align not only with the kind of ontology that gropes for a reality external in its orientation toward the given (Platonic two worlds), but also with an arrangement of division within. The constituents of this ontology would be the mechanics of analogy, similitude, resemblance, and recognition, all of them poised on a constitutive split and distance between the given and a regulative background. Yet mimesis, apart from its function as a synonym for representation and transcendence, also acts in its generative world-making capacity. The mechanics of mimesis molding a work from within encompass the familiar range of employed “mimetic” generative strategies that scaffold a literary world based on division. Imitation, “a relational term, signifying two items and some correspondence between them” (8), becomes a quality within, pertaining to the movements and morphisms of various dualities within a work. This is what I also understand by transcendence: an order dependent on a scaffold of equivocity, leaning on analogy, and thriving on the generation of a constitutive gap. Some works do not entirely lend themselves to this rhetoric, however. Rather, they demonstrate an immanent and, at times, a “nondualistic” quality. The latter is a movement toward a level of analysis described as “evental” insofar as it can gesture toward a constituent that philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls “an event of sense” in his Logic of Sense. The event of sense is entirely within a literary world and presupposes no background order. Mimesis, then, becomes part of a broader landscape. Mimesis is a generative motion intrinsic to a literary world and becomes the constitutive principle of a work, regulating its ontological commitments and manifesting itself as immanence and/or transcendence. Regardless of its slant, however, mimesis

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Introduction

is something inextricable from a work and ubiquitous to its ontology. In view of this, the Latin imitatio can be replaced with evocation: the procedure by virtue of which a literary world comes into existence by dint of a commitment to a specific kind of ontology, be it of an immanent or a transcendent cast. Let me illustrate this shift in the understanding of mimesis with some passages from The Mirror and the Lamp. Critical traditions based on the orientation and locus of mimetic practice can be summarized in terms of their preference for a work-universe, work-audience, and a work-artist fit. These start with Plato’s work-universe doctrine, “the explanation of art as essentially an imitation of the aspects of the universe” (1953, 8) and hence the take on mimesis as a “philosophy of a single standard; for all things, including art, are ultimately judged by the one criterion of their relations to the same Ideas” (9). Another proponent of the work-universe aesthetics is Aristotle as here, too, we have “a work of art constructed according to prior models in the nature of things” (9). Aristotle, however, dispenses with any relation to the Ideas and thus “imitation is made a term specific to the arts, distinguishing these from anything else in the universe” (9–10). Yet another significant innovation—particularly in terms of the Poetics, is “the way it considers a work of art in various of its external relations” (9). Aristotle’s affective aesthetics thus also posits mimesis within a work-audience fit: “Tragedy cannot be fully defined . . . nor can the total determinants for its construction be understood, without taking into account its proper effect on the audience” (10). In the 1580s, Sir Philip Sidney, in his An Apologie for Poetry, felt it necessary to add an ethical streak in his “pittiful defence of poore Poetry”: “Poesy therefore is an arte of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring foorth—to speake metaphorically, a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight” (10; emphasis added). While a continuation of Aristotle’s work-audience fit, this statement foregrounds the purposive nature of poetry (to teach and delight) and thus inaugurates a shift toward pragmatic theories. “Gradually,” Abrams continues, “the stress was shifted more and more to the poet’s natural genius, creative imagination, and emotional spontaneity, . . . the audience gradually receded into the background, giving place to the poet himself [sic]” (21). Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1800), for instance, internalize mimesis as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” aligning it with an act that corresponds to a mind-work fit. In this sense, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads becomes “a convenient document, by which to signalize the displacement of the mimetic and pragmatic by the expressive view of art in English criticism” (22). The mind-work fit simultaneously becomes a chiffre allowing us to reverse-engineer the process of creation. With the help of the work, one could produce a work-mind compound resting on the presupposition that a sincere, genuine, spontaneous work provides insight into a creative

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mind. Mill’s theory of poetry as “the expression of uttering forth a feeling” (23) is a direct consequence of this new agenda, as now a “reference of poetry to the external world disappears” (24). While the Renaissance still adheres to the work-universe fit and the metaphor of the mirror—“What should painting be called,” asked Alberti, “except the holding of a mirror up to the original as in art?” (32)— mimesis ceases to be an exercise in capturing likenesses oriented toward a transcendent extra. As the Renaissance artist gains the status of a creator, “works of art were brought in close connection to the Ideas” (42). In keeping with Plotinus’s defense of art in Neoplatonism, Postplatonic theorists give Ideas a location in the human mind (43). It is here that Abrams locates the perennial Romantic analogue of art and mind, and it is here that Wordsworth’s Neoplatonic commitment to emanative ontology manifests itself. The poet is metaphorized as a receptacle whereby the creative act, the explication of overflow or expressive abundance as “the internal made external,” becomes a miniature version of the emanations of the Neoplatonic One-All. Ex-pressus, from ex-premere (“to press out”), becomes the procedure witnessing this transfer. Relying on Schlegel’s (1801) observation that “the word expression (Ausdruck) is very strikingly chosen for this: the inner is pressed out as though by a force alien to us” (48) and Hazzlit’s definition of poetry as “expressing the music of the mind” (49), Abrams testifies to a complication of the analogy. By combining the mirror with a lamp, he seeks to “demonstrate that a poet reflects a world already bathed in an emotional light he has himself projected” (42). The major switch that took place with the rise of Romanticism meant a replacement of world with mind, imitation with expression, Platonism with Neoplatonism. This era, however, also opens up to a shift toward complete immanence. The following passage captures this arrival at a realm of withinness and non-differentiation: “this experience of the one life within us and abroad conceals the division between animate and inanimate, between subject and object—ultimately, even between object and object, in that climactic ALL IS ONE of the mystical trance-state . . .” (66). Here “the internal made external” of Neoplatonic emanation now becomes an inner and an outer surface at once, inside and outside being the sides of a unified spreadsheet now seen as the pleat manifesting “relations between forces” (Deleuze 2006, 104). With the introduction of an immanent dimension of mimesis, we arrive at what I would like to call a word-work fit. As we see from the definitions of Abrams’s work-universe, work-audience, and work-author fit, the orientation of the work within these is always extrinsic. The work is oriented outwardly so as to provide insight into something else—be it an external reality such as in the work-universe fit, a spectatorship as in the work-audience, and a creative mind as in the work-author fit. What I call the word-work fit, however, amounts to a generative motion within

12

Introduction

the work itself and can be aligned with the generation of a world within a work by means of vocal gestures. This is especially visible in postdramatic theater wherein the narrative dimension of drama comes to the fore and the act of narrating on stage coincides with the act of the very constitution of a work. I call this orientation “immanent” because it amounts to a gesture of creation from within a work. Hereby the principle of “the internal made external” can no longer be applied as we are confronted with an act of creation taking place and remaining within a work. Auerbach’s account of immanent and transcendent scaffolding within a literary world and Abrams’s survey of the transition from mimesis to expression based on the orientation of a work of art are two points of departure for this book. From Auerbach, I appropriate the basic divide of foreground and background as a means of identifying the ontological affinities of a work. From Abrams, I borrow the notion of orientation to apply it to a word-work fit. From Abrams I further borrow the conceptualization of expression as a generative and transmissive procedure as here “expression” points to a movement and to a transfer, or better still, a transmorphism taking place in the course of a movement. In the formation “expression as mimesis and event,” however, expression is no longer viewed “as one dimension of the concept of mimesis” (Halliwell 2002, 141) or as “the internal made external” (Abrams). Rather, expression becomes an overarching term, enveloping both the region of representation and the region of Deleuze’s event of sense as a supra-representational constituent. With the addition of Deleuze’s concept of “expression,” this book opens up to a slightly different dimension. Deleuze’s concept of expression alludes to a nondual ontology that conceives of being as self-organizing and self-propelled. One such view is reinforced in Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy, a book on Spinoza’s Ethics that deals with the individuating motion of an infinite substance to finite modes toward ever finer distinctions. Within this motion, substance unfolds with the help of an intermediary transmissive constituent, expression, while remaining in itself. The expressed of substance becomes manifest as an event of sense, that is, substance expressed in finite modes. At the same time, what is finally expressed remains entwined with the pre-representational region of ontological constitution and is ubiquitous to it. Within this specific context, the work of expression and the event of sense carry the non-purposive unfolding of drama. The entwinement of expression and sense, of a constitutive region and a supra-representational constituent, at once enables the genesis of representation (expression becomes expressed sense and thus a world is constituted) and opens up to the region of pre-representation (a flux of constitutive motion). Assuming this vantage point, one begins to notice that postdramatic works for the theater—albeit nonsensical to the habitual gaze—exhibit a quasi-causal logic. Rather than perceiving these plays in experiential terms, the

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present book assumes the stance that their “nonsensical” constituents are maximally expressive (to the point of being non-signifying) and that they expose the work of an event of sense within a play’s ontological texture. The manifested event of sense is not congruent with the literary world that surrounds it. It rather carries the imprint of the pre-representational region—a field of constitutive forces and relations out of which the order of representation congeals. Confronted with the consolidation of an event of sense within their habitual texture, plays are at pains to re-adjust, recompose, and thus incorporate the supernumerary within their fabric. Here I extend the concept of “expression” to mean a generative motion that carries the capacity to create and recompose literary worlds. Whereas “expression” carries the motion in the process of the constitution of a literary world, the “event of sense” or the expressed carries the capacity to reshuffle an existing arrangement within a literary world and compose it anew. In this way, the expression (generative force) and the expressed (the force precipitating novelty and change) work together in the scaffolding of literary worlds in drama. This generative motion carries the drama and lets its literary worlds unfold. Unlike Aristotelian drama that clearly identifies a beginning, a middle, and an end, the motion of expression is composed entirely of middles. It does not start, and, as mentioned, cannot be said to end inasmuch as it is a non-purposive becoming. What propels drama is not action, but the inclusion of an evental region within the motion of expression. With the help of this evental infusion, literary worlds are being generated. Literary worlds, in turn, are the manifestations of expression’s consolidation into ontological regions of immanence, transcendence, or both in a number of intermixtures. I take the regions of “immanence” and “transcendence” to evoke Auerbach’s foreground and background regions, respectively. Within this framework, Auerbachian transcendence would be one rubric, possibility, mode or guise within the concept of expression. At the same time, “mimesis” pertains to the entire generative system at hand. In this capacity, mimesis is the constitutive principle whose active side is expression. To paraphrase Latour (1999), in its activity as expression, mimesis is a gesture of transmission between “worlds” and “words” (73). In its capacity as representation, however, it accounts for “the generation of a gap that negotiates the difference between the two” (73). Further still, in its capacity as an event of sense, mimesis strives toward the creation of an immanent ontological surface on which worlds and words can co-exist. INTERSECTING DRAMA AND EVENT Yet how does this take on mimesis help us? Drama can do perfectly well with established notions of mimesis. An actional scenario pervades the

14

Introduction

classical notion of plot laid out in the Poetics. Similar to Deleuze’s cosmology of the expressive event of sense, the classical plot evolves in the general milieu of motion. Herein, however, the plot is propelled by action and governed by laws of probability and necessity. A causal network forms the fabric of the Aristotelian play. At the point of reversal, recognition comes forward in the form of knowledge of a situation. The recognition of hamartia causally precipitates suffering. This, in turn, presupposes a constituted human consciousness and the belief that it is human-like entities that inhabit a textual fabric. Such models, however, account for the level of representation as a secondary arrangement 5 that deals with already “stable” entities and a horizon of expectations that has already incorporated a set of humanbound features: consciousness, free will, a capacity for action, the potential of action to bear consequences. What follows is the dialectic of potentiality and actuality, Aristotelian logic with its laws of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and the received presupposition that it is a human subjectivity, a Zentralwesen, that shapes its own fate in knowing or unknowing, in accordance with its morally just or inept action. The emphasis on action as having its source within a unified, unequivocal human entity equipped with understanding and freedom of will is also a perennial presence in drama. Among the elements of drama, the teleological nature of the Aristotelian plot is perhaps one of its best known features. It is directly influenced by the notion of entelecheia (actuality or, interchangeably, energeia), the assertion that each thing contains its purpose within itself in the form of dynamis (potentiality, potentia) and that it takes a movement toward this purpose to effect its complete actualization. The moment of tragic reversal, peripeteia, expresses this shift. It marks the transition from probability to necessity. Newer forms of theater, however, do not necessarily subscribe to such teleological mechanics. Nor do they present us with scenarios where potentiality is exhausted in the actual. What Hans-Thies Lehmann calls “postdramatic theatre” (2006) is a theater of interweaving grades of potentiality where no character retains one’s subject position, no discernible plot is present, and causal arrangement plays no significant part. At the level of representation, postdramatic plays only strike us as nonsensical. Another point of access is needed in order to fully bear witness to this type of theater. In accounting for postdramatic theater’s focus on potentiality—a weave of forces and relations that constitute the given—this book presents an ontogenetic model that offers a glimpse of the constitutive processes that underlie the order of representation. Against this backdrop, Deleuze’s concept of expression supplies a cosmology based on a model of non-purposive becoming. While both Aristotle’s concepts of potentiality and actuality and Deleuze’s concept of expression are marked by the notion of movement—motivated and action-driven in Aristotle, unmotivated and event-driven in Deleuze—

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within Aristotelian metaphysics motion is defined as the actuality of potentiality (Physics 201a10–11, 201a27–29). Here potentiality is eventually depleted in the actual, the “unreal” becomes a fully formed “real,” and motion ceases with one’s arrival at the entelechial end of drama. Deleuze’s concept of expression, on the other hand, attests to a motion of non-purposive becoming that does not strive toward an entelechial end. Nor is it potentiality exhausted in the actual. Instead, we have shifting grades of potentiality. Whereas Aristotle defines becoming things as being both actual and potential, “real” and “unreal,” Deleuze gives reality status to both in positing them as mutually inextricable entities. Against the backdrop of a treatise on embodiment, performativity, and affective aesthetics, a word on the pertinence of drama theory foregrounding “impassive” events (Deleuze 1990, 8) is needed. Here it becomes clear what this book does not do. It distances itself from talk of subjectivity and corporeality. It references the category of the human, along with adjacent questions of identity, only inasmuch as they appear on a plane along with other phenomena, forces, or entities on the verge of emergence. What the present book attempts to access is a pre-personal and pre-representational field in drama whereby we may witness the latter’s very levels of ontological constitution. Abstractly speaking, then, postdramatic plays are non-teleological movements composed of series of responsive, encounter-dependent motilities. One aftermath of this treatment is that a non-agentive model replaces that of Aristotelian drama based on action and drawing on the perennial definition in the Poetics of tragedy as the “imitation of an action” (1449b30). Drama is no longer propelled by the action (praxis) of a (tragic) hero within an intricate network of probability and necessity. After theater (Lehmann) and performance (Fischer-Lichte), drama can also become evental rather than actional. That is to say, literary worlds in drama are no longer perceived as constituted by human consciousness. Rather, they assume shape out of impassive events at times evocative of notions such as paradox and chance. Emergent literary worlds become the playground of forces whereby evental infusions continually alter a play’s fabric by reshuffling existing structures and causing them to reform anew to incorporate ever-newer evental presences. As the motion of expression progresses, Deleuze’s event of sense shows itself as a phenomenon of emergence. Sense arises out of the movement of expression as expression glides across disparate ontological regions. Yet the event of sense surpasses these regions and is qualitatively different from them—it is a product of the “groundlessness” that separates them. Accordingly, Deleuze construes his conceptual protagonist in language that foregrounds its elusive status: an event does not exist, but rather “subsists” and “insists.” That is to say, an event is not an ontological category insofar as ontology studies “being,” that which is. The event of sense, on the contrary, is nonexistent, an infra-being that

16

Introduction

presents itself as a rupture within representation, as an anomalous occurrence, an “encroachment.” At the same time, the non-worldly character of the event makes it a messenger between world regions. It is because of evental regions assuming shape within the motion of expression that literary worlds take shape too. Here one could say that the event of sense both constitutes and underlies the order of representation. Again, representation shows us two faces: one of transcendence and one of immanence. The former can be associated with Auerbach’s background-dependent narratives whereas the latter aligns with Auerbach’s “perpetual foreground.” An evental region is “supra-representational” in the following sense: It molds and conditions the emergence of literary worlds in drama. Here, rather than working from within the Aristotelian model of action, postdramatic theater is organized around the work of an event of sense. Whereas world regions lend themselves to notions of causality, probability and necessity, or space and time, Deleuze’s events are indifferent to such items. They are the very affirmation of contingency, the very relationality of relation, a sheer force. The occurrence of an event within the motion of expression cannot be predicted, yet only the emergence of an evental region makes a literary world that which it is. TOWARD A GENERATIVE DIMENSION IN DRAMA The present book suggests that we might perceive new ontologies of drama if we uncover a vantage point of emergence and constitution. It does not debate the legitimacy of representational descriptions in drama, yet it puts forward the assumption that an ontogenetic approach could help us see such existing arrangements anew. No theater, drama, or performance is seen as inherently generative or representational. Rather, the present book looks at a certain gesture of movement and non-purposive individuation within drama that, alone and in itself, is inherently not yet particular. Deleuze’s event ontology offers a take on drama that rests upon a genesis rather than deduction. Instead of starting from the level of representation and reverse-engineering all the way down to the region of forces and intensities that traverse and constitute the given, it begins from the opposite end to allow a glimpse of the very process of ontological constitution. Also, it operates on a pre-personal level that simultaneously hopes to be pre-experiential. This stance allows us to see the order of representation within a continuum—as a stadium within an ongoing ontogenesis. This book thus does not work with an unrepeatable performance or with the affective zeal of an actor, but traces the work of Deleuze’s event of sense within the fabric of drama. The experiential, the congealment of subjectivities, in short, all that resembles a human universe, only comes as an aftermath. Here the motions of Deleuze’s “ex-

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pression” and “sense” are formal forces that act as the ontological antecedents of the generated literary worlds and their inhabitants. Deleuze’s concept of “theatrical presence” (Cull 2009b, 5) is itself another candidate for access to the region of supra-representation. It explores the rise and constitution of representation on an intersubjective level, at the intersection between a spectatorship and a given presence on stage that manifests itself as an event, “a non-representational relation between audience and event” (5). In furnishing a processual concept of presence, both stage and spectatorship are involved in a process of becoming. The ultimate aim is to reach toward a “differential” level that would transport them to the experience of a theatrical reality. This leads us to the perennial debate of the status of representation and presentation in theater, as well as the problematic positioning of presence or immediacy within a performance. It is true that Deleuze’s event ontology invites a reading of performance that favors not its power to prompt recognition and to gesture toward an external reality but “continuous variation” (16). Herein theater remains fluxional and thus opens a door beyond zones of familiarity. There also exists the question of whether one should seek this potential on the affective level, that is, within the capacity of a performance to put forth blocks of sensations as opposed to conceptual structures, on the interface between audience and play, or in an actor’s capacity to impart non-representational elements through the motions and stases of his or her body. The present book puts forth the assumption that the very ontological texture of plays can account for the work of suprarepresentational forces. Aside from dealing with subjectivities or identities, plays operate as relational aggregates—shapeshifting and open to chance. When traced at the level of their emergence, we witness how plays undergo a continual process of constitution and de-constitution. Shifting toward supra-representational drama is not a stand against representation, however. A dramatic theory of the event of sense is not set in opposition to existing models, be they mimetic or performativitybound. It rather seeks to uncover a generative layer within the fabric of plays, a glimpse of the level of their ontological genesis supplied within the pages of Gilles Deleuze’s early books The Logic of Sense (1969) and Expressionism in Philosophy (1968). This nominally “fundamental” region is not supra-conceptual, that is, composed of bodily or affective aggregates. Nor does it invite us to discard the mimetic arrangements that invariably mark plays. Such world-description regimes ideally subsist in a mode of simultaneity. Nominally, however, questions of ontological primacy invariably arise as the very mode of representation requires “vertical” arrangements and envelops its terms in layers. The positing of an ontological primacy of events (Bowden 2011) does not suggest a gesture toward the pre-philosophical or to affective aesthetics, a move that would have made me turn to another book, The Logic of Sensation (1981). Working with sensation would reveal an entirely differ-

18

Introduction

ent agenda informed by affective aesthetics and the explolation of regions that are presumably supra-conceptual. It might also appeal to a region of exploration that is experiential and interactionist. The present book, on the other hand, sees itself as a work on dramatic theory that provides glimpses into the generative motions of plays and looks at their ontological scaffolding. It traces the ways in which “expression” as an overarching generative force, “mimesis” as an organizational principle (mimesis') and as a constituted representational region, and the supra-representational region of the expressed “event” play themselves out in drama while shaping literary worlds. Here an evental logic receives attention in that it uncovers new processes and motions within the fabric of plays. These are not necessarily action-driven, insofar as they do not require constituted subjectivities for their evolvement. Nor do they rest upon procedures such as reversal, similitude, or mirroring, set to solidify and compartmentalize world descriptions. Human subjects, in turn, rather than inherently actantial, are poised at the conjunction points of formative forces and chance, on a plane together with other forces, concepts, and humans. One look reveals solid subjectivities supplied with a background and an adjacent world composed of analogies, similes, or dual terms, all of them identifiable by dint of a recognition procedure. Another glimpse, however, and these landscapes flatten out. Intensities, potentialities, and forces begin to traverse these seemingly stable objects. Backgrounds slide forward and merge into a foreground, until only a spreadsheet composed of tensions and potencies is left. Within this scenario, the onlooker is two-faced, turning to either this or that realm, but tending toward an overarching rule of univocity: it is a world nevertheless the same. The attraction of an evental approach lies in the fact that it is entirely permeable. Becoming a “naturalistic strategy aimed at eliminating the dualism of essence and appearance, and affirming difference . . . immanence, external relations” (Hayden 1998, 107), this approach is not exclusive in that it does not rest upon a vocabulary closed within itself and does not guard its generated reality against infusions from neighboring world descriptions. Within a position of immanence, aggregates of transcendence still come into existence in a secondary movement. Rather than pointing to an inconsistency, this fact bears witness to the inclusiveness of Deleuze’s event ontology. The permeability of the event of sense also allows it to function as a double screen, that is, an entity of both “within” and “without.” Its orientation is immanent and transcendent at once—an event is inextricable from its own constitutive processes but also gesturing toward a beyond. In its capacity as a formative force, Deleuze’s event of sense demonstrates particular aptitude with regard to dramatic theory. It points toward a dimension beyond—or, figuratively speaking, beneath—the work itself, thereby surpassing anything that representational descriptions or a

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mere inquiry into the actual givens of a play can supply. The event of sense takes us to a region of ontological constitution wherein potentialities intertwine and formative forces skirt bodies. Only in a second gesture does the region of representation assume shape. The present work does not seek this evental influx in the response of an audience, the metaphysical presence of an actor, the unrepeatable force of a performance, or in the vigorous expressivity of bodily motion on stage. Instead, it traces the movements of language. CAN LANGUAGE BE UNHOUSED? “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (215), says Heidegger in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947). But how about a kind of language that is intensified and open toward an extra-being? Throughout his work, Deleuze maintains an ambiguous relation to this question. The Logic of Sense explores language’s capacity to bend, exhibit aberrant components, or relish in “nonsense” (1990, 66–7). “One Manifesto Less” (1979), the text on theater, speaks of language as a repository of variation or movement, the carrier of the transformative force of sayings. In this same vein, one can evoke the work of Antonin Artaud. Artaud’s project bears witness to language’s capacity to carve into bodies and mark them in irremediable ways, leaving effects that are very much physiological. Artaud’s breath-words (mots-souffles) as the utmost manifestation of absence and insufflation as the reverse of inspiration produce effects which are of the body. Here organized language remains in ambush: “this abject invisibility is a radical departure from any lawful notion of inspiration: it is breath as a producer of intensities, abyssal breath . . .” (Barker 2009, 29). A new “alphabet of thought” (Venturinha 2012, 415) takes shape. 6 At the same time, language also plays an unsavory role: it carries the force of the “order word” in A Thousand Plateaus. In this capacity, language is the very functionary of transcendence and a symptom of what Deleuze calls “a society of control” (1995, 177–82), control meaning “continuous modulation based on continuous measurement and feedback” (Protevi 2001, 194). Apart from scaffolding a foundation of normativity, however, the “order word” also carries some potential for overcoming normativity. It is a dual formation, both “imitative and expansive” (Grisham 1991, 46). As a carrier of transcendence, language is nothing less than the prison house of being. Still, it could be treated in a “minor” way (Deleuze 2007, 106) as an atypical occurrence, a stuttering, a “foreign language . . . a secret subsystem within language” (98) manifest in the utterances of madmen or children. In its minor use, language becomes intense, becoming an instance of “pure expression” (Demers 2006, 162) whereby “the writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, cry,

20

Introduction

or even sing” (Clucas 2001, 53). These singular occurrences within language act as locales for the event of sense. They open to a dimension different from that of a habitual textual fabric. In the present selection of plays, such incongruities can be traced on the level of a play’s ontological constitution and the formative processes that inform a play’s ontological commitments. Such evental infusions can be said to point to what Deleuze calls “the order word,” the normative side of language, and to demonstrate how language breaks open, showing us a face that is slightly mad. Within this opening, language exhibits a “virtual” dimension, an incessant string of possible worlds governed by the constitutive work of events extending infinitely within and infinitely without. Here “normative” language sports a multiplicity of “terrible doubles”—each with its intensities and variations, but of the same sense. A valuable way to look at language in its relation to being involves a special way of witnessing. Merleau-Ponty (1964) sums this up in the following passage: “born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but—if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and foliation—the most valuable witness to Being, that it does not interrupt an immediation that would be perfect without it . . .” (126). The question of access that Merleau-Ponty addresses is close to Deleuze’s intuition about the possibility of accounting for the event of language by way of its own resources: “. . . that language can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation that is the Being of every being” (126). This is also the stance of the present book. THE MAKING OF WORLDS Are literary worlds a simulation, an expression, or an extension of what we call “reality”? To what extent is it possible to speak of a creation and how does a reality create itself? The present book proposes an expressionist take on the matter of literary worlds’ creation. It alludes to the ontology of unlimited groundless self-propelled becoming encountered in Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy. Deleuze’s expressionism offers a cluster of concepts that allow us a glimpse into the possibility of nondual and non-purposive creation. This way of scaffolding a literary world becomes especially visible in examples of postdramatic theater whereby the process of literary worlds’ creation does not follow a habitual logic. Rather, these examples show us literary worlds constructed almost entirely out of ruptures and breakage points within representation. In this way, postdramatic theater reinforces the view that what we perceive as representation is the secondary capture of a fluxional field of forces and relations. A closer look at this fluxional field uncovers a completely different

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vantage point and way of reality creation, much different from the ones that correspondence theories would offer. Literary worlds, then, take shape in the generative flux of expression. Whereas expression is the generative force of mimesis, the event of sense that takes shape within the flux of expression is a field of emergence marking the completion of representation—but also a force that exhibits its secondary character. The literary worlds that take shape out of the flux of expression are oftentimes different in their ontological portrait. That is to say, literary worlds with different ontological commitments emerge out of the transmissive motion of expression. Some are scaffolded around a logic of transcendence and are thus dependent on a constitutive background order. Others consist only of what Auerbach names “a perpetual foreground.” A literary world could also be an intermixture of both, or can recompose its ontological portrait multiple times as it evolves. Surely, the ontological status of a literary world—especially with regard to what we have been accustomed to call “reality”—is difficult to pin. I am inclined to think, however, that a literary world is an emergent entity that does not have a reality status fundamentally different from that of states of affairs habitually designated as “actual.” One such treatment of the ontological status of literary worlds is a direct consequence of the introduction of Deleuze’s concept of expression. Traditionally, the concept of expression is widely associated with notions of “the internal made external.” This arrangement alludes to an equivocal division between a hiddenness within (contents) and the externalization (expressions) that it becomes with the aid of a certain subjective movement (form). The way expression is treated in the present book is somewhat different. Following, but also diverting from Deleuze, this book envisions a concept of expression that encompasses a world-making zest. Here expression is a generative procedure that is the very enaction of the principle of mimesis. Expression becomes the active side of mimesis and a construct that renders the structure of the Deleuzian event of sense visible. Accordingly, drama can be seen as emerging out of a procedure reminiscent of the Vedic practice of nāmarūpa. Just as the Vedic poetpriest, kavi, calls forth a reality into being during the yajna service, so does language in drama quite literally become “a world” in the process of being uttered. This “transubstantiation” does not take place in the incorporeal conversion of speech acts but in a transfer that endows utterances in postdramatic theater with corporeality of their own and the capacity to mold and bend realities as we witness the processes of their very constitution. This very process coincides with the emergence of a literary world within a work and the subsequent definition of mimesis as a production within a word-work fit. In the readings to follow, mimesis ceases to act as a work-universe or a work-audience match but becomes a gesture of impersonal creation within—the generation of a reality that is ubiquitous in

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Introduction

drama. One becomes aware of a scaffolding of worlds that is processual and whereby mimesis simultaneously bends toward immanence and transcendence within an overarching univocal frame. Mimesis and its generative procedure, expression, thus cease to be ways of relating propositions to regions external to a work. They become means of scaffolding a work from within via the mechanics of either nonduality or division. Mimesis ceases to reflect the relationship between positivist propositions and states of affairs but becomes a negotiation of the intricate ontology underlying the word-work compound. Nominally, cases of immanence attest to scenarios reminiscent of Auerbach’s “perpetual foreground,” whereas transcendence is synonymous with ontologies of division and precedence. Formally, however, a more variegated picture presents itself. With the introduction of four kinds of relations into which the motion of expression and the region of the event of sense enter—equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality—the dyad of immanence and transcendence begins to display nuances and intermixtures (figure 0.1). Let us look into figure 0.1 more closely. Here we see expression as a generative procedure that manifests itself as motion. It is in this sense that we speak of the motions of drama and evoke a dynamic vision of being. Mimesis, however, should be understood as expression’s constitutive principle that becomes manifest only in the generative movement. Rather than working with division and analogy, mimesis here operates as an uninterrupted transmission, a continuous flux within a pre-established milieu of immanence. Its processual side, expression, carries this

Figure 0.1. Expression as mimesis and event

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transmissive motion. At times, the motion of expression congeals into evental regions. In its interaction with the event of sense, that is, within an evental region, the movement of expression coalesces into a literary world. A literary world, here, is an emergent ontological scaffold that pertains to an ontology of immanence or/and transcendence. In this way expression not only affirms immanence, but precipitates moments of transcendence as well. The former can be described in the vocabulary of Auerbach’s “perpetual foreground.” In the case of the latter, it is arrangements of hierarchy and division that coalesce out of this motion. Ontological scaffolding evocative of Auerbach’s divide between a foreground and a background begins to take shape, and becomes visible in arrangements of derivation, analogy, presence and absence. As expression and sense interact, four modes of molding a literary world become palpable. I have called them equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. Equivalence is the complete coincidence of expression and sense. Such is the case with the type of ontology wherein being is sense and sense already aligns with the very act of the constitution of substance. In molding a region of non-differentiation and collapsed duality, mimesis here gains a somewhat schizophrenic quality. Isomorphism, in turn, signals a parallelism of expression and sense. Here expression and sense, while structurally similar, belong to two disparate orders and subsist in a relation of analogy supported by an arrangement of Auerbachian foreground and background. The two never meet. Isomorphism thus adheres to the rhetoric of presence and absence, even in plays that appear prototypically “non-representational” to the naked eye. Genesis captures the process whereby the constitutive motions of expression produce a surface of sense, that is, where a generative procedure and an end product become palpable. Nonduality, lastly, is a state of co-habitation of immanence and transcendence against a backdrop of immanence. Here expression is a milieu that explicates both the region of sense and the order of representation. In delineating the various ways expression and sense intertwine, this book looks at a selection of postdramatic “in-yer-face” plays. More established dramatists such as Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp also find their place in the selection, not least because of their commitment to themes of violence, cruelty, and transformation. In this way, in-yer-face phenomena could be extended across generic conventions and époques. Whereas Sarah Kane remains a prototypical in-yer-face presence—the staging of her Blasted in 1995 marked the arrival of this new sensibility— the present volume looks beyond such well-established regions and into the newest influx of British dramatists. Of these, the work of Laura Wade stands out as a representative of the in-yer-face preoccupation with language, its overcoming, and the vestiges it leaves on bodies. The dramatists presented here share a notion of violence of a subdued, symbolic tinge. This is the type of violence Artaud finds at rest in primarily linguis-

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tic arrangements. As the plays unfold, we witness how the work of an incorporeal component, Deleuze’s event of sense, propels ontological arrangements and recomposes literary worlds. In tracing a work’s story of emergence and the formation of its ontological commitments, violence often issues forth as an impersonal formal effect, as an aftermath of a system’s efforts to regain equilibrium. Here the practice of nāmarūpa alludes to a certain corporeality of words. As De Vos (2010) suggests, Kane’s use of cruelty and her “linguistic turn” (129) work toward “a union of the spiritual and the physical” (129). This reveals a dimension in which “cruelty [is] internalised in language itself” (130). Whereas De Vos primarily references two late Kane plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, one could deem this expansive quality of words and the formative power of the subjectile of language valid for the overall body of in-yer-face works. Herein the corporeality of Artaud’s “cruelty” is installed into the very event of language, contributing to “the process of words becoming spatial” (130). Thanks to this shift, “violence is incarnated in the body of language” where it begins to manifest an “Artaudian, almost Dadaistic materialism” (130). The present book assumes this vision. I discuss plays that do not represent but incarnate the psychotic condition they thematize. Yet this immediacy simultaneously means a return to the materiality of words. Expression’s involvement in the generation of literary worlds is not an enactment but an articulation of this condition. As an event of sense transpires within the motion of expression, one becomes aware of its impersonal force and the violent necessity it imposes on bodies. PREVIEW This book begins with what I identify as the constituents of a Deleuzeinspired theory of the event of sense. It then explores the work of expression and sense in twelve British postdramatic plays. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of expression in Expressionism in Philosophy and its role in the descent of a substance toward ever finer distinctions, all the way down to finite modes. Chapter 2 goes on to transpose this scaffold to the linguistic proposition, effecting a shift toward a logic. Sense begins to function as a mapping of expression from the path of ontology onto that of epistemology. 7 I show how the movements of sense across Deleuzian series of propositions replicate the motions of expressive being. These follow a triadic principle of constitution, a descent from expression to re-expression, and share a tripartite scaffold wherein expression serves as the envelopment of analogical arrangements. With the help of Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), I show how both the expressions of being and propositional sense provide accounts of the motion and work of a transmissive

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component that positions itself as an entity simultaneously immanent and transcendent to a system. This constituent becomes manifest as an extra-being within the fabric of literary worlds. At the same time, it is shown to precipitate the emergence of the said worlds and to be constitutive of them. Here representational being and eloquent language are insufficient in offering answers to the question “How does a proposition/a world create meaning?” A superadditive dimension of being comes to the fore and enables a break from the region of representation, yet does so without invalidating it. The event of sense co-constitutes the representational region and simultaneously positions itself in a region that is superadditive to that of representation. In this way, it offers access to a supra-representational domain which, in turn, displays the secondary nature of the order of representation. According to this processual model, the emergence of the order of representation coincides with the formation of literary worlds out of the interactions of expression and sense. These literary worlds—themselves products of the motions of expression and the consolidation of an evental region within this motion—affiliate themselves to ontologies of transcendence and/or ontologies of immanence. That is to say, within an overarching milieu of immanence, a secondary order of transcendence and immanence takes shape. Here literary transcendence and immanence can be aligned with Auerbach’s background-dependent or foreground-only narratives. According to the present book, the relations into which expression and sense enter are responsible for the formation of these ontological arrangements. These relations show us how expression, the generative procedure of mimesis, arrives at sense while molding literary worlds in the process. The produced literary worlds have their own ontological commitments, that is to say, they lend themselves to an immanence or a transcendence dominant in a number of intermixtures. While opening up to a region of pre-representational ontological constitution, I do not intend to forget the domain of representation. Rather, I seek an access point through which we can perceive the constitutive processes that govern the ontology of plays and witness how a work discloses its ontological scaffold. Clear-cut versions of either immanence or transcendence will present themselves only rarely. Yet I seek to identify tendencies and locate the forces that cause immanence or transcendence to issue forth. In doing so, I am aware that a co-presence, or even an intermixture, of immanence and transcendence is often inevitable, yet nevertheless remain on the lookout for formative motions: Thinking with immanence, then, or thinking immanently, does not mean to eliminate all traces of transcendence. Like couch grass amongst flowers, transcendence grows rather spontaneously, on the back of immanence. There is a tendency of the real, which could be characterised as entropic, to develop intensities into extensities: concepts into opinions (or common sense), images into clichés, sensations

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Introduction into perception, etc. Everywhere immanence produces its effects of transcendence. We needn’t worry too much, however, so long as we don’t allow transcendence to overgrow. (De Beistegui 2010, 193)

NOTES 1. Similarly, in The Signature of All Things (2009), Giorgio Agamben evokes Paracelsus’s treatise De natura rerum and the statement “Nothing is without a sign . . . since nature does not release anything in which it has not marked what is to be found within that thing” (33). This passage reminds us of the belief that this markedness of being is a consequence of Adam’s falling “into nature,” whereas in the Garden of Eden he walks “completely unmarked (unbezeichnet)” (33). Let us pause to assess the work of transcendence spotted here. A signature is but a trace left on the surface of things. It carries the capacity to point toward their “true” but remote and inaccessible structure. Transcendence, then, appears to be a secondary arrangement: it derives from a moment of immediacy wherein no entity needed a signature as it itself constituted its own full explication. Because of a lacking separation between “nature” and “creature,” animals in the Garden of Eden could walk about “completely unmarked.” Nature and creature subsisted in a regime of equivalence where creatures were nature, the mode was that of presentation and not of representation (there is more to what the eye meets). Once this immediacy is replaced by a relation of separation, transcendence settles in. Here the one (visible) end of the equation invariably serves as a chiffre pointing to the (inscrutable) other. While there is a present but insufficiently illuminated signature, it only serves as a foreground behind which an inaccessible but complete state of affairs resides. 2. In Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943), the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev distinguishes between three types of relations between discrete terms in language: unilateral dependence (determination), mutual dependence (interdependence), and a combination without dependence (constellation). What he calls “unilateral determination” is a relation in which one term determines the other but not vice versa. In the case of transcendence, it is the target reality (absent, represented) that entirely determines the given (present, representant). In calling it a “target,” I evoke a teleological motion in which the given’s orientation toward transcendence is revealed. As this motion is desiring, striving toward, we are confronted with an arrangement of approximation. The relation between Auerbachian foreground and background is hierarchical inasmuch as, again, the background’s default “thereness” gains priority. 3. The terms are defined by distance both in the positive (approximation, lessening distance) and in the negative (hierarchy, reinforcing distance) sense. 4. In the Hjelmslevian system, selection and specification are one-sided dependencies, the latter being based on complementarity. 5. See Joe Hughes’ Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (2008). 6. Deleuze does not work with a strict theory of language but rather develops a set of micro-theories yet to be reconstructed and consolidated into a uniform whole. Lecercle identifies “a theory of meaning” in The Logic of Sense, “a theory of poetic language and style” in Essays Critical and Clinical, and “a theory of pragmatics” in Thousand Plateaus. This, among other things, demonstrates the tactics and attitudes Deleuze maintains in this regard: “Unlike Beckett, who was against language . . . he plunges into it in order to dismantle it” (2002, 154). 7. The structural similarity between expression and sense is striking to such an extent that some commentators have even proposed to regard the two terms as synonymous: “It might be more accurate, then, to define the fourth dimension of the proposition as expression rather than as sense per se. Through expression, the proposition

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yields its own impassable threshold onto that which it denotes—a threshold of sense that is also an ‘extra-being,’ an addition to being, an ontological surplus” (Casarino 2011, 187).

ONE The Reification of Expression and the Emergence of Sense

This chapter recreates the conceptual atmosphere and ethical commitments that surround the concept of expression. It shows how a vantage point of expressive univocity offers a glimpse into the constitutive motions of a literary world. A vantage point of “expression” allows us to witness the formative processes that lead to the consolidation of the order of representation. Like mimesis, “expression” maintains a transmissive and relational status, yet operates within a perspective of immanence. This perspective opens up to a supra-anthropomorphic dimension of collapsed hierarchies and suspended agency, identity, or subjectivity. Here we witness a region of emergence wherein bodies encounter their milieu in a situation described as world-embeddedness, coming into existence by virtue of the folding and unfolding of an expressive substance. Two ethical positions are discernible within this cosmology: an insistence on the materiality of bodies and the suspension of human primacy. Representation becomes the outcome of the generative motions of a substance that is generous, proliferative, and flowing forth. Finally, this vantage point reveals a region of ongoing onto-constitution in drama whereby ethical, epistemological, and ontological commitments intertwine to construct a literary world of a very particular cast and with its own very singular ways of organizing being. We begin to see that the worlds constructed in drama are no so much the effects of human action but the effects of impersonal generative processes that carry on irrespective of human intervention. The morphogenesis of drama is sustained by the transmissive motion of expression and the congealment of sense out of this motion.

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PATH, PROBLEM, AND LOGIC Deleuze’s books The Logic of Sense (1969), Difference and Repetition (1968), and Expressionism in Philosophy (1968) form a perplexing trilogy. Logic speaks of “propositions” and deals with a quasi-linguistic component, “the event of sense.” Described as incorporeal, the event of sense is impassive and non-existent, yet changes everything. 1 Difference and Repetition is a quasi-Hegelian summa tackling the genesis of difference. It seeks an overturning of Platonism and its rule of identity over difference. Expressionism, a work on the philosophy of Spinoza, emphasizes Deleuze’s commitment to non-identitarian ontology through the introduction of a term the seventeenth-century philosopher hardly used: expression. Still, it is precisely this concept that haunts the other two books as well. On differentiating between “what a sentence expresses and the sentence’s expression” (Rölli 2007, 5) in Logic, Deleuze defines sense as “the expressed” of a proposition (19), “a function involving real transformation” (Massumi 1996, 17). One of the promises of the book, therefore, is that within a regime of univocity, a world may be rewritten from another vantage point, that of expression. Difference and Repetition, in turn, maintains that “the univocity of being, its singleness of expression, is paradoxically the principal condition which permits difference to escape the domination of identity, which frees it from the law of the Same as a simple opposition within conceptual elements” (Foucault 1980, 192; emphasis added). This reads as a program set to challenge the order of representation and its strategies of identification based on sameness. Expressionism, then, links the concept of expression to the term “immanence.” Commentators recognize here an effort to construct a “model of immanent selfdifferentiation” (Kerslake 2009, 34) that would be superior to Hegel’s dialectical system inasmuch as it would allow itself no affirmation through the introduction of contradiction and negative terms. Deleuze expresses this wish as early as in 1962 in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1992, 175–89) where he offers an apology of a completely affirmative becoming, that is, a becoming that does not entail negation. Similarly, the project of Expressionism works toward the positing of a so-called “pure immanence,” or a philosophy of immanent individuation that is entirely affirmative inasmuch as it eschews the subordination of terms to one another. One already senses what the stakes are: hierarchies flatten out, reciprocal presupposition replaces linguistic regimes of markedness (Saussure) and selection (Hjelmslev), and a processual model of becoming (ontogenesis) replaces the static model of being (presence and absence, affirmation and negation). A continuity, then, pervades these three books. Each of them gravitates around the concept of “expression” and shows a facet of the term. In outlining a path, a problem, and a logic of expression, they appeal to an ethical, an ontological, and an epistemological dimension within the con-

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cept. Path, problem, and logic interfuse and mutually inform one another. What is an abstract philosophical exploration in Expressionism becomes all the more meaningful when encountered through the linguistic paradoxes of Logic. Spinozism pervades this book too, and, upon encountering the concept of sense, one cannot help but recall Expressionism’s passages on the expression of substance. This observation is a shared one: “Even though Deleuze mentions Spinoza only once (and in passing) in The Logic of Sense, this work explains what is at stake in the (Spinozan) concept of expression in more direct, explicit, and possibly also more trenchant ways than much of what we read in Expressionism in Philosophy” (Casarino 2011, 203). In Difference, expression starts as a problem within the Hegelian dialectic, opening up to a new, supra-representational rearrangement of a world’s furniture. In The Logic of Sense, the problem of expression develops into a logic, offering a quasi-epistemological inquiry into the nature of propositions and their elusive component, the expressed sense. The book on Spinoza, finally, constitutes a path of expression. 2 Among other things, it is an ethical query that attempts to answer the question of how one should live and encounter others. The book achieves this by introducing Spinoza’s theory of passive and active affects as well as the inquiry into the nature of joyful passions. 3 Whereas these three inflections of the concept of expression are inseparable from one another, they nevertheless pose three different questions and develop their respondent queries separately. The problem of expression addresses matters of ontology. The question here is “How does being express itself?” Expression’s commitments to univocity become manifest through a positing of being as sense. Deleuze states this as early as in 1954 in a review of Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence: “Following Hyppolite, we recognise that philosophy, if it has a meaning, can only be an ontology and an ontology of sense” (Deleuze 1997a, 194). The concept of expression is also part of an ethical query aiming to answer the question “How should I encounter the expressed of being?” Here “expression” reveals a vantage point of collapsed hierarchies, suspended agency, nonpurposive becoming, and egalitarian bodies—equally “human” and “nonhuman”—subsisting within an environment as things among things. Expression’s epistemology, lastly, manifests itself as an inquiry into the knowability of sense. It responds to the question “How do I know the expressed of substance?” This question amounts to an exploration into the workings of Deleuze’s event of sense upon language in Logic. It is here that the expressed shows itself as immanent sense: inextricable from and ever within its expression. The tripartite division of a path, a problem, and a logic is also a “triple attack.” First, in Difference Deleuze systematically seeks to invert Platonism and turn it against itself by pointing out insufficiencies and inconsistencies within what he identifies as its ruling representational pattern. 4 Second, and on another level, Expressionism defends a mode of thinking

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committed to univocity and immanence—concepts that I explain shortly. The gesture of putting forward an order oblivious to hierarchy, agency, and subjectivity tests the abilities of the order of representation on ethical grounds. Third, Logic transposes this ontology onto the question of sense within the linguistic proposition. It thus addresses matters of knowledge and the knowability of the supra-representational. Here the order of representation withdraws in the presence of an unruly supra-representational component, the event of sense. This undertaking, however, does not aim to dispense with representation. It seeks to draw a nuanced picture. The Deleuzian project foregrounds the very formative motions that lead to the consolidation of the order of representation and presents this order within a milieu of other possible world descriptions. Rather than an undisputed ground, representation becomes but one possibility, one thinkable outcome within the overarching ontogenesis of expression. As Casarino notes, For Deleuze, as much as for Spinoza, it is never a question of circumventing or destroying representation altogether. It is, rather, a more complex and more delicate question of distinguishing among different modalities as well as usages of representation on the basis of the different procedures according to which such modalities and such usages give certain, determinate, actual form to the expression of potentiality; it is a question of differentiating among the modalities and usages of representation on the basis of the various procedures according to which they let themselves be formed, imprinted, altered, and guided by potentiality as it implicates and explicates itself, folds and unfolds itself in us all. For both thinkers, it is ultimately a question of reading or mapping the unrepresentable contractions and dilations of being in representation: it is, in short, a question of making sense. (2011, 209)

Representation, rather than subjected to destruction, is enveloped by a mode of thought that favors responsive motilities within and outside of bodies, growth, interfusion, uneasiness with prefigured regimes of organization and pre-established encounters. Much within the concept of expression is reminiscent of another philosophical concept, life. Thacker’s After Life (2010) develops a univocal and processual concept of life grounded in Deleuze’s expression: life is “generous,” “productive,” “proliferative,” “superlative,” “germinal,” “irreducible,” “devoid of limitation,” “distributive,” “pervasive” (27). One instantaneously recalls the definition of Spinoza’s substance—closed within itself and simultaneously infinitely proliferative. Expression is a concept elastic and in flux. Continually revising and reshaping the terms it constitutes, it simultaneously allows them to inform it anew. Expression alludes to a motion within—as it ever reshapes itself—and without, as it refashions the elements it encounters. Yet, unlike the movement of Hegel’s Absolute, it remains non-entelechial, that is, ungrounded or “unhoused” as the late Deleuze and Guattari of What is

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Philosophy? (1994) would rather say. It has an intermediary and a transmissive status but cannot be aligned with a hermeneutic entity as it does not lean on communication models and remains supra-anthropomorphic. Purely relational and impersonal—the psychopomp term between two disparate entities—expression is also constitutive insofar as its elasticity allows it to show how the terms it binds flow into one another and are mutually determined. Deleuze’s expressionism offers access to a generative ontology that does not lend itself to the mechanics of representation and does not work by dint of producing a mimesis effect. The ontogenesis that expression accounts for challenges our knowledge of a given world. A world is no longer a locus of comfort and recognition, encountered through practices of matching descriptions and identifying similarities. According to Deleuze, one of the aftermaths of living in a post-Kantian age is that “there is no longer an essence behind appearance, there is rather the sense or non-sense of what appears” (Hyppolite 1997, 194). This is the turn occurring with the positing of sense as the expressed of substance. “Being” does not remain hidden in an Auerbachian background but shifts toward the regions of the fore. Here we no longer have a static account of what being is, but a dynamic account of a becoming. Instead of gesturing toward an already constituted ontological region, we witness a morphogenesis whereby each entity is relationally entwined with its multifarious environments and continually changes shape in accord with its milieus of interaction. In a way, the picture sketched out here amounts to a cosmological scenario establishing the primacy of constitution over the constituted. Expression and sense are entwined in an interplay that is indifferent to human intervention. In this process, a shift takes place. The order of representation gives way to a world description of a different making. LANDSCAPE. “THE PEOPLE ARE MISSING” As Levi Bryant reminds us in the concluding words of the essay “A Logic of Multiplicities: Deleuze, Immanence, and Onticology” (2011a), Freud 5 spoke of “three blows to human narcissism: the Copernican which reveals that humans are no longer at the centre of the universe, the Darwinian that reveals that humans are not distinct from animals or above animals, and the psychoanalytic that reveals a strange and alien agency within us” (25). To this, the philosopher adds immanence as a “fourth blow to our narcissism in that it reveals that we are not sovereigns of being but rather among beings” (25). We start with a flat landscape: hierarchic distinctions collapse and subjectivity is present inasmuch as it forms yet another body within a corporeal mass enjoying various degrees of differentiation. A perpetual foreground functions as the locus of bodily constitution, a field enabling a body’s emergence and actualization. This

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movement of claymation, however, does not presuppose a fissure within being, that is, within organizing structures of the type inside/outside, subject/object, and here/there. From Deleuze’s position of immanence, one does not conceive of a world in terms of identity, subjectivity, or perspective. The latter vocabulary remains within the conceptual framework of Renaissance humanism, positing the figure of a speaker, an onlooker, a “human” as a Renaissance Zentralwesen. The expressionist vantage point, rather, reaffirms the position of the pervasiveness of being as said in the same sense for all beings (Deleuze 1990, 179–80). In this way, the distinction between humans and worlds dissolves. Here a body is a composition tightly entwined with its worlds, the given worlds’ inhabitants, and a field of continually reshifting forces and relations. Similarly, the category of the human receives a reading that situates it on exactly the same plane as that of other beings: It is no longer a matter of utilisations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities. How do individuals enter in composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving and respecting the other’s own relations and world? Now we are concerned, not with a relation from point to counterpoint, nor with the selection of a world, but with a symphony of Nature, the composition of a world that is increasingly wide and intense. In what order and in what manner will the powers, speeds, and slownesses be composed? (Deleuze 1988, 126)

The perspective of univocity offers a way of looking at a world as a compound of fully explicated bodies without background. Being finite modes, bodies invariably contain the most complete expression of a single substance without residue. Within this scenario, bodies are perceived in their very materiality and mutual relations as the distinct attributes 6 of a univocal being. The Zentralwesen of Renaissance humanism gives way to a being plunged within a world and ubiquitous to it. A certain overlap with the Stoic cosmology of actions and passions is evident here: all that exists are material bodies (Sellars 2006b, 81). In a similar vein, the Spinozist world constitutes a region of materiality that has nothing beyond itself since the univocal substance—a causa sui, being that is the cause of itself—is fully expressed, completely explicated in a world: “This levelling of the field of being to a single plane of nature has a democratic edge to it, eliminating the distinction between human and non-human, natural and artificial, and the hierarchy of beings” (Sparrow 2011, 67). This worldembeddedness makes Deleuze a philosopher of affirmation (1992, 60) as here we no longer have terms that are defined negatively through their subordination to other terms but enter into a free play of entwinements. Rather than sustaining the two-world strategy of representational thought, Deleuze offers a model that inverts it by positing difference over

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identity. 7 Meanwhile, representation is retained within the model in that it becomes one of the effects of the work of difference. Accordingly, one consequence of the philosophy of difference is the dispersal of the category of the subject as a causa prima, an utterer and an instance out of which speaking occurs. Within a logic of expression, the evocation of the question “Who speaks?” becomes redundant. Instead, we are confronted with the “subrepresentational” (Bell 2011, 1) region of the play of difference that, among other things, also generates subjectivities capable of giving accounts of themselves. One cannot resort to the certitude of referentiality stemming from the positing of a grounded human subjectivity. Referentiality, rather, comes forth as an effect perpetuated by a constituted subjectivity and its invariable counterpart, perspective. That is to say, referentiality depends on the subrepresentational region of constitution for its emergence. Within an “expressionist” vantage point, we witness not a hierarchization but an intricate interpenetration and mutual constitution of subrepresentational and representational regions. Thus, Deleuze’s logic of expression . . . does not entail a rejection of the actual world, an attempt to get out of this world and the logic of representation. It is, rather, an attempt to intensify the actual world, including its representations, to problematise it, and to do so while remaining wholly within it. (13)

Here material bodies are embroiled in actions and passions, letting the incorporeal event of sense—or the expressed of substance—emerge. They are involved in motions of claymation by dint of which their expressive materiality shines forth as they become more and more definite. Deleuze, echoing Spinoza, insists on the corporeality and indivisibility of this world-embeddedness. Thus, according to Michael Hardt (1993), Expressionism is a systematically executed project set to evoke a world indifferent to idealisms of the Cartesian type (59). Deleuze’s insistence on immanence is one part of this agenda. As an exploration of the possibility of dissolution of boundaries, a commitment to affirmative immanence very much resembles a plunge into a realm where distinctness does not rule out merging and continuous becoming. It spells out a wish to reach out “beyond subjectivity” and “the human condition” (Pearson 2007). A philosophy of that which ever transforms itself, immanence works with mobility and change, all this in the hope of shaking off anthropocentrism, perspectivism, or apologies of the self. Rather than functioning through cemented affirmatives, it favors responsive motilities relationally growing in accord with the network into which they are embedded. A world contemplated beyond the equivocal “is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is complete and unlimited” (Deleuze 2004, 69). In this movement, form and substance are not constituted by a boundary, but “both include both” as if plunging into one another since “the resources involved in the genesis

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of form are immanent to matter itself” (DeLanda 1997, 499). What is at stake within this model of embeddedness is not only the possibility of expression within immanence, but also the potentials unlocked by viewing expression as the envelopment of both immanent and transcendent modes of existence. The concept of immanence is often associated with proper visibility, complete unmediated presentness, and involvement. Deleuze’s immanence, however, essentially functions as a collection of related conceptual groupings. It is “inherence” and “withinness,” a fully explicated inwardness that has, simultaneously, overcome the outward-inward distinction. Whereas representation imposes division and conceives of a world in doubles—an arrangement mirrored in a dualistically constituted language—the position of immanence views entities as not fundamentally discordant in kind. Devoid of an outside, they only enjoy the folding of their matter, presenting a different face every time a spectator pauses to have a look. The constituents of the conceptual clusters that shape immanence are change, the possibility of productive transformation, processual explanations, and the continual interfusions of disparate entities. The very positing of immanence faces the impossibility of a scrutinizing gaze and a speaking subject: “the regress, aporia, or ‘vertigo’ of immanence can never be undone, indeed, it can never even be said, strictly speaking. Rather, we show it by unwriting it” (Mullarkey 2006, 9). A task of this book is to produce such unwritings. Rather than forming a unified concept, these exercises in retelling form conceptual groupings, flow, intertwine, assemble in companies, and dissolve. Within this interplay, again, transcendence is not the negative counterpart of immanence but its double, a world description in its own right endowed with its own conceptual rigor. Equally, the work of Deleuze is not unfriendly toward transcendence. It treats transcendence as a necessary supplement of one’s adequate being in a world, “where immanence and transcendence are never treated as fully separable, but rather . . . essentially and indivisibly related as processes” (Williams 2010, 102). IMMANENCE AND EXPRESSION Yet what is the relationship between expression and immanence? Further still, how do expression and univocity relate to one another? In several passages in Expressionism, Deleuze explains the connection between immanence and expression through the notion of Neoplatonic emanation. Instead of thinking immanence in opposition to transcendence, as the traditional understanding of the terms would imply, he draws a divide between emanative Platonic participation, historically perceived as the strand of transcendence within the history of philosophy, and immanent Neoplatonic causality (Deleuze 2005, 170). Neoplatonism develops a the-

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ory of emanations in which participation is seen from a perspective different from that of the Platonic emphasis on that which participates. Neoplatonism, notes Deleuze, seeks an “internal” movement that locates participation in the participated and begins to function within the latter’s perspective and logic. This is how he extracts the dyad emanative vs. immanent cause. 8 Within this dyad, both terms are productive while remaining in themselves. Yet emanative cause follows a quasi-transcendent principle according to which it issues forth and is productive, while yet remaining distant and distinct from what it produces: “. . . emanative cause produces through what it gives but is beyond what it gives” (Deleuze 2005, 172). Even more so, the originary cause subordinates emanation, maintaining and defining its existence. All the while, immanence remains the truly expressive principle in which the equality of being asserts itself beyond subordination: “not only is being equal in itself, but it is seen to be equally present in all beings” (173). It is perhaps this moment of collapsed hierarchies and non-division that leads commentators to say that “Deleuze presents the notion of immanence as rooted in Neoplatonic conceptions of the metaphysical One-All, and as waiting for Spinoza to liberate it from the transcendence implied in traditional conceptions of emanation” (Kerslake 2009, 210). It is true that within Neoplatonism, emanative causality is supplemented with an immanent cause but continues to persist. Within the framework of Neoplatonism, the immediate expression of being with the help of the categories of explication, implication, inherence, evolvement, and involvement grounds participation. All the while, however, there remains a certain “centre” of emanation (Plotinus: Enneads VI.4 [22]; VI.5 [23]; VI.9 [9]) that offers a sufficient supply of transcendence herein. Immanence is present, but remains “subordinated” to transcendence or emanation (Thacker 2010, 219). To Deleuze, pure “insubordinate” immanence is found only in Spinoza where one is to differentiate between immanence and conditioned eminence (220–1). Expression is how insubordinate immanence manifests itself, with expression’s movements encompassing the motions of substance through implication/inherence, complication/involvement, and explication/evolvement: “It is in the idea of expression that the new principle of immanence asserts itself. Expression appears as the unity of the multiple, as the complication of the multiple, and as the explication of the One” (Deleuze 2005, 176). A position of immanence, then, makes expression palpable. It shows us the possibility of a component that pervades the entities to which it relates, remaining inextricable from them and, simultaneously, independently encountered. For Deleuze, immanence becomes the condition or the envelopment of expression and expression becomes the enaction of immanence. In Wasser’s words, expression is the “articulation of immanence that both divides and joins; immanence itself is revealed as expres-

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sive, expressive in a univocal fashion and according to divergent principles” (2007, 60). UNIVOCITY AND EXPRESSION The project of univocity begins as a theological dispute about the attributes of “God” and the possibility of an affirmative positing of being. 9 As a technical term, it hearkens back to Thomas Aquinas and his dyad of univocity and equivocity pertaining to the debate of how a creature relates to its creator. 10 While a univocal relation pertains to a commonality within the two and a uniformity of sense, equivocity presupposes a “relation of no-relation” inasmuch as here we have two divergent senses. Within equivocity, one thinks of “equivalence” yet the two terms are separate and equally autonomous. Within univocity, equivalence issues forth by virtue of a shared sense within the two terms. As the continuity of sense cuts across the two, this affirms a relation. Within the univocal order a relation pervades beings, whereas equivocity presupposes no relation. With the formula “a relation of non-relation,” equivocity seeks other means to bridge the cleft between the disparate terms and thus establishes a relation of analogy. Couching this in Deleuzian terms, we make a distinction between the expressive (univocal) and the representational (equivocal). The analogical tradition offers an example of the equivocal or representational strand wherein the attributes of “God” relate to a world by virtue of a similitudinal transfer of qualities. This move ascertains remoteness both semantically and spatially. In the case of the semantic transfer, two distant and dissimilar givens are made thinkable at once via a commonly established term. Spatially, “God” remains external and hierarchically superior to a world, which is, in Hardt’s words, “different in form, and thus cannot be said in the same sense” (1993, 64). This irreconcilable difference is trivially overcome through the production of analogy. It is here that one could evoke Spinoza and his version of univocity as a response to this tradition: a “substance monism . . ., the idea that there is a single principle of being for all beings, and that this single principle exists not above and beyond the world, but is fully immanent in and through it” (Thacker 2010, 137). In a way similar to that in which Deleuze reverses Platonism, Spinoza’s univocity inverts the theories of analogical participation. This move advocates immanence and posits the one-voicedness of being, a being that speaks with the same voice through all beings (Deleuze 1990, 179–80). The very invocation of “voice”—a mere audibility devoid of speech and significatory language—is telling inasmuch as it lays bare the agenda of immanence: “Unlike the traditional notion of matter, voices can capture ‘the clamour of Being’, the resounding of all ‘vocal’ events within each other, their mutual intersecting or ‘composed chaos’” (Evans

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2008, 187). This gesture amounts to the introduction of a triad in which expression becomes manifest as the “voice” of being. In this capacity, it serves as the psychopomp term that bridges the reciprocal presupposition of its remaining two counterparts, actualized world and substance. Here Deleuze rejuvenates the move with which Spinoza tackles the problem of immanent causality and simultaneously, has “made expression a problem, a paradox, a vertigo” (Nail 2008, 207). In Hardt’s interpretation, it is Deleuze who first reads the Spinozan attributes as “the expressions of being” (1993, 63), endowing them with an active force of their own entirely. This linking function of the attributes as middle terms ensuring the encounter of substance and modes is what is enacted in immanent causation (Howie 2002, 48). Within the univocal scenario, the attribute is just as divinely expressive as the substance—a move that immediately endows it with the power to uniquely create, as well. This double movement of expression works in two directions. At first, via the expressive power of the attributes, it moves toward the modes in which substance resides as the expressed, that is, as complete immanence. Second, through the power of the modes to express, the expressed substance gestures back to the expressible. A sheer paradox lies beneath the concept of expression: it functions as both a constitutive and a relational entity, as a quality within and a potentiality without, as a principle of composition and an active force. Spinoza’s immanent expression is one and many at once: it is one when perceived from the vantage point of the expressible, and many when seen from the perspective of the expressed. It is a relational term that ensures a double causality, a causality that moves in two directions simultaneously—toward the expressible substance and toward the expressed finite entities. Here expression is the third term linking two disparate levels of being. This maneuver, speaking in terms put forth by Deleuze in Expressionism, allows us to read the traditional triad substance-attributes-modes as expressible (the totality formed therein)—expression (proposition, a distinct name)—expressed (sense) (Deleuze 1992, 62). As the attributes “comprehend different manners of actualisation” (Bell 2006, 44), substance receives an infinite number of modes or “determinate ways” (44), following a principle of “self-ordering becoming” (50). The world region populated by the modes constitutes the full, unconcealed expression of the substance. Expression includes both a unified entity—Spinoza’s substance—that is expressed all the way down to the finite modes and an identity of this substance at each stage of individuation inasmuch as each stage represents an endomorphic map of substance to itself. Univocity is the principle of unity explaining how “later” stages are produced by “earlier” ones by dint of immanent causality. It is through the notion of univocity that one is also able to show how the various states of an entity constitute a single substance that undergoes stages of expression and re-expression.

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Yet what remains mysterious is that the enfolding of substance simultaneously produces something else. Each stage delivers a new component. Almost as if in passing, a novelty is “distilled” out of the movements of substance. This component is the event of sense. WITHINNESS IN THE DESCENT OF SUBSTANCE Substance 11 is Spinoza’s word for an all-connective principle that pervasively spreads across all beings while both remaining within itself and allowing for a distinction within beings. 12 Substance “descends” through a movement of expression and re-expression down to the modes—schematically speaking, individual creatures. The introduction of attributes of substance offers a means to resolve the Scholastic debate about the disparity between Creator and creation. 13 In the case of Spinoza, at least as seen by Deleuze, this distinction ceases to be vertical—as, traditionally, in Platonic participation or Neoplatonic emanation—but is made entirely flat. There remains a single plane of immanence across Being and beings, Creator and creatures, substance and modes. It is through the theory of expression and the introduction of an intermediary term, that is, the attributes, that Spinoza also resolves (at least according to Deleuze) the puzzle of thinking of Being and beings as both related and yet distinct. Within Spinoza’s immanence, substance expresses itself first within itself, with each attribute directly expressing the essence of substance. Within this first static genesis on the way to capturing the infinite in a finite form, the dual nature of the expressive procedure and immanence’s contraction of cause and effect, folding and enfolding, are clearly visible: “. . . substance complicates its attributes, each attribute explicates the essence of substance, and substance explicates itself through all its attributes” (Deleuze 2005, 185). It is here that we witness the very act of the self-constitution of substance. This act asserts a principle of equality among the attributes and a direct relation of equivalence between substance and attributes. Thus, this first movement of expression is reflexive; it is instrumental in the self-comprehension of substance. The second dynamic genesis of substance is already an act of production. Here, while remaining within itself, substance also re-expresses itself in that it exceeds itself. In other words, substance becomes generous, proliferative, flowing, radiating. It remains equal to itself and yet formally becomes a product. This second movement of re-expression is also emergent inasmuch as the attributes, following a rule of endomorphism, express themselves in modes. Thus, the motions of explication and implication become visible as “attributes complicate the essences of modes, and explicate themselves through them” (185). It is Deleuze who calls this substance “expressive,” its attributes being its immediate “expressions,” and the essences “the expressed” (Deleuze

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2005, 27). The relation between the expressive, expressions, and the expressed is one of presupposition and mutual determination, each of them preconditioning and unlocking the activity of the others through a movement of expression. Essence could not be expressed outside of the attributes: it is also through attributes that it becomes distinct from substance. Alternately, “it is through essence that substance is itself distinguished from attributes” (28). This tripartition presents expression, the relational component, as an entity at once in excess and absent. It is present and yet not to be spotted or isolated within any of the components in which it resides as the expressed. Nor does it align with its expressible or with the expressed. Expression thus offers a relation that is at once transcendent, inasmuch as it differentiates itself from both expressed and expressible, and immanent, as it still does not subsist outside of its expressions. It is different from its manifestations but, while irreducible, remains only graspable through them. Deleuze’s concept of expression aligns with what Eugene Thacker calls “superlative life”: “The superlative is that which is absolutely ‘beyond’ at the same time that it is that which is absolutely ‘within’” (2010, 37). In Expressionism, Deleuze supports this stand through an account of the history of expressive being 14 within affirmative philosophy. Here he outlines three phases. The first one he identifies within the theology of Duns Scotus. 15 Here being, while univocal, remains fundamentally neutral and indifferent in failing to think the distinction between common nature and individuating quiddities (whatnesses) together with their relation. A second impetus comes from Spinoza, who transforms the neutrality of being into an “affirmative becoming” precisely with the help of the “elasticity” of the attributes. Acting as intermediaries between essence and substance, the attributes allow us to conceive of expression. Herein being becomes active or, even more so, creative: “an ontological assertion of being as fundamentally generous—being always flows, is always productive and proliferative, is always in excess” (Thacker 2010, 145). A third phase in the scaffolding of univocal being comes with Nietzsche’s eternal return elaborated in Difference and Repetition (2004, 48–52). Here Duns Scotus’s neutrality of being is supplemented with the affirmative stance of Spinoza, whereas Nietzsche adds a certain non-teleological tinge: being is self-propelled but does not march toward a particular goal. Rather, the motions of univocal being are those of non-motivated becoming. They become without striving to become anything in particular. In this flat landscape, univocity replaces entelechy. Deleuze takes up the pervasiveness of being (Duns Scotus) along with its affirmative and productive quality (Spinoza) to supplement them with the moment of nonpurposive becoming he borrows from Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) first alludes to this development in showing how Nietzsche suspends the purposiveness of becoming as an entelechial motion toward realization. Here Deleuze rather shows how becoming succumbs to a

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plurality of forces and a variation of senses. Hence the much quoted passage, “We will never know the sense of something . . . if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it. . . . A thing has as many forces as there are senses capable of taking possession of it” (3–4). An outcome is seldom certain and becoming simply cannot have a pre-established purpose as one continually has to reckon with an overflow of contingent senses and forces. Being is no longer a movement entailing a forthcoming moment of rest and fulfillment. Its flow is continuous, denying a center and a beyond. Deleuze’s being thus becomes affirmative (always a surplus, always in abundance), flowing forth (distributing relations, each relating to each), and univocal (one single continuous voice across and for all beings). Within the context of literary worlds, the logic of expression would also entail that no distinction in being is made between an expressive substance and the constituted region of a literary world. This chapter outlined a scenario for an ontogenesis of drama by attending to the conceptual landscapes that surround Deleuze’s concept of expression. In delineating a path, a problem, and a logic of expression, it spoke of the entwinement of ethics, ontology, and epistemology within a concept that is not only fluxional and plastic, but also one that is capable of recomposing worlds. Expression thus becomes additive to a constellatory and relational ontological scaffold wherein it offers accounts of a nonentelechial becoming while remaining both immanent and transcendent to a system at hand. The procedure of expression, thus, is also a way to think the envelopment of the order of representation within immanence, yet putting on display the inseparability of immanence and transcendence within an overarching frame of immanence. This conceptual landscape is marked by bodily entanglement on a flat plane of onto-constitution whereby entities are always already their full explications consisting of foregrounds only. This type of emergence is to be imagined as a claymation—a way to envision the work of a single substance speaking with the same voice across beings. Here expression is the active constituent within immanence, at once immanent and transcendent, within and without, pertaining to univocity but also conditioning the emergence of equivocal division. Expression as the active force of immanence shows itself as the fortuitous side of a constitutive principle. Expression thus can attest to moments of emergence as its motions mold the fabric of drama. As literary worlds grow out of these motions, divisions cease to matter, notions of identity and subjectivity begin to fade, human entities lose primacy and begin to operate as things among things in a flat landscape. The shaping of literary worlds thus becomes part of a larger onto-cosmological picture wherein sense replaces being and representation becomes but one possibility in the scaffolding of literary worlds within the larger enframe-

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ment of immanence. Here the vantage point of immanence opens a region of becoming as an active, processual transmorphosis. Again, instead of dualisms, here we have a continuous flux out of which two orders, that of immanence and that of transcendence, coalesce. A rhetoric of creativity or production thus remains inseparable from the work of expression. This is a foreseeable move, since the entire concept of expression and book on Spinoza have had the purpose to show how and by virtue of which powers substance becomes expressive, that is, productive, and how the attributes express themselves, that is, become creative, in modes. Expression is endowed with the plasticity of relations forwarding a “passage” between disparate entities. What it accounts for is the pervasiveness of a being that speaks with a single continuous voice across beings. In a creative act, the elastic attributes (expressions) of Spinoza carry the descent of substance toward modes, endowing the modes with the power to create, too. With this in mind, we can begin to look at an emergentist point of access to the generation of literary worlds in plays. Here mimesis becomes a constitutive principle working from within a literary world and enabling its unfolding. Again, this principle becomes manifest with the help of a generative procedure best described in terms of Deleuze’s concept of “expression.” The concept of expression and the concept of the event of sense, thus, are shown to be intimately related. The region of expression pertains to the generative motion out of which a literary world comes to be. The region of sense, on the other hand, works within the said literary world exposing its relation to the constitutive virtual region of expression. An expressionist mimesis thus envisions a concept of expression that encompasses a world-making zest. Here expression performs double work. It leads to the formation of the region of representation and provides accounts of the work of a transmissive evental component from within a constitutive virtual region. In scaffolding an expressionist vantage for postdramatic theatre, this book seeks to arrive at a generative and non-actional drama ontology. It thus also alludes to an adjacent poetics that does not rely on formal features but finds the specificity of postdramatic theatre in its ontological grounding. An expressionist vantage traces a portrait of postdramatic theatre by delving into its very ontology. The discussed plays are interesting not only in terms of the cognitively challenging realities they scaffold but, more fundamentally, because they put on display a new type of drama: self-organizing, exhibiting and retaining a relation to its constitutive ontological processes, and open toward the generation of what philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls “an event of sense.” Within this shift, the ontology of drama continues to engender concepts such as Aristotle’s motion (kinêsis) yet dispenses with entelechy. A processual but non-purposive scenario replaces the actional model from the Poetics. Mimesis, too, no longer relies on the category of action but becomes a procedure of

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emergence. That is to say, instead of gesturing toward a reality external to the literary worlds in drama, mimesis appeals to the self-organizing quality of a literary world and thus begins to address the genesis of sense itself. An expressionist mimesis thus turns to the ambiguous question of the expression of sense—an infra-mimetic constituent that nevertheless underlies and forms the order of representation. NOTES 1. The term “incorporeal” here pertains to the fact that the event of sense is distilled out of bodily entanglement and yet is a disembodied entity that rather functions as an envelopment of bodies (Deleuze 1990, 2). Deleuze follows Stoic philosophy wherein the major category is not being but something (aliquid), a term that speaks of a co-presence of being and non-being, of the existent and the inherent. Hence the division in Stoicism between material bodies (soma) as existents and events as incorporeal effects (asōmaton) and entities posited outside of being inasmuch as they do not exist, but “inhere” and “subsist” (5). 2. Dividing the Deleuzian trilogy into a path (ethics), a problem (ontology), and a logic (epistemology) is inspired by Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept,” in Deleuze. A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 188–216. 3. This programmatic side of the study on Spinoza is tackled only in the third part, “The Theory of Finite Modes,” in the sections “What Can a Body Do?” (Deleuze 2005, 217–235) and “The Ethical Vision of the World” (255–73). Joy, being an “active passion,” acts as a threshold toward a greater power or a degree of intensity. See Ethics III, Props. LIII, LIV, LV, as well as Ethics III, Definitions II and III. 4. A survey of this is offered in Daniel W. Smith, “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism,” Continental Philosophy Review 38, no. 1–2 (2005): 89–123. 5. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage Books, 2001), 139–141. 6. In Deleuze’s interpretation, attributes are seen as a series of relations extending ad infinitum: “The attribute is no longer a specific relation, but an infinity of relations. It is not reduced to the laws of nature but is rather presupposed by each and every articulation of relations. It is the horizon, or surface, from which all determinations arise” (Bowles 2009, 95). Attributes infinitely “cascade” (95) into other relations whereas no hierarchy of attributes becomes manifest. 7. A helpful source in this respect is Somers-Hall’s Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference (2012). The book enacts the struggle between identity (representational logic based on identity) and Deleuze’s non-oppositional difference through expositions of the paradoxes of Zeno, the philosophies of identity of Aristotle, Aquinas, and of Hegel’s concept of opposition (41–66). 8. The import of Spinoza’s immanent cause carries the repercussion that notions of primacy, hierarchies, and markedness cannot be thought within its regime: “A cause is immanent . . . when the effect is itself ‘immanate’ (immané) in the cause, and not when it simply ‘emanates’ from it. What defines the immanent cause, then, is the fact that the effect it produces remains within it, albeit as something else. As a result, the difference in essence between the cause and the effect can never be interpreted as a degradation” (De Beistegui 2010, 33). 9. Traditionally, the figure behind this thinking is the sixth-century Neoplatonist (Pseudo-) Dionysius the Areopagite who, in his On Mystical Theology (Affirmative and Negative Predicates of God), compared negative and positive theology. He showed that both apophatic and cataphatic gestures (a logic of word depletion and a logic of

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speaking through a familiarity) reach a point where, after prolonged contemplation or reading, there opens up only an abyss of silence and unknowing. Apophatic theology maintains the imposition of the divine as a secret—a presence never fully present, a name that has remained hidden, and an eternal ungraspable. Yet, since this gesture pertains to a representational world of hiddenness, there naturally emerges the need to think in terms of complete explication as well. Deleuze, then, would be just as discontented with cataphatic theology, which, though nondualistic, seeks to determine the divine through an installment in human subjectivity (seeking the infinite through finitude) and language. Limited in this manner, cataphatic language also ultimately results in hiddenness. Spinoza’s work, on the contrary, follows another trajectory as here one directly installs a “divine” entity (substance) that descends into modes (finitude). 10. See Jan Aertsen’s Nature and Creature: Thomas Aquinas’s Way of Thought (1988). Of particular interest are the sections “The Origin of Things and the Question of Being,” wherein the world is produced from a first cause (47), and “Every creature is being by participation” (83) in which the adopted model presupposes a transcendent being and degrees of participation. 11. In the Ethics, Spinoza offers the following definition of substance: “By substance I understand that which exists in itself, and is conceived by itself, i.e. that which does not need the conception of any other thing in order to be conceived.” Ethics I, Def. 3. Being has its cause entirely in itself, is self-propelled, and sufficient within itself. Likewise, in Deleuze, substance is “not only the being of things, but the immanent cause of the being of things. It is the immanent cause of ‘the things beginning to exist’, that is, of the immanent existence of singular modal essence, and of ‘their persevering in existence’, that is, of the durational existence of the corresponding finite mode” (Duffy 2006, 112). 12. In this sense, Spinoza’s “God” is not the world’s causa prima working from without, but an immanent cause, an intrinsic permanent substratum. Ethics I, Prop. 18. 13. More on the debate in the twelfth century and beyond, as well as the role of Thomas Aquinas in the positing of an analogical relation between Creator and creation, can be found in Michael Sullivan’s The Debate over Spiritual Matter in the Late Thirteenth Century: Gonsalvus Hispanus and the Fransciscan Tradition from Bonaventure to Scotus (2010): 104–138. 14. See “Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression” (Deleuze 2005, 169–99). 15. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze goes as far as to say, “There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice” (2004, 43).

TWO Transpositions

This chapter links the concept of expression to the concept of sense. First, by explicating the relational nature of expression and sense, it shows how both expression and sense become primary to their relative terms. Here sense and expression are shown to be two isomorphic counterparts belonging to two different orders inasmuch as both serve as the connective, transmissive, intermediary components in the systems within which they operate. Second, in transposing Deleuze’s account of the motions of substance through expression and re-expression in Expressionism onto the constitution of a linguistic proposition in Logic, the chapter shows how the ontogenesis of sense follows a trajectory and an internal logic similar to that of its counterpart, expression. The stakes here involve nothing less than a positing of being as sense: Kant’s attempt at an immanent critique, Hegel’s Science of Logic, and Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence are evoked to sketch out Deleuze’s scaffold of a philosophy of immanence. The introduction of the event of sense as an extra-ontological yet pervasive component within being speaks of Deleuze’s continuation of the efforts of these three philosophers. Third, expression and sense are brought together and shown to intertwine in four different ways within the ontogenesis of drama. Here expression belongs to the domain of the pre-representational generative movement toward the consolidation of representation, that is, toward the consolidation of a literary world. The event of sense, in turn, can only manifest itself within representation and within a given literary world. At the same time, the event of sense requires the constitutive motion of expression for its emergence. In this way, we have two regions: a prelinguistic and pre-representational constitutive region wherein expression is at work, and a linguistic representational constituted one. The latter is the domain where the event of sense manifests itself. Literary 47

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worlds with their ontological commitments are being formed at the junctures where expression coalesces into a region of sense. Here I propose that expression and sense could potentially correlate in four ways to shape a literary world with its adjacent ontological commitments. These commitments, as shown in the analysis of the Auerbach passage from the Introduction of this book, can follow a logic of transcendence or one of immanence. Again, transcendence presupposes an ontological scaffold built upon equivocal arrangements and division between a foreground and a constitutive but unattainable background. Immanence, in turn, subscribes to an arrangement that is non-dual, generative, or speaks of a confluence of foreground and background. In forming relations of equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality, expression and sense allow us to glimpse into the very process of constitution of the order of representation. However, interweaving expression and sense also shows how this order breaks open to welcome infusions of a different ontological texture. THE MOVEMENT OF EXPRESSION This book construes expression as the active side of immanence. This is the means through which immanence manifests itself and makes itself known. Meanwhile, the connective function of expression imparts a sheer paradoxicality. It is both containment, a principle “within,” and transcendence, participation, emanation, a principle “without.” Expression is both involvement and evolvement, the constitution of a relation and its explication. Hence the most quoted statement of Expressionism: “Immanence is the vertigo of philosophy and is inseparable from the concept of expression (from the double immanence of expression in what expresses itself, and of what is expressed in its expression)” (Deleuze 2005, 180). By positing expressionist immanence as the law of things, Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza evades representational ontologies of the type offered by the theory of emanations or by Platonic participation. His work is aptly characterized as “a radical Neoplatonism without a centre” (Thacker 2010, 144) as expressionist philosophy ceases to work within a logic of exemplariness, from a Good descending across lesser entities. Instead, here immanence forms a type of causality that remains foreign to any subordinative notions such as summum bonum or privatio. Accordingly, “expression itself no longer emanates, no longer resembles anything” (Deleuze 2005, 180). Namely, expression ceases to function within arrangements of the type model-copy, imitation, or lesser good. The order of representation at work within equivocal divisions and following the principle of the Aquinian “relation of non-relation” ceases to be the sole norm.

Transpositions

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The concept of expression, as interpreted by Deleuze, is marked by a priority of relations over relative terms. Deleuze explores the primacy of relations as early as in 1953 in Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991b [1953]). Here he explicates not only the external character of relations as constituting the sum of what a body is capable of, but also alludes to an ecological practice associated with the respective theory of relations. A body, 1 here, is something that is interwoven with and co-constituted by an environment. Along with the creation of a “logic of relations,” Deleuze shows three important properties of relations: “their exteriority, their non-reducibility, and their status as effects of human practice” (Hayden 1995, 284). Relations, thus, are not pre-given but are determined by the encounters into which a body enters. As such, relations are arrangements of involvement for a body or a mode. It is only through involvement that a body expresses its essence and only through the establishment of relations that a body encounters both its power, that is, its ability to explicate an essence, and other bodies, thus activating the processes of complication and explication: So that Spinoza can consider two fundamental questions to be equivalent: What is the structure (fabrica) of a body? And: What can a body do? A body’s structure is the composition of its relation. What a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected. (Deleuze 2005, 218)

Deleuze adopts this relational tinge from the work of Simondon and his “realism of relations” (Bowden 2011, 117), postulating that a relation is not derivative from and contingent upon substance but is the originary constitutive principle of substance. In Deleuze, the rule of “relations over things” is not only transposed onto the structure of sense, offering an ontological priority of forces and processes over substances, but is also reified in that it acquires a name and a life of its own: expression. While expressly non-essentialist, and an incarnation of the effort to foreground the primacy of processes over actualities, the motion of expression from substance to finite modes thus becomes a movement of individuation 2 itself. The reality of substance and its transitions from attributes to essences all the way down toward finite modes is the reality of expression. Once again, the two constitutive entities here are the relation and its position with regard to other relations. In this respect, expression is nonreferential as it does not point toward an origin, nor does it address a background order. Rather, its character is proliferative, constellatory, situational, and flowing forth. The maxim “relations over things” entails that “relation must be understood as constitutive, as part of the entity under consideration” (Albert 2001, 192). This brings us to the matter of explication and involvement inherent in the movement of expression. Explication entails evolvement, unfolding; implication brings involvement and folding with it.

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Substance expresses itself while being indivisible, residing within both the expressed and the expressible, that is, within itself. The interrelation between the continual folding and unfolding of substance, or of its continual motion of implication and explication, allows us to see the two not as two disparate entities in opposition, but as the two faces of expression. Evolvement and involvement are both excess and containment: substance unfolds, expressing itself in attributes and essences, all the while remaining univocal or implicated in its expressions: To explicate is to evolve, to involve is to implicate. Yet the two terms are not opposites: they simply mark two aspects of expression. Expression is on the one hand an explication, an unfolding of what expresses itself, the One manifesting itself in the Many . . . Its multiple expression, on the other hand, involves Unity. The One remains involved in what expresses it, imprinted in what unfolds it, immanent in whatever manifests it. (Deleuze 2005, 16)

Again, we witness the paradoxical nature of expression, being equally “within” and “without.” Expression is at once different from the manifested or the expressed, transcending it, yet all the while remaining intrinsic to its manifestation in the expressed. Its folded state and its complete dispersion occur simultaneously as two equally valid realities. Expression is disseminating, effluent, ecstatic, and yet, just empty. Other parallels follow as well. The concept of expression, just like the concept of sense, partakes in a triadic scaffold. One discerns between “what expresses itself” (1), “the expression itself” (2), and “what is expressed” (3), a distinction that, within Spinoza’s philosophy, is translated into attributes (2) expressing the essence (3) of substance (1). The paradoxicality of expression is equally visible within this arrangement: the expressed does not exist outside of its expression, and yet still remains radically different from it. In this way expression becomes the only relation among substance, attributes-expressions or “that which expresses the essence in a particular way” (Piercey 1996, 276), and modes, or “that which exists in and is conceived through attributes” (276). As a nominal distinction is made between “that which expresses itself,” “that which expresses,” and “that which is expressed” (276), the relation allows each of these elements to be conceived as a distinct form, and yet still as one. No similarity or analogy could be postulated in this case. The expressed is both within and without, bearing the paradox of univocity in that it is both immanent and participatory. Still, the expressed relates to what expresses itself while remaining separate from the expression. Expression, as represented by Deleuze, bears something of the elasticity of a relation, and carries a twofold movement within itself: involvement and explication (Deleuze 2005, 333). The expressed can be equally perceived as intrinsic and folded within its expression, or unfolded and extrinsic.

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TOWARD A SENTENCE This relational arrangement also articulates the difference between equivocal predication (a subject-predicate arrangement) and its univocal counterpart (verbs). In the former case, substance and essence remain two unbridgeable disparate entities accountable by virtue of inexpressive propria. In the latter, a fourth component, the event of sense incarnated in the verb infinitive, supplements the representational elements of the proposition and adds a vantage point of univocal continuity. The event “spreads across” a series of propositions, making them productive bearers of sense. This connectivity uncovers an entire program of thought that works by dint of relations, processes, concept-plasticity, and growth, suspending derivative causality. Univocity foregrounds the co-presence of disparate terms, and is thus aptly characterized as “a single clamour of Being for all beings” (Deleuze 2004, 304). Here the traditional subject-predicate structure posits a relation by virtue of the copula “is” inasmuch as it relates a subject to inexpressive propria offering an analogical relation. This, however, is not a structure that would allow a substance to express its essence. In Deleuze’s logic, it is through verbs that the sense of a proposition becomes manifest and an event shines forth as it is exactly verbs in the infinitive that are capable of expressing the evental dimension of language (Deleuze 1990, 185). The “and” of verbs surpasses the subject-predicate arrangement. This also entails a transition from human subjectivity (S-P) to impassiveness, to a generalized expressive motion that is indifferent to human access (V). According to Deleuze, the event of sense in language coincides with the shining forth of a proposition’s verb infinitive. What is expressed there is pure potentiality, neutrality itself, utter indifference. The infinitive inheres and subsists in propositions but cannot be reduced or extracted from them, nor can it be encountered in its “bare” form, that is, without proper grammatical makeup. Still, the infinitive remains a bearer of the action expressed irrespective of its mood, tense, or modality. What is expressed is not necessarily related to the object denoted, to a speaker’s attitude, or to a set of presuppositions governing the proposition: this is the “indifference” of the expressed. Yet, it is precisely this indifference inherent in the positing of the event of sense as an empty form that ascertains the possibility of the singular occurrence that a proposition is. The event of sense is the element that shapes “a” proposition into “this” proposition. Let us delineate this development. In Expressionism, Deleuze differentiates between three types of signs, indicative (“perception”), imperative (“moral law”), and revelatory (“epiphany”), ultimately calling them equivocal and thus insufficient bearers of sense. Deleuze then introduces expression as a fourth component (2005, 330) within the tripartition, thus articulating a division between regimes of designation (indicative, imper-

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ative, and revelatory) and regimes of expression. Here expression posits relations among equal terms and follows “a strict reign of univocity” (330). The Logic of Sense replicates this arrangement in introducing the linguistic proposition as an amalgam of three representational components, denotation, manifestation, and signification, whereby it adds a fourth dimension, that of sense. Logic thus defines a proposition’s visible structure with the terms denotation, manifestation, and signification. First, in denotation propositions relate to states of affairs, that is, bodies. Denotation amounts to representational correspondence as it decides on the truth value of a proposition in compliance with an existing or a non-existing referent. This value is marked by a certain capacity of the sentence to fulfill adequatio conditions, that is, to weave a network of analogical matches between states of affairs and sentences. Second, the speaking person (a person speaking in self-expression) relates to the proposition in manifestation. Here sentences are viewed as placeholders for beliefs and desires (Deleuze 1990, 14) working as anticipations of states of affairs, which are themselves produced by external causalities. Signification, the third dimension of the proposition, poses a question about a sentence’s relation to the world of general concepts or conceptual implications (15). This is the realm of syntactic connections relating to other propositions. Here propositions, among other things, are caught within an order that commands them to be elements of demonstrations in Aristotelian syllogistic logic, that is, premises or conclusions such as “implies” and “therefore.” Still, the proposition viewed as a compound of correspondences, causal interferences, and formal truth operators, is invariably circular and nonexpressive. Breaking this circle, according to Deleuze, would require the introduction of a fourth dimension, namely, sense. As the expressed of a proposition, sense envelops the proposition’s three representational components and, finally, makes a singularity. Similarly, the “descending” movement of expression from substance to finite modes in Expressionism is parallel to the motions of sense within chains of propositions in Deleuze’s Logic. Deleuze invites us to think of attributes as verbs. Unlike propria, or inexpressive adjectives, attributes are verbs that simultaneously have distinct senses as an expressed, and designate substance as “one and the same thing” (Deleuze 2005, 104). This is not an arbitrary move since infinitives carry the entire potentiality of action, simultaneously containing all modes, aspects, tenses, and voices. Infinitives “guarantee specificity and determinacy without imposing subjective or objective coordinates” (Boundas 2006, 6), thus shaping a subjectless grammar of potentialities. Verbs in the infinitive are a pure possibility. They are pervasively inclusive, bringing forth all properties of an action at once, without prioritizing one or the other. In other words, “verbs cause attributes while escaping. Verbs are elusive; they leave their marks without leaving themselves. . . . And because a verb is evanescent

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and fugitive, the empiricist is drawn to ask whether it has being” (Brusseau 1998, 64). Attributes-expressions designate substance while expressing its essence. The distinction between an expression and designation becomes manifest again, this time in the field of propositions: “For the sense of an initial proposition must in its turn be made the designatum of a second, which will itself have a new sense, and so on. Thus the substance they designate is expressed in the attributes, attributes express an essence” (Deleuze 2005, 105). This is an important passage inasmuch as it later transforms into Logic’s linguistic paradoxes of dry reiteration and indefinite proliferation. 3 These paradoxes show how a proposition never states its own sense, that is, its expressed, for it would therewith be made nonsense. Within a chain of propositions, the elusive sense of a first proposition becomes the designatum of the second, itself having a new sense, and thus ad infinitum (Deleuze 1990, 28–31). This movement of sense within propositions, gliding along the series of sentences never stating their own sense, constitutes an isomorphic map of the motions of attributes-expressions. While substance expresses itself in attributes, its essence being the expressed (substance/expressive > attributes/expressions > essence/expressed), each attribute continues this line of “descent” of substance to finite modes. 4 The pattern repeats itself on a next level, inasmuch as now each attribute, an expression within the first order, expresses its modifications in the modes (attribute/expressive > modes/expressions > modifications/expressed). 5 This is how, according to Deleuze, the distinction between expressed sense and designated object 6 unlocks a series of movements in which expression opens up to a reexpression. Here the two parallel series substance > attributes > essence and attribute > modes > modifications are not only isomorphic, but also “isonomic” (Deleuze 2005, 108) inasmuch as they retain a structural similarity, but also an equality of principle within their non-causal motion (figure 2.1). Offering a causality that moves in two directions, 7 the scaffold of expression is replicated in the double movement inherent in the event of sense. 8 This is where the event of sense resides as the expressed, as a complete explication. FROM EXPRESSION TO SENSE An illustration of the dual nature of expression and its capacity to be both univocal and equivocal, “within” and “without,” is offered in Deleuze’s short discussion of “the Word of God” in Expressionism and the two disparate senses it sports. From the perspective of univocity, this is an “expressive word” needing no signs and being immediately graspable only by virtue of the shared in “God”’s essence and “man”’s understanding (2005, 57). Viewed within an equivocal regime, the same entity becomes

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Figure 2.1. Series of expression and re-expression.

an “impressed word,” a command: “as an imperative, it expresses nothing, makes known no divine attribute” (57). The former (expression) relates to an attribute and expresses an essence, whereas the latter (sign and signified) attaches to an item that does not bring substantial knowledge. In the latter case, the impressed word becomes an Aristotelian proprium, an inexpressive predicate: “Propria express nothing . . . they do not constitute the nature of substance, but are predicated of what constitutes that nature” (Deleuze 2005, 49). It is here that one can observe the distinction Deleuze draws between expression and designation—slowly beginning to outline, as if in passing, a new logic. Within this logic the expressed is sense, an inherence that does not have an independent existence outside of its expression but at the same time is the predicate of a thing. Simultaneously, sense as the expressed remains related to substance “as to the object designated by all the attributes” so that “all expressed senses together form the ‘expressible’ of the essence of substance, and the latter may in its turn be said to express itself in the attributes” (Deleuze 2005, 62).

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Sense bears a relation to (expressive) substance that makes it participate in the thing as the thing’s expressed. Sense is inherent in its expressible, while participating in and attributed to the expressed. The relation of inherence is not one of partiality and attachment, but of involvement. The expressed is, within this scenario, sense; it is ubiquitous to the attribute but distinct from the receptacle of its attribution. This relation of simultaneous separateness and involvement makes sense an elusive entity that is both “within” and “without.” Sense is immanent to and folded within its expression, yet distinct from it. It is in sense that relation and distinction meet, the former being a term belonging to the vocabulary of univocity and the latter pertaining to equivocal division that works with analogies. The dual organization manifested in the Spinozan-Deleuzian attributes—with the middle term of the tertiary arrangement linking substance and essence—is followed closely here (Figure 2.2). The gap of analogy and the connectivity of relation coincide in sense as its structure isomorphically replicates that of expression. Once this arrangement reaches the level of the linguistic proposition, it becomes clear that the subsistence of sense as a fourth dimension simultaneously constitutes and propels the motion within the “circle” of denotation, manifestation, and signification. The transformative component of sense is evental in character. The fourth dimension of the proposition does not have a foundation or a condition but is itself both constitutive and generative. The emergence of a proposition’s “fourth dimension” is both “within” and “without,” formative and functional, closing the circle of the proposition and extending it toward becoming the proposition’s envelopment. In other words, this is an “ideal” transformation giving the circle its individuating quality. A linguistic proposition, while retaining its representational features of denotation, manifestation, and signification, brings about an “incorporeal” or “ideal” transformation with its utterance, that is, with its actualization. Deleuze’s “sense” has the character of a relation that is expressive rather than referential. Here one is to presuppose that sense also ontologically precedes the linguistic proposition in its representational frame.

Figure 2.2. Designation and expression from the viewpoint of sense.

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Yet, though an ontologically primitive entity (Bowden 2011), it comes about as a “sense-effect”—an aftermath of the movement within the propositional circle. Thus, sense is simultaneously prior to the congealment of representation and manifests itself as an effect generated by the proposition’s mixture of denotation, manifestation, and signification. While postulated as non-existent (“it, rather, insists and subsists”) and non-spatial (“an occupant without a place”), it nevertheless conditions presences and locations. It is through the event of sense that states of affairs become palpable (rule of grounding), and it is events of sense that are distilled out of bodily mixtures (rule of effect). In this way, the event of sense becomes a field of causal tensions simultaneously shifting toward two directions: conditioning and emergence. The event of sense both determines and expresses representational entities. What follows is a logic in which sense figures as expression’s counterpart. The rhetoric of paradox, of simultaneous participation and immanence, complication and explication, involvement and evolvement, remains relatively intact. Along with that, the attributes-expressions are endowed with yet another name—that of the event of sense. The story of Deleuze’s event of sense is at once part of Scholastic debates of the twelfth century and contemporaneous as it reminds us of the ideal of Structuralism: an inquiry into an impassive, supra-anthropomorphic underlying scaffold of all things. In Logic, Deleuze differentiates between two series: series of propositions (words), wherein the event of sense manifests itself as the fourth “invisible” but constitutive dimension of the linguistic proposition (sense) and series of states of affairs (worlds), wherein the event of sense emerges out of the entwinement of bodies, or “bodily mixtures,” in a corporeal world of actions and passions (event). “Platonic heights” and “pre-Socratic depths” are a way to describe these two realms allegorically. The event of sense circulates between the series of words and worlds, shining forth either as expressed sense or an attributed event (Figure 2.3). Тhe parallelism between the emergence of the event out of bodily mixtures and the sense that issues forth from propositions in Logic is reminiscent of Expressionism’s parallelism between expression and re-expression in the descent of substance. That is to say, the parallelism between series of states of affairs and series of propositions is isomorphic (equal in form) and isonomic (equal in its principle) to the movements of expression (substance > attributes > essence) and re-expression (attributes > modes > modifications) as described in figure 2.1. The event of sense, or the expressed, functions as the transformative force within propositions. Yet it has something of the equivocal revelatory designatum of Spinoza (Deleuze 2005, 330): the rhetoric that accompanies it is reminiscent of that of apophatic theology. Sense becomes an unknowable, only encountered through the vestigia it has left upon series of propositions. Within the parallel series, as an event, it manifests itself as a “mist” diffusing over states of affairs, a transformation that is “incorporeal.”

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Figure 2.3. The guises of the sense-event in series of propositions and series of states of affairs.

Sense here remains an ungraspable extra, neither contained in the proposition nor aligned with any of its parts. Still, it is precisely through the emergence of the expressed that a proposition becomes of sense. Sense appears to be beyond recognition, beyond description, and cannot make itself known through inexpressive propria as they do not offer access to an essence. Meanwhile, just like expression is immanent to the expressed and the attributes to the essence, sense is immanent to the proposition. The proposition is the milieu of the expression of sense. Sense cannot be encountered independently of it but instead remains a fourth dimension within, being precisely the surplus that rounds off a proposition by donating the quality of “making sense.” SENSE AS BEING AND THE BEING OF SENSE In 1969, Deleuze took on Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1952) to develop a system that would replicate the motions of a univocal being within linguistic propositions governed by verbs as opposed to equivocal propositions governed by subject-predicate arrangements. Sense became his new protagonist, rooted in Hyppolite’s critical evaluation of Hegel’s work: “Hegelian Logic is the absolute genesis of sense, a sense which, to itself, is its own sense, which is not opposed to the being whose sense it is, but which is sense and being simultaneously” (1997, 162). One claim here is that being coincides with sense, and that its motions very much resemble descriptions of proliferative “life.” Sense grows organically, incessantly, exponentially, and has its purpose within itself. It has the shape of Neoplatonic emanative being yet without a source, a horizon, or a point of orientation. In Hegel, according to Hyppolite, being follows a progressive course through a movement of self-comprehension or what Deleuze calls a “donation of sense” (1990, 69). Hyppolite shows the overlap between sense and being in the following passage:

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Chapter 2 This genesis of sense was implicit in the prior spheres; this genesis is the Logic, because the Logic is the constitution of being as sense, comprehension, not as reference to a thing comprehended distinct from the movement of comprehension, but this movement itself as intelligible genesis of the thing (and the thing itself is only this movement). (Hyppolite 1997, 175)

Here Hegelian logic is shown as a tracing of the emergence of being as sense in a movement whereby a proliferative being understands itself only within and through this very movement. Being posits itself as sense, becoming expressive in the process. By replacing Hegel’s essence with sense, Hyppolite secures the “flatness” and immediacy of being. There is no beyond to serve as an orientation for a foregrounded world, no exemplariness. A world is sufficient within itself, with no points of reference that could be externally determined. Deleuze transposes this development to his own philosophy of sense. That sense is generated and processually produced (“this genesis of sense . . . is the Logic”) is perhaps his most significant borrowing: “sense is essentially produced. It is never originary but always caused and derived” (Deleuze 1990, 95). This move is already a departure from models of transcendence wherein a shadowy but immediately graspable realm invariably refers to an “authentic” yet unperceivable beyond. In Hyppolite’s model, being ceases to be the essence of a background. Rather, it positions itself immediately as a world’s sense (Hyppolite 1997, 195). In Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel we read that “there is no second world” (195), that by replacing being with sense metaphysical thinking is already remedied. A world of sense is devoid of a beyond. Being, rather than posited as an unintelligible core, becomes sense itself and thus immanent to a world. Though not immediately identifiable or extricable from it, sense is not to be encountered independently of the world of which it is constitutive. In his review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, Deleuze notes in an oft-quoted passage that the book’s crucial revelation is that “Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only an ontology of sense” (Hyppolite 1997, 34). Hyppolite’s sens instigated much debate at the time. The larger agenda behind this was ontology’s riddance of any anthropomorphic influx. In the 1950s, phenomenology defends the view that human finitude carries a chiffre allowing it to encounter and perceive the Absolute. That the evolution of this Absolute as the manifestation of the infinite in a finite form 9 traces a certain teleological journey of finitude’s self-realization is another well-known refrain. Hyppolite’s contribution here is the acceptance of the fact that ontology has to shed such anthropomorphic makeup. Instead, he favors the version of Hegelianism in which being is conceived in supra-human terms that rather show proximity to notions of proliferative, pervasive, processual life. This foregrounds the capacity of Hegel’s concept to “express” the given: “Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence is built

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on the claim that Hegel has found the correct—and, explicitly, the most immanent—way to express the sense or meaning of the Absolute, that is, the logic of its own self-differentiating genesis” (Kerslake 2009, 27). Here we perceive the emphasis on movement that later becomes seminal to Deleuze’s effort and the project of process philosophy as a whole. Then, the conversion of Hegel’s concept into “sense” reinforces the image of the movements of the Absolute as expressive. 10 This is where one could trace the development stages of Deleuze’s concept of sense. Sense begins with Hegel’s Science of Logic and the evolvement of the concept whereby the sense of being becomes expressed. Then, in Hyppolite’s Logic of Existence being is encountered as sense and without mediation. Hyppolite thus remains a pervasive but equally ghostly presence, as the book is never referenced explicitly within Deleuze’s texts. Spinoza is barely mentioned. At the same time, the structure and role of Spinoza’s attributes as intermediaries linking disparate terms and forming tertiary arrangements becomes manifest in Deleuze’s accounts of the geneses of sense. It is with this pre-Kantian philosopher, suggests Deleuze, that immanence becomes expressive and “expression immanent” (2005, 171). This is also the reason why he constructs a history of immanence in which the term is opposed not to transcendence, as in Deleuze’s later writings, but rather to Neoplatonic participatory emanation. Thus, he almost alludes to a certain “subterranean” history of philosophy in which the story of immanence has undergone its own evolution from Neoplatonism—which first acknowledges the fluxional, processual, and generous aspect of being—through Neoplatonist medieval philosophy, and eventually toward Spinoza and Nietzsche, with recourse to Hegel. Kant is another influence: “. . . the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze represents the latest flowering of the project, begun in the immediate wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to complete consistently the ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy” (Kerslake 2009, 5). Kerslake sees the philosopher’s work as a response to Kantianism and post-Kantian philosophy. A clue here is the discovery of the 1956–57 lecture course Qu’est-ce que fonder?, a text that throws new light on Kant’s role in Deleuze’s project of immanence. “What is Grounding?” evokes Kant’s attempts to fashion a self-grounding entity that, in line with the efforts of post-Kantianism, is a finitude containing its constitutive principles within itself. In Kerslake’s assumption, this is perhaps what for Deleuze in 1956 represented the completion of the effort to account for the infinite in a finite form. It echoes Neoplatonic participatory emanation, Spinoza’s re-expression of substance’s attributes in finite modes, and Hegel’s movements of an abstract Absolute toward ever greater concreteness. According to Kerslake, Deleuze’s work situates itself within the post-Kantian tradition. It not only follows a continuity of its own—with the question of the nature of immanent events and their expressive character recurring

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repeatedly within his body of work—but also acts as a continuation of a query that is as old as Plotinus’s theory of emanations. 11 And after Deleuze, Kant’s immanent critique has recently found a successor in the “pure immanence” of Agamben. 12 Deleuze’s views on immanence thus emerge from problems endemic to the era of the Enlightenment. His questions remain grounded in problems that puzzled post-Kantian philosophy as well. 13 Conditions of possibility and foundations withdraw to open up a path toward a logic that posits itself as a groundless and non-teleological immanent genesis in flux. Within this genesis, being posits itself as immanent sense. A processual scenario issues forth. A cosmology in which a self-issued and selfposited being comprehends itself through incessant expressive motions replaces Kant’s “tribunal of reason.” 14 “Sense” here stands for the expressive power of the Absolute. Turning to Kant’s relationship with sense, we also come upon the notion of transcendental consciousness. 15 As Voss notes, “the Kantian invention of the transcendental contradicts the simple assumption that the locus of truth for a proposition is the dimension of denotation or reference . . . Kant’s revolutionary move is to make truth dependent on sense” (2013, 6). Yet this move has the consequence that the “external world” set to serve as a garden of references, becomes “relative to the a priori conditions of the transcendental subject” (6). For an object to have sense, it first has to present itself to the transcendental conditions (e.g,. space, time) that ground the possibility of sense. In this way, the order of what poststructuralism has named “representation” surfaces. Here “recognition” becomes an “enemy” and a functionary of representation since now every item in a world has to pass through the sieve of the transcendental conditions of possibility in order to be imbued with sense. And, certainly, many of Meinong’s impossible creatures would fail the test. This critique fails because it takes on a representational stance with an appeal to ineffability. In Difference and Repetition, the procedures of (mimetic) recognition are presented as incapable of giving access to thought. Rather, Deleuze gives precedence to our encounters with active and reactive forces called “intensities” (2004, 139) that evade representation to endow a world with sense. Then, in Logic, while equivocal denotation, manifestation, and signification are valid ways to think propositions, a “true” access to what a proposition is can only be supplied with the addition of a fourth component, sense. A world is thus nominally divided into a region accessible by means of (Kantian) recognition and a certain realm that opens up to expressive becoming. This cleavage manifests itself as an event of sense poised on the fault lines between propositions and things. It ceases to work through recognition and resemblance but is instead fully immanent. Here the sense of a proposition and the event emerging out of states of affairs (figure 2.3) are expressed fully and without residue. Sense positions itself as an intermediary component be-

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tween the two worlds: “It is the joint, hinge, or articulation between the two series, which it allows to communicate with one another, without ever reducing the gap that separates them” (De Beistegui 2010, 90). Still, the region of the event of sense is not factual, referential or related to the truth or falsity of a proposition. Rather, it is an immanent field formed out of the tensions between the disparate terms that sense faces. A beingsense simultaneously affirms its self-containment and its status as an entity that only exists through its relations. While such a processual treatment of being is reminiscent of Aristotle’s hyle and Plato’s khora, inasmuch as both are receptacles of unformed matter in which a genesis of forms occurs, Deleuze’s sense refuses itself even this grounding. Sense does not point to anything beyond itself. EXTRA BEING The scaffolding of sense is, however, not entirely in keeping with prefigured paths. For one, Deleuze’s sense subsists in a dimension that is not of being, but of “extra-being.” 16 Whereas this move could easily be said to be of “transcendence” as it certainly posits an externality, defining the event of sense as an “extra-being” reaffirms its immanent status. Sense is non-existent inasmuch as it is not extricable from the proposition it informs. Still, it inheres within while, as an extra-being, it remains entirely without. Sense is an extra-being insofar as it does not pertain to referential language. The cosmology of sense allows for a subsistence that stretches beyond objects yielding themselves to designation. Sense offers an account precisely of the “intensive” part of the proposition and beyond its representational features. This capacity of the proposition to become “intensive” through a super-addition becomes manifest as the “unfolding” of language in the moment of “making sense.” Sense inheres in propositions but is inextricable from them. Like the world, it “does not exist outside of its expressions” (Massumi 2002, ii). Sense thus can be understood as an incorporeal, supra-worldly inherence in a Meinongian jungle. Rather than a graspable (a visible or a thinkable object), sense remains ungrounded and unsheltered, a movement on the interface between ideality and corporeality that Deleuze likens to Carroll’s Snark hunt. Sense cannot be aligned with things but equally so, it is not available to thought. Nor can it give account of itself in terms of its purpose and use, and Deleuze insists on this inefficaciousness of sense—in a way, sense is utterly redundant. It can only be grasped obliquely through the circle of the proposition and only shows itself through the incapacity of the remaining elements of the proposition to build a representation on their own terms. Within the generation of literary worlds, the generative procedure of expression precipitates the emergence of sense. Sense evades corporeality

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and yet remains the transformative component leaving corporeality permanently altered. Incorporeal events congeal out of states of affairs yet states of affairs alone do not necessarily presuppose the transpiring of events. It is the shining forth of a relation that bears the force of the occurrence. Here expression does not offer a ground whereby it would serve as the condition of possibility of the establishment of a relation. Rather, it constitutes a relation within a “collapsed” duality wherein the entwinement of disparate terms produces a relation based on reciprocal presupposition, a co-constitution with no term prevailing over the other or conditioning the moments of emergence and transformation independently. The establishment of a relation is thus the effect of the reciprocal entwinement of disparate entities. Again, the event of sense becomes the expressed of the relation between propositions and bodily mixtures (figure 2.3). This relation does not pertain to the being of either of the two disparate realms, but affirms itself as an “extra-being” (Deleuze 1990, 7, 21, 31). As this extra-being permeates the proposition and the states of affairs, it signals the wake of their individuation, their rounding off, and their becoming a haecceity. This is very much in tune with the role of beatitude as a superaddi in individuation (Duns Scotus). Beatitude presents itself as an absolute surplus, as a surfeit of individuation, yet illuminates a creature in a way showing it in its capacity to be exactly “this” particular creature. In a similar manner, what is expressed in the friction between worlds and words illuminates a proposition as its event of sense, the very articulation of what “this” proposition exactly is. Within this framework, the responsive reception of disparate entities within a relation replaces signification. Forms of conceptualizing through mediation—one of the features of representational thought—take the shape of transformative questioning. The proposition’s tripartition of denotation, manifestation, and signification offers a picture of equivocal thought that sees a world as an image, as cloaked in “representation.” But the role of representation within this tripartition is inseparable from the work of sense that envelops representation and in turn rounds it off. The model of reciprocal presupposition becomes evident here as well. Dualities and mediation are valid and functioning: representation is complete but incapable of granting access to sense. Representation works with the products of the work of sense—a world that has become divisible into organized structures, a case of “constancy and homogeneity” (Deleuze 1979, 210)—without delving into the processes that enable their emergence. The equivocal world of representation, however, opens up only as a secondary occurrence conditioned by a genesis of sense. Equivocity thus works with the secondary terms into which the movements of this genesis solidify, that is, subjects and predicates. Within univocity, we find the genesis of sense itself: processual, proliferative, and expressive. Thus, two complementary logics take shape: that of equivocity, working

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from without (signifier and signified), and that of univocity, working from within (sense, events). Following a similar line of thought, Colebrook suggests a partition between “equivocal” and “univocal readings,” that is, mimetic vs. evental ones (2004, 301). The latter view texts as responsive aggregates of tensions and intensities while the former yield to the rhetoric of representation that works with symbols, strategic inversions, and any type of dialectically describable duality. Thinking within representation appeals to our familiarities, and operates within a regime of signification. Thinking expression, on the other hand, takes us to a plane beyond the human condition and situates us within an arrangement that far exceeds the anthropomorphic duality we have imposed upon a world through our descriptions. Let us see, then, how this reciprocity is played out within the relations that expression and sense enter into. INTERSECTING EXPRESSION AND SENSE The relation between expression and sense remains ambiguous and sports several avatars within Deleuzian scholarship. Along with that, the very status of sense has received various interpretations, most famously with the statement that “sense and expression can never be reduced to one another” (Williams 2010, 26). Yet the question of the ontological position of sense immediately translates into an inquiry into the transition from expression to sense. Is that a matter of transference, of the interaction between a process and an end product, or do expression and sense account for one and the same mold, albeit manifested within different orders? As we observe how the relation between the terms takes on various guises, the results are, it turns out, as different as can be. In the present section, expression and sense begin to correlate in four ways which I call equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. A relation of equivalence rests upon the presupposition that expression is sense. A relation of isomorphism arises from the assertion that expression and sense are two isomorphic correlates within two orders: ontology and logic, worlds and words. Genesis amounts to a generative movement from expression to sense. Nonduality, in turn, shows that expression is the medium through which regions of both immanence and transcendence emerge and subsist in a regime of co-habitation. These four variants of one and the same relation pertain to the ways sense and expression bear witness to the gap between equivocal and univocal, or “representational” and “expressionist,” world descriptions. Here the event of sense is an entity produced within a clash of orders. This stance is evocative of Deleuze’s positing of sense as the very locale of the expression of a difference, a permeable screen that articulates the border between disparate entities in a way that allows them to co-constitute one another while

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continuing to persevere as themselves (Deleuze 1990, 28). Sense becomes the psychopomp that ultimately effects a transition between the disparate regions it traverses. A relation of equivalence can be encountered in Jean Hyppolite’s treatment of sense in Logic and Existence. Here being is sense is expression. Following a univocal perspective, sense is already the full explication and realization of being within a world. Through its positing as sense, being becomes expressive and this expressivity allows us to gain access to its reality. In an act of self-comprehension through movement, being posits itself as sense. With this, we are immediately plunged in immanence. Expression coincides with sense; the very positing of the generative expressive motion already aligns with an arrival at an event. This type of immanence, as we will see in some of the plays, signals a collapse of the already constituted representational distinctions and a redundancy of the series of words and worlds. Equivalence erases the “and,” that is, the constitutive emptiness between series. This type of immanence is understood as non-differentiation—herein signification is suspended and shapes are chimerical. Isomorphism offers a treatment of sense and expression that presents them as the two homologous counterparts of two disparate orders—that of logic and that of ontology, or that of words and that of worlds. These homologues perform analogous functions, follow an analogous procedure, and form analogous isomorphic maps. The two divergent orders remain parallel and analogical to one another, however. A transition from one to the other cannot be thought. Yet they are “isomorphic” inasmuch as expression and sense display the same intermediary characteristics and form similar tertiary arrangements within which they function as the connecting, transformative, pervasive, or “communicating” components. The principles of isomorphism and isonomy apply not only to the descent from expression to re-expression (figure 2.1) but manifest themselves as a “split within”—a generation of a gap—since they literally cut a literary world in two, dividing it into a foreground and a background, or into height and depth. Isomorphism thus follows an equivocal perspective. While the formation of equivalence is an extension of Hyppolite’s slogan “being is sense,” the isomorphic scaffold allies with Auerbach’s division between a foreground and a background and is infused by the dialectic of presence and absence (figure 2.4). Genesis is the third type of expression-sense alignment. It can be associated with a vertical movement from “non-sense” to the expression of “sense.” Genesis rests upon the division between the order of representation and the elusive yet pervasive presence of sense. Within a linguistic proposition, the two orders are present as the “subjective” (representation) and the “pre-personal” (expression). Here, the vertical rise to sense amounts to a genesis of both representation and sense through the becoming-expressive of bodily “depths,” nonsensical noise, sound and

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Figure 2.4. Equivalence and Isomorphism.

fury. In this case, expression enables the emergence of the event of sense. Becoming-expressive amounts to a shift from Deleuzian nonsense to sense, which in turn aids the formation of representation. It is sense—and further still, representation—that expression continually constitutes. In nonduality, expression becomes the milieu carrying the emergence of sense in an arrangement that is a static version of the genesis of representation. Here expression envelops both expressed sense and representation completely and without residue, creating an arrangement of cohabitation. Here, as suggested by Palmer (2004), expression aligns with a meta-level pervading and spreading across all remaining levels. Expression is a unifying component that occurs prior to the division between the “supra-representational” and “representational” regions, asserting the nonduality of the two. In other words, here expression designates a region of pre-established immanence that envelops both immanence and transcendence. Expression works as a two-sided mirror reminiscent of Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, immanence and transcendence being its two faces. Here expression manifests itself not only as the other side of representation, but also as an enveloping component that resides in the groundlessness between the regions of words and worlds. From this middle ground, it negotiates both the constitutive separation and the transitions taking place between the two orders. The constitution of this gap is a productive way of locating sense as it uncovers a host of paradoxes within the process of transition between the two orders. It is by dint of these paradoxical transitions that sense leaves its vestiges on the texture of being, assuming the shape of impossible objects and aberrant creatures. It is this side of sense that is also most likely to surface in literature, forming spots of “too much color,” that is, spaces wherein the nonsensical, deviant, unruly side of language issues forth. We can locate this element thanks to Deleuze’s discussion of serial arrangements and the constitution of a groundless surface in the middle between two disparates. The paradoxes unlocked here stem from the movement of sense across and

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along series of words and worlds, the movement of expression toward a surface, and the distillation of singularities out of the said motions. GENESIS Let us turn to the notion of genesis. The Logic of Sense offers a metaphorical account of the transition from noise (“depth,” bodily movements and babbling sounds, “primary order of language”) to voice (“height,” propositions, a “tertiary arrangement” consisting of denotation, manifestation, and signification) via sense (“surface,” “secondary organisation”), a movement that is oftentimes subsumed under the term “the dynamic genesis of language” (Smith 2009, 83). Within a “genetic” description of the emergence of sense, one draws a line between “expressionism” and “representation” as manifested in Deleuze’s linguistic proposition. Again, Deleuze’s four dimensions of the proposition offer a division between the equivocal and the univocal, representation and the supra-representational, between subjectivity (denotation, manifestation, and signification) and the pre-personal (sense). Sense conditions subjectivity and constitutes the order of language as such by rounding off its representational dimensions. What becomes manifest in the proposition is subjectivity; what enables its emergence is pre-propositional and pre-personal sense. The proposition’s tertiary arrangement, then, is an effect of the motions of productive and produced sense, of its becoming-expressive. This production and the produced quality of sense within the propositional structure cease to be immediately graspable once the order of representation is established. From the perspective of representation—once it has become solidified—sense becomes ungraspable. From then on, it begins to “haunt” the proposition. This production, however, concerns not only the proposition, but language as well. In this regard, Joe Hughes goes even further to suggest that the production of sense and the activation of the three representational dimensions of the proposition pertain to “the genesis of thought itself” (2008, 22), thus opening up to a phenomenological level of analysis in Logic and a speculation about the very rise of consciousness. Acknowledging the fact that Deleuze is interested in life prior to the proposition or to language, Hughes offers a reading of The Logic of Sense in which he extracts a host of psychoanalytical references. Similar to expression, which is both constitutive and productive or conditioning a production, here the pre- and impersonal field of sense both constitutes and produces the tertiary order. In other words, sense is the condition of possibility of the tertiary arrangement. The “voice” of the event of sense is a prerequisite for the production of meaningful “sound” as it makes language possible; the event of sense thus has a certain ordering capacity that simulta-

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neously enables representation and puts on display the expressive function (Deleuze 1990, 181–2). The impersonality of the transcendental field conditions and secures the possibility of a subjectivity that issues a proposition. Here one witnesses a movement from the maximally abstract toward the maximally concrete, that is, from an ideal state of non-differentiation through ever finer distinctions to the concrete utterance issued by a constituted subjectivity. And once the primary order is organized by representation, the tertiary arrangement—a carrier of utterances, the pronouncing of meaningful sounds 17 —obscures the impersonal infra-subjective dimension of voice, of the very possibility to be a bearer of language. Sense is yet also an effect and a produced entity (Deleuze 1990, 95). What produces sense is the primary order of actions and passions where bodies intertwine without intermediaries (124). This is a region of unbridled affections, the pre-linguistic site of “noise.” Bodies interpenetrate; no sense can yet turn noises into meaningful sound. Metaphors pertaining to this region include schizophrenic embroilment and non-differentiation. Deleuze also uses a spatial term to describe it: depth. The subjectivity of the tertiary arrangement is here yet in its most indefinite state. Lacking the capability to utter meaningful sounds, subjectivity is plunged in actions and passions that only issue noise. Noises do not transmit and do not mean—everything is literal and in a state of deconstitution. The domain of representation, or the tertiary arrangement of the proposition, is conditioned and illuminated by sense which itself is produced by the primary order. Here noises of the body become expressive upon

Figure 2.5. Genesis from expression to sense. Transition from depth to height.

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ascending to the tertiary order of language and the proposition. This transition also illustrates an ascent from states of affairs (primary order, embeddedness in a world and its various interactions) through expression (a motion out of which the secondary organization is distilled, the process of endowing a given arrangement with sense) to the region of representation (tertiary arrangement) consolidated in a concrete proposition (figure 2.5). The latter moment also marks the manifestation and realisation of sense. Hughes calls it a movement “from a corporeal depth to propositional consciousness” (2008, 25). Here I understand expression to be the intermediary transmissive component organizing the order of noise. The latter represents a region where words and subjectivities are in a perpetual state of individuation yet maximally indefinite, just as noncommunicative as “anything brought to the mouth, eating any object at all, gritting one’s teeth” (Deleuze 1990, 24). Within the realm of noise, words are devoid of their organizing quality and remain inseparable from the remaining bodily processes. The expression of sense enables the emergence of language and representation within this undifferentiated movement. Rather than remaining locked within the primary order, body noise transmutes into voice, a bearer of sense and the condition of meaningful sounds. At this level, the secondary organization becomes the site of the production of sense. NONDUALITY A perspective of nonduality locates the dimensions of subjectivity and the pre-personal within the proposition on one single plane. The two divergent orders attach to one another in a relationship whereby sense pervades the proposition and breaks the circle of its remaining three representational constituents. At the same time, the representational constituents do not recede into a background but remain equally foregrounded. This move already echoes the efforts of Romantic philosophy to establish a locus of nonduality between subject and object. In his Hegel and Deleuze: Immanence and Otherness (1999), Christopher Groves evokes a verdict made by philosopher Gillian Rose: the claim that philosophy has inflicted a wound upon itself. What Rose calls “a trauma within reason,” explains Groves, stems from the very nature of the philosophical effort based on the assumed infallibility of reason. This effort translates into a quest for finding justifiable criteria that would ground knowledge. While immanence has remained the “ambition” of philosophy, an access to a region of immediacy never encountered, this quest had resulted in reason no longer being capable to be immanent to itself (13). Within the context of this effort, Fichte and Schelling have had the role of isolating a component within reason that is “an otherness” within it, simultaneously remaining within and functioning as its condition. Being Romantics in spir-

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it, they maintain that “the absolute-ideal is the absolute-real” (53), while also stating that “subject and object are in themselves the same” (53). Here the effort to capture the infinite in a finite form has reached a level of identity where each is within each thanks to a principle of neutrality that envelops both: “. . . both subsumed by a higher principle that is the indifference of both nature (Absolute Life) and spirit (Absolute Subject). . . . Absolute indifference is simultaneously both subjective and objective, and neither subjective nor objective” (54). Deleuze formulates a similar principle of indifference not by postulating an enveloping or synthesizing entity, but by establishing a supra-representational component on the same plane along with its counterparts from the order of representation. The impersonal event of sense cuts through the mimetic proposition but is not external to it or derived from it. Rather, it is constitutive of the proposition and remains the very condition for its emergence: a proposition is as long as it has/makes sense. Here it is neither the order of denotation, manifestation, and signification nor the emergence of sense that is prevalent, but rather the processes that issue forth from the interaction and togetherness of the two. In Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (1998), David Loy traces an undercurrent in the history of Western thought that is simultaneously the norm in many Eastern “pre-philosophical” doctrines. Namely, he refers to the discussion of an “apprehended unity” articulated within the philosophical tradition as early as Plotinus (Sixth Ennead IX.10) and re-evoked in supra-philosophical works such as those of Jakob Boehme or William Blake. Within such works, Loy maintains, the world of representation as a collection of objects identifiable as such through a separate human subjectivity remains very much valid and yet, there is another, “nondual” point of access to that same world. It is this latter point of access that supplies an experience of nonduality. Here duality and nonduality begin to function as two versions of the same world region. Deleuze’s work on the event of sense could also be recast into Loy’s scheme: the linguistic proposition contains the event of sense and the utterance’s denotation, manifestation, and signification, thus enveloping both supra-representational and representational regions. Loy speaks of four types of nonduality, the fourth of which he calls “the nonduality of phenomena and Absolute, or, better, the nonduality of duality and nonduality” (5). This arrangement presupposes that “. . . there is only one reality—this world, right here and now—but this world can be experienced in two different ways” (5). Similarly, Deleuze’s logic of expression offers a way of enveloping the orders of representation and supra-representation within an overarching immanence. In a helpful article, Palmer (2004) proposes to think Deleuze’s event of sense through a taxonomy of being consisting of five levels: pure being, process being, hyper being, wild being, and ultra being. While pure being can be aligned with simple deictic acts, the procedure of pointing, and the

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thought of Parmenides, process being is related to “grasping” and the philosophy of Heraclitus. Hyper being can be associated with Heidegger’s treatment of Dasein, and wild being is directly appropriated from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1964). Ultra being, however, is a meta-level for the four dimensions of being at hand, treating being “as an externality.” Palmer describes this procedure as a “crossing over the break between the thinkable and unthinkable” (4) that allows the dimension of ultra being to manifest itself in the process. Referring to “The Intertwining–The Chiasm,” the last chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s last book, The Visible and the Invisible, he points out that wild being is still chiasmatic—“the closest you come to thinking before you reach the frontier of the unthinkable” (4). Deleuze’s philosophy and work on the event of sense have gone one step further by working out a dimension of being that represents precisely the realm of this unthinkable component. What has been traditionally indicated as the “supra-rational,” mostly because of its evasion of classic Aristotelian logical principles, could thus only manifest itself as a non-belonging paradoxical entity within thought. Here we could evoke the host of nonsensical words of which Deleuze prolifically makes use in The Logic of Sense. The logic of expression follows a similar path toward nonduality as it manifests itself as an occurrence “in-between,” perpetuating the folding and unfolding of substance: “Expression is the appearance of the nondual within the intervals of the divided line” (6). Here Deleuze’s expression becomes “the difference” between the folding and unfolding of substance in the motion from one to many, from universals to particulars, from the infinite to the finite. Taking on Deleuze’s discussion of the unfolding from one to many in emanation and the folding from many to one in deemanation, Palmer intensifies Deleuze’s philosophy with a more pronounced articulation of the non-dual perspective, “the background on which one and many are manifested” (13). He calls this manifestation “the supra-rational” as it is indifferent to appeals to paradoxicality. Moreover, this realm of nonduality is what a representational perspective best describes as “nonsense.” Within a regime of nonduality, expression acts like a hermeneutic entity, a milieu that enables the rise of sense. Here expression carries the generative ascent toward what Deleuze names a “secondary organisation” witnessed in the dynamic genesis of language. The secondary organization is also the site where non-sense is converted into sense and the pre-linguistic becomes propositional, that is, a matter of organized language. Yet here the motion of expression does not end up congealing into a representational landscape but also opens a path toward univocity. Within the context of the generative perspective, the domain of nonrepresentation becomes an undercurrent of forces that attains a supralogical status once the tertiary arrangement is established. Sense, the fourth dimension that gives a finishing edge to a proposition, withdraws

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from the region of representation and acquires the position of a hermeneutic “secret” (Derrida and Ferraris 2001). It is precisely because of this pervasive yet non-locatable quality of sense that it is thought in terms of intermediaries, betweenness, and processual back-and-forth movement. Yet it is within concrete utterances and within discrete bodies or bodily mixtures that sense, the expressed as the explication of the gap between the thinkable and the unthinkable, manifests itself. Within the perspective of nonduality, expression is seen as the milieu in which the representational and supra-representational co-exist in a regime of simultaneity (figure 2.6) which does not allow any of the terms to withdraw in a background. Expression here has an intermediary function. It acts as the meta-level that allows us to think the expressed sense and the region of representation in their togetherness by providing an environment in which the terms can be thought simultaneously. The movement of expression enabling the emergence of both representation and the event of sense is a movement of reciprocal presupposition. Being is expressed in many different senses and all expressed senses amount to and gesture back to the expressible substance: “. . . we can see the intimate relation between expressionism and sense because all the senses expressed form the expressible. But the expressible is the articulation of the nondual within Being which escapes monism or dualism or even pure plurality. It cannot be captured by any numerical delimitation just as the substance of God/ Nature in Spinoza’s conception cannot be cut or delimited” (Palmer 2004, 14). Out of this nonduality, the event of sense issues forth as expression moves toward a continuous folding and unfolding. It enwraps both movements, pervading the three “representational” dimensions of the proposition. The element of sense stretches over the remaining three dimensions of the proposition, unifying them. On the one hand, we have the domain of the logical proposition with its representational descriptions. On the other hand, we enter into relations of expressed sense that

Figure 2.6. Nondual co-habitation.

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do not pertain to any referentiality whatsoever. In this situation, “expression” is the very milieu of Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. It enables the transition from one realm to the other as well as the simultaneity of the representational and the supra-representational regions. Whereas expression creates a common environment, the mirror’s two sides—expressed sense and denotation, supra-representation and representation, immanence and transcendence—remain as different as can be. Deleuze likens this logic to the logic encountered in Through the Looking Glass: we have the two sides of a mirror, two discrepant worlds, and the one side is fundamentally dissimilar to the other, yet both are co-constituted by a permeable screen. At the one end we have relations of denotation, whereas the other side shows us a relation of expression. And this arrangement is part not only of the cosmology of the event of sense, but also of the very logic of the linguistic proposition (Deleuze 1990, 25). Here things and their words (or words and their things) continually pass into one another. The psychopomp element of expression secures their passage. Gillham (2005) provides an illustration of the simultaneity of this duality as he sheds light on the work of the constitutive gap inherent in representation. Explaining the convergence of representation and supra-representation within the utterance “found it advisable,” he dwells upon the dual nature of “it.” The word subsists within two senses and carries two dimensions, that of denotation and that of being a bearer of sense from a previous proposition. The two realms converge in a word so ambiguous that it becomes nonsensical, “since they meet one another only at the frontier which they continually stretch” (77). Here, the event of sense is an emergence of another order and texture. It occurs on the border, within the sliding between the two dimensions of the word “it.” In this way, the event of sense could be described as an occurrence on the interface, surfacing as the two dimensions—two mirror images—of a relation oscillate against a backdrop that envelops both. In doing so, this coulisse becomes the carrier of both an immanent and a transcendent mode. This chapter brought together Deleuze’s concepts of “expression” and “sense” as the two protagonists in the genesis of literary worlds in drama. It sketched out a picture in which expression carries the generative motion and the event of sense transpires out of the friction between the regions of words and worlds, simultaneously precipitating a passage toward successive series of expressive motion. In following expression on its way to becoming-sense, I outlined three trajectories. First, having fleshed out the relational and transmissive status of expression, I shifted toward the logic of the linguistic proposition to encounter another connective component, the event of sense. Transposing the work of expression onto the propositional structure, I found Deleuze’s event of sense in the proposition’s verb infinitive, indifferent to subject-predicate arrange-

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ments and remaining unchanged by them. I found sense to be an incorporeal extra, and the space wherein the regions of worlds and words maximally converge. The role of sense within a sentence was shown to be an isomorphic map of expression’s transmission from substance toward ever finer distinctions. Deleuze’s concepts of expression and sense were shown to share a structure and a common principle. The process of distilling a proposition’s sense was aligned with the process of the individuation of being. By positing sense as the expressed of being, however, I also alluded to a generative motion of sense production that reveals the paradox of expression: the expressed does not exist outside of its expressions, yet differs from them in a significant way. Expression and sense, marking the boundary between inherence and participation, were thus shown to be simultaneously “within” and “without,” negotiators between the modes of involvement and exemplariness. Second, I took a brisk look at the ancestors of the event of sense. Kant’s restoration of sense as a transcendental criterion and the supraanthropomorphic philosophy of Jean Hyppolite introducing an entity that is “sense and being simultaneously” (1997, 161) opened up a perspective of immanence. Hegel’s dynamic notion of a self-comprehending Absolute became the antecedent of a processual model of becoming and thus precipitated the introduction of expression’s generative motion. Here I yet again rehearsed the properties of Deleuze’s event of sense: an extra-being, a superadditive component, a non-existence, and an inherence that is both within and without, remaining strictly non-referential. That is to say, sense positions itself outside of being and beyond designation, grows out of the motions of expression, and is yet inextricable from these motions. Third, this chapter showed how the dual logic of univocity and equivocity is enacted in four relations between expression and sense. While the relation of equivalence pointed to an expression-sense overlap, isomorphism revealed an analogical arrangement. The genesis of sense was a vertical movement from expression toward a transcendental field, and nonduality displayed a mode of co-existence between immanence and transcendence within an overarching immanent frame. The readings to follow will also show how these relations between expression and sense lead to the consolidation of literary worlds of very singular ontological texture. But let us first turn to the question of postdramatic in-yer-face theater and see how this phenomenon came to be. NOTES 1. Deleuze’s “bodies” should not necessarily be viewed as anthropomorphic. See Joe Hughes’s Gilles Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (2008). Rather, bodies are aggregates of matter of the “primary order” of The Logic of Sense, where they coexist in

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a “‘corporeal,’ ‘schizophrenic’ mixture of ‘depths’ . . .” and “clash with one another” (23). 2. According to Albert (2001), Deleuzian individuation is inspired by Simondon. In order to substantiate his account of individuation, Simondon uses three auxiliary notions, “haecceity,” “metastability,” and “transduction.” Here, however, I use an unadorned definition of individuation as the becoming of a thing, the coalescence of a “thisness,” or “becoming this thing.” Otherwise the problem of individuation as the “dramatisation of difference” (Toscano 2006, 200) is explored in the monograph The Theatre of Production: Philosophy of Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (2006). 3. By extracting a proposition’s sense as the double of the proposition, the proposition will lay bare a nonsensical, or supra-logical, component, or as Deleuze calls it, “a smile without a cat” and “a flash without a sword.” Hence Deleuze’s paradox of dry reiteration that speaks of the impossibility of a proposition to state its own sense as a proposition cannot be fixed and petrified to such an extent—if it ever is, the result can only be a nonsensical entity (Deleuze 1990, 31–2). 4. Deleuze defines modes as “participial propositions which derive from the primary infinitive ones,” yet a mode can also be understood as “an affection of an attribute” (2005, 105 and 119). 5. In Howie’s terms, the modifications of an attribute are called its descriptions, while the modes operate as the described (2002, 89), just as “the attribute is a description of substance, [and] the mode is a description of the modification” (92). In Wasser’s terms, attributes or expressions are “definitions” (2007, 51) concerning “the internal and expressive constitution of substance” (52). Just as attributes are common to infinite and finite things, so are the modes the bridge between attributes and modifications on the way to ever finer grades within the individuation of substance. Both ground univocal production, with “God” being the immanent cause, that is, a cause such that its effect is contained within it. 6. This duality is set into motion in the book’s Fifth Series of Sense (28–35) wherein the tension between the two dimensions and the work of the element into which they converge create a number of paradoxes. 7. In Logic of Sense, Deleuze aligns this bi-directional movement and simultaneity with becoming. Also, Deleuze’s event of sense as an incorporeal effect distilled out of bodily mixtures is thought in relation to immanent causality as sense is viewed as an effect which is co-extensive with the cause in a way which makes cause and effect nonseparate (70). 8. Deleuze also alludes to a certain commonality of principle between univocal being and the event of sense (Deleuze 1990, 180) as he endows univocal being with the attributes of the event of sense, arguing in turn for its impassive, transmissive, connective, and intermediary status in the communication between worlds and words. 9. Whereas Hegel is an initial influence in this respect, some ten years later Deleuze increasingly turns to Spinoza who rids the system of descent through ever finer distinctions from the negativity of dialectics and proposes a model that is entirely affirmative. A helpful source here is Duffy’s The Logic of Expression (2006). 10. Here one is almost led to infer an evident overlap between the Spinozan and the Hegelian systems inasmuch as they both take on a perspective from within a highest possible yet undifferentiated instance (substance or Absolute) undergoing a self-propelled and self-comprehending motion through which ever finer distinctions are produced. The process involving this production is precisely a genesis that occurs through contractive expression and re-expression. Unlike Kant, who inaugurates the quest for an immanent critique only to scaffold a representational system relying on transcendence and an ineffability (the thing in itself), Hegel does not posit a beyond and a referential concept but a concept that is intrinsic to the given, that is, fully expressive of reality. Lastly, this quasi-creative act, just like with Spinoza, is immanent inasmuch as it has the quality of a gesture: it contains its reference points within itself, is explicative and immediate. The appeal to finitude is another thing that the two philosophers share, as with Spinoza the attributes in which substance expresses its

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essence are themselves expressed in the finite modes, and with Hegel this movement of re-expression is mapped upon the movements of the Absolute toward a final realisation. 11. In Kerslake’s words, “‘What Is Grounding?’ makes it much harder for commentators on Deleuze’s work to claim that he is merely a modern abstract metaphysician, whose problems have no intrinsic relationship with the central problems of the postKantian tradition of philosophical modernity. Isn’t it with Kant that the claim to immanence is first truly justified? The purpose of the Kantian critique is surely to ask how immanence is to be achieved, to ask how it is possible, and to secure it by right against the transgressions of theology and metaphysics. The ancient metaphysical idea of immanence must yield to the project of immanent critique” (Kerslake 2009, 3). The intuition that Deleuze’s philosophy is a response to and a continuation of the Kantian critique is taken further in Joe Hughes’s Philosophy after Deleuze (2012). 12. See Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000a), 220–239. 13. A reassessment of the relationship between Kant and Spinoza is offered in Lord’s Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (2011). Whereas it remains unclear whether Kant was familiar with Spinoza’s ideas and despite speculations that he would have at best dismissed them, especially given the largely derogatory and reductive German translations and commentaries in the eighteenth century (Lord 2011, 4–6), it is also unlikely that he could have been indifferent to them. According to Lord, an encounter between the two thinkers should have taken place at least through the work of Christian Wolff, Leibniz, and Hume. The suggestion that Kant’s rejection of unity could be seen as an “upholding of a principle of difference” (Lord 2011, 183) in which the idealist philosopher “shares with Spinoza a fundamental belief of the irreducibility of the difference of being and thought” (183) would make both immanent philosophers of difference. 14. As Bryant remarks with reference to the event of sense, “Rather than unconditioned conditions after the manner of Kant, we instead encounter a domain independent of both subjects and objects (but nonetheless immanent to them), which is populated by ideal events as tendency-subjects presiding over the genesis of subjects and objects” (2008, 2010). In other words, the event of sense is impassive and irreducible to the realm of subjects and objects: it is not conditioned by them or subsisting in a necessary relation to the given. Yet it is immanent to them and remains their effect, all the while being their condition of possibility. The event of sense is constitutive of subjects and objects. Events can be aligned with Bryant’s “tendency-subjects” inasmuch as they remain “indifferent” to the given but at the same time donate an “affection” as a potentiality in the realm of subjects and objects. The event as a machine for the distribution of singularities effects exactly this—the self-realization of being (Deleuze 1990, 103). 15. Deleuze subjects Kantian consciousness to some transformations. More on the reconfiguration of the Kantian category of the transcendental, with the subject installed at its very center, into a schizophrenic desiring subject can be found in David Lane’s article “The Worldly and the Otherworldly: On the Utopianism of Deleuze’s Thought” (2008). 16. Zourabichvili states that “there is no ontology of Deleuze. Neither in the vulgar sense of a metaphysical discourse which could inform us, in the last instance, what is there of reality . . . Nor in the deeper sense of primacy of being over knowledge” (2012, 36). The contention here is that, since the question of the event of sense is not a question of being, event philosophy cannot be named an ontology in the strict sense. 17. Another way to illustrate this, as Hughes notes, would be through the relation between voice and “meaningful” sound. The relation between voice and sound is not causal, but one of simultaneity. It is not that sound is extracted by voice but rather, voice is the condition of possibility of sound. It occurs simultaneously with it but remains shaded by its concreteness. Voice recedes to the background as the transmis-

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sion of a “meaningful” utterance takes over. Similarly, sense inheres in the proposition without being part of it but also without offering the possibility of being extracted independently. It conditions the proposition and produces it at the same time, but only while remaining a haunting presence within it.

THREE Words and Worlds in a Literary Machine

This chapter looks at the phenomenon of postdramatic in-yer-face theater. The problematic classification and utter strangeness of in-yer-face compel us to seek ways to come to terms with its presence, and ways that are not necessarily experiential. The present chapter shows how the theoretical scaffold drafted out in chapter 2 and the conceptual landscapes drawn in chapter 1 intertwine to tell a story of functionality. In doing so, this book remains on the lookout for vestiges of the work of Deleuze’s event of sense. I look at the traces and ruptures events leave on the fabric of a literary world, and the way an event of sense refolds the pleats and recomposes the structure of its milieu. The entwinement of expression, the generative procedure of mimesis in the constitution of literary worlds, and the event of sense, the extra-ontological component within representation, takes place in four modes: equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. IN-YER-FACE THEATER The phenomenon called in-yer-face theater surfaced as part of PostThatcherite contexts 1 such as the “nasty nineties” (Sierz 2000, 30–35) and Tony Blair’s era of “Cool Britannia.” Characterized as a “calculated mix of New Labour, Brit-Pop, and Ben and Jerry’s” (Urban 2001, 39), that social epoch showed a flipside that was nothing less than “blatant, aggressive, emotionally dark” (Sierz 2000, 30). Confrontational theater of the 1990s was called “New Brutalism” and “Nihilism,” and assigned names such as “New Jacobeanism” (Sierz 2004b, 51), “Neo-Jacobeanism,” “Theatre of Urban Ennui,” and “Cruel Britannia” 2 (Urban 2008a, 150). 77

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Yet it was Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2000) that established the term “in-yer-face.” To Sierz, in-yer-face is the substrate of a certain theatrical continuity that involves stagings of emotionally disturbing material extending back to plays as early as Edward Bond’s Saved (1965). And it was the first production of Blasted (1995) by Sarah Kane that “publicized both the idea of transgression and the notion that a new sensibility had arrived” (Sierz 2000, 120). In this way, an earlyJanuary performance at the Royal Court marked the arrival of a presence “still deeply traumatic to the English theatre” (Waters 2006, 380). A revival of New Writing 3 in 1991–1992 paved the way for this new type of theater, with names such as Jez Butterworth, David Eldridge, David Greig, Nick Grosso, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower, Sarah Kane, Ayub Khan-Din, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Phyllis Nagy, Anthony Neilson, Joe Penhall, Rebecca Prichard, Mark Ravenhill, Philip Ridley, Judy Upton, and Naomi Wallace surfacing almost simultaneously. The Royal Court, 4 still a haven for the avant-garde, was also the theater that hosted the majority of in-yer-face productions. The inventory associated with this new form of theater included “explicit scenes of sex or violence to explore the extremes of human emotion,” “breaking of taboos,” “vulgar language” and the aesthetics of “experiential theatre” 5 (Sierz 2002, 19). Yet in-yer-face primarily functioned as a response to a specific ideological atmosphere that conjured up a “media hype machine” set to “sell a revamped Left” in the early 1990s. The rebranding of British theater came about as a logical consequence of this effort, gentrifying the avant-garde and transporting its structures of hysterical addiction to novelty to the studio play. The political rebranding of Britain 6 began with New Labour’s election in 1997 and was, as Harvie describes in Staging the UK, “roundly derided in the UK, both because it too shamelessly commodified culture and because it seemed probably optimistic and certainly opportunistic, conjuring images of a delighted Tony Blair perched ludicrously on the coattails of bands such as Oasis and artists such as Damien Hirst” (2005, 17). Harvie describes the British theater under New Labour as marked by “individual creativity, isolationism, and anti-theatricality,” 7 all three being negatively connoted as establishing “a vision of the British theatre industry as not only romantically naïve but also hierarchical and fundamentally resistant to practices of devising and/or collaborating” (2005, 116). Against such tendencies, Sierz’s words echo as an appeal for an appreciation of fringe theater and the autonomy of its aesthetics: “the hegemony of social realism or naturalism is, like other hegemonies, not just one innocent preference for one aesthetic or another. No, it’s a cultural mindset that only works by excluding, by marginalizing, by belittling any theatre that doesn’t obey the right dress code” (2008b, 102). In-yerface offers glimpses into a “theatrical theatre par excellence” (103) within a landscape where naturalism remains a presence both persistent and

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overwhelming. Examining the current state of British theatre, almost a decade after the beginnings of in-yer-face, Sierz reaches the conclusion that “writers such as Laura Wade (Breathing Corpses) are at their best when their poetry fractures the form of their plays. But elsewhere, the straitjacket of naturalism remains tightly buttoned up” (106). These contexts show a more nuanced picture of fringe theater of the 1990s. Whereas in-yer-face more or less consciously positioned itself against the cultural politics of Cool Britannia, it could just as easily be instrumentalized as a carrier of New Labour’s visions of the new. At the same time, audience preferences for naturalist plays remained a muchfelt reality that even now continues to affect the work of critics 8 and younger dramatists. One essay problematizing the backdrop that conditioned the beginnings of in-yer-face is Sierz’s “Cool Britannia? ‘In-YerFace’ Writing in the British Theatre Today.” The essay examines in-yerface as an aspect of the “putative cultural renaissance much hyped as Cool Britannia” (1998, 324) and in the context of Lyotard’s demise of grand narratives, postmodernism’s fascination with surfaces, and a media-induced emphasis on violence. Sierz points out that the flipside of this hype is the fact that plays such as Trainspotting, Blasted, and Mojo ultimately built a mainstream in its own right. Against this backdrop, the question of whether the plays of the 1990s posed cases of “exciting, fresh controversy,” or were rather calculated political acts, remains open. Whereas Sierz continues to maintain that the agility of in-yer-face lies in “the directness of its shock tactics, the immediacy of its language, the relevance of its themes, and the stark aptness of its stage pictures” (1998, 333), more skeptical critics, such as Nikcevic, contend these were calculatedly sought-out plays “that would respond to a phantasmatic Zeitgeist” (2005, 262), yet represented nothing less than British appropriations of the larger movement of New European Drama. The question of individual talent and the extent to which its proclamation is a political decision also becomes poignant here. One example of such tendentiousness is the hype surrounding the suicide of Sarah Kane. It marked the end of in-yer-face theater and, paradoxically, the beginning of its academic appreciation. In the aftermath, “suddenly everyone could decipher beauty, poetry and truth in Kane’s plays, together with her portrayal of reality and political stance” (2005, 266). Aleks Sierz reassesses the concept of in-yer-face in the article “We All Need Stories” (2008a). Here he weighs his coinage against Ken Urban’s term Cruel Britannia and earlier labels such as New Brutalism. Sierz decides in favor of “in-yer-face” as it enables us to speak of theater in interactionist terms, putting an emphasis on its unsettling and confrontational nature, its status as praxis, and the effects it seeks to create in audiences. As Sierz points out, the elusive label “in-yer-face” reveals an even more unstable and shapeshifting concept. The concept has evolved from “a menu of ingredients” (29) including explicit scenes of violence,

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abusive language, and emotional intensity to a larger canvas of conceptual constellations that becomes difficult to frame: “when theatre makes you squirm inside with its depiction of emotionally fraught relationships and extreme states of mind, then it is justifiably named ‘in-yer-face’” (29). Still, even such characterizations cannot capture the kind of sensibility that extends over a larger set of plays and incorporates the work of established authors such as Caryl Churchill or Martin Crimp. 9 Given this limitation, Sierz chooses to opt for undecidability and an awareness of the fact that any clear-cut definition is exclusionist rather than helpful: In-yer-face theater is less a school of writing or a movement than a series of networks, in which individuals such as Neilson, Ravenhill and Kane formed temporary milieus. Perhaps the best metaphor for in-yerface writing is that of an arena, an imaginary place that can be visited or passed through, a spot where a writer can grow up, or where they can return to after other adventures. (Sierz 2000, 248–9)

In the context of such inclusive definitions, stagings of cruelty become “a means of both reflecting and challenging the despair of contemporary urban life, shaped by global capitalism and cultural uniformity” (Urban 2008b, 39), an approach that reaches toward “the ethical possibilities of an active nihilism” (39). In Urban’s view, Cruel Britannia as a reaction to current social and cultural trends incarnates a logic of Verwindung and nihilism working toward “a contemporary vision of the tragic” (2004, 369). In view of this perspective, I see in-yer-face as part of a theatrical continuum. The phenomenon is deeply rooted in a tradition 10 marked by Royal Court productions such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), “when a new play changed the mindset of British culture” (Sierz 2011b, 17), the infamous staging of Saved (1965) by Edward Bond, or Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980). Yet it also shares many features ubiquitous in Renaissance drama, such as subversive political undertones and sheer relish in prolific bloodshed. In this respect, in-yerface is not only reminiscent of works such as Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II or Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Changeling, but incorporates direct infusions of intertext. Such is the case with Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, whose line “Love me or kill me” famously reappears in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. After years of censorship, the nineties witnessed a revival in Jacobean tragedy with stagings that relished in torture, cruelty, and vengeance. 11 The era of in-yer-face was also marked by a rekindled interest in Greek tragedy (Sierz 2000, 10) with its themes of suicide, cannibalism, incest, infanticide, or mutilation, and exposing audiences to contemporaneous readings of figures such as Medea, Phaedra, and Thyestes. In attempting to answer the question as to why images of tortured bodies and dismemberment proliferated in the 1990s, Rebellato traces the

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work of the Young British Artists, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Jenny Saville. They share a certain notion that the human body is in crisis. Experiments such as The Visible Human, along with art works such as Four Scenes of a Harsh Life (1993) by Ron Athey and Stelarc’s Fractal Flesh (1995) exposed the precariousness of corporeality under the sway of invisible forces but also the prodigious ability of bodies to bend and transmute into other forms. In-yer-face could also be seen as a reaction to this, thinks Rebellato, with dramatists such as Kane “responding subliminally to a shift in the cultural imagination” (2008, 197). A recent examination of the state of British New Writing also concludes that timidity and adherence to status quo aesthetics can only be overcome by addressing the “irrepressible, untamed quality of the imagination” (Sierz 2005, 61) by putting forward “a project to create a new idea of the human” (61). A year earlier, in 2004, Sierz published a polemical essay posing the question of whether, a decade after the first in-yer-face debuts, timidity had come back to haunt British theater (2004a, 79). Against a backdrop of prolific funding 12 and numerous new plays on the assembly line, Sierz reintroduces the problem of quality and questions the very possibility of finding distinctive new voices. 13 Although the general atmosphere of the early 2000s—plays produced in bulk, names surfacing shortly never to reappear—was important in excavating talents such as Laura Wade, the matters of questionable quality and “audiences spoilt for choice” (Sierz 2004a, 81) remain relevant. Sierz acknowledges that, in the meantime, even in-yer-face has quietly carved its way into the mainstream (2006b, 23–38). All the while, in examining the state of British theater beyond 2005, he notes that terms such as “alternative” and “fringe” have become obsolete, and still no new name has presented itself yet: “perhaps it is only when a new sensibility is being born, as in-yer-face theater was in 1994–1996, that the fringe can come into its own as a territory which stages works not yet recognized by the mainstream” (2006b, 38). Though not without a tinge of nostalgia, such statements testify to the uniqueness of the momentum that in-yer-face represented. ELEMENTS, DELINEATION, INEPTITUDE In-yer-face is rooted in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Similar to in-yer-face dramatists, Artaud explored the ruptures and the breakage points of language: “It is not a question of eliminating spoken language but of giving words something of the importance they have in dreams” (1932, 191). One specific quality of in-yer-face, however, was its shock effect. This distinguished it from the Theatre of Cruelty practiced in the 1960s and made it more attuned to the work of dramatists such as Edward Bond or Ann Jellicoe (Tönnes 2010, 3). Brechtian influences are noticeable as well, particularly in Churchill and Kane. Berns locates these in the transitions

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“from farcical representations of characters to political/historical discourse” (2003, 58) and in the “innovative and more inclusive ways of historicizing events” (58). In-yer-face expanded and radicalized the repertoire of epic theater inasmuch as the epic Gestus now extended over a series of montages of styles. A proximity to the aesthetics of Expressionist theater is also visible. In the wake of “the crisis experienced by the Drama at the end of the nineteenth century as the literary form embodying the 1) always present, 2) interpersonal, 3) event” (Szondi 1987, 45), plays of the Aristotelian stripe gave way to the introduction of Naturalism, the conversation play, the one-act play, and existentialism. One of the “tentative solutions” to the crisis of drama that Szondi suggests in his Theory of the Modern Drama (1956) is the Expressionist play as it “gives dramatic form to the individual, to his journey through an alienated world, rather than to interpersonal actions” (65). In-yer-face theater retains this focus on an individual and the psychic landscapes created thereby. In view of subjectivity’s simultaneous constitution, de-constitution, exhaustion, and extension into a world, in-yer-face theater has often been read as an example of Late Modernist and Expressionist theater. As Szondi notes, Expressionism’s “exclusive focus on the subject finally leads to the undermining of that same subject, this art, as the language of extreme subjectivity, loses its ability to say anything essential about the subject. On the other hand, the formal emptiness of the I precipitates as the stylistic principle of expressionism—as the ‘subjective distortion’ of the objective” (65). In-yer-face productions of the nineties attest to a similar depletion of subjectivity that ultimately turns out to be productive. Apart from formal elements, the theater of the 1990s also exposes Expressionist themes. Two of the elements of in-yer-face are a direct aftermath of the Expressionist preoccupation with the category of the human. Nudity, often associated with victimization (Sierz 2000, 31), becomes a signpost for a new sensibility that exposes the fragility of bodies. Violence onstage, though contingent on directorial decisions, also gains a symbolic quality. In creating unstageable stage directions and impossible scenarios, such as rats gnawing at wounds, electrocution, or the severing of feet and hands, Kane, for instance, insisted on the difference between hyper-real and symbolic violence. 14 Instead of treating violence as an absolute to be glamorized, Kane endowed it with a formal function: the function of imparting a state. In view of this, Sierz’s formal recipe for creating an in-yer-face piece—“subvert the idea of a coherent character; turn scenes into flexible scenarios; substitute brief messages or poetic clusters for text; mix clever dialogue with brutal images; stage the show as an art installation” (2000, 33)—could almost be read as a description of an Expressionist play. Against this backdrop, the provisional definition of in-yer-face as “any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck” (Sierz 2000,

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4) exposes the same limitations as labels of the type “theatre of sensation,” an “aesthetics of shock,” or “experimental theatre” (4) do. Images of transgression, while a perennial presence that hearkens back to Renaissance drama, acquire a new dimension. Not only do they “tap into more primitive feelings . . . creating discomfort” (4), but they also compel audiences to “see something close up” and “react” (5). In the light of this, the Sierz emphasizes the non-dogmatic and non-programmatic character of in-yer-face, refusing to contain it within a solid definition. Rather, he turns to a more elusive capture of the phenomenon as a “sensibility,” an atmosphere and a mood: “In-yer-face theatre is new sensibility . . . it’s an aesthetic style, not a movement. Some writers write lots of in-yer-face plays, some use elements of this sensibility; others just write one in-yerface play and then move on” (2000, 114). Provocation, shock effects, and a wish to unsettle spectators remain parts of this aesthetic. Yet, in-yer-face is primarily hinged on its transporting quality. That it to say, in-yer-face is interesting not so much because of its ability to “bring us to deeper insights about human existence” (Müller-Wood 2010, 14), but because of its capacity to bring us in connection with an impersonal force that is indifferent to human action, yet “hovers over” (Deleuze 1990, 221) bodies and organizes their being. In this sense, a significant borrowing from Expressionism—apart from its formal vocabulary—is the preoccupation with bodily vulnerability. And what is borrowed from Artaud is not necessarily the taste for physical and linguistic mutilation, but the presentation of a theatrical immediacy that articulates bodily exposure to the fortuity of individuating forces. This immediacy, rather than aiming to bring spectators to an emotional shock, is the precise location wherein the impassive Deleuzian event of sense is at work. A question arises: how do we account for the impersonal quality that appears to be ubiquitous in in-yer-face and yet is invariably elusive? Are not violence, nudity, shock tactics, and abusive language the formal components that seek to reach out toward another realm—a region that negotiates the interface between finitude and the infinite? Is not this delving into the quality of “being human” also a means of gesturing beyond humanness and, at the same time, yet again rehearse the divide between universals and particulars—this time through an entity that is the very incarnation of this divide? In any case, the ineptitude of our existing tools manifests itself as we turn to the plays. One testimony to this is the confusion arising out of an encounter with the work of Martin Crimp: Some of the narrative ploys used by Crimp suggest that perhaps our methodology for studying playwrights and their work is a bit oldfashioned. For example, the common use of the distinction between story as independent ‘events’ and plot as an artificial ordering of them is epistemologically compromised in his most paradigm-shifting work. Not only is the plot fractured and self-imploding, but the story is fugi-

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POSTDRAMATIC TENDENCIES AND MISE-EN-PAGE Because of its emphasis on interaction with a spectatorship and affective aesthetics, in-yer-face is oftentimes aligned with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater. As Lehmann notes: “4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane would almost have to be invented as one of the great texts in analogy to postdramatic theatre if it did not already exist” (2006, ix). Lehmann’s vision of the postdramatic molds “an energetic theatre, a theatre of intensities” which “does not represent, but gestures toward reality” (VoigtsVirchow 2010, 158). It exceeds even the radical epic theater as it strips the theatrical reality down to an event structure carrying a potential for experience: the “predominance of the theatron-axis” is linked with an “emphasis on the shaping of a situation and an Ereignis (event) instead of a work” (Lehmann 2007, 43). Lehmann delineates this emergent event structure in communicational terms as the moment of congruence or “communion” taking place in the interaction of performance and spectatorship. The introduction of the theatrical event builds on Szondi’s concern about the crisis of drama and Aristotle’s model of an action-driven plot governed by a causal network of probability and necessity. The theatrical event evades significatory modes to create “a field, a dissemination of possible modes of signifying which in turn calls forward the active productivity of the audience, thus emphasizing once more the situation of the theatre event” (Lehmann 2007, 48). Postdramatic theater favors the “suspension of linearity” and “looks to the paradigm of the dream as a formal means of frustrating the thematic flow of time. Dreams are episodic and non-linear, meaning is dispersed throughout their structures, so that, for example, knowledge of a dream’s conclusion may not shed any revelatory light on the dream’s possible significance” (Barnett 2008, 15). Such structures are clearly observable in the plays of Kane, but also in the work of Churchill and Crimp, yet no less in Laura Wade. The latter, while not entirely departing from dramatic conventions, carefully envelops uneasy topics in the mundane, creating a havoc of uncertainty. Postdramatic theater reclaims narrative as well: “all that is ever delivered is a quotation, it is never suggested that the

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speaker is the originator” (Barnett 2008, 20). Like epic theater, it diegetically “narrates the event,” whereas dramatic theater mimetically “embodies” it (Szondi 1987, 70). The presence of speaking voices thus ceases to amount to a certainty in constituted subjectivities or the significance of the spoken word: “The principle of narration is an essential trait of postdramatic theater; the theater becomes a site of a narrative act. . . . One often feels as though one is witnessing not a scenic representation but a narration of the play presented” (Lehmann 2006, 109). The category of character undergoes a dispersion, 15 as does the notion of plot: “Kane has certainly arranged and ordered her scenes—there are repetitions, echoes, and changes in cadence—but there is neither cause, nor effect, nor development. . . . The architecture of the play is deliberate but the sequence is not predicated upon the demands of a plot; no story emerges from the chaos” (Barnett 2008, 21). Yet the emphasis in postdramatic theater, as Lehmann stresses, falls on the void between a performance and its recipients, as it is in this emptiness that the theatrical event takes place. Within this framework, theater no longer needs clearly defined holistic figures represented by actors. Nor does it require the category of character. As the moment of interaction becomes supra-linguistic and moves into the ritualistic communion between stage and spectatorship, it can even take place without the articulation of dialogue. 16 The stage also need not be a dramatic space that hearkens back to the spatial representation of an actual locale. The goal being “immediacy,” the metamorphosis of representation into presentation 17 is transported into audiences and made an experiential unit: “Instead of a linguistic re-presentation of facts and meanings, we find a disposition and a position of tones, tonalities, words, sentences, sounds which are not so much controlled by meaning but exposed as a material open to manifold possibilities of understanding” (Lehmann 2007, 50). Still, the postdramatic notion of “theatre without drama, i.e., without the representation of a closed-off fictional cosmos, the mimetic staging of a fable” (introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby in Lehmann 2006, 3) so radically divides the written text and the act of its embodied presentation, that it almost makes scripts redundant. The text for the theater is no longer a work carefully prepared in solitude but becomes a tool among tools, a collaborative product drafted and altered during rehearsals. The institution of drama as literature is more or less perceived as antiquated and inadequate, but most inimically, as a perpetuator of representation, the violent aesthetics of the status quo. To Lehmann, the dissolution of drama into theater ultimately coincides with the dissolution of the primacy of a written text into a constellatory network of becoming that involves the staging of a play as a multimedial performance of light and voices: “this theatre without drama paradoxically becomes all the more ‘theatre.’ Despite the interweaving of many levels, the ‘rhizome’ of media images, apparatuses, structures of light and performers does not fall apart. It is

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kept together by the formal rigour and by the spoken text. Thus the spoken language, which is devalued as individual psychological characterization, assumes the role of a constitutive, connecting element binding the whole performance together” (Lehmann 2006, 115). To him, then, the downplaying of drama is ultimately a positive gesture that allows us to see beyond “the overwhelming burden of a tradition rich in dramatic literature” (121). Against this backdrop, I feel that I should turn back to words on page and seek another, somewhat ethereal, event there—an event of sense embedded in language and carrying the emergence of literary worlds. In doing so, I look at a number of plays that go by the name of in-yer-face or “experiential theatre” and are mostly defined in terms of their interactionist potential and their ability to impose the intricate politics of affect on audiences. Here I show that what is perceived as various acts of violence is a formal effect emerging out of the work of an event within the plays. By employing the concept of the “event,” I do not imply Lehmann’s treatment of the term as an interactionist communion and a shared moment of significance. Rather, I turn to Deleuze’s concept of the “event of sense.” My readings thus enact the work of a theater of concepts that plays itself out on the written page. Herein concepts as philosophical protagonists begin to animate literary worlds. Within this milieu, drama generates its own events within a word-work fit as its generative motions allow us to witness acts of creation mise en page. So far, the study of drama has had to confront verdicts such as Szondi’s “crisis of drama,” Barish’s “anti-theatrical prejudice,” Poschmann’s dissolution of the connection between drama and theater, and Lehmann’s “theatre without drama.” Theatricality has increasingly become synonymous with an enactment on stage, its embodiment in performance, and the intertwining of stage and spectatorship. Theater becomes “no longer dramatic” (Poschmann), “postdramatic” (Lehmann), and “anti-theatrical” (Puchner). Drama and theater have been faltering in their relationship as form and medium, and it is becoming increasingly uncertain which is which since the transition from script to performance is no longer perceived as a switch in medium but rather as an extension of form. At times, even, it seems that the voicing of anti-dramatic sentiment is almost a prerequisite for a meaningful conversation about theater. Scholarship on plays as “reading drama” with singular orthography, grammaticality, punctuation, or page layouts—and such is the case with Kane, Crimp, Churchill, and Wade—has been pushed to the fringes of discourse. Yet the status of drama as a literary “work” and the exploration of formally dramatic “texts” for the theater have led to the notion of textual theatricality. This is what Worthen calls mise en page in his Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (2005). In exploring forms of typographical enactment taking place on the printed page, his book speaks in favor of the aesthetic autonomy of the theatrical script. According to Worthen,

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playwrights use the “accessories of the page” in order to turn the printed medium into a stage, “a site of performance” (2005, 11–12). Apart from the generic conventions regarding the layout of the printed page that make the dramatic form what it is—author’s notes, stage directions in italics, numbered scenes, slashes, pauses, character names in bold type, and so on—playwrights often make use of idiosyncratic textual markers. One instance is Kane’s note in the beginning of Crave: “Punctuation is used to indicate delivery, not to conform to the rules of grammar” (1998, 1). This is oftentimes done to induce a poetic effect (Worthen 2005, 137–59). Further examples are found in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis with its blank pages and dispersed numbers reminiscent of the condensed wording in Imagist poetry or Mallarmé’s words in flight. Stage directions that dominate an otherwise frugal dialogue, such as those in Kane’s Cleansed, or unfinished, barely grammatical sentences meant to replicate scripts of natural narrative, such as Laura Wade’s, also perform a function that can only be thematized within a non-theatrical setting. As Hauthal points out, texts for the theater manifest a certain opacity of the textual medium. The recipients’ attention shifts to a text’s medial qualities. 18 The tensions emerging out of this type of interaction with the text (2009, 150) are different from the tensions enacted in a performance whereby a text’s own theatricality is developed. 19 In this sense, plays such as Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis impart “a wider concept of performance” (Worthen 2005, 146). Against this backdrop, we can view Kane’s work as “a dramatised poem” (Blattes 2006) in which even the arrangement of words on the page has a profound theatrical effect: Whatever interpretation chosen, the reader cannot but notice that the eye strays across the page, left to right, up and down, searching for meaning. The page becomes a kind of stage. The reader is liberated from the steady, forward, left to right movement of the act of reading. Here a variety of movement and rhythm . . . similar to what might be achieved through movement on the stage, is brought into play. (Blattes 2006, 106)

Sierz also takes part in the discourse about the enactment of the printed medium. He notes the importance of orthography in Crimp and the use of linguistic devices to convey evasion, miscommunication, and incomprehension: “A writer’s distinctive voice is conveyed by marks on the page: . . . The Country’s five acts [are] denoted by Roman numerals, in keeping with the play’s references to Virgil. The several mentions of scissors in the text correspond to the slashes in the text, which mean that one character cuts into another’s speech” (Sierz 2006c, 122–4). Then, in an article on Kane, Ruby Cohn attests to a certain epigrammatic flair in Crave, highlighting the use of verbal techniques such as “rhyme, meter, fragmentation, contradiction, yes-no sequences, quotation, and occasional word-awareness” that create “an architecture based on linguistic tech-

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niques” (2001, n.p.). In view of these, we can return to the point of the study of drama without theater. Herein drama reveals tensions of its own notwithstanding its enactment. Parallel to Lehmann’s theatrical event as a communion, another event that is purely a language effect within drama presents itself. Within this arrangement, speaking gestures do not amount to utterances echoed from within a prison house, 20 but become carriers of Deleuze’s events of sense. In this way, I arrive at a certain site of performance within drama—a performance of concepts and their interactions, but also a performance of the materiality of language and form. CONSTELLATIONS Creating a divide between representation and expression is a practice more common than one can imagine. Predominantly representational texts sporadically manifest unruly, expressionist features. Then, works that come across as thoroughly unrecognizable expose a need to be secondarily mimeticized and thus appropriated. Such normalizing practices, however, only deem the distant recognizable and serve a purpose of meaning ascription. Rather than mimeticizing or seeking ruptures of non-representation into what is a predominantly representational scenario, I follow an ontology of emergence. Here I show how an overarching rule of expression pervades scaffolded literary worlds, be they the result of the molding of mimetic isomorphism or immanent genesis, equivalence or nonduality. In articulating the ways in which the concept of the event of sense assumes form here, I follow a well-known refrain from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? The book states that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (1991, 471). Yet concepts are seldom monolithic. Rather, they are constellatory aggregates of conceptual groupings. As a concept, “expression” becomes the reification of the relation between serial arrangements within words and worlds. Within utterances, one is to seek a shift in significance, a transition from one value to another—namely, an event of sense. Should states of affairs be touched upon, a cosmology of events becomes palpable. Yet this distinction remains only nominal. Sense and event are interchangeable inasmuch as the event is always an event of sense and the emergence of sense has the status of an event. Expression, again, is the generative procedure by virtue of which a transition to the order of sense takes place. The evental component issues forth while pointing to its own status as an intervening screen—within and without, simultaneously immanent and transcendent. This is an envelopment of nonduality that offers ground for the co-subsistence of immanence and transcendence. These components become synonymous

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with the regions of sense and of representation, “the magician-king and the jurist priest . . ., raj and Brahman, the binder and the organiser” (Deleuze and Guattari 2010, 3). A comment voiced in passing thus becomes programmatic: “. . . we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence that a breach is expected” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 47). Similarly, the discussed plays enfold in a regime of overarching immanence whereby literary worlds of either an immanent or a transcendent cast are continually being constituted. As Beatrice Monaco notes, “the difficulty of bringing philosophical concepts to narrative is not inconsiderable . . . Hence there is a strong sense in which the theory impels us theorists to form our own critical machines in response to it” (2008, 4). At the same time, Deleuze’s lack of sympathy toward interpretation has also been thematized. 21 Here I take the stance that “literary works do not mean so much as they function. When properly constructed, they are machines that make something happen” (Bogue 2003, 187). I see the discussed plays as constellatory aggregates of motions of expression congealing into events of sense. They do not aim to mean but rather are there to perform their own onto-constitution. What this performance delivers is a glimpse at how expression and sense intertwine in the congealment of literary worlds. Against this backdrop, I see postdramatic plays as practices of world making. The expression of the relation between words and worlds becomes an event of sense emerging in the in-between ground of the transmission between the wordly and worldly regions. Within this constitutive vacuity, the relations into which expression and sense enter shape literary worlds and render visible their ontological commitments. In showing how literary worlds assume form on the fault lines between the series of worlds and words, I also show how and where the doubly pointed transmission of the relation between the series of worlds and words is at work. Here the introduction of an event of sense alters events along the serial chain, and arrangements of immanence and transcendence continually transpire within the interserial region of constitutive emptiness. All the while, the effect of this play of contingencies is an entity that manifests itself exactly as expressed sense. Deleuze’s ontological monism defends the notion that a world has no beyond, and that there is one “single and same sense, . . . but that in which it is said differs . . .” (Deleuze 1994, 36). Similarly, the continuity that expression donates in the regions of worlds and words pertains to a same sense, but is said of two divergent orders. On the one hand, we have nominal fixtures within a process forever rehearsing the interplay of “withinness” and “withoutness.” On the other hand, such nominally discrete terms continually extend toward their serial counterparts, ultimately flowing into them. It is this process that

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creates “the sense of a constantly shifting ground” (Cull 2013, 9) within the play of expression. The transposition from one order to the other ceases to work within a theory of (referential) meaning but proceeds by virtue of (evental) significance. Rather than engaging in matching similarities, the logic of expression effects shifts in value that amount to the gradual scaffolding of worlds. The domain of expression is a pre-representational region wherein process and extension do not replace representational recognition and analogy but witness their very constitution. The logic and “procedure of representation” (Lecercle 2002, 56), then, is seen in the making. Enacting the work of concepts unto plays, I structure my readings after the serial form of The Logic of Sense. Each section takes on a particular problem and seeks to resolve it with recourse to the paradoxical component that governs it, the constitution of or movement toward a surface of sense, or the distribution of singularities across a serial chain. Just as each section in Logic incorporates queries related to the status of the event of sense, so does each of my readings look at a particular “subterranean” movement within the event problematic. In this way, each reading delves into a particular facet of the event concept and the problematic attached to it, opening toward the works’ “affective and asignifying potential” (O’Sullivan 2008, 144) yet only beckoning toward it without a pretense to prescribe or resolve. Each reading gestures back toward the overarching concept of the event of sense while bringing forth its own particular problematic. The result is a wealth of adjacent problematics and inflections within the concept. Statements echoing Structuralism and the linguistic turn are an invariable part of the project of the event of sense. One the one hand, structure acts as a condition of possibility that allows the singular to issue forth whereby language is yet another facet of the order of representation. Representation continually manifests its constructedness by way of linguistic procedures involving “difference, separation, replacement, hierarchy, generalisation/abstraction . . . between representative and represented” (Lecercle 2002, 58). The palimpsest of evental infusions, on the other hand, works with “a logic of circulation, not of representation” (Lecercle 2002, 74). Here language enables the rise of an entity that is at once specifically linguistic and surpassing its status as a linguistic given: “modern literature is usually found to be working against the possibility of language, in the sense that it brings language beyond its limit conditions (in silence and nonsense)” (Lambert 1997, 142–3). While grounded in and distilled from the body (bodily noise, motions, the sounds of a chewing mouth), language surpasses it to shift toward a beyond. It is only through bodies that language can become manifest. Yet language also exceeds bodies, ultimately becoming something that is not entirely of them. Here we simultaneously have an ontological arrangement based on division and a procedure of circulation. Within this palimpsest arrangement, both the orders of representation and the supra-representational

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event are present in such a way that both include both. A rule of withinness and a rule of withoutness are constantly at work. Univocity, “a single voice for every hum of voices,” issues forth together, and not in opposition to, transcendence. Whereas a Structuralist procedure works with the representational components that language reveals, a procedure of circulatory sense works with the virtuality of language. Here, the dialectic of presence and absence is layered over the rule of disjunctive syntheses and flows, creating a simultaneity. TRAJECTORIES The place of the entwinement of expression and the event of sense becomes a place of emergence. Within this locale, four relations capture the movement toward sense: equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. These relations present the exact points of juncture within a play wherein expression and sense interact, reshuffling an existing literary system or laying bare its ontological arrangement. Here I see the fabric of drama as a complex system that might break, at times, at the sway of fortuity, but may also manifest resilience and recompose after an evental infusion reshuffles its existing pattern. Protevi calls such behavior “diachronic emergence”: Some stable systems are “brittle”—they can be broken and die. Some systems are “resilient” however: a sign or trigger that provokes a response that overwhelms its stereotyped defensive patterns and pushes the system beyond the threshold of its comfort zones will not result in death but in the creation of new attractors representing new behaviours. We call this “learning.” . . . Sometimes, however, this learning is truly creation: we call this “evolution,” or as we will see, “diachronic emergence.” . . . Diachronic emergence: the production of new patterns and thresholds of behaviour, is what Deleuze will call an “event,” which is not to be confused with a mere switch between already established patterns or with the trigger or “external event” that pushes the system past a threshold and produces the switch. The Deleuzian event repatterns a system. . . . An event, in creating new patterns and thresholds, restructures the virtual. (2006, 23)

Resolving the puzzle of the event of sense remains, however, an inquiry that looks into the perturbations within the very concept rather than the delivery of a historical survey. And the question of the event of sense remains an ontological one. Deleuze’s contribution lies in the foregrounding of the functionality of the concept. In seeking out the effects of the event of sense within literary worlds, a story of functionality intensifies the mere inquiry into the concept’s ontological portrait. Here I identify three inflections or functional modes of the event of sense: (1) serial movement, (2) the formation of a surface, and (3) the generation of singu-

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larities. The event of sense is postulated as an elusive “circulating” or “paradoxical” element that traverses series of states of affairs and propositions, or words and worlds. This element regulates and conditions the series of words and worlds, meanwhile remaining an envelopment external to them. At the same time, Deleuze’s event theory locates its conceptual protagonist on a surface of sense, or a ground of emergence. And then, as a singularity, the event of sense precipitates moments of transformation that recompose literary worlds and their relations. Let us see, then, how the work of the event of sense becomes palpable in the plays at hand. In tracing the vestiges of the event, I look at the four relations into which expression and sense enter: equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. Here, equivalence is the overlap of expression and sense whereby a given entity, by dint of its very positing, always-already explicates its sense. Isomorphism offers a representational arrangement whereby expression and sense operate as two disparate world regions. Echoing Deleuze’s dynamic genesis of language, the sections on genesis trace a movement from expression to a surface of sense. The effort here is to locate entities on their way to becoming-sense or becoming-articulate, that is, shifting from corporeal to incorporeal transformation. Nonduality, lastly, marks the moment in which a co-presence of immanence and transcendence, or univocal and equivocal arrangements, is set against an overarchingly immanent backdrop. Providing a dynamic picture of functionality would require not only an examination of the modi in which the expression-sense relation sketches itself out, but also an account of the tangible vestiges left by the event of sense. The composition of a relation is informed by an enquiry into the actual work sense performs when in an arrangement of equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, or nonduality. In order to flesh this out, I introduce three inflections into the event problematic: the role of series, the constitution of surfaces, and the proliferation of singularities. Series are perceived as ever shifting in two directions at once, oscillating toward “not enough” and “too much” in perfect symmetry which nevertheless creates a disequilibrium within its terms. As the empty transmissive component of sense propels the serial movement, it also precipitates a shift in significance as the series converge and diverge. Another inflection similarly linguistic in character is the constitution of surfaces. It determines the locus of emergence of the event of sense and at the same time defines the event’s field of constitution as a groundlessness. And finally, the distribution of singularities traces processes of individuation and recomposition within a literary world. Each of the following chapters shows how the work of the event of sense becomes palpable in plays. Here the constitutive motions of expression solidify into scaffolds of transcendent and immanent texture. The relations between expression and sense allow us to see where these two ontologies are at work and what consequences they bring to a play. The

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four types of relations to which expression and sense lend themselves are intensified through glimpses into the serial movement, the composition of surfaces, and the distribution of singularities within a play. Since looking closer at one component does not take place to the exclusion of others, it is possible to produce a much larger variation of readings depending on the point of inflection that is foregrounded at a time. At times, paradoxical inherences within the plays choose to misbehave in their very singular ways. At times, however, textbook instances of the work of the event of sense readily flesh out moments formerly discussed in the abstract. So let us turn to the first inflection within the event of sense— that of serial arrangement and movement—and see how it propels plays. NOTES 1. An exploration of the 1990s Zeitgeist can be found in Abrams’s “State of the Nation: New British Theatre” (2010). The book pictures theater as a vessel for popular expression turning to examine the state of the nation with artistic means. Theater critic Billington suggests a relation between the fall of Thatcher and a “radicalisation of artistic expression” (Defraye 2004, 81) which eventually led to the emergence of in-yerface with its hermeneutics of provocation set to “intensify the audience’s involvement,” making crowds waver between “rejection and immersion” (91). 2. Urban’s “Cruel Britannia” (2008b) associates the beginning of in-yer-face theater with “Cool Britannia”—Tony Blair’s New Labour Party’s efforts to rebrand London as the global capital of cutting-edge art and music. As Urban points out, in-yer-face authors Kane and Ravenhill should rather be considered part of what he calls Cruel Britannia, “a youth-based counter-politics to the cynicism and opportunism of Cool Britannia” (Urban 2008b, 39) that is marked by a certain “renewal of the provocative” (Edgar 2005). Yet Urban also acknowledges the momentary, politically embedded and derivative status of the concept he proposes: “Cruel Britannia is not politically radical or revolutionary in any traditional sense. It is not a counter-politics existing within the moment of Cool Britannia; it is not ‘outside’ or ‘above’ the historical moment from which it emerged” (49). 3. The development of New Writing is traced in Sierz’s Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (2011b). This comprehensive study starts with the production of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in May 1956 and the rise of Kitchen Sink Drama to the present (2011b, 30). The state-subsidized London theaters specializing in New Writing were The Royal Court, Bush, Hampstead, and Soho (Sierz 2012, 54). Other sources dealing with the controversy of New Writing and its questionable resilience include Sierz’s “‘Can Old Forms Be Reinvigorated?’ Radical Populism and New Writing in British Theatre Today” (2006a) and “New Writing for Theatre: A Public Discussion” (2007c). In his Contemporary British Drama (2010), David Lane also thematizes a certain “crisis in new writing” (Lane 2010, 30), which he characterizes as a slump marked by a lack of theatricality and imagination, preoccupation with naturalism and social realism, and the absence of a “new movement.” What came to the rescue, to him, were forms such as the Churchill play and in-yer-face, namely works marked by “fractured time frames, non-linear narratives, open performance text, politically committed work and expressive forms” (51) effecting “a shift toward a total theatre of dance, music and text . . . open performance text . . . fragmented linguistic games” (53). 4. An overview of production histories, a chronicle of artistic directors and landmark events in the company’s five decades of existence can be found in Philip Roberts’s The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage (1999). Another informative source is Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin’s The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out (2007), a

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chronological study enlisting artistic directors and important performances, but also outlining the pivotal role of the Royal Court in shaping the image of in-yer-face. In his Modern British Playwriting: 2000–2009 (2013), Rebellato explores the situation of the Royal Court in the decade following the successes of in-yer-face: “the aftermath of the New Writing explosion, the 2000s, however, was anything but awash with violent, brash, young plays” (2013, 66). A change in leadership followed; Stephen Daldry and Graham Whybrow were replaced by Ian Rickson, “a good, quiet man with a taste for small, quiet, introspective plays” (66). Simon Stephens was in charge of the Royal Court Young Writers’ Group, putting a new generation on the assembly line: “the names of the members of the groups tally more-or-less name for name with the list of some of the most successful young playwrights now working in Britain: Mike Bartlett, Lucy Prebble, Laura Wade, Jack Thorne and James Graham” (68). These playwrights, for the most part, strike a middle ground between innovation and adherence to theatrical conventions. Another overview of existing names and trends is provided in Reinelt’s essay “Selective Affinities: British Playwrights at Work” (2007). Billingham’s At the Sharp End: Uncovering the Work of Five Contemporary Dramatists (2007) draws a more variegated picture of twenty-first century British theater. Books such as Bradwell’s The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre (2010) and Bull’s Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Theatre (1994) provide observations on theater politics, shifts in power, and emergent voices that draw an even more comprehensive picture in that they look back at moods and tendencies stemming from the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. 5. Experiential theater is widely associated with “disturbing subjects,” the exploration of “difficult feelings,” and the limits of acceptability. Here theater confronts the audience with a succession of “naturalistic moods” and “intense emotional material,” all the while refashioning the divide between spectatorship and performers by infusions of shock effects set to “disturb the spectator’s habitual gaze” and “violate one’s sense of safety.” The use of taboo words intends to trigger a calculated emotional effect, becoming capable of “more offence than the acts to which they refer” and exposing “all we need to know about what a culture is embarrassed by, afraid of or resentful about.” Stagings of violence (Sierz 2000, 6–9) usually seek to impart a shock effect as “an essential part of confrontational sensibility” (9). “Experiential” is also the term Kane herself used for the theater she wanted to make. This should be “a theatre that has a visceral impact, putting the audience in unease, making it question matters of both thought and feeling” (Wallace 2010, 89). Famously making use of Artaud’s total theater, “an intense all-encompassing experience of theatre” (95) that is Expressionist in spirit, Kane takes violence primarily as a tool to achieve an experiential goal. This book, however, explores something else: violence as a formal effect rising out of the motion of generative forces that constitute the very emergence of literary worlds. 6. The relationship between politics and theater is discussed in the chapter “New Labour, New Theatre? 1997–2006” of Michael Billington’s State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945 (2007). The book’s chapter “Picking Up the Pieces” explores the tensions that accompany the end of Thatcherism and their repercussions in theater politics. 7. Pointing out theater’s “entrenched isolationism,” Harvie addresses questions of societal embeddedness and a refusal to believe in the antiquated Romantic notion of a creative individual plagued by Weltschmerz and standing alone against a world: “By celebrating individual creativity, seeking isolation, indulging anti-theatricalism, and maintaining a hostility to theory, dominant British theatre culture resists collaborative practices, healthy miscegenation, and a recognition of creativity as labour, material practice, and intellectual practice. It produces profound limitations for British identities, not least in an era where changing political contexts might invite Britons to reimagine themselves as substantially different ways both within and in relation to a changing Europe” (Harvie 2005, 119). 8. One testimony to this is the fact that representative volumes maintain a politics of exclusion, pushing certain playwrights into the fringes. Christopher Innes’s Modern

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British Drama: The Twentieth Century (2002), for instance, traces a history of movements in the British drama from 1890 until 1990. A short rubric on Churchill appears only at the very end, subsumed under the label “feminist theatre.” Churchill’s innovations are only cursorily acknowledged: not even her affiliation with epic theater is thematized, although Diamond dedicates a chapter on Churchill’s Brecht in Unmaking Mimesis only five years earlier. This move testifies to an inclusion in the canon, yet under an ambiguous label that reinstates exclusionist stances. Crimp is not even mentioned. At the same time, other writers who proved formative for the emergence of in-yer-face, such as Osborne, Edward Bond, and Howard Barker, appear well-incorporated into the body of classics. Another volume offering a chronicle and analyses of British women’s plays, Kathleen Starck’s ‘I Believe in the Power of Theatre’: British Women’s Drama of the 1980s and 1990s (2005), excludes Churchill from its discussions of major female dramatists but chooses to incorporate Kane (210–17). At the same time, a large body of dissertations on Churchill surfaced from the early 1990s onward, touching not only on subjects such as “feminism,” but also delving into matters of identity, politics, and power. Notable examples include Casado’s The Power of Abuse in Five Plays by Caryl Churchill (1993), Chang’s Caryl Churchill: The Playwright, Her Work, and Its Context (1995), Schmitt’s Our Sometime Sister, Now Our Queen: An Exploration of Oppressive Female Characters in Selected Plays of Caryl Churchill (1999), Yacavone’s Clothes Make the Woman: Cross-Gender Casting in Four Caryl Churchill Plays (2002) or Lavell’s Caryl Churchill: Representational Negotiations and Provisional Truths (2004). 9. In renegotiating this further, Sierz also embeds in-yer-face theater in the larger landscape of the political situation of the 1990s, the material conditions of the theater, and even the decade’s predisposition toward smaller theatrical spaces together with the subsequent rise of the studio play. Smallness undoubtedly intensified the sense of immediacy and participation, if not entrapment. Atrocities on stage were certainly to have had a more profound effect on audiences due to the very texture of the theatrical space they inhabited. A person walking out or gasps of dismay would have become parts of the “communion” Lehmann (2006) talks about in his Postdramatic Theatre, with each such occurrence altering the fabric and dynamics of the space of performance, but also extending the stage toward the spectators. Sierz’s reassessment of his 2000 book shows awareness of this broader landscape behind the practice of in-yer-face: “As a sensibility, meaning a mix of feelings and ideas, it blows through the work not only of young playwrights, but also of older ones, such as Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill and Harold Pinter. Because In-Yer-Face Theatre includes only playwrights who made their debuts in the 1990s, it excludes older writers whose recent work has also been affected by the 1990s. As a series of theater techniques—including a stage language that emphasizes rawness, intensity and swearing, stage images that show acute pain or comfortless vulnerability, characterization that prefers complicit victims to innocent ones, and a 90-minute structure that dispenses with an interval—in-yerface theater depends on certain material conditions. One is the abolition of censorship; the other is the use of studio spaces. In fact, you could characterize the 1990s simply as the onward march of the studio play. Taken together, and seen as the complex phenomenon that it truly is, the term is less a monolith than the book implies” (2008a, 30). 10. The introduction of Aragay’s British Theatre of the 1990s (2007) points to a more heterogeneous panorama of in-yer-face extending beyond the 1990s to the work of Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill with Far Away (2000), David Edgar, David Hare, and Harold Pinter, as well as the 1980s with the early work of Martin Crimp, Neil Bartlett, Kevin Elyot. It also points out the short life span of in-yer-face and the fact that it quickly faded as a phenomenon to be transformed into other types of theater such as documentary drama—which however does not prevent playwrights from still incorporating in-yer-face elements into their work (Aragay et al. 2007, x). 11. Here a direct link can only be established in terms of dramatic content, however. Since forms of entertainment far more sensational than theater—including public hangings or participatory forms of amusement such as bear baiting—stood in direct competition for the attention of Renaissance audiences, one is to presuppose a some-

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what less impressionable spectatorship in comparison to that of in-yer-face theater of the 1990s, and therefore different concepts of interaction, sensationalism, and spectacle. 12. Blandford’s Film, Drama and the Break-Up of Britain (2007) traces the story of theater’s dependence on public subsidy (2007, 105) in the aftermath of the establishment of separate Art Councils for England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and examines “devolutionary” tendencies that had become more tangible since 1994. To this end, the author sees the premiere of Kane’s Blasted in 1995 as “constitutional articulation of one aspect of a new Britain” (116), reassessing the state of the nation as incorporated in a play that followed what he calls the break-up of Britain. 13. Sierz introduces two contrasting opinions. While Howard states, “it’s very sobering to challenge yourself as to whether even your very best work is actually great. Let’s be grateful that lots of what we do is very good, and not worry about it being gobsmackingly brilliant,” Morris laments: “I do worry about what will happen if we don’t discover a new big name. You can’t legislate for when talent will appear” (Sierz 2004a, 81). 14. The unstageability of violence and its status of an aesthetic convention with symbolic value has already been discussed: “But the acts of spectacular violence and dismemberment characteristic of in-yer-face theater are, if not impossible, certainly illegal to perform on stage” (Rebellato 2008, 205). Kane, too, has expressed her dissatisfaction with directors that tend to “glamorize” the violence in her plays. As her reaction to the staging of Blasted in Hamburg shows, she was intensely critical toward “literal” stagings of her work. A discussion of the importance of directorial decisions as well as an overview of important Kane productions can be found in Saunders’s article “‘Just a Word on a Page and There Is the Drama’: Sarah Kane’s Theatrical Legacy” (2003). 15. In the wake of postdramatic theater, the category of character has undergone its crises. A demise was announced in Elinor Fuchs’s The Death of Character: Perspectives and Theatre after Modernism (1996). Lehmann’s “celebration of art as fiction, theatre as process, discontinuity, heterogeneity, non-textuality, multiple codes, subversion” (Blattes 2007, 70) also discourages characters from continuing to exist. As Blattes notes, utterances in postdramatic plays become increasingly confusing not because of their content, but because of “their status as words spoken by the character” compelling us “to question the very nature of this discourse” (2007, 75). The examples of Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis as well as Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies come to the fore. In these cases, speakers are only sketchily differentiated, if at all. In Crave, for instance, “Certain attributes can be used at times to distinguish one speaker from another (B smokes and drinks, M has a fear of growing old, C refers to a mother, A defines himself as a paedophile, etc.), but it is difficult to interpret such features . . . Sometimes we have the feeling they are not addressing each other but the audience, in a kind of chorus, and the sound, rhythm and materiality of the words seem at least as important as their meaning” (78). 16. Szondi’s Hegelian approach toward drama in a sense preconfigures the announcement of the “demise” of drama. By stating that drama is hinged on a dialectical motion that plays itself out in dialogue and that its essence lies in the dialogic, communication-informed component, he leaves out many forms that thrive on other devices: “Ultimately, the whole world of the Drama is dialectical in origin. It does not come into being because of an epic I which permeates the work. It exists because of the always achieved and, from that point, once again disrupted sublation of the interpersonal dialectic, which manifests itself as speech in the dialogue. In this respect as well, the dialogue carries the Drama. The Drama is possible only when dialogue is possible” (Szondi 1987, 10). 17. In Barnett’s words, postdramatic theater has the potential to offer “a theatre beyond representation, in which the limitations of representation are held in check by dramaturgies and performance practices that seek to present material rather than to posit a direct, representational relationship between the stage and the outside world”

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(2008, 15). Lehmann’s slogan of “theatre without drama” and the belief in the claustrating limitations of the dramatic text are well visible in this passage; just as visible is the wish to reach out toward a realm of immediacy otherwise blocked by the mediating quality of dramatic scripts. 18. In this context, Hauthal puts forward the argument that such markers could signal the presence of metadrama, stating that “if a reading drama contains a selfreflexive treatment of the genre conventions of drama, then it can be called metadrama” (2009, 16). The definition she adopts comes from Hornby’s Drama, Metadrama and Perception: “Briefly, metadrama can be defined as drama about drama; it occurs whenever the subject of a play turns out to be, in some sense, drama itself” (1986, 31). 19. Worthen, however, is more preoccupied with the interaction between the enaction of the printed page and its transposition into—but also unsettling of—a theatrical enactment: “Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis uses the design of the page not as a stage direction but as a way to destabilize a conventionally psychological approach to acting. . . . The materiality of the text enforces a repeated encounter with print’s various registers of expression, but refuses to direct those resources toward a specific modality of stage performance. In this sense, Kane’s work is at once unique and cognate with a range of other experiments that use the mise-en-page to trouble the mise-en-scene” (Worthen 2005, 155). The various negotiations between page and stage are later played out in the book Drama between Poetry and Performance (2010). This preoccupation is already prefigured in his The Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre (1992), a book that contends that theatrical rhetoric takes place exactly at the intersection between “the text and the institutions that make it producible” (1992, 2). Worthen makes the important distinction between the rhetoric of realism that frames dramatic meaning as a function of the stage, a phenomenon he calls “scene,” and the rhetoric of poetic theater that utilizes the text, a phenomenon called “word,” as a dramatic means (5). Theater based on the word, then, would also be conscious of the imagistic, orthographic, and therefore nonverbal quality of textual layouts. 20. In his study Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theatre, Laurens De Vos traces Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, Beckett’s work, and the experiential theater of Sarah Kane from the vantage point of what he calls “an attack on the subjectile of language” (De Vos 2011, 171). In explicating the prison-house quality of language, these dramatists are thus not far removed from Churchill’s attempt to “get away from words,” a phrase the playwright used when asked about her motivation to experiment with the kind of collaborative work that led to the staging of plays such as A Mouthful of Birds. Their work, according to De Vos, is pervaded by the pre-established premise that language has a stifling quality, and that one has to abandon adherence to the written word if one is to reach toward a dimension truly capable of creativity. Yet Artaud, who was particularly hostile toward the written word and designed his Theatre of Cruelty in a way that would incorporate this conviction, also developed the kind of writing that allowed the evental dimension of language to issue forth as an event of sense. 21. Davis’s book Critical Excess (2010) states that “Deleuze repeatedly insisted he was not an interpreter of texts and films . . . he wanted to create something new through his encounters with them. He regarded the texts he discussed as machines engaged in the world, not receptacles of a hidden content to be discovered by the diligent labour of interpretation. He was interested in what they did, not what they meant” (Davis 2010, 56–7).

FOUR Machines of Movement

On enriching the event concept, Deleuze evokes Leibniz and the terms of “compossibility” and “incompossibility” between series. These relations are at times referred to as “convergence” and “divergence” (Deleuze 1990, 111) or “compatibility” and “incompatibility” (177). Compossiblity and incompossibility represent the movements that exert themselves before the order of representation is established and, in a way, participate in the shaping of its structures. Deleuze’s notion of “series” accounts exactly for these motions of divergence and convergence separating and, in a next moment, sliding toward one another. This generative motion is reciprocal. Just as serial movement constitutes an event of sense, so do events propel the serial movement. In this way, series in their divergent and convergent movement underlie, constitute, and orchestrate the genesis of worlds in a manner that is unmotivated and non-teleological. The entities derived from the motions of divergence and convergence invariably appear as secondary effects generated out of event passages. Events propel series. Yet, whereas the serial arrangement is a precondition for any structural arrangement, it in turn also rests upon a number of conditions. Series presuppose doubles. Each term from a series finds its mirror counterpart in an ontologically or conceptually disparate component in the opposite series that, however, replicates its structure following a rule of isomorphism and isonomy. The concept that two serial counterparts share manifests itself differently depending on the region it pertains to at a time. That is to say, it reveals a different face depending on the site of its incarnation in the series of worlds and words. The replication process moves in two directions inasmuch as it occurs simultaneously and is reciprocal. The terms of the series subsist in Hjelmslevian reciprocal presupposition (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 64) which donates

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symmetry, supplies connectivity, and at the same time secures the primacy of relations and positionality within the chain (relations over entities). AN EMPTY PSYCHOPOMP Across the series composed of worlds against words each entity is as different as possible from its counterpart in the chain and yet, both terms map their conceptual fabric onto one another in reciprocal presupposition. This relational tint is further emphasized by the condition that another (external) heterogeneous series determines or at least gestures toward the first. The motion of reciprocal presupposition is replicated infinitely within and infinitely without (figure 4.1). Each series is thus itself split in two ad infinitum and “internally” proliferates into an arrangement of worlds against words. At the same time, a series is also a point of collision with other series, forming isonomic and isomorphic pairs that accelerate infinitely without. Simultaneously, an external paradoxical element—alternately called an empty square, a circulating word, an occupant without a place, or a supernumerary object—governs the series. In Difference and Logic, an empty psychopomp makes an appearance as “the aleatory point” (Deleuze 1990, 56), “the paradoxical entity” (1990, 41), “paradoxical element” (1990, 66, 68 81, 119, 228), “paradoxical instance” (1990, 97) or “the dark precursor” (2004, 119–26, 145, 277, 291). In Logic, Deleuze references the circulating letter in Lacan’s 1956 reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844); the book’s many allusions to Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” and “Jabberwocky” point to a similar function. A cryptic yet pervasive object circulates between the series without belonging to them. Yet, by virtue of its empty quality, the psychopomp propels the series and secures their flowing forth. In Difference, an allusion to Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (Deleuze 2004, 150) illustrates the psychopomp’s work. The psychopomp is aligned with Frege’s place vide, 1 the empty place which, by virtue of its aberrant nature, is easily dismissed as nonsense: “what would provisionally have to be called ‘nonsense’ was, in fact, the expression of an event that could be effected by these divergent principles” (Lambert 2002, 64). It is in this element that the “expressed” of the series becomes palpable. The nonsensical element ensures the communication and donation of sense within the ontologically disparate serial counterparts. Here one detects a replication of the same scaffold both within a series and within the heterogeneous serial mold governed by the “empty” component. The very matrix of the motion of expression and re-expression, as I see it, is also mapped onto the motion of the heterogeneous series. Here the circulating or paradoxical element carries forward the motion. The element’s incarnation in the series functions as the expressed. It does not belong to any of the series. As an in-between, the psychopomp does not

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share the series’ being-status and is relational rather than referential. Neither spatiotemporal nor of substance, the element nevertheless “donates” a passage between the series, ensuring their communication and acting as “something that occurrs au milieu, between two series—as within the grafting of two branches” (Martin 1997, 624). This “empty” component can only be detected if we observe closely the “behavior” of literary worlds and if we look carefully at the motions stirred by the relations that the psychopomp donates to the series. These leave vestiges of “forms of life” that are not quite of a play’s habitual fabric. Here we can witness a string of recompositions within a literary world as it at times struggles to appropriate the effects of such evental influxes. Thus we have two heterogeneous series, each of the terms of which forms reciprocal pairs with their serial counterparts. These relations, in turn, are replicated onto one another ad infinitum (figure 4.1). The way in which a serial term relates to its counterpart “within” a series and the series in its entirety to its respective doubles “without” in the infinite serial chain, reveals that each element maintains a relation to the paradoxical component. Again, this component belongs neither to the series, nor to their terms, but regulates their behavior and donates sense. It achieves this by virtue of its “aberrant” status as an entity both “within”—immanent to the series inasmuch as it is in no way extricable from the series as an independent entity—and “without,” transcendent at the same time, as it regulates the series’ functioning. As a capture of expressed sense, the empty psychopomp carries the serial circulation. Accordingly, each series manifests its event of sense in its own idiosyncratic way. This elusive, non-motivated relation between two heterogeneous counterparts simultaneously propels, constitutes, and recomposes the series of worlds and the series of words. All the while, in the same way in which an event resounds through a series, the series themselves are the resounding of an event as it is an evental disjunctive synthesis 2 that carries their emergence.

Figure 4.1. Heterogeneous series communicating infinitely within and without.

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A SHIFT IN SIGNIFICANCE So far, I have sketched out the function of events to supply connectivity and communication in an arrangement of serial multitude. Another question arises now. How do events manifest themselves in such a way that the series undergo transformations through their emergence? An event of sense recomposes an ongoing series by employing the familiar reciprocal double movement. The series recomposes and, along with it, the event itself undergoes a change. These transformations are seen as non-spatial and non-temporal (a static genesis). They represent the work of mapping. That is to say, they are “topological and diagrammatic” (Williams), working with local punctures and constellations rather than with discrete space and linear time. This reverses the causality between events and temporal and spatial items. Rather than conditioning events or serving as their receptacles, space and time are now secondarily constituted by evental series. In the same vein, series are not sequential but discontinuous, if one is to speak in spatial terms at all. In his commentary on The Logic of Sense, James Williams explains that the transformation within series is a change to be understood as an alteration in “significance.” 3 The relations between series fold in a way that allows them to manifest both the transcendent and immanent principle within immanence. Further still, their ontological scaffold takes shape out of the double movements within the seriality they alter (figure 4.1). A regime of reciprocity issues forth at every step. Primacy is suspended inasmuch as we are unable to identify a grounding entity in a scenario in which series move forward and continually recompose by dint of the event of sense at work within them. All the while, the event only flashes out as an event by dint of the serial movements’ frictions. “Significance” becomes but one logical facet in a larger onto-cosmological picture. Here the event of sense would not merely be a manifestation of how the relations between states of affairs have effects that surpass their “physical” existence, becoming touches of significance that are “incorporeal” yet transformative. Nor does the event simply align with the capacity of sense to cause a shift in the relations of value within a world. Rather, events not only propel states of affairs and demonstrate how a shift in significance or a variation within a series resonates far beyond its local field of reach, but also show how these resonances ground and constitute the order of representation. Representation offers a world in a recognizable shape as it is with representation as a tertiary arrangement that states of affairs become palpable. A shift in significance, then, ultimately amounts to a shift in order as well. At the same time it is this order that—once established—cloaks the arrangement of evental transformations and the flowing forth of sense with a shield of impermeability. It makes itself a beginning while being a product.

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In the context of its behavior within the series, the event of sense displays characteristics that align it not only with Spinoza’s “expression” but also with Eugene Thacker’s concept of “superlative life.” It is proliferative, as the events resonating through a particular series unlock a multitude of events resonating through other series. Also, it is flowing forth, as it transforms proactively, changing the entire field of actuality with the variation it introduces. And it displays a certain generosity, as sense is always donated. This change in actuality is, according to Deleuze, nothing more than an alteration in intensity of the relations permeated by sense. The rule of a change that does not constitute a change in substance observed in many event ontologies is witnessed here as well. INFINITE PROLIFERATION IN TWO DIRECTIONS I understand the serial arrangement to be infinitely proliferative. I also see it as a maximally abstract way of describing a movement called “life” as an infinite progression of interconnected series constituting multitudinous worlds. The series give rise to other series by virtue of the evental components that resound through them and incessantly proliferate in the emergence of new interconnections, that is, new series and serial movements. Here the double movement of the becoming-personal of the event of sense gains visibility. First, the event of sense functions as a two-sided mirror, turning one face toward the most particular and minuscule and another toward the largest generalization possible. Within an overarching frame of immanence, the event faces both immanence and transcendence. Its fractal motion is infinitely inward and infinitely outward. Second, through its work within a particular series, the event donates individuation in the directions of both worlds and words, and simultaneously so. An event brings infinite proliferation in series, creating a landscape of multitudinous traversals. A cornucopia of particularities, chances, probabilities, this is a region where everything is a connection. At the other end of the scale, however, the order of representation issues forth out of this motion. The logic of the event is, again, a double one. It is a momentary state of poise or an ontological horizon between structural stability and maximal potentiality. The former is representational, whereas the latter is understood as “a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual containing all possible particles, and drawing all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately without consistency or reference, without consequence” (Plotinsky 2006, 401). This behavior of the event of sense puts on display the two disparities it carries within itself: indetermination and organization, evolvement and involvement. There are patterns accompanying the occurrence of the event of sense, such that they allow us to apprehend its effects. These include a structu-

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ral disequilibrium, aberrant inherences in clash with the habitual fabric of a literary world, and impossible objects. The flowing forth of an event, however, is never predictable. An event rarely occurs without disintegration or without the manifestation of its relation to a chaos. In view of this, events become palpable by virtue of the vestiges they imprint on states of affairs and the various manners in which they obliquely manifest themselves while traversing series and shifting in grades of intensity. The effects they generate, however, remain ultimately unforeseeable. Similarly, the traversing of a series by an event is an occurrence neither predictable nor repeatable. In this respect, an event remains strictly singular. Events are always touches of novelty or strangeness producing transformations or rearranging relations in manners that are not only incalculable but also precedential. Together with the task of accounting for and identifying patterns that emerge within what is contingent and seldom twice the same, the task of thematizing the event of sense also reinstates the very contingency of occurrences within literary worlds. Summing up, the event of sense flashes out on the interface between worlds and words precisely at a “moment” when a tension takes place between disparate series. It plays itself out within the occurrence of this tension and the flowing forth of series. Sense thus intensifies the series and causes them to rearrange anew. This new formation could be said to bear the characteristics of Freud’s “uncanny” inasmuch as it involves the same substance and scaffold—nothing appears to have changed—and at the same time is novel. This simultaneity of sameness and difference is another articulation of the paradoxes of the event of sense. It derives from the fact that sense is immanent and transcendent, inseparable from the processes and motions out of which it emerges, yet also regulative. Sense is poised on the fault line of these tensions and shifts in intensity. It is inextricable from the series and meanwhile external, an influx from without. Let us see, then, what are the incarnations of these motions within literary worlds. EXPRESSION AND SENSE IN THE SERIAL MOVEMENT As I turn to Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker, I observe how series of words and worlds work toward convergence. One series corresponds to the region of Deleuze’s heights—the domain of language, organized speech, and representation—whereas the other pertains to pre-representational depths. As depth moves toward height, height shifts toward chthonic regions, becoming schizophrenic. Cases of expression-sense equivalence present themselves at the points where these two simultaneous motions collide. Sarah Kane’s Crave scaffolds a case of isomorphism wherein the series of words and worlds remain unbridgeable. Expression is given all at once in discrete utterances whereas sense remains a phan-

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tasmatic ideal, absent and perpetually evoked. In a scenario of Auerbachian foregrounds and backgrounds, the phantasm is absent and a transcendence, yet remains constitutive of the given. In Other Hands by Laura Wade series of words and worlds race toward a surface of sense in a reversed genesis that starts from the heights. Here the introduction of paradoxical objects donates a surfeit of sense, causing the play and its figures to change course in becoming expressive. In 4.48 Psychosis, series of words and worlds regroup and reassemble at so-called “points of junction,” marking the moments of folding or pleating of the play’s fabric in convergence and divergence. An arrangement of nonduality sketches itself out as the play’s generated consciousness becomes dialogical. This section thus examines the various ways in which expression and sense collide from the vantage point of series. In isolating two heterogeneous series of words and worlds, I outline the constitutive processes of immanence and transcendence in four plays. In Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, immanence shows us a ghastly face in that it manifests itself as schizophrenic non-differentiation. Here we have a scaffold of equivalence, or an overlap of expression and sense. The two series of words and worlds, the former striving to become language and the latter to organize the depths of bodily noise, form chimerical shapes in their movement toward one another. Here expression begins to masquerade as sense in one of the series while sense aligns with the moment of its expression in the other. A constitutive extra—a haunting extra-ontological inherence—regulates this reciprocal motion. As reconciliation between heights and depths does not take place, sense topples over its constitutive motions. Here the overlap of expression and sense is aligned with suspension of the surface organization and the erasure of differentiation. In this way, the play shows us the schizophrenic face of immanence. A relation of isomorphism manifests itself in Sarah Kane’s Crave. Here I encounter a composed order of equivocity. The two series formed here are those of expression on its way to becoming sense (foreground) and sense as an absence and a floated signified operating as an instance of transcendence (background). Sense is a haunting absence, an Auerbachian background, whereas expression aligns with vocal gestures beckoning toward a void. Within this scenario, Crave is shown to capture the exact moment of gesturing toward sense. I see the play as a motion arrested between the partial actualizations of expression and a phantasmatic absence. Poised between actuality and virtuality, the text is as an elaborate evocation of its textual absentee. It enlists various attempts to name the sense, to identify a word for a floated signified. Starting from a preliminary totality, it thus fails to reach a produced totality. Its phantasm, a concept without a word, remains an absence and a transcendence. The play’s actualized utterances (expression) and the empty addressee (a carrier of sense) exhibit a structural similarity, yet are shown to be different

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in kind and asymmetrical. The fissure embodied in the order of representation manifests itself in their juxtaposition. I see the play’s pleading utterances as the expressions of a mediality, as captures of the motions of a substance on its way to becoming something else, that is, expressed sense. A reversed genesis becomes evident in Laura Wade’s Other Hands. Here the arrival at a surface of sense is the result of a motion starting from the order of the heights. Representation, exemplified by Deleuze’s “order word” as the linguistic practice of the heights, gives way to a new formation. Linguistic heights move back into the depths of a body. Yet unlike The Skriker, where folding back into the body erases transcendence to produce schizophrenic creatures, here a surface of sense is reached in a productive process of becoming. Bodies become expressive in opening their boundaries and readying themselves for an active transformation. Here “sense” is understood to be a constitutive emptiness acting as the gathering point for the multitudinous traversals of intensities. Sense, then, is only reached once we arrive at the pre-personal. In the course of this desubjectification, distinct characters begin to disappear and to recompose the relations into which they enter. Unlike the scenario drafted out in The Skriker, here the non-differentiation of bodies becomes “productive.” Only by losing their boundaries do bodies become capable of encounters. In a motion from constituted subjectivity (heights) toward a pre-subjective field (surface), sense is restored to language and language restores its capacity to become expressive. Lastly, a complex scenario presents itself in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Here a nondual arrangement manifests itself in the process of becoming-dialogical of consciousness. A layer of cohabitation of immanence and transcendence takes shape in the exact moment when the play’s constituted dialogic consciousness begins to act as a horizon moving in two directions: toward both projection and retrojection. That is, dialogic consciousness begins to operate as a horizon of sense that endows expression and re-expression with significance both proactively and retroactively. In projection, it acts as the gathering point at which the constitutive motions of expression become expressed sense (immanence, withinness). Retrojection shows a moment of reflexivity whereby the constituted consciousness gestures back toward the constitutive motions of expression (transcendence, withoutness). Sense thus becomes fully constituted only through this last moment of ingression, of gesturing back from the “heights.” Here the very horizon of sense functions as a nondual locale that transcends the motions of expression, and is yet constitutive of them. I describe it as an indifference underlying the boundary of representation and non-representation.

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CARYL CHURCHILL’S THE SKRIKER: CONSTITUTING AND RESHUFFLING SUBJECTIVITIES. EQUIVALENCE OF EXPRESSION AND SENSE The Skriker (1994) by Caryl Churchill could be described as a play almost entirely composed of motion, against the backdrop of “interpenetrating worlds dramatizing discoveries at the limits of rationality” (Rabey 2003, 136). I read this play as a succession of shifts in value, continually at pains to readjust its course as it strives to merge series of words and series of worlds. These collisions can be illustrated with the help of Deleuze’s perennial opposition between the conceptual personae of Carroll and Artaud. Whereas “Carroll” accounts for the humorous, sense-evading, and paradoxical side of language—a harmless gamble with and within the realm of propositions—“Artaud,” from whom Deleuze borrows the idea of writing “a philosophy built from experiences of extreme intensity” (Cull 2011, 46), represents the language of pre-propositional bodily depths. Here “Carroll” is a representative of Deleuze’s innocuous “good sense” and “Artaud” of pre-representational expression, of a movement of language on its way to become of sense. One series represents the realm of articulated discourse whereas the other takes shape out of the schizophrenic fragments of an Artaudian depth. In parallel with Deleuze’s evocation of Hercules as a hero of the surface and a peacemaker whose task is to negotiate the relationship between monsters and gods (Deleuze 1990, 205), sense, assuming a Promethean role, strives to organize the depths and donate “significance” snatched from the heights of representation. At the same time, the chthonic region also carves its way toward the heights and into the realm of language—bodily noises penetrate the incorporeal envelopment of sense in a movement toward becoming-voice. It is in the enactment of this convergence that the serial arrangement in The Skriker is constituted. The dividing line between the series vanishes as sense collapses in a state of corporeal mixtures and non-differentiation whereas expression shifts toward the heights. In the points of juncture marking their collision, I encounter cases of equivalence between expression and sense. Here expression, while still on the way to becoming-language (tertiary arrangement), collides with sense itself. The region of representation and constituted entities slips back into a locality wherein only formative motions are at hand. On ascending, expression as a movement of constitution begins to acquire the characteristics of an event of sense (evolvement, enfolding), whereas sense glides back toward the depths (involvement, infolding). Witnessing this motion, the play begins to produce aberrant or tensile creatures—neither of the depth nor of the height but of an arrested movement between the two. In this way, the expression-sense overlap distilled at the meeting points of these traversals takes on a ghastly dimension. Chimerical creatures begin to populate the play’s ha-

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bitual fabric, and language becomes chimerical too, eliding the duality between things and words, between “consumable objects” and “expressible propositions” (Deleuze 1990, 85). The Skriker’s world becomes of a “schizophrenic” order wherein the surface of sense has collapsed entirely and the brittle boundary between propositions and things has been erased, making everything corporeal (Deleuze 1990, 86–7). Here, erratic chatter is taken for profundity, and speaking, a gesture of the surface, is replaced by the sound of a chewing mouth. The play’s figures, the Skriker, Josie, and Lily, are poised on the fault lines of these two motions, that of expression and that of sense, and in a state of gradual self-constitution. As they are being produced as subjectivities, that is, as recognizable entities from the order of representation, a backward movement of de-constitution—the mirror image of the motion toward Deleuze’s “Platonic heights”—also takes place at a simultaneous pace and in the opposite direction, toward the depths. Here, following the maxim that “the subject is the effect of the voice” (Colebrook 2005, 230), subjectivities are produced out of the world-shaping gesture of speaking. Accordingly, the de-constitution of these subjectivities is effected by noises of the depth: by the crackling of twigs in the Skriker’s underworld, coins falling out of Lily’s mouth instead of words, and men transforming into inarticulate pigs: “The depth is clamorous: clappings, crackings, gnashings, cracklings, explosions, the shattered sounds of internal objects, and also the inarticulate howls-breaths (cris-souffles)” (Deleuze 1990, 193). The first movement is differential, whereas the second works toward unification and non-distinction. The Skriker ascends from the depths, feigning articulated discourse, attempting to obtain a healthy human child and claim it for the underworld. Josie (a mother who bakes her baby) and Lily (an expecting mother) descend from the region of good sense and articulated discourse into the Skriker’s fairy habitat. In Churchill’s play, we see Josie locked in a mental institution to avoid charges for infanticide, whereas the Skriker entices Lily into giving her child to the underworld as a gift. Two heterogeneous series of words and worlds take shape in this way. The tension between the underworld (Skriker’s kingdom) and life on the surface (Josie’s mental institution) is one aspect of this. Another tension is played out in the nonsensical (from the viewpoint of representation) language of the Skriker, marked by “deformation or explosion of the word” (Aston 2001, 80), and Josie and Lily’s homely utterances, striking one as impersonally nondescript, representatives of “the established discourse” and thus also bearers of nonsense (from the viewpoint of expression). One series accounts for the depths, a schizophrenic rattle that is the terrible double of transcn1endence. The other speaks for the surfaces and their incorporeal ever-emergent effect, the event of sense. As the terms of the series exist only through their relations to one another, the underworld and the mental institution—or the ancient

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shapeshifter and the young women—can only meet because each entity shifts toward its opposite. The Skriker’s ascending motion toward the surface of sense (obtaining a healthy child) 4 is mirrored in Josie’s descent into a realm of non-differentiation where metaphors are taken literally and voice becomes noise (baking a baby). Obtaining a healthy child and baking a baby become the tensile captures 5 of the two motions—toward heights and toward depths—enacting what Aston names a recurrent concern of the 1990s: figures of “the child at risk” (2003, 169). Another example of a capture of expression on the way to becomingsense is the Skriker’s opening song. 6 This example, however, is somewhat different as it does not merely capture the motion from depth to height or vice versa, but points to a doubly crossed movement of (1) an ascent from depths to heights and (2) a descent from heights to depths. The excerpt is reminiscent of a schizophrenic monologue, with words popping out of each other not by dint of logical connections but by virtue of onomatopoetic resemblances and associations (2). Yet this monologue generates its own significance and thus offers a very special resource of sense and access to the surface (1): Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span sick and spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold raw into roar, golden lion (Churchill 1998, 243)

According to Attridge, the Skriker’s language—unlike the language of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake that is based on superimposition—rests upon “lexical and phrasal overlapping . . . maintaining the Wake’s ability to present quite different meanings simultaneously . . . but achieving this by having one word or phrase ending at the same time as the next one begins, or sometimes cutting off the end of the last word or phrase as it morphs into the second one” (2001–2, 5). Another strategy here is to group words not according to sense, but with recourse to affinities of sound, thus creating an “interlacing pattern of echoes” (5). The shapeshifter’s song is evocative in two ways. First, by creating tensions in signification, it points back to its own sense. Exactly a Deleuzian sense-excess, the song says too much and adds too little at the same time. Then, while the song is composed of randomly rhyming words arbitrarily put together and refusing to convey sense (depth), another order begins to lurk beneath. This is the logic of humor, puns, and unexpected turns of phrase (height). 7 Language is on the loose, breaking open its tensile dimension. It points back to itself as if in a gesture of selfwriting, exhibiting its own devices, making a showcase of its principles of differentiation (“bad mad sad”). In other words, it is not language that “speaks” or conveys sense as language itself becomes speaking. Language attempts to articulate its own sense and, following Deleuze’s para-

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dox of dry reiteration (Deleuze 1990, 32, 44), becomes aberrant, a “plus one.” The constitution and de-constitution of sense take place exactly by virtue of this motion in two directions: toward depths and toward heights. Again, this motion results in the suspension of mediation. It manifests itself in the collapsed boundary between words and worlds, sense and expression. De-constitution takes place with Josie’s descent to the underworld where she is invited to a fairy feast whose elaborate dishes turn into twigs and dust. Another example is the young woman’s baking her newborn as if in an effort to claim it back from the symbolic order and restore it to the depths of bodies. These episodes add up to a refrain in which the surface of sense folds back into a chthonic region. This descent toward a “formless, fathomless nonsense” (Deleuze 2004, 28) is the exact mirror image of the transcendental field where sense is generated. Within nonsense, each component folds back into itself in a gesture that is both self-referencing (language lays bare its constitutive devices) and suspends any reflexivity whatsoever (language becomes its own speaking). On the surface, sense has never fully arrived: Lily and Josie never reach the point of reconciling the depths (mental illness) with the heights (the phantasm of a healthy child) and eventually collapse into an underworld. Nor does the Skriker, a creature of the depths, succeed in her attempt to ascend to the symbolic order by obtaining a healthy human child. An empty psychopomp, the phantasmatic presence of a human child regulates these descending and ascending motions. Here, if we are to imagine the distinction between depth and height as the two sides of a Möbius strip without insides and outsides, the phantasm, just like the event of sense, becomes the articulation of the boundary separating the right and the reverse side of the strip and at the same time, the entity which allows for communication between the two sides, making them into a single side. In the case of Josie’s infanticide, the domain of the symbolic order (words) slides back into a chthonic bodily depth (things). Just as articulated speech becomes the sound of a chewing mouth, so does a human child become an edible in schizophrenic discourse. Josie, having baked her newborn and now locked in a mental institution, thus operates within the phantasm’s descending movement that turns words into things. At the other end of the scale, we have the ascending movement of the Skriker from depths to representational heights. Here we are presented with a different figure: the gift of a healthy child. To the Skriker, this is a gift of “life,” and in Deleuzian terms, a motion from nondifferentiation toward articulated discourse. In this double movement of ascension (gift) and descent (sacrifice), a phantasmatic inherence regulates the series. Something that is “impersonal” and “pre-individual” (1990, 102) replaces essences with a nonbeing. The phantasmatic component is virtually an absence. Still, while

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moving in two directions at once, this component generates effects that alter the play’s fabric and introduce “aberrant” or “unnatural” components into it. While the movement of the surface is “absolutely impersonal” (Lecercle 2002, 19)—sense is “neutrality itself” and an extra—the depths and heights generate very particular “monsters.” In this context, Lily starts to spit slugs or coins while speaking. This literalization of discourse is an effect of the depths. Here the tertiary arrangement of language undergoes a regression and folds back into a pre-propositional region where words become objects. All the while, at the other end of the scale, chimerical creatures—the Kelpie, 8 a centaur, a man who is a brownie—populate the background, remaining aberrant and misplaced. These presences are the aftermath of the work of the phantasm. Such chimerical creatures are inherences of the depths on their way to becoming-language. Their mixed character is another testimony to their intermediary status: these are bodies fossilized in the moment of transition from pre-Socratic depth to Platonic height. The centaur is half bestial and half human, while the man who is a brownie— a speaking creature—is half edible and half linguistic, ever hesitating between “the sound of a chewing mouth” and articulated speech. The Kelpie is a supernatural being of the chthonic underworld that is nevertheless depicted with a sky-colored mane. Such “tensile” presences within the play incarnate Deleuze’s paradox of dry reiteration where an entity that explicates its own sense becomes nonsensical (1990, 31). The mentioned nonsensical infusions, by virtue of appearing in excess, gesture toward the unnamable event. By producing too much “void” significance, they incorporate exactly what the phantasm is: a repetition without an original, the incessant reproduction of a donation of value that is never “truly” there. In this way, they also exemplify an overlap between expression and sense inasmuch as their very articulation also becomes an attempt to capture sense as a shifting movement between depths and heights, to lay bare the very act of the ascending motion. The event as an empty form, an incorporeal envelopment of the states of affairs, is where the series resonate: the Skriker, Josie and Lily, the underworld, the mental institution, and the street meet in their relation to the phantasm of a healthy child. Yet the phantasm only haunts the occurrences to follow, remaining “an irresolvable problem with an indefinite number of solutions” (Lawlor 1998, 21). These “solutions” are incessantly rehearsed, reproduced, proliferated, and tested out as the play evolves, gradually shaping its fabric. Here the phantasmatic inherence is the perennial singularity of the surface, that which an expression expresses as sense (Deleuze 1990, 32). While the phantasm is extracted out of bodily passions and actions, it remains neutral and an extra being. As a phantasm, expressed sense also has the property of never being truly there. A floating signifier, it is an attribution of value without being of significance itself. Rather, its character is evental: it circulates across states of affairs

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without attaching to any of their terms. Even as it inheres in the components of the series, it remains indifferent to the two regions it binds. The donation of sense through an aberrant component is what propels the series. Here, however, the two regions of words and worlds move toward one another to fully congeal. Worlds shift toward underworlds, the rationalizations of a mental patient (Josie) glide toward schizophrenic chatter (the Skriker). By being nonsensical itself (with no intrinsic communicative purpose), the paradoxical element generates too much sense as it is being distributed across the series. By virtue of the element’s bidirectional movement, characters slide out of their proper places. The Skriker (wishing to obtain a child) moves into the world of humans, whereas the two women, Josie (having sacrificed her child) and Lily (expected to offer her child as a gift) are dragged into an underworld. Expression here functions as a generative process, enacting “an actualisation of the virtual” in a manner reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s “effectuation” (Lecercle 2002, 26). As Deleuze appropriates this process, calling it a “counter-effectuation” and a “counteractualisation” (1990, 174–78), he addresses the moment of ascension from the individual to the event, “a movement of the individual which can incarnate itself as an event because it has been able to disincarnate itself as a state of affairs” (Philippe 1999, 60). Expression marks a movement toward the realization of an intensive state, a state that is dispersive in character. Here I align expression with the very serial movement propelled by the phantasmatic event. As the motions of expression and re-expression are at pains to appropriate it, the phantasmatic event elicits the emergence of further and further chunks of literary worlds. Namely, this non-locatable virtuality produces a string of actualizations or counter-effectuations within a play’s habitual fabric. From the viewpoint of a play, then, the event of sense is a transcendence, always “without.” Yet The Skriker’s states of affairs and utterances strive toward it as the play is continually at pains to re-enact or evoke its presence. Expression as a generative principle creates presences out of a “sourceless source,” a phantasm that is never there. Yet its evocation is fiercely enacted by the play’s figures. From the viewpoint of the event, however, the bestowal of sense remains immanent to the textual fabric and always “within,” as it invariably pervades the series shaping the play. The constitution of literary worlds out of series governed by a component that is both “within” and “without” can thus be thought of as an expression of Spinoza’s movement of substance through ever finer distinctions. Here the potentials propelled by the “regulative” work of the phantasmatic event work in two directions, retroactively and proactively, and move toward their counter-effectuation. Yet even the emergence of sense at the surface as an actualization of the virtual does not amount to the constitution of a finite entity, as sense is always brittle and on the verge of de-constitution. Following Deleuze’s principle of heterogeneity between ground and grounded, “the founda-

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tion can never resemble what it founds” (1990, 99), sense remains as different as possible from the states of affairs in which it inheres. The play revolves around the Skriker’s wish to claim a healthy human child for the underworld, Josie having murdered her newborn, and Lily expecting. Yet the phantasm of the healthy child only haunts the states of affairs, never materializing but rather, as befits events, subsisting as a ghostly co-presence. At the other end of the scale, because of this evental infusion even the “actual” entities of the play gradually lose their “actual” faces, and attain something of the elusiveness of the event of sense. As Deleuze says, Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual insofar as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 148)

It is also in this way that expression and sense overlap in a relation of equivalence. Here expression motions toward actualization, whereas sense follows a backward movement toward de-constitution or toward an abundance of virtuality. The latter is the surface’s flipside, a site wherein individuation has not yet been completed and which, therefore, presents us with a wealth of indeterminacy. The two motions collide in a phantasm: the healthy child as an empty psychopomp. Within the play, most notably, a certain wish for de-constitution, for suspending the phantasm and allowing the two series to topple onto one another, is discernible. Within this scenario, the baking of a baby becomes a gesture that captures the motion from a surface of sense to pre-propositional depth. The play also enacts the folding back of transcendence within immanence when Josie’s baby, the literalized phantasm of a healthy human child, is baked. This attempted ingestion aims to re-appropriate and neutralize the symbolic order (language, tertiary organization, good sense). Another descent to a schizophrenic order wherein signifiers have toppled over signifieds takes place with Josie’s journey to the underworld (a motion from surface organization to schizophrenic depths). Here the elaborate dishes of the Skriker’s underworld feast turn into twigs and roots (a motion from articulated discourse to noise). Additional examples of this logic are the Skriker’s song, the play’s chimerical creatures, and Lily’s utterances that turn, alternately, into slugs and coins as signifiers enact their becoming-things. In these cases, the surface is lost, the boundary is

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erased, and a region of non-differentiation between words and worlds opens up. 9 In this way, one of the dangers of immanence is enacted—a shift toward and within the body that amounts to the erasure of the symbolic realm as the region of signifiers, words, and Platonic heights. In all these cases, the phantasm orchestrates a wish to short-circuit the infinite series of worlds and words. This short circuit prematurely extinguishes the incessant strife between the finitudinal and the infinite, the inherent ambiguity between real and unreal, the noematic and the noetic. The order of representation dissolves and slides into the undifferentiated pre-propositional depth of bodily noise, actions, and passions. A certain wish for the suspension of transcendence, sense-bestowal, and organized language is one consequence of this “injurious” immanence. The Skriker enacts a wish for the suspension of transcendence and for a convergence of words and worlds. In its unfolding, the play strives to eradicate traces of transcendence and thus causes the disparate series to collapse. Within this regime of immediacy, “life,” while an emergent entity of the surface, is interpreted as intrusive. The collapsed boundary between worlds and words eventually amounts to the folding-back of sense within a pre-representational region. It is this erasure of transcendence that results in the formation of tensile creatures and language on the interface of words and worlds. In his book The Implications of Immanence (2006) Leonard Lawlor identifies the use of the word “and” as one symptom of Modernity in which the perennial wish for Modernist convergence and immediacy has crystallized. Spotted in titles such as Words and Things (Foucault), The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty), or Voice and Phenomena (Derrida), such efforts point toward an immediacy nostalgia (Lawlor 2006, 27) and a longing for an original point of connectedness. Ever since “representation” has been identified as the conceptual persona non grata of philosophy, various speculative moves have been deployed in opening up toward a world of “immediacy.” Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence is one example: here mediation and distance assume form the very moment a “dividing line” is identified. Distinctions of the type here/there or interior/exterior take shape with the very positing of a boundary. Immanence easily becomes a philosophical ideal inasmuch as it aligns with the category of unmediated “life” and positions itself against transcendence, an avatar of two-world metaphysics. Exactly this wish for convergence, for the imposition of an “and,” is also enacted and perhaps parodied in Churchill’s play. Enacted as the overlap of expression and sense, immanence becomes the erasure of divisions and organizational normativity. Yet this suspension of the surface organization shows us a ghastly face in which we recognize the grimace of a schizophrenic. As sense topples over expression, we find ourselves in a world

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where everything is literal: voice folds back into noise, utterances become unintelligible gurgles. It is also this type of immanence that is employed while scaffolding the fabric of The Skriker, yet this is an immanence where immediacy and constant presentness—a perpetual foreground—gain a somewhat different dimension. Namely, here we see the overlap of expression and sense as the overlayering of expression’s movement toward becoming-sense and the organized surface of a tertiary arrangement, of noise and voice, of nonsensical clutter and propositional consciousness. This overlap is incarnated in the mixture of words and worlds wherein a phantasmatic inherence from the heights collapses into a pre-subjective and pre-propositional region of depthless shadows. Sense allies with chthonic creatures, folds back into its constitutive expressive motions, and non-differentiation issues forth. SARAH KANE’S CRAVE: TOWARD AN ABSENCE. EXPRESSION-SENSE ISOMORPHISM Premiered by Paines Plough at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in August 1998, Crave is a play for four disembodied voices: C, M, B, and A. Characterization is suspended inasmuch as none of the four figures displays any features that are not transferable to the others. The voices, optionally embodied on stage, do not attach to a specific uniform subjectivity. Similarly, no space and time markers are given at all. A dialogue equally detached and devoid of reference takes place in a vacuum-like emptiness. The absence of stage directions is only partly offset by instructions indicating the vocalization of emotion: “Emits a short one syllable scream” (Kane 1998a, 20). While there is much to say about the disruptions of Aristotelian unity the play invites, another property comes to the fore. Namely, Crave does not trace a dialogue that is coherent or cooperative (Grice 1975). At pains to account for the impossibility of being in love or addressing a loved one, the exchanges fail to create an atmosphere of responsiveness. Eschewing characters, setting, and defined gender markers, Crave appears to follow a logic of its own. Lines do not necessarily imply an addressee and do not exhibit a need for cooperative communication. Utterances fall flat—some poignantly theatrical, some obscene, some of a poetic quality, and some plainly trivial. In a similar vein, random quotations from various sources are pasted together to form a showcase of incoherence. Here one could almost assume an ironic dimension to Kane’s work as the play’s statements represent parodies of “longing” stitched together out of much-anthologized and clichéd classic works of literature. For instance, we are presented with lines from T. S. Eliot’s The

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Waste Land (1922), the Modernist attempt at “verse drama” initially entitled “He Do the Police in Different Voices”: C If I was If I If I was M HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME (Kane 1998a, 8)

These make an appearance together with allusions to the writings of Aleister Crowley: A Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. M Now. A Love is the law, love under will. (Kane 1998a, 27)

Against this backdrop, dialogue is nonexistent as the voices never turn to one another. Instead, the only stable addressee remains an absence—a loved one. The play’s reality takes shape only by dint of “the aural irregularity of the voices that, together, variously register emotional chaos” (Aston 2003, 95). Erratic bits of incoherent utterances begin to coalesce: they are set to evoke a phantasmatic presence. What drives the dialogue and pervades the play is never mentioned directly but haunts the scattered intertextual lines. Similar to Deleuze’s phantasm, craving, an unnamable absence, permeates the play yet eludes any articulation. This phantasm organizes the play’s fabric in a manner different from that of the phantasm observed in Churchill’s The Skriker. Crave does not re-enact an attempt to overlap expression and sense (equivalence) in a Modernist wish to merge words and worlds, to reach out toward equilibrium. Instead, Kane’s play points to representation’s desiring quality—a striving toward an invisible holistic that nevertheless remains unattainable. While Crave is at pains to actualize a phantasm, to evoke the appearance of a loved one, it releases a multitude of utterances professing that fulfilled love is never to take place. The play is structured in a way reminiscent of the mimeticism depicted in Mansfield’s Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (2007). Here Mansfield retells the myth of Zeuxis, a protonarrative that embodies a wish to make an ideal visible, yet a wish that is mimetic. According to the myth, Zeuxis prepares for creating an unrivaled masterpiece, a portrait of Helen of Troy. Yet the artist confronts the fact that no single existing woman can truthfully account for Helen’s beauty. To remedy this, he combines the exemplary features of five different models. While mimetic in character, this practice also points to the unreliability of nature, the source of mimesis. Nature is not capable of supplying a truthful and complete coverage of a(n phantasmatic) ideal. Here Mansfield examines female artistic practices such as Orlan’s carnal art and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as variants of the myth of Zeuxis. Kane’s play, too, succumbs to this logic and could be seen as a rewriting of the Zeuxis

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myth in that it offers a montage of “exemplary” scenes of longing cutting across the history of British literature. Within this mold, a phantasmatic ideal only assumes form out of fractured chronicles of longing. Considering this, I read Crave as a play exhibiting a relation of isomorphism between expression and sense. Here a relation of analogy is made the norm. Crave follows a mimetic procedure emerging out of a relation that rests upon a rule of equivocity. Paradoxically, a play that immediately strikes one as “non-representational” turns out to be even more “mimetic” than initially conceivable. Accordingly, another influence I observe here is the logic of Lévi-Strauss’s paradox (Deleuze 1990, 49–50) as the play is constructed around a dialectic of excess and lack played out between signifier and signified. Whereas the signifying series of expression involves a “natural excess” and thus produces a floating signifier, the signified series of absent sense is marked by a lack and becomes a “floated signified” (49). On the one hand, I encounter entities devoid of sense and in the process of taking on any sense. This motion becomes a “Snark hunt” in which sense has always-already escaped. On the other hand, I have an absence, an unknown, inasmuch as it is given without knowledge of a signifier. What is in excess in the signifying series is an “empty square,” a void locality that is an “always displaced place without an occupant.” Here it is sense that is lacking. A concept has taken shape in order to inhabit the “empty” vessel of the excessively prolific signifier. In the other series, the lacking component is a “supernumerary object,” “an occupant without a place” (41). Here, if we are to make use of the form-content division, the vessel is missing while the inhabitant has remained unsheltered. The signified thus becomes redundant. It is a “plus one,” a displaced extra that has remained without a name. In this way, “two uneven sides by means of which the series communicate without losing their significance” (41) take shape. Within this arrangement, the event of sense belongs to no series. Rather, it pertains to all elements at once, circulating in between and attempting communication between the two. As such, the phantasm appears as an excess in one of the heterogeneous series and as lack in the other. It becomes both “word and object” at once (51). The psychopomp’s function is to distribute sense in both orders: “rather than signification, it is what is attributed in such a way that it determines both signifier and signified as such” (51). Here I delineate two regions: the ghostly inherence of the phantasm— a Deleuzian twilight entity poised on the edges of immanence and transcendence—and the region of its anticipated actualization, its character reminiscent of the “partial objects” (1990, 187) in Husserl or the blindly interpenetrating bodily mixtures of Stoic philosophy. For what is actualized within the play (expression) is not a dialogue that has reached a surface. That is to say, the exchanges between the disembodied voices do not amount to utterances that have arrived at sense. What we confront,

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rather, are voices of the depths, captures of expressive motions on the way to becoming-sense and reminiscent of Artaud’s “destratified voice” that “speaks too high and too fast to act as the servant of communication” (Cull 2013, 72). They retain both the characteristics of utterances expected, in their totality, to amount to an event of sense, and of nonsignifying noises of the depth, sound and fury. In this way, the play remains continually caught between virtuality and actuality. Still, gestures of signification are not fully suspended. Signification, rather than remaining empty, finds a receptacle in an entity external to the system of utterances. It is the phantasm of a loved one—the great absentee of the play—that the utterances point to, evoke, and re-constitute. Crave’s depictions of anguish and hopeful love address a nonpresent lover or, as the play’s title suggests, an abstract longing. By taking on the function of the vessel of signification, the phantasm breaks the self-referentiality of the dialogic chain and imposes a presence “on high” reminiscent of Lacan’s transcendent Signifier. Deleuze’s phantasm, however, does not itself bear a significatory structure. Rather, it has the makings of a “floated signified” (49). The absent lover, rather than acting as a floating signifier, an empty form that is at pains to relate to a concept, pertains to the concept itself. The concept of the great absentee of the play “floats” and hovers over the play’s utterances as there is no signifier to attach to it. Rather than the transcendent rule of a word, here we encounter a concept without a word, a world left without a description. Yet this world ceaselessly generates versions of itself and the play’s utterances are continually at pains to give it shape. Also, this world rehearses, in molding the fabric of Crave, the emergence of a word to properly match it. The series of expression and sense thus shape the play in two uneven halves. Caught in-between, the phantasm of a loved one attempts to propel communication between the two, yet ever remains caught between the actualized utterances (expression, floating signifier) and the empty region of absence (sense, floated signified). Here it becomes clear how the phantasm is both immanent and transcendent, within and without. External to the given inasmuch as it is an entity never encountered and never present, the phantasm remains something that the utterances of the play only gesture toward. It is “nameless,” 10 presenting the haunted concept of a word not fully arrived at and not finalized in its formation. At the same time, it spreads across the series, is constitutive of the given and immanent to it, an inextricable extra that nevertheless conditions and molds the fabric of the play. This absence is “the magic word, in whose case all the names by which it is ‘called’ do not fill in the ‘blank’” (Deleuze 1990, 57). Kane’s “parody of hope” (Tomlin 2004, 506) thus opens up as a play poised in liminal territory. Rather than showing a perspective from the “depths” of non-signification or from the “heights” of a transcendent

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Signifier, Crave captures a movement at the interface of the orders of depth and height. The motions of expression appear to fossilize temporarily in the play’s erratic dialogic exchanges. While the expressive motions have gained an almost haptic quality by virtue of Crave’s utterances, they have not yet arrived at sense. Within this equivocal mold, the relation between expression and sense translates into a relation of co-dependence between presence and absence. While immediately available, the manifestations of expression are treated as Auerbach’s frugal foreground encountered in background-dependent narratives. Only the beyond matters here, carving out a magisterial vacuity beneath the play’s utterances. The confused chatter of four voices reaches out for something it cannot name or define. Here, the evoked phantasm remains a quasi-transcendence. Yet, it is an extra that constitutes the utterances of A, B, C, and M. This absence is being summoned, cajoled, jokingly invited, challenged to show up, even threatened. The parallel series of quasi-sense, rather than being dominated by a floating signifier, is ruled by a floated signified—a concept without a word. What is to be evoked and made into presence, into something graspable, has not yet taken shape and continually remains in the making. Thus, the two heterogeneous series of (1) expressions on their way to becoming sense and (2) sense never fully arrived at are traversed by relations of excess and lack, “too much and not enough,” a Deleuzian “eternal disequilibrium” and “perpetual displacement” (Deleuze 1990, 49). What is lacking in the first series is a concept that would unify and organize the seemingly “nonsensical” utterances. At the same time, the utterances that are voicing their demand and addressing the background are in excess. These are empty words without concepts, floating signifiers: C When she left – B The spine of my life is broken. A Why is light given to one in misery (Kane 1998a, 23)

It is this non-responsiveness and lack of desire for response that is nonsignifying. Its character is that of an empty form, a pointing gesture directed toward a void. At the other end of the scale, the series dominated by a floated signified is loaded with significance but only produces a nameless concept. Here the donation of sense is in excess while signifiers are lacking. The “ritual” of addressing the nameless concept of Crave becomes an elaborate poetic evocation that does not aim at a response. Here we have a series of utterances set to address an absence. Each voice beckons toward the absent event of sense, offering its utterances. This is an excess of floating signifiers, scraps and pieces forming an intertext composed of innumerable literary gestures of invocation. Here the absence per se re-

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mains a perennial addressee. The utterances do not address a particular figure, Crave’s perennial “you” that is ever not yet on the verge of revealing itself. What is being summoned, instead, is a void, an absence of sense. In the course of the play, a proper candidate for a figure to replace this absence is rehearsed in tracing various readings of love (rape, murder, child molestation, seduction, cruelty), or by inserting trivial quotations pertaining to enlightenment, spiritual query, and faith. Yet these utterances only gesture toward other utterances, perpetuating a chain of empty signifiers. In this manner, various candidates for a word naming “the sense” are being “auditioned.” Still, rather than arriving at an event of sense, the utterances beckon toward a void locality. The chain of utterances never arrives at sense, racing toward a flash of significance that remains an absence. This multitude of utterances forms a Deleuzian “preliminary totality” (48) whereby the entire “wealth” of expression is given at once and yet has not been organized into a unified whole by a concept. At the other end of the scale, we find the realm of sense. Its function is to arrange the produced totality that has taken shape with the various acts of evocation. This realm remains practically unreachable. Such a scenario suggests that an absence pervades the series of sense and it is an absence that the series of expressions shapes and evokes. Accordingly, the phantasm circulating between both series is “empty.” It is a concept without a word, a floated signified. Let me use a metaphor to substantiate this. One of the unexplained phenomena in the universe remains the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter. That is to say, it is not clear why matter predominates in the observable reality rather than an equal ratio of matter to anti-matter. A gap has emerged as the relations into which matter enters are disproportionately more than those of anti-matter. Analogically speaking, this inadequacy is replicated in the relations of signifier and signified. Since there usually is more than one candidate for stating the name of a concept, one time too often signifiers happen to be in excess. In a similar vein, we observe this disequilibrium in the relation between expression and sense when in an arrangement of isomorphism. Here expression and sense are two isomorphic correlates belonging to two different orders, that of words and that of worlds. In this arrangement, words make a constant effort to attach to a concept (phantasm, a floated signified). Expressions are at pains to articulate their expressed, that is, sense. Therewith, a rule of analogy is established. Namely, expression (words without a concept) and sense (a concept without a word) are structurally similar, yet different in kind and asymmetrical. They belong to two heterogeneous series governed by disequilibrium, reminiscent of Auerbach’s dialectic of foreground and background, presence and absence. The isomorphic arrangement of expression and sense becomes manifest because of this gap. On the one hand, we encounter a wealth of

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expression. This is an actuality immediately graspable, present, and composed of innumerable fleeting utterances. Sense, on the other hand, corresponds to its transcendence. Sense always remains an absence to be evoked, a target reality that is invariably, and by virtue of its definition, a perennial “without.” Here the two-world scenario of the insufficiency of the status quo translates into arrangements of expression and sense. Yet the arrangement of Platonic eidolon and ideas is overturned. It is the realm of expression (utterances, a preliminary multiplicity) that is at pains to shape a phantasmatic image of its incorporeal double, sense (significance, formed totality). The realm of expression is never capable of fully accounting for the region of sense. From the viewpoint of expression, sense remains infinitely ineffable, absent, a void. Only supplying partial descriptions, expression gestures toward what is to remain a vacuity and a hermeneutic secret without exhausting its essence. According to Lévi-Strauss’s rule of disequilibrium (Deleuze 1990, 50), the two heterogeneous series of expression and sense (or the absence thereof) are invariably asymmetrical. Providing a description of the isomorphic arrangement between expression and sense, this scaffold also suggests an isomorphic connection in which the event of sense is ontologically distant and can only be described as being’s mirror image, a “terrible double.” The gap of representation is visible here as well: being, while immediately graspable and present, is not capable of accounting for its own event. Following the metaphor of matter and anti-matter, one could say that the event is bound to remain being’s shadow, a hiddenness and a concept without a name. To furnish another example of this principle, we could recycle the classic analogy of Saussure’s langue and parole. In langue, all elements and rules are given altogether as a “preliminary totality” (Deleuze 1990, 48), yet they only enjoy a virtual state. However, the use of langue in utterances takes place progressively. Similarly, in Sarah Kane’s play, the “stuff” of craving is given altogether, forming an undifferentiated aggregate of utterances pertaining to the acts and psychic conditions of longing. This “preliminary totality” of expression, however, does not amount to the shaping of sense. Rather, sense is yet to be made, a “produced totality” is yet to come into existence. At the same time, the utterances of A, B, C, and M are exactly the captures of a movement arrested between the preliminary totality (signifier) and the produced totality (signified). They are poised on the gap between the two, shaping the very gesture of transmission between the ontologically disparate orders. The utterances become the explication of this “mediality,” of the milieu between expression and sense. Following Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture,” stating that “the gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such” (Agamben 2000b, 57), we could make use of another simile in saying that the play captures the exact locus of gesturing, of beckoning toward sense. Crave’s utterances thus remain on the fault lines

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between simultaneity and progression. Various erratic sentences express the virtuality of longing, each illuminating an aspect or mentioning a version of it. At the same time, this linear organization of utterances races toward the explication of its own sense in a Deleuzian “Hunting of the Snark.” Here gesturing toward an unattainable image or a phantasmatic inherence unlocks a movement toward the phantasm yet never manages to actualize it. It is in this sense that the utterances of Crave, while directed toward an actualization (of sense), mime the motions of a Snark hunt. What is visible within the play are only the movements of expression. Expression points toward its own process inasmuch as it offers the explication of a mediality. Being a pointing gesture directed toward the constitution of sense and rendering its absence “visible,” expression hearkens back to its own intermediary status. Here expression accounts for the emancipation of substance on the verge of generating something new. Sense, however, is yet to be made. As a capture of this simultaneity—an aggregate of virtualities arrested in the process of their actualization—the designation “mediality” serves as a description of the becoming-progression of the expressive motions. Namely, it describes the process by which the utterances gain their quality of “making sense.” One could use the metaphor of law to explain this arrangement: “This is why law weighs with all its might, even before its object is known, and without ever its object becoming exactly known” (Deleuze 1990, 49). Sense, by being given all at once yet remaining transcendent to its actualized partial manifestations, is a poignant absence, an Auerbachian background, a point of orientation and a direction to move toward. While being absent, it is nevertheless omnipresent inasmuch as Crave in its entirety represents exactly a progression on the verge of becoming a produced totality, an event of sense. What is sketched out, once again, is a gap. The transition from totality (the preliminary totality of sense) to parts (the progression of utterances only partially illuminating and addressing sense) toward produced totality (an invocation of a sense that is missing) has its culmination in a void and ultimately turns out to be gesturing toward emptiness. LAURA WADE’S OTHER HANDS: THE SURFACE OF PALMS. A GENESIS FROM EXPRESSION TO SENSE Other Hands follows a simple linear structure by alternating dialogues and fades. It features four characters. The play develops organically, with the exchanges almost resembling scripts of oral narrative. Punctuation and grammaticality are minimal, the benchmark being closeness to one’s natural way of putting stresses and uttering unfinished sentences. The play opens with an in medias res exchange between Steve and Lydia grad-

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ually revealing that Steve is a freelance IT support person called up to fix a computer. Lydia shows various signs of agitation at not being able to master the machine she is dependent on. Over the course of the play she also reveals her loneliness, thinking up little excuses to call up Steve— such as fixing her toaster or water boiler—in the hope he will stay a bit longer and keep her company. The play’s couple, Hayley and Steve, converse in a detached, disinterested manner. Their eight years of relationship have been spent exchanging trivial remarks or not saying much to one another. Sentences are left hanging; exchanges seem automatically generated: “HAYLEY: You know I think I might stop / I might just stop talking ’cause everything I say feels like / I’ve said it before every . . . thing sounds like I’ve/ rehearsed it . . .” (Wade 2006, 32). Similarly, the dialogue of Steve and Lydia has a somewhat mechanical quality. Four characters have fallen victim to a linguistic practice that stiffens and incapacitates them. At some point, the characters complain that their palms have begun to tingle and their fingertips feel as if paralyzed: “Everything I feel, feels like it’s in my hands. / Rest of me’s totally . . . numb” and “Sometimes they’re numb or they tingle or / They’re tingling, like they’re full of something it’s so” (Wade 2006, 61). Both Hayley and Steve have difficulty picking up objects or performing even simple manual tasks such as opening a bottle of milk. A recomposition of their fixed selves begins. From the edges of the body, entire personalities begin to reshuffle as if following Deleuze’s remark that events can be likened to crystals growing out of the edges (1990, 9). As bodies begin to recompose, a surface of sense replaces essences. Personalities dissolve or bend; roles and lines of spoken dialogue become interchangeable. What issues forth is a vertical becoming. This is an erasure of one’s boundaries whereby one opens toward the intensities of other forms of being and dissolves one’s territory. From the viewpoint of sense, such becoming is the level of recomposition that offers the largest repository of openness and articulation. From the viewpoint of representation, however, the described state comes across as an atavistic return to a state of non-differentiation. Other Hands enacts exactly this movement. Steve and Hayley shift from a paralytic to an articulated existence that yet culminates in a scene where bodies subsist in a state of nondifferentiation. In phenomenological terms, the shift from linguistic heights toward a surface of sense translates into a transition from constituted subjectivity understood as an ego consciousness toward a pre-personal, infra-subjective state in which a person could just as well be anyone else. Bodies become matters of maximal expression. At the surface of sense, numbness transforms into a becoming-expressive that enables a traversal of one’s own territories and entry into those of others. Bodies interchange, as it is no longer a matter of who inhabits the body of whom, but a question of the intensities a body is capable of generating and the trans-

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morphoses it can produce. Here, then, expression is not the intermediary component organizing the order of noise (chthonic depths) to create an ascent to the surface but a process that brings language (Platonic height) to the domain of sense. It is this motion that is enacted in the play as we observe how Deleuze’s “order-word”—language as the prison house of being—begins to slide toward a surface to ultimately become expressive again. This reversed genesis—from linguistic heights toward a surface of sense—is truly a transition from one formal structure to another. Nondescript humans caught up within a language that causes them to solidify to the extent that it induces a paralytic effect—become capable of love. In this way, the four characters of Other Hands traverse their fixed human shapes to merge with other beings and become something else, all the while carrying the transmorphosis forward so that it can affect other beings as well. Lydia affects Steve, and he transfers the affect, unknowingly, to Hayley, by whom Greg also becomes affected. In the end, everyone has changed in a significant way and yet no perceptible transformations appear to have taken place. This is the work of the event of sense— elusive yet capable of entirely recomposing one’s relations. Here the play has installed a number of magical objects or catalysts for the emergence of an event of sense. These magical objects regulate the work of the series, negotiating the paradoxical co-habitation of more and less, larger and smaller. In a sense, here Other Hands appears to be drawing from the resources of the paradoxes of becoming that Deleuze derives from Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Eating a mushroom makes Alice grow or shrink, a movement in two directions leaving us at a loss as to which is which. Always a magical object—an edible item—signals the initiation of becoming, the recomposition of one’s forming forces and tensions. At the same time, these becomings are invariably bi-directional. A transmutation always has a flipside, a subterranean movement either going in the opposite direction or shifting toward one’s mirror image. 11 On eating a mushroom or drinking from a bottle, Alice becomes larger while getting smaller: “Pure becoming in this sense is an affront to common sense, which demands that all things demonstrate one direction, or ‘sens’ in French. In this way, the paradox of becoming, in eluding the present, undermines the commonsense assumption of fixed identities” (Marks 1998, 89). This becoming drafts out a level of recomposition at which one becomes open to other forms of life within oneself. Yet “the problem is not of becoming this or that in man, but rather one of becoming human, of a universal becoming animal . . . to undo the human organisation of the body, to cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of us discovering the zones which are really his, and the groups, the populations, the species which inhabit” (May 2000, 228). This transmorphosis lies at the heart of Laura Wade’s play, too. Other Hands enacts a becoming-minor and translucent. As the figures display

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their idiosyncratic tastes in food or accept food items, they open up to a play of forces and become regions of multitudinous traversals wherein grades of intensity shift and bodies recompose accordingly. Along with this gradual character “dispersion”—a process in which traits fade or undergo a recomposition—a movement in the opposite direction issues forth as well. A string of minor breakdowns or moments of clarity causes the characters’ subjectivities to fade. Rather than becoming even more distinct, instead of gaining in substance with each realization, they begin to disappear. At the same time, the four inhabitants of Other Hands become more intense. This movement could be described with Deleuze’s gesture of “becoming minor,” a recomposition of one’s status quo arrangements and of one’s predispositions: At a certain level of organisation each of us is a “human” being, with all that this term has come to entail over the centuries, but as we descend to ground level—say to the level of the singular and irreducible, or the level of experience – it becomes increasingly difficult, and even undesirable, to apply categories and distinctions of any sort. . . . becominganimal is a movement from major (the constant) to minor (the variable); it is a deterritorialization in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability and identity but is instead folded imperceptibly into a movement or into an amorphous legion whose mode of existence is nomadic . . . (Bruns 2007, 703)

Here the play introduces four edible items: catalysts that carry this transition. Steve’s acting out of character begins with a drink of squash: “You don’t um, happen to have a straw at all” (Wade 2006, 38). Hayley’s drink at a restaurant also unlocks a novel chain of events: “GREG: And that’s a drink, is it? Bubble tea / HAYLEY: Try a bit? / She offers him a straw. / GREG: Got something floating in the bottom, blob or something / HAYLEY: Tapioca balls” (45). Lydia’s food item is ice-lollies, which she melts in order to obtain the sticks: “LYDIA: I couldn’t think of anything but lolly-sticks that’d work” (Wade 2006, 91). Greg’s sniffing a bundle of flowers marks the fourth point: “He leans in to sniff the flowers, to see if they have a smell. They don’t. He sits back in his chair and looks at them” (112). Encountering a strange edible object facilitates a change or, to put it in the dramatic terms of immanence, a transmorphosis. A “motionless journey” on the spot, this transmorphosis is not perceptible. As four magical edibles manifest themselves as catalysts of becoming, they alter the fabrica of their recipients, molding them anew. In her advocacy of the liveliness of objects, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett speaks of such items as “interveners,” partly reminiscent of Latour’s “actants” and of Deleuze’s “quasi-causal operators,” whereby “an operator is that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference . . . becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event” (2010, 9). Bennett names

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this intrinsic fortuity “thing-power” (20) and speaks of “an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings . . . they express or serve” (20). In the section “Edible Matter” (39–52), food items enjoy special attention as actants capable of modifying their recipients. The agency of consumable things, of foodstuffs as material agents, is aligned with Spinoza’s notion of conative bodies that have the capacity to affect one another—in the case of food items, very literally—and enhance an organism (44). Here the field of interaction is also a moment wherein the event’s flash of significance transpires, and a qualitative switch takes place. A drink of squash with a straw in it, bubble tea with tapioca balls, a plastic bag full of ice-lollies, and sunflowers serve as the four regions of sense-excess in Other Hands. It is here that the series of words and worlds overpass one another, undergoing a transmorphosis and altering the play’s habitual texture. Thinking in line with Husserl, who first proposed a scenario of viewing sense in terms of neutrality, sterility, and as an extra being (1990, 32), Deleuze posits sense as a surface effect and an impassive event. Following this logic of inconspicuity, the moments of sense-overkill in the play emerge as trivial, almost negligible occurrences that nevertheless change everything. Scaffolded as parts of seemingly immaterial episodes, they operate as empty psychopomps that carry the transition from normative language to a surface of sense. The heterogeneous series of words and worlds thus also undergo a modification. Language opens up to a becoming-expressive: starting in a position of transcendence as a carrier of the order-word, it transmutes into a means of encountering other beings. The function of the empty psychopomp, however, is not a radical novelty but something already implied in Saussurian linguistics. Something to consider with respect to the series takes us to the Saussurian notion of value: “the terms of the series exist only through their relations to one another, singularities correspond to the value of these relations” (Lawlor 1998, 20). Taking on this interpretation, the singular dimension of the empty psychopomp “makes” but also “breaks” the gliding of the heterogeneous series. Words and worlds are kept apart, made distinct, thinkable and discussible thanks to the leveling function of this sensedonating component. Still, the flipside of this function turns out to be a sense-overflow, a Lévi-Straussian floating signifier. A paradoxical element, the floating signifier distributes sense precisely by virtue of its nonsensical, superfluous nature. This stretch of sense-overabundance offers a significant resource of overthrowing potential. It encapsulates the co-presence of “more” and “less” in a maximally dense form. From here, weights shift, the bidirectional movement changes course. As the signifying series slide, the paradoxical elements generate too much sense. Thus, the four “magical objects,” in “having no sense and producing too much sense” (Lawlor 1998, 26), serve as the two series’ vanishing points. These

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paradoxical objects allow the two series to resonate, yet also change their course. While not resembling one another and being in no way analogous, the series of words and worlds offer two ways of viewing the four Deleuzian empty psychopomps within the play: once within the region of signifiers, and once within the region of Deleuzian signifieds. Within the domain of the signifier, the word would be in excess, yet will only produce a surfeit of sense. Here we also encounter the dimension of the order-word as a mechanical receptacle readied to take on any concept. From the viewpoint of the tertiary organization, these moments of sense-overkill equal an encounter with nonsense. Within the realm of signifieds, one has already arrived at a concept, yet words are spent. We arrive at the vocal dimension of language and matters of pure expression. Here everything is of significance, “everything has sense.” Let us recall the rule of expression whereby a ground must never borrow its characteristics from what it grounds (Deleuze 1990, 99). A glass of squash, bubble tea, a bag of ice-lollies, or sniffed flowers do not amount to the change they trigger. Rather, they only serve as the spots wherein the incongruity between the two series expressed as “everything’s sense” and “everything’s nonsense” levels out in an event that only professes their co-presence in declaring that “there is sense” (Lawlor 1998, 27). Whereas the heterogeneity principle that applies to the series and allows for their movement is also valid for the relationship between expression and the expressed, at the point of intersection every relation is glaringly empty. Each entity becomes easily transferable to its other; each movement can re-start from the opposite track. Yet this otherness does not constitute a case of transcendence by molding something inscrutable or unreachable we can only look up to. Rather, the outside in which we nevertheless encounter ourselves is an extension of one’s body. Toward the end of the play, the figures have become purely impersonal, a human bundle in which individual bodies are entwined quite arbitrarily, each gaining the possibility of becoming the other. The final scene draws a picture of interwoven bodies folded into one another: “HAYLEY holds her hand out for LYDIA to inject and buries her head in STEVE’s shoulder. LYDIA injects HAYLEY’s hand” (Wade 2006, 126). As befits depths, here we only witness the intermixture of partial objects. A hand, its continuation in the injection, an extended hand, and a head carved into a chest form a uniform mold. Each character has become another being: . . . becoming is never a process of imitating, yet the one who becomes finds himself before another who ends up being in oneself. With the other in me, however, I am not substituting myself for another; the structure of becoming is not reciprocal. It is a zigzag in which I become other so that the other may become something else; but this becoming something else is possible only if a work (oeuvre) is produced. (Lawlor 2008, 170)

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What this final transmorphosis produces, unlocking the possibility for others to become something else in skirting the surface of sense, is love. As Lawlor notes, “becoming involves love” (171), and in the end scene the three characters witness this novelty: “One has become imperceptible and clandestine in motionless voyage. . . . One has become like everyone, but in a way in which no one can become like everyone” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 199). In a way, this is a becoming whereby “nothing less than new worlds” (Gontarski 2012, 601) are being generated. The notion of organism is challenged just as the becoming of a body now becomes a motionless journey on the spot. Drafting out a field for stepping out of one’s territories and contours to become something else, one transmutes into a minoritarian entity. Thus, an “ethics of becoming imperceptible” (Braidotti 2006) is sketched out as each of the characters undergoes a transmorphosis that is not strictly a “becoming-man . . . because man is majoritarian par excellence,” but a becoming-animal in the Deleuzian sense inasmuch as “all becoming is becoming minoritarian” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 291). This transition from the heights of language toward the surface of sense in its capacity as an expressive plane can also be articulated through the lens of Agamben’s distinction between phone and logos, voice and language. Here phone stands for the sheer expressive quality of language. Phone involves the kind of language that suspends matters of signification. Whereas this expressivity is the very condition for the emergence of language, it, just like sense, cannot be extracted and tackled individually in the flux of speech. To a certain extent, one can even assume that in speaking, whereby an emphasis is put on the communicative and significatory value of statements, this expressive component is at best neglected, at worst removed. To Agamben, language takes place in the gap formed after the removal of the expressive component: The animal phone-voice as the sonorous flux emitted by the phonic apparatus—is presupposed as a condition of human speech, but it is presupposed as that which is removed in human speech. In other words, human speech is found upon an element that is removed. And as this removal takes place there opens up a fissure indeed; as the animal phone sighs and dies, a split occurs between human speech and voice, and another is in the gap of this split that another voice appears: The taking place of language between the removal of the voice and the event of meaning is the other voice . . . that, in the metaphysical tradition, constitutes the originary articulation of human language. (Agamben 2006, 36)

This removal marks the very depletion of language as a productive resource of sense. The tertiary arrangement cloaks the dimension of sense and instead reinstates language’s status as a carrier of the established discourse and the Deleuzian order-word. In this respect, Other Hands

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enacts a movement that reclaims expression. Language undergoes a backward motion, reverse-engineering the constitutive processes which have led to its formation in order to reach out to a region of sense. Language’s “becoming-minoritarian” is enacted here inasmuch as existences in becoming maintain a special relationship to phone, the sonorous dimension of language as a matter of pure expression. Here the very fabric of bodies enacts this movement toward an event of sense. At first, bodies within the play enjoy an existence as constituted subjectivities and fully fleshed-out identities only to reconfigure in a second step. Bodies witness a becoming in which the claustrating dimension of language gives way to a language capable of encounters and expression. Here the event of sense does not effect a change in substance but nevertheless leaves a substance altered, pervading and restructuring it into something new. This transition takes place with the help of four psychopomp objects that have the status of Deleuze’s “empty squares” effecting shifts in value within a system. What the play ultimately shows, then, is that “a radically immanent intensive body is an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify—in space—and consolidate—in time—within the singular configuration commonly known as individual . . . a portion of forces that is stable enough . . . to sustain and undergo constant fluxes of transformation” (Braidotti 2006, 138). SARAH KANE’S 4.48 PSYCHOSIS: MEDIATION AS DIALOGUE. NONDUALITY OF EXPRESSION AND SENSE First performed posthumously in June 2000 at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in London, 12 4.48 Psychosis is a brief inventory of states tracing the emerging contours of a clinical disease. The text outlines the accounts of one particular mental patient—although the original script suggests a cast of three and the number has varied extensively in successive productions from a single actor to a multiplicity of voices. 13 Resembling Crave in many ways, the play even more radically dispenses with the notion of separate human subjectivities and allows the voices to take on any line. Space and time are suspended. Stage directions remain nonexistent. Silences provide the only caesura between the dialogic passages: “Silence. . . . A long silence. . . . A very long silence” (Kane 2000, 12). Only the brief stage direction “Looks” (12) alludes to the physical presence of a speaker. The script evades coherent narrative patterns as it progresses through dialogic exchanges interspersed with longer monologic fragments (3–7). While the dialogic exchanges mime the pattern of a doctor-patient interview, the longer prose passages have more of a confessional nature and appear to issue from a unified consciousness consolidated in an “I-

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person.” Other passages resemble excerpts from a doctor’s diary (16–17) documenting a patient’s medication history and behavior patterns. The insistence on uttering the same sets of words in alternating sequences produces a mystery effect, as if mimicking the seeming communicational intent of a coded message: “flash flicker slash burn wring press bad slash/ flash flicker punch burn float flicker dab flicker/ punch flicker flash burn dab press wring press . . .” (22). The introduction of an exercise set to determine the degree of cognitive decline in mental patients reveals specifically clinical material. In a test called serial sevens, the voices enact a countdown from one hundred to two by sevens (23). A distorted version of the test is presented at the outset of the play (5). Here the numbers are not only graphically dispersed throughout the page of the script, but also systematically fail to exhibit a sequence or logic of arrangement, inducing a mock cryptographic effect. As the script progresses, language becomes sparser, culminating in blank spaces (34). Occupying a single page, the play’s conclusive sentence alludes to a separation from oneself. Here a dissolved subjectivity has been compartmentalized and spatially allocated: “It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind” (35). A “mind” appears to have concealed or suffocated a “myself.” The latter is presumably an innermost constituent that can, however, just as legitimately function as a hidden persona, a “face,” which an “I” has failed to encounter. This tripartition alludes to the division into three voices intended to reinforce the impression of a dislocated subjectivity or a consciousness at once unified and alienated from itself. 14 Notwithstanding the absence of spatial markers and other elements of Aristotelian drama, the play exhibits a wealth of mental landscapes and follows a representational agenda in supplying a plausible, coherent, and easily identifiable picture of thought scenarios in mental illness. Even the title 4.48 Psychosis refers to the particular time before daybreak when Kane repeatedly and compulsively woke during her illness. 15 The hour is referenced as the moment “when sanity visits / for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind” (20). Suicide, a perennial theme throughout Kane’s work, is addressed both in a semi-poetic—“I have resigned myself to death this year”—and calculating manner—“Take an overdose, slash my wrists and hang myself” (7)—alluding to a resoluteness that has become at once emotional and a bare fact. The play also incorporates a series of interactions with the mental projection of an inquisitive therapist, offering insight into the history of a patient’s treatment. In view of this, one could agree that “Kane’s final play is a theatrical montage: it takes different types of language, monologues and scenes and brings them together under the constructive principle of articulating the experience of a psychotic breakdown” (Urban 2011, 316). Another mimetic feature the play exhibits is the tripartite separation into voices dissolving the boundaries of the unified self. The “bewildered fragments” of a psychotic

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personality and an at least triadic consciousness swing between noncomplementary moods and mutually exclusive statements about love and hate. The play incorporates a wealth of experience that remains nevertheless fragmentary and elucidated only in part. Here the contingent nature of subjectivity is addressed together with a progressive reduction of personhood. One is under the impression that the work is “generated by words themselves” as “the narrating subject is composed exclusively of words—yet it is also ‘wordless’. It is present— only to the extent to which it is absent” (Gandron 2004, 61). The play starts with the introduction of an I-persona stripped to the essentials of a speaking voice, only locatable through the spatiality of a mental landscape and the temporal frame of a suicidal interval spanning an hour and twelve minutes. While the utterances are primarily dialogic, it is unclear whether the enacted fragments of interaction address a subjectivity external to the speaker, itself a disembodied “consolidated consciousness” partitioned into voices. Characterization being absent, it is impossible to determine to what extent the dialogue contributes to the development of a protagonist and to what extent to its dissolution. As if thematizing disfiguration, each utterance unlocks a wealth of potentialities, triggering a variety of possible scenarios that nevertheless remain only latent. Reference to an external world is either partially suspended—as in the dialogic fragments shaping a grotesque account of a patient-therapist exchange that is at once clichéd and pronouncedly personal—or absent, as in the passages collapsing into silence or culminating in gestures of disappearance (“watch me vanish”). The accounts of mental illness, 16 though mimetically reproducing the pivotal points of clinical depression, remain very much singular. This partition within the three-voiced subjectivity is enacted not only by means of Bakhtinian polyphony, but also by dint of a certain interplay of vocal abundance and depletion. An experiential flux is interlinked with calculated silences. The auditory caesuras expose not only irreconcilable worlds shaped by the utterances of the voices, but also an incapacity to relate and unify, to reach toward that which is not the self. Paradoxically, it is precisely this reluctance to gesture toward an Outside that perpetuates a splitting within, a population of at least three identities within a mind, and a litany that is vastly dialogical. Thus, the reluctance to partake in an Outside amounts to constitutive splitting. Gaps—in the shape of silences, uncommunicative or uncooperative dialogue, or allusions to self-dissolution and becoming-void—continually pop up from within. This split from within is constructed around the illusory boundary between insufficiency and completeness. The voices compete in exhibiting the various ways in which the subjectivity they pertain to is deficient. The progressive deletion of a self that is relentlessly orchestrating and narrativizing its own disappearance is conveyed in sparse language of an

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intensity and level of contraction that comes very close to poetry. The Outside remains an absence not because it is insufficiently addressed but precisely because, in a scenario reminiscent of Crave, it is a perennial addressee. Within the context of 4.48 Psychosis, however, this absence is further radicalized as it becomes an abject met with unwillingness or rejection. This revolt against the Outside perpetuates a proliferation from within; the unwillingness to address produces a dialogic consciousness. Similarly, rather than the expected document of attempted perfection, the quest toward completeness brings forth self-erasure and gradual disfiguration. The level of supra-representation revealed in 4.48 Psychosis does not work by dint of the suspension of recognizable structures, received anthropomorphic or subjectivity markers such as a sense of space and time, or a consolidated human consciousness. Nor does the play undermine representational arrangements per se, at least inasmuch as it offers a coherently constructed picture of a particular state associated with mental illness. Rather, in 4.48 Psychosis there is a relation between expression and sense in which a perspective of nonduality opens up. Here the evental component is a meta-entity that serves as the background on which a dual arrangement of immanence and transcendence emerges. Within this arrangement of nonduality, expression functions as the medium that carries forward the emergence of sense. The nondual perspective communicates hermeneutical or medial traits insofar as expression and sense appear to form a relationship based on a teleological movement toward a product, a consolidated finality. The region of sense becomes tangible only through the work of the transmissive component, expression. The product of sense, once articulated, does not become a transcendence but rather enwraps the movement of expression both retroactively and proactively. It occupies a Deleuzian surface that is groundlessness, a constituted emptiness. Thus, at each point of convergence within the motion of expression, there gapes open a cleavage. This is a screen-like gap facing both the motions accompanying the constitution of sense (expression) and the emergence that is yet to follow and to eventually exceed it (re-expression). In the case of 4.48 Psychosis, the expressive dimension is articulated in the difference between voice and language. It constitutes the capture of a consciousness on its way to becoming dialogical, and yet what is sketched out is “no-longer (voice) and of a not-yet (meaning)” (Agamben 2006, 35), marking the very in-betweenness poised on the borderlines of expression and sense. Here, “at the limits of language, words keep silent in the intervals where stuttering punctuates language” (Goodchild 1996, 12). That is to say, the play takes us to a dimension of language that, similar to the scenario sketched out in Crave, has not reached the surface of sense and tertiary organization but continually constitutes these in the course of its motion. The tertiary organization is but a phantasmatic in-

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herence, and we are presented only with expressions on their way to becoming-sense. Non-communicating, they become a stuttering, a place where language does not fail but recedes into the background, putting forth the vocal dimension of expression. As Agamben says, within the distinction between phone and logos, a voice is an entity that “always already divides,” opening up a fissure between a “being with the word (speaking being) and being without the word (living being)” (1999b, 69). While a living being would be primarily constituted by phone, speaking beings are intrinsically precarious because their logos is predicated on the availability of phone. In a similar manner, an arrival at sense takes place once the motions of expression have reached a vanishing point, once they have shifted toward Deleuze’s tertiary organization. 4.48 Psychosis thus offers a motion of expression (phone) toward becoming-sense (logos) that has a generative character inasmuch as it follows the gradual becoming-dialogue of the play’s “consolidated consciousness.” At several junctures, the play tests out the possibility of dialogue—that is, the possibilities of communicative language—in a series of trials. Here the voices of 4.48 Psychosis appear to emit incorporeal doubles that serve as their counterparts in an attempted verbal exchange. First, this takes place through the cessation of speech—as if mimicking the pauses that naturally occur in conversations. At certain moments, the play comes to a halt as if waiting for or listening to a response on the part of an invisible counterpart. The monological consciousness of 4.48 Psychosis achieves a conversational effect by continually alternating speech with such moments of silence: (A very long silence.) – But you have friends. (A long silence.) – You have a lot of friends. What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (A long silence.) What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (A long silence.) What do you offer? (Silence.) (3)

Second, probing into the proliferative potential of language by repeating detached sequences of words and numbers is another avatar of this effort. Here the very dimension of organized language is challenged as we confront the dimension of nonsense. In the following passage, for instance, the game of serial sevens is severely distorted and dispersed onto the writing surface:

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100 91 84 81 72 69 58 44 37 38 42 21

28

12 7

(5)

Similarly, the iteration of the same sets of words, randomly reconnecting, forms a one-page poem performed by voices. A surfeit of vocal gestures without logos takes shape: flash flicker slash burn wring press dab slash flash flicker punch burn float flicker dab flicker punch flicker flash burn dab press wring press punch flicker float burn dab press wring press punch flicker float burn flash flicker burn (22)

Third, projecting a double that assumes the role of an inquiring doctor is a further attempt at becoming-dialogical. The monological consciousness here literally manages to construct a responsive incorporeal double and thus proliferate from within: – Have you made any plans? – Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself. – All those things together? – It couldn’t possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help. (7)

Most dominantly, however, the motion toward sense occurs by virtue of a dialogue between a consciousness and one’s self (reflexivity). At this moment, the speaking voice turns back to the consciousness structure that has generated it: watch me vanish watch me

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vanish watch me watch me watch (33)

Here, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether the exchanges aim at a consolidation of subjectivity or at its dissolution. In this way, the play tests the registers of its vocal potential, shifting toward a “gesture to what lies outside of traditional western thought and representation to the place where the subject ‘neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions’” (Gandron 2004, 62). Rather than following a sequential arrangement or any other type of teleological movement, these dialogic sketches traverse the play with no particular priority of the one over the other. Real causality is suspended as another relation, one that remains indifferent to the sequential relations of cause and effect, manifests itself. Such is the relation of immanent causality sketched out in the sequences of silence, nonsense, division, and reflexivity. I see these particular junctions (silence, nonsense, division, reflexivity) as places forming non-causal correspondences. They are singularities, “turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling . . . ‘sensitive points’” (Deleuze 1990, 52). In being qualitatively the products of the event of sense, they exceed the play’s linear progression and yet remain immanent to it: they stretch over the serial components and endow them with their special quality of “making sense.” In other words, it is only through these “empty” junctions that the motions of expression and reexpression are endowed with sense. All the while, the region of sense remains the background on which the duality between transcendence and immanence emerges. Following the paradox of indefinite proliferation (Deleuze 1990, 28–31), sense articulates itself in what precedes it (flow of expression) and projects itself in the anticipation of what follows (flow of re-expression). The world-shaping dimension of dialogue becomes visible as each utterance of the disembodied voices within 4.48 Psychosis partakes of the shaping of a “world.” Yet, in being defined through the movements of expression that lead to its composition and by the retroactive and proactive gestures of both already-constituted and projected senses throughout the chain, dialogic consciousness always remains yet to be arrived at. In this way, it rather functions as a horizon. In its capacity as a horizon of sense, dialogue assumes a double role. It is a locale gathering the motions of

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expression to transform them into expressed sense (projection). Then, it also acts as the place from which sense gestures back toward expression as its virtuality (retrojection), toward the motions that have led to its constitution. In becoming-dialogical, the chain of infinite proliferation remains at work by virtue of the donation of sense. The “empty” junctions that operate in two directions—both projecting and retrojecting 17 — secure an incessant supply of sense. This horizon of sense—on each junction in the serial chain—functions as a locus of nonduality. It proactively gestures toward another realm of sense to be constituted by the movements of re-expression while beckoning toward the region of sense already produced by the progressive motions of expression that precede it. Here sense stretches in two directions, retroactively and proactively, remaining a singularity that transcends the motions of expression inasmuch as it constitutes a qualitative leap within the series and exceeds the already produced. Yet, by stretching over the components of the chain, sense nevertheless demonstrates that it remains immanent to both the produced lines of sense and the proactively projected lines of re-expression/sense production yet to come. Still, while singular and marking the utmost level of individuation at a junction—to the extent that an emergence of a qualitative difference takes place—sense is also a locus of reflexivity. Itself defined as indifference and as an empty surface that remains impassive in relation to the actions and passions of expression, sense also points back to itself. Sense returns to itself as it—pervasively enveloping—instantaneously becomes an Outside. One could say that sense functions as the realization or the “reflexive,” “pointing-back-to-oneself” component of expression, whereas expression itself remains non-reflexive. Within 4.48 Psychosis, one can observe this as the dialogic consciousness at once goes beyond itself in addressing a void and thus appropriating a “world,” but also turns back to itself (reflexivity) to examine its contents. It is in this simple dialectic that one can witness the production of sense. The relationship sense maintains with the motions of expression is reflexive inasmuch as it is marked by bi-directional donation: once produced, once having been an Outside, sense turns back on itself, enveloping its motions in a gesture that reveals its dual nature of reconciled immanence and transcendence. It is this pervasive and at the same time reflexive aspect of sense that becomes palpable within the case of nonduality in 4.48 Psychosis. The horizon of sense here functions as a principle of indifference underlying the boundary between immanence and transcendence. Its locus is metaphorically addressed as a “surface” or a film of non-differentiation that envelops the divergent series and ensures a dynamic steadiness of the system or what Deleuze calls a “metastability” (1990, 35). It is also this produced surface—the intermediary, freeze-frame of sense—that paradoxically “allows groundlessness to speak” (35) in making a place for the emergence of a singularity. This takes the shape of silences, nonsensical

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infusions, divided selves, and a self turning back on itself, generating worlds out of its own resources. Itself empty and an occurrence of void significance, sense retroactively and proactively stretches toward the groundlessness of the expressive motion. The junction of sense (a formed totality) from which the movement of re-expression issues forth becomes groundlessness (a preliminary totality) at the next step of the chain wherein a new junction is formed in expression’s incessantly proliferative movement of evolvement and involvement, divergence and convergence, folding and refolding. This is also the reason why the play’s four junctions acquire the shape of caesuras. Silence, nonsense, division, and a turning toward one’s self take place at the junctions (introjection) that negotiate the divide between projection (motions of expression) and retrojection (expressed sense). Sense, being isolated as an otherness within the linguistic proposition, is also an otherness within the genesis of representation. A pervasive component that nevertheless pertains to an order of its own, an extraordinary set containing only itself as a number, it offers a level of indifference wherein it envelops both the realized level of representation and the groundlessness within it. Produced sense applies itself as a locus of nonduality between depth and height, opening up a territory of immanence wherein both immanence and transcendence are at work. In Loy’s terms, this arrangement would be equivalent to a “nonduality between duality and nonduality” inasmuch as sense enwraps both the region of constituted subjectivities from the region of representation and the undifferentiated depth of their antithetical doubles from the pre-propositional region of expression. Further still, this co-habitation is one of interdependence as groundlessness dialectically intertwines with its articulation and vice versa. The region of sense envelops constituted representation and the constitutive motions of expression, becoming the background upon which the two emerge. It orchestrates the brittle dialectic between division and non-division from a locus of metastability—a horizon of sense. In other words, each “capture” of sense within the chain of serial convergence and divergence is a momentary freeze-frame between expression and reexpression. Sense retroactively envelops the groundlessness of the preliminary totality and gestures toward another groundlessness, that of the already consolidated order of representation and its formed totality. This arrangement also shows that sense not only manifests itself as a temporary product of a mediation procedure but that it is progressively renewed and reshuffled with each expressive movement along the chain. In addition, with each expressive movement sense reflexively turns back on itself inasmuch as it also becomes other than itself. Sense undergoes a realization in which it disperses its acts of sense donation across the chain not only in the direction of the expressive movements that have effected its emergence but also by initiating a new series of evolvement and sense-

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enfolding. I call this gesture “reflexive” in that it merges cause and effect—once constituted, sense begins to work bi-directionally as both a cause of the motions of re-expression and as the effect of the expressive motions of the series of infinite proliferation it envelops. Here sense turns back on itself both retroactively and proactively, through encountering both its groundlessness and itself as a formed totality in the constituted order of representation (figure 4.2). Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis works on the level of this reflexive dimension of sense in the moment at which the latter becomes the background of both immanence and transcendence. In becoming-dialogue, consciousness remains “within” its constitutive processes, yet beckons toward a “without” as it always motions toward an encounter. It is the four junctions marking a motion toward the dialogic consciousness that propel the chain of sense production. Here the movements of expression and re-expression meet in a component that pervasively envelops them both: silence, nonsense, division, and reflexive self-inquiry. Finally, it is these points of juncture that allow a transition toward reflexive sense poised on the verge between groundlessness and formed totality. Throughout Kane’s play, I encountered a consolidated consciousness that isolates its Outside as an abject and therefore begins to proliferate from within. This proliferation breeds voices and scattered bits of dialogue. It is here that nonduality is reclaimed in the becoming-dialogue of consciousness. What takes shape is a transformation toward dialogue, toward scaffolding an incorporeal double in speaking. This dialogic consciousness is a by-product of 4.48 Psychosis’s motion toward a region of sense. From the viewpoint of expression, this locale of sense serves as a plane of immanence. From the perspective of re-expression, it becomes a

Figure 4.2. Nonduality as a horizon of sense in the motion of series.

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transcendence, a regulative horizon and a point of orientation. One could say, echoing Deleuze, that in becoming dialogical the play’s consolidated consciousness issues an incorporeal double. One could also say that it is only through the interaction with this double that a horizon of sense emerges out of the motions of expression and re-expression. Sense thus attains the function of a permeable screen that takes us in the directions of both groundlessness and representation. It shows us two faces: that of madness, sound and fury, pure expression but also that of a constituted subjectivity, inasmuch as subjectivity is constituted by means of dialogue and selves take shape in the process of being addressed. NOTES 1. Frege developed the idea of the empty place as part of his theory of complex expressions. See Oliver’s “What is Predicate?” (2010) and in particular the section “Must predicates have empty spaces?” (142–46). 2. Deleuze works with two types of synthesis: conjunctive and disjunctive, whereby disjunction can be immanent (inclusive and affirmative) and transcendent (exclusive and working with negative terms). Actualization, then, is a matter of conjunction that constructs convergent series (Deleuze 1990, 174). Namely, this is a process of individuation whereby the multitudinous ascends to a singularity, many become a quasi-one. This is also the type of synthesis underlying the transitions from expression to sense, manifesting the motions of a variety of expression on the way to becomingsense. A disjunctive synthesis, on the other hand, is thought to be of a more fundamental nature. Speaking with Leibniz, it presents us with “a synthesis that somehow holds incompossibles together, but does so without limitation, opposition, or negation—that is, a synthesis of ‘total affirmation’” (Clark 2002, 196), a non-reconciling reconciliation in which two disparate entities are brought together without Aufhebung. 3. James Williams notes that Deleuze’s sense (sens) should be understood as “significance” rather than as “meaning” (2010, 3). 4. According to northern English and specifically to Lancashire folklore (Aston 2003, 27), “it is through the imbibing of human blood that they [fairies] prolong their life” (Attridge 2001–2002, 4). 5. These tensile inherences are to be understood as maximally dense captures of sense that are simultaneously “nonsensical.” 6. The Skriker, according to Attridge (2001–2002, 4), is telling the northern English story of a mother whose boasting that her daughter can spin straw into gold provokes a bargain with an inhuman creature with supernatural powers. This creature, Tom Tit Tot, the northern English variant of the Skriker, promises to assist the daughter in performing the magic trick but also informs that it will claim her for the underworld unless she guesses its name. 7. This language is thus ingeniously deciphered: “‘spin’ is echoed by ‘span,’ which provokes the remainder of the phrase ‘spick and span’ (in inverted order), before coming up with a third inflection, ‘spun.’ ‘Spun’ is then treated as if it were a Joycean portmanteau, in a self-referential allusion to the familiar saying ‘a pun is the lowest form of wit’—except that wit becomes ‘wheat,’ which leads to ‘straw,’ and we are back with the claim being made about the daughter’s prowess as spinner: ‘straw into gold’” (Attridge 2001–2002, 5). 8. The Kelpie is a non-speaking, supernatural figure from British folklore, “traditionally malevolent” and having its origins “in the period before the decline of magic” (Rabillard 2009, 97).

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9. Speaking with Deleuze, in schizophrenic discourse it is the surface that disappears as the serial movement has collapsed (1990, 91). 10. In saying this, I refer to Deleuze’s Seventh Series of Esoteric Words wherein a word does not have a name but is named by an entire song that moves throughout the stanzas and facilitates communication between them (1990, 44). In a similar manner, Crave’s phantasm is not anywhere in particular but rather, is expressed by the play in its entirety. 11. A similar argument is put forward in Marcy Epstein’s article “Consuming Performances: Eating Acts and Feminist Embodiment” (1996) where she speaks of “performers hyperbolically overembodying their consumption—in-gesting food to constitute their bodies.” This conscious self-constitution by means of eating acts can then be transposed to an act of metamorphosis in which characters, by dint of the act of devouring food, perform the ritualized appropriation of a certain characteristic or even a new self. This moment was also observed in Churchill’s Mouthful and its fruit ballet enacting the sensual pleasures of eating and being torn up. The act of selfconstitution through eating acts can, as this example shows, also lay bare a movement in the opposite direction: that of “female performers consumed by their eating acts and thus disembodied” (Epstein 1996, 23). Such is the case with another Wade character, Myra from Colder than Here. In spite of being terminally ill, she demonstratively indulges in acts of eating, staging picnics with her daughters on various burial grounds. Yet paradoxically, instead of exposing a desire to live, these eating acts show a wish to desubstantiate oneself. 12. The production took place at the Royal Court five years after the staging of Kane’s first play, Blasted, which “enveloped the theatre in the type of press interest that had last been seen following the staging of Edward Bond’s Saved in 1965” (Shellard 2000, 225). A full circle was formed in this way: in contrast to the disparaging reviews the emerging playwright received back then, Kane, who had been dead for fourteen months, was literally sanctified by the press (see Urban 2011, 313–16). 13. As in dialogic scenes there is a dash to indicate a change of speaker (Urban 2011, 315), one is to presuppose the presence of more than one voice. At the same time, “the lines are also carefully laid out on the page to give a sense of delivery, as is common in poetry” (315), thus alluding to a lyrical recitation performed by one single actor. In the first production, Macdonald, Kane’s long-time collaborator, used three actors drawing on the play’s three constructed identities: “Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander.” A 2005 production, however, “conceived of the play primarily as a monologue . . . with the doctor figure appearing only in shadow” (316). 14. An even more radicalized picture is drawn by Chute in the article “‘Victim, Perpetrator, Bystander’: Critical Distance in Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Cruelty” (2010). According to Chute, Kane proposes an impossible scenario that “collapses ‘correct distance’ and blurs ‘overcoded’ bodies and psyches. The categories of spectator and object, past and present, history and performance flow into one another in the temporal space of Kane’s performances, in which the now of performance is metonymic of an unseeable present” (164). 15. 4.48 Psychosis refers to the early morning hours when Kane wrote, “when she felt the most sane, though these were also the hours when she appeared the most insane to others” (Singer 2004, 161). 4.48 Psychosis was reportedly written in the fall and winter of 1998/9 when Kane succumbed to her most severe episode of depression (Greig 2001, xv–xvi; Singer 2004, 158). Following hospitalization in the fall of 1997, Kane hanged herself in the early morning hours of 20 February 1999. 4.48 Psychosis had been commissioned for a production in summer but the play’s performance was put off until June 2000. 16. While criticism mainly associates this play with cases of melancholia or “pastdriven depression, the moment of incorporating and acknowledging a past experience” (Emrich and Dietrich 2007), one could also reach toward another psychic reality which does not merely seek to exemplify the subjective position but also to become dialogical in exploring this same position.

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17. The terms projection, retrojection, and introjection make an appearance in Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense with reference to the work of Melanie Klein (Deleuze 1990, 187–92). I however approach these terms differently in appealing to their everyday senses: projection pertains to a motioning forward, of gesturing toward a forwardness and thus sketching out a projection of a thing to come; retrojection is the retroactive side of this movement—sketching out a thing in retrospect, throwing a shadow. Introjection, then, would be the moment of reflexivity wherein a thing is sketched out neither proactively or retroactively, but “inwardly,” as if directed toward the projecting entity in a moment of self-reflection.

FIVE Machines Producing Groundlessness

This chapter looks at another point of access to literary worlds—the formation of what Deleuze calls “a surface of sense.” In Deleuze’s philosophy, the surface of sense is the locale where the order of representation is shaped. At the same time, the formation of a surface also shows the derivative character of the order of representation as it exposes the work of a supra-representational component within its domain. The shaping of a “surface” marks the transition from pre-propositional bodily depths to the domain of language and the linguistic proposition. Pre-propositional regions, according to Deleuze, are reminiscent of the region of actions and passions in Stoic philosophy wherein the given is composed of material bodies continually entwined with one another. Bodies mix, interpenetrate, and posit two possible relations: active and passive, to act or to be acted upon (Sellars 2006b, 86). Within this pre-Socratic scenario, the event of sense presents itself as an incorporeal effect transpiring out of various bodily mixtures. An incorporeal entity (asōmaton) emerges out of the corporeal (somata). The Platonic scenario of pre-established Ideas and derivative phenomena is turned upside down as here we have something incorporeal (an event of sense) being distilled out of the corporeal (bodily mixtures). The central term, event, becomes a slight haze over the surface of states of affairs. MEINONG, CARROLL, AND THE STOICS At this point, Deleuze evokes the work of Lewis Carroll. By employing examples from Carroll in Logic, the philosopher enacts a certain “theatre of operations” that works with “the tactic of positioning literary texts as mediators for the formulation of a positive, unorthodox image of philosophical thought” (Conway 2010, 112). Deleuze’s discussion of sense—a 143

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non-referential, extra-causal, incorporeal item—opens up with a philosophically engaging introduction of Alice in Wonderland recounting “the need for Alice’s eventual climb to the surface and her discovery that everything linguistic happens on that border” (Olkowski 2008, 107). In addressing adventures of “animality” and “embodiment” (107), the book shows how it is on the surface that corporeality transforms into a clandestine inherence. At this juncture, a quasi-causal logic replaces the horizontal order of strict causality; Platonic “height”—the locus of referential logic and the law of non-contradiction—turns into flatness: Alice progressively conquers surfaces. She rises or returns to the surface. She creates surfaces. Movements of penetration and burying give way to light lateral movements of sliding; the animals of the depths become figures or cards without thickness. (Deleuze 1997b, 21)

The chief protagonist of this surface is Deleuze’s event of sense. The event of sense is often correlated with an element of Stoic logic, the lekton (sayable). Stoic cosmology is composed of bodies and the bodies that come into existence in the interaction between discrete corporeals. There are, in addition, four types of entities which cannot be said to be of a bodily nature, yet cannot be said to be non-existent either. One of them is the sense of an utterance or the so-called sayable (lekton); the others are place, time, and the void. Being thus comprises corporeals (somata), bodies unequivocally endowed with existence, and incorporeals (asomata), entities that cannot be said to exist in the proper sense of the word, but which nevertheless subsist in limbo between existence and non-existence. Both are given reality status or, in other words, “Stoic ontology posits a supreme genus of ‘something’ under which there are two subdivisions of existing bodies or corporeals and subsisting incorporeals” (Sellars 2006a, 83). This radical materialism dispenses with universals. In the Stoic perception, a Platonic Idea would be nothing but a phantasm of the mind, a not-something: “every entity that falls under their highest genus of ‘something’ must be something particular; only individual particulars exist” (84). The sayable is an intermediary concept posited between the Saussurean duality of signifiers and signifieds. 1 The sayable functions as “a linguistic entity . . . distinguished both from the sign or signifier (sēmeion) and its actual referent (tygkhanon)” (Heller-Roazen 1999, 9). Unlike the terms positioned at the two extremes, the middle concept lacks materiality, but is best described as an enactment of the invisible transformation occurring during the terms’ encounter. Thus we are confronted with nothing less than yet another isomorphic map of the triad term1 (surplus/ depletion) an intermediary term enabling the transition and continual oscillation between the two term2 (depletion/surplus). Stoic logic offers a passage from worlds to words that is, allegorically speaking, mediated by a psychopomp term. It is in the lekton that the capture of the sign and the material-

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ity of the thing meet to compose an event. As an incorporeal, asōmaton, the event is the carrier of the relation. The expressed pervades both words and worlds without constituting them in any way and without being extricable from or reducible to either of the two. This is a second moment that Deleuze appropriates from the Stoics while molding the concept of the event of sense. This irreducibility and pervasiveness of the sense-event also hearkens back to the Stoic lekton. The Stoic lekton negotiates the relation between the sign and its referent—a scheme in which the two aforementioned terms are of a material nature—and effects an immaterial transition from one to the other. Meanwhile, the lekton functions as their effect and not as a condition of possibility of the two. The lekton attaches to both terms but belongs to neither. A Janus head, it turns to two ontologically disparate regions while remaining non-belonging and non-residing. The lekton only retains the gesture of the transition from one order to the other—and it is this gesticulation that becomes manifest as an event of sense. Similar to Deleuze’s contra-Lacanian definition of desire as abundance, the event of sense is postulated as always emerging in a moment of surplus or overflow. As an extra-being, the event of sense becomes manifest in “impossible” entities that the logician Meinong identifies as the reference-ridden objects of his infamous jungle: flying monkeys, unicorns, impossible triangles, square circles. They do not pertain to the world of denotations but, inasmuch as they function as representations at all, reference the very event of sense. While pointing to the misty divide between things and propositions, events evade representation and thus remain nonsensical from the viewpoint of the latter. This is also what Deleuze means by the remark that “nonsense says its own sense” (1990, 70). It is from Meinong that Deleuze adopts this belief in the inability of a proposition to state its own sense. By doing so, the proposition violates the order of representation and ceases to be accessible to common sense. In attempting to state its own sense, a proposition becomes in excess of sense and thus nonsensical. The Stoic lekton and its Meinongian counterparts pertain to the same moment: there is an inherence in an utterance that simultaneously points to language, enables a saying, but remains a referential void—an arrow which, though pointing, does not lead to a denotation. Hence Deleuze says that the event is a supra-being, not an entity but an insistence, a minimality of being that is not so much a thing as an inherence (1990, 34). Deleuze posits the event of sense as that which runs through both the non-linguistic region of states of affairs and the linguistic propositions that attach to them. Within states of affairs, the event is an extra-being, pervasive yet incorporeal. In the realm of propositions, the event manifests itself as sense, an inherence that nevertheless remains external to the order of representation. The event of sense pervades and informs both

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orders, showing a different face each time it steps into either of the two sides of the asymmetrical equation between worlds and words. The incorporeality of the event and its status of an entity that is adjacent to being take us to the notion of potentiality as an existence only in the mode of a possibility. An existence as a possibility is also inherent in the very positing of the lekton and of the impossible referents of Meinong’s jungle. Here we are invited to conceive of “the existence of language as the existence of potentiality” and question “the nature of dynamis and potentia,” or the very idea of “being able” (Agamben 1999a, 13–4). In the same vein, Deleuze’s event could be seen as an inquiry into the possibility of a transmissive middle term that runs through two ontologically divergent regions to bring them together without reconciling them. This component remains independent from the terms, manifesting itself differently with every transition from states of affairs to propositions and vice versa. Deleuze’s event of sense, however, does not lead to a synthesis. An event construes a relation that invests itself in both of its relative terms in recomposing them in such a way that they do not fuse into one another. THE PLACE OF SAYABLES In Logic, the event of sense is shaped out of a “surface” and serves as an interface at which the incorporeal effects distilled out of bodily mixtures manifest themselves. This surface is the very locality of sense and the beginning of language as things do not have sense before they have arrived at this surface organization that arranges a world region into resonating series (1990, 104) and carries their articulation. For Deleuze, the concept of surface has a Stoic origin (1990, 132). The incorporeal sayables, lekta, puncture its region. Unlike linear time arrangements attributable to solid bodies, the Stoic lekta maintain a relation with the timelessness of the event-time, Aion. Deleuze (1990, 64, 132, 166, 175) defines Aion in spatial terms as the event’s milieu. Events are the “place” where an incorporeal predicate is found between two substances with the result that it, by virtue of its intermediary nature, captures the subtle change that takes place with an emergence. This occurrence at the interface, however, remains insubstantial. That is to say, it is not of substance. Taking the classic example of the scalpel and the flesh, Deleuze shows this change to be verbal in nature, incorporeal, and predicative (8). A change occurs but does not lead to a change in substance. Rather, it effects an (incorporeal) change in predication. To the Stoics, this move reconciles the paradox of a substance remaining the same and yet becoming different with the taking place of an event. The transformation is not that of substance but of an “incorporeal” predicate which, rather than an “external” entity, “per-

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sists” within the substance as one of its “grammatical aspects.” What is changed, then, is not substance itself but an aspect of the substance. It is this surface—the playground of sense and the place of sayables— that donates connectivity but also, in a simultaneous gesture, cracks open as a cleavage within representation. What occurs between bodies and incorporeals is not merely an enacting of the division between reference and sense, nor is it merely a demonstration of the priority of evental sense over denotation. The groundlessness of the site of the constitution of sense is an explication of the mutual involvement of sense and denotation and a problematization of this mutuality. BUILDING CROSSROADS ON A GAP The shift toward a surface and the poetics attached to it intertwine with Deleuze’s commitment to an ontology that works with surfaces as maximally intensified fields of constitutive processes and forces. A surface is also a region of capture wherein the workings of Deleuze’s event of sense become manifest. As James Williams notes, instead of inviting a horizontal or vertical movement, the surface “is instead a condition for processes in the other realms that retains an independence from them in one aspect yet is determined by them in another. The surface is a real effect between actual causes (depth) and ideal propositions (elevation) . . . it is independent of both, yet also the medium for their mutual transformations” (2008, 80). Here we witness the same principle of constitution observed in scenarios for the expression of the transition between substance and finite modes, sense and reference, words and worlds, incorporeal events and partial objects. The appropriation of sense plays itself out in the doubly pointed transmission inherent in the connector “and.” “And” carries an acceleration to ever higher degrees of concretion, starting from a maximally abstract entity and carving its way toward entities of growing concreteness. The evental field of forces and tensions continually replicates the same scaffold toward further and further concretion until the order of representation is reached. It is also within this pre-representational region that language begins to takes shape. With the formation of language, the order of representation—but also a force that cracks it open—begins to congeal. The locality of the event of sense is metaphorically described as a surface that is simultaneously a groundlessness. Again, within the series of worlds, sense is distilled out of bodily encounters. Within the series of words, an event-effect comes forth as a proposition’s sense (figure 2.3). These occurrences are possible because of the constitution of a gap inasmuch as the surface acts as the groundlessness between two ontologically disparate regions. The surface simultaneously shapes the series as what they are and enables the circulation of the event in bodies and proposi-

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tions without establishing a mixture between the two. It is thanks to the surface, then, that the event manifests itself as both ideal and real at the same time. The surface simultaneously functions as a connective component and emptiness between the series. The series bear witness to it yet are unable to represent it. Let us now turn to the plays and see how this surface sketches itself out there. EXPRESSION, SENSE, AND THE FORMATION OF SURFACES In what follows, I trace the formation of Deleuze’s surface in three plays. A surface of sense that is the sum of its expressions presents itself in Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. The play sketches out a flat ontology wherein humans, forces of nature, animals, and artifacts take shape out of a single surface as if in a movement of claymation. No vertical distinction in being is made. On this surface, the very positing of a being is already sense. In Churchill’s Far Away, we thus encounter a produced surface. This surface operates as an omnitudinal horizon on which expression overlaps with sense. “Humans” are posited as things among things in a scenario wherein the given is scaffolded upon a flat perpetual foreground. The entities of the foreground simultaneously enjoy a maximal visibility and remain inscrutable. In “being given to the open,” the creatures of the surface become instances of sense with their very explication. When sporting such an existence, an entity, through its very positing, becomes of significance. That is to say, here expression immediately becomes an explication of sense. Such entities do not exceed the given but become the very expression of their own sense. In appearing to be more than its givens, however, the foreground is thus seen to generate a mock transcendence effect. Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses offers a case of isomorphism where we have an ontological scaffold composed of a foreground, a background, and a vacuity between them. Sense is construed as a pre-established region and an inherence that “hovers over” states of affairs, illuminating them from “without” and isomorphically mapping itself onto a foreground of local manifestations. Between the foreground and the background regions, a vacuity takes shape. Namely, here the surface manifests itself as a vacuous groundlessness. The event remains enclosed in a background region and available only through partial manifestations. Yet the event infuses its own quasi-causal logic into the actual givens of the play and alters its texture. The event of sense thus becomes the incorporeal extra-ontological entity governing a line of morphisms within Breathing Corpses. The strange appearances of smells and boxes throughout the play operate as the local manifestations of sense. In Caryl Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds, a surface of sense takes shape in the play’s moments of transformation. Here the scaffolds of imma-

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nence and transcendence align with the tensions between the metaphorical and the similitudinal dimension within a meta-metaphorical arrangement. This formation allows two discordant meaning inscriptions to subsist in a mode of co-presence without forming a synthesis and without foregrounding any of the two components. These two homologous modes of being are enveloped at once and inform the meta-metaphorical arrangement equally. They manifest themselves in two ways: as similitudinal (equivocal) or as metaphoric (univocal). CARYL CHURCHILL’S FAR AWAY: A FLAT POINT AFTER THE FIRST PART OF LIFE. EQUIVALENCE OF EXPRESSION AND SENSE First performed in 2000 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, Far Away is a minimalist play. We observe motilities—human, animal, plantlike—that interchange and swap positions. A nature that is animated and endowed with agency steps up to become a character. Far Away can be said to evoke Agamben’s critique of an “anthropological machine” and begins to work by dint of what Puchner calls “negative mimesis.” The latter, a process laying bare “the very dividing line between animals and humans” (Puchner 2007, 21), demonstrates this divide to be “an effect of representation” (21) and compels us to envision a region of immanence wherein the distinction is suspended. Frugal as it is—starting in medias res, composed of three dissolving scenes and ceasing just as abruptly amidst a soliloquy—the play invites us to reconsider the links between the human condition, the status of objects, and the animal kingdom. 2 The presence of an imagined background induces a ghostly quality in this case. I understand this background in the Auerbachian vein—it operates as an explanation, a rationalization, a narrative of causal coherence that informs the play’s occurrences and projects an aura of sense. Still, very little of this background reveals itself within the course of the play’s spectacle of “cosmic chaos” (Billington 2000, n.p.). In contrast to Dymkowski’s contention that Churchill’s theatrical decisions seek “to make meaning elusive, not indeterminate” (2003, 55), I see complete indeterminacy. In Far Away, Churchill strikes new ground. This newness amounts to an ontological shift. Now everything takes place in a Deleuzian Outside, “an immanent outside” (Pelbart 2000, 207) not only endowed with ontological primacy (Symons 2006) but also acting as a surface of constitution for the play’s givens. Though action-driven and characterized by a recognizable plot, the play is laden with lacunae and unresolved tensions. While visiting relatives, Joan sneaks out at night, climbs a tree and observes how her uncle mistreats a group of people packed in a lorry. Questioning her aunt, she receives mundane explanations and a ready answer for each described

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atrocity. Having heard cries from within the vehicle, witnessing what is undeniably a beating, and slipping in a pool of blood, Joan is encouraged to believe in the correctness of what had taken place: “I’m not surprised you can’t sleep, what an upsetting thing to see. But now you understand, it’s not so bad. You’re part of a big movement now to make things better. You can be proud of that” (Churchill 2009, 142). The next scene provides no resolution as the focus shifts immediately to Joan’s first day at work as a hat maker in an artisan shop. With the progression of each separate scene in the sequence, the hats grow “more brightly decorated” (Churchill 2009, 144), “very big and extravagant” (146), “enormous and preposterous” (147). One possible explanation for this presents itself shortly, conveyed entirely by means of stage directions: “Next day. A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and preposterous than in the previous scene” (Churchill 2009, 149). The final scene opens against a dystopian backdrop of mass destruction and universal war in which Harper, Joan, and Todd are involved as complicit participants. Animals, artifacts, and even bits of landscape such as grass and rivers appear to have taken sides in an indefinite struggle for dominance. We are confronted with “a ludicrous picture of unending difference” where any “identifiable paradigm of power is lost amidst this incessant mutation of the subject” (Adiseshiah 2007, 288). Joan has run across a battlefield to Harper’s house to see her husband Todd for a day. All the while, there is confusion as to which side each person, animal, or object is fighting for. Not only artifacts, but also the forces of physics and natural phenomena have acquired agency, becoming instruments of war: The Bolivians are working with gravity, that’s a secret so as not to spread alarm. But we’re getting further with noise and there’s thousands dead of light in Madagascar. Who’s going to mobilise darkness and silence? . . . It’s a new world order, and though clearly no-one likes it, they accept it as the way things are, the new reality. Everybody wants to be on the right side, that’s what matters most. (Churchill 2009, 159)

Places of comfort—a house and a safe profession—morph into battle scenes that retain much of the serenity of the pastoral, notwithstanding excessive destruction. A poetic tinge marks the lines describing how the forces of nature have been appropriated for the cause of war: “I was outside yesterday on the edge of the wood when a shadow came over and it was a cloud of butterflies, and they came down just beyond me and the trees and bushes were red with them. Two of them clung to my arm, I was terrified, one of them got in my hair” (Churchill 2009, 152). The short passage immediately thereafter also shows how animals—swarms and packs—exhibit the very characteristic of complicit war participants, the collective blind agency of unleashed motilities: “I was passing an or-

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chard, there were horses standing under the trees, and suddenly wasps attacked them out of the plums. There were the horses galloping by screaming with their heads made of wasp” (152). This passage reveals a phenomenon close to what Eugene Thacker calls “swarming,” a coming together that incorporates centerless, “random, local interactions” (2009, 163), yet is endowed with “self-organising” and “emergent” properties (164). Here the congruence between blindly directed energetic flows and the “intelligence” of swarms manifests itself and becomes the leading trope regulating the play. In the introductory section of this book I discussed how the logic of Auerbachian transcendence, based on the interplay of presence and absence, produces the effect of a secret. In addition to the Auerbachian structure of an episodic, frugally narrated foreground and a background narrative that perpetually informs it to provide rationalizations, a supplementary ontological scaffold is discernible. Here the arrival at an event of sense does not take place at the level of an orientation toward a background but at the level of identification between foreground and background. This translates into equivalence of expression and sense. Notwithstanding the various lacunae and caesuras upon which Far Away is built, another ontological arrangement—that of the surface—makes itself known. The surface alludes to a maximal visibility and simultaneously signals an arrival at something impenetrable: “If there is nothing outside of the surface, if all there is is surface, then what characterizes the surface is inescapable, unsurpassable. There is no looking elsewhere in order to discover or understand our world or our worlds” (May 1994, 43). Following this logic, the play’s givens appear to be more than what they are. Its very frugality, poetic self-sufficiency, and suspended narrative coherence create a transcendence effect through the belief that there must be something more to the given. In the equivalence of expression and sense the given remains immediate and yet “deep.” Similar to the scenario outlined in Churchill’s The Skriker, here the equivalence of expression and sense creates a mock transcendence effect, a “false depth” (Harman 2011a, 172; Deleuze 2004, 67). It is the immediacy of an expression-sense overlap that creates a mock background effect. How does this happen? Substance generates the expressed in incessant folding and refolding. Immediately, with its very positing, the expressed becomes a case of sense. Rather than genesis (becoming-sense), mediation (sense as a hermeneutic intermediary), or isomorphism (sense as the isomorphic and isonomic counterpart of expression), here the complete overlap of expression’s expressed and sense generates immediacy—each constituted entity is always already in full possession of its sense. Let us again look at the motions of humans, objects, plants, and animals in Churchill’s play and evoke a philosophy that might help us substantiate these intuitions. In his book The Democracy of Objects (2011), 3

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Levy Bryant drafts out a flat ontology that not only posits the being of objects on an equal footing with that of all other beings, but also dispenses with Heidegger’s ontico-ontological division. Dependent on an ontological realism, the book does not dispense with the category of “the human” but treats humans as objects among the various types of other objects that populate a world. In doing so, Bryant claims to offer a posthumanist realist theory (42). Churchill also makes use of the object-like quality of her figures. Joan, Harper, and Todd are depicted as things among things in a flat landscape. Their mode of existence is similar to what Agamben describes as being given to the open, exposed and susceptible to chance. Similarly, the boundary between humans, animals, forces of nature, and objects is blurred. With all of them arranged on a unified plane, no entity is endowed with a background. The figures of this flat landscape subsist in a peculiar state of immediacy. Here no subject is posited in opposition to an object but all things engage in a perpetual comingling reminiscent of the entwined pre-personal bodies of The Logic of Sense. We witness a wealth of sensations and drives, immersion in actions and passions cutting across one another and forming impossible mixtures. Exactly the human is at stake in this erasure inasmuch as the human is a constitutively fractured entity “suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature . . . being always less and more than himself” (Agamben 2004, 29). Churchill aptly portrays how, in becoming-things or rediscovering themselves as objects, humans overcome this constitutive unresolvedness. Rather than being endowed with a world (Welt), the play’s “human” actants—things among things—submerge into an environment (Umwelt) where they become indistinguishable from other forms of being. Umwelt is the domain of animals and things. While not essentially trapped by their situation, animals, according to Heidegger’s Die Grundlagen der Metaphysik, cannot truly act but rather only behave: “Behaviour as a manner of being is in general only truly possible on the basis of an animal’s absorption. . . . The animal can only behave insofar as it is captivated in its essence . . . within an environment but never within a world” (Heidegger qtd. in Agamben 2004, 52). While humans are perceived as pompously world-forming and as beings oriented toward the production of sense—whereby sense is not immediately given to them but is instead seen as something to be arrived at—animals and things here are always already in immediate possession of their sense. A being’s very moment of constitution—its unfolding out of the motions of substance—is already an event of sense. In Heidegger’s view, things and animals never open themselves to a world, that is, to significance-shaping action. Heidegger’s things and animals are unaware of themselves, the latter possessing no intentionality beyond their instinctual activity and the former being of significance only by virtue of their utilization. Still, even if this is so, this unaware, unmediated motion is

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already sense itself. Whereas human beings are compelled to “make sense,” that is, actively participate in sense production, things and animals are constitutively of sense. With its very enfolding within an environment, animals and artifacts have constitutively, always already arrived at their sense. While not devoid of the capacity for action that can essentially alter its Umwelt—according to Heidegger—an animal’s basic condition consists of “being taken”: “this being taken is only possible where there is an instinctive toward . . . the very possibility of apprehending something as something is withheld from the animal, and it is withheld from it not merely here and now, but withheld in the sense that it is not given at all” (Agamben 2004, 53). Far Away sketches out precisely this condition, yet refigures its overarching framework so as to define it positively. We become aware of the swarming of wartime wasps and butterflies, the blind incessant motions of objects of all stripes: petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, deer, trees, rivers, Japanese and Chilean soldiers. In Churchill’s play, however, this condition applies not only to things and animals but also to “human” figures. Here we witness the rapture of “being taken”—of being completely engulfed by and indistinguishable from one’s environment—in Joan’s and Todd’s unquestioning drivenness. An instinctual effort to move toward a phantasmatic “right side” and perpetuate an unnamed struggle moves all. It is also this “being taken” that carries the paradox of the blind intelligence of swarms. Within this unified landscape, beings dispersed as objects among objects evade any type of totality. Any transcendence is denounced. Since all entities within a world coexist on equal ontological footing, objects become quasi-actors. Against this flat backdrop, entities—swarms, packs, moving humans, and bits of landscape—operate in a mode of an “instinctive toward” as things among things in a regime of absorption. Entities embroiled in actions and passions coincide with their environment. Their “being taken” and “instinctive toward” exhaust their significance. Unlike Agamben’s constitutively split humans, these entities do not exceed themselves but are exactly “all that there is.” This equivalence of expression and sense—a complete explication with no residue—paradoxically creates an unforeseen tension. A nonmediated “being taken” already reveals itself maximally in that its sense coincides with its expression. It becomes immediately available, shows itself instantaneously. Yet this immediacy creates a transcendence effect in that it projects the shadow of a secret. In becoming the receptacle for both expression and sense, an entity becomes most immediate and in that, most deep. It is perhaps this paradox that leads Graham Harman to conclude that “neither gazing at an object nor theorizing about it is enough to lure its being from concealment” (2002, 21). An object appears to be all that there is—an aggregate of psysis immediately available to the senses. At the same time, exactly this immediacy makes it inscrutable.

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In the article “On the Undermining of Objects,” Harman explores this duality in what he calls the overmining of substances. Object-oriented ontology maintains that substance remains withdrawn from presence, yet is in excess of all actuality: “the very essence or structure of substance lies in self-othering and withdrawal” (Bryant 2011b, 81). In the coincidence of expression and sense the politics of mimesis, of presence and absence, explication and hiddenness, are again at play. The overlap of expression and sense, that is, the simultaneous positing of a being as such and the flash of its significance, of the constitution of an entity and its animation, has two effects. Depending on our vantage point assumed at a time, the coming together of foreground (expression) and background (sense) manifests itself in two different ways. As the locus of Auerbachian hiddenness, the background ideates the necessity of a secret—the received notion that entities never show themselves fully, that there ever is more to what meets the eye. From the viewpoint of the background, then, as expression takes possession of sense—and such is the case with “being taken” in an instinctual absorption—the ideation of a secret arises almost invariably. Similarly, from the viewpoint of the foreground, the maximum immediacy and visibility create a transcendence effect. This effect shows itself in the fact that the entities of the foreground, while maximally immediate, begin to appear inscrutable. Deleuze’s evocation of Valery’s statement “what is most deep is the skin” (1990, 10) shows how entities, by being maximally in the open, begin to project a depth. How is this paradox conveyed? In Far Away, a group of people packed in a lorry are led into a shed and beaten. A girl observes this from the tree she had climbed, then slips into a pool of blood and goes to sleep, believing it all to be a part of a noble rescue plan. Later, we find her working as a hat maker, preparing exquisitely decorated execution attire for a prisoners’ parade. She discusses the ethical ambiguity of her occupation in a casual chat but is apparently pleased with her work and proud of her professional achievement. During a war, the same woman travels back to her family home, killing “two cats and a child” on the way, never questioning her motivation for participating in military action. The character acquires a type of intentionality that is difficult to rationalize. This mode of action resembles the “absorption” of Heidegger’s non-humans and the related phenomenon of “being taken.” Swarms of bees and butterflies, and even herds of deer, are shown as being possessed by a similar drive, a destructive yet fiercely focused “instinctive toward.” At the same time, various entities, even inanimate objects, become actants in a flat landscape wherein “the objects called subjects” are things among things put on a single plane, persisting in their “absorption” and yet encountering and forming relations with other entities. They cross and violate borders, invade foreign regions, form companies, take sides, lose or acquire territories, traverse enemy land—entities perform the motions of war. All of them share an equal ontological footing and are marked by incessant

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strife. This layer of omnivisibility is itself a surface. Upon this surface, entities are generated in a movement of claymation. Here expression and sense unite. Humans take on the characteristics of things—caught up in an environment and propelled by an “instinctive toward”—whereas things and animals acquire agency. A world becomes nothing more than its expressions, yet this is a horrendous shape. In Churchill’s play, the turn to unmediated existence ultimately reveals itself as the incessant strife in a pervasive war. The complete coincidence of sense and expression create what Deleuze calls a paradox of dry reiteration (1990, 31). This paradox results in an infinite chain of propositions in which each proposition carries the sense of the one that precedes it (31). Here explicating one’s sense would amount to nonsense. Stating one’s own sense is almost aligned with a transgression—it is complete and utter strangeness. The objects of the play, however, are exactly this: expressions (of substance) that have stated their own sense. “Human” agents that have become animal-like, artifacts that have acquired human agency, grass and forces of nature endowed with the capacity to kill regroup on a surface wherein expression is sense in a regime of unmediated omniactuality. Everything has come nearer the surface. All that persists is an environment composed of ever-shifting motilities that we see as the very embodiment of what Reynolds calls “transversal movement”: Experience and performance of emotions, thoughts, embodiment and/ or actions that exceed the border of one’s subjective territory constitute transversal movements. In effect of such movements, one enters transversal territory, however ephemerally, as an unconstrained journey through spacetime that subverts systems of subjectification, reconfigures and expands her subjective territory, and therefore modifies the structure of the official territories of which her subjective territory is a component. (2009, 286–87)

This strangeness—the explication of one’s sense and, by proxy, the alignment of expression with sense—reveals itself in the play’s transcendence effect. A similar phenomenon appears to be at work in Harman’s definition of objects as “essentially withdrawn.” Capturing the quality of entities as maximally immediate and yet haunting, this definition is derived from a long-standing debate about the ways objects persist. A world’s objects remain hidden and unavailable. A relation is but one of an object’s descriptions—even the sum of all relations of an object cannot exhaust its being. On the one hand, this ontology offers no flipsides as everything has collapsed onto a foreground. On the other hand, this foreground is the locus of an ultimate secret as it explicates with no residue but still does not offer any access to a thing. Being locales of an expression-sense overlap, the objects of the surface are most immediate and most deep. They become a playground for what

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Morton calls “the Rift,” “the suspension between essence and appearance” (2013, 162). In articulating the transcendence effect generated by the overlap of expression and sense, Churchill’s play perpetuates the paradox of equivalence: the hidden is what is most open and vice versa. Complete openness, it turns out, is just as unavailable as the withdrawal that leads to the formation of transcendence. LAURA WADE’S BREATHING CORPSES: “A MARVELOUS VACUITY.” EXPRESSION-SENSE ISOMORPHISM Breathing Corpses premiered at the Royal Court in February 2005. The play departs from the in-yer-face, postdramatic tendencies of plotless characterless work that internalizes space and dispenses with time. Quite the contrary, it makes extensive use of theatrical conventions and maneuvers into a plot reminiscent of the well-made play. Five scenes are intricately welded together, with Amy, a hotel chambermaid, finding a corpse in scene 1 and a living person—same room, same bed—in scene 5. This framing is also replicated in the objects she finds on the dressing table: the suicide letter signed “Jim” in the first scene morphs into a box containing an exquisite carving knife in the last. Scene 2 introduces Jim, who runs a self-storage service business, his wife Elaine, and the employee Ray. The three are preoccupied with a strange smell coming out of one of the units, enjoying bacon sarnies and recalling a customer who had forgotten the contents of a kebab van in storage: “Don’t realise it’s A Five till the maggots start crawling under the door” (Wade 2005, 27). This image, along with the bacon sarnies dripping ketchup, introduces the first slight moments of a revulsion that is to escalate in the episodes to follow. Yet the scenes do not have the bleak undertones of Kane’s or Churchill’s work, nor do they confront us with the emotional intensities of Crimp’s. Rather, they show a mundane and utterly contingent side of violence. As scene 3 shifts toward another domestic situation, a home on a hot September day, we observe how perpetrators of violence are not so much rational actants with an unlimited capacity for agency but figures, or better still vessels, at the sway of forces as arbitrary as a heat wave. Kate, who had found a murder victim in the park the previous night, repeatedly kicks the dog responsible for sniffing out a woman’s corpse under a bush: “but I didn’t I didn’t want it to be me and your stupid fucking dog that found her/either” (41). The juxtaposition of perishable foodstuffs and the precariousness of human bodies, a device first employed in Colder than Here, comes to the fore as smells pervade the scene: “KATE: Dog fork. Stinks” (39). Scene 4 takes us back to Jim and Elaine who had, after all, opened the mysterious storage unit: “JIM: I keep wondering if—Like maybe if I

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hadn’t found her, maybe she wouldn’t have been dead” (57). It emerges that Jim had unsealed a box storing the decomposing body of Kate, strangled and with a dog lead still around her neck. Ben, her boyfriend, had apparently found the only possible way to dispose of her and thus protect both himself and the dog from Kate’s casual acts of violence: BEN peels his shirt off and sniffs it, then pulls a face. Puts it into the washing machine. KATE looks at him. His torso is covered with red marks and bruises. KATE: You— BEN: You. Last night. KATE: That bad? BEN: You were there. (38)

Jim, as we learn from scene 1, never seems to recover from the moment of finding the body: JIM: I can’t stand the smell. ELAINE: Just a turkey sandwich. JIM: I’ve got the smell up my nose. ELAINE: What smell? JIM: B Sixteen. ELAINE sighs. (59)

Following the perfect symmetry of this pattern and equipped with the principle of Chekhov’s gun—“One must never place a loaded gun on stage if it is not going to go off”—one can only witness the play’s last scene with horror. With two finders of bodies dead, the fate of Amy is foreshadowed less than subtly. The carving knife, another foreshadowing tool, appears at the end of scene 5. Here Amy talks to the guest now occupying the room in which Jim committed suicide, then “sits down on the edge of the bed and laughs to herself, quietly” (79). Stage directions slash into the dialogue, intensifying the trope of cutting: AMY goes back into the bathroom and carries on cleaning. Just get on with it, don’t you? CHARLIE sits down on the edge of the bed with the box in his lap. . . . I mean, yeah, the first one was really hard, . . . CHARLIE: Christ. CHARLIE looks toward the bathroom door, the knife in his hand. AMY: Right mess, as well. Sick all over the sheets and blood and stuff. . . CHARLIE puts the knife back in the box, puts it quietly back on the dressing table. (74)

A recurrent appearance throughout the play is that of boxes, miniature versions of coffins. Starting with a scene which takes place in the boxed space of a hotel room, “not a great hotel, a mid-price hotel that trades on its views over the town” (9), the play ends with a scene in which Charlie shows Amy his Boxster, a silver-colored convertible. In scene 2 Elaine tells a story, in much detail, about a phone conversation with a Sky sup-

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port operator helping her to fix her Skybox. She then leaves the scene with the explanation, “Back in my box” (30). Before that, however, Elaine hands Ray a box of chocolates: “No-no, no choosing—close your eyes and stick your hand in” (31). In scene 3, Ben decants a tin of dog food with a fork and scene 4 contains Jim’s reminiscence of opening a box within a box, the storage unit containing the boxed body of Kate. Smells and boxes, the contradictory images of pervasiveness and enclosure, operate in the play in what appears to be an arbitrary manner. Whereas the advancement of action within the play is meticulously constructed, both the arrangement of the images of smells and boxes and the connections between them demonstrate a high degree of contingency. The separate episodes, rather than following a pattern, appear to “infect” one another. Smells and boxes carve their way into the isolated scenes, creating networks that connect both characters and events in quasi-causal ways more compelling than the causal relationships that construct the story. Quasi-causality here pertains to the way Deleuze understands the workings of the event of sense as a type of causality that remains indifferent to “real” causality but a causality that alludes to a fundamental unity in a given mixture of bodies, forming supra-causal correspondences that resonate through bodies in ways that are expressive and dispersive, not mono-causal. In this way, the morphisms of boxes (the tin can, storage units, the box of chocolates) follow a causality of their own entirely, and a causality that is indifferent to the remaining givens of the play. Breathing Corpses is thus structured like a dream, with constellations of boxes and smells forming local aggregates of tension extending beyond rules of linear causality and forming a causality of their own. Their significance, however, remains undisclosed. The play displays a number of isomorphic maps. Just as the decanting of dog food in scene 3 presages the unsealing of Kate’s box in scene 4, so does Elaine construct isomorphic maps between her Skybox, the box of chocolates, the box that is her home, and the numerous storage units her husband operates. A message of one’s death, the envelope left on the dressing table in scene 1 transmutes into a box containing a carving knife, a tool of death. It then swiftly morphs into a Boxster. Another isomorphic map sketches itself out as we align smells of perishable food and dead bodies. Jim has begun to smell in scene 1. The smell coming from one of the storage units evokes a memory of a kebab van in scene 2. Dog food smells unbearably in the heat of scene 3, and the ghost of a smell pervades scene 4. These isomorphisms apply not only to the passages in which smells and boxes undergo various transmutations as the play progresses, but also to a constitutive extra that informs the occurrences of Breathing Corpses. In the same way in which the vacuity between a can of dog food and a woman in a box allows us to create supra-causal relations based on isomorphism, another “marvelous vacuity” positions itself between the

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givens of the play and its “background.” It is in this second type of vacuity that the play’s event of sense manifests itself, yet remaining an emptiness. In Sarah Kane’s Crave, we encountered an isomorphic arrangement in which only one series, that of expression, was visible. Sense remained a phantasmatic inherence and a floated signified yet to be endowed with significance and made an object proper. The play, in this respect, witnessed the exact capture of motioning toward a void, an event of sense yet to be made. In Breathing Corpses, on the other hand, the isomorphic gap between expression and sense shows another dimension. The event is not an absence, nor is it yet to be assembled. The event of sense is already fully given but remains in an Auerbachian background where it “hovers over” bodies. It only informs the plane of expression, that is, the givens of the play, by dint of occasional vestiges. The event of sense already pervades the perfectly orchestrated world of Breathing Corpses, yet it acts as a transcendence and remains ineffable. The event of sense is a non-existent “plus one” which endows the series of expression with unity, yet itself remains elusive and unknown. The event of sense orchestrates the linear chains of events of Breathing Corpses yet evades causal relations. The local manifestations of the event are exactly the various incarnations of boxes and smells. Somewhat displaced and seemingly unnecessary with regard to the plot, they yet carry forward the advancement of a shadow play within the play, one that is entirely dependent on the motions of Deleuze’s incorporeal “quasicause” (1990, 33, 86, 95, 98, 108, 144, 147, 148, 169). Smells not only invade the scenes they stem from, but “infect” the following scenes as well, eventually causing deaths. The same applies for boxes, innocently making an appearance in scene 1 as chocolates or a Skybox, yet transmuting into precipitators of violence in the scenes to follow. Charlie’s Boxster, not even an actual box but a phonetic evocation of the word, is the event’s last incarnation. Not only has it ceased to resemble a receptacle, but also the word that denotes it has mutated beyond recognition, becoming the proper name of a car. We witness the same process toward ever greater abstraction followed by increasing amounts of violence in the travels of smell across the play. As Breathing Corpses progresses, the smell becomes more and more ethereal. The expressed here is an aggregate formed by the many manifestations of smells and boxes. These are the palpable vestiges of the work of an event of sense residing in a constitutive background and “hovering over” states of affairs. Here one could align the situation drafted out in Breathing Corpses with a Stoic deterministic scenario, an amor fati world wherein an impassive event of sense “hovers over” states of affairs, seeking out “bodies” for its incarnation. This literary world is not dominated by Aristotelian action, nor is it built according to rules of probability and necessity. Instead, it submits to the workings of the non-linear quasi-

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causality of events. This quasi-causality plays itself out in the various metamorphoses that smells and boxes undergo. The Skybox maps itself onto a box of chocolates, which in turn morphs into Elaine’s referring to her home as a box, boxes as shorthand descriptions of the storage units, a dog’s tin can and, eventually, a Boxster. I see these manifestations as “local” captures of the event, aberrant spots where the play attempts to explicate its own sense. The appearance of smells and boxes is that which is most unnecessary, an extra and a superfluity, yet also the component that glues the play together. Breathing Corpses would have lost its entire brilliance it if were not for this subtle interfusion of images of enclosure and pervasiveness to add an incandescent quality that can only be attributed to the shining forth of an event of sense. Representation becomes fully rounded in the moments of introduction of these supra-representational inherences. Just as the linguistic proposition becomes functional only with the inclusion of its fourth dimension, sense, and is bound to remain incomplete or truncated if perceived exclusively through its representational components denotation, manifestation, and signification, so too does the play’s order of representation reach completeness through the inclusion of these “aberrant” inherences. The event of sense animates representation in supplying a relation with something non-representable and simply expressed. Similarly, the images of smells and boxes do not aim to represent. They rather operate as captures of the expressed within an otherwise mimetic milieu. On the other hand, these occurrences display a very formal function as well. That is to say, they participate in the gradation of violence in the play’s scenes. In this vein, the play follows an equivocal logic reminiscent of a Lévi-Straussean strife toward equilibrium. Once a state of imbalance disrupts a system, the latter begins to produce aberrant elements in order to regain poise. Floating signifiers and floated signifieds being a system’s maximally exaggerated points, they also ensure that a system ever wavers between “not enough” and “too much” seeking a point of composure. In the case of Breathing Corpses, this disequilibrium effect becomes a gradation. The more abstract the manifestations of smells and the popping up of boxes within the narrative, the greater the exposure to violence. It all starts innocently with boxes of chocolates, television sets, and the vague realization that a strange smell persists. All this is lined up with subdued verbal aggression not untypical of conversations between couples. The next moment we look at the play, however, and there is physical abuse. A dog is being kicked and Ben is seen clutching clumps of hair after a fight. Simultaneously, the manifestation “box” has undergone a mutation to become a tin can and smells have begun to “stink.” The tin can of dog food mutates further, however, and morphs into a cardboard box containing a decomposing body. At this point the smell—“There was

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that smell and—It. It smelled a bit like. Sex” (Wade 2005, 61)—becomes so unbearable and outlandish that it remains imprinted on the character’s psyche as a persistent nightmarish odor. The play’s last scene shows us even more ostentatious transformations. The image of the woman in a box transmutes into a Boxster in which Amy is to take a ride. The envelope on the dressing table becomes a box with a knife in it. In this way, one witnesses the formation of quasi-causality. As the event “hovers over” states of affairs from within a vacuous background, this precipitates an arrangement of episodes indifferent to temporally or spatially governed relations of cause and effect. They witness Aion, the timeless perpetual present of the event of sense. The objects at hand are perfectly superfluous and of no significance for the evolvement of the play’s well-wrought plot. They function as empty spots within the textual fabric, as places of void significance. Still, it is in their emptiness that the highest concentration of significance and ultimately the event of sense are to be encountered. The aberrant occurrences balance form and emptiness, creating points of juncture that pertain to the kind of supra-causality that Deleuze addresses. By utilizing the workings of the quasi-cause, we are now able to view Jim’s suicide—an act unnecessary and unexplainable from the point of view of representation—as one of the manifestations of the event of sense. Jim’s suicide also aligns with a wish to embody the event; this is a Stoic gesture of offering one’s body as a receptacle for the event’s “incorporeal splendor” (Deleuze 1990, 221). Here the man of scene 1 becomes an amor fati persona, offering one’s own body to the event. In doing so, he becomes a point of emptiness himself, a receptacle for the marvelous vacuity informing the play’s actuality. The act of suicide transports Jim to the realm of the quasi-cause. He is now of one order with the boxes and smells—the empty forms of the expressed. In offering himself as a vessel for the traversals of the incorporeal event of sense, he also allows it to shift into the foreground and create a surface. In this case, the concrete act of the suicide remains immaterial, just as the sheer facticity of the various acts of violence recedes into insignificance. What matters is that they become available to the workings of the quasi-cause. How the violent event enacts its actualization is of secondary importance. It becomes clear, however, that the woman kicking a dog and mutilating her friend, the carving knife prepared for an elaborate murder, or the woman with a cut throat lying under a bush in a park are occurrences that do not quite amount to the causal chains of events that propel the play. Rationalizations remain insufficient in supplying a logic that envelops them and exposes their texture. Jim’s suicide, the dead woman under a bush, Ben’s unmotivated outburst of violence, and the murder anticipated in the last scene are rather the manifestations of an ultimately “malignant” event that unites and sustains them. This event remains unnamable, incorporeal and clandestine, only showing itself in local areas of capture. Such captures of “the expressed”

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become visible in the metamorphosed manifestations of an enclosure trope and a pervasiveness trope. Yet even they do not fully account for what remains a vacuity, a region of unknowing that nevertheless directs and commands worlds with all its might, enwrapping actants in a Stoic deterministic scenario. The event is always already there, seeking out receptacles for its embodiment—and one’s only choice is to receive it with dignity and poise: “The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us. . . . Bousquet goes on to say: ‘Become the man of your misfortunes, learn to embody their perfection and brilliance’” (Deleuze 1990, 149). CARYL CHURCHILL’S A MOUTHFUL OF BIRDS. NONDUALITY IN THE COMPOSITION OF A SURFACE Drawing on Euripides’ The Bacchae (410 BC), Caryl Churchill’s “elaborate theatrical representation of violence” (Keyssar 1988, 141) was first staged in 1986 at the Royal Court Theatre in collaboration with David Lane and the Joint Stock Company. In the form of isolated tableaus, A Mouthful of Birds traces the longings of a collection of unrelated characters. First shown in mundane surroundings, each character surrenders to an “undefended day,” becoming open to unnamable forces or undergoing a transformation. The overarching presence of the tropes of possession, violence, and the ecstatic make Mouthful an apt inventory of heightened states. Agave, King Pentheus, and Dionysus of Euripides’ classic make appearances, endowing the play with a haunting palimpsestic quality. 4 An ancient Sybil also surfaces briefly. Stage directions and dance predominate, making the actual script but one facet of a chronicle of ecstatic gestures. Dancing, entirely conveyed by stage directions, has a pivotal role in bringing forth both love and destruction. It is also by dancing that characters transmute into one another. Chimerical creatures, an interspecies mating dance, men-women and women-men all come to the fore. As the play questions “whether altering one’s consciousness truly is freedom” (Nutten 2001, 3), it enacts the two faces of madness: one drafting out a line of flight and bearing a transformative potential, the other a “dangerous” madness, “incarcerating” and “alienating” (2). Notions of expression as “pressing out” one’s juice in “the internal made external” (Abrams 1953, 48)—and here one is reminded of Dionysus’s wine and the pressing of grapes—are sketched out literally in the scenes documenting “the sensual pleasures of eating and the terrors of being torn up” (Churchill 1997, 16). This literal treatment of expression as Romanticism’s “the internal made external,” of letting out one’s vital energies or making visible one’s innermost longing, is captured either in a dance, a scene of extreme violence or in a physical transmutation: “these possessions, then, enable the persons either to experience the full

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weight of repressed desires or to find themselves in the grip of what they have mostly tried to avoid” (Reinelt 2000, 187). The result, in most cases, is a chimerical shape that does not signify and does not form relations. It is at these moments that Deleuzian surfaces are formed, engulfing the series of signifiers and signifieds, making transcendences collapse onto a flat playground of non-differentiation. Here we have a plane that folds back both relationships of transcendence and immanence within itself. Gestures of consumption or tearing oneself open dominate the play. Examples range from pressing out fruit, skinning a rabbit, or dancing with a pig, to human dismemberment or destroying another by literally “squeezing out their juices.” Dan’s dance is an example of the latter, as he “presses out” his victims’ innermost desires by dancing them to their deaths. Another instance is Herculine Barbin’s gender change, 5 a recomposition of one’s relations from which a new being emerges. A further illustration is Lena’s struggle with the Spirit. The transmutations she undergoes in this fight are marked by gestures of symbolic consumption or a folding back into oneself that are later made literal with the subsequent act of infanticide. These points within the script scaffold nonduality between subject and object: it is on a produced surface of sense that “both can become both.” Perhaps one way to describe the role and position of nonduality within this context is by introducing an analogy pertaining to the transference of figural meaning. Here Aristotle’s Rhetoric offers a number of commonly accepted definitions. In explaining the difference between similarity and metaphor, Stephen Halliwell (2002) points out that Aristotelian mimesis, rather than relying on a transfer of the metaphorical type, is based on similitude (189). Here homoia, or discrete likenesses (e.g., the depiction of a person in love or in pain), are set against universals (love, pain as such), offering a contemplative pleasure in the very act of recognizing and understanding the “imaginable reality” of a thing depicted. This very primitive version of mimesis offers a representational model—based on analogy and thus laying bare a gap—inasmuch as the collision of the two series of universals and particulars, a transcendent paragon and its concrete version, ends in recognition. Here we have the simple procedure of matching local descriptions against one another and against a model. In this moment, the contact and alignment of two corresponding disparate regions produces recognition. This procedure is mimetic in character in that it rests entirely upon the construction of analogies in the identification of already-existing correspondences. It is Abrams’s mirror, depicting but not capable of creation. The relation foregrounded here is that of isomorphism. According to Rhetoric 3.10, metaphor, on the other hand, asserts that “this is that” (1410b19) wherein the establishment of correspondence contains a heuristic component. The predominant procedure here is not that of recognition, but of sense production. Metaphor thus already contains a

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Neoplatonic tinge and aligns with Abrams’s lamp, a capture of something illuminating and flowing forth that allows for a new relation to emerge. In “this is that,” one can identify an automorphism inasmuch as an entity is replicated onto another entity because of a shared quality that is foregrounded. One entity thus becomes a morphism of itself while continuing to persevere. This morphism rests upon an identity of a shared structure: “Achilles is a lion” is an immanent automorphism based on the shared structure “strength” which alternately morphs into either “Achilles” or “a lion.” Here the arrangement of correspondence recedes to a background— the comparative or mimetic component is subject to erasure—giving way to an arrangement of new significance. A sense-generating component comes to the fore. While a comparison between two terms is made because of the shared structure, it is the novelty that is foregrounded. The fact that “Achilles is a lion” contains a heuristic tinge that is not to be explained by a simple procedure of mimetic matching or the establishment of likenesses. This level is not strictly representational as in simile, the procedure of establishing likenesses. It is with meta-metaphor that this moment of sense production is radicalized as one arrives at nonduality and erasure of the hierarchies governing the relations of immanence and transcendence. Now both have collapsed onto a single plane. Drawing from Flip Droste’s article “On Metaphor and Meta-Metaphor” (1986), I show how a meta-metaphorical plane relates the incidents of Mouthful. In creating arrangements of nonduality, it generates a surface wherein a common milieu enables a sense production to take place in a regime of mediation. Here this is called mediation because sense becomes the end product congealing out of the expressive juxtaposition of the arrangements of immanence and transcendence. Droste’s meta-metaphor refers figuratively to a state of affairs and, simultaneously, to the literal state of affairs conventionally referenced. Thus, two language levels are touched upon at once: the metaphorical and the similitudinal. Another useful feature that Droste emphasizes is that meta-metaphors appear to enjoy a paradoxical process of transfer that, at the same time, does not take place. Rather, we have a mode of copresence. While the terms no longer mean what they mean, they also do not enjoy a transfer of qualities as is the case with “Achilles is a lion.” Instead of conforming to the mimetic arrangement of similitude or emanation, meta-metaphor rather leaves a gap between its two terms. In this unresolved state, the terms remain entirely within themselves yet are posited against one another. Following Hjelmslev (1966, 176), according to whom a meta-system is a second-order system in comparison to the object system, Droste contends that metaphor “should refer to elements it is homomorphous with but with which it cannot be identified because of the different orders they belong to” (1986, 766). A meta-function would

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then be the case when an expression has a homomorphous expression of a lower-order language as its referent (766). The mere juxtaposition of the two creates a relation, and yet the comparative structure (e.g., Richards’s tenor-vehicle-ground) is superseded by a cohabitation of the literal (“meaning proper”) and the figural (“metaphoric meaning”). This poses a case of immanence since the terms are simultaneously within and without, involved in a metaphoric arrangement and external to it. The very co-habitation of the two layers precipitates the emergence of an event of sense. This is neither an emanative transference (metaphor, automorphism) nor the matching of two terms onto one another (mimesis, isomorphism). Within meta-metaphor, a similitudinal layer and a layer of transference collide and all the while remain in a Hjelmslevian reciprocal presupposition. That is to say, they inform one another as the similitudinal layer offers a frame of reference for the transference layer and vice versa, without a prevalence of any of the terms involved. Each term is the other’s meta-level, treating it as an externality. As this is not a phenomenon of oscillation, the arrangement at hand can best be named “co-habitation.” This meta-metaphorical level follows a principle of indifference according to which two layers of significance co-inhabit the “undefended” moments depicted in Mouthful. Such junctures of meta-metaphoricity are visible on several occasions in Mouthful’s tableaus. Uniformly, it is the meta-metaphoric occurrences on an “undefended day” 6 that offer a culmination and a resolution of a character’s situation. The dance of Dionysus, performed at the play’s opening and conclusion, foreshadows and frames the series of transformations to follow. It activates the various ways in which the play’s figures respond to the Dionysian intoxication, laying bare their innermost longings. While the complexities and wealth of Mouthful cannot be exhausted by this brief inventory, it serves the purpose of cataloguing the transformations and effects of the figures’ “undefended days.” The latter serve as loci wherein nonduality becomes manifest as a layer of meta-metaphoric significance, enveloping both the layer of immanence implied in metaphoric arrangements and the mimetic layer implied by similitude. 7 Inasmuch as stories are discernible, they are shown to undergo a three-fold evolution: a showcase of a character performing trivial tasks in mundane surroundings, an ecstatic rupture as a response to Dionysus’s dance, and the effects or traces left on a character once the “intoxication” has subsided. Churchill thus supplies a mock version of an Aristotelian plot with a beginning, middle, and an end, culminating in recognition (anagnorisis). Here, the moments of mock-anagnorisis coincide with the characters’ moments of self-realization—the occurrences of an undefended day lead to a change of fortune (peripeteia), most often effected by transformation or violence.

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One character, Lena, drowns her infant following the instructions of a commanding voice in her head. At the same time, she actually responds to and puts into action the passive-aggressive violence her dismissively condescending husband conveys. Her possession by an ancient spirit is shown in a dance of mutual transmutations: He is a frog. She approaches threateningly as a snake. He seizes her arm and becomes a lover. She responds but as he embraces her he becomes an animal and attacks the back of her neck. She puts him down to crawl and he becomes a train. As he chugs under the table she blocks the tunnel with a chair and he rolls out as a threatening bird. (Churchill 1997, 11)

A meta-metaphoric arrangement is formed as Lena is aligned both with a destructive Spirit that subjects her to various transmutations and with Roy, a husband. The co-habitation of a literal and a metaphoric component in “Lena is (possessed by) a Spirit” includes a layer of similitude, in which her becoming like (violent, destructive in a literal manner) an evil spirit is being sketched out and, by implication, a layer of metaphoric transference in which her becoming-Roy (violent, destructive by proxy) is foregrounded. This co-habitation of a literal (similitudinal) and a metaphoric (transference) component poses a case of homology since the two extensions, Spirit and Roy, share a structure and yet pertain to different levels of language, the literal and the figural. At the same time, one almost experiences a cognitive dissonance, as none of the levels poses a case of complete transference—rather, they occur in a regime of simultaneity. Here, in the mode of co-habitation, we see the inclusion of two layers, a mimetic and an immanent one. At the same time, the metametaphorical arrangement offers a ground for the envelopment of the two. Toward the end of the play, Lena is shown to have reconciled the extremes of creation and destruction. While the moment of Aristotelian tragic reversal here coincides with an infanticide, the anagnorisis stage that marks the episodes of possession yields to a twofold scenario: one pertaining to the order of mimesis and one that exceeds it by offering a heuristic transference. Similarly, Marcia, a Trinidadian switchboard operator, becomes possessed by a Sybil, and yet it is precisely this “possession” that unleashes a thirsting for freedom. She is also possessed by an ambiguous character, Baron Sunday—presumably a pun on Baron Saturday, one of the spirits in Haitian Voodoo. Marcia’s transformation thus relates to the rediscovery of racial roots untangling the mixture of indigenous animism (Baron Sunday) and verbal sophistication (Sybil). This transformation is conveyed entirely by vocal means. In scene 2, Marcia operates a switchboard, occasionally switching to a West Indian accent. On her undefended day, she is correspondingly possessed by an ancient Sybil, “a spirit from the upper middle classes” (Churchill 1997, 17), presumably an indication for

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her speaking in the voice of an Empire, and by Baron Sunday, who stands for her indigenous Caribbean heritage. The meta-metaphoric compound formed here rests upon the co-habitation of a voice that stands more or less in direct relation to Imperialism (Sybil) and one that hearkens back to an autochthonous past (Baron Sunday). The common structure is supplied by the vocal component: on the similitudinal level, this is the occupation of a phone operator who predominantly works with her voice, taking on different accents, and on the metaphoric level, this is the occupation of a Trinidadian medium taking on the voices of spirits. Their cohabitation is again supplied by an overarching meta-metaphorical composition that envelops both the simile “Marcia is like a Trinidadian medium” (pertaining to her daily tasks as an operator switching between accents and modes of speech) and the metaphor “Marcia is a Sybil/Baron Sunday” (bearing reference to the occurrences of her undefended day). On his undefended day, Derek undergoes a sex change, as both The Bacchae’s Pentheus and Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, possess him. Here the meta-metaphoric arrangement is sketched out on two levels that mutually inform one another. As Herculine Barbin, he transmutes into a woman: “My breasts aren’t big but I like them. My waist isn’t small but it makes me smile. My shoulders are still strong” (Churchill 1997, 52). In Euripides’ play, Dionysus persuades Pentheus to dress like a Bacchante and witness the “Bacchic revelry upon the hills” (2012, 84). There, the Bacchantes spot him and tear his flesh into pieces with their bare hands. As crossdressing Pentheus, his “old” masculine self is thus dismembered, consumed, broken open in a “banquet sweet of flesh uncooked” (2012, 84) and readied for transformation (similitude, mimetic dimension). The meta-metaphoric layer of this series of tableaus becomes manifest as Pentheus, presenting the mimetic practice of “dressing like” a woman, is juxtaposed with the historical figure of the French hermaphrodite who starts her life as a woman and ends it as a man (metaphor, emanative dimension). In the case of Barbin, we are confronted with a transference of the metaphoric type, as here the component of likeness is entirely superseded by a heuristic arrangement that suggests immanent becoming. Somewhat similar cases are offered with the figures of Yvonne and Paul. Yvonne, an acupuncturist, becomes a butcher with a talent for chopping body parts: “Many people are surprised to see a woman behind this counter. . . . Chop! Chop!” (Churchill 1997, 51). Paul, a businessperson, falls in love with a pig readied for the slaughterhouse: “PAUL: . . . You look at him, you just—You don’t want to do anything else. His shape is cut in the air” (32). On his undefended day, he undoes the clingfilm of a meat package. The chopped animal is miraculously reassembled, rising to dance with him “tenderly, dangerously, joyfully” (33). Here the metametaphorical constituent is again twofold. Two different layers, one mimetic and the other offering a metaphoric transference, inform it. A

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thirsting for an experience of emotional surfeit supplies the common structure. Paul encounters his innermost desire in the sensation of being in love, and Yvonne finds it in the spirit of alcohol. Both love and alcohol pertain to a thirsting for an affective excess. The former corresponds to the metaphorical dimension wherein a heuristic transference is at hand (“love is a drug”) and the latter to a literal treatment of the arrangement at hand (“drug”). Toward the end, a reversal takes place: it is Yvonne who is cured from alcoholism by having discovered the joy of chopping meat and Paul who, having lost the pig, succumbs to alcoholism: “PAUL: When you stop being in love, the day is very empty. . . . It may not be love next time. You can’t tell what it’s going to be. You’re lucky if once in your life. So I stay ready” (Churchill 1997, 52). Dan, the most expressly Dionysian character, murders people as he dances to them. In his dance, he conveys the innermost pleasure of his victims, a spectacle that has a lethal effect on them: “I wanted them all to be pleasant deaths . . ..” The second character is Doreen, possessed by Euripides’s Agave, hacking Pentheus to death: “AGAVE: I put my foot against its side and tore out its shoulder. I broke open its ribs” (16). It is, however, these two characters who also do not change, as if incapable of transformative creation. Dan remains locked within a state of unresolvedness. Toward the end of the play, he is shown as neither male nor female, growing fruit in a desert (51). His thirst for destruction has not undergone a transformation. One testimony to this is the act of growing fruit, containing the paradox of the inextricability of nourishment and destruction. This outcome is already foreshadowed in the dance of the fruit ballet earlier in the play: “This dance consists of a series of movements mainly derived from eating fruit. It emphasizes the sensuous pleasures of eating and the terrors of being torn up” (16). Similarly, in the play’s closing confession, Doreen confesses of having suffocated her impulse for freedom. Instead of undergoing a transformation and becoming capable of articulated discourse, her words turn into solid objects unable to fly out of her mouth. Dan’s unresolved state is thus supplemented by Doreen’s descent to the order of pre-propositional depths, the region of undifferentiated bodily mixtures: DOREEN: I can find no rest. My head is filled with horrible images. I can’t say I actually see them, it’s more that I feel them. It seems that my mouth is full of birds which I crunch between my teeth. Their features, their blood and broken bones are choking me. I carry on my work as a secretary. (Churchill 1997, 53)

In this reading we saw how Mouthful’s mock-anagnorisis moments were marked by the co-habitation of two expressions of a longing. One of them was mimetic and conveyed by means of similitude, whereas the other offered a metaphoric arrangement that could be called automorphic and emanative. These two layers met on a surface of sense supplied by the

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enveloping structure of meta-metaphor. In encompassing both immanence and transcendence at once, this structure allowed them to subsist in a regime of co-habitation. The episodes of possession marked moments of sense production that reached toward a region of nonduality. The meta-metaphoric quality they conveyed allowed for the inclusion of both mimetic and non-mimetic components. In this interaction of a literal/similitudinal component and a component of transference, new relations emerged and existing relations were recomposed. Sense took shape within the co-existence of these two modes and ultimately led to a transmorphosis in which each character became something else while also retaining an “older” self. NOTES 1. It turns out that the sayable has evaded Aristotle’s attention. In Ars Meliduna and Logica Modernorum, the twelfth-century logician E.M. de Rijk lists the Stoic sayable (lekton) as “extracategorical” inasmuch as it does not pertain to any of the classic taxonomies (Dronke 1992, 245-8). Peter Abelard also adheres to the extracategorical status of the sayable when he scaffolds his Logica (1121). Six centuries later, the Austrian logician Alexius Meinong follows the same move in the article “Über Gegenstände höherer Ordnung und deren Verhältniss zur inneren Wahrnehmung” (1899). Here the Stoic lekton receives a place in the infamous Meinongian jungle and becomes a subsistence, a name without an “existing” referent, a non-object that nevertheless could be talked about. This is exactly the property which Deleuze adopts in his definition of the sense-event as an “extra-being” (Deleuze 1990, 206). Also, as an incorporeality, lekton captures both the enunciable aspect of a sentence and the very quality of a proposition’s “being said.” Similarly, the event of sense is an immaterial inherence that remains qualitatively different from the worlds and words in which it subsists. 2. On tracing the origins of Churchill’s dystopian drama, Schnierer touches on the decomposition of mimetic markers in the play, reading it as “a conflict between the events on stage and their doubly unreal character: it is not ‘real’ and it is not even a replica of what is ‘real’” (2010, 82). Spatiality becomes a dominant trope: While theater is a medium that transforms fictional entities into “a here and now,” it creates “a there and later” in dystopian drama (82). And whereas Churchill’s drama with its “eradication of the past and the notion of plot,” the “symbolic function” of the stage and the “reduction of character” (Schnierer 2010, 83) can be used as a prime example of postdramatic theater, it also hearkens back to works as early as Aristophanes’s Birds (414 BC) or Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). Other contemporary dystopian pieces exploring the notion of “the compromised idyll” (84) and evoking the minimalism of Far Away are Howard Brenton’s Greenland (1988) and A Map of the World (1997) by David Hares. Churchill’s play, as the article goes, works within a tradition that can even include Orwell’s 1984: “dialogue is not cryptic, but slowly fleshes out something already foreshadowed, in line with the tradition of dystopian writing which starts with subtle allusions but eventually reaches a point where it has to name the unsavoury elements of its depicted reality” (85). 3. Bryant addresses Heideigger’s division between objects and things using “objects” in an almost pejorative sense to designate the products of representation that have acquired object status due to a mimetic opposition of subject and object. 4. Churchill’s Author’s Notes provide an explanation for this decision: “We could have left the play as the seven stories without including anything from The Bacchae itself, but we would have missed the presence of the horrific murder and possession, something not invented by us or by Euripides, so we kept it as something that bursts

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from the past into these people open to possession, first the voice of an unquiet spirit telling of a murder, finally the murder itself happening as the climax to all their stories” (qtd. in Diamond 1997, 95). 5. In her readings of Foucault, Churchill must have stumbled upon Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite (1980). Foucault recounts that Barbin was born a “female” in 1838, fell in love and attempted a gender change after a judicial order to do so. The order was issued as part of a larger agenda of the nineteenth century—the organization of a social reality that compels humans to have one gender only. Barbin committed suicide several years after the trial. 6. According to Churchill, these are the days on which one can be possessed by an addiction, a love, or intense desire, a time “in which there is nothing to protect you from the forces inside and outside of yourself” (Churchill, “Author’s Notes,” 5). 7. Addison (1993) invokes a camp of metaphor theorists claiming that metaphor and simile, rather than aligned with a stronger and weaker (1) or a narrower and broader (2) case of metaphor, indeed refer to two different orders, namely the figurative and the literal.

SIX Machines That Make Individuals

This last set of readings focuses on the notion of singularities. Again, this is a concept by Deleuze. The concept deals with the process of individuation of an entity. One such entity, as the readings will show, can be both human and non-human. Singularity is a term Deleuze distills out of the work of Albert Lautman and Simondon (Bowden 2011, 95–151). A singularity is what “determines a thing as a series of ‘becomings,’ that is zones and neighborhoods where there is change and inflection, such as all the places where a living being is becoming something other than it currently is in an open, tense, unsure manner” (Williams 2008, 91). That is to say, singularities are the facilitators of becoming. They enable a change in the intensity of a thing, allowing it to transform in new and unpredictable ways. In this capacity, a singularity simultaneously gestures toward two realms: that of potentials and that of particulars. By characterizing singularities as “bottleneck, knots, foyers . . .” (1990, 52), Deleuze likens them to places of transition in the process of individuation wherein a potential begins to actualize. Yet here an entity is still relatively indeterminate; it subsists as “a thing” and not as “this thing.” A singularity is a locale of continual emergence. Rather than offering a picture of a world that is seamless, unquestioned, and organized, a singularity brings alteration. Metaphorically speaking, a singularity is a “place” of enhanced thickness and color. It offers a ground for the copresence of chaos and organization, contingency and structural stability. The transformation that a singularity carries is never prefigured, nor does it promise a foreseeable result. It is encounter-dependent and thus relatively contingent. We are never certain as to what other entities an entity will accommodate within its field of interaction, what regions it will traverse, and what forces will begin to skirt it. In this sense, while a singularity has a dimension that characterizes it as purely potential, it also acts as 171

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a region of tension that opens up to finitude. This latter dimension, however, is dependent on encounters. Only in interaction does a singularity show its mettle. What a singularity precipitates thus can be described as “personal” as it is a response to a very particular set of arrangements and a playground of very particular forces within and without a very particular body. Deleuze introduces singularities as “quite indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general” (52). In fact, a singularity is something in-between these poles. While it facilitates the emergence and individuation of an entity, a singularity is not yet quite an entity itself. “Pre-individual, non-personal and aconceptual” (Deleuze 1990, 52) singularities are neutral and remain maximally open to both the general and the particular. The particular, however, is not the end of individuation. In “Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity,” Deleuze states that even actual entities are themselves events endlessly open to other events, entities, individuals. That is to say, in Deleuze actualized entities do not exhaust the process of individuation. Finitude nevertheless remains “open to further determinations” (Bowden 2011, 81). In this way, Deleuze’s finitude becomes twofold: while a constituted finitude, it remains a functional infinity. What is important here is that, at the level of singularities, entities express an infinity of attributes whereby disparate entities resonate across singular points (Deleuze 1990, 174). Yet this wealth of indeterminacy is not depleted with the arrival at a finitude. As outlined in chapter 4, as sense traverses series, it is expressed in two realms: that of bodily mixtures and that of propositions (figure 2.3). Within the context of pre-individual singularities, this passage becomes a movement of individuation. The expression, or the process of individuation, occurs at the interface of the two. While the individuated or the expressed is maximally personal, the expression itself remains impassive. Similarly, singularities are shown to exhibit a dual nature: with recourse to their enaction or the expressed, they are “personal,” but they remain neutral with recourse to the expression. On the one hand, singularities precipitate the strictly personal, an encounter-dependent constituted finitude. This introduction of chance saves Deleuzian individuation from being goal-oriented. A singularity precipitates the emergence of a particular individual entity only within the milieu of a given encounter; another encounter would have molded a completely different shape. Here no form is fixed in advance; each actualization is contingent upon a collision with other entities. On the other hand, however, when virtualized across an infinite number of series, singularities remain pre-individual and neutral. In this way, similar to the event of sense, a singularity is revealed to be an interface pointing toward both a world’s actual and virtual sides, within and without.

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EVENT-EFFECTS IN LANGUAGE In The Priority of Events Sean Bowden shows that Deleuze is able “not only to affirm the evental-determination of the event, but also that events are ontologically prior to things in general—that is, individuals or individuated states of affairs, persons and general concepts—‘all the way down’” (2011, 141). Bowden also shows how speaking persons generate the event structure while, reciprocally, the structure also produces the event of speech. Here language could be said to carry the intertransitions between worlds and words, bodily mixtures and incorporeal senses. In doing so, language organizes and manifests the event of sense. Yet one should bear in mind that “although the event of sense is bound up with language, one must not conclude from this that its nature is purely linguistic in such a manner that language must function as its cause” (Lambert 2006, 46). Language ceases to be conceived as an exclusively human property but posits itself as a place of maximal convergence and approximation between disparate orders regardless of speaking subjects: “its character belongs to the very character of the movement of the face-toface encounter of the world’s regions . . . the relation of all relations” (Heidegger 1982, 108). In this maximally abstract form, language becomes a “bridge” between states of affairs and the region of the event of sense with its relation to chaos and chance. The expressive power of the event of sense in language could best be registered in so-called “atypical expressions” that function as “tensors” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 99) or captures of the expressed that secure continuous variation. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari evoke a tensile force, a becoming within language that comes across as at once nonsensical and sense-producing. Here everything starts with expression, whereas sense is only molded secondarily and in passing. These tensors can be unruly components such as ungrammatical sentences, wild neologisms, or propositions that evade any factual reference and thus impede communication or the extraction of knowledge. With the help of such tensors language is allowed to break open and stretch out beyond its prefigured boundaries and referential frames. The tensor shows just what language could also become, what variegated potentialities it is yet capable of unlocking. Here “agrammaticality brings out the tensile dimension of language by stretching its elements beyond the limit of their known forms and conventional functions” (Massumi 2002, xxii) precisely because, rather than being co-operative, language remains thoroughly “unmotivated” and self-propelled. In this way, the tensor paves the way to a new becoming of language. It triggers an encounter with what language could be, what forces it could evoke within itself while remaining the same well-known system, that is, without a change in substance. The tensor acquires the transformative character of a paradoxical element: “The moment that the series are traversed by the para-

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doxical agent, singularities are displaced, redistributed, transformed into one another, and change sets” (Deleuze 1990, 53). As propositions are incapable of stating their own sense, this component is bound to remain aberrant, displaced, and nonsensical. BEING, SAYING, AND THEIR MIDDLE The intermediary character of singularities can be further illustrated with the passage between language and utterances. An incorporeal transformation occurs with the transition from invariant language to an utterance. This is a shift from being to speaking, from an instance to a modification of the given captured in sentences such as Gadamer’s remark that “Being that is understood is language” (1960, xxxv). This middle ground, which Deleuze often calls a “transcendental field” and which is to be understood as a plane of ontological constitution, is punctured by an extra-being. Again, the extra-being is an incorporeal that is not a ground but an effect. This extra-being—a minimality that almost compels us to speak of it as of something ghostly—does not function as the condition of possibility of language or its utterances, nor does it offer a point of origin. Rather, it is a production that streams out of the encounter between the virtuality of language and the singular occurrence that a particular utterance is. Yet the relationship between the three is one of simultaneity. Speaking is a gesture that simultaneously captures and exhausts language. Language is captured in a shape; an utterance becomes its maximal foregroundedness. Simultaneously, with this most immediate actualization, the potentiality of language is partly suspended. This very event—sense, the expressed of an utterance—occupies the field of ontological constitution that emerges in the transition from worlds to words. It marks the passage from being to saying and vice versa. A shaky tension between two grounds so dissimilar in kind, the event of sense becomes their effect and at the same time, allows them to meet: “it is on the (intense) surface connecting the two realms [depth and height, bodies and the ideal] . . . an event is actual and virtual and a change in intensity” (Williams 2009, 106). This dimension of the event of sense, however, is not to be distilled or extracted out of the utterances and the worlds attached to them. Rather, as Deleuze stresses, it is an irreducible “inherence” (1990, 22): a locus of non-belonging between the two generically divergent givens to which it relates. Again, the relation that is continually re-enacted is a movement in two directions at once (Deleuze 1990, 63), always oscillating and transmitting. It is in this transference that a singularity occurs as a secondary effect. And this comes to pass when speaking becomes the presentless present in which the simultaneous convergence and divergence of being and saying take place. An excerpt from Agamben alludes to this imbal-

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ance between the two sides toward which a singularity shifts—between being and a proposition: Only because they always presuppose the fact that there is language are statements necessarily incapable of saying the event of language, of naming the word’s power to name; only because language, as actual discourse, always presupposes itself as having taken place can language not say itself. Preceding and exceeding every proposition is not something unsayable and ineffable but, rather, an event presupposed in every utterance, a factum linguae to which all actual speech incessantly, necessarily bears witness. (Agamben 1999a, 4)

In this scenario, language is the condition of possibility of the utterance and its virtual, disproportionately larger double. Thus, a surplus in language would always constitute a lack in the domain of the utterance and vice versa. An unrealized utterance, one that has not yet come to let its event shine forth, is simultaneously an abundance of language inasmuch as language, here, is posited as a maximal virtuality. As Agamben notes, statements cannot descriptively account for the shining forth of the event they carry. At the same time, the event of sense appears to be inextricable from them. Equally, language cannot offer an account of its own actualization: it already pervades its own actualization as an underlying virtuality. This perpetual shifting between the general and the particular manifests itself in a singularity. Here again the event of sense is the intermediary that enables and carries the transition from abundance to lack and vice versa in the incessant back-and-forth movement from language to utterance. With this, we have fully moved within the proposition wherein the event of sense crops up again, this time as a singularity within the saying and as the protagonist of vocal inscriptions. Let us see now how these concepts are enacted in the last set of plays, The Country and Fewer Emergencies by Martin Crimp, Colder than Here by Laura Wade, and Cleansed by Sarah Kane. EXPRESSION, SENSE, AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF SINGULARITIES At certain points of juncture where an impossible object interacts with humans, Martin Crimp’s The Country begins to emit singularities, moments of “too much color” within a play’s texture. Laura Wade’s Colder than Here emits singularities at each stage of the molding of its phantasm, a constitutive extra operating in a manner similar to that of Latour’s “circulating reference” (1999). The phantasm of Fewer Emergencies, on the other hand, breeds fantastic inherences and confusion. A Deleuzian empty square, the play’s song is a tensile inherence that brings havoc and disintegration. In Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, lastly, singularities are distilled at each stage as the play undergoes a number of morphisms that recompose its very ontological fabric.

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This section thus explores the arrangements of equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality from the viewpoint of singularities. In Martin Crimp’s The Country I encounter a singular object, a Deleuzian “empty square.” In Colder than Here singularities are distributed in a mimetic regime of isomorphism. Expression and sense run in parallel series, one projecting an illusion of disappearance (worlds) and the other an illusion of reference (words). In this way, an interplay of Auerbachian presence and absence is unlocked. What was absent in the realm of words becomes present in the region of worlds and vice versa. The phantasmatic creation of a dead body takes place simultaneously with the scaffolding of a symbol. What happens in the play can be likened to the phantasmatic enaction of a gradual transubstantiation. Namely, an entity transforms into something that exceeds and surpasses it. This takes place with the help of metonymic concealment, alignment, and transposition, along with a procedure Bruno Latour calls “a name of action.” An “impossible object” (Deleuze 1990, 35), a word without a name and a thing without a concept, becomes manifest in Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies. The play’s voices rehearse the gradual molding of a world. Yet an aberrant inherence invades this arrangement. A voice on high, traversing the minds of various characters, continually asks about the performance of a song, thus also asking the play to state its own sense. The onomatopoetic song operates as a Deleuzian empty square: it is an aberrant inherence that has the nature of a non-signifying denotatum without a word or a concept. While the task of the empty square is to regulate the series and propel the motion of expression and re-expression, thus effecting transformations in the worlds it visits, this component misbehaves. It begins to pop up unexpectedly within the narrative, bringing havoc and eventually causing the play to disintegrate. The distribution of singularities in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed reaches toward an ontology that supports a regime of simultaneous immanence and transcendence against a backdrop of immanence. The play’s movement of expression and re-expression goes through an isomorphic and an automorphic arrangement to arrive at an endomorphism. Here we see how a play continually recomposes its ontological texture: it begins with a Platonic two-worlds arrangement, moves toward a Neo-Platonic emanative one, and then arrives at a “radical Neo-Platonism without a center” (Thacker 2010). MARTIN CRIMP’S THE COUNTRY: THE RESPONSE OF OBJECTS. EQUIVALENCE OF EXPRESSION AND SENSE The Country, staged at the Royal Court in 2000, was described as “Pinteresque” by Michael Billington and as imparting “a cool formal sense of theatrical possibility” by Dromgoole (2002, 62). Drawing a macabre pic-

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ture of the country idyll, The Country vivisects human interaction. Crimp’s preoccupation with dialogue becomes visible in the opening as we witness Corinne, a woman of forty, cheerfully cutting pictures to decorate a children’s room. Through a series of frugal verbal exchanges, we learn that her husband Richard, a doctor, has brought a young unconscious girl called Rebecca into their house. Corinne reveals her desperation as she eventually cuts herself, putting an end to a forced conversation laden with innuendos. Suspicion escalates as a line of interlinked incidents comes to the fore: Richard had failed to attend to a dying patient that very night, Rebecca appears to be no random stranger, and the backstory of Richard’s early addictions is told. The married couple’s retreat to the countryside begins to reveal its flipside. Not only does it begin to resemble a failing exercise in escapism, but it also alludes to the kind of happiness built upon ignorance, exploitation, and sheer malevolence. The mention of Virgil’s Eclogues intensifies this view and overlays it with Rebecca’s observation that the Roman pastoral ideals of husbandry and life governed by the cycles of nature were infused by the politics of slave labor and war (Crimp 2005b, 331). Within this spectacle of “enveloping mystery” (Billington 2011, n.p.), dialogue sketches out the conflictual nature of the characters’ situation. The sense of a zero-sum game is underlined by bracketed words at the end of each scene: “scissors” (Crimp 2005b, 305), “stone” (315), “paper” (330), “scissors” (345), and “stone” (366). The agonistic side of dialogue is captured in what appear to be the turns of a rock-paper-scissors game. 1 As rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper, the implication is that Corinne wins the verbal duel of Scene I. “Stone” beats “scissors” in Scene II, “scissors” in Scene IV beat “paper” in Scene III, and, again, “stone” beats “scissors” at the end of Scene V. While one characteristic of zerosum games is that they invariably have one winner only, rock-paperscissors relies more on chance rather than on skill. Similarly, the outcome of the play’s agonistic conversations is oftentimes arbitrary. Every so often, a remark made in passing leads to forebodings, with the person gaining the upper hand becoming an unwitting victor. Similar to Fewer Emergencies and Cruel and Tender, speaking in The Country is a gesture that brings forth a world. Oppression, struggles for dominance, and tensions about to erupt puncture its generated reality. Richard dominates the agonistic dialogue by creating silences and offering frugal or misleadingly ambiguous answers to Corinne’s questioning: “So there wasn’t a bag? / A what? / A bag. A purse. Didn’t she have some kind of. . . / A purse? / Yes, a purse. A bag.” (Crimp 2005b, 299). While Corinne uses Socratic maieutics to seek out details, Richard articulates a type of dialogue that is uncooperative and does not have the purpose to inform. When not able to create distraction by means of silences or displays of bewildered innocence, he takes up an authoritative position. As

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a country doctor, a figure of knowledge and reliability, he declares: “Because the fact is, (a) I fully intended to make that visit, and (b) regardless of any visit the man was always going to die” (Crimp 2005b, 309). In this manner, he furnishes an excuse for failing to attend to a dying patient. Corinne, on the other hand, slowly assumes the shape of a victim trapped in homemaker dependency. Against this backdrop of layered concealment, several episodes present us with moments in which the play behaves differently. Places of inflection—of “too much colour”—reveal themselves, opening the play’s fabric to further alteration. Here the short, snappy dialogic exchanges of the play’s habitual fabric give way to larger blocks of text. In these episodes, a stone makes an appearance. It is, at first, the very reason for Rebecca’s unconscious state. Rebecca, coming across an ancient Roman outpost, sits upon the stone as if in an armchair. In a strange unison, human flesh and stony surface congeal, causing the entire landscape to reverberate with tension. Upon falling under the stone’s influence, the girl first experiences a state of heightened awareness—she becomes capable of perceiving each detail of the landscape individually: And I’d found the stone. Yes. This . . . outpost . . . of the empire. Only it wasn’t just ‘a stone’ because it had arms, like a chair. And I rested my arms along them. I rested my arms along the arms of stone. And there was a kind of congruence. Pause. ... — Exactly. Between the arms of stone and—yes—exactly—my arms of flesh. So—okay—I watched the trees. I’m watching the trees. And each tree is green, but each green is different. And in fact each leaf is different. Each leaf within each tree is of a different green. And they’re all trembling. I mean each leaf is trembling, and the whole line isn’t just bending, it’s also waving. But ever so slightly. While the cold of the stone is—what—is seeping into me. (Crimp 2005b, 316–7)

As the stone becomes a key to opening up a world to its things, it manifests itself as a tensile inherence. Here the play begins to “stutter,” laying bare an “atypical expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 99) as if under the sway of unknown forces. Sense is already intertwined with expression up to the point of an overlap. I could call the emergent structure a fossil, an immovable fixture wherein significance becomes manifest simultaneously with the generative expression. This inherence is an aberrant presence within the play’s fabric and becomes “nonsensical” from the viewpoint of representation. The result, again, is an impossible object. Yet this object has nothing of the mobile, shifting quality of the creatures-motilities in Far Away or the song in Fewer Emergencies that freely travels across human heads in its efforts to create significance, to mold a surface for the emergence of sense.

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The stone, rather, is reminiscent of the monoliths of Arthur Clarke’s Space Odyssey series (1968–1997), inscrutable black objects interspersed throughout the universe as remote observers of intelligent life. Contact with this “empty square” alters those who encounter it, just as the monoliths’ magnetic fields effect a transformation for any sentient creature that happens to be in their perimeter. The exact nature of this alteration remains unknown, and yet both Corinne and Rebecca are drawn to the stone and experience a heightened state. Rebecca becomes capable of differentiating the shape and color of each leaf of the landscape in front of her, and Corinne becomes conscious of an emotion carefully suppressed. Upon sitting within the stone, Corinne all of a sudden sees herself spending the rest of her marriage “simulating love” (Crimp 2005b, 365). As the women speak of their interactions with the stone, language becomes dense and poetic. At the same time, as the last scene suggests, the stone is inimical, consuming the victims it has drawn: “Which is when I noticed, and this will amuse you—that the stone had started to devour my heart.” (Crimp 2005b, 364–65) In an episode in Scene I Corinne recalls an afternoon outdoors, sitting very still on a chair overlooking a landscape. Morris, a Pinteresque “unseen character,” approaches (Crimp 2005b, 300–301). This episode could be said to replicate the situation of the play’s last scene, whereby a given concatenation—sitting immobile, perceiving, sinking into one’s environment—opens the play to a sensation of a different texture. Sighting the immobile woman triggers a reaction in Morris: all of a sudden, he begins to recite a pastoral by Virgil. This rupture in the flow of language is captured in the following way: I said, ‘That must be very frustrating for you, Morry.’ But the thing is, is then he began to talk to me in another language. One moment it was English—the paint and so on—then the next it was like he was chanting to me in another language. I said, ‘What’s that, Morry?’ And of course I couldn’t help laughing. He said, ‘It’s Latin, it’s Virgil.’ (Crimp 2005b, 303)

A question arises at this point: how do we account for this supernatural congruence? If we say that the appearances of the outpost mark the points of juncture within the play wherein expression and sense coincide, why is this so and which are the effects generated by the concatenation of these episodes? At this moment, I introduce the function of Deleuze’s tensor as a “translator,” as the local capture of an encounter wherein singularities issue forth in a process of individuation. Acting as an “empty square” and an “occupant without a place,” the ancient outpost effects transformations in the intensities of objects. This is an instance of one of those “turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion” (1990, 52) that Deleuze calls singularities. The work of this inherence becomes manifest as heightened states, or

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what Deleuze calls becoming-intense. The outpost is a puncture within the play’s ontological fabric, marking the exact places of congruence in which objects translate into one another, opening themselves to chance and to becoming something other than themselves. In fleshing this out further, I turn to Bryant’s object-oriented ontology. By stating that objects are withdrawn from their relations and only partly constituted by them, Bryant’s “onticology” retains the regime of the irreducibility of substance and, similar to Deleuze’s univocity, evades the gap between humans and objects. Further still, Bryant suggests a “pluralizing” of the gap that would make it not only “a unique or privileged peculiarity of humans, but as true of all relations between objects whether they involve humans or not” (2011b, 26). Against this backdrop, the notion of the inaccessibility of objects to one another, as I read it, gains another dimension. I appropriate Bryant’s proposition that the difference between entities is not one of kind but of degree, or that “put differently, all objects translate one another” (26). Translation can replace inaccessibility as a way of opening up a world to its things. Here the difference between entities is not one of kind since entities manifest themselves as different only by dint of the fact that they sport different degrees of intensity. A change in one’s intensity, therefore, also precipitates encounters with new, otherwise “inaccessible” objects concordant with this newly acquired intensity. Here the notion of translation is not to be understood in the hermeneutic sense but as an ideal point of congealment that causes singularities to issue forth. It is within a regime of translation that entities undergo an intensive alteration and thus become given to one another. Here the production of sense coincides with the generative motions of expression and re-expression. The relation is not that of an end product and a motion toward its attainment. Rather, sense and expression intertwine. Similar to the scenario sketched out in Far Away, the generative motion of expression becomes sense immediately with its positing. In becoming congruent with the stone, the “human” characters take on bits of its experience, immovably perceiving a landscape and becoming conscious of every detail observed over thousands of years. In turn, the stone exposes itself to the experiences of the flesh, seeping its coldness into the human heart as if in curiosity or in an effort to make it its own. In further articulating what takes place at these points of junction, I evoke Bhaskar’s notion of “generative mechanisms” and their reformulation by Bryant as “difference engines” (Bryant 2011b, 69). The latter are exactly points capable of producing events as differences in a world. Following Deleuze’s rule that a ground always differs from its grounded, difference engines are not even slightly similar to the effects they generate. The taking place of an event is always already a positing of sense and a singularity. It is unrepeatable, structured in an unprecedented way and occurring in an environment never twice the same. Bryant calls such

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occurrences produced by difference engines “local manifestations” (69), which I see as the very particular actualization of the work of an event in a world. It is these local manifestations that I see as “places” for the generation of singularities. Having drawn a slightly more complex picture, I am now able to better articulate the relation of equivalence of expression and sense in the stone episodes. Here the local manifestations coincide with the moments Corinne and Rebecca sit within the stone and experience a heightened state. These episodes of congruence mark the surfacing of the event of sense within the play’s fabric. At the same time, the ancient outpost acts as the difference engine enabling these occurrences. Prior to its interaction with humans, the stone is merely a point in a landscape, an object among objects just as nondescript or trivially describable as trees, rivers, and leaves. It is, however, exactly in the face of the two encounters that it also becomes expressive. 2 Along with this, its surroundings undergo a shift in intensity too, “trembling . . . waving . . . But ever so slightly” (Crimp 2005b, 317). The event of sense brings forth alteration along the chain of expression and re-expression, causing other components to reverberate and recompose, to become intense. A singularity thus envelops the surfacing of the event of sense as a heightened state (a local manifestation) and the becoming-expressive issued forth the moment the stone is activated as a difference engine. These two modes, the generative motion and the product, subsist in a regime of simultaneity. On the one hand, we confront Harman’s notion of objects as essentially withdrawn (2002), and the kind of philosophy contending that substances have a life independent from and irreducible to their relations to other substances. Bryant’s onticology repeats the same refrain in saying that “no relation ever deploys all of the forces contained within an object” (2011b, 71). On the other hand, however, the intertwining of expression and sense gives us hope that we can create accounts of an entity on the grounds of the relations it forms and the intensities into which it recomposes itself in encounters. In the case of this expression-sense overlap, we may have arrived at an “impossible object” (Deleuze 1990, 35) that, with its very positing, has become the full explication of its sense. Rather than generating the false depth of representation informed by the notion of a phantasmatic background, this “impossible object” confronts us with a background that has completely shifted into the regions of the fore. By introducing a case of equivalence of expression and sense, I encounter a point of overlap between generative constituent and expressed. When in an arrangement of expression-sense equivalence, objects do not “alienate themselves . . . in qualities” (Bryant 2011b, 85), but rather manifest them all at once. In this manner, they become the full and nonresidual explication of their sense. As shown previously, in this overlap objects also become nonsensical, aberrant or impossible. I see the outpost not strictly as a mediator, but as a mediator and a participant at once. As

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objects are endowed with a certain degree of agency, they are capable of effecting qualitative shifts within the series of worlds and words they continually skirt: in approaching entities as mediators, we are encouraged to attend to the manner in which entities produce surprising local manifestations when perturbed in particular ways and to vary the contexts in which entities are perturbed to discover what volcanic powers they have hidden within themselves. That is, we begin to investigate the manner in which substances creatively translate the world around them. . . . Rather than treating deviations from our predictions as mere noise to be ignored, we instead treat these deviations as giving us insight into the way in which entities translate their world. (Bryant 2011b, 185)

As the outpost of the former empire only becomes expressive in its interactions with the two women, it introduces moments of strangeness that verge on the supernatural. The landscapes begin to resonate with tension. Just as the landscapes begin to tremble and shake in Scenes III and IV, so does Morris’s language in Scene I shift in levels of intensity. The “stuttering” unsure dimension of vocal gestures becomes manifest as he begins, all of a sudden, to recite a pastoral. Again, we have a case of a difference engine at work, with the Latin poem being its local manifestation. Against this backdrop, becoming-intense takes place in a regime of simultaneity of expression and sense, the stone being their area of capture. The effects that the impossible object generates are twofold. They encompass its virtual state as a difference engine and its actualized state as an actor enabling local manifestations. Rather than acting as a hermeneutic connector that transports one state to another, the becoming-intense of stone, women, and landscape takes place in a mode of parallel actualization. This actualization stretches toward both the virtual and the actual. The becoming-expressive of women and stone coincides with the explication of their sense. This simultaneity takes place exactly in the moments of intertranslation in Scenes III and IV, as well in Scene I. It is in these interactions that the stone gains its status of an impossible object, a carrier of strangeness. As points of junction and “spots of too much colour,” the play’s three episodes of intertranslation mark the thresholds at which new forms emerge. The mere isolated facts of the sudden Latin recitation, the forest bending and waving, and one’s heart being engulfed by a stony surface do not amount to a singularity. A singularity, as I see it, incorporates the whole aggregate of intertranslations between objects and the humans they have invited into their kingdom. One aggregate is the image of Corinne sitting on a chair with Morris approaching against a landscape; another becomes manifest in the image of Rebecca resting her arms of flesh upon the stony arms of the outpost throne. Lastly, Corinne’s shriek at becoming suddenly immobile, the stone engulfing her heart, also forms one such spot of

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enhanced intensity. It is from the congealment of these constellatory aggregates that singularities are distilled and it is in these locales that expression and sense reach a state of overlap in that each entity partakes in the other’s translation. These points of intertranslation could also be said to be junctures of multitudinous traversals. Being empty themselves, superfluous and only of supplementary significance to the development of a plot, they engage in the concatenation of a quasi-causal chain of intensive transformations. In their emptiness and capacity to receive various significatory infusions while remaining hollow, the points of intertranslation resemble Mauss’s “mana” and Lévi-Strauss’s “floating signifiers.” Such “difference engines” carry the paradoxical features of an inherence at once within and without, internal to a state of affairs, undetermined by it, and yet constitutive and capable of altering its texture. Such points of juncture, again, are empty forms of maximum indeterminacy, yet serve as milieus of transformation. Along with uncovering elements of dystopian drama, fraught power relations, or dimensions of communication failure in The Country, one could also turn toward the play’s less-attended regions. There one witnesses another world endowed with a causality of its own. An ancient outpost of the Roman Empire—an outlandish stone with the arms of a chair—presents itself, and learns how to become expressive in its interactions with two women who choose to sit in it. As arms of flesh and stony surface experience an unusual congruence, landscapes begin to resound under the weight of an intensity. Once activated, the stone becomes expressive and so does it encounter a sense. All the while, it acts as a difference engine, causing intensive transformations in others and altering the fabric of its milieu. LAURA WADE’S COLDER THAN HERE: THE FABRICATION OF DEATH. ISOMORPHISM BETWEEN EXPRESSION AND SENSE Colder than Here was first performed at Soho Theatre in February 2005. Revolving around the preparations for the expected death of Myra, a terminally ill bone cancer patient, the play’s setting shifts between a home in Leamington Spa, various burial grounds, fields, and woodlands. Myra carefully inspects prospective sites, coffin prices, and even appalls her family with a PowerPoint presentation detailing her exact wishes for the funeral. Cheerfully unpacking a meticulously selected cardboard coffin, she builds it in the family living room with the intention to paint it with sky and stars. Firmly set on locating the most suitable spot, preferably “under a tree,” she invites her daughters to picnics on various burial grounds. All the while, the house boiler breaks, the family cat escapes

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repeatedly, and Jenna, Myra’s daughter, gives up on her dysfunctional relationship. The play appears deliberately mundane. It does not uncover layers, nor does it scaffold ambiguities. Immediacy becomes the norm, and the piece is carefully crowded with everyday banalities to confirm this. Colder than Here presents an ontological scaffold built upon a relation of isomorphism. That is to say, two ontological regions that are isomorphic and isonomic remain entirely detached from one another. As they belong to two different and unbridgeable orders, no relation is formed between the two. Colder than Here, as I see it, offers an isomorphism between the series of expression and the series of sense. The play rests upon the constitutive separation of the two. In this reading, one series accounts for what I call the illusion of disappearance and the other for the illusion of reference. In enacting a transformation in the realms of words and worlds, the serial movement turns an absence into a presence. In tune with Lewis Carroll’s Alice, here worlds and words glide toward one another, becoming interchangeable. Namely, Deleuze’s dualities “to eat/to speak” and “consumable things/expressible senses” (Guyer 2004) are at play here, morphing bodily depths (worlds, denotation) into linguistic heights (words, phantasmatic inscription) and vice versa. One of the series follows the edicts of the heights and, as befits heights, does so by means of converting a body into a symbol. The other represents depths and, as befits the order of worlds, molds a body out of vocal inscriptions. From the viewpoint of the heights, the conversion of absence into presence amounts to the fabrication of a symbol and the erasure of corporeality. From the viewpoint of the depths, corporeality has to be made present by means of language, that is, by means of the conversion of saying into being. Within this scenario, there is a world that remains in ambush and yet continually moves toward an emergence. This is the world of death, carving its way toward the creation of a denotatum and molded by means of euphemistic reference (Malinowski 1923). The movement of one series molds an object to point to within a world, a very physical shape. What I call an illusion of reference then boils down to the vocal creation of a dead body. Various rituals of evocation partake in this endeavor. As the realm of reference, a solid entity to point to, progressively takes shape, the old exercise of calling forth absence into presence is acted out. An absent, and ultimately “unborn,” denotatum has to be pushed to the fore. Reference, clearly, remains an imagined reality. Myra is a body that persists: “noticeably thin but surprisingly energetic” (Wade 2005, 15), she is yet to be shaped into the desired referent and pushed into the realm of death. This transmorphosis takes place through a series of vocal gestures. The denotatum begins its journey as an ideation and a reality yet unperceived. Here the point of departure is an act of symbolic creation that is to take on a corporeality of its own, that is, to very literally become a world.

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Becoming-world, unsurprisingly, would coincide with the play’s ultimate event of sense. At the other end of the scale, we have the parallel realm of the word. Here we are confronted with what I call an illusion of disappearance. This dialectic offers a scenario that is the exact mirror of the situation offered within the realm of worlds. Namely, rather than encountering an absence that is to be evoked into a corporeal presence within the realm of worlds (creation of a denotatum), we are confronted with an incorporeal presence that is to be molded out of a corporeality (creation of a symbol). The playground will again be Myra’s weakened but not yet dead body, positioned in limbo between presence and absence. An illusion of disappearance, in this context, accounts for a procedure involving a gradual desubstantiation. Here, again, Myra’s body is at stake. Yet this time, within the realm of words, the desired dead body would amount to the creation of a symbol. Namely, a symbolic arrangement gradually replaces corporeality. Here acts, words, and objects come to the fore inasmuch as they are set to stand for something else, to represent. As the referential void in the realm of worlds gradually begins to gain substance, the given corporeality within the realm of words begins to wane, thinning out to become an abstraction. This motion takes place simultaneously as each series—of words and worlds—is at pains to convert absence into presence out of its own resources and according to its own rules, that is, the rules of either height or depth. Across the gap between word and world, a euphemistic reference circulates and carries forward the conversion from absence into presence. I liken it to a euphemistic reference as it performs work without ever naming its denotatum. Here, in attempting to present a way to account for the conversion of absence into presence, of the calling into existence of an entity and making it visible, I evoke Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope (1999). While such an inclusion may seem far-fetched at first, this book follows an underlying logic that is essentially Deleuzian—and confronts us with a suggestion for bridging the divide between worlds and words: The old settlement started from a gap between words and the world, and then tried to construct a tiny footbridge over this chasm through a risky correspondence between what were understood as totally different ontological domains—language and nature. I want to show that there is neither correspondence, nor gaps, not even two distinct ontological domains, but an entirely different phenomenon: circulating reference. . . . The hope to bridge the gap and solve the mystery involved in the separation between language and the world and the fact that we are still able to relate the two. (1999, 34)

This excerpt brings forth the perennial discussion about the nature of reference, the relationship between language and a world, epistemology and ontology, as well as the very practice and collection of knowledge. So

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let us see how the two constructed series, the illusion of disappearance (words) and the illusion of reference (world), would be propelled by using Latour’s “circulating reference,” a term that faintly reminds us of Deleuze’s circulating word, similarly traversing series and effecting events of sense by distributing singularities. Traditionally, the transition from language to world and vice versa has been a solid mystery. A world does not appear to amount to its descriptions—at least not convincingly so. Nor do world descriptions, be they scientific, poetic, or metaphysical, bear much resemblance to the world as we encounter it. It is difficult to determine to what extent it is certain that words “truly” “represent” the worlds they evoke and whether worlds are “truly” captured in language by using only these two available terms. Latour’s “circulating reference” introduces the very procedure of generating certainty in the production of knowledge. Like the event of sense, circulating reference follows a trajectory of multitudinous traversals. It moves across the heterogeneous series, translating passages of the serial chain into one another and thus molding encounters: Reference is not something that is added to words, but that it is a circulating phenomenon . . . Instead of the vertical abyss between words and world, above which the perilous bridge of correspondence would hang, we now have a sturdy and thick layering of transverse paths through which masses of transformation circulate. (Latour 1999, 113)

This is what Latour observes to be the status quo in scientific practice, too. Rather than creating representations (words) of what is determined during fieldwork (worlds), scientists, according to Latour, take a middle path in shifting across the series and molding “translations” across the gap between their written reports and the gathered samples. Likening this practice to a ritual of transubstantiation, he points out that these translations are the result of many micro-interactions that ultimately end in the representation replacing the represented: “It does more than resemble. It takes the place of the original situation” (Latour 1999, 67). One could say that the circulating reference lays bare the moment in which singularities issue forth in a given encounter between worlds and words. It is only in the mutuality of this encounter that this singularity takes shape: “we are well aware that we have invented it . . . Still, it discovers a form that until now has been hidden . . .” (Latour 1999, 67). In Colder than Here, I observe a similar motion in the transition of Myra’s body from absence to presence—a symbol from the viewpoint of words and a body (denotatum) from the viewpoint of worlds. In one of the series, a switch from corporeality to symbol is effected and, additionally, a shift from world to word. The parallel series simultaneously effects a switch from a vocal inscription to the molding of a body. The former movement amounts to the transubstantiation of a visible entity into

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something else that surpasses visibility. The latter exemplifies a conversion of saying into being, the molding of a reality out of vocal gestures. The two motions could be said to coincide with the generative level of expression. Sense, then, congeals as the euphemistic reference transpires and becomes more and more defined in traversing the two regions. This double-sided motion ultimately lays bare what worlds and words can become in this particular encounter. It is also the procedure of tracing the motions of the circulating reference that helps us reconstruct the scaffold of isomorphism within the play and still, in spite of the emerging gap, arrive at an event of sense. Here sense is reached as the circulating reference continually switches back and forth across the gap separating the mirror motions of the illusion of disappearance and the illusion of a denotatum. This is achieved by following the steps of scientific discovery that Latour retraces with the help of a historic protagonist, Louis Pasteur. In Pandora’s Hope chapter “From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment” (119), Latour traces the motions of “conjuring up” a scientific fact. In this chapter Latour first shows that reference is not merely added to linguistic inscriptions but is a circulating phenomenon, continually skirting the two regions of the factual and the linguistic by means of “transverse paths” (119). Then Latour traces how in his discovery of the lactic acid ferment Pasteur shifts from a fabrication of facts to the generation of events. This is a counter-intuitive procedure. In begins by first establishing the existence of an entity speculatively and in the abstract. Only then, after the speculative existence of an entity has been postulated, does Pasteur find it substantiated in a perceivable external reality. This he achieves by means of a series of laboratory trials. Eventually, the lactic acid ferment turns out to be there, but it takes a series of laboratory trials to make it show itself. In this way, Pasteur does not illustrate but enacts the coming into existence of an entity. He calls this practice “designing an actor” (122). I appropriate this underlying logic to show how the disparate series of words and worlds in Wade’s play work toward the explication of their event of sense. Colder than Here scaffolds a dying body in the same way in which scientific entities are generated according to Latour—namely, as objects undergoing trials and submitted to an extraordinary series of transformations (118). Four steps mimicking the stages of Pasteur’s innovation trace death’s slow coming into being and, on the other side of the mirror, its gradual glide into a symbolic realm. According to Latour, the first step that Pasteur took in attempting to isolate a new entity is to state that it is not there: “its very existence is denied” (118): It would be hard for something to have less existence than that . . . not an object but a cloud of transient perceptions, not yet the predicates of a coherent substance. . . . Something else is necessary to grant x an es-

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In Colder, at first the presence of a dead body is systematically erased, made an impossibility. Dialogues are profuse and extend over long stretches, yet they only dance around the concept with their indirect allusions, never naming it. The region of worlds, that is, the domain of proper denotation, remains unattended. None of the characters touches on the subject of dying. The body remains unnamed. Death as such is not mentioned even once, nor does the fact of dying reveal itself in the episodes. Myra’s body is mentioned by implication and is metonymically aligned with the act of burying: MYRA: Do you like it? JENNA: Houmous? MYRA: Here. Do you think we should bury me here. JENNA: I don’t want to bury you anywhere. (Wade 2005, 19–20)

Another metonymical concealment of the dead body takes place as Myra is entirely aligned with the pain her body generates: JENNA: Does it – Does it hurt? MYRA: Just aches and pains. I’ve started to make a noise when I bend down to pick things up. (Wade 2005, 20)

A third transference takes place as Myra is finally metonymically transposed to the burial ground itself, this being yet another maneuver to erase the dead body out of presence and give way to a symbolic substitution: MYRA: So we’re happy with here, yes? JENNA: Sure. Beat. (26)

Second, the procedure of bringing an absence into presence continues with what Latour calls “a name of action” (1999, 119). Latour sums it up in the famous characterization “we don’t know what it is but we know what it does from the trials conducted . . .” (119). Here Latour identifies a series of performances that chronologically precede “the definition of the competence that will later be made the sole source of these very performances” (119). Again, the dead body is being symbolically shaped out of actions and yet is never mentioned directly. One example of this activity is the zeal with which the family members partake in picking a burial site, making appointments, and visiting each relevant ground to be found on the city map: A burial ground in the West Midlands. (Wade 2005, 15) ...

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Another burial ground near Leamington. (Wade 2005, 42–3) ... A civil cemetery in Coventry. (Wade 2005, 64)

Buying a cardboard coffin and using a PowerPoint presentation to announce an approaching death are other examples that fall into this category: JENNA turns back to the screen, which ALEC and HARRIET are looking at, aghast. The words ‘MY FUNERAL, by MYRA BRADLEY’ have appeared. . . . ALEC looks back at the screen. The words ‘No funeral director or mortician’ slide onto the screen from the right. . . . The caption ‘Woodland burial’ slides on from the left. . . . (Wade 2005, 38–40)

Meanwhile, the ontological status of the entity has begun to move on an imaginary scale, slowly shifting from non-existence to existence. The effected transition is a motion from “a name of action” to what Latour names “the name of a thing”: Something more is needed to turn this fragile candidate into a fullblown actor which will be designated as the origin of these actions; another act is necessary to conjure up the substrate of these predicates, to define a competence that will be then “expressed” or “manifested” through so many performances in laboratory trials. (1999, 120)

A last step along the chain involves the processes of domestication and cultivation, ultimately reaching the result that a former non-entity becomes established and taxonomized. Myra’s dying body, at first ethereal and chimerical, more symbolic than corporeal, slowly becomes “a fullblown independent entity, used as a stable element to redefine all the former practices” (20). This slow coming into existence and simultaneous transubstantiation into a symbol is not merely a gradation: an ontological shift is also at work. The generation of a dead body and its simultaneous creation in the symbolic realm could also be aligned with what Latour calls a movement from fabrication of facts to events, or “from fabrication to reality” (113). This could include the episodes in which Myra is found painting her cardboard coffin. The iterative nature of the action and her perseverance remind us of ritualistic attempts to bring a certain state of affairs into existence by dint of repetition: She starts to add another coat of paint to the silver stars on the coffin. (Wade 2005, 90) ... She paints. Pause. (90) ... MYRA goes back to painting.

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This ritualistic appropriation continues in the scenes to follow, where Myra is found sitting in her coffin to watch television (84). Another example is the very last scene of the play where we observe Myra lying on the ground, making herself comfortable on a mossy patch of land. In these four steps, the two series can be said to simultaneously design an actor and make an actor disappear: MYRA strokes the moss on the ground beside her. (98) She tucks her feet up and places her hands under her face, as if she were asleep. (102–3)

This practice gradually reveals the nature of the euphemistic reference and shows how a hidden word is discovered by doing. Here four “laboratory trials” borrowed from Latour’s chapter “From Fabrication to Reality” ensure the emission of singularities—“bottlenecks . . . foyers . . . points of fusion” (Deleuze 1990, 52) and thresholds—that carry the transition from one state to another in the process of individuation. The conversion from absence into presence takes place not by naming, but by vocally performing the denoted object as a thing carefully enwrapped in allusion, metonymy, pointing gestures, and iterative action set to evoke its presence. In the course of these traversals, the dying body becomes at once a reference and a symbol, an impossible object that gains in corporeality and wanes in substance at the same time. Within the realm of worlds, the ideation of a denotatum is shaped out of rituals that name its attributes, surroundings, containers or parts. A transubstantiation—from an ideal construct into a fully fledged object—takes place in this region. Within the realm of words, a desubstantiation takes place as a body begins to disintegrate to give way to vocal gestures. Colder than Here thus offers an isomorphic arrangement in which two series run parallel to one another, remaining separated. A series representing the realm of words enacts rituals of disappearance in which a dying body is gradually transported to a symbolic realm. Another series glides toward depths where it enacts the scaffolding of reference, attempting to mold an absent body into existence, to reclaim it from the realm of words. Here both series enter in relationships that are best described through the rhetoric of presence and absence. Vocal gestures effect the transitions from depths to heights and from heights to depths. The circulating component that allows for communication between the series is a dying body molded by language, a euphemistic reference. From the viewpoint of the word, it has to become incorporeal. From the viewpoint of the depths, it has to be molded into a proper existent. A circulating denotatum-symbol exposed to trials and undergoing transfor-

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mations thus assumes form in four successive steps: verbal erasure in denial of its existence, identifying its action, inscription of a name, and domestication. MARTIN CRIMP’S FEWER EMERGENCIES: THE CIRCULATING PARASITE. A GENESIS FROM EXPRESSION TO SENSE Fewer Emergencies (2005a) is a triptych play comprising the playlets Whole Blue Sky, Face to the Wall, and Fewer Emergencies. Three disembodied voices labeled 1, 2, and 3 take turns commenting on characters never encountered on stage. The evoked figures are shaped entirely by means of speech that gradually assumes the form of a dialogue—though a detached, inconsequential one. 1, 2, and 3 pose questions that remain unanswered, interrupt each other or give suggestions on the details of a character’s action. Utterances are often immediately corrected or undermined by a contradicting statement coming from one of the other voices. 1, 2, and 3 mold the worlds of the grotesque dummies Mummy, Daddy, and Bobby/Jimmy by talking about them, commenting on their life situation, continually giving newer details. All the while, the voices themselves remain nondescript. A play of foreground and background becomes visible as the mimetically evoked characters-dummies are foregrounded in speech while being physically absent, just as the physically present 1, 2, and 3 never become the subject of the play’s utterances. Another peculiarity of the play is the diluted boundary between mimetic recreation of another’s speech, a diegetic account of an action, and one’s own words. No diegetic markers are supplied throughout the play, erasing the divide between the telling and the performing of a story. It all happens at once and through the sheer interplay of the three voices, giving the play a somewhat schizoid touch. The voices shift the focus from their bodily presence to the thematic materiality of the figures they frenetically discuss. In Sierz’s words, “Fewer Emergencies foregrounds the verbal struggle to create a story but also shows how even the smallest stories collapse: the play’s radicalism lies precisely in the fact that, while never departing from a normal conversational mode, it enacts a crisis of representation. . . . the stories stubbornly resist their own telling” (2011a, 220). The play shifts even beyond the confines of postdramatic theater in that it does not work toward a theatrical event as a heightened form of communication or a communion but struggles with an unwillingness to go on and with a wish to simply short-circuit. In Nick Kaye’s words, “the event of narration, the move toward containment, is frustrated and so made apparent” (Sierz 2011a, 139). Whole Blue Sky starts as a piece meant to recreate what Crimp has named “pictures of happiness.” Three voices mold the figure of a young woman, as if observing her both in retrospect and in an immediate

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present. They jointly decide on her feelings, the subtleties of her character, on her emotional quirks, agreeing on a best phrase to capture a situation. In this way, the play slowly outlines a picture of hopelessness instead: a woman stifled by marriage, a supposedly unloving husband, and an overall middle-class situation. One of the voices sketches out possible escape routes for her: “Pack and leave” (8). The others correct it, matterof-factly pointing to evidence against the possibility of escape: “. . . gets pregnant very young and has the baby. Look: there it is” (9). Such pointing gestures remain ambiguous. They invariably direct one to a void and all the while remain doubly affirmative (telling and showing) of a presence. In the second part of the play, the acting figures become more confident and unanimous as to how the life-sketch is to evolve. Here they partly pose clarifying questions among themselves and partly recreate a dialogue between “Mummy” and “Bobby” during which the boy confides about a voice in his head. The voice demands that “Mummy” sit with him and sing a little private song of hers, ending the play in an utter confusion of roles: “3 Says who? / Says Mummy. / 1 Says what? / 3 Says Mummy. / 1 (smiles) Not says Mummy, sweetheart, not says Mummy: says the voice” (20). Face to the Wall is both thematically and formally different from the two plays that frame it. The constellation of 1, 2, and 3 is retained but the piece starts directly in a diegetic mode with a killing spree in an unknown school. The voices take turns to comment on the actions of a nondescript character walking through the school premises, shooting down staff members and children: “1 Yes? says the receptionist, What can I do for you? . . . 2 Yes? says the teacher, How can I help you?” (25). The scene of the shooting of Child C is prolonged as 1, 2, and 3, as if commenting live from the spot, report on the child’s three identical attempts to “duck away.” The impression that parts of the piece are enacted in rewind mode is confirmed as the figures continue to rehearse various outcomes of situations. The playlet is negotiated as it evolves line by line, utterance by utterance. At a later point, the voices begin an interrogation among themselves, as if attempting to find a justification for the act. A quarrel among the voices issues as they struggle to piece together the lines of the play. After a long pause, the voices set out to collect statements that rule out innocence: “3 He’s never suffered. / 1 No. / 3 Experienced war. / 1 No. / 3 Experienced poverty. / 1 No. / . . . 2 Abused, then, as a child. / 1 No” (32). One detail of the spree killer’s life comes to the fore: his irritation at the postman’s being frequently late. Suddenly, however, the dialogue morphs into an exchange between a postman and his son trying to wake him up for work: “1 ‘Dad, dad,’ he says, ‘Wake up. It’s five o’clock. Time to get up. I’ve brought you your tea’” (34). The postman’s sung monologue follows shortly, with the confession that a singing voice in his head

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robs him of all his capacity to act: “Doo ba ba-doo ba ba—Doo ba ba-doo ba ba” (36). Fewer Emergencies then abruptly takes us back to the constellation of Whole Blue Sky. No indications of time and place are given, yet one perceives that the events reference a later moment. All of a sudden, the playlet is overridden with fantastic elements. As the couple is sailing toward the world’s rim, the surroundings of their exquisite home become the playground for a riot—stones are being thrown and cars overturned. Bobby, the child, has remained locked inside. After having been shot in the leg, he is seen trying to climb up the stairs to obtain the key to the house. As the boy crawls up the stairs, the voices evoke the picture of his parents, greeting him from the world’s rim singing: “1, 2, 3 Doo doo-badee doo doo doo ba doo . . .” (49). As a centerpiece, Face to the Wall diverges in every respect from the remaining two dialogue sequences. The first and the third piece form a temporal sequel and almost give one the impression of having told a story. Here, however, space and time remain irrelevant and are accordingly marked as “blank.” Apart from slashes indicating overlapping monologue, no other stage directions or descriptions of character are given. The text not only forms the backbone of the play, it is all that there is. An overwhelming presence and a binding component throughout the triptych pieces remains a voice that appears alternately in the characters’ heads, making them perform a little song composed of erratic monosyllables: “Doo-ba ba-doo ba ba – doo ba ba-doo ba ba . . .” (36). The song marks the moments in which voice and body converge. It is through the figures’ corporeality that the voice—uniformly mentioned throughout all three plays—exercises its wish to have the onomatopoetic tune performed. This is a voice on high, an instance of Auerbachian transcendence. It represents a disembodied word stating truths that are “tyrannical.” It simultaneously demands that the characters explicate their sense and posits the private song as a hermeneutic secret, as a thing not immediately available and communicable. In Whole Blue Sky the voice dictates its wish to Bobby: “2 He wants you to sing the / little song. . . . 1 That is—yes, that is a private song” (19). As Face to the Wall ends with the “Twelve-Bar Delivery Blues,” jointly sung by all characters, we come to find out that the song has made its way even into this sequence. In Fewer Emergencies the voice is already integrated into the dialogue between 1, 2, and 3, oftentimes occurring as an imperative: “1 . . . see how/ it swings. / 2 See how the key swings. / 3 That’s right, Bobby-boy. Watch the key. Watch the key swinging” (49). All the while, Bobby’s parents sing the same song from the world’s rim: “Doo doo-ba-dee doo doo doo ba-doo . . .” (49). No utterance says its own sense: by doing so it would become nonsensical noise or an onomatopoetic sound without substance. The hunt for sense thus compels figures 1, 2, and 3 to continue speaking, give sugges-

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tions, interrupt, and quarrel. Propositions and worlds intertwine, mutually transform, and condition one another. A world is gradually evoked through utterances that in turn propel further world-shaping bits of speaking: “2 So you’re saying she’s still there? / 1 Still where? / 2 She still hasn’t left the house? / 1 Left? No. Why?” (12). In this way, the fabric of the triptych play assumes form and becomes a progression. At the same time, one observes the scaffolding of a realm in which two conflicting world versions are at play. Along with the habitual version of the depicted world, a region of aberrance and nonsense becomes visible as well. In Whole Blue Sky, the former is composed of separate “pictures of happiness”: “. . . three of them in the pet shop, three of them buying the pet” (12). Yet nonsensical, parasitical, or fantastic intrusions continually rupture this representational layer: “2 You mean for a child to call its own pet. / 1 I said for a child to call its own pet. / 2 You said for a pet to call its own child” (13). As sense is an aftermath, “a product and an incorporeal effect” (Deleuze 1990, 70), it also is yet to be arrived at. The triptych of Fewer Emergencies attempts this by virtue of a generative procedure in which a surface of sense is to be reached. It is within the context of this generative procedure that the play advances, testing out ground, rehearsing or discarding possible scenarios, deciding on the outcome of situations. Yet a circulating component intervenes. As the voice alternately plants itself in the heads of characters asking them to perform a song, it also asks for the sense. This question can be understood in a broader perspective if one is to assume that the voice’s inquiry touches on the very nature and location of sense in the depicted dysfunctional reality marked by havoc, violence, and a general atmosphere of disintegration. Figuratively speaking, by asking the play to state its sense, the circulating voice also asks it to verbalize the feigned family bliss in Whole Blue Sky, the unmotivated killing spree in Face to the Wall or the vision of a shattered childhood in Fewer Emergencies. “What is the sense of all this?,” it inquires. The play, in turn, responds with “a little song” that almost becomes parasitic in that it pops up unexpectedly on almost any occasion. A singing voice attempts to overpower telling voices. It feigns significance and maintains the illusion of a secret, yet is entirely empty—not even a word and not even a concept. The only “meaning” it could possibly gain would be one attached to it by the narrative’s meaning ascriptions, and there are none of the latter. On the one hand, we have a voice on high insisting on a performance. The song’s unnatural ability to travel across characters and plant itself in their utterances, on the other hand, points toward an inherence of a different nature. The little song within the triptych play and performed at the world’s rim offers an encounter with the fully fledged incarnation of a Deleuzian empty square. Namely, it is an “impossible object” (1990, 35) and “an occupant without a place” (41, 47, 50, 66, 81, 228). Its main characteristic

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is that it is “always supernumerary and displaced” (41), an utter superfluity and a presence of no inherent significance. Just like Deleuze’s paradoxical object, “doo doo-ba-dee doo” is at once word and thing inasmuch as it functions as a performed sound, encapsulating a vocal and a material dimension at once. Yet this impossible presence is not a word proper and simultaneously has become an object that is without a concept. Or rather, it shows a formation in which word and thing have interfused to form an element of new significance: a word without a name and a thing without a concept. This deviant inherence “expresses its denotatum and designates its own sense. It says something, but at the same time it says the sense of what it says” (67). The performance of the song coincides with the moment in which the play says it own sense. In line with the paradox of dry reiteration, saying one’s sense can only remain nonsensical. The circulating component thus remains non-communicative and non-signifying. It does not propel a chain of propositions wherein the sense of one component will only be explicated in the next proposition, and the latter’s sense will only become manifest in the succeeding proposition. By following the procedure of organized language, the play would eventually have to arrive at a moment when it will have to explicate the unsettling components of its reality. Accordingly, the little song attempts to trick the play into stating its own sense and the play resists. By doing so, it alters the fabric of its reality and induces a series of transformations. Still, unlike the inhabitants of the Meinongian jungle that have only a “conceptual” existence, that is, subsist as signifiers or signifieds without denotation, the little song is an existent. Here we encounter a case in which a play’s aberrant component is neither a floating signifier, nor a floated signified, but a vacuous denotatum, a void object. That is to say, the triptych’s little song does not present us with an oversignifying and thus empty word or with a disembodied concept. It acts as a fixture that is devoid of a word and a concept to be matched to that word. In saying this, I can only conclude that it remains a capture of both. Moreover, it is this vacuous denotatum that the three plays are continually at pains to classify, incorporate, and rationalize. The plays’ little song represents the laying bare of sense, its extraction, the cutting edge and meeting ground of the two series of worlds and words. All the while, because of its displaced character—a voice in a head, a tune sung by a postman, a song performed at the world’s rim—it also works toward the series’ convergence and divergence as the series are at pains to appropriate it: “It fails to observe its place. . . . It also fails to observe its own identity, resemblance, equilibrium, and origin” (Deleuze 1990, 41). The song never takes place where it is expected to. Being asked for in Whole Blue Sky, it only appears toward the end of Face to the Wall, sung by a voice in a postman’s head. The first playlet only thematizes this nonsensical component. The song is talked about but not

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evoked into existence. Although the playlet resists saying its own sense, toward its end one already observes how the circulating component overrides the series, as if struggling to overpower. Nonsense steps up with Face to the Wall. In the performance of the parasitic song, the second playlet attempts to say its own sense, becoming “a kind of textual double-bind or paradox . . . both free and constrained. It tells the reader to abide and not to abide by the rules of language” (Lecercle 1994, 25). The performance from the world’s rim in Fewer Emergencies is also an attempt at locating the play’s sense, furnishing an explanation for its occurrence. It is at this moment that the play disintegrates. As the song’s parasitic intrusions intervene, asking for the sense, the voices’ narrative begins to exhibit some confusion. As the play continually attempts to re-invoke the particular moment of extracting and stating its own sense, it opens up to two pending catastrophes: boating to the rim of the world, and the voices encouraging Bobby to snatch the key and open his home to the crowds. The work of the empty square thus sabotages the linear progression of the play and its adherence to organized language. Having become nonsensical, the play ends in dissolution. Rather than naming the unsavory elements of its reality—elements that remain in hiding up until the very end—it prefers to self-destruct. At the same time, if we decide to take the triptych play in its entirety and examine the relation between its three constituents, we begin to discern a similar mirror structure on the macro level. Whole Blue Sky and Fewer Emergencies represent each other’s aberrant versions or terrible doubles. What is anomalous in the former is thriving and well in the latter. What is shaped in vocal gestures in the first excursus takes on a very material existence—destruction and violence—in the third one. All the while, the centerpiece of the triptych itself functions as a circulating and sense-donating component in that it serves as a connector between both, yet supplies the series with a zero level of significance. Its incarnations in Whole Blue Sky amount to little bits of information that do not cohere with the representational agenda of the series of “pictures of happiness.” Confused reference is minimal and the imperative voice has disrupted the playlet’s generated reality only mildly. Fewer Emergencies, however, confronts us with the fullest scope of the circulating component’s malevolence—a neighborhood is invaded and lives are in danger. At the same time, it is in Face to the Wall that one learns of the destructive potential of the private song. The tune has incapacitated the postman and has brought about a killing spree. In this way, the triptych’s centerpiece acts as a fossilized capture of the play’s sense—once this sense is explicated, everything disintegrates. The triptych formation also offers a scenario of infinite regress. A playlet never says its own sense, and yet the next playlet explicates it, its own sense being in another play. This mode of depiction follows Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “what could be seen from the old

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room was quite uninteresting, but . . . all the rest was as different as possible” (qtd. in Deleuze 1990, 43). The marriage from Whole Blue Sky has miraculously improved in Fewer Emergencies. Yet the bits of description surrounding it strike us as fantastic and confusingly negative. They include a journey to the world’s rim, “brighter” light, and episodes with the married couple smiling, “the kind of smile you smile in spite of yourself” (Crimp 2005a, 42). This self-undermining continues with the description of their improved neighborhood: “trees are more established” (44) with “nice families” having moved in once “they’ve identified the sequence—that’s right—of genes that make people leave burnt mattresses outside their homes” (44). As the onomatopoetic song circulates through both plays, the series of events regulated by propositions shift from trivial depression, lack of fulfillment, and middle-class neuroses designated as “pictures of happiness” to a landscape of utter havoc and destruction curiously dubbed “fewer emergencies”: “Things are looking great. Things are improving. . . . Things are looking up” (44). While the event of sense differs from bodies and is characterized by its neutrality with regard to actions and passions, it orchestrates the motions of expression toward “evolvement” and “revolvement,” constitution and de-constitution. As a singularity, it is impassive. Neutrality is one of the specific traits of the singular, and this neutrality makes it different “from the physical object, from the psychological or ‘lived,’ from mental representations and from logical concepts” (Deleuze 1990, 24). This singularity remains indifferent to its ground of constitution and the generative processes that have brought about its emergence. Thus, while generated out of the motions of expression, a singularity has the potential to further recompose a literary world and generate further events. And although the event of sense is characterized by an “impassive splendour” and maximum neutrality, its incarnations bring about certain effects that are very much destructive at times. While the generative motion in Other Hands concluded on a positive note with its recipients becoming expressive, in Fewer Emergencies we witness a level of de-constitution and revolvement in which the circulating component’s malignant side rears its head. A play where “speakers relentlessly and cumulatively create, recount, or even apparently recall a story, albeit teasingly elliptical, about figures we never see” (Ledger 2010, 121), Fewer Emergencies offers a scenario of genesis—a motion of expression toward sense—whereby the play undergoes several trials in which the narrative is “tricked into” stating its own sense. Ultimately, the surface of sense is never reached. Instead, the triptych play’s circulating component, an onomatopoetic song, begins to act as a parasite. The circulating parasite partly masquerades as a hermeneutic secret that feigns “meaning” and “significance,” partly as a tyrannical and commanding Platonic voice on high. Yet the little private song is nothing more than an impossible object, an empty square, and an occu-

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pant without a place that has no existence separate from its inherence in the series. Nevertheless, though it represents a neutrality and is equipped with the attributes of an event of sense, the aberrant component truly misbehaves in that it becomes parasitical on the narrative, ultimately causing it to disintegrate. SARAH KANE’S CLEANSED: TRANSMORPHISMS. NONDUALITY AS THE ENVELOPMENT OF IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE First performed at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in April 1998, Cleansed is the earliest of three plays by Sarah Kane 3 in which a decomposition of plot, characters, time, and action becomes the norm. Characterization, stage directions, and spatial markers are well incorporated into its fabric. Yet the play is not far removed from the level of abstraction seen in later works such as Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. While offering a much denser stretch of reality and clearly outlined protagonists, Cleansed remains faithful to the perennial themes of shifting subjectivities, interchangeable personas, and the arbitrariness of agency 4 of the remaining Kane plays. Profuse and lengthy stage directions dominate the text. Kane’s sparse wording becomes even more felt as the frugal dialogue relies on an informational and communicative minimum to shape a coherent narrative. Transmutation governs the play’s twenty scenes. Love becomes mutilation, gestures of commitment morph into acts of violence. The characters appropriate each other’s gender markers, be it by exchanging clothing or by miming gendered gestures. Personalities shift with an equal ease, and such is the case with spoken lines that travel from one character to another, as if having acquired an agency of their own. Human subjects are merely receptacles for the traversals of words. The play’s ontological scaffold is equally shaky as it is reshuffled several times until it arrives at a simultaneity of immanence and transcendence enwrapped within a background layer of immanence. Taking place on the grounds of a university campus, Cleansed traces two love relationships: the union of the siblings Grace and Graham as well as that of the couple Carl and Rod. Added to these are the encounters between Tinker, a shapeshifting doctor presiding over the facility, and a woman dancing in a peep show booth. A Foucauldian atmosphere permeates the scenes as “aberrant” lovers are “punished” in a landscape marked by the corrective presence of institutions. 5 The last scene depicts Carl having acquired female genitalia and Grace having completed the transition toward literally becoming her brother. Tinker, who goes to great lengths to test the couples’ love in spectacles of tremendous cruelty, admits: “I think I—/ Misunderstood” (Kane 1998b, 40).

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While rehearsing her transmutation into “Graham,” Grace’s body is variously bent and tried, up to the point of ceasing to exist “as a single subject” and becoming “dispersed” (Singer 2004, 156). Scene 3 supplies the first of three transformations. Stage directions are profuse, pointing toward self-erasure and intense anguish: “Grace dresses in Robin’s/Graham’s clothes. / When fully dressed, she stands up for a few moments, completely still. / She begins to shake. /. . . . / She collapses” (Kane 1998b, 7). Scene 5 contains two further transitional episodes. For instance, in the following scene Grace and Graham reunite in a dance, as if gradually becoming one person as their utterances become interchangeable: Grace dances opposite him, copying his movements. Gradually, she takes on the masculinity of his movement, his facial expression. Finally, she no longer has to watch him—she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time. When she speaks, her voice is more like his. Graham You’re good at this. (Kane 1998b, 13)

The siblings then also reunite in a love scene: They slowly embrace. ... A sunflower bursts through the floor and grows above their heads. When it is fully grown, Graham pulls it toward him and smells it. (14)

In Scene 10, an invisible troupe beats and rapes Grace. As blood seeps through her clothes, Graham holds her head, his own clothes stained with blood in precisely the same places as hers. Another flower makes an appearance (27). As if an immediate consequence of the picking of the flower, an electric current is switched on in Scene 12, putting Grace’s body into shock. In all these cases, the siblings’ union is accompanied by a supernatural occurrence that disrupts the habitual fabric of the play. Just as Grace gradually fuses into Graham’s body, Carl’s dissolution takes place in three successive scenes. After exchanging rings with his lover, his tongue is cut off. Having written a love message, his hands are severed. In another scene mostly governed by stage directions, Carl dances to Rod under the scrutinizing gaze of Tinker: “The dance becomes frenzied, frantic, and Carl makes grunting noises mingling with the child’s singing. / The dance loses rhythm—Carl jerks and lurches out of time, his feet sticking in the mud, a spasmodic dance of desperate regret” (30). As a consequence, his feet are cut off. In a subsequent scene, Tinker witnesses Carl’s beating, simultaneously regulating the number of blows and bodily damage with hand gestures. Mirroring the invasion of fantastic components in the scenes with Grace and Graham, the episodes involving Carl and Rod are marked by the presence of rats that proliferate at uneven rates throughout the play.

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While in Scene 8 “A single rat scuttles around Rod and Carl” (23) after the lover’s hands are severed, it is “a dozen rats” (29) that “carry Carl’s feet away” (30) in Scene 13. In Scene 16 “Most of the rats are dead. / The few that remain are running around frantically” (35), as a reunion scene is followed by Rod’s murder. Rats close the final scene of Cleansed: There are two rats, one chewing at Grace/Graham’s wounds, the other at Carl’s. ... The sun gets brighter and brighter, the squeaking of the rats louder and louder, until the light is blinding and the sound deafening. Blackout. (43–44)

Against this backdrop, Cleansed exposes an expressionist ontological scaffold wherein three transmorphoses take place. Here the play appears to be continually at pains to generate versions of the union of Grace and Graham by means of derivative isomorphism. At the same time, the generated literary worlds seek to arrive at symmetry and equilibrium by continually generating fantastic components that offset the play’s elaborately staged acts of violence. Examples include the flowers that burst open each time Grace and Graham are symbolically united and the rats invading the scenes of Carl’s dissolution. A flower “bursts open” as Grace simultaneously implodes before she is eventually engulfed by “Graham.” Meanwhile, the rats make an appearance (23) and proliferate (29) during two successive dismemberment scenes, but die (35) once the lovers’ reunion is orchestrated. Each state of possible disequilibrium within the play is thus neutralized by an equal portion of fantastic occurrences that restore balance. Once agency, self, and articulation are lost, one arrives at a scene where the scaffolding of a spectacle of love becomes formally successful, though ghastly. The two characters have entirely replicated themselves onto the bodies of their loved ones. In this scene, Carl is mute and Grace speaks through Graham’s voice. As rats gnaw at their bandages, the amor fati scenario of Stoic ethics is fulfilled in the incarnated event of the wound: “My wound existed before me. I was born to embody it” (Deleuze 1990, 148). The wound becomes the locale of the event, a capture of a violence so dense that it becomes a place of the multitudinous traversals of significance inscriptions. This is a place of sense excess that is nonsensical. The play arrives at this moment through three successive transmorphoses. Each of these morphisms recomposes its ontology anew. First, in rehearsing the union of Grace and Graham, an isomorphic map between Grace and Graham and Tinker and the woman in the peep show booth is conjured up. It is Grace and Graham’s dance of love that Tinker attempts to mime. Inserting token after token and talking to the woman in the

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booth as if addressing Grace, he pleads for her to love him, show her face, and talk to him. The booth dance becomes an ideation of Grace’s dance, yet the scenario sketched out here only offers an imitative model. The desired relationship is only mimed and a similitudinal version of it is distilled. The union between the woman in the booth and Tinker remains only an imperfect double of Graham/Grace. This arrangement translates into an ontological scaffold pertaining to Platonic participation seeking “on the side of what participates” (Deleuze 2005, 169) and thus to a scenario of isomorphism. Here a given either partakes in the target reality offering a similitudinal version of it, or serves as its receptacle (169) receiving components of what participates. Either way, a clash of orders makes itself present. Two entities of a different making are linked by means of derivative isomorphism. Here a target reality is mapped upon its similitudinal double in an exact structural match. It thus creates division between a participated and that which participates. In this way, any property or procedure relevant for one of the entities would be relevant for the other. Yet, while of the same structure and procedure, the two givens remain of different orders. What is more, one of the orders, namely that of the target reality, invariably stays hierarchically “superior” and “prior” to its derivative double. An overarching layer of transcendence obscures immanence inasmuch as the primary function of the isomorphic derivative is to “represent” the target reality. The procedure that links the two is an analogical one, an arrangement governed by equivocity. As Cleansed advances, a second ontological scenario issues forth. Here the relation between Graham and Grace is mapped onto Grace and Robin. Throughout the play, “Robin” barely has an independent existence as he rather functions as an ideation of “Graham.” The love scenario generated here can be described as automorphic and produced out of an emanative procedure. What we witness throughout the scenes involving “Robin/Graham” is how an entity (Graham) is mapped onto itself. This is evident in the many episodes in which Graham stands next to Robin, miming his gestures and talking through his lines. Robin temporarily becomes a receptacle for Graham, containing him entirely. First, he is shown to wear Graham’s clothes (Kane 1998b, 7). Later, Graham, now a ghost, speaks through his lines, the two voices overlapping: “Robin/Graham Do you still love him? . . . Robin/Graham Gracie. . . . Robin/Graham But choose” (Kane 1998b, 18–9). The scene continues to make use of this overlap even after an overlap of the voices of Grace and Graham presents itself: “Graham/Robin What would you change? . . . Robin/Graham I would. . . . Robin/Graham I am. Robin/Graham Never will” (Kane 1998b, 21–2). Eventually “Robin” dies (Kane 1998: 38) as “Graham” reaches out to him. Here Cleansed recomposes its ontology anew to allow for an emanative arrangement. Neoplatonic emanation offers a version of isomor-

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phism that begins to demonstrate proximity with the principle of immanence. Here, rather than producing an isomorphic map of a target reality onto an ontologically divergent (and by default “inferior”) given, the procedure is that of automorphism. In an emanative procedure, an entity, rather than being transposed to something else, is mapped to itself while preserving all of its structure. Participation becomes a movement in which, first, participation is sought from the perspective of the participated, simultaneously explicating “the principle that grounds participation in the participated” (Deleuze 2005, 170). The participated, while remaining in itself, maps itself forth onto a world. The act of automorphism is generous in its entirety. Here the participated becomes both the cause of a donation and that which is donated. In emanation’s triad—given, giver, and recipient—the participatory action through the given can be described as an automorphic transference of a cause toward its receptacle. The effect (receiver) comes in full possession of the gift if and only if it turns back on the cause (giver) through what is given (automorphic donation). In the final scene we arrive at a third version of Grace and Graham— already the unity that Kane designates as “Grace/Graham”—and thus at a third transmorphism. This moment is already prefigured in the scenes wherein Grace and Graham become voices indistinguishable from one another, as in “Graham/Grace (laugh.)” (Kane 1998b, 19) and “Grace/ Graham I do. . . . Grace/Graham No” (Kane 1998b, 21). Now, a last step has been taken so that Grace could literally “become” her brother. Her wish that her body “looked like it feels” (Kane 1998b, 20), together with the clarification “Graham outside like Graham inside” (20), are made literal. Carl’s genitalia are attached to Grace’s body, marking the final stage of her transmutation into Graham—at least to Tinker’s literal mind. At the same time, Carl undergoes a surgical treatment in which he acquires the genitalia of a woman. The bodies of Grace and Carl are “hollowed out” (Horton 2012, 117), reshuffled, and made open for entirely different flows. The final scene exposes an endomorphic relationship between Grace/ Graham and Grace/Graham/Carl/Grace. Here “Graham” is mapped onto “Grace” while “Grace” is mapped onto “Carl,” thus leaving each character subject to perfect erasure. Tinker believes to have done everything right, yet the result is a horrendous shape. In this third scenario, we are presented with a spectacle of Kaufman’s “most vulgar and mythical violence” (2003, 21) that, at the same time, contains within itself an event of sense, an impassive force that is utterly impersonal. It enwraps the violence, lays out a plane of immanence, and all the while retains a tinge of hope. With its very positing, it constitutes an openness and, with this, the possibility for further alteration along the chain of ontological transmorphosis that the play undergoes at every step. Here I side with Urban’s interpretation: It states that Kane’s work dramatizes an arrival at an eth-

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ics emerging “from calamity with the possibility that an ethics can exist between wounded bodies, that after devastation, good becomes possible” (Urban 2001, 37). This scene documents an emergence. It amounts to the distillation of something new that nevertheless remains contained within its older self and derives from within its originary structure. With immanent cause, we encounter an arrangement already implied in automorphism: that of an endomorphism. Similar to emanative cause, immanence remains within itself while issuing acts of production and donation. With emanative cause, the effect is external: it is not contained within the cause. Even while producing through the given, emanative cause remains outside of it. The effect of immanent cause, as in the case of the sense-event, is “immanate” (Deleuze 2005, 172) within the cause. Thus, within the scenario of immanence, just as the cause remains within itself, the effect is contained in the cause while also being contained in something else, constituting an infinite openness. Deleuze addresses the ethical dimension, too: “We do not even know of what a body is capable. . . . We do not even know of what affections we are capable, nor the extent of our power” (2005, 226). Cleansed shows us the elasticity of the relations into which bodies enter: relations stretch infinitely; modes exhibit a number of stages and varieties. At each stage, an event of sense is distilled wherein the relations into which bodies have entered reshuffle and recompose. Through the relations into which they enter and through the relations that constitute them, essences become expressive, expressing both their substance and “the principle of their production” (2005, 304) as well as the infinity of their grades of intensification and openness. As a locus of immanence, expression articulates the dialectical motions of evolvement and involvement or explication and implication. It clears up a ground for a type of causal efficiency based on the unification of cause and effect as well as the distillation of another type of movement: an emergence. Expression offers itself as an “intrinsic” reality that manifests itself as one with recourse to what expresses itself and as many with recourse to the expressed. The double potential of expression is thus the following: a similitudinal expression based on resemblance and analogical isomorphism, and best represented by the metaphor of the “mirror,” is set against a subspecies of emanation, a radiating expression based on donation, emergence, and endomorphism. On the one hand we have “knowledge by signs, through apophasis or analogy” (Deleuze 2005, 182) and on the other, a production distilled into an event of sense. It is in this manner that the duality of expressionist mimesis asserts itself. This model of immanent causation aligns with Spinoza’s notion of elasticity: the ability of a relation that characterizes an existing mode to stretch so that the finite mode undergoes a limitless number of stages while retaining its essence, “passes through so many stages that one may

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almost say that a mode changes its body or relation leaving behind childhood, or on entering old age” (Deleuze 2005, 222). Here and in the context of Cleansed, each stage would correspond to a particular intensification of a relational composition that remains nevertheless the same in order for the mode to continue to exist. The expressed in a relation is evental in character inasmuch as it constitutes an openness. I understand this openness as a singularity capturing the process of individuation, a capability to be affected, a potency of a new magnitude that opens up a new line of re-expression. It is here, in this openness, that the play reinstates itself as a spectacle of hope—the violent image of the last scene could recompose in a second step, arriving at new encounters and congealing into an entity that is radically novel. Cleansed, thus, scaffolds a spectacle of love in three “trial” stages. In Kane’s vivisection of love, two lovers are put into an ingenious torture machine. Grace’s and Carl’s bodies are subjected to a series of elaborate acts of mutilation and surgical interventions. Tinker, a doctor figure, orchestrates these as he is at pains to rationalize and perhaps even extract or isolate the love out of these bodies. In a final scene, Grace is molded into the body of her brother whereas Carl is reunited with Rod after the former’s male genitalia is removed. As the characters begin to fold into one another, fantastic elements invade the scenes: a flower rises from the ground and bursts open; rats proliferate and gnaw at wounds. All the while, the play shows us the morphisms of substance across three stages. As subjectivities intertwine and traverse their prefigured boundaries, the play begins to generate versions of the union of Graham and Grace. In a first step, this union assumes the form of an isomorphism. Then we have an automorphic arrangement. Toward its end, by having produced the chimerical creature Grace/Graham/Carl/Grace, the play generates an endomophism, subjecting each of its characters to erasure. While the first scenario translates into representational correspondence and the second into Neoplatonic emanation, the third version exposes a scaffold of immanence. In this way, the play recomposes its ontology several times, at first producing a similitudinal form based on a principle of analogy, then an emanative form based on emergence, and finally a nondual one resting upon a co-presence of immanence (endomorphism) and transcendence (analogy). The latter is an incarnation of the principle of immanence as a territory open to the complete redefinition of substance in a scenario of incessant creation whereby entities become maximally open and capable of recomposing. NOTES 1. According to an interview Martin Crimp gave for Aleks Sierz, the story of the scissor-paper-stone games in The Country comes from Debussy’s Preludes for Piano:

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“They are slightly programmatic, and their titles come not at the beginning, but at the end, preceded by the same little ellipse” (Sierz 2006c, 106). 2. This allusion to agency on behalf of the stone—its ability to produce effects and become expressive—is directly inspired by another mystery object in the play. The object in question is Rebecca’s watch and its changing whereabouts. In the last scene, Morris mysteriously finds it on the grass of a countryside meadow: “The discovery of Rebecca’s watch is disturbing but does not mean the play is a murder story: it is not. What has happened, according to Crimp, is that the watch, as an object, has acquired ‘a life’ of its own” (Sierz 2011b, 214; also qtd. in Sierz 2006c, 106). 3. The play was initially conceived as a trilogy with Blasted and a play bearing the working title Viva Death. This project, however, was never completed (Urban 2011, 310). 4. Kane’s plays for the most part are distinctly Deleuzian in spirit, not in the last place due to the suspension of agency or the interchangeability of subjectivity they offer. With Deleuze, as Lorraine summarizes, “agency as it is conceived traditionally is an illusion. That an agent can make choices and act accordingly depends on the convergence of forces beyond her control in an actualization of a state of affairs that includes her as an embodied individual with the psychic self and social identity she has. Subjectivity is an ongoing process of diverging difference, an individuating flux that is always unfolding with and through the fluxes of which it is a part and within it is immersed; it unfolds in concert with life as creative evolution” (2011, 157). 5. Dedicated to fellow inpatients at the ES3 clinic, a psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital in London, Cleansed was reportedly a response to Barthes’s comment in A Lover’s Discourse that being in love is akin to incarceration. According to Steve Waters, this documents the intense experience of love (2006, 379). Against this backdrop, Brusberg-Kriermeier explores the ways Kane “parodies medical rituals” (2010, 85) in Cleansed and Crave, using the technique of the questioning of the patient and the handing out of medical advice. Crave’s questioning of the patient “implies the doctor’s wish to standardise human relationships” (85) which is then radicalized in Cleansed as Tinker’s self-righteous corrective action. The article addresses the ritual of thanking one’s doctor, Graham’s “Thank you, Doctor” in Cleansed at the start before he dies and Grace’s repeating the same line at the play’s end, but with another meaning, show how “her transformation into Graham is completed” (85).

Conclusion

This book developed the notion of a genesis of literary worlds which attends to the pre-representational lives of plays and enacts the performance of their ontological constitution in motion. Here I staged an encounter between scenarios of immanence and transcendence that play themselves out in shaping the very fabric of drama. These two scenarios became manifest as a supra-logical and a representational machinery. Both were enveloped within an overarching immanent substratum. This immanent substratum contained a constitutive principle within itself, a transmissive and relation-dependent yet latent property that I called mimesis'. It was its generative procedure, expression, that became additive to the shaping of worlds in drama. Out of this initial mold, I began to differentiate between another, secondary level of mimesis' as the order of representation and a supra-representational constituent, the event of sense. Expression as the procedural principle of mimesis' was shown to generate both the representational region and the evental region. The practice of mimesis' as representation aligns with what Alphonso Lingis calls “the first person singular” (2007). Representation gives us a verisimilitudinous world in which we feel, recognize, and are congenially affected by a multitude of actions and passions. These heuristic glimpses of recognition, however, are poised on an inimical habit. At the sway of representation, we “respond to directives” (Lingis 1998). A voice on high organizes our world and reminds us to abide by “the established discourse” (Lingis 2007, 123). We continually confront “words that organise and that command” (28) and at times become vaguely aware that, in spite of ourselves, we obey as “words order our action” (28). In its maximally abstract form, this side of mimesis' is just that: an organizing principle and an imperative, “a set of commands.” As we shift into a Deleuzian setting, we notice that it is not only the imperative of representation but also a subterranean movement of forces and potencies that aids an emulated literary world in assuming form. A genesis takes place underneath the established order—it forms relations and reinstates the primacy of networks over entities. In this way, we witness how a world within a work takes shape between two constitutive motions: one coming from above as a voice on high (mimesis), and one emerging out of a brittle surface (event). The former of the orders consolidates into representation; the latter is the domain of Deleuze’s event of sense. Nominally speaking, representation finds its principles of constitu207

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tion in the logic of transcendence. That is to say, it works with division and its manifestations—arrangements of alternating presences and absences. Representation corresponds to an impassioned state wherein purposive action, intentionality, and subjectivity organize states of affairs. The event of sense, on the other hand, works from the vantage of univocity. It is maximally impassive, impersonal and pre-individual, characterized by what Deleuze calls “a neutral splendour” (1990, 148). As the order of representation and the region of sense ally, however, this alliance only takes place in a manner that appears asymmetrical to the observer. Forming a quasi-causality within established causal chains, the products of the genesis of sense do not become manifest within representation but act in a manner that envelops it. The region of the event of sense, while ontologically prior to the order of representation and additive to its emergence, withdraws once the region of transcendence takes shape. While representation is at pains to project a world picture that is impermeable, consistent, solid and smooth, the event of sense is distinguished by its maximal permeability: it pervades and envelops, but has no corporeal existence. The former works with contradiction and strives to avoid incongruity by all means, even at the cost of presenting a literary world that is anesthetized, unruffled, and readily available to recognition. The event of sense, on the contrary, is identifiable by its strangeness and the incongruity of its structure within a given emulated world. Mimesis obeys: it responds to the impositional structure to the letter. The event of sense misbehaves: it responds to the structure in its own, maximally contingent and unaccountable way. In positing mimesis as a constitutive principle and expression as its generative procedure, I was able to witness the shaping of literary worlds from the vantage of a transcendence or an immanence dominant, and at times, an intermixture of the two. Expression manifested itself as a Janus head with two faces: mimesis as representation and as the event of sense. While shaping the ontological affiliations of its generated world regions, expression sometimes congealed into a representational arrangement. At other times, it showed us the face of immanence. These manifestations, however, were seldom clear-cut. Rather, they presented themselves in a number of intermixtures. In order to account for the complexity of the various variations of mimesis, I introduced a number of modes within the motion of expression toward the consolidation of a literary world. Depending on the manners in which expression relates to the event of sense, that is, to the constitution of a surface marking the complete rounding off of representation, I isolated four modes within the generative procedure of expression: equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. I see these as four variations of mimesis' rendered visible by the generative procedure of expression. Equivalence amounts to an overlap of expression and the event of sense. Here the full explication of an entity’s sense becomes manifest in

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the very act of generative motion. Isomorphism plays itself out as a regime of a constitutive separation between expression and sense whereby the groundlessness stretching over the border between the two becomes a site of production. Genesis offers a scenario of vertical becoming. Here the region of representation receives a finishing touch with the constitution of a surface of sense. The scaffold of nonduality, lastly, shows us a milieu of immanence that sustains a co-habitation of immanence and transcendence, the evental and the mimetic. While isomorphism shows us an analogical arrangement in which I identified a logic of constitution ubiquitous to representation, the remaining three scaffolds (equivalence, genesis, and nonduality) are instrumental in isolating supra-representational constituents within literary worlds. In this way, we could witness the formation of literary worlds at the level of their ontological groundwork—their self-composition and, at times, recomposition. This book, however, primarily dedicated itself to the study of the vestigial work of Deleuze’s event of sense. After a plunge into the conceptual atmosphere of this supra-representational region within representation, I traced the various manners in which sense participates in the shaping of literary worlds. Here I portrayed Deleuze’s event of sense as an entity that is both “within” and “without,” an inclusion and exclusion, a flush of contingency and a very concrete occurrence within the series of words and worlds. Just as events are poised on a crossroads—of surfaces and depths, of states of affairs and the degrees of intensities that run through them—so are they doubly pointed and dynamic in their internal structure. In other words, in showing both immanent and transcendent features upon a screen of immanence, events accommodate and carry imprints from both representational and supra-representational regions. THE EVENT AND ITS PASSAGES While on the lookout for an impassive, non-actional, non-teleological component that would nevertheless propel and alter the fabric of plays— and thus reinstate drama’s basic condition, motion, from a vantage point indifferent to human access—I found out that Deleuze’s concept of the “event of sense” aptly responds to this vision. The event of sense bears witness to constitutive forces and motilities that exert themselves prior to the consolidation of the order of representation. The scaffold of an expressive transmissive component gluing together two disparate world regions and representing a reification of their relation surfaces on almost every level of analysis. It equally pervades the level of expression and reexpression, logical sense, and the onto-cosmological event. Inasmuch as it is evasive, however, this phantasmatic constituent functions as a meta-level enabling the “communication” between entities of the type of words and worlds. This logic behind the event of sense and

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expression makes them psychopomp terms. The symmetry is thus complete: facing both orders, the event of sense intensifies and unlocks motions within and between two heterogeneous series. The series, in turn, are isomorphic to one another. They represent each other’s “translations” into respective disparate ontological regions. At the same time, the system remains immanent in its entirety, with no external corrective. An event is just as elusive as the boundaries it traverses as a psychopomp. Thus, the donation of significance, that is, the rise of sense, occurs directly on the border between the two disparate orders. We saw this border as the mirror allegorically separating pre-Socratic depths and Platonic heights, extending infinitely within and infinitely without, that is, stretching toward an infinity both “externally” and “internally,” retroactively and proactively, vertically and against a horizon, thus making the event of sense a point of multitudinous traversals. An asset of this genetic approach to sense is that sens positions itself in relation to nonsense in a way allowing it to envelop the two components in a reciprocal arrangement where “one can talk about things which are unsinnig yet not logically contradictory . . . What is unsinnig in this way is not a deficiency, but rather an essential resource of sens” (Rajchman 2000, 64). THE SHAPE OF LANGUAGE Moving into the domain of language, we observed how the onto-cosmological event assumes the shape of an event of sense within a proposition. In a representational arrangement, the events of language only persist as anomalous inherences. Still, such anomalies act as transformative catalysts across the series of words and worlds. Words and worlds remain distinct and yet nevertheless reach a point of maximal convergence in an event wherein they begin to interact. Language—rather than failing— begins to show us its slightly unrecognizable face in this interaction. By laying bare the nondual side of language, representation does not subside. Rather, it reveals itself as but one secondary and static account of the subterranean movements of expression. While a reified capture of Deleuze’s affirmation of chance, the event of sense nevertheless requires a structure that supports its emergence. This structure, however, is only representational in that it relies on the logic of isomorphisms, similarities, and replication, but does not work toward the establishment of identities. It remains constantly open to variation. If we are to imagine ourselves as holding a zooming lens that takes us from the movements of expression and re-expression toward the constitution of definite beings, all the way down to the establishment of the event of sense in language, what becomes evident is that at each level the serial structure remains fluxional and open to further movement. Thus, the generative structure works toward the formation of “identity” only inas-

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much as it offers captures of momentary poise within a scaffold that instantaneously reshuffles anew. The event-effect is multi-faced within language, too. The event of sense is “actual” inasmuch as it could become manifest within a serial scaffold. At the same time, the evental constituent also maintains a relation to potentiality or to a “virtual” side that manifests itself as transcendence from the viewpoint of the system at hand. These relations of simultaneous immanence and transcendence are both present as an event “takes place.” Along with its actualization within a series, an event virtually extends across an infinity of series, modifying their senses. Thus, each “new” event is a retroactive and a proactive reformulation, a reconstitution, and a reshuffling in the existing series that nuances the series further or endows them with new significance. What events nevertheless do, however, is leave marks on the habitual fabric of literary worlds. Despite all claims that language is a “tool” of representation, a fossilized capture of an expressive motion long-since immobilized, here we see that language need not crack open in order to bring forth its supra-representational constituent. Rather than being composed of order words or interpellations that can only be shattered through “extra-linguistic” infusions, language is itself evental and already propelled by supra-representational constituents. They sustain it, condition its flowing forth, and render palpable its capacity to deliver statements that bear the mark of “sense.” EMERGENT WORLDS IN LITERARY MACHINES These qualities of the event manifested themselves in the collection of inyer-face plays at hand. Reading through Deleuze, I was able to witness their ontogenesis at the level of pre-representational constitution and account for world-shaping work in the intertwining of expression and sense. In doing so, I could outline the ontological scaffolding of several plays: at times immanent, at times yielding to transcendence, and at times sporting an arrangement of nonduality. I also identified some moments that did not readily succumb to Deleuze’s theoretical preparations but rather allowed me to diversify the conceptual framework. The outlined speculative scenario gained substance as the relations of expression and sense, equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality began to manifest themselves in the plays and allowed me to glimpse into the very composition of their literary worlds. In this way, I was able to identify not only mimetic arrangements based on a relation of isomorphism or constitutive division, but also gained insights into the work of immanence that drafted out realms of collapsed boundaries, flat ontologies, and nondual co-habitation.

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On examining the arrangement of equivalence across the three inflections within the event problematic—namely, serial movement, the composition of surfaces, and the distribution of singularities—I identified three variations within the overlap of expression and sense. Equivalence examined the results of the suspension of the constitutive vacuity between the regions of worlds and words. Whereas, traditionally, productive relations emerge on the fault lines and in the collision between worlds and words, equivalence testified to the erasure of this rule of generative distinctness. These regions of overlap were metaphorically designated as points of juncture wherein the series of worlds and words fold into one another, creating chimerical creatures within an otherwise congruent textual fabric. Looking at the arrangements of equivalence in Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away, as well as Crimp’s The Country, three different areas of overlap became visible. Whereas The Skriker showed us how height and depth come together, Far Away molded its beings in the place of overlap between an ontological foreground and background, and The Country presented us with a tensor wherein all four regions—height and depth, foreground and background—coalesced. The Skriker offered a bi-directional movement in which expression ascends in a motion of genesis whereas sense regresses to the order of the depths. Here a journey toward the formation of a transcendental field is supplemented with a journey toward becoming-indistinct. As these motions take place, they generate aberrant beings that bear the features of both worlds, yet remain in limbo between the regions allegorically designated as depth and height. Far Away sketched out a surface which already, with its very positing, offers a groundwork for the overlap of expression and sense. In “being taken” and propelled by an “instinctive toward,” the emergent constituents of this surface—humans, forces of nature, animals, and artifacts—already maximally explicate their sense. As they are shown as arising out of the surface in a moment of claymation, their sense becomes manifest instantaneously. In this maximal explication, the background shifts toward the regions of the fore and thus suspends any traces of transcendence. The Country, lastly, presented us with a tensor that is most immediate and maximally deep. Its inherence as a withdrawn anorganic object was disrupted as it began to form relations with a being of a human frame. In this encounter, both stone and human became expressive of each other’s properties in a moment of congruence. The intensity of the encounter was distributed across the regions of the emulated literary world, causing its landscapes to shake and its figures to act out of character. In sum, these three plays uncovered the inimical side of immanence. The locus amoenus of philosophy, a place of maximal convergence and an arrival at non-division, became a place of schizophrenic non-differentiation in The Skriker, the unreflected instinctual drivenness of motilities in Far Away, and the discovery of an injurious disruptive force in The Country.

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Isomorphism, the analogical alignment of expression and sense, showed us three variations as well. First, Crave presented us with an arrangement of foreground and background wherein sense inhabited a vacuous coulisse, a void locality. The regions of the fore strove to name it, producing a surfeit of signification. All the while, the unnamed item of the background remained a floated signified, a concept without a name. In other words, a phantasm assumed form in the background region and then began to skirt the two disparate regions of worlds and words, alternating between presence and absence, expression and sense. Sense, here, remained continually in the making, a totality yet to be produced and organized. Expression, on the other hand, resided in the foreground wherein it acted as a preliminary totality; this was a significatory overflow. If we are to speak in Platonist terms, here we witnessed the formation of a reversed mimesis: the eidola were given but the ideality was yet to be shaped; the copies had gathered to discuss what their model would look like. Wade’s Breathing Corpses acquainted us with a literary world in which the background was already constituted but remained unavailable and withdrawn. This background was also the residence of the event, permeating and informing the region of the fore, yet never manifesting itself fully. The foreground, in turn, only offered partial manifestations of the evental workings. These followed a rule of inconspicuousness, masquerading as the various morphisms of displaced objects within the play’s causal chain. They, however, created a quasi-causality of their own that appeared to also propel the play by virtue of the mechanics of excess and lack. As the morphisms became more “daring” and eccentric—a box transmuted into a Boxster and a smell turned into an ideation—so did violence escalate. Such elastic objects functioned as captures of the expressed and witnessed Aion, the quasi-causal perpetual present of the event. In this sense, they could be said to be infusions from the background. All in all, the constitution of this literary reality took shape by virtue of the gap of representation. Similar to its manifestation in Crave, this gap presented itself as a constitutive groundlessness, a magisterial vacuity which allowed a withdrawn realm to influence the foreground. Since the background was already fully constituted and only imposed its decisions on the region of the fore, I aligned this impositional behavior with Stoic determinism. Here bodies made themselves available to the event as the event sought receptacles for its embodiment. Wade’s Colder than Here, lastly, scaffolded a literary world in which foreground and background were mutually constituted. Two series corresponding to the regions of words and worlds sketched themselves out. A chimerical euphemistic reference skirted the emptiness between them, creating shifts in value. These value shifts manifested themselves as the various singular occurrences of the play. Here an object constructed by means of euphemistic reference was subjected to “laboratory trials.”

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These offered a spectacle of an elaborate transubstantiation, a conversion of an absence into presence. The euphemistic reference, accordingly, manifested itself differently depending on its location. Within the series of worlds, it was a denotatum striving toward a symbolic existence. Within the series of words, it acted as an ideation at pains to acquire a body. Within this endless motion of entities shifting toward becoming their opposites, the literary world of Colder than Here took shape. Arriving at genesis and the way it plays itself out within the three inflections of the event problematic—series, surface, and singularities—I came across three additional variants. The motion of expression toward the consolidation of a phantasmatic surface manifested itself as a reversed genesis in Wade’s Other Hands and an arrested generative motion in Fewer Emergencies by Martin Crimp. Other Hands started from the heights of established discourse. Deleuze’s “order word,” shorthand for the interpellatory side of language, set out to become expressive by motioning toward a surface of sense. At the outset, we encountered the claustrating guise of representation: characters were in a state close to paralysis, utterly inexpressive. Hence the play began to reshuffle its constituents. Once a path toward becoming opened up, the play’s figures became open to intensities and its ontological groundwork began to grope for sense. As representation began to slightly dissolve, logos, our shorthand for articulated discourse, was shown to fold back into phone, a vocal dimension and a region of pure expression. By dint of this “regression,” the play’s figures regained their capacity to perceive, relate, and be receptive to other beings. Fewer Emergencies, on the other hand, confronted us with a circulating parasite which readily sabotaged the play’s journey toward a surface of sense. In a movement from depth to height, a song traveling across human heads and across the individual tableaus of the triptych play obstructed the motion of expression. The few performances of the song in the course of Fewer Emergencies captured moments of de-constitution in the generative motion. Here the play’s song, a Deleuzian circulating component and an empty square, showed its true mettle in becoming destructive. Ultimately, the narrative disintegrated. This reading showed that the event of sense, while an entity entirely impassive and neutral in its disembodied state, can have truly malevolent incarnations and unsavory encounters in store. Nonduality, the arrangement showing a co-habitation of representational and evental constituents within a general milieu of expression, also exhibited three variations. The nondual ontological scaffold best exemplified the possibility that literary worlds may incorporate both mimetic and evental features that form juxtapositions or productively intertwine in a manner indifferent to contradiction. An overarching rule of immanence supported their mode of togetherness. Sarah Kane’s Cleansed presented us with a gradual transmorphosis of its figures to finally arrive at

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a nondual arrangement. In this case, nonduality became a horizon, and we witnessed a process of becoming that very much resembled a morphing claymation in that the play appeared to recompose in three successive steps, forming ever newer creatures and relations between them. We could also align these steps with a trial-and-error procedure. The play first generated an isomorphic arrangement that was more of an unsuccessful, grotesque imitation of the relation it desired to emulate. Then it molded a structure emanative in character, which I called “automorphic.” Finally, it created an endomorphism that, however, was more of a tragic double of the ideal that the nondual perspective incarnates. Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis exhibited a case of nonduality in the formation of four “empty junctions” at which the play’s consolidated consciousness became dialogical. Within these junctions, a horizon of sense sketched itself out. Namely, these moments represented captures within the play wherein dialogue was shown to gather the generative motions of expression and re-expression and transform them into expressed sense. This gesturing toward a horizon of sense was aligned with projection. In retrojection, then, constituted sense was shown to turn back on expression and thus beckon toward its constitutive motions. In this way, we observed how sense sketches itself out within the serial movement. In becoming dialogical (introjection), lastly, the play exhibited nondual properties, gliding toward a horizon of sense and at the same time retroactively revisiting its constitutive motions as their sense horizon, respectively. By looking at the serial movement, we could account for a dynamism in the nondual arrangement of expression and sense. In Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds two components, a mimetic (similitudinal) and a heuristic (metaphoric), could interact and inform the givens of the play simultaneously. These moments coincided with the moments wherein the play’s figures became exposed to a transformation. At these moments, the work of the event of sense and its ability to recompose the given became manifest. Here the surface of sense was formed in the productive co-habitation of representation and supra-representation in a meta-metaphoric capture, and within a general milieu of expression. Namely, instead of being confronted with a generative procedure of expression (movement), we witnessed a spatial dominant. Expression functioned as a background and an envelopment allowing the juxtaposition of its relative terms to become manifest. EVENT-EFFECTS IN POSTDRAMATIC THEATER This book showed how eleven postdramatic and in-yer-face plays generate their literary worlds. It also showed us what guises these worlds take on depending on the ontological scaffold that assumes form in the process of their constitution. This became possible in tracing the work of a

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generative constituent called expression and a supra-representational element that philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls “the event of sense.” The work of the event of sense exhibited formal principles that allowed us to encounter arrangements of immanence, transcendence, and nonduality. These arrangements were seldom clear-cut, and for this reason I mostly spoke of intermixtures—inflections of immanence or transcendence within a play’s fabric. In examining the formative work of Deleuze’s event of sense and its relationship with the generative procedure of expression, the active side of mimesis' (figure 1), I could trace the constitutive motions that shape a literary world. The event of sense, specifically, showed us how a given literary world has some constituents that precede the level of representation or form a regime of quasi-causality within an otherwise causal arrangement, a shadow play within a play that is informed by processes indifferent to representational mimesis. The principle of mimesis' manifested itself at two levels—at first, it made an appearance as an overarching principle of constitution that gave rise to literary worlds. Here its generative procedure and dynamic incarnation was called expression. As expression motioned toward the formation of literary worlds within a work in a regime of non-purposive becoming, it also nevertheless strove to reach a surface of sense and thus round representation off. In the course of this motion, expression branched out. Depending on the relation it formed with the oftentimes ideated or phantasmatic constituent of sense, it showed us four combinations—equivalence, isomorphism, genesis, and nonduality. These combinations exhibited either an immanence or a transcendence dominant with a number of nuances. Here mimesis' cropped up again, this time in its capacity as the region of representation and as opposed to the event of sense as a representative of a region of immanent self-constitution. The three plays resting upon an isomorphic scaffold—Wade’s Colder than Here and Breathing Corpses, as well as Kane’s Crave—showed themselves to be overarchingly representational. Their literary worlds were scaffolded around and informed by a constitutive gap. Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away, as well as The Country by Martin Crimp, exhibited a groundwork poised on an equivalence of expression and sense. They showed us a case of immanence that hearkens back to a Modernist nostalgia for convergence and a return to sources that had a schizophrenic tinge. Laura Wade’s Other Hands, as well as Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies, offered a generative motion toward a region of immanence. Nonduality as a co-presence of immanence and transcendence within a permanent immanent substratum was present in Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds, as well as in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Cleansed. In observing the travails of the event of sense within the collection of in-yer-face plays, I came to the conclusion that their most prominent features, such as unmotivated acts of violence and utter strangeness, turn out to be formal effects rising out of the event’s work within a play. Where-

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as the event is neutral, utter impassivity itself, its incarnations bear the potential to both be nurturing, to carry forward a transformation, and to come across as aberrant and destructive. In view of this, the event of sense can be said to respond to expression’s motions of evolvement and involvement, unfolding and enfolding. The contractive motions of expression (figure 2.1) can be said to produce injurious effects and bring havoc, whereas those of evolvement offer encounters with incarnations of the event that, as opinion goes, can be perceived as positive and productive. I witnessed instances of the former in the plays Fewer Emergencies, The Skriker, and Far Away, while the latter became manifest in Other Hands, A Mouthful of Birds, The Country, and 4.48 Psychosis. Lastly, I observed yet another way in which an event of sense recomposes a play’s fabric. Here, after the incorporation of an event of sense within is ontological texture, a play strives to regain equilibrium and, to this end, reshuffles its existing structure anew. Such was the case with Crave, Cleansed, Colder than Here, and Breathing Corpses. In sketching out a genesis of literary worlds, this book gained some insight into the ontological affiliations of works for the theater and bore witness to their processes of constitution. It observed how this dynamic constitution is linguistic in character and lends itself to both immanent and transcendent world descriptions. Regardless of their slant, however, these two guises of the work of expression follow an overarching rule of immanence. This rule manifests itself unto a word-work fit, and serves a level of analysis that is indifferent to spatiotemporal descriptions, entelechy, teleology, human agency, matters of subjectivity, and their likes. Further still, it gestures toward a supra-rational region which becomes visible in examining the ontological scaffold of literary worlds in drama. This is a region unaffected by experiential, interactionist, or strictly theatrical realities. It plays itself out on the written page and renders visible the incongruent structure of an event of sense. This event acts as a locale of multitudinous traversals that recompose a play’s fabric with its occurrence. This take on dramatic theory provides glimpses into the generative motions of plays. It shows us how a work discloses its ontological scaffold and the ontological processes that build up its literary worlds in the making. Here emergent literary worlds become the playground of potentialities and forces. Evental infusions continually alter a play’s fabric by reshuffling existing structures and by causing its constituents to reform anew to incorporate ever newer evental presences. Such drama of nonpurposive becoming is continually somewhere on the fault lines between the constituted representational region and the constitutive evental one. It ever wavers between actual states of affairs and regions of ontological constitution, putting on display the permeability between the two. The fabric of drama itself becomes a field of ongoing individuation that is

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non-entelechial inasmuch as its constituents can always re-scramble anew. Here it is the infusions of what Deleuze calls “an event of sense” that supply a constant influx of uncertainty and chance within the flux of expression. The event of sense, then, becomes additive to the formation of literary worlds. Such literary worlds remain open toward the constitutive region of forces and relations that underlie the fabric of the constituted. As the event of sense extends toward it, in generating impossible objects and aberrant inherences, a literary world exposes its relation to a virtual region of expression and becomes capable of recomposing anew. The region of sense is thus the productive constituent within representation. Because of it, literary worlds retain an openness toward the constitutive region, and continually stretch back to the affluent self-propelled flux of expression.

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Index

Abrams, Meyer, 9, 10–12, 93n1, 162, 163–164 action, 13, 13–16 the actual, 2, 14, 21, 112–113, 172, 174, 175, 182, 211, 217 actualization, 14, 33, 39, 55, 105, 112–113, 122, 139n2, 161, 172, 174, 175, 180, 182, 211 actuality, 2, 3, 14, 103, 105, 117, 154 Agamben, Giorgio, 26n1, 60, 121, 128, 132–133, 146, 149, 152–153, 174–175 Aquinas, Thomas, 38, 45n13 Aristotle, 10, 14, 43, 44n8, 60, 84, 163, 169n1 Artaud, Antonin, 19, 23–24, 81, 83, 94n6, 97n20, 107, 117 asōmaton, 144–145 attribute, 34, 38, 39–43, 44n6, 49, 50, 52–57, 74n4–74n8, 90–59, 172 Auerbach, Erich, 1–13, 14, 16, 21–23, 25, 26n2, 33, 48, 64, 104, 105, 118–119, 120, 122, 149, 151, 154, 159, 176, 193 automorphism, 163–165, 201–203 background, 2, 2–4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 21, 22–23, 25, 26n2, 33, 34, 48, 49, 58, 64, 68, 70, 71, 75n17, 104, 105, 111, 118–119, 120, 122, 132, 135, 137, 138, 148, 149, 151, 154, 158–159, 161, 164, 181, 191, 198–199, 212–213, 215 Bell, Jeffrey, 34, 39 Bennett, Jane, 125–126 bodily mixtures, 55–56, 62, 70, 74n7, 117, 143, 146, 168, 172, 173 Bowden, Sean, 49, 172, 173 breath-words, 19 Bryant, Levi, 4, 33, 75n14, 151, 154, 169n3, 180, 181–155, 182

Carroll, Lewis, 61, 72, 100, 107, 124, 143–144, 184, 196–197 Churchill, Caryl, 23, 79, 81, 84, 86, 93n3, 94n8–95n10, 97n20, 104–115, 140n11, 148, 149–155, 162–168, 169n1–170n7, 212, 215, 216 circulating reference, 175, 185–187 co-constitution, 61 co-habitation, 23, 63, 73, 124, 137, 165, 166, 168, 208, 211, 214, 215 constitutive gap, 4, 9, 72, 216 constitutive motion, 12, 23, 29, 47, 92, 105, 106, 137, 207, 215, 215–216 constitutive principle, 9, 13, 22, 42, 43, 49, 50, 59, 207, 208 convergence, 99, 104, 107, 114, 132, 137, 173, 174, 195, 205n4, 210, 212, 216 Cool Britannia, 77, 79, 93n2 co-presence, 5, 25, 44n1, 51, 92, 112, 126, 127, 148, 204, 216 counter-actualization, 112 counter-effectuation, 112 Crimp, Martin, 23, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 94n8–95n10, 96n15, 156, 175–176, 176–181, 191–197, 204n1, 212, 214, 216 De Beistegui, Miguel, 44n8, 61 Deleuze and Guattari, 32, 88, 99, 128, 173, 178 Deleuze and Parnet, 113 denotation, 51–52, 55, 60, 62, 66, 68–69, 71–72, 145, 147, 160, 184, 188, 195 designation, 51, 53, 54, 55, 61, 73, 122 difference engine, 180–181, 182–183 disequlibrium, 1, 92, 103, 119, 120–121, 160, 200 disjunctive synthesis, 101, 139n2 distance, 4, 9, 26n3, 114 divergence, 99, 104, 137, 174, 195 231

232

Index

division, 4, 6, 9, 21–22, 36, 42, 55, 61, 135, 137, 138, 207–208, 211 drama, 5–6, 7, 12–14, 15–16, 16, 17–18, 21–22, 29, 42, 43, 47, 72, 84, 85–87, 91, 96n16, 96n17–97n18, 207, 209, 217 dry reiteration, 53, 74n3, 109–110, 111, 155, 195 Duns Scotus, 41, 45n15 elasticity, 32, 41, 50, 203 emanation, 9, 11, 36–37, 40–48, 59, 70, 164, 201–202, 203–204 embeddedness, 29, 34, 35, 67 emergence, 5, 6, 8, 15, 15–16, 16–17, 21, 23, 24–25, 29, 42, 43, 47, 55–57, 58, 61–62, 64, 68, 71–72, 86, 88, 91, 91–92, 112, 124, 132, 137, 146, 165, 171–172, 178, 184, 197, 203, 203–204, 208, 210 eminence, 37 empty square, 100, 117, 129, 175–176, 179, 194–196, 197, 214 endomorphism, 40, 176, 203–204, 214–215 enfolding, 40, 107, 138, 153, 217 entelechy, 14, 32, 41, 43, 217 entwinement, 12, 34, 42, 56, 62, 77, 91 equilibrium, 23–24, 116, 160, 195, 200, 216–217 equivalence, 22–23, 26n1, 38, 40, 48, 63–64, 73, 77, 88, 91, 92, 104, 105–115, 149–155, 176–183, 208, 212 equivocity, 9, 38, 62, 73, 105, 117, 201 essence, 40–41, 45n11, 49, 50, 51, 53, 53–55, 56–57, 58, 74n10, 110, 120, 123, 203 Euripides, 162, 167, 168, 169n4 event of sense, 9, 12–14, 15–16, 16–17, 18, 19, 21–24, 24–25, 30, 31–32, 35, 39, 43, 44n1, 47, 51, 53, 55–56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64–65, 66, 68–70, 71–73, 74n7–74n8, 75n14, 75n16, 77, 83, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 91–93, 97n20, 99, 101, 102, 103, 103–104, 107, 108, 110, 112, 117, 119–120, 121, 122, 124, 129, 135, 143, 144, 145–147, 148, 151, 152, 158, 158–161, 165, 169n1, 172, 173, 174–175, 181, 184–185, 186, 187, 197,

203, 207, 207–211, 214, 215, 216–218 event-effect, 147, 173, 211, 215 evolvement, 18, 37, 48, 49, 55, 59, 103, 107, 137, 161, 197, 203, 216–217 explication, 3–4, 7–8, 11, 26n1, 37, 40, 42, 44n9, 48–49, 49, 50, 53, 55, 64, 153, 203, 208, 212 the expressed, 12–13, 17, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40–41, 48, 49, 50–53, 54–57, 59, 62, 70–71, 72, 100, 120, 127, 145, 151, 159–160, 161, 172, 173, 174, 181, 203, 213 the expressible, 39, 40, 49, 54–55, 71 expression, 8–9, 11–13, 14, 15–16, 17, 19, 20–25, 26n7, 29–43, 47–73, 74n10, 77, 88–92, 93n1, 100, 103, 104–109, 110–115, 116, 117, 118–119, 120–139, 147–168, 172–173, 175–176, 178–184, 186, 197, 203–204, 207, 208–218 Expressionist theater, 82–83, 94n5 extra-being, 19, 24–25, 26n7, 61, 62, 73, 145, 169n1, 174 extra-ontological entity, 5, 8, 47, 77, 105, 148 false depth, 151, 181 floated signified, 105, 117, 118, 119–120, 159, 160, 195, 213 floating signifier, 111, 117, 118–119, 119, 126, 160, 183, 195 foreground, 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 15–16, 18, 21, 21–22, 26n1, 33, 42, 48, 49, 64, 104–105, 115, 118, 120, 148, 151, 154, 155, 161, 174, 191, 212, 213 Frege, Gottlob, 100, 139n1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 174 generative motion, 9, 11 generative ontology, 33, 160, 207, 208–209, 211, 215 generative procedure, 8, 21, 21–23, 25, 43, 61, 77, 88, 194, 207, 208, 215, 215–216 generosity, 41, 59, 103, 201 genesis, 8, 16, 17, 21, 23, 43, 48, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64–65, 66–68, 67, 70, 72, 73, 74n10, 77, 88, 91, 92, 99, 102, 104, 106, 122, 124, 137, 151, 176, 191, 197,

Index 207–209, 211–214, 216, 217 genesis of representation, 12, 65, 137 gesture, 11, 13, 16, 21, 105, 108, 109, 121–122, 134, 182, 184, 186–187, 190, 196 groundlessness, 15, 65, 92, 132, 136–139, 147–149, 208, 213 habitual texture, 13, 126 haecceity, 62, 74n2 Harman, Graham, 151, 153–154, 155, 181 Hegel, G. W. F., 30, 47, 57–59, 73, 74n9, 74n10, 96n16 Heidegger, Martin, 19, 69, 151–153, 154, 173 Hjelmslev, Louis, 4, 6, 8, 26n2, 26n4, 30, 99–100, 164–165 Homer, 1 horizon of sense, 106, 135–138, 138, 215 Hughes, Joe, 66, 67, 73n1, 75n11, 75n17 Hyppolite, Jean, 31, 33, 47, 57–59, 64, 73 immanence, 3, 5, 5–6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 21–23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35–39, 40–42, 47, 48, 56, 59–60, 63–65, 68–69, 71–73, 75n11–75n13, 88–89, 92, 102, 103, 105–106, 113–115, 117, 125, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 149, 163, 164–165, 168–169, 176, 198, 201–204, 207, 208–209, 211, 212, 214, 215–217 immanent causality, 39, 74n7, 135 immediacy, 17, 24, 26n1, 68, 83–85, 114–115, 151–154, 184 imperative, 3, 6, 51, 53, 193, 207 implication, 37, 40, 49, 203 impossible object, 65, 103–104, 175–176, 178, 181, 182, 190, 194, 197, 218 indifference, 51, 68, 106, 136, 136–137, 165 individuation, 16, 30, 39, 49, 62, 67, 72, 74n2, 74n5, 92, 103, 113, 136, 139n2, 171–172, 179, 190, 203, 217 infinite proliferation, 103, 135–136, 137–138 infra-being, 15–16 intensity, 103–104, 124, 171, 180, 181, 182, 183 interdependence, 8, 26n2, 137

233

introjection, 137, 141n17 involvement, 36, 37, 48–49, 49, 50, 55, 72, 93n1, 103, 107, 137, 147, 203, 216–217 in-yer-face theater, 77–81, 82, 83, 86, 93n2, 95n9 isomorphic map, 53, 64, 73–72, 144, 158, 200, 201 isomorphism, 9, 21, 23, 48, 63, 64, 65, 73, 77, 88, 91, 92, 99, 104, 105, 115, 117, 120, 148, 151, 156, 158, 163, 165, 176, 183, 184, 187, 200, 201, 203–204, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216 isonomy, 64, 99 junction, 104, 135–138, 180, 182, 215 Kane, Sarah, 23–24, 77–78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84–85, 86–87, 93n2, 94n5, 94n8, 96n12, 96n14–97n20, 104, 106, 115–121, 129–131, 138, 140n12–140n15, 156, 159, 175, 176, 198–204, 205n4–205n5, 214–215, 216 Kant, Immanuel, 33, 47, 59–60, 73, 74n10–75n11, 75n13, 75n14, 75n15 Koller, Hermann von, 7–8 language, 15, 18, 19–20, 21, 23–24, 24, 26n2, 26n6, 31, 36, 38, 44n9, 51, 61, 65, 66–70, 78, 79, 81–83, 86, 87, 90, 92, 97n20, 104, 105, 106, 107–108, 109–111, 113, 114, 123–124, 126, 127, 128–129, 130, 132–133, 145, 146, 147, 173–174, 175, 179, 184, 186, 190, 210–211, 214 Latour, Bruno, 13, 125, 175–176, 185, 185–187, 188, 189, 190 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 26n6, 90–92, 196 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 14, 15, 84–86, 87–88, 95n9, 96n15, 96n17 lekton, 144–146, 169n1 Lingis, Alphonso, 207 literary world, 5–7, 8, 9–10, 12, 13, 15–16, 16–17, 18, 20–25, 29, 41, 42–43, 47–48, 61–62, 64, 72, 73, 77, 86, 88, 89, 91–92, 100, 104, 112, 143, 159, 197, 200, 207–209, 211, 212, 213–214, 215–218

234

Index

local manifestation, 148, 159, 180–181, 182 logos, 128, 132–133, 134, 214 Loy, David, 69, 137 manifestation, 51–52, 55, 60, 62, 66, 68–69, 160 Mansfield, Elizabeth, 116 Mauss, Marcel, 183 Meinong, Alexis, 60, 61, 145–146, 169n1, 195 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20, 69–70, 112, 114 metastability, 74n2, 136–137 mimesis, 6–13, 17, 21–23, 25, 29, 33, 43, 77, 116, 149, 154, 163, 165, 166, 203, 207–208, 213, 215–216 mimesis', 17, 207, 208, 215–216 mimesis-effect, 6 mise-en-page, 84–88, 97n19 mode, 12, 24, 39–40, 43, 44n9, 45n11, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 59, 74n4, 74n5, 74n10, 147, 203 modification, 53, 56, 74n5, 126, 174 movement, 8, 9, 12, 14–19, 22–23, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40–42, 47, 49–73, 74n7–75n11, 90, 91, 91–93, 99–139, 147, 148, 154, 155, 172, 174, 175, 176, 184, 186, 189, 201, 203, 207, 210, 212, 214, 215 nāmarūpa, 21, 24 Neoplatonism, 9, 11, 36–37, 40, 44n9, 48, 57, 59, 163–164, 201–202, 204 neutrality, 41, 51, 68–69, 110, 126, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 59 noise, 64, 66, 67, 90, 105, 107, 108, 113–115, 117, 123 nonduality, 5, 21–23, 48, 63, 65, 68–73, 77, 88, 91, 92, 104, 129, 132, 136, 137, 138, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 176, 198, 208, 211, 214–215, 215–216 non-purposive becoming, 13, 14–15, 216 non-relation, 38, 48 nonsense, 19, 53, 64, 69, 90, 100, 108, 110, 127, 133, 135, 137, 138, 145, 155, 194, 196, 209–210 normativity, 4, 6, 19, 114

Odyssey, 1 Old Testament, 2–4 ontogenesis, 5–6, 16, 30, 31, 33, 42, 47, 211 ontological armature, 5 ontological arrangement, 5, 23–24, 25, 90, 91, 151 ontological commitment, 5, 5–8, 9, 20, 21, 23, 25, 29, 47–48 ontological constitution, 5–6, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 25, 174, 207, 217 ontological scaffold, 4, 5, 6, 17, 22–23, 25, 42, 48, 102, 148, 151, 184, 198, 200, 201, 211, 214, 215, 217 order word, 19–20, 106, 123, 126, 127, 128, 211, 214 Palmer, Kent, 65, 69–70, 71 participation, 36–38, 40, 45n10, 48, 72, 201 performance of concepts, 87 perpetual foreground, 4–5, 5, 16, 21, 21–22, 33, 115, 148 phantasm, 4, 105, 110–115 phonē, 128, 132–133, 214 Plato/Platonic, 6–7, 10, 11, 30, 31, 38, 40, 48, 56, 60, 108, 111, 114, 120, 123, 143, 144, 176, 197, 201, 209, 213. See also Neoplatonism Plotinus, 11, 37, 60, 69 postdramatic theater, 5, 11, 14, 16, 20, 21, 43, 84–85, 95n9, 96n15, 96n17, 169n2, 191, 215 potentiality, 14–15, 39, 51, 52, 75n14, 103, 146, 174, 211 Prendergast, Christopher, 6 pre-personal, the, 15, 64, 66, 68, 106 pre-representational region, 5, 12, 13, 89, 114, 147 primary order, 66, 67, 73n1 projection, 106, 130, 135, 137, 141n17, 215 psychopomp, 8, 32, 38, 63, 72, 100–101, 110, 113, 117, 126–127, 129, 144, 209 quasi-causality, 158, 159–160, 161, 208, 213, 215–216

Index reciprocal presupposition, 6, 30, 38, 62, 71, 99, 100, 165 recognition, 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 17–18, 33, 57, 60, 90, 163–165, 207–208 re-expression, 24, 39–40, 47, 54, 56, 59, 64, 74n10, 100, 106, 112, 132, 135–138, 176, 180, 181, 203, 210, 215 representation, 4–25, 26n1, 29–43, 44n9, 47–48, 51–56, 60–72, 77, 85, 88, 89, 90, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105–106, 107–108, 114, 116, 121, 123, 130, 132, 135, 137–138, 143, 145, 147, 149, 160, 161, 163–164, 169n3, 178, 181, 186, 191, 207–209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 215–216, 217–218 retrojection, 106, 135, 137, 141n17, 215 Romanticism/Romantic, 9, 11, 68, 162 Rose, Gillian, 68 Royal Court Theatre, 78, 80, 93n3, 93n4, 129, 140n12, 149, 156, 162, 176, 198 secondary organisation, 66, 67, 70 Sellars, John, 144 sense-effect, 55 serial movement, 91–92, 99, 102, 103, 104, 112, 140n9, 184, 212, 215 series, 92, 99–104 series of propositions, 24, 51, 52–53, 56, 57, 62, 91, 107, 145–146, 155, 172, 195, 196 series of states of affairs, 21, 52, 55–56, 57, 60, 62, 67, 88, 91, 102, 111, 112, 143, 145–146, 148, 159, 161, 173, 207, 209, 217 series of words, 56, 64, 65, 91, 101, 104–105, 107, 108, 126–127, 147, 185, 187, 210, 213 series of worlds, 56, 64, 65, 89, 91, 99, 101, 107, 114, 126, 127, 147, 181, 185, 187, 195, 210, 212, 213 Sidney, Sir Philip, 10 Sierz, Aleks, 77–84, 87, 93n3, 95n9, 96n13, 191, 204n1, 205n2 significance, 86, 88, 89, 92, 102, 106, 107, 109, 111, 117, 119–120, 120, 125, 127, 137, 139n3, 148, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161, 164, 165, 178, 183, 194–197, 200, 209, 211

235

signification, 51–52, 55, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68–69, 109, 117–118, 128, 160, 213 Simondon, Gilbert, 49, 74n2, 171 singularity, 91, 111, 136, 139n2, 171–175, 180–182, 186, 197, 203 sound, 66–67, 75n17, 85 Spinoza, 12, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38–43, 44n3, 44n8, 44n9, 48, 50, 55, 56, 59, 71, 74n9, 74n10, 75n13, 103, 112, 125, 203 splendor, 197, 207–208 Stoic philosophy, 34, 44n1, 117, 143, 144–145, 146, 159, 161, 169n1, 200, 213 Structuralism, 56, 90 substance, 12, 23, 24, 29, 30–43, 45n11, 47, 49, 49–56, 70–72, 74n5, 74n10, 112, 122, 129, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154, 155, 180, 181, 204 the superadditive, 24, 62, 73 superlative, 32, 40, 103 the supernumerary, 13, 100, 117, 194 the supra-representational, 7, 12, 16, 17, 24, 30, 31, 65, 66, 68–69, 71–72, 132, 143 surface of sense, 23, 90, 91–92, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 123–124, 126, 128, 132, 143, 148, 163, 168–169, 194, 197, 208–209, 214, 215, 216 swarm, 150–154 Szondi, Peter, 82, 84, 85, 86, 96n16 tensor, 173, 179, 212 tertiary arrangement, 55, 59, 64, 66–67, 70, 102, 110, 115, 128 texture (see ontological texture), 12 Thacker, Eugene, 32, 37, 38, 40–41, 48, 103, 150, 176 Toscano, Alberto, 74n2 tragedy, 10, 15, 80 transcendence, 3, 4, 5–7, 9, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 21–23, 25–26, 26n1–26n2, 36, 36–37, 42, 48, 58–59, 61, 63, 65, 71, 73, 74n10, 88–89, 90, 92, 103, 104–106, 108, 112, 113–114, 117, 120–121, 126, 127, 132, 135, 136–138, 148, 151, 153–154, 155, 159, 163, 164, 168–169, 176, 193, 198, 201, 204, 207–209, 211, 212, 215–216

236

Index

transcendental field, 67, 73, 110, 174, 212 transmorphism, 12, 198, 202 transmorphosis, 42, 124, 125, 126, 128, 168–169, 184, 202–203, 214–215 univocity, 18, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 51, 53, 55, 62, 70, 73, 90, 172, 180, 207 Urban, Ken, 77, 79, 80, 93n2, 130, 202–203 verb infinitive, 51–52, 57, 72 the virtual, 20, 43, 90, 103, 105, 110, 112–113, 117, 121, 135, 172, 174, 175, 182, 211, 218

voice, 2–3, 38, 41, 42, 43, 52, 66, 67, 75n17, 81, 84, 107, 108, 114–115, 117, 128, 132, 176, 193, 194, 197, 207 Wade, Laura, 23, 78, 81, 84, 86–87, 104, 106, 122–127, 140n11, 148, 156–161, 175, 183–190, 213–214, 216 Williams, James, 36, 63, 102, 139n3, 147, 171, 174 within and without, 42, 50, 73, 88, 101, 118, 164, 171, 172, 183 Wordsworth, William, 10–11 word-work fit, 11–12, 21, 86, 217 world-making, 8, 9, 21, 43 Zentralwesen, 14, 34 Zourabichvili, Francois, 44n2, 75n16

About the Author

Zornitsa Dimitrova received her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Münster and holds an MA in English Literatures and Literary Theory from the University of Freiburg. Her work on theater has appeared in Deleuze Studies, the New Theatre Quarterly, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies. The present book, Literary Worlds and Deleuze, is her first scholarly monograph.

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