Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
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IN
BAUDRILLARD AND DELEUZE
By
MASTER OF ARTS
In
PHILOSOPHY
In the
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
At the
UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG
SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR J.J. SNYMAN
MAY 2009
DECLARATION
I, Vanessa, Anne-Ccile Freerks, hereby declare that the work contained in this
dissertation is my own original work and that I have not previously submitted it, in its
entirety or in part, at any university for a degree.
ABSTRACT
When
fighting
against
the
dominance
of
instrumental
reason,
aesthetic
consciousness always admitted its allegiance to another state of being, i.e., to the
explosive break with the continual inertia of linear social development. In the
literature written at the turn of the 20th century this was symbolized in the life of
danger that contrasted with the normality of ordinary bourgeois life. This study shows
that Baudrillard no longer believes in another state of being with explosive force. In
Baudrillard's theory of simulation, the crisis of overproduction in capitalism is to be
understood as the total shift of production into reproduction. His position has
consequences for the idea of the catastrophic nature of the present social situation
and
for
the
aesthetic
means
with
which
it
can
finally
be
thought.
Baudrillard calls the catastrophic effect of the threat emanating from simulation an
implosion not an explosion, it results from the fact that under pressure from a merely
simulated reality, every social energy is expended internally in the play of signifiers,
evaporating in some catastrophic process. His aesthetic fascination with events does
not seem to have disappeared completely in the process. For Baudrillard, on
September 11 2001, the terrorists countered simulation with simulation itself. This is
what makes it a true event. What is unthinkable in this event is the use of death in a
staged exchange where a whole culture could be attacked. The attack brings back
death to a world that pretends it is not there. If political economy is the most rigorous
attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political
economy.
Baudrillard encounters an indifference, a void and death at the heart of thought. This
leads to apocalyptic tones. For Baudrillard, one only attains to thought when one
interiorizes the limit and displaces it. Thinking no longer works except by breaking
down and dismantling itself. For Deleuze, on the other hand, to dissent is to affirm
other modes of life. Deleuze constructs an entire philosophy of life conceived as a
philosophy of difference. This enables Deleuze to have an affirmative notion of the
aesthetic impulse: the artwork as an unexpected event that actualizes the virtual. The
virtual is not a general idea, something abstract and empty, but the concept of
difference (and of life) rendered adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the
time of life. Pure, virtual being is real and qualified through the internal process of
differentiation. Being differs with itself. It does not look outside itself for another or a
force of mediation because its difference rises from its very core, from the explosive
internal force that life carries within itself (Deleuze, 1988: 105). Deleuze conceives of
a discrete art with metamorphic force. Deleuze, unlike Baudrillard, manages to pull
back from the capitalist void and construct a desiring machine to manipulate
capitalist simulacra.
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
I am thankful for Professor Ltters motivation and for Professor MacKenzies lan
vital.
Un grand merci Madame Wilreker pour mavoir ouvert les voies de lArt, Dr. S.
Leissner pour mavoir permis de raliser la force de la mise-en-scne franaise, et
Professeur A.E. Snyman pour mavoir montr un chemin dans les labyrinthes
galliques.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1.2.
1.3.
Virtual Ontology
13
1.4.
Preview
20
Introduction
26
2.2.
System of Objects
29
2.3.
Waste
39
2.4.
Conclusion
49
Introduction
51
3.2
Symbolic Exchange
53
3.3.
Death
67
3.4.
Symbolic Violence
77
3.5
Conclusion
87
Introduction
89
4.2.
91
4.3.
110
4.4
Capitalist Cynicism
121
4.5.
Conclusion
129
Introduction
132
5.2.
Revolution of Desire
135
5.3.
Imperceptible Aesthetics
143
5.4.
Francis Bacon
157
5.5.
Conclusion
167
Introduction
170
6.2.
173
6.3.
187
6.4.
189
6.5.
Conclusion
199
Bibliography
201
-1-
Chapter One
Force of Destruction and Force of Desire
1.1. Introduction
Either one sees the art work as always already constituted, determined by the
scene of the existing (capitalist) structure. Or one is more optimistic: the art
work as an event that is truly unexpected. This need not involve a
transcendent aesthetic. Deleuze reconfigurates art as an event that is
immanent to this world, as not arriving from some transcendent plane and not
transporting us there, but as emerging from the realm of the virtual. This is the
-2true sense of freedom, an embrace of the virtual that is not limited to the
possibilities that are contained within our present point of view. Perception
must therefore be freed from its location or actualised scene. The virtual is life
in all its imperceptibity. This view of arts metamorphic power is much stronger
than Baudrillards anti-productive void or terrorism.
Although Deleuze considers this possible, he also regards the mask as a means of expression that is
indispensable to every new force: A force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the feature of
the preceding forces with which it struggles (Deleuze, 1983a: 5).
-4wisdom to speak the truth about nature except through an act of alliance with
such a norm. Poetic wisdom must adopt the values of modern science in
order to state any objective verities. Truth is the best ornament because it has
no ornaments so science is the best poetry because it has the least poetry.
The irony is that poetry must draw its rules of metaphor from a genre that
rules out metaphor. Science becomes the muse of poetry. Jarry does not
borrow scientific concepts so much as scientific conceits, doing so, in order to
imagine a counterdynamic (Jarry, 1965: 253).
-5transect our perceived reality at many points across many scales. Jarry
suggests, through pataphysics, that reality does not exist, reality is never as it
is but always as if it is. Reality is quasi, pseudo: it is more virtual than actual; it
is real only to the degree to which it can seem to be real and only for so long
as it can be made to stay real. Science for such a reality has increasingly
become a philosophy of as if, wilfully mistaking possibilities for veritabilities
(Vaihinger, 1966: xvii).
-6Proclaiming that art is null was not an aesthetic judgment on his part, but an
anthropological problem. It was a polemic gesture towards culture as a whole,
which now is simultaneously nothing and everything.
Baudrillards provocative and iconoclastic theories are very much in the antifoundationalist line of development. In this study, I will be confronting
Baudrillards theories in order to demonstrate a particularly extreme version of
the anti judgmental imperative: a version which might be called post aesthetic.
There is an apocalyptic cast to Baudrillards thought:
Baudrillard believed that art had exhausted itself and he became associated
-7with the end of art theory. 2 Baudrillard claims that every possible artistic form
and function has been exhausted. Furthermore, against Benjamin and
Adorno, Baudrillard claims that art has lost its critical and negative function.
Art has entered all spheres of existence. With the realization of art in everyday
life, art itself as a separate and transcendent phenomenon has disappeared.
Baudrillard calls this situation transaesthetics which he relates to similar
phenomena of transpolitics, transsexuality, and transeconomics, in which
everything becomes political, sexual, and economic, so that these domains,
like art, lose their specificity, their boundaries, their distinctness. In this
confused state, there can be no more criteria of value, of judgement, of taste,
and the function of the normative thus collapses into indifference and inertia.
Our society has given rise to a general aestheticization. In contemporary
media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a
spectacle, a transaesthetic object, thereby revealing a further dimension of
the postmodern (Sim, 2000: 87).
In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981), Baudrillard takes
the painting as a signed object (signature) and as a gestural object, the
product of artistic gestures or practices. He sees art as exemplary of how
objects in the consumer society are organized as a system of signs. Art is
subject to the same rules and system of signification as other commodities
and follows as well the codes of fashion, determination of value by the market
and commodification, thus subverting its critical vocation. Modern art is an art
of collusion vis-a-vis the contemporary world. It plays with it and is included in
2
The lament that art has come to an end because its choices have been rendered arbitrary dates back
to Hegel, who claimed in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art that art had now become a free
instrument, and that nothing stands in and for it-self above this relativity any longer (Hegel, 1975: 605).
Hegels aesthetic repealed modernity before it had even begun, thus simultaneously ensuring that the
end would have to be repeatedly invoked (Geulen, 2006: 4). Baudrillard believes he can squeeze
dialectical surplus value from the end: Perhaps a product of pure simulation might manage to become a
seduction, a confrontation with the other, an illusion (Geulen, 2006: 4). What Baudrillard calls
simulation, Hegel termed dramatization. Among the most subtle post aesthetic art theories are those
that seek to shake off the Hegelian spectre by emphasising the formlessness of the end, for instance by
radically temporalising the end. The dictum Hegel arrogantly decreed can be played off against the
unending end presumably operative in works of art. In another vein, the end of art is interpreted
antiaesthetically as interruption or rupture (Bohrer, 1981: 86). Perhaps the rediscovery of the sublime
following Lyotard in the 1980s can be understood as the effort to locate an antiaesthetic moment deep
within the aesthetic tradition. With the limit category of the sublime, the end reveals itself as a
specifically antiaesthetic counterlogic of art (Lyotard, 1984). In the context of such strategies, the end of
art tends to be called a departure (Bohrer, 1996).
-8the game. It can parody this world, illustrate it, simulate it, alter it; it never
disturbs the order, which is also its own (Baudrillard, 1981: 110).
Contemporary art had an ambiguous status, halfway between terrorism and
de facto cultural integration. Arts collusion was affecting society at large and
there was no more reason to consider art apart from the rest. Obstacles and
oppositions are used by the system in order to reinvigorate itself.
Baudrillard is deliberately provocative. For him there are only signs without
referents. He presents us with a realm where reality is nothing other than its
own simulation. This study will engage in the concepts of simulation and
simulacra and hyperreality, but the major reason for tackling Baudrillard is to
discover where his post aesthetics takes criticism. Simulation takes us beyond
foundations. Baudrillard cuts us free from the world of epistemological
commitments and he delivers us into a value-free realm beyond judgement:
we leave history to enter simulation this is by no means a despairing
hypothesis, unless we regard simulation as a higher form of alienation which
I certainly do not. It is precisely in history that we are alienated and if we leave
history we also leave alienation (Baudrillard, 1986: 23).
Baudrillard is not only post aesthetic but also post Marxist. According to
Marxist theory, alienation is a problem to be worked on and overcome in
history. The possibility of social change in Marxist terms is being denied in
Baudrillard with history inexorably accelerating towards its end: everything
happens as if we were continuing to manufacture history, whereas in
accumulating signs of the social, signs of the political, signs of progress and
change, we only contribute to the end of history (Baudrillard, 1986: 21).
For Baudrillard, the Enlightenment has both failed and collapsed and been
realised, leaving us to wonder what to do next, how can critical thought
continue to operate in the wake of this fully realised utopia? The golden age
of alienation is over and Western cultures enter a new configuration with the
arrival of simulation processes. Baudrillard identified the dissolution of
relations between subject and object, true and fake in the triumph of
consumer capitalism. In consumer capitalism, political and cultural events are
-9modified so fundamentally that in effect they no longer exist apart from their
mode of representation. Baudrillard sees reality as entirely impregnated by an
aesthetic that has become inseparable from its own image. The fusion of the
real and the imaginary means there is no longer a play of representation
based on clearly demarcated separations: the real swallows its alienated
double and paradoxically becomes at the same time transparent to itself. In
this fusion, the aesthetic dimension enters into reality even into what he calls
the new aesthetic game of reality (Baudrillard, 1976: 74).
Baudrillard connects the poetic and the utopian vision of culture. For the poet,
the important thing is the immediate realisation of utopia: Poetry and the
utopian revolt have this radical presentness in common the actualisation of
desire no longer relegated to a future liberation but demanded here
immediately (Baudrillard, 1975: 165). Time in this conception (symbolic) is
quite different. It is not linear or historical. Utopia in this conception is not to be
regarded as something in the future to be waited for. In Marxist theory, the
actual moment of revolt is only an aspect of revolution. For Baudrillard, every
society is already a complete totality, always already present. Here there is no
room for a theory of alienated essence which will be recovered at some future
point. For each person is completely present at each moment (Gane, 1991a:
114).
Such is the fatality of every system devoted through its own logic to
total perfection and thus total defectiveness, to absolute infallibility and
thus incorrigible extinction: all bound energies aim for their own
demise. This is why the only strategy is catastrophic and not in the
least dialectical. Things have to be pushed to the limit, where
everything is naturally inverted and collapses. At the peak of value,
ambivalence intensifies; and at the height of their coherence, the
redoubled signs of the code are haunted by the abyss of reversal. The
play of simulation must therefore be taken further than the system
permits (Baudrillard, 1993a: 4).
Baudrillards work raises the whole problem of how to judge, how to speak
critically in the absence of outside criteria. How is it possible to criticise
capitalisms mise-en-abme? Capitalism is a self-legitimising, self-authorising
system, a system that sets the horizons for its own evaluation. For Baudrillard,
there is no point in opposing capitalism, because there is no outside to
capitalism. Baudrillard does not directly oppose the capitalist system he
analyses because it is closed, has no other. The very problem this study will
be looking at in Baudrillards work is how to think an other to the capitalist
system that has no other, in which otherness is its very object. It is not a
matter of simply refuting or proposing alternatives to capitalism, but thinking
what is excluded to allow this all inclusiveness, that other excluded to ensure
it has no other. In Baudrillard, there is a new notion of criticism, one that
works not by evidence, enunciation but by annunciation and prescription.
Baudrillards post-structuralism is driven by doubling: thought continues even
in the absence of any external standards of judgement outside the world and
its systems (Butler, 1999: 165).
It is this real excluded by any attempt to speak of it that is the limit to every
system it is the Platonic paradox that Baudrillard means by the real. The
work of Baudrillard endlessly reproduces the paradox first stated in Platos
Cratylus. For Plato, the point was that when two things resemble each other
too closely they no longer resemble each other anymore. There is no longer a
relationship of original to copy but two separate originals. The copy only
resembles the original in so far as it is different from it. The relationship of
resemblance is paradoxical, therefore in that it cannot be pushed too far
without turning into its opposite: a bad imitation is a good imitation and a too
good imitation is a bad imitation. There is a limit to the technical perfectibility
of music, a point beyond which it cannot go except at the risk of no longer
reproducing music. Beyond this point, technology no longer resembles its
music, but only itself. It would no longer resemble its music, but would be only
a simulacrum of it (Butler, 1997: 51).
For Baudrillard, the true key to this world is this fundamental illusionality. For
him the world can resemble itself, can realise itself only because of an
otherworldy explanation: the very difference between the world and itself, the
real and its copy. It is this point already two at which absolute
resemblance and absolute difference come together (death, reversibility,
terrorism) that Baudrillard means by the real. For Baudrillard, it is the
unrepresentable, the unthinkable that is the most real thing in the world. It is
the vital aesthetic illusion which saves us from the disillusionment of the world
(Butler, 1997: 62).
Deleuze agrees with this diagnosis, but not with the cure. Deleuze constructs
an ontology that is concerned with becoming and experimentation. Deleuze
attempts to think our own subjectivity differently. Deleuzes ontology is
productive, it is not a final answer. It is the opposite. An ontology of difference
is a challenge to recognize that what is presented to us is only the beginning
of what there is. We are never finished with living, there is always more. The
alternatives of contentment (I have arrived) and hopelessness (there is
nowhere to go) are two sides of the same misguided thought: that what is
presented to us is what there is.
Like Baudrillard, Deleuze replaces the practical and rational view of reality
that we derive from everyday experience, with a philosophical speculative
account of reality. A central element of this new account is that the human
being is not presented as a conscious centre of action and belief. In the
philosophical tradition, the concept of the subject grants precisely such a
privileged role to the human being and to self-conscious thought. Deleuzes
philosophy, like Baudrillards, is therefore a critique of the subject. Yet the
Deleuzean critique is not a straight forward attack or rejection. His philosophy
constructs different and quite sophisticated arguments to show that what the
philosophy of the subject takes as an origin or as a basic premise (selfconsciousness, individual freedom) is in fact derived from or produced within
a larger process bearing no resemblance to subjective experience. In
Deleuzes account of reality, the human being occupies a limited place as a
process unfolding amidst other processes to which it is subordinated and with
which it also interacts.
Deleuze constructs a
metaphysics and a semiotics in his early work and then applies these
metaphysical and semiotic principles within the sphere of a general and
formal social theory. The application of semiotics to a general theory of the
mind, politics and culture is the joint project of Deleuze and his collaborator,
the psychiatrist and political activist Flix Guattari, in the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus, 1977 and A Thousand Plateaus,
1987). 3
The initial metaphysical intuition of Deleuze is very simple: the vital forces that
can be activated in thought are controlled by an ordering and filtering system
which imposes on reality a determinate logical structure. We can go beyond
this logical structure if we produce thoughts that are sufficiently abstract to
think reality outside of representation. Deleuzes general account of what it is
to be, or ontology, therefore leads to a perspective on human life that is in
conflict with conscious experience. However, Deleuze also seeks to replace
this conscious subject with another subject, defined by its passage through
time, its creative potential rather than its conscious experience (Due, 1999: 9).
The connections between Deleuze's separate writings and his collaborations with Guattari are very
complex and not always clear or consistent; it would be impossible to draw them out in any detail here.
If anything, it is the combination of Deleuze's foundational work in the history of philosophy with
Guattari's psychiatric and political involvements that gives their work together its particular intensity and
interest. I draw on both Deleuze and Guattari, whether separately or together.
Signs are not uniquely human. All life is a plane of interacting signs. We are
confronted by a world of signs and codes: systems and series of biology,
genetics, history, politics, art and fantasy. And each series of signs creates its
own lines of difference: genetic differences, chemical differences and so on.
And all these specific modes of difference are made possible by pure and
positive difference: a differential power that for Deleuze is life itself. There is
not a simple and undifferentiated life that we then differentiate through signs,
representations or languages. The signs of a culture are the effects of more
profound differences. We should try to grasp how signs and differences
proliferate. Art has a distinct power opposed to common sense, which works
with already given signs and conventions it is the creation of new signs,
which will allow us to think the emergence of difference. Art presents singular
differences: the very being of colour, sound, tone or sensibility. Art affirms all
those differences that allow meanings to appear.
Art presents us with the power of presentation as such. It might seem that
such instances give us the exhaustion or end of art, where art can no longer
do anything but refer to itself. But Deleuze argues that the form of selfreference needs to be understood in terms of its potential, or its justification.
If there can be a play within a play or a character remembering or an object
reflected this is because there can only be the original the first play or the
initial character because life as such is the power to create, to be more than
itself. Art within art or images within images just show what has always
marked art: the power of opening the virtual from the actual. Art brings the
virtuality of life to presence. Life is not something that is fully given. Life is a
potential for multiple creations. Practical relations to the world mostly reduce
infinite becomings to a closed set of functions; we map an ordered world of
relations from a stable but repeatable view point. Art, however, repeats the
events of this actualised world in order to release the further power that was
not brought to actuality (Colebrook, 2006, 84).
- 16 -
Deleuzes project of immanence abandons the idea that one point of being
could provide a point of judgement or foundation for being as a whole. This
means that any connection of beings would be serial not ordered or
sequential. A series is necessarily multiple and divergent. A series never
converges into some fixed harmonious unity. A series expands perception
beyond the human viewer into the universe in general. A linear evolution
subordinates becoming to some final end; one looks back and sees all the
changes leading up to ones own development. From the point of view of the
present, the past is only presented as a sequence of ordered conditions or
causes. But Deleuze sees the whole universe as perceptive: responses,
creations and mutations cannot be explained in terms of the present or in
terms of the human point of view.
The past is not some process that culminates in the present human being. It is
a virtual whole of possibilities that can be retrieved and activated. To affirm life
means affirming all those changes that go beyond intention, recognition and
meaning. Art is an attempt to think in an untimely manner. This is the true
sense of freedom, to embrace the virtual that is not limited to the possibilities
that are contained within our present point of view. The virtual is Deleuzes
Antonin Artaud, for example, talks of bringing cinema into contact with the
innermost reality of the brain, which fragments the thinking subject and
allows thought to think itself (Deleuze, 1989: 167). This form of cinema might
be considered as exploring the virtual possibilities of thought and perception.
Such cinema achieves self-movement or automatic movement (ibid). It
gives rise to the conviction that it can act directly on the nervous and cerebral
system, producing a shock to thought, a new flow of thought. Deleuzes
privileging of such non-narrative modern cinema is not reducible to a French
avant garde fantasy for the shock of the new, the resistant and difficult. It is
There are no true or false presentations, there are just simulations. Any move
of thought or social relation is desirable so long as it deterritorialises, leaves
known territory old or new conventions, because they have become just
that: coagulations of thought and relations behind. Capitalism creates
relations between workers that are temporary and the sites of production
separate workers from their environment. Everything becomes mobile:
images, consumer products and people are cut off from their conditions of
production
and
circulate
globally.
Deleuze
and
Guattari
call
this
- 19 and inactive and assembling them into a constructive machine that is capable
of producing something. Production does not repeat predetermined
processes; the machine is singular and its product is entirely new. This
product can then react back upon and affect its conditions of production,
becoming a component of further machines. The politics of desire acts directly
on the unconscious but can only do so by acting directly on its own social
context at the same time. Theory is an attempt to think otherwise, to explore
new relations, new subjectivities. Instead of tearing away from truth to show
that ultimately there is no essence apart from her veils, one adopts the signs
of truth in order to fabricate something else, even if this is a further patchwork
of veils and signs. Deleuze and Guattari move away from the mere suspicion
of truth and pose the problem of philosophy through the power of relation and
desire.
Desire is not primarily sexual and they reject the idea that it naturally tends
toward the formation of a fixed or centred subjectivity. Desire produces real
relations, connections, investments within and between bodies. In this sense,
Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 30) say desire produces reality. Desire is not
constituted by the ever-renewed and impossible attempt to regain a lost object
of satisfaction. The point is to deny that unsatisfied desire is the essence of
desire. Deleuze and Guattaris theory of desire is constructivist.
- 20 -
1.4. Preview
Baudrillards
notion
of
challenge
has
metaphysical
and
In Chapter Four I will move on to Deleuzes concept of life. There are three
qualities that characterize life in Deleuzian thought: positivity, productivity, and
incorporeality. Productivity is the creative aspect of life. Incorporeality means
that life must be thought temporally if it is to make any sense; and here
Deleuze's debt to Bergson is profound. Chapter Four will navigate through
Deleuze's early work to discern a powerful, progressive evolution: Bergson,
Nietzsche, Spinoza. These philosophers form a foundation for Deleuze's
thought. Deleuze's work, however, does not stop with a revalorization of this
alternative tradition: He selects what is living and transforms it, making it
adequate to his concerns. In this way, he both makes the history of
philosophy his own and makes it new.
- 22 differentiates in its own way, the indeterminate element of life. And in its own
way, resolves the problem of living. Life obeys a logic of internal difference.
There is no identity to life nor is there life in general, there are only
differentiated ways of living (and ways of thinking that envelop ways of living)
Life exists only in being differentiated, in its internal difference, or that which
affirms itself only in differing from itself.
Chapter Four will also show that Deleuze's politics are based on his concept
of life as internal difference. The struggle to promote life to promote positive
difference, production of the real, and a fluid incorporeality of events is
pursued against a background which is that of life itself. What Deleuze values
is life, its unfolding and its various concrete realizations. But in valuing life, the
question arises of why there would ever be a politics, and political struggle, in
the first place? If everything is already positive, then what is there to revolt
against?
Deleuze values life, yet he does not value everything that is actual. It is not
the same to affirm life in its temporality and to affirm everything that occurs
within this temporality. What is at issue, if the need for a politics is to become
manifest, is how it is that negativity is introduced into life. How is it that life can
admit of negativity, death, or repression, if it is pure positivity and productivity
in its principle? If negativity comes later, as Deleuze's anti-dialectical position
insists, then how does it come? In the book on Nietzsche negativity arises in
the question of how active forces can become reactive, when active forces
are the only ones that act. In Anti-Oedipus, written with Guattari, it appears as
the question of how desire can desire its own repression.
Desire, or life, exists only within the context of a determinate social situation.
In that social situation, there are forces that work against life, but not by
repressing it from the outside. The problem of repression or negativity is not
that it comes to bear upon life from something which is not life, but that it is a
possibility internal to life itself as it unfolds under determinate social
conditions.
- 23 Life, although naturally fluid, can produce that which blocks production; it
produces anti-production. All other negativity, repression, and death follows
from this.
Deleuze and Guattari have given many names to the types of interventions
that attempt to release life. The most well known of these is the line of escape
or flight. In conceiving the line of escape, what are commonly called political
structures must be understood not in the spatial metaphor of structure but in
the temporal metaphor of coding or axiomatizing. Flows of life are coded, they
are constrained into precise networks which act like channels to divert them
along specific routes and in specific directions. Kinship rituals in primitive
societies are ways of coding sexual production (production of pleasures as
well as of children). And overcoding, a state process, is a way of making the
various codes in different sectors of a given society resonate together.
Finally, in capitalist societies, flows which are no longer subject to traditional
forms of coding are axiomatized, administered by broad constraints that
regulate whole areas of experience rather than specific flows. The regulations,
formal and informal, of investment banking provide an example of axiomatized
flows of money.
Lines of flight are flows that break with both the axioms and the codes of a
given society in order to create new forms of life that are subversive to the
repressions of that society. They do not flow along regulated pathways, but
are instead transversal to them, cutting across them and using elements
from them in the process of producing something new, different, and most
important, alive. It would be a mistake to say that the productions of a line of
- 24 flight are prohibited by the society it arises from; its productions have probably
never been considered for prohibition by that society. Instead, a line of flight
subverts life's attachment to the negativity of repressive social constraints. A
line of flight is not an escape from society. It is an escape from the negativity
of determinate social conditions within a society. For Deleuze, life is the core
of reality; the negativity that must be escaped is derivative.
In Chapter Five I will move specifically to arts line of flight. For Deleuze it is
the artist who sees the limit of the liveable (exhausts the lived). The artist
lives what was enveloped within lived experience, yet nevertheless was not
lived through (the virtual). Art expresses something other than itself: life in all
its imperceptibility. In art, sight is potentialized, raised to a second power. In
its ordinary employment sight is separated from what it can do. Sight regains
its power when it sees the invisible or imperceptible, or when what cannot be
seen is perceived: the invisible enveloped in what is seen not as a hidden
world beyond appearance but animating sight itself from within appearance,
or what one sees. I will show that for Deleuze, Francis Bacon, as a painter of
forces or sensations, shows an experience of the body that leads one beyond
the phenomenological lived body to the chaotic body without organs. This
means deforming organised forms of conventional representation. Bacon
paints the body, the figure of sensation as opposed to the figurative body of
conventional representation.
The body with organs is a virtual state of being, an unorganised level of life.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the image of the organism is really opposed
to desire. Desire must be understood to embody the power of metamorphosis
or differential reproduction, which is the condition of creativity in culture as
well as in nature. Social production stabilises, identifies and codes the flow of
pure becoming and differentiation. I show the various historical stages of
Deleuze and Guattaris political theory of desire and how each stage has its
own dominant form of synthesis. The first synthesis is that of connection
(primitive society). Then there is the second synthesis of disjunction (State).
Then there is the third synthesis of conjunction (Capitalism).
In the concluding synthesizing chapter I shall emphasize that for both Deleuze
and Baudrillard resistance is not opposition; it constantly accompanies power.
For Baudrillard it is the spiral of intensification, the raising of the power that
counts. The massive logic of the capitalist system can only be resisted by
redoubling capitalism back against itself in a movement of hyperconformist
simulation. Baudrillards critique rests upon an allegorical mode of reading
and writing. Allegory, as defined by Walter Benjamin, is appropriated
imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them' (Owens,
1980a: 69). Benjamin saw the critical yield of the allegorical way of seeing.
The task of criticism is not to conjure up the appearance of the world as it
really was, restoring a false totality to it, but to collaborate with the corrosive
effects of the passage of time. Deleuze has a more affirmative notion of the
aesthetic impulse. Art must be thought as the expression of possible worlds.
Deleuze can always hear a song to life in the artists he admires, such as
Franz Kafka, however violent or intense their work. With Deleuze there is no
resigned and pessimistic cult of death. It is to this cult of death in Baudrillard
that I now turn.
- 26 -
CHAPTER 2
Baudrillard: Death of the Social
2.1. Introduction
Baudrillard totalizes the social. 4 The present, he claims, serves as testimony
to a perfect socialization; the social expanded to infinity. What emerges most
powerfully from this is Baudrillards sense of the pathology of society. 5 At the
very moment of totalization, the social attempts to extend the sphere of social
relations to residual groups on the margins of society in order to normalize
and institutionalize society's relations with what lies outside its boundaries
(the so-called remainder). After the inclusion of that which has previously
remained at the margins of the social, the social totality (which survives and
grows only through its capacity to generate and administer to marginal
elements) reverts back on itself and designates itself as the (sole) remainder.
Baudrillard's notion of the social cannot be precisely defined, although the general way in which he
employs the term is fairly clear. For reasons essentially having to do with economy of style, he
nominalizes the adjectival form of the word as a convenient gloss for an entire range of key terms in the
social scientific lexicon, e.g. -social structure, social relation, social class, social institution, social
exchange, social interaction, social theory, etc., which taken together with related concepts comprise
the master discourse on society.
5
Durkheim also emphasizes the pathological features of industrial society and vividly discusses the
negative effects of the high-velocity circulation of bodies, ideas and commodities. Mike Gane
(1991a:199-203) usefully compares the two thinkers but concludes (1991a:201-2) that a major
difference ultimately divides them: Durkheim locates himself (not without some hesitations) in the
flawed, unfulfilled, or rather incomplete project of the culture of organic societies, in the project for a
sociology as a science of society. Baudrillard is based in primitive symbolic exchange, and develops a
form of sociology which is best described as transtheoretical, a form of resistance from the irrational and
a theoretical fatwa against the modern and postmodern system.
Baudrillard's style presents the first and most difficult obstacle for anyone more accustomed to the
linguistic conventions of Anglo- American social theory. Rarely does he take the time to define his
terms-the social, mass, disappearance, etc. with any degree of precision or construct detailed
arguments in support of his position. His mode of expression is intentionally elliptical, declarative,
replete with poetic allusions, and marked by abrupt transitions. As Mark Poster (1988: 7) has noted,
Baudrillard has a tendency to simply proclaim his insights and make light of apparently contradictory
conclusions which can be drawn from his remarks. Baudrillard does this intentionally, with full
awareness of what he is doing.
7
Mass is another of Baudrillard's terms which is impossible to define precisely. He does claim,
although not always consistently, that he is not referring to the conventional meaning of the term in
critical social theory, viz., the working classes. Similar to his use of the social, mass often functions as
a gloss, and occasionally as a punning device, for a number of related concepts within the social
sciences-mass culture, mass society, etc. The primary connotation of the term, however, appears to be
physical, as when Baudrillard speaks elliptically of the black hole of the mass, which absorbs all the
energy of the social. The images Baudrillard often wishes to convey with the term are those of
randomness, implosiveness, fragmentation, and entropy.
- 28 which all attempts to control the decay only result in intensifying it until social
life finally exhausts itself, collapsing from its own weight and inertia.
The above stated view of present day society causes problems for a theory
about such a society. For Baudrillard, simulation closes off forever the
possibility of an ideological critique of social theory, precisely because such a
critique cannot itself break free from the assumption of the reality principle of
the social. Baudrillard sees distinct types of simulation. In the first type, the
reality principle, which makes possible a distinction between a state of affairs
notwithstanding its absence and its representation, remains intact. In the
second type, the reality principle itself disappears; simulation winds up
mistaking reality with its reproduction. Better, rather than simple reproduction
(or even reduplication), what is involved in later stages of simulation is the
perfect substitution of signs of the real for the real itself the real, in other
words, simulation is elevated to the status of a copy without an original. For
Baudrillard, it is the third phase, which inaugurates the space of simulation
proper, while the fourth marks its perfection. In the third phase, the image
masks the absence of a basic reality, whilst the fourth phase bears no relation
to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Simulation proposes the system on the basis of a certain other but simulation
in the end always seeks to master this other. This chapter will show how
Baudrillards simulated and totalised social puts forward an other but what is
realised is that this other only exists because of the social, only leads to a
growth in the system. This is the ability of the social to prove itself via the
remainder. The social exists to take care of the useless consumption of
remainders so that individuals can be assigned to the useful management of
their lives. In Baudrillards total system, utility is the dominant principle but it
exists only as simulation. According to Baudrillard, the economic is born when
what the object 'is', is assumed to reside within it, it has an essence; when the
object attains its value in accordance with an abstract code that enables its
relation to other objects to be ascertained through a logic of equivalence
which in turn obtains its rationale from the ideology of utility and use value;
and when the individual emerges as a 'subject' whose relation to the world of
- 29 objects is articulated primarily through the ideology of need. From this critical
viewpoint, the notion of the 'individual' emerged.
This chapter will proceed as follows: I will first outline the simulated system of
equivalences (sign value, exchange value and use value) and then show how
the system safeguards itself by developing many means of waste and
controlled squandering. I will make reference to Baudrillards use of Alfred
Jarrys farcical plays. This is not meant as comic intermezzo or relief. Rather,
Baudrillards parody intensifies his apocalyptic vision of the totalized system of
objects.
Lefebvres Marxist approach wanted to believe in the true value and meaning
of objects and the possibility of unalienated needs and desires with regard to
them. In capitalism, exchange value functions to mystify use value, because
the labor process disappears from view leaving a pure object of consumption
determined solely by a price. For Marx labour is a necessary condition,
independent of all forms of society; it is an external nature-imposed necessity.
Without which there can be no material exchanges between man and nature
and therefore no life. The problem for Marx was that capitalism obscured the
objective value of labour, so that workers earned less than their labour was
objectively worth and were thus exploited. Marxism convinces men that they
- 30 are alienated by the sale of their labour. In the Marxian schema, use-value
the glorious autonomy of mans simple relation to his work and his products
is the nemesis of abstract exchange and the promise of a future resurgence
beyond the fetishism of money and the market. Marxists, like Lefebvre, tried
to locate and rediscover a natural relation to use value undistorted by
capitalist exchange value. Lefebvres critique leaves the assumptions of use
value and the ideology of needs intact (and in fact more firmly reconstitutes
them) (Poster, 1979: 280).
Roland Barthes (with whom Baudrillard would later collaborate and teach)
wanted to break with Lefebvres Marxist approach. Barthess Mythologies
showed how relationships with objects are always mediated by the sign.
Objects are not to be seen in terms of use and function but in terms of
communication. Objects form a certain language within which such values as
use and function are merely rhetorical. There is not some underlying
denotation to the object, but only an endless succession of connotations
(Barthes, 1972: 116).
The fundamental paradox of the sign on which the system of objects is based,
is that if the comparison opened up by the sign (the fact that every object can
be compared to another, that our desire is given to us by way of another)
means that everything can be consumed, that nothing is outside the system of
consumption, it also means that nothing can be consumed, that everything is
outside the system of consumption, in so far as we actually never consume
- 32 anything as such but only insofar as it resembles the desire for another. 8 The
fact that everything can be compared in terms of the sign means that there is
nothing outside consumption, it also means that nothing is actually consumed
because it is only consumed as something else. The fundamental limit of
consumption is that in the very act of consumption something goes missing;
the very thing i.e. the sign that allows and forces us to consume also means
that we cannot, that there is nothing to consume. We only consume the myth
of consumption. Baudrillard emphasizes much more than Barthes the inherent
abstraction of the system of objects. Yet at the same time Baudrillard also
wants to speak like Lefebvre against a system of objects, to show in the end
why there is no such thing as a system of objects, why any description of the
system of objects cannot be divorced from a critique of that systems practical
ideology (Baudrillard, 1998: 316).
With Lefebvre, Baudrillard wants to show what is excluded from this system of
objects, what the limit is to its organization through signs. The system of
objects is the most complete expression of function; function is only possible
in the form of the sign. The System of Objects shows that function and use
are no longer real but only effects of the sign, only rhetorical values within the
system of objects (and that they were perhaps like this from the beginning).
Nature becomes naturality and function becomes functionality. Functionality is
the lynchpin of the system: Every object claims to be functional like every
regime claims to be democratic (Baudrillard, 1996: 89).
Baudrillard does not simply catalogue objects, he seeks the process whereby
we live objects and how they come to respond to needs which are other than
functional. The object expresses a function better than ever, but it is a function
8
In America Baudrillard will conjure the figure of the subject who is at once full and empty, consumes
everything and nothing.The anorexic prefigures this culture in a rather poetic fashion by trying to keep it
at bay. He refuses lack. He says I lack nothing; therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person it is
the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says I lack everything so I will eat anything at all. The
anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight staves off fullness by excess. Both are
homeopathic final solutions by extermination (Baudrillard, 1988: 39). I will show in Chapter Four that
Deleuze and Guattari attack the notion that desire begins from lack. Desire: who, except priests would
want to call it lack? Nietzsche called it the Will to Power (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:91). Deleuzes
theory of desire is constructivist. Desire is seen as a machinery of forces, flows and breaks of energy.
Deleuze for instance reads Kafkas The Hunger-Artist as variation, experimentation.
The system of objects both expresses and does away with function, use-value
and need and this constitutes the problem of simulation. Simulation is not
mere abstraction or derealisation of the object, or its passing from material
presence to sign. For Baudrillard, the term simulation describes an essential
dynamic element of modern mass cultures. Abstractly, it refers to the
reproduction (model, copy, map) of a state of affairs which simultaneously
masks the absence of the state of affairs it claims to represent. A simulation
makes a claim to be something it is not, distinguishing it from simple feigning
or dissimulation, which by contrast claims not to be something it in fact is. To
dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to
have what one hasn't (Baudrillard, 1988: 167).
The aim of simulation is not to do away with reality, but on the contrary to
realise it, to make it hyperreal. Simulation in this sense is not a form of
illusion, but opposed to illusion, a way of getting rid of the fundamental
illusionary character of the world. In an interview, Baudrillard says If you start
from the idea that the world is a total illusion, then life, thought becomes
absolutely unbearable. So you have to make every effort to materialise the
world, realise it, in order to escape from this total illusion. And this realising of
the world is precisely what simulation is the exorcism of the terror of illusion
by the most sophisticated means of the realisation of the world (Gane, 1993:
184).
The real is possible only because of the system, only leads to a further
extension of the system. Simulation is a system of differences where we
If an outside of simulation is no longer possible, then the question of the real becomes like the
question of God or the question of truth: not provable, but also not to be disproven, or not representable,
therefore in desperate need to be simulated to conceal the truth that there is none. Baudrillards
simulation, may be a version of the ideology of the end of all ideology. Baudrillards theory of simulation
is to be taken as a strategic point of articulation of cynicism, an enlightened false consciousness, which
Peter Sloterdijk has analyzed as a dominant mindset in the post- sixties era (Sloterdijk, 1987).
10
Disneyland is an example of pure baroque logic (Baudrillard, 1989: 101). The baroque fascination for
the ruin, the construction of reality, the incompleteness of the world, the artifice, the artificial has much in
common with the endlessly constructed and simulated, in Baudrillards terminology, the character of the
social in hyperreality. Many configurations of the postmodern world were present in the Baroque culture
of the seventeenth century. Here was a culture which had been thrust into a global arena by European
imperialism, which had a strong sense of the fragmented and constructed nature of the social, which
developed an articulate notion of the anxiety and subjectivity of the self, and which practised parody and
irony as rhetorical styles. The luxurious sensuality of Baroque public culture has been seen as a mixture
of high, low and kitsch culture, which was designed to trap the masses in a simulated culture (Turner,
2000: 93).
- 35 up to the other, but it is an other that is only possible because of the system.
We do not have the system as such, but the world in its very indifference and
otherness can only be explained because of it. With Disneyland, a place of
childhood is marked off to show that the rest of America is by contrast
grownup. The system puts forward its other as real (Disneyland) only in order
to exclude the real: the fact that all of America is childlike. The real strategy of
the system in putting forward its other is ultimately to get rid of this other.
From now on this other to the system can be thought of in its terms, only
proves it all the more:
There have always been Churches to hide the death of God, or to hide
that God was everywhere which is the same thing. There will always
be animal and Indian reservations to conceal that they are dead, and
that we are all Indians. There will always be factories to conceal that
work is dead, that production is dead, or that it is everywhere and
nowhere (Baudrillard, 1976: 36).
- 36 them as signifieds in and through the sign system. This seemingly innocent
split, creating the mirage of the referent, plays a vital function for semiotics;
in fact, it becomes the constitutive condition for any semiotic discourse
(Baudrillard, 1981: 187).
Economic and political systems are falling even deeper into a binary pattern,
thus making possible an illusion of bipolar oppositions and insuring a stability
and durability that monopolies or single political parties would not possess
standing by themselves alone. This dual logic is characteristic of the
fundamental code that regulates our society; it allows for distinction,
opposition, and exclusion, and determines the processes of simulation that
dominate our culture (Racevkis, 1979: 33).
The intrusion of the binary schema, the 0/1, the yes/no, question/response,
begins, effectively and dramatically, to render, immediately, every discourse
inarticulate. It crushes the world of meaningful dialogue: a discourse based on
the play of real and appearance is abolished. From now on the media
determine 'the very style of montage, of dcoupage, of interpellation,
solicitation, summation' (Baudrillard, 1976: 123). As Marshall McLuhan alone
has pointed out, says Baudrillard, this new age is not visual but tactile;
The mass media create universal suffrage. Here social exchange is reduced
to its most essential function: to obtain an answer. But the context so created
is also binary. This appears to establish a fundamental complicity between the
code and the tendency to bipartite political rivalry. Political opinion polls effect
and mirror alternations of the parties. As these polls are located beyond
institutional supports, the tendency inevitably becomes one in which opinion
feeds on, and reproduces, itself. Public opinion is not produced, and it does
not appear. It belongs to the order of simulation where reproduction
predominates, where all opinions become interchangeable, all theories and
political hypotheses become reversible, since it is a feature of the system at
this point that questions are fundamentally undecidable (Gane, 1991b: 99).
At first this is veiled, since scientific statistics give the illusion of solid content.
It soon becomes evident, however, that public opinion is a 'fabulous fiction'.
The effect of this is absolutely decisive for modern society: all political
discourse is thoroughly drained of content. This is the outcome of the
manipulation of the political by the politicians. Finally, political opinion polls
retain meaning only for politicians and political scientists as these polls have
only a tactical value for political manipulators. The mass media brings into
existence an 'operational simulation' of an informed political mass (Gane,
1991b: 99-101).
In single-party systems, the essential play in the system and its vital feedback
processes are absent and public opinion, if it exists, cannot be manipulated.
In the dual system, against all expectation again, representation ends as the
law of equivalence of value, stemming from the code, begins to exercise its
effectiveness: the inevitable to and fro motion begins, and from that moment,
a public consensus is formed and re-formed. It is shaped by pre-structured
polls, so that after a while the distribution of votes tends to approach a natural
split of 50/50 on each side: 'it is as if everyone voted by chance, or monkeys
voted (Baudrillard, 1983:132).
- 39 The two twin towers of the WTC are the visible sign of the closure of the
system in a vertigo of duplication, while the other skyscrapers are each
of them the original moment of a system constantly transcending itself in
a perpetual crisis and self challenge (Baudrillard, 1981: 136-137).
It is the ability of simulation to produce its own other that is at the centre of
Baudrillards work. The essential problem he addresses is how to think what is
excluded from the system, but he can only do so by repeating the very same
strategy of the system, by proposing another to them by which they are
proved. There is a double strategy necessary on the part of Baudrillard in
attempting to think the outside to the system of simulation. On the one hand,
he has to name this outside, but on the other hand he must realise that he
cannot name this outside, that any outside is only an effect of the system itself
(like Disneyland and public opinion). He has to think, therefore not so much
what is outside or other to the system of simulation as what is excluded by the
fact that it has no outside. There is no way of saying that the system simply
fails, except in terms of the system itself. It is the limit to the system, a limit
that makes the system both possible and impossible (Butler, 1999: 43-45).
2.3. Waste
Baudrillard develops his concept of waste from Bataille who argued that the fundamental principle of
the universe consists of waste, destruction, death, eroticism and transgression rather than truth, wealth
and security. There must always be an accursed share to keep the system going. Bataille believes that
we ought to behave in ways that encourage this general economy of expenditure over the limited or
restricted economy of economics but that this is almost impossible to realize; it is paradoxical
utopianism. Batailles notion of the accursed share and the general economy are ideas that came from
Mausss anthropology of the gift. The critique of the economic as such feeds into Baudrillards view on
Batailles notion of the general economy which uses Mausss notion of the gift as a principle that is anti
economic and seeks to be an economic broader that the modern concept of economy (Hegarty, 2004:
39). I will return to Baudrillards engagement with Mauss and Bataille in the next chapter.
- 41 can be wasted, but what can be wasted that determines this basic biological
level (Butler, 1999: 55).
The social exists on the double basis of the production of remainders and
their eradication. If all wealth were sacrificed, people would lose their
sense of the real. If all wealth became disposable people would lose
their sense of the useful and the useless. The social exists to take care
of the useless consumption of remainders so that individuals can be
assigned to the useful management of their lives (Baudrillard, 1983:78).
- 42 a rebellion against poverty but a protest against lack of want, the ease of life,
the fact that nothing is missing; for instance, the rejection of consumption as
typified by hippies or counter cultural movements and terrorism. These
alternatives are not contradictory. As Baudrillard says: Fatigue, depression,
neurosis are always convertible into violence and vice versa (Baudrillard,
1998: 293). It is the fact that the same group of people can alternate between
violent attacks upon the system and passive rejection of it that constitutes the
specificity of their response. It is this ambiguity between revolt and conformity,
the possibility of exchanging one for the other that the system can never
finally reduce or absorb (Baudrillard, 1998: 293).
Anguish, like violence, arises when desires are fulfilled, when there is nothing
left to desire. This is the same circularity of waste and production. New
therapies and social services, for instance, are produced on the basis of
anguish. In a sense, therefore, there is no limit to the system. Even the
systems other, anguish, is only possible because of it, and makes the system
stronger. This anguish arises not directly from want or lack but because there
is no want or lack. The very process of getting rid of it is also what causes it.
The system absorbs anguish, but it is precisely this process of absorption
which leads to anguish (ibid., 293).
Waste and anguish are not outside the system but simultaneous with it.
Baudrillard speaks of waste in terms of reversibility: the system begins to
reverse upon itself and the absorption of waste leads to more waste. The
result is the bloated figure, the figure of Alfred Jarry's pataphysical Ubu who
has now entered into reality itself. Baudrillard defines pataphysics as the
philosophy of gaseous states, as tautology the use of redundant language
that adds no information and as the minds loftiest temptation. Pataphysics is
Although there is some debate about the authorship of the urtext of Ubu Roi, it
emerged from a farcical puppet play staged by Jarry and his friends Charles,
Henri and Charlotte Morin while they were students at a lyce in Rennes. Ubu
was inspired by their physics teacher, Flix Hbert, a short man with a
magnificent gut which he maintained by incessantly eating petit fours. The
alimentary machine which is Ubu is articulated by an immense gidouille or
giborgne. Jarrys two pairs of neologisms, the other combination being
boudouille and bouzine, signify digestive, sexual and excretory functions and
organs a crude retention-evacuation device (Genosko, 1994: 106).
Like Jarry, Baudrillard projects a malefic vision of the universe ruled by baser
13
Pataphysics does not escape metaphysics. It neither disappears into metaphysics nor operates as a
postmetaphysics. Instead, it redoubles itself and absorbs metaphysics, thus becoming more
metaphysical than metaphysics. Pataphysics is metaphysics paunch. How does one approach
something pataphysically? In his preamble to Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard states that
once a system nears perfection it only takes a little push in the right direction to make it collapse
(Baudrillard, 1976:12). It is only a small epiphenomenal step from the tautologies of capitalism to la
gidouille dUbu; from a sublime operationality to a perfectly ridiculous spherical belly. The science-fiction
of turning a hyperreal system against itself is pataphysical: an imaginary solution indeed. See also
Baudrillard, 2005:8.
- 44 instincts and objects in which good or subjective designs are foiled and come
to naught. Yet there is a fundamental, substantive difference between Jarrys
and Baudrillards pataphysics. Jarrys subjects Ubu Roi, Faustroll and the
rest heroically, albeit foolishly, try to master the universe and remake reality
according to their imaginary designs, ambitions and desires. But for
Baudrillard, this game is over: the subject has been defeated, the reign of
objects has commenced (Kellner, 1989: 163).
Jarrys La Gidouille dUbu, the famous Gut of Pre Ubu, has served
Baudrillard well in its capacity as a symbol of our system. Ubu is a misshapen
figure (gidouille, retractible ear, three teeth one of stone, one of iron and one
of wood) and a foundational persona of Baudrillards textual imaginary of the
pataphysical as if:
Ubu: the small intestine and the splendour of emptiness. Ubu form
full and obese, of a grotesque immanence and a brilliant truth. A figure
of genius, replete with that which has absorbed and transgressed
everything, shining in the void like an imaginary solution (Baudrillard,
1983: 79-80).
We happen upon Ubu with the same mixture of horror and disgust as one who
finds an eye at the bottom of a chamber pot. For Baudrillard, its as if we are
all a little bit Ubu; he is the sign of our fatalit. Hypertely is another biological
term central to Jarrys writing, which refers to the overdevelopment of
organisms, which may be manifested by the growth of useless appendages
(i.e. extra horns) such as a gidouille. This grosse bedaine is as vacant and
If one were to gather together all of the terms which take the prefix hyper in
the texts of Baudrillard, one would not only have a large collection, but a
veritable hypermarch of signs. Even with only a fragment of this collection in
hand, one might linger in the medico-biological section and serve oneself
signs denoting abnormal growth. This would enable one to establish the
domains of research whence Baudrillards operative concepts have come
(pathology, biology, geometry, etc.), and sketch a figure of the social structure
provided by his elaborations upon the theme of hyper (obese, cancerous,
etc.), and describe his fanciful, and hyperbolic use of hypers. Los Angeles is a
kind of hyper space or more spatial than space, a cyberspace, or to put it
simply, a maze (Genosko, 1994: 155).
After our excursion into the so-called ubuesque pataphysics of the system,
which becomes apparent when we are made aware of its production of waste,
it is possible to interpret this phenomenon of pataphysics as the contemporary
form of the system revolting against itself. The contemporary form of the
revolt, Baudrillard argues, is that of the body against itself, a cancerous
phenomena at the genetic level. Here there is, potentially, undisciplined
proliferation, an instability which cannot be maintained. These cancerous
formations have overambition, a hypertelia, appearing to offer affinities with
the nature of the hyperreal itself: it revolts against the genetic order, as if it
were disobeying a law. The body seems to revolt against its own internal
regime, disturbs its own balance, in a form which is, Baudrillard remarks, none
the less, mysteriously esoteric. Obesity is an ascent to extremes in a field
where the rule has been withdrawn. For theory, the decisive point is that its
logic is that of a realization of potential, an excess of potential, on a single
plane: potentialization, not dialectical progression. There are no longer
structures of distinctive opposition, no contrastive field (Gane, 1991b:108).
14
Both Baudrillard and Jarry use scientific and biological discourses for images and ideas to
concatenate, play against and pile upon one another. Pseudocyesis is the medical term for a false
pregnancy.
It is only by being less than totally efficient that the system runs well. When
the system runs too well and there is no waste, when all waste is absorbed,
then the whole system becomes a form of waste. For Baudrillard, the
structural law of waste is against all economic morality (even that which would
make waste part of the system). Baudrillard considers waste as the limit to the
system of consumption. But at the same time Baudrillard realizes that any
outside to the social is only what the system produces. It is this waste which
the system produces that keeps the system going. Waste does not exist
before production and production not before waste, but out of this exchange
of each for the other something is produced out of nothing. Baudrillard calls it
double or nothing (Baudrillard, 1993b: 104).
Baudrillard discusses the necessary circularity of the system and its other by
retelling Bernard de Mandevilles allegory, The Fable of the Bees, concerning
the necessity for a certain waste, the way a system runs all the better for a
little waste. A certain outside is produced but it is on the basis of this outside
that the system starts up again. This is a cycle of exchange and reversibility
that enables the system to run on forever. Baudrillard also refers to Alfred
Jarrys Le Surmle, a bicycle that keeps pedalling even when its passengers
are dead (ibid., 104).
In Transparency of Evil (1993b: 107), Baudrillard refers to the PerpetualMotion-Food Bicycle Race in Jarrys Le Surmle. In the former, he likens,
through a series of rhetorical questions, America to the Race; that is, during
the 10,000 mile, trans-Siberian race between a team of cyclists on a bicycle
built for five and an express train, one of the riders expires en route. It is,
however, in death that he is able to set a pace so remarkable that the cycle
outruns the train! Like Jarrys dead cyclist, America is at its most powerful
when its time has passed: this power is hysteresial (a physical process in
which there is a time-lag between causes and the appearance of their effects;
the appearance of the latter depend upon an established pattern of causes).
In a reflection on extreme phenomena which implicates both physics and
If one needed to characterize the present state of affairs, I would say this is a
situation after the orgy. That orgy, is the explosive movement of modernity,
one of the liberation in all realms. All finalities of liberation are already behind
us We accelerate in a void (Baudrillard, 1990b: 4). The postmodern
capitalist world seduces its residents by its alleged emptiness. It offers itself
as the realm of freedom accomplished and there is nothing less to fight for.
There is nothing one can demand that the world cannot deliver, as the world
made sure that nothing is demanded except what it can, and wants to, deliver.
In a world which makes freedom into necessity (having first made necessity
feel like freedom) disaffection is aplenty. In a world cleansed of past
infections, in a clinically ideal world, spreads an impalpable, implacable
pathology, born of disinfection itself(Baudrillard, 1990b: 69). The modern
project did not fail. Its undoing was its success too overwhelming, too
complete. It is precisely the right to be critical that has been decomposed
(Bauman, 1993: 38).
Capitalism hides the waste beneath its glittering surface, and waste is there
because the inner energy of the emancipation drive has dissipated. The inner
rot shows itself in global catastrophes such as AIDS. AIDS is a product of the
disarmed defences turning against the very organism they were supposed to
defend (Baudrillard, 1990b: 71). This kind of decomposition is the twilight
zone of the anti-decomposition drive. The modern order has become bankrupt
by its own excesses. The obsession with order creates waste, and in turn the
crushing cost of waste disposals. In this world, no waste can be disposed of
radically and completely, it can only be recycled and recycling of waste is in
itself a waste-producing process. The result is a ubuesque obese existence,
in which health and disease change places and lose meaning: there is
continuation of all categories, tantamount to the substitution of one sphere
2. 4.Conclusion
It is in this context that one should assess the significance and practical value
of Baudrillards analyses. Baudrillards apocalyptic sociological diagnosis of
the current capitalist figuration may not by itself be revolutionary, but without it
prospects of revolution would look even darker. It is important to know that
waste has submerged global projects, and that simulacra replaced commodity
fetishism as the veil hiding the link between individual fate and social
figuration. It is important to know that with the absorptive capacity capitalisms
self-perpetuating mechanism, a change-bearing shock may come only from
outside. But for Baudrillard, il ny a pas dehors du jeu. For Baudrillard, one
does not blame the rules for losing a game. Losers have even more reason
than the winners to wish that the game goes on, and that its rules stay in
force; and no more reason than the winners to want the game to be banned or
its rules overhauled. Post-modernity creates its own discontents as its most
loyal playmates. Dissent lives dangerously close to collaboration.
Baudrillard wants to think what is excluded from the total system but he can
only do so by repeating the very same strategy of the system. There is a
double strategy necessary on the part of Baudrillard in attempting to think the
outside to the system. On the one hand, he has to name this outside,
something they actually exclude. But on the other hand he knows that any
outside is only an effect of the system itself. He has to think, therefore not so
much what is outside or other to the system as what is excluded by the fact
that it has no outside. There is no way of saying that the system simply fails,
except in terms of the system itself. It is a matter of thinking the limit to the
system, a limit that makes the system both possible and impossible. The next
chapter will show that terrorism is precisely the twilight zone or liminal state of
capitalisms anti-decomposition drive. The obsession with order creates
terrorism, and in turn the crushing cost of security. Before I reach terrorism,
- 51 -
Chapter 3
Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and Terrorism
3.1. Introduction
The dark side of symbolic exchange is the role of sacrifice and death.
According to Baudrillard, the dead in primitive societies played integral roles
in the lives of the living by serving as partners in symbolic exchange. Today,
collective exchanges with the dead have ceased. Only that which can be
accumulated or consumed is valued. Death is only viewed as a subtraction
from life. Capitalism's implicit promise is that to consume is to live. For
Baudrillard, sacrifice subverts values of utility and self-preservation, an idea
This chapter will proceed as follows: I will first explain Baudrillards notion of
symbolic exchange and how it relates to Marcel Mausss destructive
antagonistic gift giving as well as to Georges Batailles sacrificial dpense and
part maudite. Next, I will exemplify Baudrillards notion of symbolic exchange
through art auctions and terrorism. The social seeks to become a total
principle, but what terrorism shows is that it can become total only because of
another. The system justifies its security on the need to prevent terrorism and
terrorism justifies its activities on the basis of a terrorism already operative in
society. Each is only possible because of the other. It is the very exchange
between them that precedes either as such.
Next, I will show how under capitalism, death is excluded; death is seen as
biological and irreversible. Life is reduced to use value. It is the assignation of
useful self-management that must be defied and it is only defied by
challenging the systems separation of life and death into binary oppositions.
Defiance and suicide reverse death; they reengage the systems construction
of life/death at the level of symbolic relations. Suicidal defiance would abolish
life as use value by giving life symbolic stakes, which is intolerable to the
system. Finally, I will show how suicide terrorists on September 11 2001
reengage the systems construction of life/death at the level of symbolic
relations.
3. 2. Symbolic Exchange
The previous chapter showed how consumer society produces a certain form
of waste, but it is on the basis of this waste or remainder that the system
starts up again. Baudrillard draws on Marcel Mausss The Gift (1990) to
develop a comparison between the restrictive frame of waste in consumer
society and a more general total social logic (Mauss, 1990: 3). The crucial
difference between consumer society and earlier forms of social organisation
- 55 Baudrillard, the economic is born when what the object 'is' is assumed to
reside within it, it has an essence; when the object attains its value in
accordance with an abstract code that enables its relation to other objects to
be ascertained through a logic of equivalence which in turn obtains its
rationale from the ideology of utility and use value; and when the individual
emerges as a 'subject' whose relation to the world of objects is articulated
primarily through the ideology of need; then, the notion of the 'individual'
emerged (Grace, 2000:19).
15
Bataille has been criticised for a one-sided reading of Mauss that greatly overstresses the violence of
the gift (Habermas, 1987). This cannot be said of Baudrillard, whose reading of the gift is not confined to
violence and the exceptional form of the potlatch on the North West coast of America.
- 56 lifted a certain hold that the giver had on the recipient through the gift.
Through gift-giving, social bonds are created; individuals share with each
other the back and forth of the social power that is associated with the gifts
exchanged. Gift-giving maintains social structures. It places the individual into
a structure of total services. Mauss emphasizes the collaborative,
consensual social structure of an economic system as opposed to the rational
calculation of individuals (Mauss, 1990:viii).
A number of related themes drawn out in Mauss are vital for understanding
Baudrillard. Mauss and Baudrillard reject an independent or autonomous logic
of the economic and this is central to Mauss and Baudrillards rejection of
liberal and Marxist thought. The notion of the Homo economicus man
existing in a state of nature for immediate survival is a fabrication of
economic theory. Mausss theory of the individual as only meaningful within
the wider kinship ties as a channel along which gifts circulate and of ritual
agents or personae is a profound influence on Baudrillards notion of
individuality and agency. Another theme in Mausss study that is crucial for
Baudrillard is the obligatory nature of reciprocation and particularly the power
of counter-prestations or what Baudrillard calls the contre-don or counter-gift
to challenge existing power relations. The theme is not highly developed in
Mauss although it is implied due to his emphasis on the establishing of honour
through humiliating others in gift ceremonies (Mauss, 1990:39).
16
Important here is the spirit of the thing in Baudrillards The Spirit of Terrorism.
- 57 Baudrillard imports the idea from Mauss that the gift received has a soul.
One would not dare to keep it or refuse to return it, thereby breaking the social
bond it establishes and to risk bringing its moral and spiritual power against
oneself. To accept a gift without returning it in kind or with something even
more powerful or valuable is to subordinate oneself to the giver. Baudrillard
emphasises that the primitives know that the gift is a challenge, and it is
annulled only in the counter-gift. This characteristic of the gift as reversible
has to be recognized as different from any mode of contractual exchange
(Baudrillard, 1993a:135).
The ownership of things is temporary, lasting only until the point when they
must be returned. The sanctions for failing to observe ritual rules involve loss
of honour and authority and even in traditional Maori culture, death,
apparently self willed and brought about by feelings of sickness and disgrace
(Mauss, 1990:35-5; cited by Baudrillard, 1993a:134). The disgraced may die
and be brought back to life at a later date by the renewal of their inclusion in
the ceremonial expressions of their community. Death appears as a relation of
social exchange rather than a biological event in the life of an individual
because life and death are reversible (Mauss, 1990:38). 17
17
The reversibility of life and death is dealt with in the next section.
- 58 entire villages are left destitute by the ravages of potlatch. In the destruction
of wealth, then, the individual gains status, the recognition of superiority by
their contemporaries (ibid., 37).
He saw in the
potlatch the hint of his conception of the need to annihilate excess, rather than
the production, gathering and hoarding necessitated by conventional analyses
based on the assumption of scarcity. The entire classical conceptual structure
excludes an explanation for all human activities (such as extreme or violent
pleasure) that are motivated not by a desire to gain, but rather by a desire to
lose. As Bataille argues in considering the potlatch, we need to give away,
lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and so we would never
decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence
giving must become acquiring of power. Gift-giving has the virtue of
surpassing the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the
subject appropriates the surpassing: He enriches himself with a contempt for
riches' (Bataille, 1988:106).
Before I reach the art auction, however, it is important to remember that for
Baudrillard, it is increasingly difficult to draw a line between art and non-art
where all phenomena are considered from a quantitative rather than a
qualitative point of view, where everything is being made subservient to
strictly utilitarian interests. For the majority of contemporary art consumers,
leisure activities have become inseparable from self-realisation. This
possessive and individualistic orientation is in turn inseparable from the
What Baudrillard did ostensibly for the art world was to provide a poeticotheoretical language with which to describe a state of affairs that certain of its
members sensed and sought to render critically: the art world had become no
more than the exchange of sign-commodities and these signs no longer
signified anything other than their own exchange value. The process by which
a painting loses its meaning and even its visibility is described by Baudrillard
in an essay in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. It is very
difficult to speak of painting today because it is very difficult to see it. Because
generally it no longer wants to be looked at but to be absorbed visually
without leaving any traces(Baudrillard, 2005: 115). Art has become
iconoclastic, but this no longer involves destroying images. The iconoclasm of
art lies in manufacturing images, a profusion of them.
For Baudrillard [t]here is an art of simulation, an ironic quality that revives the
appearances of the world to destroy them. Otherwise, art would do nothing
more than pick at its own corpse, as often is the case today. To add the same
to the same and the same, and so on to infinity is poor simulation. You must
rip the same from the same. Each image must take away from the reality of
the world, something must vanish in each image. The disappearance must
remain alive that is the secret of art. In art and this holds for both
contemporary and classical art there is a dual conjecture and thus a dual
strategy: an impulse to annihilate, to erase all the traces of the world and
reality, and a resistance to this impulse (Baudrillard, 2005: 109). For
Baudrillard subtraction is what gives strength; power emerges from absence.
We produce; we accumulate. And because we can no more assume the
- 61 symbolic mastery of absence we are plunged today into the inverse illusion,
the disenchanted proliferation of screens and the profusion of images
(Baudrillard, 2005: 115).
For Baudrillard, ...the soul of Art was its power of illusion and its capacity
for negating reality. Baudrillard called this the setting up an other scene
one opposed to reality and in which things obey a higher set of rules. In art,
beings, like line and colour on canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to
extend themselves beyond their own raison detre. For Baudrillard, and
Francis Bacons portraits do this very well, the sitter for a portrait in a painting
(like his own ideas in his writing), is to be pushed to their extreme limit and
possible destruction. Baudrillard, bewildered by the excess banality of the
contemporary art which surrounded him, years prior to registering his
satisfaction with Bacon, had come to believe that, art in this sense is gone
(Baudrillard, 1990b:14).
- 62 An auction shows that exchange can never be grasped as such. We are too
late, because the various bids attempt to stand in for an original exchange or
value that seems to precede them. We are too soon because this exchange is
only an effect of or only given by the very attempt to stand in for it. Each
bidder tries to predict the relationship between the others and the object, to
predict its final value. The bidder wants to bid before the hammer falls, and
yet no one wants to be the first, each knows that his/her bid merely opens up
the possibility of another. Each bid seeks to make equivalence between the
self and the other, but this is only possible because of, and this only leads to,
a difference between them, another gesture by the other that must be taken
into account (Butler, 1999: 84).
The auctions abrupt bids and pauses are at once discontinuous and cyclical,
unrepeatable and only able to be repeated. In the ritualised space of an
auction, every gesture is a response and the other has already responded on
this basis. It is for this reason that one must act before the other does. And yet
one only wants to act after the other, in order to defer the end. Nobody wants
to make the final bid when there is this definitive exchange between money
and its object, the bidder and what he or she has bid for. For the object only
has value insofar as there is another bid after it. Every bid stands in for the
equivalence of the first and last bids (we only bid because of that initial
exchange between money and the object which allows every bid; every bid
seeks to put a figure on the final value of the object) but this bid is only
possible because the first and last bids are missing (we only bid insofar as we
think there is another after us). Every bid occurs across this impossible
simultaneity, this symbolic exchange. Every bid requires another comparison
or exchange. Exchange means we cannot say what anything is worth.
Exchange, if it opens up value, is also its impossibility or end (ibid.,85).
The art auction shows that before the consideration of need or profit there is a
reciprocal wager between its various parties, in which each is recognised in
his or her difference. It is this symbolic reciprocity, in which each gives to the
other without expectation of return that value arises. This impossible moment
makes exchange possible. For it is always possible that there is no other with
- 63 whom to exchange, that there will be no bid after ours. This risk is necessary
for the creation of economic value (Baudrillard, 1981:116). In an auction,
value arises on the basis of the impossible parity between money and object,
buyer and seller, in which each is given its value at once. Every exchange is
the attempt to stand in for that missing first exchange and defer that last
exchange (Baudrillard, 1981:25).
Terrorism
This is the point where we can introduce the notion of terrorism. For
Baudrillard, the capitalist system is a system of total order and determination
in which everything is connected to everything else, everyone is
exchangeable and responsible for everyone else. The supposed other of the
system, i.e. something like terrorism, replays this security in its own way. The
system makes everybody hypothetically responsible for everyone else, so
terrorism takes someone hostage and holds him or her responsible in this
way, tries to exchange him or her for a whole series of demands against the
state. Terrorism does not simply oppose the social; it is an exaggeration of it.
To the simultaneous responsibility and arbitrariness of the system, it responds
with an even greater responsibility and arbitrariness (Baudrillard, 1990b:36).
- 64 -
This is the radicality of Baudrillard. His argument implies that the social only
arises because of a prior terrorism, or that the social pushed too far leads to
terrorism, the social responds to terrorism with an increased security, thus
bringing about more terrorism. The social exists only on the basis of the
opposition it makes between itself and terrorism. And terrorism can only exist
in exchange with the social; but it also knows that the social lives on in
exchange with it. Terrorism threatens the state with its own demise, i.e. with
the possibility that there will be no other with whom it might exchange. This
forces the state to concede to the terrorists demands. The state cannot
eradicate terrorism, because terrorism is what justifies it and allows it
(Baudrillard, 1990b: 97).
Earlier, we saw that in an art auction value arises from the calculation that
there is still another bid to go before the final bid, while knowing that the other
parties are also basing their calculations on this so that this final bid might
come at any moment. In the same way, when terrorists take hostages, it is by
risking that the hostage will not be exchanged that the terrorist ends up
exchanging the hostage, but this situation cannot be mastered by terrorism
because it is itself only possible as a result of this exchange with the social
(Butler, 1999:97).
This shows how a certain notion of exchange lies at the origin of things, as a
- 65 result of which we cannot grasp what the origin is. We can only say what that
origin is by exchanging it for something else. Any system inevitably falls into
this cyclical economy. A system puts forward its own other. As we saw in
Chapter 2, the system proposes a use value. Function and use value are
expressed better than ever yet this use value is only a tactical value within a
regime of signs. With modern furniture, for instance, there is a mobility, an
image of interconnectedness or freedom between space and function. This
immediate openness to the outside and scrutiny of others, however, ends up
being the very opposite of freedom because it ultimately does away with
interiority and free will that makes choice possible. This simulation of freedom
taken to its furthest point produces the exact opposite of freedom (Baudrillard,
1990b: 42).
Both the state and the terrorist seek to render everyone totally responsible, to
see one exchanged for all and to make exchange transparent. The terrorist
takes the hostage as the singular equivalent for the rest of society, only to
realise that this medium of exchange cannot be grasped. Terrorism exposes
the paradox that at the very moment the hostage is most bound to exchange,
held responsible for the rest of society, he or she is most free, unable to be
exchanged for anything at all. It is on the basis of this inexchangable, free
hostage that both the social and the terrorist begin their process of initiating
exchange, but this exchange taken to its furthest point also produces a
hostage that cannot be exchanged. This failure of exchange is itself an
exchange. Terrorism and the social can never fully manage to take anyone
hostage because in exchange, there is always the risk that there is no one or
nothing to exchange with. Terrorism and the social can never exchange itself
for everything or to render exchange visible, there is always one exchange left
out. There is always a limit to any provocation and manipulation, whether
that of terrorism or the social, always an exchange before it and after it
(Butler, 1999: 93).
- 66 system: Violently withdrawing the hostage from the circuit of value, the
terrorist also withdraws it from the circuit of negotiation. The two are out of
circulation ... and what is established between them is a dual figure ... the
only modern figure is the shared death (Baudrillard, 1990b: 49). Hostagetaking then is a failure, a failed challenge. It threatens the system by
producing the inexchangeable in a system that survives by ordered
exchange, but it fails in its attempt to reintroduce exchange in terms of its
choosing. It thereby reaffirms the system of value it had momentarily
breached, and lapses into signs fodder for global TV companies (Pawlet,
2007: 137). For Baudrillard we are all hostages and we are all terrorists
[Terrorism] only carries to the extreme conclusion the essential proposition of
liberal and Christian humanism: all men are in solidarity; you here, are in
solidarity with and responsible for the wretched ... a proposition of universal
responsibility itself monstrous and terroristic in its essence (Baudrillard,
1990b:3: 54).
away
from
the
binary
oppositions
of
self/other,
- 67 Mauss and Bataille are Baudrillards key to resisting fixed economies of signs
or of capital: sacrificial economy for Bataille, or symbolic exchange, are
excluded from political economy and its critique, which is only its realized
form (Baudrillard, 1981:42). This approach also signals Baudrillards interest
in radical possibilities of challenge (le dfi) that are essential to symbolic
exchange as a theory. In symbolic exchange the subject is at stake and the
object becomes nothing, such as the object is annulled and the subjects are
no longer discrete but joined in the difference, not separated by it. Baudrillard
believes that culture did live in this symbolic (with its rituals constituting
symbolic exchange), only being forcibly ejected with the institution of total
signification, which could be seen as being at the heart of language or, as
Baudrillard seems to imply, when capitalism and signification colluded in
valuing everything. In Baudrillard, the breakdown of the separation between
subject/object, presence/absence, use value / exchange value and so on
revolves around death, the rejection of which is seen as having installed the
capitalist code or signification (Baudrillard, 1981: 208).
3.3. Death
The central and crucial chapters of Symbolic Exchange and Death attempt to
construct a genealogy of death. Where there have been many attempts to
establish genealogies of morals (Nietzsche) or of capital (Marx), 18 Baudrillard
has possibly located one that is more basic. The principle of the genealogy of
death, according to Baudrillard, traces the gradual process of exclusion, the
extradition, of the dead from society; little by little the dead cease to exist, and
death becomes a state of abnormality. It is the dead who are first put at the
periphery of the city in order to ensure the operationality of the living, of the
human. In primitive societies they are held in the village. The dead are later
ghettoized on the outskirts of the village, and then they disappear altogether
and cease to exist as beings in society. Even the mad and the delinquent are
received in society at some point, but the dead are never received as such. In
18
Similar genealogies are constructed by Durkheim and Foucault for punishment (cf. Durkheim, 1972
and Foucault, 1977) and Debord for time (cf. Debord, 1987).
What is now termed death, as an event that happens to the body is for
Baudrillard ultimately nothing more than the social line of demarcation
separating the dead from the living (Baudrillard, 1993a: 127). That is, society
and its systems of knowledge attempt to define what constitutes death.
The separation and opposition of life and death creates power: the
hierarchical structures of authority that are the fundamental mechanisms of
social control. When life and death are separated, time becomes linear rather
than cyclical, religion becomes repressive rather than expressive and death
becomes the final, irreversible event in the life of the individual. The
separation of life and death is the founding condition of binary thinking. Once
binary thinking becomes dominant it is difficult to think otherness or difference
as anything other than a relation of binary opposition to what is known or
similar. The binary opposition of life and death is unable to progress beyond
the simplistic logic of life equals not dead and death equals not living. Life and
- 69 death are not, however, either/or categories, are not binary oppositions
(Pawlett, 2007:56).
Baudrillards
theoretical manoeuvres
with binary
oppositions
owe
What gives you a hard on [vous fait bander], theoreticiansis the coldness of the clear and distinct,
Jean-Franois Lyotard has provocatively written (Lyotard, 1975:115). Lyotard describes the erection of a
disjunctive bar whose function is to draw and to maintain critical distinctions. This bar at once invokes a
dis- and a con-junction, Lyotard thinks, since in order to demarcate this side from that, one must be on
both sides. One must work the bar from both sides, the two sides (at least) which hold it up. The
concept of the bar (la barre) is taken from Jacques Lacans reading of Saussure (Lacan, 1977: 149).
Jacques Lacan places the signifier over the signified, the former exercises power over the latter (avoir
sur barre) (Gallop, 1985:120).
- 70 The barred symbolic exchange (of life and death) is present in the very
process of its barring. Death as symbolic exchange with life is barred, but
separated out from symbolic meaningfulness, death is devoid of meaning, an
unprogrammable horror, an unthinkable anomaly (Baudrillard, 1993a:136).
Yet life too, separated from death, loses its meaningfulness, reduced to the
indifferent fatality of survival (Baudrillard, 1993a:136). The separation of life
and death does not result in a profit accruing to life. Although life is shielded
from death it must end in death: moreover a death now devoid of symbolic
meaning. Life then is reduced to survival, not living but literally living on, not
(yet) dead. No matter how much death is denied or hidden, it touches life.
Similarly it is possible to define sanity only by separating it from insanity, so
the meaning of sanity depends on the existence of insanity. The excluded,
negative or demonised term exerts a certain power over the positive term. So
for Baudrillard, the spectre of death haunts life, just as the spectre of madness
haunts sanity, disorder threatens order and Evil stalks Good. The excluded or
pathological term casts a shadow over normality, because, in the terminology
Baudrillard borrows from Lacan, it becomes its Imaginary, its phantasy
(Pawlett, 2007 59).
Baudrillard argues that the destruction of the symbolic modes relating to death
has meant that there is an unresolved problem of facing the dead in our
societies, just as there is in facing the ill, the mad, the disabled, the criminal:
- 71 contemporary societies cannot find a solution to the problem that they have
themselves created that the dead are dead or that the mad are mad.
Madness is never only the line of partition between the sane and the mad, this
line of demarcation is shared between the two sides, and it is in relation to this
shared line that sanity defines itself. A society which incarcerates its mad is a
society profoundly invested in madness, and which in turn valorizes sanity.
The effects of the work done on 'madness' in society, as a work of discipline,
are complete, and the walls of the asylum have been breached. Not,
Baudrillard notes, by growing tolerance, but because the process of
normalization has been effective, at the cost of generalizing a kind of
madness throughout society. Normality resembles madness, the virus has
spread to all the sites of normal existence and 'madness has become
ambient' (Baudrillard, 1993a:197).
The mad have been set out of the asylums, now everyone is seen as a
potential madman. There is a new absorption of the asylum back into the
heart of society. For Baudrillard, the mad have been set free in New York,
madness has taken hold of the entire city (Baudrillard, 1989:17). Normality
has become so refined that it resembles madness. By being normalised, that
is to say, by extending the logic of equivalences to everyone, society,
socialised at last, excludes every antibody. What is hanging over us now,
reflects Baudrillard in the 1980s, is not schizophrenia but melancholia.
With its precursor, hypochondria, that derisory signalling of enervated bodies
and organs, rendered sad by involution. All systems, especially political ones,
are virtually hypochondrial: they manage and ingest their own dead organs
(Gane, 1991b: 11). This recalls the mobilit cadavrique of Alfred Jarrys dead
cyclist.
New York, like the dead cyclist, lives off the energy born in the
expenditure of energy.
In the world of instrumental reason, death was one event that was not a
means to any end (unless it was, of course, the death of an-other that served
my, or our, end). Death had no reason. This is why it had to be censored from
daily life. The production of risks and fears is the characteristically modern
way of defusing the perennial horror of mortality and to dissemble the
intractable irreversibility of death into the infinite chain of safely human,
practical, mundane tasks and worries. To diet, abstain, exercise leaves little
room for the thought of death. The leftovers are mystified in specialist
language and skills (Bauman, 1993: 29).
- 73 abolishing death itself, and this has striking pathological effects throughout all
the social separations of our societies, in religion as the desire for eternity, in
science as the desire for eternal truth, and in production as the desire for
infinite accumulation (Gane, 1991b:116).
Baudrillard leaves the world of capital behind to look at societies that include
rather than exclude death. Baudrillard looks at societies that accept the dead
as those who are still among the living such that they pass to a death that is
given and received and that is therefore reversible in social exchange,
soluble in exchange. At the same time the opposition between birth and
death disappears: they can also be exchanged under the form of symbolic
reversibility (Baudrillard, 1993a:203). For Baudrillard capital has closed off
the symbolic and he attempts to combat the political economy of capitalism to
reveal that now lost dimension as a possible alternative (even if this
alternative is unattainable).
Death is socialized by the symbolic. It must not come to one from an abstract,
impersonal force (nature, science, state). Death exists as a social relation
between persons. It is not biological, but artificial and sacrificial. Death is a
For Baudrillard, death is horrifying for any social order, be it for capitalist
modernity or primitive culture. For Baudrillard all societies must do something
to ward off or make meaningful the sudden loss of signs that befall the dead,
to prevent there remaining in the asocial flesh of the dead something which
signifies nothing (Baudrillard, 1993a:180). It is not the real biological death
but the asociality of signs that is most threatening. The corpse of the recently
deceased is rich with social meaning, but on the other hand there is
putrefaction: a formless sign signifying nothing. It is then always a matter of
signs and social meaning, not the biological reality of death.
Baudrillard elaborates his conception of death in terms of the gift and counter-
- 78 counter-gift (from the process of outbidding in the potlatch form) is the single
truly symbolic process which in fact implies death as a kind of maximal
excess (ibid.,8). Baudrillard is wary of the naturalization of the gift (hence his
drawing out the counter-gift as a prevailing principle). Baudrillard develops the
counter-gift through reversibility; the defining, organizing (non-) centre of
which is death (Baudrillard, 1993a: 8).
- 79 -
- 80 the use of death in a staged exchange where a whole culture or world could
be attacked. This event brings together many of the phenomena particular to
capitalist simulation, meshed together with that which would be outside it. It
also brings Baudrillards thought to another peak of condensation (Hegarty,
2004: 109).
Attempting to destroy the potent symbol of U.S power is, then, a symbolic
assault in the commonplace meaning of symbolic. But further, the terrorists
reintroduce sacrificial-suicidal death into a system built on the severing of all
symbolic relations including that of life and death. In their readiness to die, the
terrorists refuse the slow death of the normalised, affluent, modern, educated
existence in an extreme potlach-style act that the system cannot
21
It might be objected that the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were not an iconic symbol of US
power before 9/11, but became only in their destruction. Yet it is clear that the twin towers were a
symbol of US hegemony for Baudrillard long before the attacks took place Why has the World Trade
Centre got two towers The fact that there are two identical towers signifies the end of all competition
(Baudrillard, 1993a: 69-70).
- 81 comprehend and that shakes its binary foundations. But this is not, of course,
a conscious wilful strategy of symbolic exchange. Not even the terrorists could
predict that the twin towers would actually implode and collapse to the ground.
It was as if, Baudrillard insists, the twin towers were committing suicide,
repaying the symbolic debt of the suicidal sacrifice of the terrorists and the
death of innocent passengers. The deaths of the hijackers were symbolic and
sacrificial: the irruption of a death that is far more than real (Baudrillard,
2002a:17).
The death of the terrorist is the only possible counter-gift to the system. This
leaves the terrorist challenge completely unanswerable. In return for a
symbolic challenge of death to the system, only such a counter-death is
appropriate. The immense system of powers in the West seems unable to
respond to this kind of challenge since beyond the specific act itself is another
cultural order which calls for a specific sacrifice, one which cannot be
acceded. This symbolic exchange is incapable of being absorbed. The martyr,
when created, always poses a fundamental ambivalence (Gane, 1991b:88).
It is the same in the Christian tradition, for the veiled aim of self-sacrifice to
God is to reach towards a position in which God cannot contain the debt. At
that point the relative positions of the sacrificer and God are reversed. This
explains why these activities always approach heresy and always have to be
rigorously controlled by the religious authorities. Such exchanges are
controlled by the church in order to prevent them from becoming catastrophic.
It is done by establishing a hierarchical order of exchanges but always in
order to lead to an equivalence between the sacrificer and God. This implies
that a gift which is irreversible (i.e. suicide) is a threat to the order itself.
Institutions in general have therefore to control exchanges and to ensure that
a catastrophic situation is avoided. In this respect the challenge of terrorism is
fascinating for the modern order since it mirrors the exorbitant violence of the
social system at the same time as it threatens it with death (Gane, 1991b:89).
Terrorism, in its absurdity and meaninglessness, is societys verdict on and
condemnation of itself. Terrorism is viral, no demarcation line can be drawn
around it, because it is at the heart of the culture which combats it. The
22
For Mauss the gift received has a soul or spirit. One would not dare to keep it or refuse to return it,
thereby risk bringing its moral and spiritual power against oneself. To accept a gift without returning it in
kind or with something even more powerful or valuable is to subordinate oneself to the giver (Mauss,
1969:269).
- 83 system can face down any visible antagonism, but against the other kind,
which is viral in structure against that form of almost automatic reversion of
its own power, the system can do nothing (Baudrillard, 1990b: 36). The
system provided the 9/11 attackers of the World Trade Center in New York
with everything they needed: the bulk of the terrorists involved were from one
of the USAs major allies, Saudi Arabia; the pilots were trained in the USA; the
planes were American and civilian (Baudrillard, 2002b:32).
The terrorist power to terrorise is amplified by the media. The media provide
the key element in making terrorist attacks into a worldwide phenomenon. The
media report in real time; they obsessively analyse and sensationalize the
event; they are enlisted in the terrorist symbolic exchange. The media are part
of the terror. The terrorist event is constituted by the media and by the
masses consumption of it. The terrorist event cannot be comprehended
through binary opposition. What the terrorists count on is that there is no
possible distinction, at the level of images and information, between the
crime and the crackdown. The reversibility of crime and repression depends
upon the media being seduced into working for the criminals. It is this
uncontrollable unleashing of reversibility that is terrorisms victory. For
Baudrillard, it is a victory that is visible in the subterranean ramifications and
infiltrations of the event not just in the direct economic, political, financial
- 84 slump in the whole of the system and the resulting moral and psychological
downturn but in the slump of the value-system, in the whole ideology of
freedom, of free circulation on which the West prided itself, and on which it
drew to exert its hold over the rest of the world (Baudrillard, 2002a: 31).
If security forces wipe out terrorist cells is this a victory or has the state merely
facilitated martyrdom and lost the moral high ground? The violence of 9/11
has a reversibility which produces violence and counter-violence, as the USA
tries to make the world secure (ibid). Ultimately the West now has an alibi to
destroy those pockets of the world untamed by globalisation, and spread
undifferentiation while providing a police-state globalisation (Baudrillard,
2002a:43).
The terrorist attacks of 9/11, as the event has subsequently become known,
were a consequence of the global injunction to positive value and the denial of
the symbolic potential of death an injunction that precisely left the West
vulnerable to sacrificial death, a strategy it cannot meet or answer on its own
terms. The death of the suicide pilots is a death which is symbolic and
sacrificial (Baudrillard, 2002a: 17). The terrorists, for Baudrillard, have
succeeded in turning their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a
system that operates on the basis of the exclusion of death (Baudrillard,
2002a:16). Baudrillard states that if the political economy is the most rigorous
attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to
political economy (Baudrillard, 1993a: 86-87).
For Baudrillard, terrorists create a void around themselves, a vacuum of nonmeaning. Terrorist acts cannot be understood as grounded in the objectives of
the terrorists; that is at the level of content of their demands. Baudrillard
almost completely empties the Islamic terrorism of 9/11 of any characteristics
or qualities other than of pure disruption. Islam is defined in terms of what it is
not. Islam is that which does not fit the capitalist world order. The central
quality of the Islamic faith becomes its anarchic energy, its wild potential to
subvert, its unpredictable alterity. Baudrillard speaks of the virulent and
ungraspable instability of the Arabs and of Islam, whose defence is that of the
hysteric in all its versatility (Baudrillard, 2000:36).
When Western culture sees all its values extinguished one by one, it
spins inwardly towards the worst. For us, death is an extinction, an
annihilation, it is not a symbolic exchange that is our misfortune
The singularity (terrorism), in killing itself, suicides the other with the
same blow one could say that acts of terrorism have literally
suicided the West (Baudrillard, 2002b: 42-43).
3. 5.Conclusion
For Baudrillard, the massive logic of the system can only be redoubled back
against itself in a movement of hyperconformist simulation, by pushing the
code into hyperlogic a massive spiral of accession to the demands of the
system, whose effect is an explosion of terrorism to match the terror of the
social. Baudrillards catastrophic strategy involves ceaselessly pushing things
For Baudrillard, theoretical violence, not truth, is the sole expedient remaining.
It goes beyond recuperation and cooptation. The production of meaning only
contributes to an over-saturation and neutralisation of meaning, and robs
radical social theory of another oppositional strategy. Baudrillard encounters
an absence, an outside, a void, displacement or death at the heart of thought.
This leads to apocalyptic tones: all the projects of modernity are abandoned
because they run up against this internal limit. Thinking no longer works
except by breaking down and dismantling itself. There are, however,
theoreticians who do not accept this dead end for a philosophy that wants to
be critical of modern society. For Deleuze and Guattari absence, death, lack
and the void are the illusions. These are merely shadows of difference. The
outside or absolute limit upon which all events are inscribed is not death but
desire and life. It is to Deleuzes concept of life that I now turn.
- 89 -
CHAPTER 4
DELEUZE: THE POLITICS OF LIFE
4.1. Introduction
Deleuze, like Baudrillard, refuses to separate life and death into binary
oppositions. As shown in the previous chapters, Baudrillard sees death as the
very confusion, reversibility or exchange between life and death, the fact that
neither is possible without the other. Deleuze, in the same way, gave strict
philosophical reasons for rejecting the idea of life as some ultimate foundation
from which mind, body and language would flow a life that would be
opposed to a death or non creation, inertia and indifference. Deleuze does not
see life as some evolving, striving developing power that creates a human
brain that can then understand that originating life. In Anti-Oedipus (1977) he
will with Flix Guattari, argue that it is desire that we should consider first,
with life and death being ways in which desire produces both organisms and
- 90 their dissolution. This means that instead of opposing a creative flowing life
into a negative destructive death, Deleuze and Guattari posit one plane or
substance desire from which life and death emerge. Desire is both life and
death, for at a quite literal level, the death of this or that body is not at all
negative. Without the death of organisms there would be no change, evolution
or life in its radical sense. Deleuze was insistent that life and death were
aspects of desire or the plane of immanence.
This chapter will proceed as follows: I will start out by showing how Deleuze
refuses to accept any pre-established opposition. Deleuze emphasises lifes
internal difference. This requires an explanation of Deleuzes so-called plane
of immanence. This plane of immanence does not function as some ultimate
explanatory point outside difference. Nothing lies outside difference, and all
being expresses the same plane of immanent difference differently. In order to
understand how Deleuze and Guattari can unite difference on a single plane,
it is important that I show Deleuzes encounter with Spinoza, Bergson and
Nietzsche. The plane of immanence is positive, incorporeal (virtual) and
productive. These qualities embody the transformative force of life. Next, I will
turn to how the plane of immanence functions in practice, by discussing the
immanence of desiring production to social production. This refers to the
process in which social wholes take desires or those connections which
The absolute or infinite is often seen as what lies outside or beyond our
knowledge of finite concepts, but Deleuze sees the infinite not as some great
beyond, but as infinite difference within life itself. The negative understanding
of difference difference as a system imposed on some undifferentiated real,
elevates some image of God, man or the subject as the author and origin of
all difference. This is an illusion that posits some point outside difference that
will then explain and produce difference (Colebrook, 2002b: 30).
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 49) refer to the illusion of
thought as the plane of transcendence. The plane of transcendence
imagines a grounding substance that transcends difference. For Deleuze and
Guattari, nothing can step outside the difference of life, for life always has the
power to produce further events of difference. For Deleuze and Guattari, life is
transcendental, which means life has no ground outside itself. The plane of
immanence is the starting point for a transcendental method that does not
accept that life takes the form of some already differentiated or transcendent
thing. This plane of immanence cannot be reduced to some fixed description
because it does not function as an ultimate explanatory point outside
difference. Nothing lies outside difference, and all being expresses the same
plane of immanent difference differently; as a result Deleuze and Guattari
arrive at the equation expressed in A Thousand Plateaus: PLURALISM =
MONISM (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:20).
- 92 Monism or one univocal being sees no foundation; all beings are located on a
single plane (pluralism). Dualism on the other hand believes in a being that
has a foundation. In order to have a ground set against what is grounded, two
types of being are necessary. Only with dualism can a foundation (such as
God or reason) be subtracted from what it grounds. But when being is
univocal and immanent then no point of difference can be privileged over any
other. Univocal being means that any thought or expression or representation
of being is itself an event of being. Univocal being sees everything as within
being, as immanent to life. The essence of univocal being is to include
individuating differences while these differences do not have the same
essence and do not change the essence of being just as white includes
various intensities while remaining essentially the same white . Being is
said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of
which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself (Deleuze, 1984: 36-7).
23
Relations and differences would be neither uniform nor symmetrical. The style
of difference depends on each specific event of difference. When one point
perceives another, it is not a linear or direct picture. Perception is an
encounter or event of difference. Deleuze sees interacting perceptions each
producing itself and its other through the encounter. In the univocal plane,
there is no division between perceivers and perceived; there are just
perceptions from which relatively stable points are effected. If all the
differences could be perceived, there would be (only) chaotic data. To
perceive is to slow difference down. For Deleuze, the challenge is becoming23
Here is an example of difference that would be subsumed under categories of identity: An ironing
board and a shoe are different. They are different because there is such a thing as an ironing board (an
identity) and a shoe (another identity), and those identities are not identical with each other. They are
different. Here difference means non-identical. For example G.W.F Hegel sees difference in the form of
opposition. This is difference seen through the dialectic. A perception that appears immediately to me,
without being brought into linguistic categories, is opposed to linguistically mediated perception (it is a
chair or it is red).The immediate and mediated are opposites. Hegel sometimes says that each is the
negation of the other. In the course of the dialectic, these oppositions will need to be mediated into a
higher unity that will eliminate their opposition. The immediate character of perception and its linguistic
mediation will need to be reconciled, their opposition overcome. This is a sophisticated form of
difference, but one that is still subsumed under categories of identity. The identity of the immediate is
opposed to the identity of the mediated, although in the end they will both be subsumed. But they will be
subsumed into a higher identity that captures them both. Difference here is in thrall to identity (May,
2005: 54).
Deleuze, taking his cues from Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, opens a
programme of a metaphysics of the world as it is, but in order to recognize its
diversity and transience. Against the emphasis of transcendence in the older
metaphysics, Deleuze emphasises immanence: the requirement to account
philosophically for the world not as it ought to be according to a Rational Ideal.
- 95 singular existing at its own level of contraction and bound to the rest of
temporality through duration (May, 2005: 45).
Furthermore, Deleuze argues not only that the domain of duration provides a
more profound multiplicity than space, but also that it poses a more profound
unity. The modal nature of space, in effect, does not afford it an inherent unity.
To recognize the essential nature of being as a substantial unity, then, we
have to think being in terms of time: a single Time, one, universal,
impersonal (Deleuze, 1988:78).
- 96 -
For Bergson, there is only one time, the time that includes both the present
and the past, always at the same time. It is this what Bergson is after in
constructing his concept of duration. The present passes. In order for this to
happen there must be a past for the present to pass into. For psychological
memory, the past takes place in the present, in retention and in memory.
Husserls concept of retention as well as his concept of recollection and
remembering are psychological. It belongs to the living present of the
existential conception of time. Bergsons concept of the past is not
psychological; it is the ontological source from which memory springs.
Bergsons ontological memory is concerned with the past itself, not simply
with its existence in the present. Only the present is psychological; but the
past is pure ontology; pure recollection has only ontological significance
(Deleuze, 1988: 56).
The past is not merely a psychological residue in the present. If it were there
would be many pasts, as many as there are people, or as many as there are
psychological states of people. Memory is not a series of moments spread out
across a continuum. As a present moment passes into the past, it passes into
all of the past, not just in serial connection to the immediately preceding
moment. The entire past exists as a tightly contracted horizon surrounding the
passing present moment. Bergsonian duration is defined less by succession
than by coexistence. For Bergson, there is one past, a single past in which all
psychological memory participates (Hardt, 1993: 15).
The past exists virtually. The virtual past is there; it is not a void or
nothingness. It is not the past of the linear conception of time. The past is not
an instant or a thing. But it is there, in a different way from the way the present
is there. For instance, genetic information, even though it exists it does not do
so in actuality. Genetic information is not visible. Only as the genes unfold, as
the person becomes what the information formatted that person to become,
do genes become apparent in the actual world. In the same way memory
actualises itself, but it does not exist in actuality. The virtual exists but not in
actuality. To understand the past is to understand the way expression occurs.
Thus, Bergson claims that within our normal experience the acts of perception
and memory are always mixed but that in themselves, according to their own
intrinsic natures as mental activities, they are clearly distinct and do not
overlap. This means that conscious experience is a wholly inadequate source
for understanding the components of experience. Experience is not selfelucidating, we do not arrive at an understanding of experience by examining
experience but only by acquiring a rigorous method for separating mental acts
from each other according to their own intrinsic natures. This method depends
on a distinction between what is given in experience, which Deleuze calls
actuality and the real natures of mental acts which are not given as such in
actuality. These natures only exist virtually (Due, 1999: 32).
There is a relation to the past which Deleuze calls pure memory (le souvenir
pur) in which the past is revealed as a virtual realm of being. The kind of
memory that is able to disclose the virtual region of the past is sharply distinct
from the mental activities of perception and awareness that are oriented
towards the present. Bergson analyses memory as being entirely distinct from
the mental activities of perception and involving a completely different
structure of mental activity. Deleuze thus argues that memory in its purest
form introduces the mind not only to a different dimension of being the
virtual past but also to a different dimension of thought. This realm of
thought consists of formal operations of combination and of abstract relations
of difference. These combinations and relations can only be thought of in the
primary sphere of the present in which we of course only grasp and relate to
what is actually present before us (Due, 1999: 48).
This theory of virtual being further means that the present moment is itself as
if split, composed internally and virtually of two temporal dimensions, on the
one hand the present tense this is now and on the other hand a
movement of passing away. This movement of passing away is for the
present already to belong to the past at the moment of being taken up by it,
otherwise the present and the past would be cut off from one another. The
present is thus virtually both present (first synthesis) and passing away
(second synthesis). The second synthesis is then the capacity to synthesize
the present with the past and from the point of view of the past. For thought,
this means that mental activity in the second synthesis moves beyond the
mere recording of what takes place before it. By opening up to virtuality, the
mind is now able to conceive of parallel series coexisting in the same present.
Deleuze finds this notion of virtually parallel series developed in the
philosophical tales of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. With Borges,
the possibilities of the narrative are not realized one at a time, so that the
ones that are realized exclude the ones that are not realized. Instead, all the
possibilities of the narrative co-exist as a virtual composition (Due, 1999:48).
- 99 -
In the next chapter, I will show how the body without organs becomes an
important ethical term, the idea being that we can only escape social and
political oppression by undoing the effects of social and political forces in
ourselves. This means undoing our social self and returning to a prior state of
being, reaching the body without organs. In such a state, thought moves
beyond the rational model of representation by purifying itself from the
contents of perception and pragmatic needs. Thinking is something we
undergo rather than do. It is the body rather than the mind that is involved in
the third synthesis, because the move beyond the present is a process that
affects the body as much as the mind. For it is through the body and its
repetitions that I am anchored in the present. The body without organs or the
third synthesis is an exploration of relations in thought unconstrained by
actual empirical content (Due, 1999:50).
The third synthesis corresponds to Bergsons pure being, the virtual simplicity
of being, pure recollection (le souvenir pur). Pure, virtual being is not abstract
and indifferent, it is real and qualified through the internal process of
differentiation. Being differs with itself. It does not look outside itself for
another or a force of mediation because its difference rises from its very core,
- 100 from the explosive internal force that life carries within itself (Deleuze, 1988:
105). Deleuze calls this force, in accordance with Bergson, the lan vital that
animates being. This vital process of differentiation links the pure essence
and the real existence of being: Virtuality exists in such a way that it is
realized in dissociating itself, that it is forced to dissociate itself in order to
realize itself (Deleuze, 1988: 93).
The virtual may not be actual, it is nonetheless real. Virtualities are always
real (in the past, in memory) and may become actualized in the present.
Deleuze invokes Proust for a definition of the states of virtuality: real without
being actual, ideal without being abstract (Deleuze, 1988:96). Deleuze claims
that the actualization of the virtual Whole is the positive production of the
actuality and multiplicity of the world: One only has to replace the actual
terms in the movement that produces them, that is, bring them back to the
virtuality actualized in them, in order to see that difference is never negative
but essentially positive and creative (Deleuze, 1988: 103).
- 101 Negativity only comes afterward, and it is a political affair (May, 1991:28). 24
For Deleuze, Bergsons ontological movement relies on an absolutely
immanent, efficient production of being driven by intuition. This creative
principle is a cosmic Memory, it actualizes all the levels at the same time
(Deleuze, 1988: 111). Cosmic Memory is capable of tracing the design of an
open society of creators. Cosmic Memory leaps from one soul to another,
every now and then, crossing closed deserts (Deleuze, 1988: 111). For
Deleuze there is no direct movement between intelligence and society.
Instead, society is more directly a result of irrational factors. What fills this gap
between intelligence and sociability is intuition. In order to bring this intuition
from ontology to politics in Deleuzes thought, it is necessary to look at the
conception of efficient power, or force internal to its manifestation, which is
developed in Deleuzes study of Nietzsche. By shifting the terrain from the
plane of logic to that of values, Deleuze moves from a Bergsonian logic of
being to a Nietzschean logic of the will (Hardt, 1993: 26).
Negativity is introduced only when positive transformation is made to turn back upon itself in order to
stifle itself, when life desires its own repression. In that social situation, there are forces that work
against life, but not by repressing it from the outside. This is the big issue Deleuze and Guattari identify
in capitalism. Under capitalism, we are made to desire or invest in our own repression. I will return to
this in section 4. 4.
25
According to Deleuze, Nietzsches method of cultural historical analysis of psychological and moral
phenomena is grounded in a particular ontology of force. This notion of force is not just a physical or
mechanical quantity but a quasi-spiritual energy expressed as signification. If the mind is a theatre, it is
because forces that run through the individual and forces influencing the individual from the outside find
expression in the mind. The mind, like the world, is a system of forces (Due, 1999:32).
- 102 view to growth. Here difference is purely positive. In selecting, not opposing or
negating, will to power expresses itself, expresses itself as selection and does
not stand outside the selection as a judge or subject. The selection is a selfdefining process. The will to power is not subject of this process. Deleuze
focuses on the willing of power, that is to say desire. He refrains from
subjectifying desire while recognizing the intimate and multiple couplings of
desire and power. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1993), Deleuze first linked
the notion of desire with the will to power and the insight that desire is
productive follows from his reflection on will to power (Schrift, 1995: 66).
There is a virtuality to machines because they are not reducible to their actual
connections, which allows them to connect in novel, different ways. Deleuze
and Guattaris concept of the machine is in line with the concept of difference,
which Deleuze developed before his collaboration with Guattari. Difference is
not a lack of identity or sameness. Machines are (using Melanie Klein's
terminology) partial objects, and the search for the whole object is misplaced
because machinic connections happen between partial objects. Unlike
classical mechanics, Deleuzian and Guattarian machinics are entropic
machines work by breaking down. Machines are simply material flows. Every
society is a machine because it is an assemblage that transfer, amplify, or
dissipate energy (Bogard, 1998: 68).
- 104 the maternal origin and submit to the system of exchange, law and
signification. Deleuze and Guattari's theory of productive desire reverses the
relation between desire and lack (ibid).
- 105 inevitability of weak, decadent will to power. Deleuze advocates that desire be
productive while recognizing that desire will sometimes be destructive and will
sometimes have to be repressed, while at other times it will seek and produce
its own repression (Schrift, 1995: 70)
In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze (1983a:59) shows that the active forces
of life go to the limit of what they can do. Active forces do whatever is in their
power to the full extent of their ability. Active forces are creative. What is
created is not only up to the active force. It also concerns the context in which
that force expresses itself and its own ability to reach its limit. The universe
does not necessarily cooperate with active forces, which means that their
creativity may be channeled in unexpected directions or even undermined
altogether (Due, 1999: 33).
Reactive forces separate an active force from what it can do. If active forces
go to the limit of their power and create through self-expression, reactive
forces stifle the creativity of active forces. As a reactive force, dialectics is a
The problem of repression or negativity is not that it comes to bear upon life
from something which is not life, but that it is a possibility internal to life itself
as it unfolds under determinate social conditions. We see the most
disadvantaged, most excluded members of society invest with passion in the
system that oppresses them, and where they always find an interest, since it
is here that they search for and measure it (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977:
346). Life exists only within the context of a determinate social situation in
which there are forces that work against life, but not by repressing it from the
outside. What certain determinate social conditions promote is a perversion of
life: life desires that which represses and negates it.
This can be explained as follows: Life flows along the two axes of being and
becoming, in which becoming is the primary axis. In The Logic of Sense,
Deleuze discusses the Stoic distinction between bodies, constancy of forms
or states of things, which are corporeal and of the present moment, and
events, which are incorporeal and occur as becomings in time (Deleuze,
1990: 4-6). For Stoics, bodies alone are the causes of events, bodies alone
can be causes, and bodies, in turn, are only causes. Bodies are primordial
mixtures or composites, unformed matters, with their corresponding
permeations, tensions, or states of affairs. They alone exist in space and
time (i.e., space as extension, time as the eternal present) (ibid).
On the other hand, events, for the Stoics, are non-corporeal idealities; they
are non-spatial and express a different order of time (unlimited time, time that
escapes the present). They are surface effects of the bodies, which are their
true causes. They result from the mixtures and composition of these bodies
and are coextensive with bodies, but are themselves neither bodies nor
causes, even among themselves (they are pure, incorporeal effects; they do
not exist, but rather, as Deleuze says, they subsist or insist). Like the Stoic
event, Deleuze sees sense or the thinkable as incorporeal and this therefore
means that it is relative to or dependent on something which is corporeal. Yet
Deleuze does not accept the materialist thesis of derivation or causation but
affirms that thought or culture has a structural autonomy. Sense, like the Stoic
event, is thus paradoxically both dependent and autonomous (Bogard, 1998:
61).
- 108 -
Like the Stoic event, sense is a phenomenon of the surface, while bodies,
as unformed and undetermined matters, inhabit the depths (it is important
not to confuse bodies with determined objects or even things, especially
with the human body or to consider surfaces superficial) (Deleuze, 1990: 4).
Life is not so much concerned with the physical as with the incorporeal or that
which occurs between bodies, what changes pass across the surfaces of
things that are not material but immaterial transformations. Life is concerned
with sense of things.
In keeping with the Stoical division into states of things (constancy of forms)
and incorporeal transformations (event or sense), all transformations occur
through or across states of things. Deleuze sees transformations as essential,
but this does not deny that states of things exist. The possibility presented by
states of things is that they will persist, and finally that they will block positive,
productive transformations from occurring. This possibility can be actualized,
not as an individual affair, but only in the social context, through the various
mechanisms of coding, decoding, and axiomatizing. This will be dealt with in
the next section where I will show how a social surface of sense, or the
thinkable, is achieved through the intermingling and inscription of bodies and I
will show how this inscriptive encounter is part of a history of political systems
(May, 1991:29).
The Deleuzian practice of affirmation and joy is directed toward creating social
bodies or planes of composition that are ever more powerful, while they
remain at the same time open to internal antagonisms. Political assemblage is
an art because it has to be continually reinvented. The multitude is assembled
through this practice as a social body defined by a common set of behaviours,
needs, and desires. This is Deleuze's way of grasping the living force in
society that continually emerges from the dead forces of social order. And this
quality of living is defined both by the power to act and the power to be
affected (Hardt, 1993:121).
- 109 In order to really think in terms of power, one must pose the question in
relation to the body (Deleuze, 1990: 257). From Spinoza, Deleuze has learnt
that politics arises as a question of bodies. To understand the nature of power
is to first discover the internal structure of the body. A body is a dynamic
relationship whose internal structure and external limits are subject to change.
For Deleuze [a] body's structure is the composition of its relation. What a
body can do is the nature and the limits of its power to be affected (Deleuze,
1990: 218). Passive affections mark a lack of power. The force of suffering
affirms nothing, because it expresses nothing at all: it is the lowest degree of
our power to act (Hardt, 1993: 92).
- 110 -
In the same way, I will now show that Deleuzes political critique does not
begin from a power that opposes desire but from one single univocal flow of
desire that produces the very terms that enslave it. Power derives from desire
and turns to repress or mark or inscribe the univocal flow of desire. From a
transcendental point of view we cannot assume some pre-social and essential
individual that we might discover underneath power. The transcendental
method of Deleuze is to show how persons are produced from the chaotic
flow of desire. Deleuze and Guattari want to show how desire has an
intensive and political history, which culminates in capitalism. Deleuze and
Guattaris views on capitalism will be dealt with in section 4.4. For now,
however, I will concentrate on how social structures produce themselves and
their subjects out of the immanent flow of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari refuse to begin their explanation of desire from what
man currently appears to be; instead they ask what historical forces produced
contemporary man and how those forces might be extended beyond man.
Deleuze and Guattari propose a new ontology of the social, of social being,
grounded in a philosophical ontology of being as pure difference or becoming.
Being, for Deleuze and Guattari, is that which differs from itself in nature,
always already, in itself, qualitatively different. This idea departs from the
dominant Western ontological tradition, which posits the identity of being and
supports, in their words, the representational thinking, or state philosophy,
that has governed Western metaphysics since Plato. Social theory has long
been an accomplice of this order, of identitary logic, 26 which acknowledges
difference in social being only to dispel it. Ontologically, the history of the
socials plurality springs from a common source. Identitary logic x = x = not
y structures every social theory whose inspiration can be traced to Hegel,
but also to Marx, whose critique of state philosophy accepted the dialectic. It
encompasses all the varieties of inter-actionism (self-identity as the reflection
26
27
For Schutz (1967), the lifeworld as social being is essentially a production of the Same-the mundane,
repetitive and taken-for-granted routines of everyday existence. The force of Schutz's work lies in his
attention to the unseen details of this production, but the lifeworld itself remains a synthetic unity, a
resolution of the contradictions of co-presence (I-Thou-We).
28
Deleuze and Guattari do not accept Baudrillards idea of a non-structural exchange since exchange
remains the conceptual basis of the definition of society rather than their notion of inscription (Genosko,
1994: 95).
29
Deleuze and Guattari describe Nietzsches The Genealogy of Morals as the greatest book of modern
ethnology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:190). Nietzsches ethnology is used to trace the cruelty of
marking bodies. Punishment, for example, begins as festive cruelty, the sheer force and enjoyment of
inflicting suffering to affirm one's power. But we subsequently come to imagine a law and morality that
would justify and organise this pleasure of asserting force; in doing so we invent man and morality. A
genealogy does not accept the current reason or understanding of the present; it looks to the past in
order to unhinge the present, to show that there is no justification for the present. Deleuze and Guattari's
two major works, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, are genealogies of capitalism and humanism;
they both attempt to show how man and capital emerge from the play of forces and interacting bodies.
Deleuze and Guattari also explicitly wrote a geology of morals. This extended the idea that there is not a
history or single line of development, but overlaid strata or plateaus: the history of inhuman and
inorganic life, as well as differing histories within the human (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:3974).
30
Lingis (1994) is valuable for providing many historical examples of body markings in savage,
despotic and modern societies.
- 112 bodies that vary in intensity and composition. Exchange relations, and social
relations generally, already presuppose a complex machinics of desire, an
orchestration of currents, in ways that connect some bodies together and
disconnect them from others. Deleuze and Guattaris political theory begins
with pre-personal desire. Pre-personal desire is simply the chaotic flow and
force of life, prior to any organised identity or stability. The concept of the
individual is for Deleuze and Guattari repressive or reactionary because it
grounds all desires on some prior value of the self. This is why Deleuze and
Guattari historicise the individual's emergence from desire, and in so doing
hope to provide a political theory of difference (Due, 1999: 77).
- 114 -
31
Outside, that is, the Western or Occidental formulation of the concept, which is rooted in a philosophy
of identity and sameness. For Deleuze and Guattari's critique of this philosophy and the alternative they
pose to it (a notion of the concept grounded in a philosophy of difference), see Deleuze and Guattari,
1994:24.
32
This breaking of an immanent relation between meaning and reason, between sense and the concept
has provoked charges of irrationalism against the kinds of poststructuralist thinking that Deleuze and
Guattari represent. See, for example Habermas, 1984:3. Habermas, in this sense, is absolutely correct
to see the history of sociological theory as a history of rationalization. Given its identification of sense
with significance, it could be little else. At the same time, his critical theory does not move beyond this
history, but reflects only an effort to complete it. Habermas cannot concede the possibility of a notion of
sense outside the concept because this would undermine in a fundamental way his theory of validity
claims. i.e., that society, for its very existence, depends on the assumption of a rational basis for
speech.
33
I use the term inhuman not in the sense of lacking some quality of humanity but in Deleuzes positive
sense that there is a world of life and affect synthesis well beyond the domain of human beings.
34
Foucault, perhaps, has offered the best defense of poststructuralism against the charge of
irrationality. Against all the excesses of rationality in the twentieth century (the concentration camps,
the gulags), Foucault asks if we should not perhaps put Reason itself on trial. Such a response, he
argues, would be completely sterile. Rather than focus on rationalization in the abstract (a criticism of
Habermas), we should analyze specific rationalities, i.e., the concrete power relations that define
rationality within specific fields and in reference to specific kinds of experience (e.g. madness, illness,
criminality, sexuality; 1982: 210). Such an approach has much in common with that of Deleuze and
Guattari.
- 115 Deleuze and Guattari recognize a symbolic reality holding society together.
But their account of the symbolic reality is non-reductive, so what it describes
is no longer symbolic or signifying but expressive: the expression of reality as
sense. Deleuze conceives sense independently of both agency and
signification. That is, sense is neither the manifestation of a communicating
subject nor a structure of language it is incorporeal, impersonal, and prelinguistic; a pure effect or event (Bogard, 1998: 20).
The event reveals that existence itself is a narrow slice of the real. The event
does not exist, it makes possible, it has force but it does not act (Deleuze,
1990:183). Deleuze asks how sound, which issues from bodies, becomes
separated enough from those bodies to be organized into propositions and
expressions. How do sighs of pleasure or other sounds of the body, cross
- 116 over to the relative autonomy required for language? Something separates
the proposition sound of language from the state of affairs, the corporeal
sound of the body. And this permits one to turn toward language and the
states of things. It must use this double aspect to organize the relationship
between language and the state of affairs, but be neither one nor the other,
for if it were one or the other it could not separate and organize the two series
language and states of affairs; it would merely homogenize them so that we
would need to say that all states of affairs are language, or that language is
simply another state of affairs. An event operates on both sides by means of
one and the same incorporeal power' (Deleuze, 1990:183).
For Deleuze, the perfect model of the event has always been death. Death
has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in
me, but it also has no relation to me at all it is incorporeal and infinitive,
impersonal, grounded only in itself. On one side, there is a part of the event
which is realized and accomplished; on the other there is that part of the event
that cannot realize it accomplishment (Deleuze, 1990:151). The event
crosses the threshold from the non-existent to the existing world, making
possible and exerting force while powerless to act. It is the ideal model of the
relationship of human and non-human. The objection that the non-human
does not exist must be met with a claim that renders the objection irrelevant.
The non-human does not exist, does not act, but, like the sense-event, makes
possible the human. It has force that is not of existence, and it holds together
the human and the non-human in two resonating series that make the human
possible. The human fears this encounter because it is the overwhelming
force of the real that exceeds existence (Jameson, 1999: 67).
- 117 leaf) is an event which possesses its own sense (Deleuze, 1990: 6). The
greening of the tree cannot be located in a specific place and time: instead it
is a meaning which is extracted from its actualization in a body. Meaning
never comes from language as such; it is determined by an outside of
language the real social power formations that can be identified in terms of
territories.
It is the myth of representation that separates man from an inert and passive
world that he then brings into language. There is not a present world and then
a representing language. The world or cosmos is an immanent plane of
signification or semiosis. There are signs and codes throughout life, not just in
the separate mind of man or language. Before there is a system of language
that allows one to refer to a world stretched out before us, there are
investments in intensities. A tribe, for example, enjoys and invests in an
image, such as an animal, a body part or an inscription. It is not that the tribe
uses the symbol of the animal to represent who they are; it is only in gathering
around or desiring this image that there is a tribe at all. The investment
produces an assemblage of bodies; it does not represent it. Deleuze and
Guattari refer to these as territorial or collective investments, and it is the
investment that connects the tribe as a group not some underlying identity,
which the investment then signifies. A tribe territorializes through a collective
and connective ritual of marking, where each body is scarred or marked by a
tattoo. This is a process of coding: cutting or marking the flows of intensity into
body parts or specific intensities (Colebrook, 2002b: 108).
Codes are not representations they articulate bodies and liberate libidinal
forces, allowing them to recombine in new ways. Coding does not produce
identities or resolve contradictions it multiplies surfaces, like the infolding
effect of fractals described by chaos theory not x = x = not y, but x + y + z
+ a... (an arm connects to a tool which connects to a flow of thought which
connects to various affective states . . .). While the coding machine certainly
operates as a state apparatus, state philosophy systematically misconceives
that operation, positing a necessary connection for what is a purely contingent
relation of heterogeneous elements, an identity of parts for what is an internal
Deleuze
distinguishes
the
connexion
(connection)
from
conjugaison
- 119 -
Deleuze and Guattari borrow from Marx the view that the state or despot
comes into existence as something that subordinates pre-existing tribes,
communities, clans and groups. It makes these diverse groupings resonate
but relating them to a central institution or structure. The state is an idea, if not
ideality, thus giving evidence of another dimension, a cerebral ideality that is
added to, superimposed on the material evolution of societies, a regulating
idea or principle of reflection that organises the parts and flows into a whole
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 259). This leads to the mutually reinforcing
connection between thought and the state, in which thought and philosophy
borrows its model from the state (a republic of free spirits whose prince would
be the idea of the supreme being) and in turn the state is legitimated by
thought (the more you obey the more you will be master, for you will only be
obeying pure reason, in other words yourself) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977:
259). The passage from tribal society to despotic or state societies is marked
by an increased level of abstraction; a homogenization of the social realm
from the stand point of a centre; the imposition of a representational system of
regulation (Read, 2008: 145).
Every form of society or form of social production has an aspect that appears
as the condition or cause rather than the effect of the productive relations, the
desires and labours of a society. Paradoxically this quasi-cause appears to be
a cause of production because it is itself not productive, it is anti-productive. It
appropriates forces of production, distributing some for the reproduction of
society and wasting most in excessive expenditure (such as tribal honours,
palaces or war). As Marx argues, the Asiatic despot appears to be the cause
and not the effect of the productive powers of society, the massive public
works, such as irrigation that define the Asiatic mode of production for Marx:
it appropriates for itself the productive powers of society. Each of the precapitalist modes of production is constituted by a fundamental misrecognition,
what is produced by the labour of the community appears as its precondition,
as an element of divine authority. This misrecognition stems from a
fundamental difference, a basic gap between production and the recording or
- 120 representation of production. Production is not recorded in the same way that
it is produced (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 12).
35
It is only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are
petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes
effects, by a 'subject' the popular mind separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an
action, for the operation of a subject called lightning as if there were a neutral substratum behind [it]
But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming the deed is
everything (Nietzsche, 1967:45).
- 121 -
Under capitalism, labour and wealth have become stripped of any code that
would tie them to any determinate relation to the past. Rather than coding the
various practices and desires constitutive of the society, capitalism functions
by setting up quantitative relations between the two flows of labour and
capital, establishing as axiomatic an equivalent between a particular amount
of labour time and a particular amount of money. Axioms relate to no other
scene or sphere, such as religion, politics or law, which would provide their
ground or justification. Axioms are distinct from codes in that they do not
require belief in order to function (Jameson, 1997:398).
- 122 -
Deleuze and Guattari insist that the breakdown of codes and traditions by
abstract quantities of labour and desire or deterritorialisation is inseparable
from the process of reterritorialisation, which means the revival of antiquated
beliefs and political forms, archaisms. This is not due to some grand conflict of
cultures (Jihad vs McWorld) but it is two sides of capitalism itself. It is a
conflict between capitalisms tendency to create new desire, new needs, new
experiences and possibilities (or what Deleuze calls deterritorialisation) and
the tendency to subordinate this potential to the overarching need of
maintaining and reproducing the existing distribution of wealth and property
(Deleuze, 2004:196).
What Deleuze and Guattari insist on and this makes up the idea of
reterritorialsation is that capitalism produces subjectivity, not in spite of its
disruptive and deterritorialising cultural and political force but through it.
- 124 Modern subjectivity is split between axioms and codes, between cynicism and
piety, between past and future. Deleuze and Guattaris insistence on the
immediate coincidence of subjectivity and production makes it possible to see
this split as a political division, between meaninglessness of capital and the
search for meaning and tradition (Read, 2008:147).
Capitalism is thus able to confront and overcome its limits. Capital now
becomes a limit towards which all societies tend because its own limits are
merely relative. Each time it approaches one, it can displace it by various
means, such as a recession together with a drop in wages of the lowest paid.
Capital is much more invisible than in its classical Marxist account because its
internal contradiction now only makes it stronger (Goodchild, 1996:120).
- 125 systems down; on the contrary, they are the very motors which give society its
dynamism. Social machines feed off:
the contradictions they give rise to, the crisis they provoke, on the
anxieties they engender. Capitalism has learnt this and has ceased
doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the
possibility of capitalisms natural death by attrition (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1977:178).
Capitalisms apparent indifference to the beliefs and desires of its subjects, its
ability to tolerate everything, to turn every scandal and taboo into a commodity
must itself be seen as a kind of social subjection to capital. Deleuze and
Guattari began to illustrate this by suggesting that the gap that exists in capital
between what one believes and what one does, already carries with it a
subjective and affective component.
It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of
cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. (The two taken together
constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence of the social
field and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualised Urstaat; cynicism is
capital as the means of extorting surplus labour, but piety is this same
capital as God capital whence all the forces of labour seem to
emanate) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977:225).
or
intra-atomic
distance in
metres
and
- 127 system as equals; the dollars you and I earn are the same dollars that the
wealthy invest to make billions. It makes it appear as if the dollars that we
carry in our wallet are made of the same substance as the money that is
capital. The difference between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited is not
coded in language and blood, honour or race, it is expressed as a purely
quantitative difference. Thus it is possible to believe that only a few dollars
more will enable one to cross the line, to invest to become rich. Capital does
not spread the wealth, only the idea that we could all become wealthy (Read,
2008:153).
The defining contradictions at the heart of the modern capitalist machine, the
obscenity which it must constantly try to hide, is the scandalous difference in
kind between the money of the wage earner and the money of the financier,
between the money that functions purely as payment and money that
functions as finance. The wage earners money can be used to buy goods
and even to set a value on certain goods, but this is a limited power in that its
effects are always confined to an extremely localised sphere of influence. In
contrast, the financiers money is capable of affecting the lives of billions of
people as is evident in the operations of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank. These two institutions transform the finances of
whole nations into mere wage earners payment money. Persuaded that First
World standard of living is in reach, Third World nations have taken on vast
amounts of debt which has reduced them to a state of peonage (Buchanon,
2008:31). The Third world dreams of transforming payment money into
finance money.
- 128 desire disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of
any economic understanding or lack of it, in the capitalist social field as a
whole(Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 229).
- 129 conscious or unconscious repressions to which they have been subject (May,
1991:34).
4.5. Conclusion
Baudrillard focuses not on difference, but on radical otherness, that which lies
beyond all law, structure and systems. Baudrillards unconvertible other is
based on an absence, a lack, a void. For Baudrillard, Islamic suicide bombers
are the radical other that have succeeded in turning their own deaths into an
absolute weapon against a system that operates on the basis of the exclusion
of death. Baudrillard states that if the political economy is the most rigorous
attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to
political economy. Baudrillards powerful emphasis on the exclusion of death
in capitalism, however, lacks transformative force. Baudrillard remains in the
place of criticism. Symbolic exchange stays in place after wreaking its
damage.
Deleuze and Guattari show that it is the place of capitalism which must be
overcome. And this can be done only by displacement of and flight from
capitalism. There is a movement in Baudrillards work (a libidinal conception
of exchange), but Baudrillard installs a non-place of non-value in the place of
theory. Baudrillard produces a lost referent. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise
the ability of life to always transform itself. A politics of life focuses on the
specific intertwining of fluidity and constancy, life and death, becoming and
being that occur on various levels.
- 131 they are a political ontology that provides tools to describe transformative,
creative forces and movements. Deleuze and Guattari provide a conceptual
language in which to describe the impact of social movements that impose
new political demands upon the qualitative or cultural dimensions of social life.
Among the many places where analysis and intervention are possible for
Deleuze, art is ranked as special because it is here where the positive,
productive, and incorporeal are being both enacted and perverted. Deleuze
and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus calls for a subjective multiplicity, difference,
deindividualisation and displaced desire. This is a self-invention, connection
and expansion, an enlargement of lifes limits across capital relation.
Capitalism must become material for a new mode of expression: capitalism
can become a form of content for an independent machine of expression.
- 132 -
CHAPTER 5
Deleuze: Revolution of Desire
5.1. Introduction
As shown in the previous chapter, Deleuze and Guattari do not see life as
some linear or developing power that creates a human brain that can then
understand that originating life. Deleuze and Guattari posit one plane of
immanence or desire from which everything actual emerges. On the one
hand, there is a life of the actual organism: the life of a human body that has a
certain stable continuity and then dies. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other
hand, aim for a radical sense of life the life beyond the bounded organism
with its own life. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the body without
organs. The body without organs in Anti-Oedipus (1977) is that which is other
than the closed organism.
In a Thousand Plateaus (1987), the notion of the body without organs will
become an important ethical term, the idea being that we can only escape
social and political oppression by undoing the effects of social and political
forces in ourselves. This means undoing our social self or personality in order
to return to a prior virtual state of being, reaching the unorganised level of life
which is the body without organs. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the image
of the organism is really opposed to desire. Desire must be understood to
embody the power of metamorphosis or differential reproduction, which is the
condition of creativity in culture as well as in nature.
- 133 in their pure state. It is not some actual ground or being that precedes
different parts, nor some organism that unites parts into a more meaningful
whole. This is why desire itself is revolutionary; desire is just this flow that
passes across, destroys and dissolves organisms, structures, terms and
identities.
The first section of this chapter will therefore explain the virtual flow of desire,
its positivity and productivity. I will move on specifically to how social
production stabilises, identifies and codes the flow of pure becoming and
differentiation. This requires that I show the various historical stages of
Deleuze and Guattaris political theory of desire and how each stage has its
own dominant form of synthesis or production. The first synthesis is that of
connection or territorializing. It is also a process of coding: cutting the flows of
intensity into body parts or specific intensities. Then there is the second
synthesis of disjunction, with one intensity set against another; the occupied
territories are ordered by some overarching or transcendent power such as a
despot or State. Then there is the third synthesis of conjunction. The law is no
longer transcendent. It becomes the internal and immanent law of life. The
third synthesis of conjunction refers all the flows back to some general
abstract essence, such as the flow of capital.
The second section of this chapter will show that works of art open thought
onto the body and landscape, so as to give voice to the body before all
organisation, discovering its postures, capabilities and the forces which work
upon it. By working through matter, art makes visible the imperceptible forces
- 134 that work upon us. 37 Deleuze embraces an art where the material rises up into
a metamorphic plane of forces. I will explain that this involves a process of
passive synthesis. Art is thereby able to articulate pre-personal, inhuman,
unlived forces. Capitalism constructs a closed and finite world, whereas art
rediscovers the infinite through finite objects that it fashions, restoring the
infinite as a principle of composition.
The plane of composition 38 opened by an artwork cannot be identified as an
origin, grounding or founding subject. This is a crucial feature of all Deleuze
and Guattaris work, which ties them both to a modernist conception of art and
distinguishes them from either a philosophy of life or phenomenology. I will
show that art is not representational, nor is it expressive of an artists personal
vision. I will show that Deleuze claims that art releases a non-intentional level
of life. This non-representational and pre-conscious level is connected to and
comes out of the materiality of art, namely the block of sensations that it
conserves.
In the final section of this chapter I will move on specifically to Deleuzes work,
Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. I will first show that Bacon, as a painter of
sensations and forces, shows an experience of the body that leads one
beyond the phenomenological lived body to the chaotic body without organs. I
will show how this refers to the process in which the organised forms of
conventional representation are deformed. Bacon paints the body, the figure
of sensation as opposed to the figurative body of conventional representation.
Bacons primary subject matter is the body disorganised and deformed by a
plurality of forces. This extraordinary bodily passivity in Bacon is not negative.
I will show that, by painting forces and their effects of deformation on bodies,
Bacon is able to confront and combat the forces of violence and terror.
37
Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern, macht sichtbar (Klee, 1961:76).
Plane of composition, plane of immanence and body without organs all refer to the same thing. In
What is Philosophy Deleuze and Guattari seek to differentiate philosophy and the arts and do so by
distinguishing between a philosophical plane of immanence and an artistic plane of composition. The
philosophical plane of immanence they identify as that of the virtual and the pure event and the artistic
plane of composition is that of the possible and sensation. Given the insistent presence of the concepts
of the virtual and the event in nearly all of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattaris analysis of the arts, such a
configuration can be confusing.
38
- 135 -
Alternatively, if one persists in calling such libidinal energy sexual, then one
must say that sexuality is everywhere: in the manner in which a bureaucrat
fondles his files, the way in which a judge administers justice, or the way in
which a film-maker handles her camera, her characters and her story. What is
important is the manner in which this energy is invested in its surrounding
field: we always make love with worlds, Deleuze and Guattari write, and our
love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close
himself or herself off or open up to more spacious worlds (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1977: 294).
- 136 production. Deleuze and Guattari also continually argue that desire only works
when it breaks down. It is only when desire goes haywire refusing any
recognised or visible object as its supposed fulfilment that it is really at work.
Desire is essentially alien to structure, organisation and extended systems.
For desire is just this flow that passes across, destroys and dissolves
structures, terms and identities. Desire is the tendency towards flow and
difference, which means that desire is inherently revolutionary or destructive
of any closed order. Desire is a flow of life, an impersonal differentiating
sexuality, which produces organisms. So, before there are any subjects who
desire, there is the production or synthesis of desire (Colebrook, 2002b: 106).
Desire is a positive and productive force in the sense that it produces real
relations, connections, investments and intensive states within and between
bodies. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari suggest (1977: 30) desire
produces reality. This sets the Deleuzian theory apart from the idea that
desire is constituted by the ever-renewed and impossible attempt to regain a
lost object of satisfaction. The point is to deny that unsatisfied desire is the
essence of desire.
Deleuze had already placed a great deal of importance on the positive notion
of synthesis in Difference and Repetition, where the argument was tied to the
history of philosophy. In order to have a world or an experienced and ordered
domain of objects, philosophers like Hume and Kant argued that there needed
to be a process of synthesis (Deleuze, 1984: 191). Perceptions need to be
- 137 connected into spatial and temporal continuities; the world is ordered causally
and logically. The world is the effect of a process of synthesis. Deleuze mostly
accepts this argument but he emphasises that there is not a world but worlds
resulting from all the different syntheses that make up life. Alongside the
synthesised worlds there is also the chaosmos, intense germinal influx, a
plane of immanence, plane of composition, a body without organs or
mechanosphere (depending on which of his books we are reading).
This plane upon which syntheses take place is itself a production or synthesis;
it is produced alongside. That is, there is a process of synthesis and
connection; this produces relations and terms. There is some presynthesised, disorganised or chaotic origin or plane from which synthesis
emerged. There is however not a subject who faces chaos, there is a sieve
from which chaos is inseparable and which is like a crystal of becoming that
draws on chaos for its forces. Chaos is inseparable from the crystal of its selfperception. The crystal shows the power of expression indiscernible from the
content it determines. The crystal is expression (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986:
74).
The BwO (Body without Organs) is the egg. But the egg is not
regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always
- 138 carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation, your associated
milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension
the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not
undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished
solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 164).
Deleuze and Guattari describe various historical stages of the political theory
of desire, each of which has its own dominant form of synthesis or production.
Anti-Oedipus is a history of desire and its syntheses. In Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze and Guattari refer firstly to a synthesis based on the connection of
flows. The difference between one flow and another, or one becoming and
another, can be understood in terms of cut and connection. A plant turns to
the sun; a wasp flies to an orchid each connection is the becoming of a flow
of life, but it is a double-becoming becoming; it becomes only through
connection with another becoming. It is this connection or synthesis that
allows two intensities to be cut from the flow of life. A flow continues and
becomes only in being connected, but any connection also cuts into the first
flow. The two intensities wasp and orchid become only in being
connected. The flow of life, the flow that is at the origin of all these specific
intensive flows, does not actually exist; it is the virtual whole of
interconnecting and interrupting intensive flows. These intensities emerge
from difference itself (Patton, 2000: 69).
What is produced out of cuts and connections are desiring machines. These
connections are not connections between terms; they are expressions of a
flow of life from which extended terms can then be abstracted. Sexuality, for
example, is best understood not as one person desiring another, but as the
way in which life produces and continues with bodies being the points
through which this impersonal life flows. Distinct bodies would be intense
affirmations of virtual differences or tendencies. Masculinity and femininity, for
example, are two of the responses or creations that life produces in order to
continue. There is a flow of life that affirms and expresses itself in different
ways, such as sexually different bodies. But the general notion of male and
- 139 female as two sexes is the result of reducing a far more complex political
history that begins with the differentiation of genetic flows into larger territories
(Colebrook, 2002b: 103).
connection
for
what
is
purely
contingent
relation
of
- 140 affect or intensity that organises the tribe. The mark or scar (the code) is
read as a sign of subordination to the power of the despot. The pain is no
longer a collective ritual of intensity, but the threat of the despot's power. The
pain has become more than itself, producing a surplus value of code; it has
been overcoding (Goodchild, 1996:86).
Lastly, there is the third synthesis of conjunction. The flows are explained or
referred back to some ground, reason or logic from which they emerged. The
connections are governed by some general law of nature. The cruelty of tribal
scarring or coding is not just ordered by the terror of the despot or State; the
law is no longer a transcendent and explicitly overpowering terror. It becomes
the internal and immanent law of life.
- 141 -
of
exchange
that
has
become
the
immanent
authority.
- 142 Capitalism does not work by ideology or belief; capitalism is not a set of moral
or political values. This is why capitalism can allow for all forms of art,
knowledge and belief.
The only way out of this is to push the deterritorialising tendency of capitalism
to its limit. If all life is flow and synthesis then the illusion that such flows can
be generalised into a single system that can act as the axiom or starting point
for all flows must be undone. Rather than seeing difference as the system of
signification that codes and orders all other differences, the very notion of the
speaking subject or man as the locus of economic and sexual difference
is actually the effect of inhuman, divergent and positive becomings.
Revolution, therefore, is not about transgression or overthrowing the law
revolution comes from confronting the syntheses of desire that produces law.
The task Deleuze and Guattari propose is then to take this image of universal
man and capital and disclose its specific political and historical formations.
The State is the site of deterritorialisation, a point within desire that elevates
itself to be the law of all desire. This transcendence, in capitalism, becomes
nothing more than the abstract essence of man and capital in general
(Colebrook, 2002b: 133).
- 143 deterritorialisation that serve as the foundation for desiring machines and
make them function (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 368)
For Deleuze, one can only think out of joint with ones time if one affirms the
deterritorialisation power of capital. This requires that one sees life as a flow
that is not the flow of some underlying substance (such as capital). Where
capitalism constructs a closed and finite world through money, sheltered from
chaos, art rediscovers the infinite through finite objects that it fashions,
restoring the infinite as a principle of composition. Unlike capitalism, art
wishes to tear open the firmament and plunge into chaos, before returning as
if from the land of the dead (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 202). There is an
economy to art: an economy of intensification with respect to change rather
than an economy of production with respect to investment. The power of the
artist is to take an actualised set of relations the lived and open up the
potential of other relations. Life is not properly realised in human perception,
for our world is only one of the ways in which life might be actualised or lived
(Goodchild, 1996: 188).
39
Aesthetic modernity is, by the conventions of most art historians and literary critics, dated from the
last decades of the nineteenth century. It constitutes a break with representation, hence a certain selfreferentiality and above all a set of formalisms.
- 144 appealed to history, tradition or culture as the broader life that might be
appealed to in the face of commodification (Colebrook, 2006: 94).
Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, reject the idea that there is some
human history or tradition which might reground life and which can be
retrieved if art is separated from everyday life. Great art is not expressive of
any constituted tradition and the life which the work of art opens up is radically
inhuman and radically futural and not yet given any form of experience. On
the other hand, while critical of some aspects of modernism, it is the
modernist production of the radically separated artwork that enables Deleuze
and Guattari to see the autonomy of affect and percept in all art (Colebrook,
2006: 94).
Percepts are not perceptions, and affects are not affections or feelings, for
percepts are independent of a state of those that undergo them and affects
do not arise from subjects but instead pass through them (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1994:164). The percept is the landscape before man, in the
absence of man (ibid.,169). Affects are these non human becomings of man,
just as percepts are the non human landscapes of nature (ibid.,169). Percepts
are not continuous with life and are not effects of a synthetic activity of
consciousness. Affects and percepts stand alone and bear an autonomy that
undoes any supposed independence of self constituting consciousness: we
attain to the percept and affect only as autonomous and sufficient beings that
no longer owe anything to those who experience them or who have
experienced them (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 168). Deleuze insists on art
as a power that is not located within lived experience nor within a constituted,
personal, historical time.
Deleuze and Guattari, like the modernists, want to reach the animating life
from which systems and maps of movement emerge. Modernist works of
literature stepped back from habit, reification, mechanization, commodification
in order to intuit the emergence of order from chaos, the genesis and the
sense of logic from the flux of life. It is this idea of plunging back into life and
then re-emerging with the work of art that frames Ezra Pounds Cantos, which
- 145 recalls Homers Odyssey and the poets giving of blood to the ghosts of the
past in order to retrieve the life of the present. Everyday present life is dead
precisely because it has become enslaved to the technologies that were
originally formed to sustain life. In T.S. Eliots The Waste Land urban
commuters are figured as the march of the dead into hell. In D.H Lawrences
novels and short stories, mining communities are represented as a form of
living dead. In Joyces Ulysses a funeral body passes through the streets of
London and in Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway the city is haunted by the
spectral figure of Septimus, the returned soldier. For the modernists, the only
escape of this land of the living dead is through an escape from life as it is
currently lived (Colebrook, 2006: 94).
Deleuze and Guattari directly refer to this communion of the dead in What is
Philosophy? Instead of the habitual life that has become organised by the
labouring human body, Deleuze and Guattari advocate a life of sensation that
has not been synthesised or rendered meaningful: The philosopher, the
scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead The artist
brings back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction
of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of
sensation that is able to restore the infinite (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:
202).
Just as Joyces Ulysses sets the flowing life of Molly Blooms menstruation
beyond the newspaper dominated streets of urban Dublin, Deleuze and
Guattari also describe the artist as plunging into chaos and returning with a
renovated order. However, Deleuzes approach to modernism is not reducible
to a return to the lived. Life is not the lived, not the unified world of one
ongoing, meaning producing humanity. On the contrary, there can only be the
perception of the life of humanity or the history of this world because various
affects have been organised from some synthesising point of view; before the
lived there is for Deleuze and Guattari the affects or possible encounters from
which lives are forged. The affect certainly does not undertake a return to
origins, as if beneath civilisation we would rediscover in terms of
In Difference and Repetition, and in many of his other works, Deleuze refers
to passive synthesis. We usually conclude that because our world is made up
of meaningful and ordered (or synthesised) units that there must have been
some subject who synthesised, and we usually think of this subject as the
human mind or ego. But synthesis, Deleuze insists, is passive and can only
be explained if we do not locate desire within organisms but think of desire as
life itself, which then synthesises or connects and produces organisms.
Traditional evolutionary theory suffers from the same failures that plague
western metaphysics: of thinking difference extensively. It explains life from
bodies or species that survive, respond and adapt. To think creation
intensively demands that we see evolution as a process that flows through
bodies, so that genetic creations are neither bounded by organisms, nor can
they be explained as adaptations or responses to some outside world
(Colebrook, 2002b: 118).
- 148 There is a creative genesis that produces borders between insides and
outsides through the formation of strata. The development of vision, for
example, is a creation that can be affirmed in the becoming of a number of
species in different ways; it is a tendency in life which can manifest itself or be
actualised in different types of organisms. It is not that the organism offers a
response to an outside world. It is from a responsive life in general that the
eye light assemblage can be formed. There is, in life, already a virtual
tendency for vision to be actualised, and it can be actualised through different
lines of development. The tendency or becoming is not owned by the
organism; the organism is the vehicle or passage through which the becoming
flows (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 225).
The history of thought has tended to ground synthesis on some subject, such
that becoming or desire the very production of life is interpreted as the
activity of some being. This is the error of transcendence: attributing
becoming to one of its effects. It is only when synthesis is seen as passive
that desire can really be affirmed. Actives synthesis is the activity of some
thing, being or subject; it relates, then, to what it is not. The subject
synthesises its world; mind synthesises its experiences. But passive synthesis
just means that there is production and connection, without being grounded
on some prior agent or subject (Bogue, 2003a: 183).
The work of art produces a unity, but this product is simply a new part that is
added alongside the other parts. The artwork neither unifies nor totalises
these parts, but it has an effect on them because it establishes syntheses
between elements that in themselves do not communicate, and that retain all
their difference in their own dimensions. Art establishes transversals
between the elements of multiplicities, but without ever reducing their
difference to a form of identity or gathering up the multiplicity into a totality.
The work of art, as a compound of sensations, is not unification or totalisation
of differences, but rather the production of a new difference. Deleuzes theory
of art is not a theory of reception, an analytic of the spectators judgment of a
work of art, but a theory of aesthetics written from the point of view of creation
(Bogue, 1996: 49).
The aim of art is not to represent the world as it is, but to present a sensation,
which is a composition of forces, an intensive synthesis of differential
relations. The conditions of sensation are at the same time the conditions for
the production of the new. For Deleuze, art is not representational, bearing a
- 150 resemblance to the world: no art and no sensations have ever been
representational (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 193). Representational
thinking assumes that there is an ordered and differentiated world, which we
then dutifully represent; it does not allow for thought itself to make a
difference, and it does not see difference as a positive and creative power to
differentiate. If thought were simply representation, then we could only
imagine difference as the difference between the different beings that we
recognise: the world of representation is characterised by its inability to
conceive of difference in itself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 138).
- 151 continues to produce its fruits. Nature and art are two kingdoms of creation.
But the second owes nothing to the first Klee says that the artist is nothing
more than a tree trunk through which the sap rises; but the fruit the tree bears
is something no one has ever seen before (Lyotard, 1971: 237-238). Paul
Klees phrase echoes Deleuzes writings on the arts: not to render the visible,
but to render visible.
For Deleuze and Guattari, art or the body of sensation renders visible the
invisible forces that play through bodies. They do not make a distinction
between external forces and internal sensations, but between invisible forces
and visible bodies. Is it not the genius of Cezanne to have subordinated all
the means of painting to this task: to render visible the folding force of
mountains, the germinative force of the apple, the thermal force of the
landscape etc? (Deleuze, 1988: 39). The germinative force of the apple is
experienced as a corporeal intensity, but that force is not a mere
psychological projection any more than the apple is an extension of the
human body. In sensation there is no differentiation of inside and outside, of
human and non-human. Hence Deleuzes insistence that the germinative
force is the apples force, not the viewing subjects, a factual rather than a
projected, phantasmagoric intensity (Bogue, 2003a: 125).
Art stands alone as a monument that produces sensations that no longer rely
on a perceiving subject or a constituted world. This can be explained with
reference to Maldineys Heideggerian meditation on the monument (Maldiney,
1973: 174-82). The monument is Denkmal, both sign (to think, denken) and
body (paint, Mal). The monolith is the simplest and most ancient of
monuments and the prototype of all artworks, a surging forth of a self-forming
form. In Maldineys analysis, nature itself forms monuments, the Matterhorn
being a self-forming form that surges forth from a chaotic unfoundation
(Ungrund) and in forming itself though a founding rhythm establishes its
surrounding landscape as its foundation (Grund) (Bogue, 2003a: 168).
- 152 it were able to stand on its own. Its solidity, viability or monumentality has
nothing to do with its physical size, but arises from the block of sensations
that it conserves. The smile of a young boy captured in a portrait is conserved
in the painting. The smile is distinct from the artist who painted it, the boy who
served as its model and finally from the boy himself figured in the painting.
The smile as a monumental, enduring moment conserves itself in the painting
and it is perpetually reactivated and recommenced at each viewing. In a way it
depends for its continued existence on the material survival of the paint and
canvas, but the smile is finally distinct from the matter in which it is embodied.
The smile itself has an unspecified, free floating existence and even if the
material of paint and canvas were to endure only for a few seconds, it would
give the sensation the power of existing and of conserving itself in itself, in the
eternity that coexists with that short duration (Deleuze and Guattari,
1994:166).
The material of the artwork does have a necessary relation to the selfconserving sensation it embodies. The formation of the artwork takes place on
a plane of composition that Deleuze and Guattari subdivide into a technical
plane of composition which concerns the material of the artwork and then an
aesthetic plane of composition (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 192) which
concerns sensations. Though artists have developed limitless means of
engaging the two planes, Deleuze and Guattari propose two basic poles in
their interrelation. In the first, the sensation realizes itself in the material, that
is, sensation adapts itself to a well-formed, organised and regulated matter. In
painting, this is the mode of representational, perspectival art in which
sensations are projected onto a material surface that already contains within it
the spatial schemata that structure its figures. In the second case, it is the
material that passes into the sensation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:193).
Rather than sensation being projected onto a calm material surface, the
material rises up into a metamorphic plane of forces. In painting, the paint
itself, its thickness, saturation, texture articulates forces. Matter becomes
expressive in the artwork. There is finally only one single plane, in the sense
that art involves no other plane than that of aesthetic composition: the
technical plane in fact is necessarily covered over (i.e. when the sensation
- 153 realises itself in the material) or absorbed by (i.e. when the material passes
into the sensation) the aesthetic plane of composition (Deleuze and Guattari,
1994: 195-196).
The aim of art is not to make a moral or existential judgement about our
conditions of experience. Instead it is a question of wrestling with the vision
that is too much for us, in order to disengage a force of life. The work of art
reveals the force of that which is repressed, that which we do not know that
we know. Cosmic virtual forces impinge on artists, including affects or
becomings, which themselves are compositions of forces a simple vibration
or passage of force from one level of corporeal intensity to another
(connective synthesis); an embrace (treinte) or clinch (corps corps) in
which forces resonate with one another (disjunctive synthesis); or a
withdrawal, division, distension whereby forces separate and spread out
(conjunctive synthesis). And as the artist becomes other they pass into things,
- 154 they become absent but everywhere in the landscape 40at which point they
are able to render palpable in the work of art the impalpable forces of the
world (Bogue, 2003a: 165). 41 Though this bonding of bodies and sensations,
of people, artworks and cosmos might sound like sheer mysticism, it is based
upon a coherent theory of nature as creation. How artists are able to render
matter expressive is a mystery, but less so is the sense in which matter itself
is expressive. The key is to understand the plane of composition as both an
aesthetic plane of artistic creation and a material plane of physico-biological
creation. 42 The plane of composition is an infinite field of forces (ibid.,188).
Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite; it lays out a plane of
composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears
monuments or composite sensations. A canvas is the framing not of a scene
to be represented, but a selection of the plane of composition. What is seen is
40
For instance, Cezanne saw the percept as man absent but everywhere in the landscape (Maldiney,
1973: 185).
41
This taxonomy of sensations is a reprise of Deleuzes classification of forces in Bacons paintingsforces of deformation, forces of coupling, forces of separation
42
It must be admitted that Deleuze and Guattaris treatment of the relationship between artists and
physico-biological creation is rather cryptic. Bogue (2003a: 170) attempts a somewhat speculative
reconstruction of their argument. Deleuze and Guattari had planned to write a philosophy of nature and
this would have clarified many points had Deleuze and Guattari completed such a work.
- 155 not the world as it is coloured, as though sensibilities were qualities through
which we grasped being. Rather, colours, shadows, lines are the being of the
world. It is not that being has a sensible dimension; for being is the sensible.
Colours, lights, sounds are presented as the powers or potentials that allow
us to perceive worlds. Colour in the work of art has to be extracted from the
plane of composition presented not as perceptual overlay but as one
connection through which being is given. Colour is only possible because the
forces of light and sensation encounter each other. The material, the paint on
the canvas, has to capture within time and space, the intensities, singularities
or powers which open spaces and which are then perceived in chronological
time. Such singularities are for all time or untimely; they bear a power to be
actualised over and over again, returning eternally (Colebrook, 2006: 101).
43
According to Deleuze, Nietzsches method of cultural historical analysis of psychological and moral
phenomena is grounded in a particular ontology of force. This notion of force is not just a physical or
mechanical quantity but a quasi-spiritual energy expressed as signification. If the mind is a theatre, it is
because forces that run through the individual and forces influencing the individual from the outside find
expression in the mind. The mind, like the world, is a system of forces. Deleuze turned to Nietzsches
thought in order to explore relations of force, both physical and social (Due, 1999:32).
Art should not maintain or repeat what has already been expressed, allowing
content to circulate while leaving the actual world or system unchanged; great
art changes the very nature of any system. Deleuze would, for instance, not
be opposed to popular film because it becomes common and then makes
money. He differs from modernists who lamented the commodification of art
simply because art would become popular. The problem with arts relation to
money, is for Deleuze more formal. Any art that aims to reproduce the future
on the basis of the past is repressive or majoritarian and focuses on content.
Cinema is at its most cinematic not when it is presenting ordered temporal
narratives, such as historical epics or dramas with historical contexts. Deleuze
is anti-contextual. Recognising our culture is just one way of allowing
ourselves to remain who we are. The point is rather to ask which book will
change the entire landscape of literature. Great art disrupts the pre-given
categories of thouht; it is minor not because it is elitist, but because it does not
yet have a people or group whose world it represents (Colebrook, 2006: 88).
The problem of money in relation to art is not that works become alienated
from their aura, capable of being copied, distributed and torn from their origin.
The problem lies in the style of repetition. The role of money in circulation and
repetition
is
one
of
reterritorialisation;
all
copying,
circulation
and
- 157 dissemination occur not for the sake of creating a difference or new relations,
but for reinforcing the circulation of money. One creates a sequel to a film in
order to repeat the same networks of exchange, in order to have the original
flows of money, audience and products repeated in the same way. The point
for Deleuze is not to resist repetition and circulation of art, but to allow
circulation to proceed without reterritorialisation of money: the creation of a
sequel that would repeat the creative force of the original, not its effected
relations of exchange. Every work of art must be singular. For this reason I
will now limit myself to Deleuzes examination of the oeuvre of a single artist
in Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (Colebrook, 2006: 90).
Deleuzes book on Bacon attempts to show that Bacons art in particular and
painting in general can only appropriately be understood if we move away
from all narration, representation and figuration as long as we mean by the
latter terms, identifiable signification of something outside of painting.
Deleuzes overall interpretation of Bacon is in part supported by Bacon
himself who underlines, in his famous discussions with David Sylvester, that
his art of painting has something to do with violence, the nervous system, life,
excitement, and death. For Deleuze, Bacons paintings directly attempt to
release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation
(Deleuze, 1981: 45).
Bacon paraphrases the poet Valry: ... I want very, very much to do the thing
that Valry said give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance
(Sylvester, 1993: 65). Deleuze understands Bacon's paintings and his own
theory of desire as inscribed in a logic of sensation. Deleuze deals with the
status of sensation as a pre-representational realm as such. In addition, he
works out a different conception of the body, which follows his interpretation of
the role of sensation in experience in general and in painting in particular.
Sensation, according to Deleuze, has an immediate status in experience and
indicates a pre-conscious form of being in direct contact with the world. As
such, sensation is the level of pure presence (Deleuze, 1981: 47).
- 158 -
For Deleuze, sensation is not qualitative and qualified, but has only an
intensive reality, which no longer determines within itself representative
elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration (Deleuze, 1981: 39).
Vibration is a connective synthesis. This concept of sensation has
consequences for how Deleuze addresses bodily experience and the handling
of the body in Bacon. If sensation, according to Deleuze, enters the bodily
level, it emerges in the form of a spasmodic appearance (Deleuze, 1981:
40). This means that experience is not (or not yet) organized and ordered
through bodily organs.
This means that sensation is not a reflex of [the body's] living unity, but
instead rather like a transgression of this unity by the forces which overflow it
and violently carry away the body to seize possession of it (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987:204). Sensation is the action of forces on the body, the
intensive fact of the body (Deleuze, 1981: 27). The body, which differs from
the organism, is traversed by a wave which traces levels and thresholds
according to variations in their amplitude (Deleuze, 1981:67). Sensation is
44
As it has been stated in the previous chapter, Deleuze takes the term from Antonin Artaud , who
writes The body is the body/ It is alone/And has no need of organs/The body is never an organism/
Organisms are the enemies of the body (Deleuze, 1981: 33).
- 159 the meeting of forces with these waves. Sensation takes place when, for
example, a force, such as light, meets with the body's waves by means of an
organ such as the eye. If Deleuze's body is possessed with organs, they are
not the organs of biology or of common sense. It is sensation that determines
a body's organs, and only then provisionally, at the spaces of intersection
between forces and waves. Whenever a force meets the oscillating wave of
the body without organs, a provisional organ is determined by that encounter,
but a provisional organ that lasts only while the passage of the wave and the
action of the force last, and which will be displaced in order to be situated
elsewhere (Deleuze, 1981: 126). Each site of such a provisional organ is the
site of a force meeting a vibratory wave, a rendering visible of an invisible
force.
The distinction is not between external forces and internal sensations but
between invisible forces and visible bodies, the body of sensation rendering
visible the invisible forces that play through bodies. Deleuze initially describes
sensation as having a subjective and objective side, but he soon adds that it
really has no sides at all; it is both things, indissolubly; it is being-in-the-world
as the phenomenologists say: at the same time I become in sensation and
something arrives in sensation, one through the other. And finally it is the
same body that gives it and that receives it (Deleuze, 1981: 27).
Hence when the eye views an apple, the apple is not to be taken as an
external force impinging on the corporeal eye. Rather in sensation apple and
eye are part of a body without organs, such that when Cezanne paints an
apple with what D.H Lawrence calls the applyness of an apple he paints the
body. The body without organs is the body of sensations and these
sensations take place at a pre-subjective or pre-organised level in which body
and world cannot be differentiated. It is the fusional world-body of sensation
that Cezanne paints. But what Cezanne ultimately aims to do is to go beyond
sensation and paint the invisible forces that impinge on it, to turn sensation
back on itself, to extend or contract it, harness in that which sensation gives
us, the forces that are not given, to make sensate the forces that are nonsensate (Deleuze, 1981: 39).
- 160 -
Bacons aim is not to paint the visible horrors of the world before which one
screams, but rather the intensive forces that produce the scream, that
convulse the body so as to attain a screaming mouth: the violence of the
horrible spectacle must be renounced in order to attain the violence of the
sensation. One can paint the horror (the sensational) and not paint the
scream, because one represents the horrible spectacle and introduces a story
or one can paint the scream directly (the sensation) and not paint the visible
horror, because the scream is necessarily the capture of an invisible force. If
force or intensity is the condition of sensation, it is nonetheless not the force
which is sensed, since the sensation gives something completely different
from the forces that condition it. How will sensation be able to turn upon itself,
extend or contract itself in order to capture, in what is given to us, forces that
are not given in order to make us sense these unsensible force and elevate
itself to its own condition? How can the material used by the artist (paint,
words, stone) attain this level of forces? How is it capable of bearing the
sensation?(Smith, 1996: 42).
- 161 Bacons paintings, the human body plays the role of the figure. 45 Figuration
refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent
(recognition); the figure, on the other hand, is the form that is connected to
sensation and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the
nervous system (Smith, 1996: 44).
Bacon attempts to render the figure without figuration, to escape the clichs of
illustration and narration by isolating or framing the human body inside a
circle, or cube. Bacon then deforms the figure by making random marks, such
45
What Deleuze says about the figural derives from Lyotards analysis. In Discours, figure (1971)
Lyotards primary objection is with structuralisms rampant textualisation of the world and to insist the
visual constitutes a domain unassimilable within codes and regulated oppositions. The
phenomenological critique of Saussurean structualism is only a preliminary stage in Lyotards argument,
for the visual itself requires examination if what Lytoard calls its truth is to be disclosed. To the extent
that the visual is recognised, comprehended and assimilated within a rational order, Lyotard contends,
its truth is lost, for it is thereby coded and made readable and textualised. Its truth is only revealed in the
event, which presents itself as fall, as a sliding and an error, what is called the lapsus. The event opens
a space and a time of vertigo(Lyotard, 1971:113). The event discloses a dimension of disorganised
visibility that Lyotard labels the figural. The figural is unmarked by the coordinates of a regular
dimensionality, of a fixed up and down, left and right, its objects defy good form or ready
categorisation. The figural itself is unrepresentable. The figural forces of deformation directly invest the
eye and hence engage the domain of the sensible which at the same time manifest the operations of the
unconscious. Lyotard links the figural to the Freudian unconscious and in this enterprise he and Deleuze
part company. Yet much of Lyotards figural is compatible with Deleuze. In appropriating the concept of
the figural Deleuze too wishes to resuscitate discussions of figuration and abstract art and delineate a
space of sensible autonomous forces but without resorting to Freudian psychoanalysis (see Bogue,
2003a:114-117).
- 162 as throwing paint at the canvas. Such techniques undo the organic and
extensive unity of the body, and reveal its intensive and non-organic reality, a
body without organs. These marks also undo the optical organisation of the
painting itself, since this force is rendered in a precise sensation that does
violence to the eye. The marks reveal the precise point of application of the
intensive force contorting the body, making the body shudder or vibrate
violently (Smith, 1996:46).
For Deleuze, one of the most important functions of art is to make us believe
in the body, to restore a direct self-awareness to the body. This can only be
done by showing the body its limitation along with its postures and
movements such as tiredness, sleep and illness, by which art interrupts
significance and subjectification: the body itself becomes expressive. Such a
belief in the body enhances rather than diminishes the possibilities of life, for it
awakens a sensitivity to intensities. Deleuze is fond of the paintings of Bacon
which often show cuts of raw meat, contorted bodies or flesh flowing off
bodies onto the ground. The aim of this, according to Deleuze, is not to give
one a sensation of horror so much as allow the nervous system to attain a
direct, unmediated sensation. For the sensing body can dramatise the cuts of
- 163 meat or movements of flesh in the painting. Sensations are then experienced
directly as intensities on ones body (Deleuze, 1981:189).
To the extent that Bacon paints intensities and forces and their effects of
deformation on bodies, he paints sensation. A painting by Bacon is
circumscribed by a logic of sensation insofar as he is the painter of the body
without organs. We can understand Bacon, Deleuze maintains, through a
clinical aesthetic. The body without organs that Bacon paints is the body of
the hysteric. The hysteric feels the body to be, so to speak, under the
organism; he or she senses transitory organs underneath the fixed organs.
Hysteria has always been a matter of more than just functional disturbances
of the body; it has also been a matter of such excesses of presence. When
Bacon paints Velsquez's Pope Innocent X, caged in plate glass and crying
out in horror, he is painting the hysteric, giving substance to an art hysteris
(ibid.:36-37).
Bacons heads are probe-heads, lines of escape from the face and from
faciality. Crucially, they are not a return to some kind of primitive pre-faciality.
They are in fact an escape that takes place from within the terrain of the face,
a kind of stammering from within. Probe-heads are not necessarily pictures of
heads but rather any device that disrupts faciality, for the latter applies not just
to heads but to most mechanisms that produce significance and subjectivity,
from
faces
and
landscapes
within
painting
to
facialisation
and
landscapification within the world. Bacons probe heads are a move to chaos.
They dismantle the strata, break through the walls of significance and steer
the flows down lines of positive deterritorialisation or creative flight (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1977:190).
- 165 Yet all art must have an element of figurality, an intimation of order emerging
from chaos, something that looks back as it were (not a face, but a head).
Bacons defacialisation involves a deployment of the figural. For Bacon, the
watchword is caution: always save the contour. The contour is that which
isolates the figure, producing a territory, but also that which allows contact
and communication with the outside or ground (a vibration or connective
synthesis). All art has a rhythm in this sense, relations between territory and
an outside to this territory, like Klees interworld or Maldineys monument: A
local refrain that opens onto the cosmic refrain.
Music must then be seen as exemplary of all art, involving as it does, the
specific production of local refrains within larger ones. In Bacons paintings,
Deleuze finds complex rhythms of movements and forces: a systolic force of
isolation that passes from the back-ground to the figure; a diastolic force of
deformation that induces various becomings; a dissipative force whereby the
figure escapes itself in a line of flight; a coupling force (connective synthesis)
that establishes a relation between two figures; a force of separation
(disjunctive synthesis) that distributes figures within a universal field of colour
and light (conjunctive synthesis) (Bogue, 2003a: 126).
For Deleuze, the diagrams in Bacons work are chaos but also the seed of
order or rhythm (Deleuze, 1981: 67). It is the diagram that enables the
deformation or deterritorialisation of the figure, this production of the body
without organs, that which lies under organs, under faces, under organisation.
In painting, and specifically Bacons paintings, the diagram involves the
making of random marks that allow the figural to emerge from the figure. The
diagram is the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and
zones, line-stokes and colour-patches (Deleuze, 1981:101). We might say
that this rule of the diagram can be applied to all arts, all of which must involve
this chance, this contact and utilisation with that which goes beyond
conscious control.
Bacon says When I was trying in despair the other day to paint the head of a
specific person, I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint and I put it
- 166 on very, very freely, and I simply didn't know in the end what I was doing, and
suddenly this thing clicked, and became exactly like this image I was trying to
record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do with
illustrational painting. What has never yet been analyzed is why this particular
way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a
life completely of its own. It lives on its own, like the image one's trying to trap;
it lives on its own, and therefore transfers the essence of the image more
poignantly (Sylvester, 1993: 17)
For Deleuze, figurative and geometric abstract painting pass through the
brain, they do not attain the sensation, they do not liberate the figure, they do
not act directly on the nervous system. Geometric abstraction, as Deleuze
argues with Kandinsky, elevates the optical and ultimately returns to figuration
inasmuch as it contains a code (visual or spiritual). This is a signifying art,
waiting to be read (Deleuze, 1981:104-5).
- 167 rise to it, but to paint the virtual or invisible forces which are its condition.
Bacon does not reproduce the spectacle of a body undergoing torture, but the
isolated body wanting to vomit, wanting to sleep on which forces act. But
this assumption of passivity, this pessimism, is only one side of sensation.
The other side is the optimism of a cry that is itself the struggle of the visible
body against the invisible, decomposing force. It is the body whose figure
renders the force visible. The cry is thus life, desire, in struggle against the
forces (Deleuze, 1981:71).
Deleuze seeks to contradict the idea that artists such as Bacon are in some
way expressing a deep terror of life in their art. Bacons work may be imbued
with all sorts of violence, but he manages to paint the scream and not the
horror. The virtual forces that cause the scream, Deleuze says, should not be
confused with the visible spectacle before which one screams. The scream
captures invisible forces, which cannot be represented, because they lie
beyond affections or pain and feeling: they are, Deleuze claims enigmatically,
the forces of the future, virtual forces, affects. In deciding to paint the
scream, Bacon is like a wrestler confronting the powers of the invisible,
establishing a combat which was not previously possible. In this way, Bacon
evinces an extraordinary vitality. He allows life to scream at death, by
confronting terror, and entering into combat with it, rather than representing it.
Bacon engages in what Deleuze considers to be a form of combat with the
forces of violence and terror (Marks, 2003:118).
5.5. Conclusion
- 168 Everyday capitalist life is characterised by repetition as the return of the same,
primarily in the standardised, technological production of commodities and the
proliferation of information. Art embraces and incorporates this habitual
repetition, in order to expose its limits and to extract what is differential and
virtual within it. The task of the work of art, then, is to open a line of flight that
passes from perception to the imperceptible by interrupting repetition with
difference. And gradually, repetition is transformed from the return of the
same to creation from difference. All art is an isolation of affect and percept
separated from the ordered world that then allows for the opening of an
infinite: art wants to escape the finite that restores the infinite.
Deleuzes philosophy of the virtual affirms that what does not act, is not
perceptible, is not actualised or brought to presence, and has yet to realise
itself through effected relations. Deleuze insists that the virtual is an inhuman
power. Art, like freedom, is what happens when the virtual intervenes or does
violence to the sequence of the present. It is the virtual that opens the power
of human decision or freedom. We have an image of who we are in relation to
a being that we are not. For Deleuze, freedom is not a feature of human
beings; freedom is what happens when we do not respond automatically and
immediately; it is a question of speed and slowness. There is a delay between
stimulus and response because of the intervention of invisible forces and it
is this delay that leads us to believe that we were the authors of this freedom.
It is more accurate to say that there is a flow of time or imaging which is
slowed down or disrupted by the virtual. It is this disruption that makes it
possible to then distinguish between the human perceiver and the world
perceived, between human freedom and organised matter. We imagine that
the free human being was there all along, as some actual point that then
perceived the world.
- 169 must become material for a new mode of expression. The revolution of desire
is an aestheticisation of the social field: it takes the social field as its material
that it will build into a monument of sensation, exceeding matter. The implicit
presuppositions of social relations are sensed, not represented. Instead of
desire being immediately present through territorial expression, the territories
become virtual, implicit, disguised and displaced.
Deleuze and Guattari, like the modernists, want to reach the animating life
from which systems and maps of movement emerge. The society of desire is
an association of experimentally constructed subjects, each creating their own
plane of composition or body without organs. This chapter has shown the
importance Deleuze places on synthesis. The connective, disjunctive,
conjunctive, passive syntheses have all been dealt with in this chapter. What
remains to be seen is my synthesis of Baudrillard and Deleuze.
- 170 -
Chapter 6
Baudrillards Metastasis and Deleuzes
Metamorphosis
6.1. Introduction
- 171 Benjamin, and this is directly tied to the way in which allegory like the symbol
is a public and cultural mode of communication. Benjamins Baroque allegory
does not seek to present the world as it is, but seeks to present it as it is not,
since it is a priori unrepresentable. Benjamin establishes a relationship
between decay and critique. Allegory does not invent images it confiscates
them. In the same way, Baudrillard refuses to participate in the game of
producing positive solutions.
For Baudrillard, one only attains hyperreality through the elimination of ones
desire the speaker is always missing in the speech. In a simulated world, the
object of simulation is cut off from the specificity which produces it. This
discourse does not speak in the name of someones desire: it is only
considered in terms of the effects which they produce. In a neutral world of
simulated
desire,
the
object
can
resist
through
oversimulation,
- 172 confrontation with power. I will show in this concluding chapter how minor,
lowly, and obscure gestures (lacking glory) are illuminated as immense and
brilliant by a glorious power. Kafkas art, which can be described as art in a
minor key, therefore a kind of minor art, aims for a sober hyperrealism, a
realism that deals with metamorphosis rather than with metaphor. Kafkas
work is driven by an anti-lyricism and anti-aestheticism. The Castle and The
Trial function as machinic assemblages. Writing has double function: to
translate everything into assemblages and dismantle those assemblages.
Rather than illustrate the transcendence of the law, Kafka sets out machines
which function as immanent fields for the working of desire.
- 173 The Baroque world is post structural. But Deleuze also emphasises that the
Baroque is always seen from a certain perspective. It is both One and
multiple. On the other hand, we shall now see that Baudrillard emphasises
merely fragmentation, absence and ruins.
6.2. Baudrillards System of Objects Revisited
fascination
for
the
ruin,
the
construction
of
reality,
the
incompleteness of the world, the artifice and the artificial has much in
common with the endlesslessly constructed and simulated, in Baudrillards
terminology, character of the social in hyperreality.
For Baudrillard: the social void is scattered with interstitial objects and
crystalline clusters which spin around and coalesce in a cerebral chiaroscuro
(Baudrillard, 1990b: 3). Baudrillard might be a great describer, but description
is commonly associated with melancholy, loss, the fetish of the lost object,
the experience of the void and dispossession (Baudrillard, 1990b: 142).
Descriptive writing (which ought to be a life force) is often declared as deadly.
For example, according to Barthes: description exhausts itself in its attempt to
render the moral properties of the object while pretending all the while (an
illusion by inversion) to believe and wish the object to be alive. Capturing life
really means seeing dead. Adjectives are the tools of this delusion; whatever
- 174 else they may be saying, their very descriptive quality makes them funereal
(Beaujour, 1981: 47).
Reality can only exist if it is different from the imaginary, so is it with sex and
work, desire and power: if the opposition between them is dissolved then in an
absolute sense they are no longer with us. This is one difference between a
system of meaning and a system of simulation, the former depends on solid
oppositions which in the latter are short-circuited by the confusion of poles in
a total circularity of signalling. There is no more faith in denotation. By
substituting signs of the real for the real itself, by rendering the real
reproducible, the system does something worse than remind us that discourse
is discourse, with no way back to the real; it initiates a catastrophe for any
realism still surprised that the referent may be the future of the sign, not its
proof, not its past, not its cause (Morris, 2000: 208).
It is the end of the scene, everything is obscene, there is no more mise-enscne, only a depthless screen with no perspectival space for play. Everything
is hyperreal. Hype does not refer to things but only to itself. The real is
growing and enlarging so the real no longer exists. The social is both residual
and swelling. The frenzy of information, the ecstasy of too much of ever more
x than x absorbs the opposite of something by abolishing the distinction
between them. Over-representation abolishes both real and illusion; over
banality is not the opposite but the equivalent of fatality. The scene is empty
(Baudrillard, 1990b: 43).
This is the turning point in the story of the object: when resemblance runs riot
in the obscenity of the media and imagination expires, when the death of
denotation destroys the distinction of signs and things, a redemption of sorts
may be sought in the absurd illusory secrets of language; those secrets are
- 176 known to language alone and immune to obscenity. These are the sense-less
but ceremonious secrets of signs. This is the singular object, indifferent,
devoid of interest and without equivalent. It is impossible to say what the
object is since the effect of the object is to defy description to flee before or
parodically surrender to the subject trying to take hold leaving the latter with
the inarticulate stutter (Baudrillard, 1990b: 236). The subject tries to solve the
object, meanwhile the object dissolves the subject and ultimately the object
always triumphs (Baudrillard, 1990b: 84).
typicality
with
abstract
particularity
(Lukcs,
1971:43).
By
underscoring the affinity of allegorism and detail, and despite his own
Other critics more receptive to modernity like Baudrillard have insisted on the
pre-eminence of the detail, indeed the hypertrophied detail and detotalised
detail in the allegory. The detail with allegorical vocation is distinguished by its
oversignification and this is not a matter of realism but surrealism, if not
hyperrealism. The allegorical detail is a disproportionately enlarged
ornamental detail bearing the seal of transcendence, it testifies to the loss of
all transcendental signifieds in the modern period. Modern allegory is a
parody of the traditional theological detail. It is the detail deserted by god.
Kafka, for instance, severs the ties which link the detail to concrete existence
while at the same time putting it into contact with a totality that gives it
meaning. By eliminating the typical, by skipping the stage of generalisation,
Kafka condemns his details which are meticulously observed and seized in
all their phenomenological density to be nothing but details, pure
hypostases of transcendence which is very much in doubt. The allegorical
detail is a disembodied and destabilised detail (Schor, 1987: 61).
- 180 has nothing in common with its more familiar usage in Hegelian traditions.
Benjamin understands dialectics as an eccentric motion that enacts a
reversal between extremes (Benjamin, 1974: 337). The antinomies of
allegory involve a radical, despairing alternation between unbridgeable
antipodes; the comforting prospect of a harmonious synthesis is denied. Such
drastic reversals recur at all levels of Benjamins analysis.
The
extremes
result
from
the
emblematists'
search
for
significant
- 181 But the result is chaotic disorder, a heaping of elements rather than an
orderly, organic whole. The law that governs such works is therefore an
alternation
between
scatteredness
and
collectedness:
Things
are
- 182 this simultaneity of value and the destruction of value. It is the impossible
parity between money and object, buyer and seller in which each is given its
value at once. It is the equivalence of the beginning and the end, the first and
last exchange, value and the destruction of value that means that there is an
infinite distance between them. There is an infinite delay, and we can never
be sure whether any bid is the final one, that produces the possibility of
equivalence. Value is inseparable from the loss or destruction of value. The
act of consumption is never simply a purchase (reconversion of exchange
value into use value) it is also expenditure, that is to say, it is wealth
manifested and a manifest destruction of wealth (Baudrillard, 1981: 112-113).
For Benjamin, the extravagance, sumptuous, even wasteful profusion of
Baroque art is neither a flaw nor an incidental by-product but part of the
generative core of the allegorical form of expression. An endlessly
preparatory, digressive, voluptuously hesitant manner and even an awkward
ponderousness are essential to it (Benjamin, 1974: 358, 363). Baroque
allegorists were fascinated by the squanderous proliferation of natural history;
not harmony but decay and decomposition. The antinomies of the allegorical
generate an eruption of images typical of the Baroque type of form-giving
impulse: With each idea, the moment of expression coincides with a veritable
eruption of images, whose precipitate is a chaotically scattered heap of
metaphors. The rank metaphorical overgrowth (Benjamin, 1974: 374).
Benjamin likens allegory to sadism. Both betray and devalue their objects,
violating them: Significance rules voluptuously, like a sinister sultan in the
harem of objects ... Indeed, it is characteristic of the sadist to degrade his
object and then or thereby to satisfy it. The baroque aims not so much to
unveil objects as to strip them naked (Benjamin, 1974: 360). But the sadist,
like the allegorist, remains trapped in a compulsive repetition, alternating
between fascinated absorption and disillusioned abandonment of the emptied
emblem (ibid). In principle, no limits are set to this unrelenting drive to violate
the dignity of objects, leading to vertigo: As those who are falling turn
somersaults as they plunge, so would the allegorical intention fall, from
- 183 emblem to emblem, into the dizziness of its own bottomless depths
(Benjamin, 1974: 405).
Allegory's subjection of the world of objects ends in a frenzy of destruction
[Vernichtungsrausch] in which all earthly things collapse into a heap of
rubble. At this point, however, the world of allegorical forms culminates in a
reversal. Allegory ends by turning on itself. The very destruction of those
requisites of signification on which allegory depends leaves it empty-handed
and self-deceived, (Benjamin, 1974: 404-406). But this is what finally
releases it from its frenzy.
In the same way, Baudrillard shows that the pleasure of collecting is at once
its satisfying and disappointing quality. It is an economy of failure. Each piece
seeks to complete the collection yet knows it cannot and does not even want
to. The collectors pleasure grows the longer the collection continues, and the
more ingenuity is required to obtain the next piece but the collector knows that
at the same time the risk increases as each new piece brings the conclusion
closer. The pleasure in collecting is inseparable from a certain risk or pain.
Each piece stands for the last piece, completes the collection and also seeks
to defer the end. Each piece in the collection is at once its end and the
impossibility of its end. In the same way we saw in Chapter Three that the
social wants to be total but it exists only on the basis of the opposition it
makes between itself and terrorism. Terrorism threatens the state with its own
demise, i.e. with the possibility that there will be no other with whom it might
exchange. This forces the state to concede to the terrorists demands (Butler,
1999: 89).
For Benjamin: the danger of allowing oneself to plunge . . . into the abysmal
depths of the baroque state of mind is not negligible. The characteristic feeling
of dizziness induced by the spectacle of the epoch gyrating in its spiritual
contradictions is known to him (Benjamin, 1974: 237). Baroque Trauerspiele
are built as ruins to begin with: From the very beginning they are set up for
that critical dissociation wreaked on them by the course of time (Benjamin,
1974: 357). Baroque allegorical works make no attempt to disguise the fact
that they contain the seeds of their own destruction. That is for Benjamin, the
- 184 critical yield of the allegorical way of seeing. The task of criticism is not to
conjure up the appearance of the work as it really was, restoring a false
totality to it, but to collaborate with the corrosive effects of the passage of time
(ibid).
Benjamin stresses the necessarily discontinuous structure of representation.
This discontinuity pertains, first of all, to the representation of ideas by
philosophical criticism. Unity and totality cannot be attained by the unbroken
chain of deduction characteristic of philosophical systems (Benjamin, 1974:
213). Philosophical criticism involves the art of interruption (Benjamin, 1974:
212). The structure of the world of ideas itself is also discontinuous
(Benjamin, 1974: 213). Benjamin establishes a relationship between decay
and critique. Periods of alleged decay, particularly the decay of classicist
cultures whether the Baroque or Benjamins own time or any other had a
coherence of their own and offered chances for insight and knowledge.
Benjamin's insight into the coherence of the Baroque allegorical way of
seeing, in which remarkable stabilities of an entirely new kind had emerged,
in turn helped train his eye for the new stabilities of his own time (McCole,
1993:125).
catastrophe. That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe. It is not that which is
approaching but that which is.
For Benjamin, the point was rather to collaborate in the work of destruction
and collaborate with barbarism. Benjamin embraced a new, positive
barbarism the good kind which was seen as the only match for the
barbaric powers of fascism of his time (Benjamin, 1972b: 396-398). For
Benjamin Culture is dead and he called for the liquidation of traditional
culture itself. Benjamins protagonist in this positive concept of barbarism is
- 185 the destructive character. This protagonist disavowed responsibility for what
he would leave in his wake. In an iconoclastic reversal of the fetish of
creativity, Benjamin praised his modus operandi as the way to cope with
dead-end situations:
The destructive character's only watchword is: make room; his only
activity: clearing out ... The destructive character envisions nothing.
Where others come up against walls or mountains, there too he sees a
way. But because he sees ways everywhere, he also has to clear the
way. Not always with brute force, sometimes with its refinement ... He
reduces the existing to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble but of the
path that leads through it (Benjamin, 1972b: 396-398).
For Benjamin, sovereignty inheres in whoever can master the state of
emergency. Like Benjamin, Baudrillard proposes collusion as a better
response than contestation. It is the spiral of intensification, the raising of the
power that counts. Baudrillard develops a fatal theory, a theory-fiction. For
theory, the decisive point is that its logic is that of an excess of potential, on a
single plane: potentialization. The massive logic of the capitalist system can
only be resisted by redoubling capitalism back against itself in a movement of
hyperconformist simulation, by pushing the code barbarically into hyperlogic
a massive spiral of accession to the demands of the system whose effect is
an explosion of terrorism to match the terror of the social.
For Baudrillard, on 9/11, the terrorists countered simulation with simulation
itself. This is what makes it a true event. The attack brings back death to a
world that pretends it is not there. The death of so many so visibly, makes it
oscillate between real and its other (and all it would exclude) and ultimately
what makes the event (not the act, or its direct consequences) unthinkable is
the use of death in a staged exchange where a whole culture could be
attacked. This event brings together many of the phenomena particular to
capitalist simulation, meshed together with that which would be outside it. It is
precisely the destructiveness of terrorism that creates a thoroughly concrete
reality, namely that of the threat, which fascinates Baudrillards aesthetic
consciousness. In these events we experience a fascinating artificial death.
- 186 The system prescribes a natural death, which represents an unnegotiable and
unwanted end. In the terrorist spectacle, death becomes more than simply
natural. Death itself demands to be experienced immediately, in total
blindness and total ambivalence. But is it revolutionary? If political economy is
the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can
put an end to political economy (Baudrillard, 2002a: 86-87).
Baudrillards fatal strategy (if indeed it can be called a strategy) is that it must
continually destroy itself in the process of realizing itself in its object, i.e., in
becoming an event in the very universe it describes. This endless autodestruction of theory attempts to transform both itself and its object in
revolutionary praxis. Theory no longer represents or mirrors the real, but
rather must be the discursive intensification of its object. For Baudrillard, this
is a theoretical violence a stylistic excess whose function is to be as
extreme as the object itself. In the intensification of writing, theory renounces
its distance and merges with its object.
- 187 the strategy of writing is that it is only by daring to represent nothing, to offer
nothing in exchange for the appearances of the world, that the world
necessarily recognises itself in it that we bring about an exchange with it.
In the same way, Benjamins allegory does not seek to present the world as it
is, but seeks to present it as it is not in fact, from its point of view, the real
can only be presented as it is not, since it is a priori unrepresentable. In such
presentations of the world-as-it-is-not politics and aesthetics become
indistinguishable, with the political and the aesthetic occupying the same
moment. Ideally, such presentations will have the effect of disrupting
(ideologically comforting) presentations of the world-as-it-is, and of introducing
the complacent bourgeoisie to the exciting uncertainties and vast political
potential
of
the
world-as-it-is-not.
Progress
depends
on
ever
new
- 188 and the Baroque (1993), Deleuze uses Leibnizs most famous proposition,
that every soul or subject (monad) is completely closed, windowless and
doorless, while also illuminating some little portion of that world, each monad,
a different portion. So the world is enfolded in each soul, but differently,
because each illuminates only one aspect of the overall folding (Deleuze,
1995: 157).
We fold that which is outside inside. Art is a possible world folded, by means
of artists style, in substance. We are forced to unfold worlds, that is, to
encounter the work of art. We might say art is a cut; it shakes us out of our
habitual mode of being and puts other modes of being into play. Art offers us
a new image of thought a new folding. For Deleuze, Baroque art is a certain
over spilling, a blurring of boundaries. Painting becomes Baroque when it
exceeds it frame (Deleuze, 1993:123). The Baroque then names that which is
in-between, which allows or forces deterritorialisation. This is not a system or
universe without centre. For the Baroque names not only the broadest unity
of extension but also its highest unity (Deleuze, 1993: 124).
- 189 The Baroque is like a cone, its base is a seething world of-yet-to-beactualised vitualities, but only from the point of view of its summit which
surveys the terrain and indeed actualises the latter. It is in this sense that the
Baroque is at once the multiple and the One, a constant interplay, or
resonance between the two the two floors of the Baroque house. We might
say that the Baroque world is then without centre, that it is post structural but
that it is also always seen from a certain perspective. For Deleuze, the
Baroque is allegorical in nature, because it contains a multiplicity of
viewpoints. Baudelaires flneur might be seen as an exemplar of the isolated
yet connected monad, at once a part and apart from the world. Folds have
less to do with isolated monads and more to do with open monads and
relationship between monads (OSullivan, 2006: 139).
- 190 decoding forces that are being stabilised, formed and coded by a particular
social system (Bogue, 2003b: 84).
It is from this vantage point that we must consider the revolutionary function of
Kafkas writing machine. Kafka does not protest against oppressive
institutions
or
propose
utopian
alternatives.
He
accelerates
the
In The Trial, Kafka starts with the social representation of the complex
relations inherent in the juridical system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
46
In Forget Foucault Baudrillard says that the cellular form of power does not contain any revolutionary
principle at all. Desire is only the molecular version of the law. For Baudrillard there is nowhere out
there. In Deleuze and Guattaris Kafka:Toward a Minor Literature, the transcendental Law such as is
found in The Castle is opposed to the immanence of desire in the adjacent offices. How can we fail to
see that the Law of The Castle has its rhizomes in the corridors and in the offices the bar or the
break constituted by the law has simply been geared down ad infintum in cellular and molecular
succession. Desire is only the molecular version of the Law. And what a strange coincidence to find
schemas of desire and schemas of control everywhere. It is a spiral of power, of desire, and of the
molecule which is now bringing us openly toward the final peripeteia of absolute control. Beware of the
molecular! (Baudrillard, 2007: 47). Baudrillard uses Jacques Monods theory of DNA and the genetic
code to put in question the celebration of the molecular. Baudrillard suggests that precisely on the most
microscopic level of the molecular, the DNA code dominates and controls flows and intensities of
behaviour and that to fetishise a molecular politics or a mircopolitics of desire as Deleuze does might be
to advocate a politics of liberation in a sphere which itself may be controlled by coercive and in some
cases unknown powers. Baudrillards critique is provocative but he fails to articulate a convincing
counter position. I will show that for Deleuze the molecular version of law that is to say, desire, must be
accelerated so that virtual forces can be ignited. Deleuze does not deny that molecular lines have their
dangers too. It is not sufficient to attain or trace out a molecular line supple lines themselves produce
or encounter their own dangers, a threshold crossed too quickly a supple line rushes into a black hole
from which it will not be able to extricate itself (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:138).
Kafkas writing machine does not mean so much as it functions and its
functioning makes of itself an open multiplicity. It is embedded and traversed
by social machines, its operation is interconnected with the processes of a
universal desiring production. Its functioning takes place in a collective field of
activity. What remains to be seen is the way in which language functions
within such a machine. Deleuze and Guattari regard Kafka as a practitioner of
minor literature, an immediately political literature.
- 193 precursor of a community still in formation. It prepares the way, calls into
being the revolutionary machine yet to come. We might say as well that minor
no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for
every literature (Deleuze and Guattari: 2006:18).
Kafkas literature does not occur elsewhere or apart from a dominant or major
structure (this is not a dialectic) but, on the contrary, operates from within,
using the same elements, as it were, but in a different manner. Language has
to acquire an intensity and the world has to be appropriated as an immanent
logic of desire rather than represented according to its own moral categories.
Kafka re-enacts societys logic of desire, thereby connecting the order of the
unconscious and the structure of power in a given political context. This
requires that the artist establishes a direct non-representational relation to the
desires circulating within the social realm. In order for language to become a
vehicle of desire, in order for it to enter into direct relation with the social body,
the representational level of language needs to be broken down. Through the
break down of representation, Kafka acquires a direct or visionary relation to
social reality (Due, 1999: 73).
The art (modern art in this sense) that Kafka tried to introduce is effectively no
longer an art that proposes to represent (a thing, a being) or to imitate (a
- 194 nature). It is rather a method (of writing) of picking up, a confiscation, even
of stealing: of a double stealing, which is both stealing and stealing away
that consists in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of
(nonsignifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders
of signs and powers. Kafkas literature is a a gypsy literature which had stolen
the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind
of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn't even a
German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was
dancing) (Boa, 1996: 27).
Kafka creates a unique solitary writing but in the sense of a new sobriety, a
new unheard of correctness, a polite rectification, drunkenness from pure
water (Deleuze and Guattari, 2006: 26). The strangeness of Kafkas prose
lies in hypercorrectness, its stark purity that admits no direct violation of
standard usage. The reduction of vocabulary pushes each word a few steps
closer to an inarticulate extreme, toward vanishing point at which all sense
must be expressed in a single sound. It is in this way that Kafka makes
- 195 Prague German cry with a cry so sober and rigorous (Deleuze and Guattari,
2006: 26).
To depict power is to absorb it and then speed up the movement that already
determines contemporary social reality. Kafkas novels exaggerate elements
of social reality and combine them into a new whole in which the social,
sexual and spatial configurations of power are displayed and brought out of
control. Kafkas machine of expression is capable of disorganising its own
forms, of disorganising the forms of content, so as to free up an intense
material of expression that is made of pure content that can no longer be
separated from its expression: Expression must break forms, encourage
ruptures and new sproutings. When form is broken, one must reconstruct the
content that will necessarily be part of a rupture in the order of things (Due,
1999: 75).
- 196 multiplicity of virtual evaluations. For Deleuze and Guattari one must hate all
languages of masters (Deleuze and Guattari, 2006: 26).
Minor art stops being representative in order to move towards its extremities
or its limits (Deleuze and Guattari, 2006: 23). In Kafkas The Metamorphosis,
Gregor Samsas animal cry sound is deterritorialised noise. Kafka utilises
existing materials in order to deterritorialise them. Humour also is
deterritorialised language. It is an affirmative violence against typical
signifying formations. Humour is here not irony but something more
affirmative of lifes multiplicity. Deleuzes humour focuses on the bodies,
particularities, noises and disruptions that are in excess of the system and law
of speech.
Humour falls or collapses: down from meaning to the singularities of life that
have no order or intention. Humour is not the reversal of cause and effect but
the abandonment of the before and after relations the very line of time.
Samuel Becketts humour makes the order of time and explanation no longer
hold. In Endgame, a character repeatedly looks out of the window to see if it
is still the end of the world. The end of the world becomes one object
among others in an absurd time that can both continue beyond, and view, the
end of time. Unlike Socratic irony, which insists on what concepts must mean,
Becketts humour perverts conceptual meaning, saying what we cannot say.
(Colebrook, 2003:136).
- 197 Literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, can reverse this historical
tendency by re-living the cruelty and terror from which the law is imagined.
Kafka is often read as an ironic or negative author because all we see are
judgements and prohibitions, never the law itself. Kafkas fathers and judges
in The Castle or The Trial are not signs of a hidden law. Kafka exposes the
law as a fiction, as nothing more than a series of authorities who have such a
lack of force and power that they must present themselves as signs of some
greater law. But there is nothing behind the father or the judge. We need to
see such fictions as signifiers, pure affects or sensations with no underlying
reality. The subject, or the self subjected to an unseen law, is one fiction or
image among others. Kafkas endless images of the law shows the law is
nothing more than the performance or image of power, with power itself being
the power of images (Deleuze and Guattari, 2006: 55).
K. wanders through passage after passage never arriving at the law. On the
negative and traditional reading, the law is what must always remain hidden;
one can only produce images and interpretations of the law of a justice
beyond conception or measure but any attempt to represent or articulate
this law defies its essential purity. On this reading, one is essentially alienated
and guilty, and Kafkas fictions are symbols of this alienation, the loss of any
sense of a present or presentable god or law. For Deleuze and Guattari, the
wanderings in Kafkas The Trial are positive. There is an intensity, an
enjoyment of movement itself. In fact, the law as supposed end or reason for
this movement is produced from the movement. Kafkas texts produce
doorways, passages and images, all with no law or fulfilment and not as some
ultimate goal or origin which drives action. It is interpretation that imposes a
law: if you were wandering from door to door then you must have been
searching for some end (Colebrook, 2002a:138).
The key political question is not how to attain the law, but how it is that we
have enslaved ourselves to laws that deny our desires. Bodies have a
tendency to create images that enhance their power; but these same images
can appear as external laws towards which life ought to strive. As shown in
Chapter Four, Deleuze and Guattari show that capitalism does not oppress on
- 198 the basis of some external law or code. Capitalism argues for the value of
exchange itself. The subject is nothing other than the empty axiom that allows
all life to flow across one single plane; the subject is nothing other than a
potential for labour and exchange, devoid of any positive qualities. The
subject is just that capacity to adopt any and every persona or value; the
undetermined subject who exists behind determined values is an effect of the
dominance and immanence of the capitalist system, a system that precludes
any outside. Capitalism produces any and every value as one more
quantifiable item of exchange. The idea that everything is discourse, that
there is no self, substance or perception outside signs, that individuals are
constructions of social systems: this type of postmodernism is at one with a
capitalism that reduces life to one undifferentiated plane of relative values. For
Deleuze, difference is not constructed from an undifferentiated system.
Deleuze goes against negative difference and insists life, desire and
difference extend well beyond the imaginary or myth of capitalism
(Colebrook, 2003: 151).
Baudrillard focuses not on difference, but on radical otherness, that which lies
beyond all law, structure and systems. Baudrillards unconvertible other is
based on an absence, a lack, a void. Baudrillard asks, [i]f you were to see
written on a door panel: This door opens onto a void wouldnt you still want
to open it? Of course one would always be tempted: to open the door to lose
oneself, a fatal loss which is none the less craved and essential to the
existence of the subject. The subject needs to be threatened: while it is
vulnerable it knows who it is. The threat must seem credible and appear to
pose a real danger (Gane, 1991a:158).
- 199 now Im going to close it (Kafka, 1983:195). Baudrillards story omits the trap
set by the law, the deferred effects which will arise if the door has written on it
this door is for you, do not open it, or do not open it yet, or this door is for
you, do not open it because it opens onto the void. In other words, the void
for Baudrillard, is simply forbidden; certainly a chasm, the abyss, exercises its
fascination, but would anyone open such a door without looking over ones
shoulder to see if there is not a doorman somewhere? (Gane, 1991a: 159).
For Freud the jokes pleasure strips out spatiotemporal measure: an hour spent laughing cannot be
adequately measured subjectively (Freud, 1991: 187).
- 200 -
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