Showing papers in "Substance in 1984"

Conceptual Politics and the War-Machine in Mille Plateaux

Abstract: In an interview published at the same time as Mille Plateaux, Deleuze described his work with Guattari as "philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word."' By that he means a quite specific activity of conceptual creation: to philosophize is to invent new concepts. The understanding of concepts, however, is far from traditional. These are described as singularities, elsewhere as lines or intensities, which react upon the flow of everyday thought, forming relays between artistic, political, or other practices. Concepts function in assemblages with non-conceptual modes of thought, form

Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and His Br(others)

Abstract: Responding to the appearance of Deleuze and Guattari's (D + G) Mille Plateaux in 1980, Catherine Clement pointed out what could be said about most of Deleuze's books, whether or not his is the only signature: it is a book of history, economy, ethnology, politics, aesthetics, linguistics. And a book of philosophy? "It's philosophy. Or maybe not. It's writing and thinking. Chagrined people those with thin skin you know? will sit worrying in their corner, smaller and smaller. The others, philosophers or not, will amuse themselves. And even seriously."2 Seriously. For some, especially in the United States, this adverb is irrelevant to D + G. That judgement, in my opinion, is, however, simple and unfortunate. First, because D + G are very "serious"-perhaps not in the French sense (grave, without laughter, reasonable) because their work is also frivolous, gay, light (and perhaps even futile). But they are most certainly not joking. This is clear if only because of the wide impact they have had on contemporary thought and, most especially, on its students everywhere. In the U.S., where theory from France enters through language and literature departments, that impact has tended to be academically minimized with words like "utopian," "anarchistic," "perverse." This is in part because Deleuze and Guattari take you further and further out of the text, not deeper into it. It is also because

A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: "The Lost Object: Me"

Abstract: Translator's Note: This article is excerpted from Nicolas Abraham's L'corce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), with the permission of Maria Torok. It is being published simultaneously in Psychoanalytic Inquiry (forthcoming 1984). The Hungarian-born French philosopher's and psychoanalyst's works are being systematically introduced to the English-speaking scholarly community. Diacritics has devoted half of a special issue (Spring 1979); the University of Minnesota Press has recently commissioned the translation of Abraham's and Torok's Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l'Homme aux loups (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1976); and the Georgia Review has published the English translation of Jacques Derrida's prefatory essay, "Fors," to Cryptonymie (Spring 1977). The original title of the essay, "L'objet perdu-moi," has been supplemented here by "A Poetics of Psychoanalysis" to underscore its contribution to both psychoanalysis and literary theory. The essay offers a privileged entry into Abraham's works in that it puts forward a theory of fiction in the place of the psychoanalytic subject. The type of fiction outlined here is not based on the workings of the unconscious or the illusion of an imaginary self, it is the result of a loss. In setting up the fiction of being another, the subject creates himself as a dialogue or, more precisely, as a system of analogical references to a fictitious other. The status of the subject becomes poetic in that the dialogic structure can only be recognized through linguistic acts. The essay thus implies a dia-logic theory of readinga subject or a text may be read through to another text which is its own fictitious (and concealed) system of reference.

The Literary Element in "Mille Plateaux": The New Cartography of Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract: Twelve years have passed since Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari shocked the French intelligentsia with their provocative assault on the systems of structuralist, psychoanalytic, and political signification in L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrinie I.1 While their subsequent works go virtually untranslated2 and have inevitably been judged as outmoded in Parisian circles, Deleuze and Guattari have continued elaborating the system of schizo-analysis, their most thorough development being the recent second volume of Capitalisme et Schizophrinie, entitled Mille Plateaux. 3 In both volumes of this mammoth project, as well as in the intervening works,4 they have cast literature as an exemplary mode to demonstrate systems of machinic functioning; how literature, books, and writing operate in terms of such functioning in terms of the "rhizomatic" analysis presented in Mille Plateauxconstitutes the focus of this study. While literary works played an important role in Anti-Oedipus, 5 it was not until the subsequent analysis entitled Kafka. Pour une littirature mineure that the works of a single author were considered thoroughly in light of "machinic" concepts.6 The purpose of this critical work seems double: on the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari continue their anti-oedipal polemic, this time against certain literary and psychoanalytic interpretations of Kafka's works; and on the other hand, the authors seek to move beyond the schizo-analytic terms suggested in Anti-Oedipus, to situate the machinic functioning in the organic as well. Thus they not only posit "minor" literature's existence vis-a-vis the "great" or "major" literatures, thereby extending their view of literature as locus of desire and of the real; they also advance their terminology in another important direction: the molecules of the expression-machine function as rhizome (Kafka's letters, K, pp. 53-62); as animal-becomings (le devenir-animal) and as lines of flight (Kafka's short stories, K, pp. 63-68); and finally as machine assemblage (l'agencement machinique) (Kafka's novels, K, pp. 69-73). While Kafka represents a limited example of the next step of the schizoanalytic project, "to see how, effectively, simultaneously, the various tasks of schizo-analysis proceed" (AO, p. 382),7 a year later there appeared a slim

Inside "The Masque of the Red Death"

Abstract: This note will explore a dialectic between inside and outside in Poe's tale which seems to fit the following propositions: 1. The tale narrates the penetration of an inside space by an outside agent or force, yet, in its personification, this agent represents the deepest inside of that space; 2. The external agent is finally seen to be an outside which has no corresponding inside. I am not tempted to identify the ghastly masquerader as anything-the plague, death, life, the Philistine world, etc. other than an "outside." I find support for this in the fact that my ordinary notions of how one contracts a fatal illness, dies, or puts the world at defiance are not accommodated by the literal process of the tale. The identification that seems to be most excluded by the tale is the equivalence of the body and its infections. Prince Prospero and a thousand knights and dames seek to secure themselves against the Red Death by relocating themselves in a "new" place, a place which can be effectively contained as inside space. The Red Death is described as an invader from outside: it had "long devastated the country"; it "raged most furiously abroad"; and it "had come like a thief in the night."' Victims of the disease are "shut out" by the "pest ban." The place chosen is "the deep seclusion" of a castellated abbey surrounded by a "strong and lofty wall" with "gates of iron" (p. 670). The fixity and impenetrability of this boundary is seemingly assured by the strenuous work of welding the bolts. Yet the welding of the bolts is explained by a sentence that disturbs its context and creates a counter-movement, a loophole in the text (the very means, perhaps, by which the Red Death enters the abbey): "They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within" (p. 671). The text gets it backwards, which is often the case in Poe. The threat which was wholly outside is now balanced between outside and inside. Indeed, this sentence is dominated by the newly arisen impulse to get out which remains untexted, although it drifts into contiguity with the even more unspecified "confused revery or meditation" which besets the "more aged and sedate" during the pauses of the music (pp. 672-673).

Riffaterra Cognita: A Late Contribution to the Formalism Debate

Abstract: "Formalism" and "interpretation" are at loggerheads, it seems. We can no longer subscribe to an inductive empiricism which claims to find meaning hidden in the structures of a text, waiting to be revealed by the correct analytical procedures, for these structures and these meanings are the product of our interpreting strategies. The dichotomy of description/interpretation, which derives from the discovery that formalism cannot automatically account for the interpretation of a text, has, in its turn, given rise to the notion of "undecidability": the text exceeds, signs exceed, plurality is of the essence, "indefinitely determined is indeterminate,"' . . . "and so, as a result," we either do deconstructii, that formalism of the signifier that takes as its object not the containment--the content-of language, but its excess; or we become anxious and insecure as practitioners of literary criticism, interpreting texts at our peril and speaking, with more or less elegance and wit, our defenses against self-slaughter. "Semiotics" is neither a word nor a project that can of itself resolve this debate, since the Peirce/Saussure encounter has much the same delineations: structuralist semiotics is formalist in its orientation, whereas Peircian semiotics is interpretive .2 Professor Riffaterre's project of a semiotics of poetry is avowedly Peircian in its strategic use of Peircian texts to provide its theoretical rationale, yet it also argues strongly in favor of submission to the authority of the text as the royal road to decidability.3 I can only applaud the fact that the question of the readability of Rimbaud has been raised in a journal with as wide a readership as New Literary History,4 and that this question has been considered on the basis of the general premises of semiotics, defined as the claim that "there can be no meaning save in the relationship between a sign and a complex of other signs, or in the integration of a sign system into another sign system."s But notwithstanding my sympathy with Professor Riffaterre's intentions and, indeed, my conviction that his construals of features of two notoriously hermetic texts of Rimbaud are undoubtedly correct,6 I am com-

Criticism and the Closure of "Modernism"

Abstract: Sur C. Greenberg, "Modernist Painting", in The New Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973). Histoire de la "modernite" et du "modernisme", en art notamment. L'art et la science, la raison: la Critique du jugement de Kant| la sensation, la peinture. Criticisme et pratique artistique.

Nodality or Plot Displaced: The Dynamics of Sollers's H

Abstract: It seems axiomatic that an increasing number of books advertising themselves as novels refuse to tell tales. To the extent that such books retain vestiges of plot and narrative discourse, both are attenuated and/or sublimated. Questions of plot, character, setting, and point of view, if not of narrative tension, are displaced by the question of organization, and that is most often nodal. Such texts are frequently informed by systems of interrelated passages (scenes, images, visions, treatments of topics, etc.) which do not contribute to a coherent and generalized narrative development, but rather break the narrative surface, standing out against or being readily isolable before blending into the verbal context. The passages in question can best be thought of as nodes or clusters of signifiers in "open works."' In their nature and function, fictional nodes will vary from text to text, but generally a major node is a complex, foregrounded moment capable of subdivision and subject to expansion. Typically, a fully developed node will find enriching echoes in other parts of the book. While they need resolve nothing on the level of plot or argument, such echoes gradually contribute to the formation of nodal systems. Nodes tend to be fundamental statements of the textual predicament; so we may expect aspects of a given group of nodes to overlap with those of others, contributing to networks that gradually reveal their significance and simultaneously give the reader a sense of the text's articulation, its essential structure. The latter, while displacing linear discourse by complementing other structuring systems, ultimately reassures by imposing, through

Poe and the Mystery of Things: A Remembrance

Abstract: The dignity and solemness, the awe, involved with death--because elevated or deep feelings are absent in life--go up in the smoke of modern thinking: ratiocination. A person murdered, a dead body, is killed again, dies a second death this time for good. The body loses all qualities which recall its humanhood (species-being) and now manifests the mutilations of a life impossible to live; it becomes a mere corpse, a hunk of flesh, visited by corruption. Yet in the horror of this process, in the repulsion consequent to its decomposition and putrescence, to use a Poe word, the body--nameless because undistinguished by that which would make it humanbecomes for the first time a referent to that which would be human. It refers to the hitherto faceless generality, in whose bad name it has suffered a fate no longer tragic but by now commonplace: deathly disfiguration. In the figure of its complete annihilation --in body as well as in name--the body is transfigured, as it were, into the afterthought of its own denial, the prefiguration of its blank future. Yet this future would be inscribed with the inescapable logic of the perpetual present. At the root of Poe's detective story lies the body. The body which is never there, even in its negation as a corpse. Here we will not speak of the body in terms of the phallic mysticism of esoteric popular academic writing, but rather on its own grounds--those unhallowed by the Christian prayer and buried without further ado. Except the body in the prototypical detective story (actually, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" predates our mundane, hence, as

The Signs of Consciousness

Abstract: According to Husserl, consciousness has, moment by moment, insight into itself. It is given to itself. Its being is present to itself. This self-consciousness in consciousness is conceived as intuition - immediacy. Consciousness is in relationship with itself immediately, not through intermediaries, not through signs. And adequately, apodictically--not through aspects, profiles, adumbrations. Consciousness itself produces this evidence of itself; it gives itself to itself, presents itself to itself. This immanent intuition is interwoven with transcendent and merely presumptive intuitions. Every consciousness is consciousness of something -of something given in the world or of its reproductions, its representations. The seeing of seeing occurs when seeing sees the visible, that which is transcendent to it. It is true that Husserl imagines an annihilation of the world, which leaves consciousness intact. But this only means that there would be seeing of visible givens, where the givens would never coalesce to confirm presumptive identifications- and seeing of that seeing. The immanent intuition, immediate and apodictic, is in reality a retrogressive intention that accompanies an intuition naturally turned to transcendent objects. Yet all excellence belongs to this ancillary structure. The imaginative annihilation of the world proved that consciousness can exist with immediate hyletic material alone, affecting its own substance; it can exist without objects and without a world, a coherent system of objects. The objects, however, and the world cannot subsist without consciousness. Objects and the world are constituted in consciousness. Its own existence is an absolute, independent of any and all objects.

Toward Grounding Peirce's Semiotics in a Homological Architectonic

Abstract: What I believe may be helpful to construct from C. S. Peirce's work is rather simple, perhaps even simple-minded: 1) the triadic nature of the sign is not arbitrary and depends upon a complex of homologous relations represented by Peirce in equally trichotomous manner; 2) this complex tissue of thought is not merely a function of "triadomany" (triadmania), but rather of the innate structure of the universe as Peirce perceived it; 3) this innate structure is represented in a realist-organic architectonic which Peirce never explicitly constructed, but toward which all his thinking tends. Rulon Wells notes that Peirce's work "is not a mere heap of ideas from which one can deftly pick out some [themes] while leaving the others quite behind. His concept of sign involves interpretant . . his concept of interpretant involves mind; his concept of mind is generalized (to include 'quasi-mind') beyond recognition along panpsychistic lines dictated by his synechistic idealism. His pragmatism and his anti-Cartesianism must be mentioned in the same breath."' W. B. Gallie agrees that this organic unity is important, but notices as well that its expression is incomplete: "The greatness of Peirce ... lies rather in the organic unity of his thinking, a unity which has been obscured by his own failure to present his teaching during his lifetime in a unified literary form, but partly also by the fact that he sought to test out his central doctrines on a wide variety of clearly defined issues."2 While Murray Murphey senses organic unity to have been a motivation present from the beginning,3 William Rosensohn points out that the term "architectonic" makes its first appearance in 1891 in the Monist article "Architecture of Theories."4

Image-Movement and Its Three Varieties: Second Commentary about Bergson

Abstract: The historical crisis of psychology coincides with the moment when it was no longer possible to maintain a certain position: this position consisted of placing images in consciousness and movements in space.' In consciousness, there would only be qualitative, unextended images. In space, there would only be extended, quantitative movements. But how would it be possible to pass from one order to the other? How could one explain that movements might suddenly produce an image, as in a perception, or that the image might produce a movement, as in voluntary action? If one refers to the brain, it must be vested with a miraculous power. And how could one keep movement from already being an at least virtual image and image from already being an at least possible movement? What finally appeared without solution was the confrontation between materialism and idealism, the first wishing to reconstitute the order of consciousness with pure material movements, the second wishing to reconstitute the order of the universe with pure images in consciousness.2 It was necessary at all costs to overcome this duality of image and movement, of the consciousness and the thing. And, at the same period, two very different authors were undertaking this task, Bergson and Husserl. Each brought forth his war cry: all consciousness is consciousness of something (Husserl), or even further, all consciousness is something (Bergson). Undoubtedly, many factors exterior to philosophy made it clear that the old position had become impossible. These were social and scientific factors which increasingly placed movement in conscious life and images in the material world. How could one no longer take cinema into account, which was also being developed at that moment and which was going to bring its own evidence of an image-movement?3 It is true that Bergson, as we have seen, apparently only finds a false ally in cinema. As for Husserl, as far as we know, he does not refer to cinema at all (one notices that even Sartre, when he later makes an inventory and analysis

The Alcatraz Effect: Belief and Postmodernity

Abstract: Visitors to Alcatraz Island, former Federal Penitentiary, know what to expect. To make the excursion worthwhile, however, demands a certain state of mind; their knowledge must be left hanging in the balance of a suspension of disbelief. Seeing, after all, is believing, which is no less than the commodity fetish of a tourist industry, content to trade in forms (as the phrase goes) of organized escapism. If that is so, then the trip out to Alcatraz should be impossible, a false re-staging of a prisoner's "impossible" escape, except in reverse. We go there, however, as guests of the liberal authorities to see an object-lesson of the law at work, and in splendid isolation, cut off from the social and geographical body and thus fetishized for our comfort and curiosity as the flipside of the desert island of imaginary pleasure. Our interest, then, in learning about the exacting conditions of incarceration firsthand, is not self-contained, but is predicated upon its very obverse accession to the belief that escape is possible all the same, despite being repeatedly reminded that it is not. What thus came as a revelation to Ken Kesey, the very contours of a parable of modernity, may have been little more than quotidian logic to the scholastic rule of thumb: credo ut intellegam, under which rubric doubt was always already a conventional province of belief, a desert for an oasis, but containing it too. Hence the surprise of another tourist, Freud in Athens for the first time, discovering, as he cast his eyes around the terrain of the Acropolis, that "it really does exist," an equivocal response in the light of his confidential desire that it turn out to be too good to be true, that the glamorous spell cast by the classical education of his childhood might still be preserved intact, tucked into the memory of his original landscape of desire and the heroic feats performed there upon his mother's body. The "truth" of this revelation would never be found to reside in any purely empirical setting, like the real scandal of coming across the Loch Ness monster stranded upon the

Landscape, Consumption, Redemption: Thomas Moran's "Mountain of the Holy Cross" and the Signifying of Representation'

Abstract: If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting possession spread before our eyes. William James