Showing papers in "Substance in 1991"

A Thousand Trails to Work with Deleuze

Abstract: GILLES DELEUZE, LIKE MICHEL FOUCAULT, has often described theory as a "tool box," the tools being the concepts a philosophy creates and makes available to others in different fields of research. Despite the many new concepts it develops, A Thousand Plateaus comprises a rather unwieldy tool box, since both Deleuze and Guattari refuse to offer their readers a closed system or "recipe" to work from. As soon as it was published in 1980, A Thousand Plateaux appeared to be just as unclassifiable as the Anti-Oedipus had been eight years earlier. It was seen by Anquetil and Deligeorges as an "Unidentified Theoretical Object."' After a first reading, many critics remained "flabbergasted, amazed, puzzled,"2 or even "stricken with astonishment, stunned."3 The same critics, however, recognized that while this book "generates irritation," it constitutes, with the Anti-Oedipus, "a philosophical body without equal in contemporary production" (Delacampagne), "a passport for the imagination," or a "fully positive book" (Deligeorges). Despite its being a long-awaited event, this essay was not as successful as the Anti-Oedipus. Like the Image-Movement published a few years later, A Thousand Plateaus provoked multiple reactions, but few followers. While Deleuze is widely considered (at least in France) as "one of today's greatest philosophers,"4 his work is still rarely discussed, especially in comparison with other philosophical works more accessible to the media, or more oriented towards a systematic school of thought.5 As noted by Michel Contat, this apparent paradox of a celebrated but rarely analyzed work makes Deleuze a great philosopher about whom many talk without always having read his books.6 This problem becomes even more paradoxical if one recalls that Deleuze himself characterized A Thousand Plateaus as "a book of concepts" that is supposed to be open to different fields of thought.7 Deleuze's philosophy is oriented toward inventing concepts within a system that must be accessible and useful not only to philosophers but to anyone

Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization"- From the Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus

Abstract: EIGHT YEARS AFTER THE ANTI-OEDIPUS, the long-awaited second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia appeared under the title A Thousand Plateaus.? It hardly seemed to belong with the earlier volume, in one respect: the points of departure in Marx and Freud that made "capitalism and schizophrenia" a fitting rubric for the Anti-Oedipus all but disappear in A Thousand Plateaus, or rather become submerged in a far vaster field of references ranging from cell biology to botany and zoology to geology and beyond. It is nevertheless some of the connections between the two volumes that I want to explore here, by focusing on the evolution of a term crucial to them both: territorialization. One way of understanding the relation of A Thousand Plateaus to the Anti-Oedipus is to imagine Deleuze and Guattari setting out to "deconstruct" in the second volume any binary oppositions left standing at the end of the first. Not that Deleuze and Guattari are beholden to Derrida in this respect: schizoanalytic "deconstruction" (if it can be called that) derives from the unconscious logic of non-global connection and inclusive disjunction, as specified in the Anti-Oedipus.2 The connective synthesis produces not the closed binary couple, "this and that" but rather an open-ended series "this and then that

The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze

Abstract: of political discourse in French philosophy whose effects upon Continental thought have still not diminished. With the collapse of the Marxist project in Europe, the more valuable contributions of that mode of discourse need to be investigated in order to provide the framework for an alternative vision of progressive politics. One philosopher whose thought was decisively influenced by the "events of May," and whose contribution to political theory has become accepted in the U.S., is Michel Foucault. However, his colleague and friend, Gilles Deleuze, is still in the process of becoming recognized here as a major thinker in current French political discourse.

Linguistics as an Indiscipline: Deleuze and Guattari's Pragmatics

Abstract: ion can be thought of spatially as extending across a virtual surface, rather than reaching to a hidden depth. As Deleuze and Guattari say: ... if the abstraction is taken further, one necessarily reaches a level where the pseudo-constants of language are superseded by variables of expression internal to enunciation itself; these variables of expression are then no longer separable from the variables of content with which they are in perpetual interaction. (ATP 91) A "true" abstract machine-one that is capable of interpreting these variables (in addition to state functions)-"pertains to an assemblage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that assemblage" (91). Pragmatics,

Issue 65 || From Order to Chaos: Michel Serres's Field Models

Abstract: IN HIS PRE-GENESE WRITINGS, Michel Serres uses laws of thermodynamics and information theory to articulate passages that would "bring literary culture and scientific thought into play with one another" (Paulson, 31). The notion of interplay, with its attending complexities and ever-shifting dynamics, prevents Serres from "seeking global paradigms, universal ways of ordering, that can join the literary and the scientific" (Paulson, 36), and instead drives him on to explore the fluid and heteroclite topology of the passages he discovers. This urge toward the all-inclusive (thus limitless) limits of Serres's field vision eventually leads to an a-topical "foregrounding" of all passages in an indeterminate "soup" or "noise" that can summarily be called "chaos," but which Serres refers to by a variety of tropes. The following is a description of Serres's descent into chaos and an attempt to discern a meaning from this undertaking-a reconciliation of literature and science in a discourse surpassing both.

The Undecidable and the Fugitive: Mille Plateaux and the State-Form

Abstract: When intuitionism opposed axiomatics, it was not only in the name of intuition, of construction and creation, but also in the name of a calculus of problems, a problematic conception of science that was not less abstract but implied an entirely different abstract machine, one working in the undecidable and the fugitive. It is the real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. But it is precisely for this reason that nothing is played out in advance.Mille Plateaux (MP 576-7/ATP 461)1

Roger Nimier, Hussard du demi-siecle

Abstract: Les cliches ideologiques, moraux, esthetiques, n'ont pas suffi a eliminer de la memoire roger nimier (1925-1962). Essai de documentation organisee, roger nimier, hussard du demi-siecle contribue a fonder une lecture critique de l'oeuvre, grace a une discipline encore jeune, quoique seculaire: l'histoire litteraire. Etablissement de faits et revelation d'inedits (dont une fraction occupe le tome premier du volume annexe) manifestent, de l'avant-guerre a l'apres-guerre, la genese d'une ecriture et d'une individualite dans l'histoire. L'etude des annees de formation demontre au sein d'un imaginaire d'ancien regime la naissance conjointe d'une singularite et d'une conception de la litterature. Apres la liberation, l'engagement volontaire du hussard agit en 1945 comme un revelateur. On observe ensuite comment nimier, pendant la periode litteraire conquerante (1945-1952) met en ecriture un mal du siecle et lance une maniere allegre d'etre ecrivain. Il est considere alors par les temps modernes comme l'initiateur d'un mouvement, les "hussards", ou sont reperes aussi blondin, laurent, et, posterieurement, deon, hecquet. Cette emergence est saisie par une approche des instances de legitimation intellectuelle: magisteres anciens et nouveaux, manifestes de generation, solidarites ideologiques (gaullisme, heritage maurrassien) et amicales, edition (gallimard), periodiques (la table ronde, liberte de l'esprit, opera, carrefour, arts, la parisienne, la nouvelle n. R. F. ). L'examen de ces structures eclaire aussi le silence final du createur (19521962). Son reve de contre-revolution culturelle ayant echoue, nimier oppose au "siecle" un libertinage. Il semble se borner aux mediations journalistique et editoriale, en faveur d'aines comme chardonne, morand, celine. Paradoxe vivant, il incarne un romantisme et prone un classicisme moderne.

Taking Sade Serially: "Les Cent vingt journees de Sodome"

Abstract: EROTICISM, WE SOMETIMES NEED TO BE REMINDED, is a serious business. Writers associated with the surrealist movement have often taken it upon themselves to do the reminding, none more eloquently than Robert Desnos: "L'esprit gaulois dans ce qu'il peut avoir de plus repugnant, la paillardise la plus 6loign"e de l'amour et toutes ces horribles joies que le vulgaire nomme grivoiseries, bagatelles, lgeretes ... representent en general l'rotisme pour les instituteurs et les ames grossieres" (37). Laughter, ribaldry, even smiling are frivolous, and therefore base and crude. They should not be allowed to contaminate the discourse of eroticism. Think

Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus: Science Fiction and Deleuzo-Guattarian "Becomings"

Abstract: By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"

Electronic Media Studies: From Video Art to Artificial Invention

Abstract: AS A PARODY OF MAGISTERIAL HORNS, a bing, beep, or boing announces more than an electro-writing pad or a glorified calculator: every time a personal computer turns on, it lights up a primitive prototype of artificial intelligence. Cartoon-like icons pop onto a field of candy-colored luminescence, and an arrow floats on the screen, manipulated by a wired "mouse." Like writing while looking at the page in a mirror, it conjures up fantasies of cyborg gloves and goggles: senses of sight and touch separated, then electronically synthesized. Dragging through Menus of promises to "Open," "Duplicate," or even "Shutdown," the computer user follows the contours of a thought built on computational commands. The system mirrors something called cognition-the abstract rules of supposedly pure unadulterated thought. Or, more precisely, the screen mirrors cognitivism's pop-comical description of human minds as algorithmic computational code machines. This cartoon-like cognizing-subject suggests an assemblage of possibilities. These assemblages lead to the following analogy: what cognitivism is to artificial intelligence, rhizomatism is to artificial invention. While cognitive psychology promises to trace out the contours of intelligence, rhizomatism offers a map: cognitivism takes off as a line of flight, careening from code machines and cogs through bicycle chains to scores of songlines and musical comedies, turning Naim June Paik's electronic invention, the Tele-Cello, into a model for artificial invention. While cognitivism's algorithms function as rules for expert systems, Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus functions as an expert rhizomatism, helping to insert video art experiments into computer programming. How can we turn Paik's Tele-Cello into a model for artificial invention? In the context of media theory, we can appreciate its relevance. Media theories in the 1970s and early 1980s tried to account for the ways in which the "cinematic apparatus" positioned subjects as consumers/spectators; the social "apparatus" effaced the labor involved in constructing meanings.

Changing the Facts of Life: The Case of Baby M

Abstract: THE CUSTODY TRIAL FOR BABY M raises the question of how "newness" emerges through specific cases. This trial involves advances in reproductive technologies and the ethical issues that have arisen with them. Although the problems associated with "discovery" and "invention" have been spread across the disciplines, it seems important to ask whether there is a common denominator within this diversity. Not just at the theoretical level, but also as it is implemented in examples, so that we may pass from cognitive to ethical thought. Two hypotheses serve as a point of departure for what follows: 1) Resistance to and the acceptance of what is new involves definitions of what is pertinent, or important, to the thinking of a given era. By the transposition of ideas from one discipline to another, by returning to older forms and discourses, the emergence of newness depends upon a complex relationship between a tradition of thinking and the sudden appearance of what I will call "facts." To ascertain what one means by a "fact" in such cases is not easy. Although at a certain level facts, like events, are cultural constructs, subject always to the process of interpretation, there is a limit to this definition in the context of action, pain and human distress. 2) Ethical thought may be defined here as a questioning of the status of the particular event, and its insertion into a system of thinking: making relevant what is most contingent, relative, even temporary. The legal system in the United States, for example, is based on case-by-case precedent, and this makes what is contingent into a future given. Within the framework of a specific case, I want to ask not only: what legitimizes ethical judgment? but also, how does one judge?1 The passage from thought as invention to fact as experiment is currently being debated in biology, where the advances of reproductive technologies now give these questions urgency. What makes this passage so acutely important now, as J. Testart has pointed out in his book L'Oeuf transparent, is that ethics must form the bridge between this generation and the next, because there is nothing that has been discovered in science and technology that may not be tried out. So that if one cannot limit invention, one

The Primacy of Matter

Abstract: THE SITES OF AESTHETIC DISCOVERY are as varied as our passions, and our fears. The objects of our fascination, the raw matter of our arts, are sometimes familiar and reassuring, sometimes bizarre and uncanny. Sometimes such things lead us back to our childhood, sometimes forward to the moment of our death. On certain rare occasions, birth and death are conflated, and we are privy to the internal workings of the cosmos, revealing the very origins of our being. In Nadja (1928), Andre Breton recounts that he would often go to the flea market at Saint-Ouen, just outside of Paris:

Nomad Love and the War-Machine: Michel Tournier's Gilles et Jeanne

Abstract: IN THE SECTION OF MICHEL TOURNIER'S intellectual autobiography, The Wind Spirit, entitled "The Mythic Dimension," Tournier reminisces about his association with Gilles Deleuze at the Lyc~e Carnot in the early 1940s: "All the tired philosophy of the curriculum passed through him and emerged unrecognizable, but rejuvenated, with a fresh, undigested, bitter taste of newness that we weaker, lazier minds found disconcerting and repulsive" (128). This perspective of the Deleuzian "fresh, undigested, bitter taste of newness" has been vastly enlarged, not only in Deleuze's philosophical works and in the ambitious project he has undertaken in collaboration with Felix Guattari entitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia (AntiOedipus and A Thousand Plateaus). This "bitter taste of newness" also emerges in Tournier's work in the tension between ecriture and sens, in what Colin Davis calls "his simultaneous identification with both nomad and sedentary, when the former values the journey and the latter only the destination" (205). It is the connection between "nomadology" (proposed by Deleuze and Guattari to conceptualize philosophical, political, ethical and textual multiplicity) and Tournier's re-mythologizing in the short recit, Gilles et Jeanne, that I propose to explore. In Tournier's tale, Jeanne d'Arc's quest and martyrdom are depicted for the transmutation they incite in the life and soul of her notorious comrade-in-arms, the sire Gilles de Rais.' Through the brief but intense period of military campaigns which Jeanne and Gilles share, the chevalier is transformed from merely one "of those country squires from Brittany and the Vendee who had thrown in their lot with the Dauphin Charles" (5; 9), into an isolated, tormented warlord waging his own private, roving battle with forces known only to him and to his henchmen. Tournier's reinscription of the myth of Gilles de Rais likens this transformation to an alchemical process of "becoming," ignited by the initial contact with Jeanne d'Arc and perpetuated through subsequent phases. It is from the perspective of this "becoming" and its relation to "nomadology" that I will map out the textual coordinates, plotted through

Sexual Scenarios in Freud's Joke-Analysis

Abstract: MOST STUDIES OF JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS take the book at face-value, as an analysis of humor, and avoid discussion of its inherent oddities.' Freud's title indicates that the work is a psychoanalytic, scientific deconstruction of jokes in general, and indeed his terminology for jokes parallels that for his scientific dream-interpretation: most obvious is the similarity between the phrases "dream-work" and "joke-work," a similarity which "emphasizes the resemblance between the processes concerned in producing jokes and dreams" as Freud himself notes (91n1).2 But Freud's interest in jokes was much more personal than he implies on the level of "text." His sub-textual agenda is an attempt to fulfill a wish, to solve a problem. Interestingly enough, Freud twice quoted Goethe's phrase, "where he makes a jest, a problem lies concealed" (Schorske 181; emphasis mine);3 the problem Freud conceals in the Jewish jests that he "tells" and analyzes is a problem of identity. If Jokes is read with attention to Freud's self-image as a Jewish physician in fin-de-sikcle Vienna, its puzzling contents begin to make more sense. The historical context of Freud's book sheds light on his use of Jewish jokes, which comprise most of the examples in the work. The wish that he tries to fulfill in writing the book on Jewish jokes is, ironically, a version of his wish to free himself from the Jewish cultural milieu in Vienna, which was plagued by anti-Semitism. "The increasing importance of the effects of the anti-Semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days," writes Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, 196). Jokes, then, contains a "subplot of personal history" as does The Interpretation of Dreams (Schorske 183), a history that is buried in the psychoanalytic discourse Freud himself invented. The language he uses to disguise or "invent" himself is neutral, devoid of any distinguishing Jewish dialect. As a Jew, Freud was encountering great difficulty in attaining a professorship, and he was determined to

The Sartrean Viscous: Swamp and Source

Abstract: As Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Age de Raison (The Age of Reason) opens, Mathieu learns that he has inadvertently impregnated his long-time lover, Marcelle. The primordial given of individual freedom, thrown into crisis by the vagaries of human reproduction, constitutes the guiding theme in this 1945 novel. The next several hundred pages are like a dissection table upon which Sartre lays bare the workings of Mathieu's mind, where repulsion at female anatomy intermingles with horror at embryogeny. By the end of the ontological meanderings in L'Etre et le ndant (Being and Nothingness), published two years earlier, Sartre had managed to navigate beyond the descriptions of the "for-itself's" bodily life in everyday experience: he had readied his readers for a long-awaited landing in the harbor of ethics. Yet Sartre is never far from carnal desire and puzzlement at how our body connects with the world. The treatise's last chapter, entitled "On Quality as a Revelation of Being" (EN 661-78), proves to be an increasingly lurid account of the means by which an unmistakably feminine slime may afford the (masculine) "for-itself" that euphoric experience of total being. In a last stab at synthetically embodying ideal ontological totality, Sartre's famous surrogate in this odyssey of the "for-itself," Pierre, corporeally enters a netherworld where he knows that le visqueux (slime, or "the viscous") will imperil his monolithic, existentialist freedom. Yet, risking his life, Pierre cuts deeply into this voracious "quality of being," the final metaphor for the Other in L'Etre et le niant, managing to emerge unscathed by coital contact with the dark side of being. But rather than recapture his stolen being by figuratively killing or ingesting the Other in the manner usual to the Sartrean "for-itself," Pierre will leave "the viscous" as an ever-thriving threat.

"Impervious to Criticism": Contemporary Parody and Trash

Abstract: JOHN UPDIKE REFERS to "my decade's one precious parody" in a recent collection of non-fiction (xxiii). The fact that it is just "one," and can be properly termed "precious," exemplifies the condition of parody today. It is a condition which is terminal: few parodies are written any more.' What life it does have is indeed "precious"--because it is so rare, and also refined or even affected. Certainly to write traditional parody today is to engage in a more problematic practice than the venerable "art" defined in literary handbooks. In a recent study, Joseph Dane quotes one definition only to dismiss it, speaking instead of "a consensus on what texts we call parodies" and adding, "I do not assume beyond this that we know the 'nature' or 'essence' of parody, or that a description of such a hypothetical nature is desirable." His own text will be, Dane continues, "not the application of a definition of parody to exemplary parodies but rather a study in our own discourse of parody" (5,6). But what if there really isn't any such discourse? Or if it is so radically at odds with the traditional one that there is no coherence at all?

Video-Texts: Technology and the Teaching of Literature

Abstract: quotations whose synthesis seems impossible. Looking for the word, any word, you punch radio station button after button, crossing the great plural plains of AM and FM offerings: rock, jazz, classical, all talk, all sports, and so-called "easy listening." Unsatisfied, you pop in a homemade cassette whose contents are so edited, repeated, and erased that the label refers to last season's favorites: a farrago of styles, repetitions, thefts of the most harmless kind, inventions of the soundtrack that will be your morning's life. Voices and visions, for you also live in an empire of multiple perspectives and time-frames: you see through the windshield the future, the postmodern edifice complex with the juxtaposed facades of old and new; in the rear-view mirror, the familiar flow of the immediate past; and at your sides, the parallel universes (didn't Einstein learn something about relativity this way?) of the blurrily relative present. You are in your car, but your mind still moves with headlines from The Times, and with lines from last night's reading on "distressed" literature and the "ex-centric canon." As you gear towards the classes you must teach today, you remember that you are to talk about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and its discussions on deconstruction, the problematic nature of logocentrism, and the spread of indeterminacy, all in the guise of a medieval mystery story. You have