by Daniel Smith
Literature acceded to its modernity, Deleuze suggests, not only when it turned to language as its condition, but when it freed the virtual from its actualizations and allowed it to assume a validity of its own. Deleuze often cites as an example Borges's famous story “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” in which a purely virtual world is described in the labyrinthine book of a Chinese philosopher named Ts'ui Pen:
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at the expense of others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them … Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at the door. Naturally there are various outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die, etc. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations … You have come to my house, but in one of our possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.35
Leibniz had in fact given a similar presentation of the universe at the conclusion of the Theodicy—“an astonishing text,” says Deleuze, “that we consider a source of all modern literature.”36 In Ts'ui Pen's labyrinth, however, God is no longer a Being who compares and chooses the richest compossible world, as in the Theodicy; he has now become a pure Process that passes through all these virtual possibilities, forming an infinite web of diverging and converging series. Divergences, bifurcations, and incompossibles now belong to one and the same universe, a chaotic universe in which divergent series trace endlessly bifurcating paths: a “chaosmos” and no longer a world.
Hindered as he was by theological exigencies, Leibniz could only hint at the principle of the “ideal play” that governs the relations among singularities considered in themselves. For the inherence of predicates in the expressive monad presupposes the compossibility of the expressed world, but both in turn presuppose the distribution of pure singularities that are a-cosmic and pre-individual, and are linked together in series according to rules of convergence and divergence. This liberation of the virtual implies a fundamentally new type of narration, whose conditions Deleuze outlines in a chapter of The Time-Image entitled “The Powers of the False.”37 Descriptions no longer describe a pre-existing actual reality; rather, as Robbe-Grillet says, they now stand for their objects, creating and erasing them at the same time. Time ceases to be chronological, and starts to posit the simultaneity of incompossible presents or the coexistence of not-necessarily-true pasts. Abstract space becomes disconnected, its parts now capable of being linked in an infinite number of ways through non-localizable relations (as in the Riemannian or topological spaces of modern mathematics). Concrete space is no longer either stable or unstable but metastable, presenting “a plurality of ways of being in the world” that are incompatible yet coexistent. Forces lose their centers of movement and fixed points of reference and are now merely related to other forces. “Perspectivism” no longer implies a plurality of viewpoints on the same world or object; each viewpoint now opens on to another world that itself contains yet others. The “harmony” of Leibniz's world gives way to an emancipation of dissonance and unresolved chords that are not brought back into a tonality, a “polyphony of polyphonies” (Boulez). Most importantly, perhaps, the formal logic of actual predicates is replaced by a properly “transcendental” logic of virtual singularities. It is under these virtual conditions (and only under these conditions) that Deleuze and Guattari speak of a “rhizome”: that is, a multiplicity in which a singularity can be connected to any other in an infinite number of ways. Deleuze distinguishes, in general, between three types of syntheses among singularities: a connective synthesis (if … then), which bears upon the construction of a single series; a conjunctive synthesis (and … and), which is a method of constructing convergent series; and, most importantly, a paradoxical disjunctive synthesis (either … or), which affirms and distributes divergent series and turns disjunction into a positive and synthetic principle. (One of the essential questions posed by The Logic of Sense concerns the conditions in which disjunction can be a synthetic principle and not merely a procedure of exclusion.)38 Narration, in short, can describe this virtual domain only by becoming fundamentally falsifying: neither true nor false in content—an undecidable alternative—but false in its form, what Nietzsche called the creative power of the false.39
Many of Deleuze's analyses of literature in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense concern the various techniques by which such disjunctive syntheses have been put to use in language by various writers. The Logic of Sense, for instance, includes an analysis of the various types of “portmanteau words” created by Lewis Carroll, which make language ramify and bifurcate in every direction: the contracting word, which forms a connective synthesis over a single series (“Your Royal Highness” is contracted into “y'reince”); the circulating word, which forms a conjunctive synthesis between two heterogeneous series (Snark = snake + shark; slithy = slimy + lithe, and so on); and the disjunctive word, which creates an infinite ramification of coexistent series (frumious = furious + fuming, in which the true disjunction is between” fuming-furious” and “furious-fuming,” which in turn creates ramifications in other series).40 Raymond Roussel produced his texts by making two divergent series resonate. In La Doublure this procedure rests on the double meaning of a homonym (the title can mean either “The Understudy” or “The Lining”); the space opened at the heart of the word is filled by a story and by objects that themselves take on a double meaning, each participating in two stories at the same time. Impressions of Africa complicates the procedure, starting with a quasi homonym, “billard/pillard,” but hiding the second story within the first.41 Gombrowicz's Cosmos is similarly structured around a series of hanged animals and a series of feminine mouths, which communicate with each other by means of strange interfering objects and esoteric words. Joyce's Ulysses implicates a story between two series, Ulysses / Bloom, employing a multitude of procedures that almost constitute an archaeology of the modes of narration: a prodigious use of esoteric and portmanteau words, a system of correspondences between numbers, a “questionnaire” method of questions / responses, the institution of trains of multiple thoughts. Finnegans Wake takes the technique to its limit, invoking a letter that makes all the divergent series constitutive of the “chaosmos” communicate in a transversal dimension.42Such a universe goes beyond any lived or livable experience; it exists only in thought and has no other result than the work of art. But it is also, writes Deleuze, “that by which thought and art are real, and disturb the reality, morality, and economy of the world” (LS 60).
2. The Dissolution of the Subject (Affects and Percepts). In such a chaotic and bifurcating world, the status of the individual changes as well: the monadology becomes a nomadology. Rather than being closed upon the compossible and convergent world they express from within (the monadic subject), beings are now torn open and kept open through the divergent series and incompossible ensembles that continually pull them outside themselves (the nomadic subject).
Instead of a certain number of predicates being excluded by a thing by virtue of the identity of its concept, each “thing” is open to the infinity of singularities through which it passes, and at the same time it loses its center, that is to say, its identity as a concept and as a self. (LS 174)
An individual is a multiplicity, the actualization of a set of virtual singularities that function together, that enter into symbiosis, that attain a certain consistency. But there is a great difference between the singularities that define the virtual plane of immanence and the individuals that actualize them and transform them into something transcendent. A wound is actualized in a state of things or in the lived experience of an individual; but in itself it is a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that sweeps one along in a life. “My wound existed before me,” writes Joë Bousquet, a French poet shot in World War I. “I was born to embody it.”43 The question Deleuze poses with regard to the subject is “How can the individual transce
nd its form and its syntactical link with a world in order to attain the universal communication of events?” (LS 178). What he calls “schizophrenization” is a limit-process in which the identity of the individual is dissolved and passes entirely into the virtual chaosmos of included disjunctions. The schizophrenic quickly shifts from one singularity to another, never explaining events in the same manner, never invoking the same genealogy (“I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself”), never taking on the same identity (Nijinsky: “I am God. I was not God. I am a clown of God. I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinaman. I am a Japanese …).”44 If Deleuze sees a fundamental link between Samuel Beckett's work and schizophrenia, it is because Beckett likewise situates his characters entirely in the domain of the virtual or the possible: rather than trying to realize a possibility, they remain within the domain of the possible and attempt to exhaust logically the whole of the possible, passing through all the series and permutations of its included disjunctions (the permutation of “sucking stones” in Molloy, the combinatorial of five biscuits in Murphy, the series of footwear in Watt). In the process, they exhaust themselves physiologically, losing their names, their memory, and their purpose in “a fantastic decomposition of the self.”45
Even without attaining this limit, however, the self is not defined by its identity but by a process of “becoming.” Deleuze and Guattari analyze this concept in a long and complex chapter of A Thousand Plateaus (TP 232–309). The notion of becoming does not simply refer to the fact that the self does not have a static being and is in constant flux. More precisely, it refers to an objective zone of indistinction or indiscernibility that always exists between any two multiplicities, a zone that immediately precedes their respective natural differentiation.46 In a bifurcating world, a multiplicity is defined not by its center but by the limits and borders where it enters into relations with other multiplicities and changes nature, transforms itself, follows a line of flight. The self is a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities, as in Rimbaud's formula “I is another.” One can enter a zone of becoming with anything, provided one discovers the literary or artistic means of doing so. Nowhere is this idea of becoming better exemplified than in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which Deleuze and Guattari consider to be “one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming” (TP 243). The relation between Captain Ahab and the white whale is neither an imitation or mimesis, nor a lived sympathy, nor even an imaginary identification. Rather, Ahab becomes Moby-Dick; he enters a zone of indiscernibility where he can no longer distinguish himself from Moby-Dick, to the point where he strikes himself in striking the whale. And just as Ahab is engaged in a becoming-whale, so the animal simultaneously becomes something other: an unbearable whiteness, a shimmering pure white wall. “To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there is naught beyond. But ’tis enough.”47 What is the reality of this becoming? It is obvious that Ahab does not “really” become a whale, any more than Moby-Dick “really” becomes something else. In a becoming, one term does not become another; rather, each term encounters the other, and the becoming is something between the two, outside the two. This “something” is what Deleuze calls a pure affect or percept, which is irreducible to the affections or perceptions of a subject. “Percepts are not perceptions, they are packets of sensations and relations that outlive those who experience them. Affects are not feelings [sentiments], they are becomings that go beyond those live through them (they become other)” (N 137). In Moby-Dick, both Ahab and the whale lose their texture as subjects in favor of “an infinitely proliferating patchwork” of affects and percepts that escape their form, like the pure whiteness of the wall, or “the furrows that twist from Ahab's brow to that of the Whale, or the ‘horrible contortions’ of the flapping lanyards that pass through the fixed rigging and can easily drag a sailor into the sea, a subject into death” (ECC 77). “We attain to the percept and the affect only as to autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them” (WP 168).
What does it mean to speak of a pure affect as an “autonomous being”? In his chapters on “the affection-image” in The Movement-Image, Deleuze takes as one of his examples the climactic scene of G. B. Pabst's film Pandora's Box. Jack the Ripper, looking dreamily into Lulu's compassionate face in the light of a lamp, suddenly sees the gleam of a bread knife over her shoulder; his face, in close-up, gasps in terror, his pupils grow wider, “the fear becomes a paroxysm”; then his face relaxes again as he accepts his destiny, given the irresistible call of the weapon and the availability of Lulu as a victim. This scene, Deleuze suggests, can be grasped in two ways. On the one hand, it defines an “actual” state of affairs, localized in a certain place and time, with individualized characters (Lulu, Jack), objects with particular uses (the lamp, the knife), and a set of real connections between these objects and characters. On the other hand, it can also be said to define a set of qualities in a pure state, outside their spatio-temporal coordinates, with their own ideal singularities and virtual conjunctions: Lulu's compassionate look, the brightness of the light, the gleam of the blade, Jack's terror, resignation, and ultimate decisiveness.48 These are what Deleuze call pure “possibles”: that is, singular qualities or powers.
In Pabst's film, brightness, terror, decisiveness, and compassion are very different qualities and powers: the first is a quality of a sensation; the second is the quality of a feeling; the third, of an action; and the last, of a state. But these qualities are not themselves either sensations, feelings, actions, or states; rather they express the quality of a possible sensation or feeling. Brightness is not the same as a particular sensation, nor is decisiveness the same as a particular action; they are rather qualities that will be actualized under certain conditions in a particular sensation (the knife blade in the light of the lamp) or a particular action (the knife in Jack's hand). They correspond to what C. S. Peirce called “Firstness,” the category of the Possible, which considers qualities in themselves as positive possibilities, without reference to anything else, independently of their actualization in a particular state of affairs. According to Deleuze, Peirce seems to have been influenced here by Maine de Biran, who had already spoken of pure affections, “unplaceable because they have no relation to a determinate space, present in the sole form of a ‘there is … ’ because they have no relation to a subject (the pains of a hemiplegic, the floating images of falling asleep, the visions of madness).” “Secondness,” by contrast, is the category of the Real, in which these qualities have become “forces” that are related to each other (exertion–resistance, action–reaction, excitation–response, situation–behavior, individual–milieu) and are actualized indeterminate space-times, geographical or historical milieus, and individual people.49
Now, what Deleuze calls an affect is precisely the “complex entity” that, at each instant, secures the virtual conjunction of a set of such singular qualities or powers (the brightness, the terror, the compassion). Art does not actualize these virtual affects; rather, it gives them “a body, a life, a universe” (WP 177). The strength of Deleuze's discussion in The Movement-Image lies in its analysis of the way in which, in the cinema, such qualities or powers are obtained through the close-up; when we see the face of a fleeing coward in close-up, we see “cowardice” in person, freed from its actualization in a particular person. “The possibility of drawing near to the human face,” writes Ingmar Bergman, “is the primary originality and distinctive quality of the cinema” (MI 99). Ordinarily, the face of a human subject plays a role that is at once individuating, socializing, and communicative; in the close-up, however, the face becomes an autonomous entity that tends to destroy this triple function: social roles are renounced, communication ceases, individuation is suspended. The organization of the face is undone in favor of its own material traits (“parts which are hard and tender, shadowy and illuminated, jagged and curved, dull and shiny, smooth and
grainy”), which become the building material, the “hyle,” of an affect, or even a system of affects (MI 103). Sometimes a face can be reflective, immutable and without becoming, fixed on a thought or object, expressing a pure Quality that marks a minimum of movement for a maximum of unity (Lulu's compassion); sometimes, by contrast, a face can be intensive, feeling a pure Power that passes through an entire series of qualities, each of them assuming a momentary independence, but then crossing a threshold that emerges on to a new quality (Jack the Ripper's series of ascending states of terror). Between these two poles, there can be numerous intermixings. But this is the way in which the face participates in the non-organic Life of things, pushing the face to its point of nudity and even inhumanity, as if every face enveloped an unknown and unexplored landscape. For Deleuze, the affective film par excellence is Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is made up almost exclusively of short close-ups. Joan of Arc's trial is an event actualized in a historical situation, with individuated characters and roles (Joan, the bishop, the judges), with the affections of these characters (the bishop's anger, Joan's martyrdom). But the ambition of Dreyer's film is to extract the “Passion” from the trial: “All that will be preserved from the roles and situations will be what is needed for the affect to be extracted and to carry out its conjunctions—this ‘power’ of anger or of ruse, this ‘quality’ of victim or martyrdom” (MI 106). Bergman perhaps pushed the affection-image of the face to its extreme limit: in the superimposition of faces in Persona, the image absorbs two beings and dissolves them in a void, having as its sole affect a mute Fear, the fear of the face when confronted with its own “effacement” (MI 99–101).
