by Daniel Smith
Literature has its own means of extracting affects. “A great novelist,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his characters” (WP 174). It is not that they are proposing an aesthetic of pure qualities, for affects must always be considered from the standpoint of the becomings that seize hold of them. “Pure affects imply an enterprise of desubjectivation” (TP 270). The aim of literature, for Deleuze, is not the development of forms or the formation of subjects, but the displacement or catapulting of becomings into affects and percepts, which in turn are combined into “blocks of sensation” through their virtual conjunction. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, Catherine and Heathcliff are caught up in a double becoming (“I am Heathcliff”) that is deeper than love and higher than lived experience, a profound passion that traces a zone of indiscernibility between the two characters and creates a block of becoming that passes through an entire series of intensive affects.50 In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is caught up, like Ahab, in a becoming-animal, but he finds himself Oedipalized by his family and goes to his death (K 39). In Chrétien de Troyes's novels, one finds catatonic knights seated on their steeds, leaning on their lances, awaiting chivalry and adventure. Like Beckett's characters, “the knight of the novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing, what people say to him, he doesn't know where he is going or to whom he is speaking”—an amnesiac, anataxic, a catatonic, a schizophrenic, a series of pure affects that constitutes the becoming of the knight (TP 174). It is at this level of the affect, as a genetic element, that life and literature converge on each other: “Life alone creates such zones where living beings whirl around, and only art can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation” (WP 173).
What we have said of affects applies equally to percepts. Just as the affect goes beyond the affections of a character, so the percept goes beyond the character's perceptions of the landscape. A percept, says Deleuze, is “a perception in becoming,” a potentialization that raises sight to the nth power and breaks with the human perception of determinate rnilieus (ECC 88). The character's relation to the landscape, writes François Zourabichvili, “is no longer that of an autonomous and preexistent inner life and an independent external reality supposed to reflect this life”; rather, the landscape “involves one in a becoming where the subject is no longer coextensive with itself.”51 In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab has perceptions of the sea, but he has them only because he has entered into a relationship with Moby-Dick that makes him become-whale, and forms a compound of sensations that no longer has need of either Ahab or the whale: the Ocean as a pure percept. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence has perceptions of the Arabian desert, but he has entered into a becoming-Arab that populates the hallucinatory haze of the desert with the affects of shame and glory: the Desert as percept. In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway has perceptions of the town, but this is because she has passed into the town like “a knife through everything,” to the point where she herself has become imperceptible; she is no longer a person, but a becoming (“She would not say of herself, I am this, I am that”): the Town as a percept.52 What the percept makes visible are the invisible forces that populate the universe, that affect us and make us become; characters pass into the landscape and themselves become part of the compound of sensations. These percepts are what Woolf called “moments of the world,” and what Deleuze terms “haecceities,” in which the mode of individuation of “a life” does not differ in nature from that of “a climate,” “a wind,” “a fog,” or “an hour of a day.” They are assemblages of non-subjectified affects and percepts that enter into virtual conjunction. “The street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into composition with each other” (TP 262). The landscape is no longer an external reality, but has become the very element of a “passage of Life.” As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “We are not in the world, we become with the world” (WP 169).
How can such a “moment of the world” be made to exist by itself, to achieve an autonomous status? In his chapter “The Perception-Image” in The Movement-Image, Deleuze shows how Vertov's “kino-eye” attempted to attain, through cinematic means, a perception as it was “before” humans, the pure vision of a non-human eye (the camera) that would be in matter itself, making possible the construction of an “any-space-whatever” released from its human coordinates. Similarly, in painting, Cézanne spoke of the need always to paint at close range, no longer to see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities: the forces of folding in a mountain, the forces of germination in an apple, the thermal and magnetic forces of a landscape. This is what Cézanne called the world before humanity, “dawn of ourselves,” “iridescent chaos,” “virginity of the world”: a collapse of visual coordinates in a universal variation or interaction. Afterward, the earth can emerge, “stubborn geometry,” “the measure of the world,” “geological foundations”—though with the perpetual risk that the earth in turn may once again disappear in a “catastrophe.”53 Paul Klee described the act of painting in similar terms: “not to render the visible, but to render visible”—that is, to render visible forces that are not visible in themselves. In music, Messiaen spoke of his sonorous percepts as “melodic landscapes” populated by “rhythmic characters.”54 In literature, Woolf's formula was “to saturate every atom”: “to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity,” everything that adheres to our lived perceptions; but also to saturate the percept, “to put everything into it,” to include everything.55 Whatever the technical means involved, such percepts can only be constructed in art, since they belong to an eye that we do not have. “In each case style is needed—the writer's syntax, the musician's modes and rhythms, the painter's lines and colors—to raise lived perceptions to the percept and lived affections to the affect.”56
Affects and percepts are thus the genetic and immanent elements constitutive of a life. “The individuation of a life,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support” (TP 261). A “life” is constructed on an immanent plane of consistency that knows only relations between affects and percepts, and whose composition, through the creation of blocks of sensations, takes place in the indefinite and virtual time of the pure event (Aeon). A “subject” is constructed on a transcendent plane of organization that already involves the development of forms, organs, and functions, and takes place in a measured and actualized time (Chronos). It is true that the opposition between these two types of planes is abstract, since one continually and unnoticeably passes from one to the other; it is perhaps better to speak of two movements or tendencies, since there is no subject that is not caught up in a process of becoming, and affects and percepts presuppose at least a minimal subject from which they are extracted, or as an envelope that allows them to communicate.57 In A Thousand Plateaus, Goethe and Kleist are presented as almost paradigmatic examples of these two tendencies in literature. Goethe, like Hegel, insisted that writing should aim at the regulated formation of a Subject, or the harmonious development of a Form; hence his emphasis on themes such as the sentimental education, the inner solidity of the characters, the harmony between forms, the continuity of their development, and so forth. In Kleist, by contrast, feelings are uprooted from the interiority of the subject and are projected outward into a milieu of pure exteriority: love and hate are pure affects (Gemüt) that pierce the body like weapons; they are instances of the becomings of the characters (Achilles’ becoming-woman, Penthesilea's becoming-dog). There is no subject in Kleist, but only the affects and percepts of a life that combine into “blocks of becoming,” blocks that may petrify in a catatonic freeze, and then su
ddenly accelerate to the extreme velocity of a flight of madness (“Catatonia is: ‘This affect is too strong for me’; and a flash is: ‘The power of this affect is sweeping me away’”).58 Proust, who is perhaps the most frequent point of reference in Deleuze's works, combines these two tendencies in an almost exemplary manner. In the course of “lost time,” Proust progressively extracts affects and percepts from his characters and landscapes, so that the “plane of composition” of the Recherche emerges only gradually, as the work progresses, slowly sweeping everything along in its path, until it finally appears for itself in “time regained”: the forces of pure time that have now become perceptible in themselves.59 For Deleuze, it is only by passing through the “death of the subject” that one can achieve a true individuality and acquire a proper name.
It's a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them … Experimentation on ourself is our only identity. (N 6; D 11).
3. The Dis-integration of the Body (Intensities and Becomings). The dissolution of the logical identity of the subject has as its correlate the physical dis-integration of the organic body. Beneath the organic body, and as its condition, there lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs, which is a purely intensive body. The body without organs is one of Deleuze's most notorious concepts; it appears for the first time in The Logic of Sense, is developed conceptually in Anti-Oedipus, and is the object of a programmatic chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled “How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” (TP 149–66). Deleuze finds its biological model in the egg, which is an intensive field, literally without organs, defined solely by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, displacements and migrations.60 But here again, Deleuze appeals to embryology only in order to extract a philosophical concept from it: the body without organs is the model of Life itself, a powerful non-organic and intensive vitality that traverses the organism; by contrast, the organism, with its forms and functions, is not life, but rather that which imprisons life. But for Deleuze, the body without organs is not something that exists “before” the organism; it is the intensive reality of the body, a milieu of intensity that is “beneath” or “adjacent to” the organism and continually in the process of constructing itself. It is what is “seen,” for example, in the phenomenon known as internal or external “autoscopia”: it is no longer my head, but I feel myself inside a head; or I do not see myself in the mirror, but I feel myself in the organism I see, and so on.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make use of the concept of the body without organs to describe the experience of schizophrenics, for whom the body without organs is something that is primarily felt under the integrated organization of the organism, as if the organs were experienced as pure intensities capable of being linked together in an infinite number of ways. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs provides a vivid literary description of such a vital schizoid body:
No organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout everywhere … rectums open, defecate, and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments … The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place.61
In Lenz, George Büchner describes the stroll of a schizophrenic whose intensive organs enter into a becoming with all the elements of nature, to the point where the distinction between self and non-self, man and nature, inside and outside, no longer has any meaning.62 D. H. Lawrence painted the picture of a similar body without organs in Fantasia of the Unconscious, with the sun and the moon as its two poles, and its various planes, sections, and plexuses.63 But schizophrenics also experience states in which this anorganic functioning of the organs stops dead, as the intensities approach the limit where intensity equals zero. It is here that the body without organs becomes a model of Death, coextensive with Life. Authors of horror stories know this well, when they appeal to the terror not of the organic corpse, but of the catatonic schizophrenic; the organism remains, with its vacant gaze and rigid postures, but the vital intensity of the body is suspended, frozen, blocked. These two poles of the body without organs—the vital anorganic functioning of the organs and their frozen catatonic stasis, with all the variations of attraction and repulsion that exist between them—translate the entire anguish of the schizophrenic. For schizophrenics experience these naked intensities in a pure and almost unendurable state: beneath the hallucinations of the senses (“I see,” “I hear”) and the deliriums of thought (“I think”), there is something more profound, a feeling of intensity: that is, a becoming or a transition (“I feel”). A gradient is crossed, a threshold is surpassed or retreated from, a migration is brought about: “I feel that I am becoming woman,” “I feel that I am becoming god,” “I feel that I am becoming pure matter.” When Judge Schreber, in a famous case analyzed by Freud, says he is becoming a woman and can feel breasts on his naked torso, he is expressing a lived emotion that neither resembles nor represents breasts but rather designates a zone of pure intensity on his body without organs (AO 18–19).
Now, according to Deleuze and Guattari, what we call a “delirium” is the general matrix by which the intensities and becomings of the body without organs directly invest the socio-political field. One of the essential theses of Anti-Oedipus is that delirious formations are not reducible to the father–mother–child coordinates of the Oedipus complex. They are neither familial nor personal but world-historical; it's the Russians that worry the schizo, or the Chinese; his mouth is dry, someone buggered him in the subway, there are spermatozoa swimming everywhere; it's Franco's fault, or the Jews’ … The great error of psychoanalysis was to have largely ignored the social, political, geographical, tribal, and, above all, racial content of delirium, or to have reduced it to the familial or personal. More importantly, for Deleuze, these delirious formations constitute “kernels of art,” in so far as the artistic productions of the “mad” can themselves be seen as the construction of a body without organs with its own geopolitical and racial coordinates (AO 88–9). Artaud's “theater of cruelty” cannot be separated from his confrontation with the “races,” and his confrontation with forces and religions of Mexico, all of which populate his body without organs. Rimbaud's “season in hell” cannot be separated from a becoming-Mongol or a becoming-Scandinavian, a vast “displacement of races and continents,” the intensive feeling of being “a beast, a Negro, of an inferior race inferior for all eternity” (“I am from a distant race: my ancestors were Scandinavians; they used to pierce their sides and drink their own blood. I will make gashes on my entire body and tattoo it. I want to be as hideous as a Mongol … I dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics with no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs, displacements of races and continents”).64 Zarathustra's “Grand Politics” cannot be separated from the life of the races that leads Nietzsche to say, “I'm not German, I'm Polish.”65 Delirium does not consist in identifying one's ego with various historical figures, but of identifying thresholds of intensity that are traversed on the body without organs with proper names. Nietzsche, for example, does not suddenly lose his reason and identify himself with strange personages; rather, his delirium passes through a series of intensive states that receive various proper names, some of which designate his allies, or manic rises in intensity (Prado, Lesseps, Chambige, “honest criminals”), others his enemies, or depressive falls in intensity (Caiaphas, Wilhelm Bismarck, the “antisemites”)—a chaos of pure oscillations invested by “all the names of history,” and not, as psyc
hoanalysis would have it, by “the name of the father.” Even when he is motionless, the schizophrenic undertakes vast voyages, but they are voyages in intensity; he crosses the desert of his body without organs, and along the way struggles against other races, destroys civilizations, becomes a woman, becomes God.
Deleuze and Guattari seem to go even further. If the body without organs is the model of Life, and delirium is the process by which its intensities directly invest history and geography, then every literary work—and not merely the productions of the mad—can be analyzed clinically as constituting a kind of delirium. The question one must ask is, What are the regions of History and the Universe, what are the nations and races, that are invested by a given work of art? One can make a map of the rhizome it creates, a cartography of its body without organs. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose a brief cartographic sketch of American literature. In the East, there was a search for an American code and a recoding with Europe (Henry James, Eliot, Pound); in the South, an overcoding of the ruins of the slave system (Faulkner, Caldwell, O'Connor); in the North, a capitalist decoding (Dos Passos, Dreiser); but in the West, there was a profound line of flight, with its ever-receding limits, its shifting and displaced frontier, its Indians and cultures, its madness (Kerouac, Kesey, the Beats). It is from this clinical viewpoint that Deleuze writes of the superiority of Anglo-American literature.66 D. H. Lawrence reproached French literature for being critical of life rather than creative of life, filled with a mania for judging and being judged. But Anglo-American writers know how to leave, to push the process further, to follow a line of flight, to enter into a becoming that escapes the ressentiment of persons and the dominance of established orders. Yet Deleuze and Guattari constantly point to the ambiguity of such lines of flight. For is it not the destiny of literature, American and otherwise, to fail to complete the process, such that the line of flight becomes blocked or reaches an impasse (Kerouac's sad end, Céline's fascist ravings), or even turns into a pure line of demolition (Woolf's suicide, Fitzgerald's crack-up, Nietzsche's and Hölderlin's madness)?67 Kerouac took a revolutionary “flight” (On the Road) with the soberest of means, but later immersed himself in a dream of a Great America and went off in search of his Breton ancestors of a superior race. Céline, after his great experimentations, became the victim of a delirium that communicated more and more with fascism and the paranoia of his father. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that a “universal clinical theory” of literature as delirium would have to situate works of art between two poles: a “paranoiac” pole, or literature as a disease, in which the intensities of the body without organs are invested in fascizing, moralizing, nationalist, and racist tendencies (“I am one of your kind, a superior race, an Aryan”); and a “schizophrenic” pole, or literature as the measure of health, which always pushes the process further, following the line of flight, invoking an impure and bastard race that resists everything that crushes and imprisons life (“I am a beast, a nigger … I am of an inferior race for all eternity”).
