Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  it is difficult to see how the upholders of a minor language can operate if not by giving it (if only by writing in it) a constancy and homogeneity making it a locally major language capable of forcing official recognition (hence the political role of writers who assert the rights of a minor language). (TP 102)

  The acquisition of power by a language and the becoming-minor of that language, in other words, are coexistent movements that are constantly passing and converting into each other in both directions. In this manner, Deleuze and Guattari, following Gobard, propose a kind of “geo-linguistics,” a “micro-politics” of language (in Foucault's sense), in which the internal functions of language are inseparable from incessant movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

  What, then, does it mean to speak of a “minor literature”? Many of the writers that interest Deleuze are indeed those that find themselves in situations of bi- or multilingualism: Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in German; Beckett, an Irishman writing in French and English; Luca, a Romanian writing in French. It was Kafka who spoke most forcefully of the set of linguistic “impossibilities” that this situation imposed on him as a writer: the impossibility of not writing, “because national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature”; the impossibility of writing other than in the dominant language of German, because the Prague Jews had forgotten or repressed their native Czech vernacular, viewed Yiddish with disdain or suspicion, and could only dream of Hebrew as the mythic language of Zionism; the impossibility of writing in German, not only because of its standardized and vehicular status as a “paper language,” but also because the “deterritorialized” elements introduced by Prague German into the Middle-High German of Vienna and Berlin threatened its cultural function (“a withered vocabulary, an incorrect use of prepositions, the abuse of the pronomial, the employment of malleable verbs,” and so on).79 For Deleuze, however, the situation described by Kafka is the situation faced by all writers, even those who are not bilingual. Creation, he says, necessarily takes place in such choked passages:

  We have to see creation as tracing a path between impossibilities … A creator who is not grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is not a creator. A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates the possible at the same time … Without a set of impossibilities, you won't have a line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. (N 133)

  And Kafka's solution to this problem, his way out of the impasse, also has a validity that extends beyond his own situation. Rather than writing in Czech, Yiddish, or Hebrew, he chose to write in the German language of Prague, with all its poverty, and to push it even further in the direction of deterritorialization, “to the point of sobriety.” Rather than writing in a minor language, he instead invented a minor use of the major language.

  A minor literature, in other words, is not necessarily a literature written in a minor or marginalized language; for Deleuze, the term “minor” does not refer to specific literatures but rather to the revolutionary conditions for every literature, even (and especially) in the midst of a great or established literature: “Only the possibility of setting up a minor practice of a major language from within allows one to define popular literature, marginal literature, and so on” (K 18). As Deleuze and Guattari argue in a chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled “Postulates of Linguistics,” the essential distinction is between two different treatments or uses of language, a major and a minor use. Language is by nature a heterogeneous and variable reality, but the variables of language can be treated in two different manners. Either one can carve out a homogeneous or standard system from a language by extracting a set of constants from the variables or by determining constant relations between them, thereby relegating pragmatics to external factors (Chomsky); or one can relate the variables of language to inherent lines of continuous variation, thereby making pragmatics the presupposition of all the other dimensions of language (Labov). The performative “I swear!,” for example, is a very different statement depending on whether it is said by a son to his father, by a lover to his fiancée, or by a witness to a judge. But this variability can be interpreted in two different ways: either the statement can be said to remain constant in principle, its variations being produced by de facto and non-linguistic circumstances external to the linguistic system; or one could also say that each effectuation of the statement is an actualized variable of a virtual line of continuous variation immanent to the system, a line that remains continuous regardless of the discontinuous leaps made by the statement, and that uproots the statement from its status as a constant and produces its placing-in-variation. The first is the major treatment of language, in which the linguistic system appears in principle as a system in equilibrium, defined by its syntactical, semantic, or phonological constants; the second is the minor treatment, in which the system itself appears in perpetual disequilibrium or bifurcation, defined by pragmatic use of these constants in relation to a continuous internal variation. It may be that the scientific study of language, in order to guarantee the constancy of its object, requires the extraction of a systematic structure from language (though A Thousand Plateaus contains an interesting analysis of “minor sciences” that do not operate by means of this type of formalization) (TP 361–74). But Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this scientific model of language is inextricably linked with its political model, and the mechanisms by which a language becomes a language of power, a dominant or major language, homogenized, centralized, and standardized. When schoolteachers teach their students a rule of grammar, for example, they are not simply communicating a piece of information to them, but are transmitting an order or a command, since the ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences (“competence”) is a prerequisite for any submission to social laws. “The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers.”80 This is why the problem of becoming-minor is both a political and an artistic problem: “the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: How to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path?” (K 19).

  For Deleuze, then, the “minor” use of language involves taking any linguistic variable—phonological, syntactical or grammatical, semantic—and placing it in variation, following the virtual line of continuous variation that subtends the entire language, and that is itself apertinent, asyntactic or agrammatical, and asemantic. It is through this minor use of language that literature brings about a decomposition or even destruction of the maternal language, but also the creation of a new minor language within the writer's own language. Many of the essays collected in Essays Critical and Clinical analyze the specific procedures utilized by various authors to make language “stutter” in its syntax or grammar: the schizophrenic procedures of Roussel, Brisset, and Wolfson, which constitute the very process of their psychoses; the poetic procedures of Jarry and Heidegger, who transform and transmute a living language by reactivating a dead language inside it; e. e. cummings's agrammaticalities (“he danced his did”), which stand at the limit of a series of ordinary grammatical variables; and the deviant syntax of Artaud's cris-souffles (“ratara ratara ratara / Atara tatararana / Otara otara katara”), which are pure intensities that mark a limit of language.81 (In other contexts, Deleuze analyzes the phonetic stuttering of language in the theater, as in Robert Wilson's whispering without definite pitch, or Carmelo Bene's ascending and descending variations).82 Such writers take the elements of language and submit them to a treatment of continuous variation, out of which they extract new linguistic possibilities; they invent a minor use of language, much as in music, where the minor mode is derived from dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium. In a sense, this procedure of placing-in-variation is the most
natural thing in the world; it is what we call a style. Style is a set of variations in language, a kind of modulation, and it is through style that language is pushed toward its own limit, and strains toward something that is no longer linguistic, but which language alone makes possible (such as the affects and percepts that have no existence apart from the words and syntax of the writer).83

  This is what style is [write Deleuze and Guattari], the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, but by what causes it to move, to flow … For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal … a pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—art as “experimentation.”

  Likewise, reading a text is never an act of interpretation, it “is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier”; it too is an act of experimentation, “a productive use of the literary machine … a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.”84

  Deleuze's “critique et clinique” project, in the end, can be characterized by three fundamental components:

  1. the function of the proper name

  2. the non-personal “multiplicity” or “assemblage” designated by the name; and

  3. the active “lines of flight” of which these multiplicities are constituted.

  The first two components define what we have called the symptomatological method. For Deleuze, writers are like clinicians or diagnosticians who isolate a particular “possibility of life,” a certain way of being or mode of existence whose symptomatology is set forth in their work. In these conditions, the proper name refers not to the person of the author, but to the constellation of signs and symptoms that are grouped together in the work itself. The literary technique and style of the writer (the critical) is directly linked to the creation of a differential table of vital signs (the clinical), so that one can speak of a clinical “beckettism,” “proustism,” or “kafkaism” just as one speaks of a clinical “sadism” or “masochism.” But the symptomatological method is only one aspect of Deleuze's project. The deeper philosophical question concerns the conditions that make possible this production of new modes of existence: that is, the ontological principle of Life as a non-organic and impersonal power. We have seen the two aspects of this active power of Life: on the one hand, it is a power of abstraction capable of producing elements that are in themselves asignifying, acosmic, asubjective, anorganic, agrammatical, and asyntactic (singularities and events, affects and percepts, intensities and becomings) and placing them in a state of continuous variation; on the other hand, it is a power of invention capable of creating ever-new relations between these differential or genetic elements (syntheses of singularities, blocks of becomings, continuums of intensities). These two ontological powers of Life—the production of variation and the selection and synthesis of variants—are for Deleuze the indispensable conditions of every creation.

  Deleuze describes the artistic activity of the writer in the same terms. “The aim of writing,” he says, “is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power” (D 50). The writer, like each of us, begins with the multiplicities that have invented him or her as a formed subject, in an actualized world, with an organic body, in a given political order, having learned a certain language. But at its highest point, writing, as an activity, follows the abstract movement of a line of flight that extracts or produces differential elements from these multiplicities of lived experience and makes them function as variables on an immanent “plane of composition.” “This is what it's like on the plane of immanence: multiplicities fill it, singularities connect with one another, processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall.”85 The task of the writer is to establish non-preexistent relations between these variables in order to make them function together in a singular and non-homogeneous whole, and thus to participate in the construction of “new possibilities of life”: the invention of new compositions in language (style and syntax), the formation of new blocks of sensation (affects and percepts), the production of new modes of existence (intensities and becomings), the constitution of a people (speech acts and fabulation), the creation of a world (singularities and events). The negative terms we have used to describe the above rubrics (destruction, dissolution, disintegration, and so on) are therefore only partial characterizations, since they are merely the necessary propaedeutic to this positive activity of creation and invention. “To be present at the dawn of the world …”

  It is this ontological and creative power of Life, finally, that functions as the ethical principle of Deleuze's philosophy. For what constitutes the health or activity of a mode of existence is precisely its capacity to construct such lines of flight, to affirm the power of life, to transform itself depending on the forces it encounters (the “ethical” vision of the world). A reactive or sickly mode of existence, by contrast, cut off from its power of action or transformation, can only judge life in terms of its exhaustion or from the viewpoint of the higher values it erects against Life (the “moral” vision of the world). “Critique et clinique,” from start to finish, is as much an ethical project as it is an aesthetic one. In this regard, perhaps the most important piece included in Essays Critical and Clinical, in terms of Deleuze's own œuvre, is the programmatic essay entitled “To Have Done with Judgment.”86 For Deleuze, it is never a question of judging a work of art in terms of transcendent or universal criteria, but of evaluating it clinically in terms of its “vitality,” its “tenor of Life”: Does the work carry the process of Life to this state of an impersonal power? Or does it interrupt the process, stop its movement, and become blocked in the ressentiment of persons, the rigors of organic organization, the clichés of a standard language, the dominance of an established order, the world “as it is,” the judgment of God? The renunciation of judgment does not deprive one of the means of distinguishing the “good” and the “bad.” On the contrary, good and bad are both states of the becoming of Life, and can be evaluated by criteria that are strictly immanent to the mode of existence or the work of art itself.87 Life does not function in Deleuze's philosophy as a transcendent principle of judgment but as an immanent process of production or creation; it is neither an origin nor a goal, neither an arche nor a telos, but a pure process that always operates in the middle, au milieu, and proceeds by means of experimentations and unforeseen becomings. Judgment, by contrast, operates with pre-existing criteria that can never apprehend the creation of the new, and what is of value can only come into existence by “defying judgment.”

  It is sometimes said that we must learn from life and not bury ourselves in books, and in a certain sense this is no doubt true. Yet we must also say that art and literature have no other object than Life, and that a “passage of Life” can only be seen or felt in a process of creation, which gives the non-organic and impersonal power of Life a consistency and autonomy of its own, and draws us into its own becoming.

  Art is never an end in itself [write Deleuze and Guattari]. It is only an instrument for tracing lines of lives, that is to say: all these real becomings that are not simply produced in art, all these active flights that do not consist in fleeing into art … but rather sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, the asubjective. (TP 187)

  This is the point at which “critique” and “clinique” become one and the same thing, when life ceases to be personal and the work ceases to be merely literary or textual: a life of pure immanence.88

  ESSAY 13

  Sensation

  Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in “The Logic of Sensation”

  F

  rancis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is the record of Deleuze's confrontation with the work of the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon (1909–92).1 The book originally appeared in 1981, when Bacon and Deleuze were both at the height of their powers. Although already well known at the time, Bacon was hardly a canonical painter and was even
suspect in certain circles for his figural leanings. When Deleuze's book appeared, it received a number of favorable reviews, but then was largely passed over in silence.2 Today, however, The Logic of Sensation has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze's most significant texts in aesthetics. It was the first book Deleuze published after his decade-long collaboration with Félix Guattari on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In the following years, Deleuze would publish a number of works on the arts, including the two-volume Cinema (1983, 1985), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), and the writings on literature collected in Essays Critical and Clinical (1993). The Logic of Sensation can thus be read not only as a philosophical study of Bacon's paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze's broader philosophy of art.3