If my memory serves me, it’s in ‘Gilles Deleuze from A to Z’, a series of conversations with Claire Parnet, that Deleuze expresses his opposition to schools of thought (see “‘P’ as in Professor” and “‘W’ as in Wittgenstein”). He lists, among others (that we could think of here), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan as ones that became schools. The way I understand this is that it’s not really even about the big names, but what comes of them, schools, leading to all these squabbles about who is right and who is wrong, culminating in what’d say is priesthood like behavior, if we take some cues from Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, as I’ve explained a number of times already in my essays. How to put it simply? Well, nothing good comes out of that, everything becomes very static, not to mention bureaucratic and it results in admin. If there’s something I cannot stand, it’s admin, so I’m with him on this, just on that notion alone, albeit I agree otherwise as well. If my memory serves me, with Lacan, in the interview he has this moment of amusement that is simultaneously marked by feeling for Lacan, having set himself up to be that leader. The thing with being the leader, the one on top, is that it becomes a chore and you’ll end up being the emperor, surrounded by priests, albeit in this case they are the loyal or fanatical followers, people who strive to be more you than you are. They are not like you, as would be the case when you run into someone who, to your surprise, thinks alike, and, perhaps, has no prior awareness of your existence. Anyway, long story short, the point being that, with Deleuze in particular, the notion of being someone who has disciples or loyal followers is abhorrent.
How is this at all relevant? Where am I going with this? It happens to be that, once again, I was searching for something, only to end up reading something else instead. This time I landed on an article written by Kathryn Strom, a name I had previously never even heard of (or read, it’s not like I hear what I read…). It’s a very recent article, titled ‘“That’s Not Very Deleuzian”: Thoughts on interrupting the exclusionary nature of “High Theory”’. In the article she (104) notes that it was Michel Foucault who once pointed out in a review of Deleuze works, ‘Différence et répétition’ and ‘Logique du sens’ that:
“[P]erhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.”
This (165) from ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, as included in ‘Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews’. I think Strom (104) is a bit off with the statement that “the twenty-first century would be Deleuzian”, but then again one day could well be in the twenty-first century, not the twentieth century, thus nonetheless being accurate, considering that it is now that we think of it and Deleuze being firmly situated in the twentieth century. One way or another, it makes little difference here really. If one looks at the French original, it actually says:
“[P]eut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien.”
Assuming that the third party source has it correctly (I couldn’t actually find a copy of ‘Critique, 282, pages 885-908 to confirm that), it’s actually the century, not this century, albeit that’s still passable, considering that it would make little sense for Foucault to refer to some other century than the twentieth century. Anyway, so, Strom (104) is well on the point that, if I’m getting it right, Deleuze is a rather recently appreciated figure in philosophy and, perhaps, even more so outside it. Her point of contact is that of education. Mine is, not as you might think of it, geography, not linguistics. Good luck trying to find a linguist who has read anything by Deleuze (and/or Guattari)! Okay, fair enough, there are some, so let’s not be overly dramatic about it. Then again, the number of people I can think of is … rather … Jean-Jacques Lecercle? I can’t think of others really, at least established ones (do let me know of others, I’d certainly appreciate it). I was going to write that he’s not even that Deleuzian, but in a way he is, in the sense that he isn’t a disciple or an acolyte, someone who’d just go with whatever the ‘great philosopher’ has once said and then preach it to the world, as if it was the truth and nothing but the truth.
Right, so, I’ve thought about this, but not really encountered such, perhaps because my background and (supposed) field are different from Strom. I also have some background in education, having teacher qualifications, but, like Strom, opted to do a PhD, which is, currently, work in progress, as I (have to) wait for people to review my manuscripts. Anyway, Strom (104) characterizes her “journey from the classroom to Deleuze” as uneasy, marked by some “encounters with the surprising orthodoxies of using Deleuzian thought[.]” I’m not going to get stuck with reiterating her experiences pertaining to how she went from the classroom to read Deleuze, as well as Guattari. I assume you can do that yourself. What’s common between me and Strom (106) is that it appears that we both found ourselves “dissatisfied and uninspired by the dominant theoretical bodies” in existing research. It’s worth emphasizing the word ‘dominant’ here, as otherwise it would be the same as stating that all existing research is unsatisfying and uninspiring. That’d be quite the hubris.
This going to be a bit of a detour, but, for example, I found much of linguistic landscape research unsatisfying and uninspiring, but not all and the more contemporary it is, the more satisfying and inspiring it tends to be, perhaps because others also find themselves unsatisfied and uninspired by merely doing the same, keeping things as they are, instead of bravely going forward and coming up with all kinds of novelty, even if that entails having to go outside your comfort zone. I found much of geographic landscape research particularly inspiring in this regard as I struggled to come to terms with the landscape part of my research. The thing was that, as much as I appreciate the work of others in the field, it just didn’t and still doesn’t feel right to just copy them, ignoring their own influences. So instead of taking things as they are, I tried my best to understand how they’ve come where they are. This involved reading all kinds of literature, on this and that, for example trying to understand rock climbing as a practice in the world, in a phenomenological sense. Anyway, long story short, I ended up reading Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ in particular, not because they were the go to guys, I mean hardly, but because I was curious about how they address landscape. At first it was quite the … push … and it took me a lot of effort to get into it. I think the best advice I got, reading what others had to say about the book, was to just read it, not get stuck on some bit. After a while it turned out to be very, very inspiring. It turned out to be not only relevant to my research but also, and perhaps even more importantly, very inspiring, thought provoking and revolutionary on a personal level. Oh, another good tip was not to read what others have written on their work, unless you’ve read the relevant works first. It’s quite daunting that way, but well worth it. Am I done with it? No and probably never will be. I’m not even that sure my work is Deleuzian or Deleuzo-Guattarian, but I’m, honestly, not too fussy about that. Something tells me they’d rather have me go my own way, do my thing, whatever that is, taking some cues from them and some others from others, perhaps even stumble a bit on my way, wherever that way may take me, or not. That’s actually the topic here, so let’s get back to it.
Strom (106) points out that reading Deleuze, at first, “was like a foreign language” and it stretched her “thinking in entirely new and often uncomfortable directions.” Well, I can only agree here. It sure comes across as strange at first and it does cause a deal of discomfort. You might even question your sanity at times. It’s not easy reading and far from holding your hand. She (106) also points out that through a friend she understood that with Deleuze, and I would add Guattari (who often gets ignored and lumped into Deleuze) here, it’s not about understanding it all, knowing what the great philosopher means by it all, the emphasis being on feeling that you have to understand his philosophy in its totality, from the beginning to the end. This is what I meant by not getting stuck with not getting something. It’ll come to you eventually and if it doesn’t, well, then it doesn’t, no biggie. Her (106) point really being, in a nutshell, that, as she puts it, “[w]hat mattered was if I found anything that worked for me.” Conversely, as she (106) characterizes a friend of hers worrying about it, it’s not about whether you get it right. The way I understand it is that the point is that you cannot get Deleuze (and Guattari) right. It’s exactly as she puts it, whether it works for you, or should I say, on you. It makes little sense reading ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ like a textbook and then be done with it. Done with it? Really? Be careful what you wish for! Okay, at first you may wish to be done with it, after one plateau or so, say just the intro, as it can feel a bit tiresome, but the more you get into it, the beginning and the end just doesn’t compute like it did before and you find yourself going all over the place, reading a bit of this and a bit of that, sometimes in other books, only to read some parts again because as you become something else. The text also becomes something else, not entirely different but different nonetheless. It just wouldn’t work if it was a textbook, a linear reading experience with a preset ending. At this point Strom (106) cites Deleuze, as having said about reading that:
“Something comes through or it does not. There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It is like plugging in to an electric circuit.”
Indeed he did, albeit the reference is off in the article. It’s not on page 8 in ‘The Logic of Sense’ but in ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, as included in ‘Negotiations’. Now, I’m not trying to condemn Strom for providing the wrong citation. It’s probably just something that got mixed up, ‘The Logic of Sense’ being published as an English translation in 1990 (French original in 1969) and the French original of the text collection being published in 1990. It could easily have been included in some draft, only to be incorrectly cut at a later stage. Happens. No biggie. Incidentally, if you let me (not that you have a choice though, I mean, after all, this is my essay), this is a text in which the earlier point about the century being Deleuzian is mentioned. It’s an interesting text alright, addressed to Michel Cressole who wrote a book about Deleuze, as indicated in the translator’s notes (183). Judging by the content, Deleuze wasn’t too happy about the book, not because one couldn’t or shouldn’t write books about people, but because he wasn’t fond of the idea, really. That would only make sense, considering his views on schools of thought, as expressed earlier on. To be honest, it is a bit weird to have someone write a biography of you, you know, when you are alive, and to be expected to go with it, to cooperate with it. It may come across a bit like you are sourcing someone to do it for you, hence it being a bit strange, well, at least if you ask me that is. Deleuze (4) does point out that he was fine with exchanging letters, I assume to give his views on this and that (journalists like quotes, for the added value). I may be getting this wrong (the sentence, or the translation of it, is a bit wonky), but he seems fine with the letters, pending that there’s transparency to it, so that people could actually check on those letters. Anyway, one way or another, regardless of whether I got that right here, I take it that Deleuze finds Cressole’s book project frivolous, having more to do with Cressole than Deleuze, consider that he (4) states that:
“[T]hat’s your business, and I told you from the start that your book was nothing to do with me, that I wasn’t going to read it, or I would read it when it came out, as saying something about you.”
There’s also a great bit about him addressing the critic for supposedly trading compliments with Foucault, you know, being buddy buddies for the added value of it (4):
“Your version of this is that we’re trading compliments. It doesn’t seem to cross your mind that I might really admire Foucault, or that his little remark’s a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.”
This is, indeed, one of those things that damned if you do, damned if you don’t. How dare you compliment someone! How dare you not compliment someone! It may well be that, as Deleuze (4) points out but won’t say how it is, Foucault was just joking about it. I reckon it was both, actually admiring Deleuze, but also pointing out something which really wasn’t the case back then and wasn’t the case later on after Foucault’s death either. In this sense Strom (104) is only correct to state that it’s the twenty-first century that’s Deleuzian. There’s also another great bit that by Deleuze (4-5) in this:
“Weird ambition … to be someone’s guilty conscience. And you too, it’s as though you think doing a book about (or against) me gives you some power over me. No way. The idea of feeling guilty is, for me, just as repugnant as being someone else’s guilty conscience.”
What. A. Nugget. Of. Gold. I mean he didn’t even want the book and he should feel sorry or, as he puts it, guilty for something. The what now? That is just priceless, or, as Kelso would say in ‘That ’70s Show’, “Burn!” He (5) continues:
“I’m not admitting anything. Since what’s at issue, through no fault of mine, is a book about me[.]”
This is one of those things that I also came across randomly. Turning Paul Grice upside down, as an exploit of the co-operative principle, the maxim of relation in particular, Lecercle addresses this in ‘The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy’ when he (28) states that:
“The victim of an insult, or of an accusation of this sort, even if (s)he denies the charge, always answers, if only for a moment, from the position named by the accuser.”
True or false, makes no difference at that moment. So when you accuse someone, of something, you force the person to respond from that position. It’s far from a fair trial. It’s not a moment where equals, peers, entertain a moment of wonder in which blame or the lack thereof is established. This is why, in contrast to the judicial system, Lecercle (29) states that:
“The law of ordinary conversation is a lynching law, where there is no smoke without fire, and where the accused answers from a position of presumed guilt.”
How to put this in other words? Well, in Louis Althusser’s terms, this is about interpellation or hailing, as presented in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, as published in his 1971 publication ‘Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays’. To be more specific, interpellation, as exemplified by Althusser (174), has to do with situations where a subject position is imposed on someone by someone else. His (174) example is that of a policeman who hails at a person:
“’Hey, you there!’ … [T]he theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).”
He (174) characterizes this as “a strange phenomenon[,] … one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their conscienscies’. In other words, guilty or not, you end up having to recognize the subject position imposed upon you. The subject here is not the subject you like to think yourself as, the grammatical subject, the ‘I’, the one who does things, but a subject to, as in being the subject to a sovereign. You are not objectified, but subjectified, albeit not on your own terms but on someone else’s terms. In terms used in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, this is an incorporeal transformation, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari (80):
“In effect, what takes place beforehand (the crime of which someone is accused), and what takes place after (the carrying out of the penalty), are actions-passions affecting bodies (the body of the property, the body of the victim, the body of the convict, the body of the prison)[.]”
That’s the example they use to explain a juridical assemblage. However, that’s only part of the story, so they continue (80-81):
“[B]ut the transformation of the accused into a convict is a pure instantaneous act or incorporeal attribute that is the expressed of the judge’s sentence.”
To make more sense of this, it’s worth first reiterating that this is, indeed, about sentencing done by judges, not about a mere accusation. The point here is that nothing physical happens to the person who is sentenced by a judge, unless the sentence involves a punishment upon the body. Contemporarily this is not the case. What’s at stake here is that the person undergoes an instantaneous transformation, going from being merely accused, innocent until proven guilty, to guilty, which, in turn, results in the person being considered as such. What that then entails depends on what one is found guilty of, ranging from fines to imprisonment, as well as stigma that may or may not come with it, which may then affect how people will treat the person in this and/or that situation. That said, I’d argue that a mere accusation already transforms the person, even if only temporarily, hence the following point made by Lecercle (29):
“It takes a whole system of judicial rights, and a long tradition of fair trial, to convince one that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
In other words, we have the system just so that we push ourselves to think that people are not guilty, to be lynched, before they are proven to guilty and then not be lynched but punished accordingly, as agreed upon beforehand for this and/or that infraction. Unless I’m mistaken, this is what is known as rule of law. This is why Lecercle (29) calls conversation an unfair trial. Anyway, getting back on track here, this is how I read Deleuze (5) reacting to being portrayed in a negative way, as if he was guilty of something, as presented by Cressole.
I think that at this point it should be noted that, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari (81), incorporeal transformations are not inherently negative. So, the emphasis here, the negative depiction of someone, based on an accusation, treating them as a suspect, is not all there is to this. Among the positive ones, I hope, is love, what they (81) call an intermingling of bodies in which it’s not just about the intermingling of bodies but the declaration of it, expressing it. Okay, fair enough, you can have intermingling of bodies, in this case the bodies of people, the corpora, in whatever configuration, and it can be, I was going to write pleasurable, but to make the point better here, I’ll use the word lovely. It’s not, however, what is love, to cite Haddaway for a moment, as it misses the relevant noncorporeal or incorporeal aspects of it. At the same time, we can think of this the other way around as well. Expressing love without the appropriate intermingling of bodies just won’t work, or, as Deleuze and Guattari (82) put it:
“[It] has neither meaning nor subject nor addressee outside of circumstances that not only give it credibility but make it a veritable assemblage, a power marker, even in the case of an unhappy love[.]”
Obviously this is not as straight forward as I’ve, perhaps, made it seem. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (82) warn not to treat assemblages as all the same and always the same but rather “in constant variation … themselves constantly subject to transformations” pending on the circumstances which are both corporeal and incorporeal. In simple terms, it depends on the context. For example, getting back on track here, only a judge can sentence someone, not just anybody will do, assuming that, of course, we are convinced that we should leave the judging of the accused only to them. Conversely, if we are not convinced to leave the judging of the accused to judges, the accused is rendered guilty at that moment, until, not unless, that person can provide proof of innocence against the accusation/judgement. This is what Lecercle (29) calls an unfair trial, what I’d call a starting position in which you are framed.
Right, returning to Strom (106), Deleuze (8) does indeed state that:
“[S]omething comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit.”
To contextualize this, he (8-9) is explaining that there are two ways of reading books and this is the second one, the one he prefers. The first way he (8) characterizes as:
“You … see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on.”
To contextualize the second one, the one already defined, he (9) further characterizes it as:
“[Y]ou see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book.”
This is the point made by Strom’s (106) friend, about reading Deleuze in a way that what matters if it works for you. Deleuze makes the same point via Proust in conversation with Foucault in ‘Intellectuals and Power’, as included in the aforementioned 1977 publication. During the interview Deleuze (208) states that:
“[I]t was Proust … who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don’t suit you, find another pair[.]”
That’s pretty much the same point made by him in the ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, in which he (8-9) also goes on to characterize it as:
“This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything … is reading with love.”
I don’t know about others but this is sort of how I’ve approached his works, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ in particular. It connects to all kinds of things through me, in as much it does, or, well, it doesn’t. So, for example, I might be reading about something, which, sort of, leaves me hanging, not knowing what to think of, say, some concept, which then, at some random moment, outside the book, as he puts it, opens up to me. That in turn then will change the reading as I return to the book.
This also relates to how in that text, in that letter, he (7) elaborates his writing process, treating it as a flow instead of a code. He (7) notes that he writes in plural, which then, according to him, angered many readers who wanted to know who wrote what, whose idea is this and the like, when they read the ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, his first collaboration with Guattari. In the intro of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, they (3) state that they wrote ‘Anti-Oedipus’ together, but not in the traditional sense as having, merely, two writers:
“Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. … Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit.”
Now, that’s only a part of the opening paragraph, but it’s already evident from this that it’s irrelevant who wrote the book, whether something was written by Deleuze or Guattari. They are keen to point out that they are merely playing along. Typically the name first mentioned is considered the primary author, the one that did most work, followed by the names of people who did less. Here they go on record to point out that they put their names on the book purely out of habit, out of convention. It could well be that Guattari wrote more, came up with more, and should thus should be listed first, but they opted to list Deleuze first, just to mess with you, considering how Deleuze (7) characterizes the hostility toward his collaboration with Guattari:
“I’ve wondered whether one general reason for some of the hostility toward the book is simply the fact that there are two writers, because people want you to disagree about things, and take different positions. So they try to disentangle inseparable elements and identify who did what.”
In other words, when people see two names, in this case Deleuze and Guattari, they want to think them as separate individuals who have their distinct identities. The author needs to be identified and the author’s works need to be organized into a canon. I reckon this is the point Deleuze (7-8) makes on the first way of reading. Foucault addresses this in ‘What Is an Author’, as included in ‘Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology’. In summary, he (207) states that the individual, the writer, is not of importance, but the author and the body of work by the author, which, for some reason, needs to be organized:
“Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche’s works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is ‘everything’?”
Foucault (207) goes on to qualify all works published by the person, in this case Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as draft works, plans and notes, only to state that this becomes an endless list, an obsession that goes on forever. Deleuze and Guattari are messing with this, not making it evident who wrote what. Anyway, getting back to the first paragraph in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, they (3) specify that the purpose is to:
“To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”
The thing with ‘I’ is that it’s always ‘I’ who is saying or writing ‘I’ when it is invoked, as it is explained in the book. It’s inherently circular, hailing yourself, really. However, it’s not even really about invoking ‘I’. Getting rid of it is not really a solution. It’s still there, even in the absence of it, so not writing it, being super careful about it, is not a solution. As you can see, they are certainly not bothered about it. They are fine with attributing the book as written by Deleuze and Guattari because that’s beside the point. It is of little value to me to characterize myself, as this and/or that, as I’m always myself. That’s all there’s to it. So, when I say or write ‘I’, I’m doing it purely out of habit. Not long ago, at a conference, where I was able to explain this to a fellow scholar (who happened to think alike and who shall remain nameless) that to be yourself is not to be yourself, as the fellow scholar expressed it back to me in reference to Søren Kierkegaard. I’d say that was among those rare moments that, to put it in Deleuze’s (7) words in the letter, “we understood and complemented, depersonalized and singularized” or, as expressed by Deleuze and Guattari (3) in the intro of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, “[w]e have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” Okay, I can’t speak for others, so I can’t be sure if that’s how it worked for the other person. It did for me though.
Some paragraphs back I pointed out how I read ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. I read it here and there, when I have the time for it, only for it to end up mixing with outside the book. Now that I think of it, an hour later or so (when that was that is, as I’m editing this a day or two later), it came to me that this actually applies to writing as well. For example, I’ve been writing this in bits and pieces, when I find the time for it. This results in parts being written at different times, spanning over a number of days, even if the actual time that goes into writing isn’t that many hours. This may result in the text appearing as if a number of people wrote it, likely because I don’t edit these texts almost at all afterwards (unless I feel like it), except for typos (which I’m not doing), which I may or may not notice. However, this is sort of beside the point. While writing this, or, to be specific, in between writing this, I went cycling for a couple of hours. During that time it occurred to me that it would be sort of impossible to write anything without being several, as Deleuze and Guattari (3) put it, even by myself. I can never write all the words at the same time, now can I? Even if I didn’t take any breaks, as I sometimes do if I don’t have other commitments to attend to, I’d still end up not being what I was at any given point in time writing the text. But that’s hardly an issue. Why would it be? So, as Deleuze (9) puts it in the letter, “[s]o we’ll change, we already have, it’s all going wonderfully.” Okay, if this seems a bit tough to grasp, think of what Foucault points out about the author. Is the author the writer or a figment of our imagination, who we (like to) think the writer is, as patched together from what we read? I don’t know about others, nor can I speak on their behalf, but something tells me that, to me, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Lecercle, Strom, me, the here unnamed scholar I was referring to and anyone I forgot to include here, despite referring to them, are who I think they are, not who they are or were (as some of them are dead). It’d be quite disappointing and disheartening if people just stayed the same and all they had to say was, as if, precoded for them to say, existing in full in the code, only to be expressed during the person’s lifetime. As Deleuze (9) points out, it’d be quite horrible if all we did was to write sequels.
Back to Strom, skipping quite a bit, she (109-110), after explaining her current situation, having the opportunity to put her reading to work, argues that, despite what one might expect, “there is a particular kind of orthodoxy that emerges around Deleuzian philosophy.” Here we return to the earlier points made by her (104) regarding orthodoxy, before I ended up on a tangent, followed by another tangent, followed by yet another tangent. Anyway, she (110) provides an example of this, having participated in “a month-long rhizomatic reading group for interested education faculty and doctoral students.” I take this to be some sort of a learning retreat. I might be wrong about that, but that’s because I’ve never had the opportunity to attend such. I wouldn’t know. She (110) elaborates her experience, how she reading/reviewing the intro part of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:
“A graduate student whom I had met passed by and stopped, peering over my shoulder at the title of what I was reading: ‘Introduction: Rhizome.’ He gave me a smirt and said, ‘An Introduction. That’s not very Deleuzian, is it?’ Right, I thought, because Deleuze says we are in a perpetual middle, and that things do not progress in a linear way. Aren’t you clever?”
She (110) then goes on to explain how the day progressed, how she made a poster pertaining to the principles of rhizome, as contained in the intro, as included by Deleuze and Guattari, in that shape and form, only to encounter something similar as she did earlier on during the day:
“As I wrote, a faculty member walked by the table where I was working and stopped to read my efforts. He said with a grin, ‘Principles. Not too Deleuzian, is it?’”
Okay, two encounters hardly mark a pattern, as she seems to suggest, so she (110) provides another example, unrelated to the reading group. She (110) states that she suggested to a peer that it would be interesting to write a literature review, an overview of how Deleuzian concepts are used in educational research, which resulted in a reply:
“‘But a literature review? That wouldn’t be very Deleuzian, would it?’”
Okay, okay, three cases are still hardly a pattern. I’ll grant that to the reader. Then again, it’s not like Strom could go on and on, on and on, explaining all the encounters where people argue that her line of thought is not very Deleuzian. Articles tend to have hilarious limitations when it comes to how many words can included (as if there was a quota on language?), often including the list of references, so, to be honest, it’s hard to blame her for offering only three examples. Anyway, what I found particularly interesting, and somewhat surprising, as well as unsurprising, is what she has to say on these examples. Firstly, she (110) notes that:
“[B]eing told that ideas are not ‘Deleuzian’ enough is an exclusionary mechanism – it actually does what is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of positivistic thinking or arborescent thought.”
If you ask me, this, stating something is not Deleuzian enough, is just hilarious. As she points out, it’s just simply contradictory. This is why I opted to elaborate Deleuze’s own views on this in the opening paragraph. If what’s elaborated in ‘Gilles Deleuze from A to Z’ won’t convince you, perhaps going further back in time will convince you. Deleuze (9) addresses this explicitly in the letter:
“[N]either Félix nor I have turned into little leaders of a little school. And we couldn’t care less what people do with Anti-Oedipus, because we’ve already moved on.”
Moreover, in the previous paragraph he (9) expresses his disgust to schools of thought:
“Some people think we’re going to continue along the same lines, some even thought we were going to set up a fifth psychoanalytic group. Yuck.”
Anyway, secondly Strom (110) notes that:
“The examples above also show that those who judge others’ ideas for ‘not being Deleuzian enough’ are misunderstanding, or perhaps missing entirely, a key part of Deleuze’s ideas.”
She (110) goes on to wonder “what does it mean to ‘be Deleuzian’ anyway?” That is a very good question and, judging by what Deleuze expressed, as included in this essay, being Deleuzian is, in itself, contradictory, as she (110) goes on to point out. I would use, and I believe I have used, ‘Deleuzian’ or ‘Deleuzo-Guattarian’ to mean how they might put it, or something would be explained in their terms, mainly because I’m too lazy to look up where something gets discussed by them and then explaining how they put it in this and/or that book. This is the sense that Strom (104) mentions at times using the descriptor. This is, for me, sort of the same as saying how they might put it this way, a less academic way of saying pace, as I cannot speak for them. Anyway, I think she (110) puts this quite eloquently, yet without any pomp, nor throwing anyone under a bus:
“If we are zeroing in on what something means, exactly, and evaluating whether or not someone is applying it properly, then we are stuck in the realm of meaning and what is.”
How to put this in other words? Well, I’d say that Deleuze, as well as Guattari (who, in general, tends get forgotten all the time), aren’t interested in you trying to be them. Now, this may seem confusing, so I’ll let Strom (110) finish her line of thought:
“The verb ‘to be’ has been imposed – to be Deleuzian – and we are once again back reproducing dichotomous thinking: you are, or you are not, Deleuzian.”
Right, so, as she points out, the whole thing with being is, itself, the issue here. Not that I know if they get me, but as I keep telling people, the question isn’t to be or not to be, as you always are, like it or not, regardless of how you are, unless you die, that is of course. You are always what you’ve become. Aha, so, I am what I’ve become, therefore I am … this and/or that! No. No. No. That’s who you were and that’s assuming you can tell who you were, which, I’d be highly doubtful of. Deleuze (11) is super clear on this in the letter:
“We have to counter people who think ‘I’m this, I’m that,’ and who do so, moreover, in psychoanalytic terms (relating everything to their childhood or fate)[.]”
Instead, he (11) recommends that:
“[We have to counter this] by thinking in strange, fluid, unusual terms: I don’t know what I am – I’d have to investigate and experiment with so many things in a non-narcissistic, non-oedipal way – no gay can ever definitively say ‘I’m gay.’”
Just as a note here, I’m skipping the gay bit here. I’ll return it to shortly. This just so that you don’t think he is gay bashing here and that I’m cool with it. Argument wise it’s not really even about that. We could simply replace it with just about anything as the question really is, or should be anyway, whether to become or not to become. There’s actually no avoiding it, you always become, whatever it is that you become, even if you think otherwise. I may or may not have used this in a previous essay, but, for example, I didn’t go running today (yesterday from now, actually), so it may well be that I didn’t do any favors to my physical fitness. In other words, just by doing nothing, or so to speak, you are becoming something. You may not like that, but you are becoming something. Now, that’s an unnecessarily simplistic example and, to be honest, it ignores, as I mentioned, that I went cycling instead. I did it for the variety of it and in hopes of avoiding overworking certain parts of my body, which, in turn, facilitate me becoming more fit in the sense that I’m also trying not to get injured. Summarizing these two, being and becoming, in Deleuze’s (11) words:
“It’s not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman, of a universal animal becoming – not seeing yourself as some dumb animal, but unraveling your body’s human organization, exploring this or that zone of bodily intensity[.]”
I can’t remember if I’ve addressed the becoming plateau in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. I don’t think I have, but I’ll leave that to an another time. That’d be quite the wild tangent here. So, skipping bits here, again, Strom (111) goes on to express her discomfort of completing her dissertation, fearing that, as you might guess already, it’s not Deleuzian enough, whatever that means. Now, just to add something here, as, I guess, I sort of did already, but only in passing, how is it that people keep telling her that something isn’t Deleuzian enough when … geez … it should, if we want to go that route, be Deleuzo-Guattarian enough. It should also be mentioned that, as Deleuze and Guattari (3) themselves point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, they couldn’t care less about the labels, who wrote what, who’s who, who gets the attribution and the usual jazz that pervade academia. This is also something that Deleuze (9) brings up in the letter, noting that what they are working on, at the time, that would be, is going to something very different indeed:
“We’re well aware that the first volume of Anti-Oedipus is still full of compromises, too full of things that are still scholarly and rather like concepts.”
And (9):
“We’re going to stop compromising, because we don’t need to any more.”
If we ignore what was published in between, namely the book on Kafka, what they are on about is the book known as ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, a book that is, itself, something that forms a rhizome. As Deleuze (8) characterizes it in the letter, “[a] book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery.” It’s a book that could just be referred to by its name, rather than by its authors, but of course, you can’t, at least not in the academia, because, you know, we can’t have things like books without authors (in the sense that Foucault discusses the issue) as that’d be mad.
I just couldn’t help myself, I had just had to rant for a moment, but back to Strom (111) who was told before her dissertation defense that her work wasn’t Deleuzian enough, not proper rhizoanalysis. The issue was, apparently, that she wasn’t unconventional enough. Oh my, my oh my, it’s not about being conventional or unconventional. I’ve brought this up before, so, to rehash myself, for example, a formal style is expected of me when I submit an academic article for peer review. I’m far from an advocate of such, because I think it’s an exclusionary practice to do so. It’s there to keep out the riffraff, a handy excuse. Anyway, going against it, advocating for informality won’t really solve anything. Going all out on informality only results in making it the new preferred category, the formal, the new orthodoxy. It’s not about for or against, but something altogether different. You don’t have to write ‘do not’, but just because you don’t have to, doesn’t mean you can’t. Indeed you can and it’s up to you if you do or you do not. Whatever works for you. In the letter, addressing Cressole, Deleuze (10) goes on to explain it in terms of everyday life:
“I’ve got a wife, and a daughter who plays with dolls and potters around the house.”
Then adding (10) that it may seem contradictory, but isn’t:
“And you think that in the light of Anti-Oedipus this is a huge joke. … If you think it’s dolls that produce the Oedipus complex, or the mere fact of being married, that’s pretty weird. The Oedipus complex is nothing to do with dolls[.]”
It’s not this or that, something external, as he (10) goes on to explain:
“[I]t’s an internal secretion, a gland, and you can’t fight oedipal secretions except by fighting yourself, by experimenting on yourself, by opening yourself up to love and desire (rather than the whining need to be loved that leads everyone to the psychoanalyst).”
Then going on the offensive, pointing out that Cressole is actually the one being Oedipal:
“[Y]ou should know that it’s not enough just to be unmarried, not to have kids, to be gay, or belong to this or that group, in order to get round the Oedipus complex-given all the group complexes, oedipal gays, oedipized women’s libbers, and so on.”
If you are unaware, which you may well be, just as I was, that Cressole was Gay Lib, if I understood correctly, short for Gay Liberation (?), and part of the FHAR (Front homosexual d’action revolutionnaire). So, simply put Deleuze reprimands Cressole for assuming that being gay, that is to say not heterosexual, equates to escaping the Oedipus complex. He is very clear on that, as he (10) finishes the paragraph:
“Just look at the piece called ‘Us and the Arabs,’ which is even more oedipal than my daughter.”
Here, to contextualize this, Deleuze is referring to a piece, ‘Les Arabes et Nous’, that Cressole wrote for a notorious journal number that got censored out of existence in 1973 (for being … erm … sexually deviant, only to be republished as late as 2002 and 2015). Now, I’m not exactly an expert on homosexuality in France in the early 1970s as the only thing I’ve read where this gets covered is Laurent Binet’s romp, in which young ‘Arab’ men make ends meet by … inspiring … French intellectuals. As my knowledge of this is clearly limited, if not fictional, Todd Shepard (94-95) addresses this in his book ‘Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979’, stating that the problem was that the texts on ‘Arab’ men were all about Arabs, in the absence of Arabs. He summarizes (221), that, for Deleuze, in ‘Les Arabes et Nous’ desire (think of desiring machines, to use the term from ‘Anti-Oedipus’) was reduced to mere (b)anal sex, having to do with (im)pertinent questions, such as vaseline or no vaseline (a point that is drawn from a commentary that follows Cressole’s contribution, ‘Sex-pol en acte’ that is considered attributable to Deleuze). In this sense I’m not that surprised that Deleuze and Guattari opted to drop using desiring machines and went for assemblages instead, even if that probably wasn’t the one and only reason for the change between the two books. I think it’s worth emphasizing that this is not even about homosexuality or heterosexuality, but rather about reducing desire into sexuality, or that’s how I read it anyway.
Anyway, getting back on track here, to Strom (111), who states that she was told that she isn’t (un)orthodox enough, not properly Deleuzian which is, if you ask me, not what Deleuze and Guattari advocated for. As indicated already, Deleuze went on record to point out that his earlier work was playing it safe, making compromises, even in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, which is a rather unorthodox book, if you ask me. I read Strom (111) as struggling with having to be conventional because that’s expected of her in a dissertation, only to be then judged for being conventional. Oh the irony. It’s not like she has much of a choice. It’s not like she is at an equal footing. I’m actually quite amazed by this, probably because I haven’t encountered this, in the absence of knowing anyone who reads Deleuze and/or Guattari. Then again, I’m not exactly surprised that people turn them into orthodoxy, a school of thought. That’s only bound to happen, as contradictory as that may be.
How to end this? I think Strom (112) ends her article well, so it’s only fair to have her express it, with a minor addition from yours truly:
“In resisting orthodoxy, we must also push back against the urge to be the expert or authority on Deleuze [and Guattari]. If every time we plug into a Deleuzian or Deleuzoguattarian text, we are different (being part of different assemblages at each time producing different things), then it stands to reason that each time we read these texts we may come away with ideas and lives changed – once again a student and novice, never an expert.”
I’d add here that this applies also to writing, each time we write, we come out of it different, lives changed, albeit never really getting anywhere, in the sense that it’s not like we level up until we hit a level cap. This is part of the reason, at least it is now, why I write on this and/or that, after reading some interesting text. Reading the article written by Strom (or should I Stroms?) certainly wasn’t just a mere task, going from the first page to the last page, and then be done with it. I went all over the place with this one, as I tend to do in my essays, plugging into all kinds of machines. Actually, now that I think of it, I ended up on all kinds of tangents just because one citation was off in the text! Wooah!
References
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