. . . . . . • Organs without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze • |
The measure of the true love for a philosopher is that
one recognizes traces of his concepts all around in one's
daily experience. Recently, while watching again Sergei
Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, I noticed a wonderful
detail in the coronation scene at the beginning of the
first part: when the two (for the time being) closest
friends of Ivan pour golden coins from the large plates
onto his newly anointed head, this veritable rain of gold
cannot but surprise the spectator by its magically
excessive character - even after we see the two plates
almost empty, we cut to Ivan's head on which golden coins
"nonrealistically" continue to pour in a continuing flow.
Is this excess not very "Deleuzian"? Is it not the excess
of the pure flow of becoming over its corporeal cause, of
the virtual over the actual?
The first determination that comes to mind apropos
of Deleuze is that he is the philosopher of the Virtual -
and the first reaction to it should be to oppose
Deleuze's notion of the Virtual to the'all-pervasive
topic of virtual reality: what matters to Deleuze is not
virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual (which,
in Lacanian terms, is the Real." Virtual Reality in
itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating
reality, of reproducing its experience in an artificial
medium. The reality of the Virtual, on the other hand,
stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for its
real effects and consequences. Let us take an attractor
in mathematics: all positive lines or points in its
sphere of attraction only approach it in an endless
fashion, never reaching its form - the existence of this
form is purely virtual, being nothing more than the shape
towards which lines and points tend. However, precisely
as such, the virtual is the Real of this field: the
immovable focal point around which all elements
circulate. Is not this Virtual ultimately the Symbolic as
such? Let us take symbolic authority: in order to
function as an effective authority, it has to remain not-
fully-actualized, an eternal threat.
Perhaps, the ontological difference between the
Virtual and the Actual is best captured by the shift in
the way quantum physics conceives of the relationship
between particles and their interactions: in an initial
moment, it appears as if first (ontologically, at least)
there are particles interacting in the mode of waves,
oscillations, etc.; then, in a second moment, we are
forced to enact a radical shift of perspective - the
primordial ontological fact are the waves themselves
(trajectories, oscillations), and particles are nothing
but the nodal points in which different waves intersect. [1] This brings us to the constitutive ambiguity of the
relationship between actual and virtual: (1) the human
eye REDUCES the perception of light; it actualizes light
in a certain way (perceiving certain colors, etc.), a
rose in a different way, a bat in a different way... The
flow of light "in itself" is nothing actual, but, rather,
the pure virtuality of infinite possibilities actualized
in a multitude of ways; (2) on the other hand, the human
eye EXPANDS perception - it inscribes what it "really
sees" into the intricate network of memories and
anticipations (like Proust with the taste of madeleine),
it can develop new perceptions, etc. [2]
The genius of Deleuze resides in his notion of
"transcendental empiricism": in contrast to the standard
notion of the transcendental as the formal conceptual
network which structures the rich flow of empirical data,
the Deleuzian "transcendental" is infinitely RICHER than
reality - it is the infinite potential field of
virtualities out of which reality is actualized. The term
"transcendental" is here used in the strict philosophical
sense of the a priori conditions of possibility of our
experience of constituted reality. The paradoxical
coupling of opposites (transcendental + empirical) points
towards a field of experience beyond (or, rather,
beneath) the experience of constituted/perceived reality.
We remain here within the field of consciousness -
Deleuze defines the field of transcendental empiricism as
"a pure a-subjective current of consciousness, an
impersonal prereflexive consciousness, a qualitative
duration of consciousness without self." [3] No wonder that
(one of) his reference(s) here is the late Fichte, who
tried to think the absolute process of self-positing as a
flow of Life beyond the opposites of subject and object:
A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is sheer power, utter beatitude. Insofar as he overcomes the aporias of the subject and the object Fichte, in his later philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life which does not depend on a Being and is not subjected to an Act: an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers back to a being but ceaselessly posits itself in a life. [4]
Perhaps Jackson Pollock is the ultimate "Deleuzian
painter": does his action-painting not directly render
this flow of pure becoming, the impersonal-unconscious
life-energy, the encompassing field of virtuality out of
which determinate paintings can actualize themselves,
this field of pure intensities with no meaning to be
unearthed by interpretation? The cult of Pollock's
personality (heavy drinking American macho) is secondary
with regard to this fundamental feature: far from
"expressing" his personality, his works "sublate"/cancel
it. [5] The first example that comes to mind in the domain of
cinema is Sergei Eisenstein: if his early silent films
are remembered primarily on account of their practice of
montage in its different guises, from the "montage of
attractions" to "intellectual montage" (i.e., if their
accent is on cuts), then his "mature" sound films shift
the focus onto the continuous proliferation of what Lacan
called sinthomes, of the traces of affective intensities.
Recall, throughout both parts of Ivan the Terrible, the
motif of the thunderous explosion of rage which is
continuously morphed and thus assumes different guises,
from the thunderstorm itself to the explosions of
uncontrolled fury: although it may at first appear to be
an expression of Ivan's psyche, its sound detaches itself
from Ivan and starts to float around, passing from one to
another person or to a state not attributable to any
diegetic person. This motif should NOT be interpreted as
an "allegory" with a fixed "deeper meaning," but as a
pure "mechanic" intensity beyond meaning (this is what
Eisenstein aimed at in his idiosyncratic use of the term
"operational"). Other such motives echo and reverse each
other, or, in what Eisenstein called "naked transfer,"
jump from one to another expressive medium (say, when an
intensity gets too strong in the visual medium of mere
shapes, it jumps and explodes in movement - then in
sound, or in color...) For example, Kirstin Thompson points
out how the motif of a single eye in Ivan is a "floating
motif," in itself strictly meaningless, but a repeated
element that can, according to context, acquire a range
of expressive implications (joy, suspicion, surveillance,
quasi-godlike omniscience). [6] And, the most interesting
moments in Ivan occur when such motifs seem to explode
their preordained space: not only do they acquire a
multitude of ambiguous meanings no longer covered by an
encompassing thematic or ideological agenda; in the most
excessive moments, such a motif seems even to have no
meaning at all, instead just floating there as a
provocation, as a challenge to find the meaning that
would tame its sheer provocative power...
Among contemporary filmmakers, the one who lends
himself ideally to a Deleuzian reading is Robert Altman,
whose universe, best exemplified by his masterpiece Short
Cuts, is effectively that of contingent encounters
between a multitude of series, a universe in which
different series communicate and resonate at the level of
what Altman himself refers to as "subliminal reality"
(meaningless mechanic shocks, encounters, and impersonal
intensities which precede the level of social meaning). [7] So, when, in Nashville, violence explodes at the end (the
murder of Barbara Jean at the concert), this explosion,
although unprepared and unaccounted for at the level of the explicit narrative line, is nonetheless experienced
as fully justified, since the ground for it was laid at
the level of signs circulating in the film's "subliminal
reality." And, is it not that, when we hear the songs in Nashville, Altman directly mobilizes what Brian Massumi
calls the "autonomy of affect"? [8] That is to say, we
totally misread Nashville if we locate the songs within
the global horizon of the ironico-critical depiction of
the vacuity and ritualized commercial alienation of the
universe of American country music: on the contrary, we
are allowed - even seduced into - fully enjoying the
music on its own, in its affective intensity,
independently of Altman's obvious critico-ideological
project. (And, incidentally, the same goes for the songs
from Brecht's great pieces: their musical pleasure is
independent of their ideological message.) What this
means is also that one should avoid the temptation of
reducing Altman to a poet of American alienation,
rendering the silent despair of everyday lives: there is
another Altman, that of opening oneself to joyful
contingent encounters. Along the same lines as Deleuze and
Guattari's reading of Kafka's universe of the Absence of
the inaccessible and elusive transcendent Center (Castle,
Court, God) as the Presence of multiple passages and
transformations, one is tempted to read the Altmanian
"despair and anxiety" as the deceiving obverse of the
more affirmative immersion into the multitude of
subliminal intensities. Of course, this underlying plane
can also contain the obscene superego subtext of the
"official" ideological message - recall the notorious
"Uncle Sam" recruiting poster for the US Army:
This is an image whose demands, if not desires, seem absolutely clear, focussed on a determinate object: it wants "you," that is, the young men of the proper age for military service. The immediate aim of the picture looks like a version of the Medusa effect: that is, it "hails" the viewer, verbally, and tries to transfix him with the directness of its gaze and (its most wonderful pictorial feature) the foreshortened pointing hand and finger that single out the viewer, accusing, designating, and commanding the viewer. But the desire to transfix is only a transitory and momentary goal. The longer-range motive is to move and mobilize the viewer, to send the beholder on to 'the nearest recruiting station, and ultimately overseas to fight and possibly die for his country.
/.../ Here the contrast with the German and Italian posters is clarifying. These are posters in which young soldiers hail their brothers, call them to the brotherhood of honorable death in battle. Uncle Sam, as his name indicates, has a more tenuous, indirect relation to the potential recruit. He is an older man who lacks the youthful vigor for combat, and perhaps even more important, lacks the direct blood connection that a figure of the fatherland would evoke. He asks young men to go fight and die in a war in which neither he nor his sons will participate. There are no "sons" of Uncle Sam /.../ Uncle Sam himself is sterile, a kind of abstract, pasteboard figure who has no body, no blood, but who impersonates the nation and calls for other men's sons to donate their bodies and their blood.
So what does this picture want? A full analysis would take us deep into the political unconscious of a nation that is nominally imagined as a disembodied abstraction, an Enlightenment polity of laws and not men, principles and not blood relationships, and actually embodied as a place where old white men send young men and women of all races (including a disproportionately high number of colored people) to fight their wars. What this real and imagined nation lacks is meat - bodies and blood - and what it sends to obtain them is a hollow man, a meat supplier, or perhaps just an artist. [8]
The first thing to do here is to add to this series the
famous Soviet poster "Motherland is calling you," in
which the interpellator is a mature strong woman. We thus
move from the American imperialist Uncle through European
Brothers to the Communist Mother... - Here we have the
split, constitutive of interpellation, between law and
superego (or want and desire). What a picture like this
wants is not the same as what it desires: while it wants
us to participate in the noble struggle for freedom, it
desires blood, the proverbial pound of our flesh (no
wonder the elder sterile "Uncle (not Father) Sam" can be
deciphered as a Jewish figure, along the lines of the
Nazi reading of American military interventions: "the
Jewish plutocracy wants the blood of the innocent
Americans to feed their interests"). In short, it would
be ridiculous to say that "Uncle Sam desires you": Uncle
Sam wants you, but it desires the partial object in you,
your pound of flesh... When a superego call WANTS (and
enjoins) you to do it, to gather the strength and
succeed, the secret message of DESIRE is: "I know you
will not be able to achieve it, so I desire you to fail and to gloat in your failure!" This superego character,
confirmed by the Yankee Doodle association (recall the
fact that superego figures inextricably mix obscene
ferocity and clownish comedy), is further sustained by
the contradictory character of its call: it first wants
to arrest our movement and fixate our gaze, so that,
surprised, we stare at it; in a second moment, it wants
us to follow its call and go to the nearest conscription
office - as if, after stopping us, it mockingly addresses
us: "Why do you stare at me like an idiot? Didn't you get
my point? Go to the nearest conscription post!" In the
arrogant gesture typical of the mocking characteristics
of the superego, it laughs at our very act of taking
seriously its first call. [10]
When Eric Santner told me about a game his father
played with him when he was a small boy (the father
showed, opened up in front of him, his palm, in which
there were a dozen or so of different coins; the father
then closed his palm after a couple of seconds and asked
the boy how much money there was in his palm - if the
small Eric guessed the exact sum, the father gave him the
money), this anecdote provoked in me an explosion of deep
and uncontrollable anti-Semitic satisfaction expressed in
wild laughter: "You see, this is how Jews really teach
their children! Is this not a perfect case of your own
theory of a proto-history which accompanies the explicit
symbolic history? At the level of explicit history, your
father was probably telling you noble stories about
Jewish suffering and the universal horizon of humanity,
but his true secret teaching was contained in those
practical jokes about how to quickly deal with money."
Anti-Semitism effectively IS part of the ideological
obscene underside of most of us.
And one finds a similar obscene subtext even where
one would not expect it - in some texts which are
commonly perceived as feminist. In order to confront this
obscene "plague of fantasies" which persists at the level
of "subliminal reality" at its most radical, suffice it
to (re)read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the
dystopia about the "Republic of Gilead," a new state on
the East Coast of the US which emerged when the Moral
Majority took over. The ambiguity of the novel is radical: its "official" aim is, of course, to present as
actually realized the darkest conservative tendencies in
order to warn us about the threats of Christian
fundamentalism - the evoked vision is expected to give
rise to horror in us. However, what strikes the eye is
the utter fascination with this imagined universe and its
invented rules. Fertile woman are allocated to those
privileged members of the new nomenklatura whose wives
cannot bear children - forbidden to read, deprived of
their names (they are called after the man to whom they
belong: the heroine is Offred - "of Fred"), they serve as
receptacles of insemination. The more we read the novel,
the more it becomes clear that the fantasy we are reading
is not that of the Moral Majority, but that of feminist
liberalism itself: an exact mirror-image of the fantasies
about the sexual degeneration in our megalopolises which
haunts members of the Moral Majority. So, what the novel
displays is desire - not of the Moral Majority, but the
hidden desire of feminist liberalism itself.
NOTES
[1] The genealogy of Deleuze's concepts is often strange and
unexpected - say, his assertion of the Anglo-Saxon notion
of external relations is clearly indebted to the
religious problematic of grace. The missing link is here
Alfred Hitchcock, the English Catholic, in whose films a
change in relations between persons, in no way rooted in
their characters, totally external to them, changes
everything, deeply affects them (say, when, at the
beginning of North by Northwest, Thornhill is wrongly
identified as Kaplan). Chabrol's and Rohmer's Catholic
reading of Hitchcock (in their Hitchcock, 1954) deeply
influenced Deleuze, since, in the Jansenist tradition, it
focuses precisely on "grace" as a contingent divine
intervention which has nothing to do with the inherent
virtues and qualities of the affected characters.
[2] And is this ambiguity not homologous to the ontological
paradox of quantum physics? The very "hard reality" which
emerges out of the fluctuation through the collapse of
the wave-function, is the outcome of observation, i.e. of
the intervention of consciousness. Consciousness is thus
not the domain of potentiality, multiple options, etc.,
as opposed to hard single reality - reality PREVIOUS to
its perception is fluid-multiple-open, and conscious
perception reduces this spectral, pre-ontological,
multiplicity to one ontologically fully constituted
reality.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, "Immanence: une vie...," quoted from John
Marks, Gilles Deleuze, London: Pluto Press 1998, p. 29..
[4] Deleuze, op.cit., p. 30. - One is tempted to oppose to
this Deleuzian absolute immanence of the flow of Life, as
the presubjectlve consciousness, the Freudo-Lacanian
unconscious subject ($) as the agency of the death drive.
[5] So what about the opposition Pollock-Rothko? Does it not
correspond to the opposition of Deleuze versus
Freud/Lacan? The virtual field of potentialities versus
the minimal difference, the gap between background and
figure?
[6] Kirstin Thompson, Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible": A Neoformalist Analysis, Princeton: Princeton University
Press 1981.
[7] Robert T. Self, Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality,
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 2002.
[8] Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton, Oxford:
Blackwell 1996.
[9] Tom Mitchell, "What Do Pictures Really Want?" in October 77 (Summer 1996), p. 64-66.
[10] What, then, more generally, does a picture want? One is
tempted to apply here the good old Lacanian triad of ISR:
at the level of the Imaginary, it is a lure which wants
to seduce us into aesthetic pleasure; at the level of the
Symbolic, it calls for its interpretation; at the level
of the Real, it endeavors to shock us, to cause us to
avert our eyes and/or to fixate our gaze.
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