Copyright © 2012
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 2:
The Unconscious
O' Sullivan, Simon & Zepke, Stephen. (ed.) Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New.
(2008) Continuum.
O' Sullivan, Simon & Zepke, Stephen. (ed.) Deleuze and Contemporary Art (2010). Edinburgh
University Press.
The Deleuze and Contemporary Art volume, of approximately three hundred pages, appeals to the lover of art gallery exhibitions and politics alike. For some critics, they will be drawn to the text through an appreciation of an oil-on- canvas from a van Gogh collection, for others their direction might start from an assemblage of texts comprising Aristotle's Politics or Negri & Guattari's
Communists Like Us.
The question of Dasein
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in the first section of this book takes a political route, through a territory of contemporary art as a critique of institutions. Deleuze follows Kant in suggesting that aesthetic realms create sensations, thus producing the ontological new. This argument by Zepke picks up where he left off in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, but with a slightly different focus on sensations as a becoming- active force of art's real life conditions.
These sublime rhythms and material forces are a form in-itself , and an immanent principle of individuation .
Our political imagination is often informed by art. Painting has become that veraciously embedded in our political culture, that its Symbolic dimension now has a direct impact on the psychoanalytical regulation of political philosophy itself. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy dismisses Kant's Critique of Judgement on this very point, claiming that Kant was not able to
1 German: being – there.
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extend his critique in to the realm of values where artistic sensations form real (qua individuation) political conditions.
These becoming-active and reactive forces are real conditions if we are to agree with Zepke's reading of Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic Of Sensation.
My analysis is not so much to query or debate this line of argument but perhaps to ask how feminism can be introduced in to the fold.
Through out the text (not just this opening section on politics) there is an absence of feminist interventions. The second section on the aesthetic paradigm and the third section on scenes and encounters are considerably lacking in this area. There is a visible gap in the scholarship. It is not until we enter chapter 14 that we are greeted with von Samsonow's 'Anti-Electra: Totemism and
Shizogamy' that we find feminist psychoanalysis with feminist logic in an ontological frame. This excellent intervention, correctly reinstates the primal mother as of utmost importance to what Freud ignored in the pre-Oedipal stages of his oeuvre. Deleuze's concept of the universal devenir-femme and Klein's interpretation of Sophocles Electra are inter-weaved elegantly in this chapter to explore schizomatic art alongside womanhood's role in feminine identifications. 'If matrilineal society attempted to set up the pre-Oedipal as permanent, then the logic of its relationships will not find its
(Lacanian) condition in a breach of the original bond with the mother, which is assumed to be obligatory for the Electra complex (von Samsonow 2010: 250).' This psychoanalytic perspective might be enhanced by turning to de Beauvoir's points of view in The Second Sex where woman defines her emotional self, on her own account, rather than misplacing faith in psychoanalysis and its privilege of the phallus .
Von Samsonow and de Beauvoir develop their arguments much more explicitly against Freud, rather than towards Jung, but it should be noted that Freud disagreed with Jung about the Electra complex, the relationship between castration and the Oedipus complex in addition to several other key psychosexual developments in girls. Von Samsonow also omits the influential Elementary
Structures of Kinship by Lévi Strauss which was in wide circulation in France amongst both the
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intellectual circles of de Beauvoir and Lacan. This text is crucial to understanding Lévi Strauss's underscoring order of culture, communication and exogamy that forms some of the pillars of
Lacan's Symbolic architecture. The Symbolic order of the mother is at the bosom of von
Samsonow's reading of pre-Oedipality and female gender identification, however she skips past a significant amount of case study research on matrimonial exchange and anthropology. Lévi Strauss also documented important insights in to the totemism which proposes symbolisation in the central part of von Samsonow's argument. Her totemic thesis perhaps would have been enhanced by Lévi
Strauss's structuralist, heterogenous anthropology and / or Lacan's guiding remarks on femininity.
Despite these observations, von Samsonow asserts several fascinating and thought – provoking positions such as 'Why are women so hypersensitive about this gaze that encounters them only from the “outside” , in extremity, that entire feminist libraries have been composed as war machines against its validity? (von Samsonow 2010: 255).' The exterior, hegemony of the male gaze comes under attack here from contemporary feminists whose search for the meaning of Being is obscured by it. Oedipalisation, if we are to follow Freud, is a man-made construct, thus any parallels to the
Electra complex perhaps subjects femininity to a male, clinical gaze that misses some of the the intricacies of the mother/daughter bond and maternal, mother/daughter constellations. This is interesting because Freud continually analyses a mother or daughter as a real mother or daughter, but then shifts his focus to a mother or daughter as a signifier. This is why Lacan (after reading de
Saussure) found the verbal sign between the signifier therapeutic for patients in his application of
Freudian psychoanalysis as a clinical cure. For Jacques-Alain Miller, this is how the Lacanian
Symbolic reigns supreme over the Imaginary and the Real in his commentary on
Écrits
.
In conclusion, Deleuze and Contemporary Art is a useful conceptual tool for analysing
Deleuze's innovations in the use of the signifier, subjectivity, lines of flight and assemblages. It forms a valuable extension to the editor's precursor Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the
New. This precursor occupies a place in a vast literature on Deleuze and a crucial year in particular
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for Deleuze scholarship. At the time of publication, Bernd Hwerzogenarth edited An [Un]Likely
Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari for Cambridge Scholars Publishing;
Robin Mackay, a few months earlier, had edited Collapse 3 for Urbanomic;
2 whilst Sarah Gendron published Repetition, Difference and Knowledge in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze with Peter Lang. As for the books immediate companions in its Edinburgh
University Press series, a transfer to digital print of Ian Buchanan's and Gregg Lambert's co-edited
Deleuze and Space was circulated, in addition to Mark Poster (along with David Savat) starting to form Deleuze and New Technology at the time.
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (2008) collects the contributions of an international selection of thinkers mostly based in American and English university philosophy departments. It was sent to me with a copy of the editor's later Deleuze and Contemporary Art
(2010) collaboration, with a request that they are both reviewed together for the first time. The former text is an excellent precursor, guide or supplement to Deleuze and Contemporary Art, covering several of the same themes, with greater emphasis on the notion of desire, whilst giving equal weight to how we sculpt, perform, paint and write with sensations as percepts. An intriguing omission from the index of the latter text is the important Deleuzian variant of the term multiplicity, as the entire text, and indeed the entire series 3 that it is an element of, hinges on what is between the sets.
After the introduction, this major contribution to the field of Deleuzo-Guattarian studies stretches to twenty articles covering a wide variety of perspectives on their writing on affects, art, aesthetic paradigms, becoming and the virtual culminating in 'Consciousness and Subjectivity' (an excerpt) from Guattari's Cartographies Schizoanalytiques . Prior to this Guattarian conclusion on the functors of deterritorialization and the Freudian based Libido-Unconscious, we have the Novelty and 'Double Causality in Kant, Whitehead and Deleuze' chapter by Shaviro. This chapter might
2 This was in a limited run of approximately 1, 000 numbered copies.
3 The E.U.P Deleuze Connections series General Editor is Ian Buchanan.
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have been better placed after the introduction, as it sets up the rest of the collection chronologically in terms of philosophical origins and conceptual foundations. Colebrook also makes extensive use of Kant in the central section of the book, specifically focusing on aesthetics, actualization and beauty despite omitting Kant from the bibliography after her note on Žižek. Shaviro's chapter might have been better situated preceding Colebrook's.
'Kant's argument against metaphysical dogmatism, which both Whitehead and Deleuze endorse, means that being always remains open' (Shaviro 2008: 207). This allows for the continual production of a new, unrecognisable terra incognita, where being equates to becoming. 'Philosophy begins with difference, and thus with the production of the new (O' Sullivan & Zepke 2008: 1).' Yet, this is an oversimplification of Deleuze's position in Difference and Repetition, as difference is initself a repetition. Ansell – Pearson's Germinal Life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze (1999) picks up on this point masterfully, situating it through and beyond the neo-Darwinism of Weismann and the neglected work of Uexküll. The question of Being and difference as univocal perhaps cannot be divorced from the final climax of Difference and Repetition. Ansell – Pearson extends and supports this argument by postulating that all of Being's individuating differences can be revealed from how 'Deleuze's engagement with the history of philosophy revolves around his adherence to this conception of univocal Being (Ansell-Pearson 1999: 15). A problematic with this
Deleuzian approach to the question of Being, is that it tends to sculpt the universe in to its own image. 'Need expresses the openness of a question before it expresses the non-being or absence of a response (Deleuze 1968: 106).' This problematic is accentuated by temporality. To be specific, time must not be self-present, paradoxically, for it to be present. This is part of the incompleteness and paradox of Deleuze's temporal analysis for Dasein's Being. 4
This is a slight digression away from the main thesis of the book, which is 'Being = Difference = the New (Smith 2008: 151).' Thus, novelty becomes a fundamental cog in the machinery of
4 Bergon's Matter and Memory may seem like the obvious turning point for such an assertion, however my inclination would be to re-read the final section of Heidegger's Being and Time on the synthesis of time and the present.
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ontology and perhaps can be refined further to the ontological equation Being + Repetition =
Becoming. This is Deleuze's ontology, not Being = Becoming or Construction = Expression =
Becoming, which are thinly disguised variants of Nietzsche's ontology of the eternal return.
5
Deleuze differs , in that, the question of Being, in its place as a metaphysics of difference, queries the ontological conditions under which the production of the new can occur . On this trajectory, Smith's chapter has a direct Kantian link to the aforementioned Shaviro chapter.
Kant considered carefully the conditions that enframe the limits of possible experience and split up things- in- themselves from things- in- appearance. Both Smith and Shaviro open the magnum opus Critique of Pure
Reason, but for alternative arguments. Smith wishes to articulate Maimon's rebuttal of Kant as an important influence on Deleuze's principle of difference, whilst Shaviro utilises Kant's critiques as a critical source for Whitehead's Modes of Thought and Process and Reality. Here we can extrapolate the final cause of repetition in being as as a supplement to the efficient cause; or to put Process and
Reality in to Deleuzian terms, final causation becomes itself in an internal process – whilst efficient causation expresses the becoming from entity to entity. This is how Whitehead replaces Kant's distinction with an entirely immanent distinction. It is clear Shaviro is reading Whitehead in tandem with Deleuze's wider philosophical project, not just confining to his thoughts on causality to what is contained in Kant's Critical Philosophy . Whitehead continually reminded his pupils Russell and
Quine, whilst supervising their respective Doctoral dissertations, that analytical philosophy must never fall in to the trap of using too small a selection of data or evidence. There is a craving for novelty, however there is a sublime terror at losing the familiarity of past gravitational
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weights such as the scriptures elucidating the Being of God.
Kant's improvisations on the possible conditions of Dasein and experiencing repetition punctuates Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New from cover to cover, on a long journey
5 See Nietzsche's Nachlass notes on 'European Nihilism' (1887) taken from his notebook N VII 3 published in the
Colli – Montinari Kritische Gesamtausgabe.
6 Whitehead's theory of gravitation is an alternative to Einstein's theory of general relativity.
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in our imagination from the dynamic sublime to the mathematical sublime culminating in the argument that 'the process of actualization is the hinge, or the interstice, not only between past and future, but also between the two forms of causality (Shaviro 2008: 215.' The mathematical sublime in Kant and Whitehead can be divided further in to its foundations of algebra, geometry and logic.
Smith's chapter does this using the mathematical tools of calculus and differential calculations to discover the sublime nature of the Real and its conditions. Smith ignores Lacan's seminars in favour of Deleuze's seminars of 1980 to support this thesis, however it is Whitehead's pupil Russell (in An
Outline of Philosophy , that underpins these conditions with the scientific catalyst that laws of nature must only be 'expressed in differential equations (Bunge 1979: 74-5).'
Here we have a repetition of Deleuzeo-Lacanianism via mathematics. To be specific, through
Whitehead's panexperientialism we can see how psychology supplements Deleuze's use of group theory, non-Euclidean geometry and topology. This is how Deleuze clarifies the question of being as a question of difference-in-itself through repetition. The mathematical function of differentiation, multiplicities and the differential relation are all concepts extracted from calculus to purify and clarify empirical relations by Deleuze. This reveals Russell's empiricist dictum as essential to understanding how Deleuze moves mathematically from singularities to multiplicities. The question of being, through this refinement, takes the form of 'what is singular?' As one of the most fundamental questions of his ontology. Whitehead's panexperientialism supplements this (as a variant of Lacan's panpsychism) where experience as a mental property is the master discourse of ontology. Smith's brilliant conclusion to this chapter has three key points:
1.
The actual does not resemble or mirror the virtual like the Real reflects the possible.
2.
The new is never produced ex nihilio, but it when the virtual is actualized, it differentiates itself in the production.
3.
Being presents itself in a constantly diverging series, as a problematic of the new, not just as a remote metaphysical question, but as a primary catalyst of Being itself.
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My closing remarks on this volume of papers are very positive. O' Sullivan and Zepke have gathered material from theorists on an interesting intersection between various artists (such as
Cézanne, Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso etc.) and various thinkers such as Badiou, Foucault and
Nietzsche. The synthesis of this hybridisation oscillates between Deleuze and Guattari, with great fluency despite the variety of the research stretching to musical realms of Jazz, Techno and Rock.
My recommendation is that it read together with their Deleuze and Contemporary Art , as the latter text consolidates and extends further many of the political questions raised by the politics of the production of new art. Zepke has also recently been receiving critical acclaim not only in Vienna, but across the world for his Contemporary Art – Beautiful or Sublime? Kant in Rancière, Lyotard and Deleuze article in Avello Publishing Journal's inaugural issue. A conversation my friends and I had earlier today (in the Howard Building of Downing College) concerned the growing interest this particular article is generating here in Cambridge and how the Deleuzian elements might be expanded to incorporate the (1967) Présentation de Sacher – Masoch to critique the sadistic desires found in the fictional characters of Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) by E.L James. In non – fictional terms, the excellent work by both Zepke and O' Sullivan might be of interest to Katherine, the
Duchess of Kent, who opened the Howard Building in 1987. In 1961, she married Prince Edward, the current Duke of Kent, who is the eldest son of Prince George and Princess Marina of Greece &
Denmark.
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