“It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of existence” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 75). A little earlier they write, “There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared, selected, judged relative to one another. On the contrary, there are only immanent criteria. A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected. A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good and Evil or any transcendent values: There are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life” (74).
Yet it is hard, is it not? It is hard to find those tenors of life that are inherently affirmative, where we are not beset by a dark malaise. When I was young I was so blissfully ignorant. When Lacan talks about the imaginary, one of the things he has in mind is the way in which we treat others as being like us, as thinking in the same way, as having the same values, beliefs, and views. I really can’t say that I was aware of “otherness” when I was young. For me the first real shock of otherness came in 2000, with the election of George Bush; but even more strikingly it came following September 11th, when I watch my fellow countrymen rally around this president’s ideology, falling for just about every trick George Orwell had described in his novel 1984. Here, before my eyes, I saw everything Orwell had described materializing and I wondered how we could be so stupid, how we could forget so easily. All my assumptions about the world and people evaporated, and I no longer knew what thoughts lurked behind the twinkling eyes of those about me. It seemed that the worst nationalistic, repressively religious, fascist madness had been loosed upon the land… And if not the worst, at least seeds of madness that could easily become the worse.
It is difficult not to go a little mad if you’re paying attention. Everything in this world seems as if it is upside down, as if viewed through Caroll’s looking glass. In our media, the good and just are endlessly portrayed as the dangerous and wicked. Partial truths are transformed into the total truth, so that uncomfortable truths might be ignored. Perhaps the worst thing about rhetoric– of the sophistical sort –is that it works. In other affairs, whether education, health care, the so-called “war on terror”, economic issues, etc., it seems that we never miss the opportunity to make the stupid decision where policy is concerned, perpetually ignoring the complexity of situations for simplified, idiotic solutions that exacerbate our problems. Moronic administrators rule our institutions who perpetually have only the most dim understanding of what it is they’re administrating; and worse yet, these administrators all too often are filled with dark, fascist desires. But the despair produced by the stupidity of these “solutions” is not simply a result of the way in which they pose problems poorly or simplify the complex, but rather it is the way in which this stupidity is also the function of cruelty, mendacity, hatred, or ressentiment. These “solutions” are all too often a will to wound, rather than a will to produce flourishing. Lurking in the background is always the interests of money and privilege, and we seem to bow readily to these things, despite the fact that we vastly outnumber those in whom the wealth is concentrated. Most of us don’t even get angry about this, but see it as perfectly natural, assuming those who enjoy wealth, power, and privilege acquired these things through their own sweat and hard work, making them inherently superior, while the rest of the world is simply poor and morally inferior. And then, all around, we see ugliness, stupidity, and cruelty in the form of hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, ressintement, and all the myriad ways we find to torture one another. Meanwhile, in those endeavors that ought to be guided by a shared desire for justice, more equitable and finer living conditions, the joy of intellectual inquiry and discovery, and the production of beauty, ego, rivalry in the imaginary, gets in the way and petty feuds emerge between rival tribes, striving to stake out their own turf and ensure that they’re recognized (which, as Hegel pointed out, also entails the obliteration of the other). It is not enough that an idea be remarkable or interesting on its own, but it must be expressed in the framework of one’s own territory and no other: only phenomenology! only Anglo-American philosophy! Only deconstruction! Only Lacan! Only Deleuze and Guattari! Yes, it’s difficult not to go a little mad if you’re paying attention.
I suppose that if I am having these thoughts, then I have grown sick. Rather than discovering my own “immanent criteria” as Deleuze and Guattari describe (my cats don’t seem too troubled with the madness of the world and are thus masters of immanent evaluation), I measure the world against some transcendent standard of what I unconsciously believe it ought to be. I have transcendence folded into my thought, like a tain behind the mirror, infecting me with sickness and fatigue, filling me with despair. It seems that philosophy comes in too flavors: there are revolutionary practices of philosophy that seek to transform the world and eradicate this stupidity, superstition, cruelty, brutality, and injustice, and there are those philosophies that seek some peace of mind that might allow us to endure all of this ugliness. I wish I could somehow expel these “oughts” from my thought.
July 30, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Your post is very beautiful – hopefully it will not be intrusive if I ask a question – honestly open-ended, as I’m not familiar enough with Deleuze and Guattari to know the answer: is the implication of the rejection of transcendent values – values that sit outside a plane of immanence – really the same as a rejection of the “ought”? I ask this because there are approaches that also reject transcendence (whether as consistently or rigorously as Deleuze could be an open question), but that still see in the folds of a particular immanent situation different potentials, which are not equivalent in what can be created from their development.
In the passage you quote above, Deleuze and Guattari don’t seem, for example, to reject the notion of good or bad – but instead to reject the notion that we need some transcendent image of Good and Evil as a ground for the concept of good and bad as mobilised within a plane of immanence – instead, the passage suggests to me (and I understand fully that this may simply be an ill-informed reading), adequate understandings of good and bad can be understood to be immanently emergent. There is no “objective” position from which to judge among modes of existence – but there might be diverse immanent potentials within a mode of existence, with different implications that can be immanently grasped.
I’m commenting obviously just on a single quoted passage, and I may well misunderstand the strategic intent of the passage, due to lack of familiarity with the overarching work, but it at least sounds as though Deleuze and Guattari might be suggesting the possibility to distinguish approaches that seek some kind of closed and fixed image that functions as a normative standard, without however closing down the meaningfulness of critical engagement?
I understand you may not intend this post to open up to this kind of discussion – if my question is beside the point or not what you would wish to discuss, please accept my apologies and disregard the comment.
July 30, 2007 at 11:56 pm
[...] from Larval Subjects has posted a particularly poignant set of reflections that take as their starting point Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge: “It may be that [...]
July 31, 2007 at 12:11 am
Deleuze does, as far as I can tell, reject the “ought” as a norm that stands outside the immanent movement of a thing, measuring it against what it is not. This does not, however, entail that he rejects the good and the bad. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he contrasts the standpoint of affirmation where things are evaluated in terms of what is and the standpoint of the slave or man of ressentiment where the world is measured in terms of what it is not. Thus, for example, the master takes himself to be good and measures those others that do not have his characteristics of intelligence, creation, strength, etc., as bad. Here the affirmation precedes the negation. By contrast, the slave evaluates the master negatively for exercising his creativity or power to act, as in the case of the rabbit that refers to the eagle as evil for preying on the rabbit. Here a transcendent standard has been introduced, and the rabbit arrives at its estimation of itself as good by first instituting a negation of the qualities of the eagle.
I kind of hint at this a bit with my offhand reference to my cats: my cats don’t require any justification for their existence and their evaluation of the world, but rather this flows from their mode of living itself. Similarly, the artist, scientist, or philosopher at the height of her engagement and activity doesn’t pause to ask “what’s the point of all this”, but rather the activity itself is instrinsically, immanently, meaningful and valuable. Or maybe love would be a better example. Unless things are faltering, we don’t pause to ask why we love or why we do what we do when we love, but rather the activity is an end in itself. In certain respects, then, the valuation involved in immanence resembles the form judgment takes in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where the beautiful is appreciated for its own sake and not for the sake of its utility, or the way it satisfies a need, or the way it gratifies an appetite. By contrast, when transcendence enters the picture– as per Nietzsche’s analysis of Socrates –the world has somehow been devalued or lost its ability to justify itself of itself. Deleuze thinks of this as a sort of sickness or disease. This is a vast simplification of Deleuze’s arguments here, but at the moment I’m too exhausted to give a more detailed development.
Deleuze does claim, in a few places, that philosophy is nothing if it is not critique. For him critique generally refers to a way of unshackling these potentials through a sort of demolition of those forces of negativity and transcendent that block immanent potentials of creation. For instance, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to show how Oedipus functions as an illegitimate transcendence in psychoanalysis (among other things), similar to the illegitimate transcendent application of the categories of the understanding in Kant, such that the productive flows of desire in the unconscious are devalued and always reterritorialized back on the family setting. Again and again they emphasize that the unconscious does not represent, but rather produces but that psychoanalysis perpetually finds ways to halt this production through these reterritorializations. The aim of schizoanalysis, then, in contrast to psychoanalysis, is to promote this productive dimension of desire as opposed to this reterritorializing tendency. Part of this form of critique often consists in showing how illusions of transcendence (in the Kantian sense) that present themselves as universal and eternal, are habits or historically contingent practices.
July 31, 2007 at 12:18 am
Hey Levi, thanks again for your splendid blog – even when you suffer from your periodic dark moments. Are you really saying that you didn’t realize the otherness of people until after 9/11? I find that hard too believe. Of course D&G are right when they write,
There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared, selected, judged relative to one another.
That is also way too easy, as you state,
I have transcendence folded into my thought, like a taint behind the mirror, infecting me with sickness and fatigue, filling me with despair.
But even that is an affirmative – of the desire to reflect, think, feel, and ultimately to problematize existence. The examined life. The freshness of Deleuze is precisely that: The joy of acceptance. And the (dare I say this about him?) anti-intellectualism he promoted, even when he was suffering from lung cancer and certain death before he chose his gallant exit from the window ending his life – AFTER he comforted his (sentimental) visitors.
Levi, deal with it. As I know you will. Also rest assured that your blog and thinking bring so much philosophical joy (yes, there is such a thing) to so many people.
July 31, 2007 at 12:19 am
Many thanks for this – I don’t intend to draw you into a long discussion on Deleuze. Just a quick comment here that I like this image of the task of critique: where the primary issue is the identification and liberation of immanent potentials.
July 31, 2007 at 12:44 am
OOps, even while I was writing my post the ever inspiring N Pepperell was responding, and you LEVI was replying, referring to,
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where the beautiful is appreciated for its own sake and not for the sake of its utility, or the way it satisfies a need, or the way it gratifies an appetite.
Can’t life be viewed aesthetically?
Kant had his categories. Moralistic duty as opposed to aesthetics = (his lovely phrase) disinterested pleasure. And Nietzsche had his: Master/slave, Beyond good and evil, etc.
But what Nietzsche REALLY taught us is that philosophy is Die Fröliche Wissenschaft.
July 31, 2007 at 1:05 am
Orla, you write:
Are you really saying that you didn’t realize the otherness of people until after 9/11? I find that hard too believe.
No, of course not. Rather, I’m saying I had a certain conception of how the world works, of how it’s organized, and how politics functions prior to this taking place. You could refer to it as a sort of “das Man” in Heidegger’s sense of the term. On these grounds, I would encounter otherness in the sense of individual persons that didn’t at all fit with this unconscious model, but I think I took it for granted that they were idiosyncratic, outliers. Despite the fact that I had read piles of material on ideology critique and fascist movements, there was a very strange way in which I thought these things no longer existed, as if they were Past, as if somehow we had grown wiser collectively and had moved beyond these sad passions. I was thus deeply shocked when I saw all these mechanisms that I had read about in various works of theory on ideology, in history with respect to fascist movements, in the sad passions against which those involved in the Civil Rights movement had to fight, and so on, so readily came to the fore in the United States. I think that at some very basic level– it wasn’t at all theoretically elaborated or conscious –I somehow felt that the fact that these things had been theorized and critiqued entailed that they could no longer exist. I still find myself shocked when I see people so readily falling for certain rhetorical devices. None of this, of course, is to suggest that I’m somehow immune to these things.
Can’t life be viewed aesthetically?
Kant had his categories. Moralistic duty as opposed to aesthetics = (his lovely phrase) disinterested pleasure. And Nietzsche had his: Master/slave, Beyond good and evil, etc.
But what Nietzsche REALLY taught us is that philosophy is Die Fröliche Wissenschaft.
I don’t disagree at all. I wasn’t trying to suggest that Nietzsche or Deleuze somehow base their theory of value on Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment, although Deleuze does speak very positively of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in a number of places, arguing that it opened up an entirely new direction in Kant’s critical philosophy that Kant himself was unable to pursue as he died. What interests Deleuze in the Third Critique, I think, is the idea of a form of value that no longer requires transcendent standards. I don’t know that Nietzsche anywhere mentions the Third Critique, but Nietzsche seems to be thinking in a similar vein with respect to questions of values. With the death of God we’re threatened, as Nietzsche says, by nihilism because the will to truth had devalued this world in favor of another world (whether of the Platonic variety or the Christian variety). The question then becomes that of how this nihilism can be overcome such that life takes on value. Nietzsche’s interest in life sciences such as biology seems premised on the observation that living systems, like aesthetic judgments, require no transcendent standard to find meaning and value in life. Thus in Nietzsche you get this conjunction of aesthetic valuation and biological valuation as a response to nihilism. Of course, Nietzsche also argues that biology itself requires a critique as it is infected with Platonic presuppositions that have led biologists to view life only in reactive terms, i.e., only in terms of survival and homeostasis. This will lead Nietzsche to conceptualize the will to power as the creativity of life and the way it perpetually overcomes limits and sedentary fixations.
Thanks for the kind remarks!
July 31, 2007 at 1:14 am
N.Pepperell writes:
Just a quick comment here that I like this image of the task of critique: where the primary issue is the identification and liberation of immanent potentials.
To the list of identification and liberation, I would also add the unfolding, development, and inventiveness that accompanies tracing these potentials. I think this is one of the reasons that I’m often resistant to the signifier “critique”. On the one hand, I associate this term with an analysis of limitations that are not to be gone beyond (here I’m thinking too much in terms of Kant). On the other hand, and more importantly, I associate critique with negativity or what something is against. For me, the far more interesting moment is the inventiveness that takes place as these potentials become actualities. Of course, critique and praxis are not temporally successive moments, but often unfold simultaneously. The development of a praxis, whether conceptual, political or otherwise, is not simply the deployment of new concepts, new ways of living, new institutions, etc., but simultaneously the deployment of critical tools that are “discovered” concurrent to the deployment of these inventions. For instance, the critical concepts of ‘abstraction’ and ‘stupidity’ as I’ve developed them elsewhere on this blog only emerge in and through the inventive process of unfurling an ontology and politics surrounding relationality, production, individuation, multiplicity, etc., etc. In deploying-unfurling these concepts– if concepts they actually are –the other of these concepts is necessarily encountered such that critique is both necessitated and becomes possible so that further developments might occur. So many problematic fields begin to reveal themselves, requiring technologies of thought and practice– not unlike engineering –to enable the further development of the concepts. I get uneasy with talk of critique, however, as often it implicitly seems to suggest that first there must be the critique and then second the unfurling of the potentials. The process is rather janus faced, hence a reluctance to use the term at all.
July 31, 2007 at 1:55 am
Strangely, I tend to think of critique as something that happens fairly late in a collective process – as something that follows the unintentional or aleatory constitution of potentials: I think we do, and then perhaps can sometimes begin to recognise potentials in what we’ve done, and begin to assume a more active relationship to what we have done. I see critique as a dimension of this process of assuming an active relationship – not as a distinct activity separate from other forms of practice, but as an aspect of collective practice that emerges at a moment of collective recognition of potential.
I understand the concern that the concept of critique, in some articulations, could stand in opposition to action, or could imply a privileged status of the critic. But I don’t think this is the only possible imagining of the term (and I would take you to agree with this): there are other traditions and associations that can be activated through the mobilisation of the concept of “critique” – which doesn’t of course mean that I think everyone should use the term, but is the reason I tend to retain it.
I agree with you on the centrality of notions of unfolding, development and inventiveness: the issue with critique, for me, is that it is a process of opening up the space for the possibility of such things, of breaking through closures and fixed boundaries that prevent inventiveness from taking place. I hope nothing I am writing here is coming across as an attempt to debate on terms or concepts: I have an interest in thinking through these things, but don’t see myself as disagreeing with anything you are trying to say here, and don’t wish to do anything to dislodge the discussion from the more important issues you were raising in your post.
Orla – Many thanks for the kind words :-)
July 31, 2007 at 1:55 am
Of course, Nietzsche arrives at this conception of the role of art and bios via Schopenhauer. However, for Schopenhauer, aesthetic appreciation or enjoyment was one of the ways of dealing with the horror of life, whereas for Nietzsche it reflects the affirmative nature of life in its creative dimension… It is no longer a curative for the sickness of life, but becomes coincident with the nature of life itself. Moreover, where Kant approaches art from the standpoint of the spectator or observer of the artwork or the object of beauty, for Nietzsche the question of art is now posed from the standpoint of the creator or artist… Art is no longer something passively appreciated, but rather comes to be identified with production.
July 31, 2007 at 2:04 am
I agree with you on the centrality of notions of unfolding, development and inventiveness: the issue with critique, for me, is that it is a process of opening up the space for the possibility of such things, of breaking through closures and fixed boundaries that prevent inventiveness from taking place.
No, I don’t take you to be debating. I take it I was trying to say something similar in my reference to the engineer above and the way in which the engineer discovers a particular problematic field in the course of unfolding her project. She wishes to build a bridge from one river bank to the other. All sorts of problems begin to emerge: soil density and composition on the banks, the geometry of the banks, the speed of the water currents, phase transitions that the water undergoes with the change in seasons, available materials, the intensity of wind gusts, etc. There’s a discover of a world, of a field of problems, as a function of the unfolding potential that requires a series of solutions, but also a transformation of the science of engineering itself (the specificity of the circumstances generate new technologies, now and again).
The case is similar with the unfurling of potentials, whether at the level of philosophy or speculative thought or at the level of political practice. As the potential unfolds resistances are encountered and all sorts of questions emerge as to how to navigate these resistances and deadlocks. What are the forces that lock certain people into certain forms of life or existential territories? How do extant institutions functions to prevent emergences by absorbing them and feeding them back into existing systems? What forces animate particular social organizations and how can they strategically be undercut or sidestepped? Etc., etc. The unfolding of a potential discovers its own soil, it’s own earth, just as the engineer discovers a unique configuration on those river banks. Critique then functions as a technology, as a navigation, of a problematic field that emerges out of a response to the self-positing nature of the unfolding potential or the way in which the potential begins to posit itself as it actualizes itself. Or something like that.
July 31, 2007 at 2:08 am
All of this converges, somewhat, with the language you’ve been experimenting with pertaining to determinate negation. There’s no abstraction position of critique here, but rather a field that is discovered as a function of the potentials unfurling. I’m a little more hesitant to claim that critique only emerges late in these processes, but I’d have to think on it more.
July 31, 2007 at 2:42 am
I don’t want to make a strong claim on the… temporality of critique – I suspect that generalisations (even though I made one ;-P) on this unnecessarily close off options. The sort of critical work that I personally do actually does lag – I tend to be examining things I think have already been constituted. But this is mainly because I’m trying to explore whether it’s actually still viable to think in terms of immanent social critique – a concept that, for reasons I’ve explained at rough theory, actually does rely on the concept that potentials have already been constituted, but only because the approach pre-commits to certain kinds of determinate claims about the nature of the society being criticised.
These concerns wouldn’t necessarily bind other approaches to critique – and I see no advantage in restricting the search for potentials to one, fairly circumscribed, model that I’ve been exploring…
Sorry to meander – tired today…
July 31, 2007 at 5:22 am
dr sinthome the destitution you experienced as a result of 9-11, you and a lot of americans, is perfectly understandable to me – the words you just used could have been plucked from my diary in 1989, when yugoslavia suddenly collapsed. it is never easy to realize that your life is at the mercy of forces you can’t really control.
and americans SHOULD wake up, it’s our only hope for america, in fact, but it is not their FAULT. it is not their projection, their unconscious desire.
all the more vicious and insulting to have to listen to the slovenly alien chastize us on how americans ”brought it upon themselves”. it is such pronouncements that makes all those conspiracy theories ring true about the government doing it against their own people.
it sounds like dr. zizek wrote the screenplay for 9-11.
this is the same moralistic high horse the slovenly alien took when serbia was being pulverized, for a decade no less – first he championed the separation, then he clapped the neoliberal fuckers when they dropped bombs. all with a great anal sense of humor! ha ha ha! look – dialectic reversal!
antigram was right about that superiority delusion, only he erroneously contributed it to k-punk!
July 31, 2007 at 7:49 pm
What would it mean to view life aesthetically? We might begin by asking, say… The Marquis de Sade?
How do we view our lives “aesthetically” when we are complicit, inescapably complicit in any of the horrors we might wish to name? When we can’t deny our involvement, our complicity, without doing grave violence to our critical sense? And how would an appeal an aesthetic view, or life stance, not be another attempt to escape our situation, our imminence–a flight into another sort of transcendence? An aesthetic that has its origin, in whatever degree, in that need to remove oneself from the pain we experience when we discover that we live in a human charnel house–sounds all too Emersonian. I hear Melville on the Masthead…
“But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, I he fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, nor more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”
August 1, 2007 at 8:16 pm
dear you
just also wanted to thank you for your post. had wanted to respond to your previous writing on july 6th, about being confused. both posts touched me very much.
have just discovered and fallen for deleuze. now been thinking about doing a phd, in conjunction with hindi poetry. but also been wondering about what use that would be to anyone.
anyway, i definitely find it a constant challenge, experiment, the question of how to think, how to position oneself in the middle of life. how to actually live like the ideas that you read.
lonely sometimes. lessons. so many questions. and people with all their own multiplicities pushing through their skin.
wonder how conscious a choice deleuze made at the end. i find it very tempting to wonder how his suicide relates to his ideas.
thanx again for you posts and blog
night.
August 2, 2007 at 11:48 am
“I really can’t say that I was aware of “otherness” when I was young.”
I think I stumbled upon otherness at least at some intuitive level when I entered high school. Just before I began reading Freud and Jung back then, I had this sense of understanding how people worked via myself. I felt very angry, because it seemed to me like no secret that people betrayed what I thought to be their (my) motivations, commitments and assumptions. Over time though, I let go of this thought, and relied less and less on the assumption that how I feel or think is basically the same in others.
It didn’t come to me as a moment, certainly not one I can think of now. I began to bear the uneasy feeling of a disconnect. It wasn’t a loneliness either, but more like the kind of burden one feels when stuck with a group making decisions that bind you to what seem like problematic outcomes. As time goes by, and I live exposed to a life well above the class into which I was born, this nauseous disconnect is stronger and more pervasive, as well as has a theoretical dimension to it that makes it invades my thoughts in a way like never before.
I guess that’s why I didn’t really feel as betrayed with the “election” of Bush or 9/11: I already didn’t expect people to have nearly the same reactions, thoughts or feelings as I did. They were already playing their pipe-organ music for their monkey before I was there.
I think I experienced the fullness of this disconnect when I realized my mother was staunchly conservative in a way only her blinding poverty could explain for me. It was after living for a year with my currect girlfriend that it occured to me that my mother was openly anti-feminist, mildly racist, and all other sorts of things over which we argue. I had an imaginary identification along the same lines about my grandmother for the longest time, and still somewhat even after she’s dead: that grandmother would really be a repository of wisdom and knowledge, and that she would lift a veil from my existence so things would be just how I imagined them. She never did, of course; she died incredibly unimpressively, leaving no recourse for the mess she left me with called “the rest of my life.” Unlike alot of those people who probably fell into an unspeakable lock-step with the president in the early days of his first term, I never identified with my grandmother as she was; I maintained a skepticism and distance that probably would have earned the title of disrespect had any one really understood that it was there.
For all that, I’m glad that I have not lived these young years (totally) unconscious of the fact that people are not what I make them seem to be.