The most amazing thing I've read in awhile
The recurrent dialogue (and my unrequited monologue) could use a fresh Deleuzian infusion...
"Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes-- the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land-- or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol-- or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresitably; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations.
"How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to wake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this "form of the content" that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style-- asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what cuases it to move, to flow, and to explode-- desire. For literature is like a schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression."
(From Anti-Oedipus)
"Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes-- the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land-- or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol-- or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresitably; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations.
"How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to wake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this "form of the content" that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style-- asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what cuases it to move, to flow, and to explode-- desire. For literature is like a schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression."
(From Anti-Oedipus)
4 Comments:
It's a Foucaultian viewpoint. Place Deleuze in "the order of things" and we find that he is taking the notion of literature as modern literature (because literature didn't exist before modern literature). Foucault holds modernism (and especially high modernism) aloft because it is the point of protest against the rest of language (science and exegesis). It is entirely self-referential, and therefore the derivation of meaning is practically impossible (which is the most ideal text for Foucault's - and it seems Deleuze's - view of literature).
I read an interesting article today that argued that modernism is necessarily conservative, because it holds to a static idea of form (i.e. literature, painting, film, etc.), and tries to tease out the essence of that form, ever deconstructing it into infinity (in the name of some supposed progression). He attributed it to the inheritance of realist ideology of form (to summarize). At first, not understanding, all I could see was some kind of post-structuralist herecy in his argument, and a curmudgeonly reliance on Marxist values. Upon afterthought, however, it seemed that this argument fits nicely with Foucault's - and now, Deleuze's: this insistent plumbing of the depths which is modernism seems akin to the modernist author's inability to "prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon." Of course, however, the modernist's work is bound to failure, precisely because of the instrinsic reliance on form in the method of production.
So how does this failure erect a "revolutionary machine?" Foucault also believed that there was something new on the horizon - it is the elephant in the room in the works of his which I have read - but we should not believe that he thinks these modernist authors are that revolutionary machine. They only nourish it, feed it like rain over a planted seed. Late modernism - like late Freudian thought, I suppose Lacanian thought - is the death of Man, the limit of the infinite, like the final wave to erase the "face drawn in the sand." Are we, therefore, already to the point where we cannot read the modernist works as they were written? Or, to say it another way, are we only able to really read them now - If we have crossed the border into a new form of subjectivity? That is yet unexplained.
The author whom I read today (Peter Willeman), after debunking modernism, procedes to compare it against the avant-garde, which breaks with the past reliance on form (most ideally, it seems, in terms of production/distribution), and therefore is truly progressive (yet utopian). This tendency, he says, however, is not necessarily neatly opposed to modernism. This is an interesting footnote to the Foucault/Deleuze interpretation of literature (modernism). Is the avant-garde (whatever it is... pre-emptive post-modernism?) that revolutionary machine?
The point I want to emphasize, however, is right there between those parentheses in the penultimate sentence. It is that Foucault - and it seems Deleuze - characterizes literature as modernism, and, ideally, only modernism. Modernists inherited from the texts of the classical period, but those texts were not, in the strict sense, literature. And certainly nothing before the classical period was literature, and certainly nothing outside of the western world (which seems to be, for Foucault, basically France) is literature. Also, science is not literature, neither is exegesis (even modern exegesis). Modernism is the only literature, because it attempts to free itself of what might be called ideology. It could also be called the human subject: Deleuze says "people are co-opted, not works." Well, let us paraphrase all of "The Order of Things" and say that Man is modern times and vice-versa. Modernist literature is: man attempting to escape from Man - the work attempting to escape from literature - the idea attempting to escape from ideology. Yet the simple fact that it is an escape proves that there is an ideology from which to escape. Deleuze seems to say that ideology is this "form of the content" (correct me if I am wrong, it is difficult to follow). Deleuze is not saying that ideology does not exist; he is saying (when I derive him from Foucault) that ideology is that which literature attempts and fails to escape. But in that failure - that glorious, ultimate failure - sleeps the birth of a new form, in fact, a non-form, a non-ideology. Foucault would say that this is the threshold of a new episteme, and that the ideologies of the modern age (varied, disjunctive, yet nevertheless all-consuming) will not continue, because they have reached their limit in (deconstructive) modernism. Or they will reach their limit soon. It is unclear exactly when the transformation, the generation will (or has) taken place.
So, to be even more clearly and selfishly defensive, when I say that the cartoon I used to make the video that I posted here earlier is ideological, it really has nothing to do, in the Foucaultian or Deleuzian sense, with literature. Or, on the other hand, if I produced a post-modern work (in the sense of the "revolutionary machine" as post-modernism, or at least a trend within post-modernism), then the connections between my work, past and present ideologies, and modernist literature are still unclear. ...Although I personally believe that we are in the post-modern age already and that the delineation of the episteme between the post-modern and the modern is as fragile and blurred as the distinction between the classical and the modern. And futhermore, is Foucault's own work an example of exegesis or literature, in his sense? Is it a collision between the two? Finally, he seems to totally disregard film as existing in the world, so its hard to say what he thinks about it. He certainly - Deleuze is much better in this regard - picks and chooses his examples, which leaves it fairly easy to come up with "what abouts." Neither does Foucault mention anything about artistic production which deals directly with ideology, in an attempt to expose and exorcize it. Sure, one might say it's a "return of the repressed," but I am still unclear as to why Foucault gives Freud and Marx a bad rap in deference to the high modernists, when it seems they are all "plumbing the depths" of Man in the attempt to expose his fragile (in)finitude. I suppose the distinction is more easily found in Deleuze (from what I gather): Freudians and Marxists succeed, whereas the modernists fail. Even so, there it seems he takes more issue with Freudism and Marxism than with Freud and Marx (though Foucault calls Marx, derogatorially I guess, "a fish in water").
I am interested to read Discipline and Punish because I think that probably deals more directly with the themes we've been discussing, especially in relation to Jed's post about race and prison ideology.
Regardless, I think a stricter Foucaultian than Foucault himself would say that to deal directly with ideology in a work is no more nor less noble (nor even individualized) than to deal with escaping it through modernist reductionism. It is one piece of the puzzle, without which modernist literature could not exist (because modernity, like every age, is characterized by an endless set of relations without which the entire puzzle cannot exist). Foucault dislikes Man - he makes multiple comments about the comforting notion that Man is temporary. What do we think about the subject in contemporary times?
And, finally, if you go back and re-read something I posted earlier from Foucault, tongue-tied, you will see that your monologue is already requited.
And to everyone who is reading this and criticizing me for staying up till 4 am to write this crap, don't worry I don't have class tomorrow. Besides, you purposefully incited me, ttl!
Fucking shit. I just wrote a long ass comment and then went back and tried to find your foucault posting and lost my comment. And I copied a whole nother long quote from D&G. Well I'll summarize. D&G, it must be noted, were Marxists. They believe in ideology. They are not talking about modernism, they are talking about schizophrenia. And they are talking about capitalism, not ideology. These binaries may be intricately related, but we have to view their choice of these words as a movement beyond Foucault. So I'm not sure everything you're saying about modernism can be directed towards D&G. And you also have to remember that this is D & G, not just Deleuze, the 'lapdog.' Guattari was a huge revolutionary, and I'd say he believed a lot more in political action than in high modernism.
The reason I posted that quote was that I thought it justified both what I was posting and what you guys have been doing on the blog of late. It all strikes me as 'modern' - a lot of the discussion has been about modern poetry - as well as rather schizo, in the sense that our work is like Artaud's, at least insofar as we are all writing rather strangely, that is, in a language and structure that doesn't quite fit into the syntax and semantics of ideology. (Just let me have that compliment for now.) I do not want to raise the issue of whether one escapes ideology or not.
For one thing, you should note that D&G start the quote I cited by talking about Anglo-Americans, Kerouac and Henry Miller; not the French. And their hero is Artaud, not the modernists. They like Proust, but mostly for his sexual agenda. This is not Foucault 2.0. The attack is on Freud. The argument is that Oedipus is a rather bourgeois idea; it is itself a repression; it sanctifies Law, reifies the power structure; forces upon us an oedipalization which ultimately becomes, in the psychoanalytic institution, a mode of suppressing and channelling the flows of desire. The new project is schizoanalysis, which places a value on the break, the split. Psychoanalysis cannot account for psychosis. Something new was needed. And this something new was going to do something wholly different: the family here is not the end-all-be-all; it does not all come down to a daddy-mommy issue. The family is only the first indoctrinator, the first ideologizer, and Oedipus has become society's favorite metaphor in this directly repressive practice. Oh, you dreamed about that girl? Really you want your mother. And that's a no-no. It isn't quite as simple as D&G make it out to be. But something polemical had to be said.
The value here is on Artaud. I don't exactly understand his heroism for them yet. And I'm not ready to write off all modernists. With you, s.g., I'll agree that modernism really isn't all it's cracked out to be (by Foucault). What the fuck did Ulysses and The Wasteland really accomplish? I'm more for a modernism that effects realizations in individuals. That's why I like Faulkner. And the fact that D&G are talking about those Anglo-Americans, the "men who know how to leave," ought to tell us something about their agenda. It's not Hip Hip hooray for modernism! It's: look at these writers who become marginalized, both in their life and their literature; what didn't they accept, why. Apparently D.H. Lawrence took a lot of issue with oedipal notions, and he was writing back in Freud's day. So he gets thrown into the mix. Those men who know how to leave -- that's something I associate with the death drive. I've been talking about the death drive a lot, and it hasn't been based on a 'death drive' essay (it doesn't exist, there's only references). But this schizo stuff gets at it. It's being fed up with ideology and capitalism, in a deep, inconvertible and irreconcilable way. That's the death drive. I think that's been the death drive going all the way back. In any case, all D&G want to recommend here is a view of art that allows for and champions Artaud.
I mean, look at your own poetry. Where you start to get dirty, where you word play for the sake of playing and forsake the end you set in the first stanza for the simple enjoyment of metonymy. Neither your nor I are significantly similar to Artaud, but check out what D&G say on him: "Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit-- that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap of being and its language," transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate. At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that whic places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content." This all goes a bit far, granted. But let's not read Foucault here. Let's read Artaud and Marx. I do not agree with them that literature can't set ends. That would even be a critique of modernism, a deadly one if it's any good. But the explosive device, who can argue with that. Who cares how we define literature historically, where it starts and stops. Let's just try to go somewhere with it, let's try to move the present where we want it to be, let's write writing and produce art that aims at the very end of explosion (ploughing crap is an end too: in march, when you remove the manure, you don't call it a day, you plant some seeds). Take it all for what it's worth now. Always now. This is what I tell myself I have to remember when I read D&G. They too had their ends, their purposes, the people they wanted to influence then, the institutions they wanted to attack. We read them, and we have our own aims. Fucking theory. It kills me because it never seems to want to be relevant past its own heyday. It's so damn topical. But I posted that quote because it says something by way of justification. If we're anglo-american, if we're still under capitalism, what they say there somehow applies to us.
I'd like to chime in, quickly (I really appreciate how much time is being spent here, and I want to be responsible and get a small piece of what is in my head OUT); so, to respond to TTL's statement:
"I do not want to raise the issue of whether one escapes ideology or not."
and all this D&G reading Artaud, broken syntax, failure to escape entirely, etc.
because it most definitely relates to Deleuze's later work on aesthetics (what I'm familiar with)...if there is an escape from ideology, it is first as a failed escape (the confrontation with limits...any attempt to move "outside" of ideology reenforces ideology (something that's, I gather, reiterated often by all these folks))..so what you have is a movement through...the preposition changes. This connects also to this idea of "the last painting" (Cixous, from my presentation)..."what a number of apples you have to paint to paint the first apple!"; we could say, similarly "what a number of ideas you have to think before thinking!" Ideology corresponds to a figurative given in painting (the "cliche").
D&G are so interesting to me because of this ability to, not just neologize, but create some sensory experience in writing...to renew our experience in-the-world as a result. And this is why, for me, cultural theory does what I want from literature...it plows THROUGH ideology.
And as for all this poetry business...I am reading Charles Bernstein's "A Poetics" right now, and he quotes someone else, it's a great quote, it's where I'll stop, but think about the new, creation, thinking, through, etc. :
"Then where is truth but in the burning space between one letter and the next?"
Cool, very cool. I'm just getting inundated with D&G right now, I'm reading some secondary stuff, random introductions to books that I have in my course packet, and it makes me like them more and more. Deleuze's defense of his writing style in "Letter to a Harsh Critic" is spectacular - he talks about where he comes from philosophically, why he writes like he does, why his books are different from one another, which parts of which books are good in retrospect. He's all about moving forward, over and over, not dwelling too long - I'd say in general that one is lucky to have more than 5 original ideas in one's life, that usually one's books just repeat these ideas in different ways. Which is fine, great - different expressions of the same ideas make those ideas more sublime and approachable. Nietzsche is one of the few to have had a nearly innumerable canon of original thoughts (or at least original expressions and reformulations and affixations of old thoughts). Deleuze seems to be saying more or less the same thing in each of the pieces I've read. There's always a sentence to the effect of: "Flows, flows, multiplicities, intensive and extensive, molar and molecular, multiplicities of bodies, of modes, flows of sperm, of piss, flows of love, of recreation, flows, multiplicities, flows... etc." But he gets at it over and over in way after way. I really like his project, even though I may not think his pushing points are the same as mine.
p.s. anyone ever noticed that below this comment box, when you're writing your comment, you are then asked to 'Choose an identity'? this whole blogging medium is relevant on multiple levels... as per robert's about the presence of the posting time at the end of the post.
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