Deleuze and (Modern) Political Cinema: “The People are Missing”

In chapter eight of Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses what he calls “minor cinema,” and in the context of the modern political cinema of such filmmakers as Glauber Rocha, Ousmene Sembene, and Pierre Perrault (a Brazilian, an African, and a French Canadian, respectively). Political film of the classical period is premised on the idea that “the people are already there” (C2: 216): the people pre-exist their representation in film. In this cinema the filmmaker’s role is to bring to light, in a representative fashion, the concerns and struggles of the people. As Rodowick says (in Deleuze’s Time Machine, the first book-length study of Deleuze’s two volume work on cinema to appear in English and still probably the best one), the goal of political film in the classical period is “to represent the masses or ‘the people.’ They may be oppressed or in the process of liberation, alienated or awakened, but representation is nonetheless their right. That they are representable as a collective image, and that their political self-consciousness is also renderable in images, are givens” (1997: 152). All political films, documentary or otherwise, premised on the notion that the filmmaker is simply and objectively recording a reality to which he or she remains external or detached would be an instance of this kind of classical political cinema.

Modern political cinema begins from a very different position, premised not on the “already there” of the people but on their absence. In the words of the experimental Italian theatrical director Carmelo Bene, “the people are missing.” Bene says this in response to the query: for whom is your theatre addressed, to which people are they addressed? Bene’s answer: his work is addressed to a people who do not yet exist; a people who do not preexist their performative enunciation through, or with, the work of art. This, according to Deleuze, is also the answer found in modern political cinema. The stakes involved in proclaiming the people “missing” is nowhere more evident than in the postcolonial cinema of Rocha and Sembene. These filmmakers, Deleuze argues, understand that what is required is not simply an assertion of an identity counter to the one proposed in colonial rule; they thus resist the urge to evoke dubious notions of “origins” – a true identity, a unified peoples, prior to colonialist domination – and, instead, actively seek to forge a new collectivity, a people who belong not to the past, to history, but to the future: the people as future conditional. “This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema,” Deleuze writes, “but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded” (C2: 217). It is because the people are missing, rather than present, that there is a necessity for political art.

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For me, Deleuze’s remarks on “minor cinema” remains the most interesting of all his discussions of the “minor” in art (far more convincing than the arguments about “minor literature” that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to Kafka). I find compelling his commentary on Rocha and Sembene and, along these lines, if I had time, I could add a few examples of my own (including the work of the great heretical Italian Marxist filmmaker and provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini). Having said this, I’ve never been entirely convinced by Deleuze’s critique here of the work of Sergei Eisenstein as an instance of classical political cinema (and which has been repeated rather thoughtlessly by various Deleuze scholars, including R. Bogue). Does Eisenstein really presume the existence of a revolutionary proletariat, or does he see it as his – and other artist’s – responsibility to provoke or stimulate this revolutionary form of consciousness through the work of art? In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the revolution has already occurred – literally so – but what remains unknown is the nature of the future communist society: what will it look like and what role the people will play. It is to this future collective that Eisenstein pitches his works. What interest Eisenstein is the ability of cinematic montage to stimulate both affective and cognitive responses and it is the imbrication of these two modes of spectatorial activity that allows cinema not simply to entertain its audience but also to transform them.

In this sense, we can’t say that the revolutionary proletariat pre-exist the cinema; the revolutionary proletariat is a being-in-formation and the cinema is one of the mediums through which it comes into existence. For Eisenstein, this meant that cinema needed to be pure experimentation, a mode of non-representational art in which the cinematic “image” is produced by the spectator in their encounter with a series of shots whose meaning is relational, whose meaning results from the tension produced by individual shots placed in conflict or collision, and which the viewer must resolve for himself or herself. This kind of experimentation became anathema in Stalinist Russia and precisely because the central administration no longer wished to provoke an (unpredictable) becoming; instead the goal became the affirmation of an identity that is already formed and complacent and a “true” ideology that doesn’t require thinking or feeling, only obedience. (Is it any surprise that Socialist Realism took the exact same "form" as classical Hollywood films, with their stories centered on the heroic exploits of the protagonist and the editing as unobtrusive as possible, so as to facilitate the suture of spectator to narrative, spectator to representation. Thought is no longer mandatory. Thought becomes optional.)

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Those interested in the topic of art and the political, as well as Deleuze’s notion of the “minor,” might take a look sometime at Nicholas Thoburn’s excellent book on the “minor politics” of Karl Marx entitled simply Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Thoburn argues that Marx doesn’t posit communism as the simple description of a predetermined, and fully worked out, perspective or methodology but rather “a process of continual engagement with the flows and constraints of the capitalist socius towards its overcoming” (2003: 3). If it takes Marx sixteen years to complete the endlessly-revised Capital, Thoburn says, it is precisely because he is sensitive to the mutations that capitalism undergoes in the second half of the nineteenth century and because he is aware that such a strategic, dynamic mode of critique must also characterize communist politics. Marx thus re-configures communism as an immanent political practice, one that continuously discovers, or creates, a line of flight through the networks of capitalist production. “Marx presents the Communist Party, then, not as a distinct and timeless organizational form, but as a mode of engagement that is immanent to the content of the proletarian-in-struggle, which in turn is immanent to the particular configurations of capital” (Thoburn 2003: 40). The "proletariat" thus no longer simply refers to a particular group of people but to a revolutionary potential – a virtual potential – that awaits its actualization in, and as, our future.

S I-G

The Whitney, Alone

It always annoys me that one is not able to take photographs or video while wandering through museums (at least in NYC; the same rule didn't apply the last time I was at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris). While I appreciate the fact that it saves me from having to view tourists gathering around art objects for a photo – indeed, now that I think about it, maybe it's not such a dumb rule after all – I still resent the fact that one can only do this (take a photograph) clandestinely. For me, often the most interesting "visual" within a gallery space is not found in the art work itself but in the relation that is established, or not, between work and spectator. I like to see the art work refracted through the movements – or stillness – of the museum's visitors, sometimes huddled in masses; sometimes exposed and alone. I particularly like when the latter occurs, which rarely happens in the cluttered spaces of NYC museum spaces. It was thus nice to see less, rather than more, at the more modestly-scaled Whitney Biennial 2010, although I think they should have cleared another floor for the new exhibition, giving the works even more "breathing" room. Above are three (illicit) images from Ari Marcopoulos's Detroit, projected on a wall-sized screen in a large, mostly empty room, as part of this year's selection. (Note the size of the image in relation to the emergency "Exit" sign.) By this point, I had lost track of where most of the students had gone – ciao Susana, Brian, Caldwell, Maria, Raul, Lukas, Katherine – and it was okay. Art needs a bit of solitude. I like too the experience of leaving such an event and re-entering the "real" world alone. This is what we need more time for: art and solitude. Indeed, what is art except this ability to experience – however fleetingly, however momentarily – a bit of solitude from a world that assaults us at all times and on all fronts. A solitude that allows us to return to the world with renewed interest and attentiveness (the world in all its depth and opacity) as well as a renewed commitment to resistance: to resist the false solicitations that lead us to trivialize the world and ourselves.

S I-G

Death of the Reader (Capital R)

Surely the most unfortunate line that Roland Barthes ever wrote is the one that concludes his essay "Death of an Author": “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Endlessly quoted, yet so poorly understood. I don’t know how many readers have read this as a slogan that what is important is not the literary work itself (and by extension the work of art) but what the intrepid reader does with the text. Thus, while the “author” is cast aside as a useless or outmoded concept, the reader affirms himself or herself as the true creative locus for a text’s meaning. (One consequence of this: a shift from “difficult” modernist texts to an emphasis on the artifacts of popular culture, to be pillaged at will. Why does this occur? Precisely because it is believed that creativity is now the art of the beholder. The text is secondary to its usage.) Let’s not forget that the “death of the author” was meant to signal the death of the sovereign subject, i.e., the belief in the author as the punctual source for a text’s meaning. It was meant to question the fallacy of the intentional subject – whether this subject is understood as an author, a critic or a reader. (Note that in the first quote above "author" is capitalized: the death that Barthes is calling for is the Author as transcendent source of meaning. So, yes, there is no Author, but there are authors. In the same way, there is no Reader, only readers.)

Barthes statement, it seems to me, should always be accompanied by another, this one by Maurice Blanchot: “What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s ability, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads – a man who knows in general how to read” (emphasis added). What Blanchot valorizes here is not the reader but the act of reading, and what this act means for both the author and the reader, each destabilized by the same experience (or event). This, I would argue, is fundamentally Barthes’ point as well, but his inability to resist a stylistic flourish led him, and several generations of students, down the garden path. Reading is an encounter between oneself and another. What is affirmed is neither the author nor the reader, but the act that binds one to the other. Blanchot: “To read is thus not to obtain communication from the work, but to ‘make’ the work communicate itself. And if we may employ an inadequate image, to read is to be one of the two poles between which, through mutual attraction and repulsion, the illuminating violence of communication erupts – one of the two poles between which the event comes to pass and which it constitutes by its very passage.” These two poles are the author and the reader, and the event occurs in the (anonymous) passage between them.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes a similar point in a recent article "The Author as Gesture", which revisits Foucault's "What is an Author?", often read in tandem with Barthes' essay. (It is assumed that the two works, in combination, thoroughly discredit the notion of authorship. In fact, the real challenge of both works is the way they ask us to re-think authorship as a philosophical problem.) At one point, Agamben considers a poem by César Vallejo. He asks, where does the thought or sentiment expressed in the poem come from? It would be a mistake, he says, to assume that the thought or sentiment first existed "in" César Vallejo, who then diligently transcribed this pre-existent idea or emotion. Rather, "this thought and this sentiment became real for him, and their details and nuances become inextricably his own, only after – or while – writing the poem." This thought or sentiment cannot therefore be said to originate within the poet, but it is equally wrong to suggest that it in any way belongs to, or should be attributed to, the poem's reader. The thought or sentiment emanates from neither; it comes from elsewhere. And yet it only exists because, once upon a time, there was a writer who sat down to write a poem, and then, some time later, a reader who sat down to read it. "The place of the poem – or, rather its taking place – is therefore neither in the text nor in the author (nor in the reader): it is in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infinitely withdrawn from it."

S I-G

A Common Confusion (x2)

(A few days ago, Lukas informed me that, in fact, a short film has already been made of the Kafka piece we read in class. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. (Still...) It can be found at the end of the post. For your reading pleasure, I'm also including Kafka's story in its entirety.)

"A common experience, resulting in a common confusion. A. has to transact important business with B. in H. He goes to H. for a preliminary interview, accomplishes the journey there in ten minutes, and the journey back in the same time, and on returning boasts to his family of his expedition. Next day he goes again to H., this time to settle his business finally. As that by all appearances [it] will require several hours, A. leaves very early in the morning. But although all the surrounding circumstances, at least in A.’s estimation, are exactly the same as the day before, this time it takes him ten hours to reach H. When he arrives there quite exhausted in the evening he is informed that B., annoyed at his absence, had left half an hour before to go to A.’s village, and that they must have passed each other on the road. A. is advised to wait. But in his anxiety about his business he sets off at once and hurries home.

This time he covers the distance, without paying any particular attention to the fact, practically in an instant. At home he learns that B. had arrived quite early, immediately after A.’s departure, indeed that he had met A. on the threshold and reminded him of his business; but A. had replied that he had no time to spare, he must go at once.

In spite of this incomprehensible behavior of A., however, B. had stayed to wait for A.’s return. It is true, he had asked several time whether A. was not back yet, but he was still sitting up in A.’s room. Overjoyed at the opportunity of seeing B. at once and explaining everything to him, A. rushes upstairs. He is almost at the top, when he stumbles, twists a sinew, and almost fainting with pain, incapable even of uttering a cry, only able to moan faintly in the darkness, he hears B. – impossible to tell whether at a great distance or quite near him – stamping down the stairs in a violent rage and vanishing for good."

A Common Confusion

Refraction Arts Project | MySpace Video

The (Necessary) Dissolution of Avant-Garde Art

Avant-gardes have only one sole moment; and the best that can happen to them is,
in the fullest sense of the term, for them to have made their moment
– Guy Debord

I would like here for us to pause and reflect on the problematic of avant-garde art. Here, I will use the term "avant-garde" as defined by the art theorist Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). For Bürger, there is a necessary distinction to be made between “modernist art” and “avant-garde art.” For Bürger, the latter should be applied only to a discussion of the revolutionary avant-garde movements that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Futurism, DADA, Surrealism, and Constructivism. What distinguishes these movements from earlier ones such as Symbolism or Fauvism, etc., is the desire of the members of these various movements to break down the barrier between art and life and, in the process, to break down the barrier between artwork and receiver. Rather than attempt to remove themselves from the commercial, market-driven world ushered in by capitalism, these groups saw that it was precisely in this terrain that the battle must take place – precisely because it was the commercial/industrial realm that worked to transform life into something shriveled and small, so that, for example, a factory worker came to feel as though his or her life only had meaning (gained value) to the extent that they worked, to the extent that they labored for another.

While modernist artists favored a retreat from the banality and alienation of everyday life, these avant-garde movements, according to Bürger, embraced elements of popular culture and attempted to re-appropriate these elements for alternative (subversive) purposes. These movements were thus less interested in promoting a specific artistic style than in formulating a series of aesthetic strategies or techniques to provoke the spectator and provoke themselves.

Let’s consider quickly one well-known example from DADA: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Duchamp takes an object (a urinal, which he purchases in a shop), gives it a title (Fountain) and submits it to an art exhibition. By doing so, Duchamp questions both the concept of the artist and the artwork. To the question "What is art" he says: art is what the artist says is art (and it doesn’t even need to be made by the artist, just give it a name and a signature); more importantly, art is what the museum says is art, for even if Duchamp wished to give a porcelain urinal the status of art it would have failed if the museum did not confirm his claim. Whatever we think about the various readymades and like-minded objects that would follow in the wake of Duchamp’s “sculpture”, this gesture in the 1920s (especially when combined with other DADA activities) was truly subversive, not to mention extremely funny. All our assumptions about craftsmanship and self-expression in the work of art – not to mention the supposed "neutrality" of the museum space itself as a repository of culture – are flushed down the toilet, so to speak. These were the types of questions that were meant to be provoked by this work, and they did.

But the museum space proved itself quite adept, in its own way, in transforming subversive/radical art into art proper. Even though audiences to this day stare at such works with either bemusement or (more likely) bewilderment, they still managed to enter into the canon of Western art. In these terms, Surrealism was the biggest failure of the groups associated with the 1920s avant-garde, since it was also paradoxically the most commercially successful; the Surrealists failed precisely by allowing their aesthetic strategies to devolve into a style.

It was this turn of events that led later avant-garde movements like the Situationist International (SI) to formulate new methods or strategies for combating the forces of reification or commodification. What Guy Debord, leader of SI, wanted was to extend the radical possibilities of surrealism without falling into the same traps: capitalist appropriation, absorption into the museum, reduction to style. And the way to evade these traps, he came to believe, was to do away with art, or "works of art." As long as one drew a distinction between "art" and "life," art was always assimilable to commodity exchange. As Anselm Jappe writes, “There was," – for Debord – "no longer any place for the work of art that sought to ‘fix emotions’ and strove to endure.” Instead of the creation of artworks, we have the “construction of situations,” the “conscious construction of new affective states” (1999: 57 and 65). The emphasis on concrete situations points to their main goal: the revolutionary transformation of everyday life.

In the Sixties, the SI became primarily an underground movement, a “provisional microsociety,” exhorting the populace-at-large to revolt against the alienation of everyday life and to invent experimental modes of living (Jappe 1999, 68). Although Situationists groups would briefly emerge in a number of countries including Italy, Scandinavia, the UK and the US, Debord’s group remained autonomous and inviolate. In Paris, Debord and the SI did not attempt to recruit more members. They stayed true to their belief that a revolutionary avant-garde movement must remain clandestine, must provide underground agitation. A revolutionary avant-garde movement must supply provocation without succumbing to the desire for social legitimacy. Years later Debord would say, “We did not go on television to say what it was that we had understood. We did not hanker after grants from the scientific research bodies, nor for praise from newspaper intellectuals. We brought fuel to the flames” (emphasis mine). He adds, “It is wonderful to see that disturbances with the tiniest and most ephemeral of origins have eventually shaken the order of the world” (qts. in Jappe 1999, 45 and 46).

The legendary status of SI today is the result, in part, of the instigatory role the group played in the political events that took place in France in spring 1968 and culminated in May '68. What began as student protests/demonstrations became a general wildcat strike involving ten million factory workers. The strikes and demonstrations would continue for two weeks, paralyzing the country. May 1968 was not provoked by a specific incident but by a general sense of discontent. It was a kind of spontaneous revolution. As Jappe notes, May ’68 “showed beyond a doubt that a very large number of people yearned inwardly for a completely different life and that this desire, once it found expression, could quickly bring a modern state to its knees: exactly what the SI had always said.” “May 1968 was indeed proof that something very much like revolution could occur in modern societies, and in a form very closely resembling the SI’s predictions” (1999, 100-01).

Increasingly, the association between art and politics takes on a different value or tenor in the 1960s. The SI, for their part, would assert in their journal “that Dada’s true heir was not American Pop Art but the spontaneous revolt of the Congolese people”, and other such revolutionary insurrections (Jappe 1999, 96). In the 1970s, the logic of such claims would perhaps be taken to their limit with the emergence of terrorist cell groups like Red Army Faction (RAF) who carried on the spirit of the avant-garde in their own way. (I won’t dwell on this here, but I do think that one of the better sections of Simon Sullivan’s essay on “Art and the Political” is his brief consideration of RAF in the context of political art practice and D&G’s notion of “minor literature.”)

Andreas Huyssen, in an essay about Peter Bürger and avant-garde movements, concludes his survey with this observation: “Today the best hopes of the historical avantgarde may not be embodied in art works at all, but in decentered movements which work toward the transformation of everyday life. The point then would be to retain the avantgarde’s attempt to address those human experiences which either have not yet been subsumed under capital, or which are stimulated but not fulfilled by it” (1986, 15). This, in fact, is what we find in the art practices described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. The question, I suppose, is to what extent these practices are a continuation of the radical project of the avant-garde and to what extent are they merely a pale (rote) imitation of the "work" of their predecessors?

An additional question would be: to what extent was the dissolution of the object the correct strategy for the avant-garde, and, more importantly, is it the only strategy left to such politically-minded groups at a time when global capitalism steadily and inexorably colonizes the world? Is the only option left, for those who wish to bridge the gap between art and life: to choose life over art (to the extent that art is equated with a commodifiable object)? And how to do so exactly – to choose life over art – in an era when television gives us its own nihilistic version of this dissolution or merger? Television teaches us not to see life so much as a practice of art as to see life as a form of serial television (with commercial breaks!). Reality TV, indeed.

S I-G

References

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1986.

Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord. Trans. Donald Nicolson-Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

Snow Day Lectures (III): Spinoza, God and Immanence

In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as “prince of philosophers.” Spinoza, they write, “is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere […] He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence” (1994, 48). Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is the consequence of his rejection of the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a transcendent creator; a supernatural being who is cause of a world distinct from himself, created out of nothing and through an act of free will. Spinoza argues that God is not prior to or outside the world – transcendent to creation – but wholly immanent within it. God is “an extended substance composed of an infinity of attributes that is purely immanent throughout nature” (Daniel Smith 2003, 18). Divinity is fully expressed in the world and without reserve. This leads Spinoza to his scandalous formulation “God, or Nature” (Deus sive natura), which both divinizes nature and naturalizes divinity (and explains descriptions of Spinoza as both pantheist and atheist).

By rejecting the notion of God as transcendent cause, Spinoza also undermines the link between God and moral absolutes or laws. Moral judgments have no corollary in the natural world and therefore cannot be attributed to God, since what cannot be said to belong to nature cannot be said to belong to God. Moral judgments must be understood as “human creations made for our convenience and utility.” Morality as “the product of social agreement” can only be deemed legitimate or illegitimate in terms of its beneficial or harmful effects on the society that agrees to live under its rules and regulations (Smith 2003, 52 and 126). For Spinoza, there is no “imaginary supernatural realm” and no external authority to which we can refer or reference in order to determine morality, and if there is no God who pre-exists the world, then there can be no source that can be said to stand outside or beyond the world to approve or condemn it. Life cannot be explained by what transcends life.

Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence thus requires a new kind of ethics, addressed to the here and now, immersed in the sensible world, without recourse to absolute or divine authority. Spinoza goes further. He rejects the anthropomorphic fallacy that conceives God in the image of man, albeit raised to the power of infinity. “People attribute to God features borrowed from human consciousness […] and, in order, to provide for God’s essence, they merely raise those features to infinity, or say that God possess them in an infinitely perfect form” (Deleuze 1988, 63). What Spinoza makes clear is the extent to which this notion of God functions as a mirror image of the attributes man perceives or idealizes in himself: man as an intending agent, who supposedly creates, like God, through a spontaneous act of free will; man as outside, or transcendent to, nature.

Here, Spinoza’s critique can be directed not only against the philosophy of transcendence found in Plato and in Christian theology, but the modern variant found in Descartes. Thus, in opposition to the latter’s dualist ontology, Spinoza asserts the conjugation of mind and body. Both mind and body are modes of substance (i.e., God or nature). Spinoza: “Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension” (qt. in Montag 1999, 42). Spinoza renders problematic the notion that that body is controlled by “the will of the mind and the exercise of thought” (Spinoza qt. in Montag 1999, 38). Spinoza doesn’t simply reject Descartes’s dualist thought, but challenges the hierarchy that subordinates the body to the mind, which subordinates the power to be affected to the power to think, which separates the power to be affected from the power to think. Spinoza’s immanent philosophy does not allow us to set apart “mind from body, thought from action,” or man from nature: each coincides with the other (Montag 1999, xvii). Just as God is expressed in world (as world) so too is the artist, for example, expressed in their work. There is not an individual who acts but an act that individuates. And this individuation is ongoing.

S I-G

References
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988.
––––– and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. London: Verso, 1999.
Smith, Daniel W. “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought.” In Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida. London and New York: Continuum, 2003.

Snow Day Lectures (II): Nietzsche and the Over-man

As some of you already know, Nietzsche is considered an influence not only on “post-structural” philosophers, like Foucault and Deleuze, but also on the movement that came to be known as “existentialism” that precedes post-structuralism by a couple of decades. (The most recognized face of existentialism at the time was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre.) Deleuze, for his part, would argue that existentialism does not live up to the challenge of Nietzsche’s thought, since it presumes a transcendent subject with a power to choose this or that action. In other words, existentialism remains a philosophy of transcendence. Indeed both existentialism and phenomenology can be understood as the latest developments in a legacy that begins when Descartes utters the formula cogito ergo sum. As Todd May notes, in his explication of Deleuze’s philosophy, “It is not simply a question of how we human beings might go about creating our lives, of what we might decide to make ourselves into” (2005, 23). This is Sartre's question. It is still insufficient or inadequate because it prioritizes being over becoming, identity over difference. It presupposes that there is an identity, a self, who chooses their existence. Deleuze rejects the emphasis placed in Sartre on agency, on self, and, more importantly, the emphasis placed on the human. “Deleuze,” May writes, “tries to pry us away from humanism by focusing on a difference that need not be human difference and a one that need not be a person.” Humanism is to be understood here as a form of anthropomorphism. Humanism commits the "error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject" (2005, 24).

Humanism places man at the center of the universe, since man is its principle or exclusive concern. Deleuze places his emphasis on life; on the becoming of the entities that populate our world. These entities are not pre-determined; nor is their future known once and for all. To stop at the human would be to presume that the goal of life were the creation of man. (Which, of course, is what Christian theology says.) It would be a mistake to argue (and some have done so) that this “anti-humanism” is an expression of contempt for mankind. How could this be so since mankind is part of world? At the same time, we cannot fall into the trap of thinking too highly of ourselves. Since everything is becoming – everything is in process – so too is man. Man is becoming, in and with the world. This, Deleuze will claim, is what Nietzsche means when he coins the term übermensch (the “over-man” or “super-man”). We are in the process of overcoming ourselves, and there is no certainty that our evolution will not take us elsewhere, even beyond man. At least, man as it is known today.

As Deleuze says to his interviewer, in “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” the goal of contemporary philosophy is to attempt to rethink the questions of existence without the constraints of either God or Man – which is to say, without the constraints of transcendent being. And the value of Nietzsche is that he “was trying to uncover something that was neither God nor Human…” which he called Dionysos or the over-man (2004, 139).

***

What does it mean though to say that there is no identity or self who chooses this or that existence? And how might this be squared, for example, with the thought-experiment known as the Eternal Return? (Does not the Eternal Return seem to presuppose choice?) This is where Nietzsche gets tricky. Consider here his concept of Will-to-Power, which he views as the “noblest” of values. Will-to-Power is misunderstood if we imagine an individual who exerts his or her will on another entity or thing. For Nietzsche, there is no separation between a will and what is willed. They are one and the same. There is no pre-constituted subject who wills this or that act. No, the act (what is willed) and the subject (who wills) are constituted at the same time. (The error of separating out one from the other is precisely what we find in Descartes: Descartes assumes that a thought, the act of thinking, requires a subject who performs this action. Nietzsche would deny this hierarchy or priority: the subject doesn’t precede thought but is constituted in the act of thinking.)

Put more simply, we can say that the subject is immanent to its expression. The challenge then is not to fall back on a notion of substance or install an agency at the origin of an activity or an expression of Will-to-Power. The use of terms like “object” or “thing” or “entity” is an example of how language misleads us into seeing solids (autonomous, pre-constituted beings) when there are only fluidities, only relations. The artist’s relation to their artwork is a good demonstration of this: the challenge from a Nietzschean perspective is not to be misled into seeing the artwork as an expression of the artist’s will. There is not an entity we call an “artist” who decides to will a painting into existence. Rather, the activity of painting itself is the expression of a will to power that produces both the painting and painter at the same time: the painter as such emerges through the activity of painting, and not once and for all, not through the painting of this or that painting, but over the course of years or decades and in conjunction with a body of work. What then is the difference between an artist and an oeuvre? There is none in terms of Will-to-Power: they are an expression of the same force, the same will. The artist accumulates an oeuvre and, in the process, a self.

S I-G

Snow Day Lectures (I): Transcendent Subjectivity (Cogito, Ergo Sum)

We already traced, in class, the way Plato’s philosophy of transcendent Ideas and Forms is transformed and extended in Christian theology. In both cases, as we saw, the sensible, sensual world is considered inferior, is considered secondary, to another world that exists beyond or above it. Life – life in this world – is what we are taught to distrust or devalue in the name of something else, something that transcends the immanent world. In the seventeenth century another type of transcendent philosophy will emerge, and it is this one that has perhaps had the most influence on contemporary Western thought. This new brand of transcendent philosophy finds its origins in the works of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes’ goal – in attempting to outline a new methodology for philosophy – was to remove all external (i.e., transcendent) sources of knowledge from the realm of truth and reason. Thus he claims, for example, that he will refrain from making assertions such as “man is a rational animal” since this statement presumes prior knowledge of “man” and “animal” (not to mention what it means to be “rational”). He also casts doubts on the objective world, since he says we can be mistaken at times in believing we are seeing external objects when in fact all that is occurring is that we are having a dream or hallucinating (or being led astray by a mischievous demon). After this exercise of removal, the casting aside of philosophical presumptions, there is only one thing – according to Descartes – that he can be certain of: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). The only thing he can be certain of is that he has had these thoughts and that this “having” is an affirmation of his existence as a conscious being. Note that what is foregrounded here is not thinking itself but the I who thinks; the I who has a thought; the I who recognizes the first certainty in the utterance “I think.” The assumption here is that "thinking" only occurs because there is an entity to whom this action belongs, an entity to whom we can attribute thought.

In Descartes, we no longer have a transcendence of the Idea or Form (as in Plato) or the transcendence of Being (as in Christianity) but the transcendence of a thinking subject. Now it is the I, as an expression of consciousness, which is privileged in relation to experience. This leads Descartes to assert a dualist ontology, claiming a fundamental distinction between mind and body. It takes little guesswork to figure out which of the two attributes – mind and body – will be placed on the side of transcendence and which will be placed on the side of immanence. It takes little guesswork too to figure out which of the two substances is considered superior, is giving priority over the other. Mind is superior, is transcendent, precisely because it is “immaterial”, precisely because it is not-body. If this form of transcendence continues to be dominant in contemporary society (even as we become more secular, and more suspicious of the notion of universal truths and moral absolutes), it is because it conforms to our common-sense perception of the world; each of us perceives the world as though we are at its center, with the freedom to remove ourselves from the world when we feel the necessity to reflect, to cogitate, and so on. We feel as though we are transcendent to the world, no more so than when we are thinking.

Needless to say, this mode of transcendence is no more acceptable to Deleuze than the other two we considered. There is, for Deleuze, no "mind" or "consciousness" or "self" or "I", or whatever you want to call it, which exists outside of life (or outside of time). There is only mind or consciousness or self or I, or whatever you want to call it, that exists within life, that exists on an immanent plane along with all the other entities that make up the world, all the other entities that make up our world – the only one we have.

S I-G

Gabriel Orozco

(This post is a reminder that the Orozco retrospective at MoMA will end on March 1, 2010.)

Gabriel Orozco: "One thing that I’ve had to learn as an artist – considering how everything that I had learned about what art should be and what art was, and what an artist should be like (disciplined, following the love of the craft) – was that this didn’t work for me. Suddenly I had to take all of these notions apart, because they weren’t mine, they weren’t enough for me; they bored me and threw me into despair. It was a system that really didn’t work for me. Realizing this gave me a very different vision; I think it has repercussions in the way in which my pieces started to turn out, because I understood at last that my urgent struggle was to find something that was not art. In that sense, I’m not sure if people who consider themselves 'educated' understand what art is; I think not. I saw that 'educated' people as well as 'ignorant' ones immediately viewed my work with disapproval: the yogurt lids, the balls of Play-Doh. With ignorant people, it’s obvious that you have to try to destroy their prejudices, but with educated people it’s the same thing, you also have to destroy their prejudices – and their judgment. In their case, it’s a prejudice regarding what they ask of and from art. But as Borges said, we don’t know what art should be, and we don’t need to find out, either; what we seek is to understand the reason why art exists."

Preface to Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" (A Reading)

A scene from Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008), in which the family patriarch reads a passage from Nietzsche to his perpetually unhappy/unsatisfied daughter (the reading begins at 1.26). The citation is completely unexpected and all the more wonderful for being so, and there is a lovely coda that follows: Henri, the black sheep member of the family, sitting on a swing, his back to the camera, saying these words (but to whom?): "You don't know me. I'm not like that."

For those who might like to compare, here is an English translation of the first two paragraphs from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887): "We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people – we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that 'Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.' Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures – collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with one thing, to 'bring something home.' As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call 'experience' – which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been 'missing the point.'

Our hearts have not even been engaged – nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself 'What exactly did that clock strike?' – so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed, 'What have we really just experienced?' And more: 'Who are we really?' Then, as I've mentioned, we count – after the fact – all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being – alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: 'Each man is furthest from himself.' Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not 'knowledgeable people.'"

It's a marvelous scene. It's a marvelous text.

S I-G