Paul Trembath

Department of English
Colorado State University
ptrembath@vines.colostate.edu

 

Paul Patton, Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

 

A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

–Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (4) [emphasis mine]

 

New “theoretical” horizons are starting to open up on the scene of historicist criticism–or, rather, “old” ones, and it’s about time. If, as Adorno argued, philosophy lives on because the moment of its realization was missed, one can only hope that the same untimely life is not perpetually in store for the astonishing work of Gilles Deleuze. Then again, one might well hope otherwise, for Deleuze’s philosophy has untimely hopes as well as timely ones, even though academic criticism, given its present list of worldly concerns, is insensible to goals other than those that applied theorists can already sense and register, and by now perhaps too well.

 

Deleuze has the power to change the goals and subjects of criticism as well as serve them–a power, a theoretical capacity, that most critics at present fail absolutely to demonstrate. Such failure of demonstration, in Deleuze’s still unexplored terms, signals an act of de/valuation–a living sign that a certain limit to what criticism can think and do has been “realized” (think Adorno again). Moreover, it is “signs” of this sort, in a way consistent with his larger philosophy of affects, that Deleuze teaches us to read. What is devalued by current criticism (and in no sense deliberately, but rather reactively, implicitly) is any way of reading the world that moves astray from the explicit subject areas and goals that encode current critical rhetoric and its affects (for Deleuze, the two are never distinct)–that is, astray from articles, conference papers, dissertations, and books that foreground gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. as their subjects, and which seek the enhanced cultural enablement of differences of this recognizable sort as their “practical” goals.

 

These subjects and goals are of unquestionable importance to critical pedagogy and progressive politics. In the estimate of this reader, only an uncritical reactionary of the worst kind would be “against” these subjects and goals, or oppose the practical politics with which they aim to coincide. What Deleuze reminds us, however, is that theory can do other things than transform itself dutifully into common-sensical language and practical alterian politics. Theory can also, in addition to pursuing instrumental goals and perhaps at the same time, invent or pre-form new “sense” altogether, and move at speeds different from those compatible with the going quotidian or academic instrumentation. (All that theory needs to do this is a body capable of doing it, which always implies more than one body, if not the always-to-be-hoped-for critical mass). Theory would be the end and not just the means that untimely sense takes on in senselessly one-dimensional worlds, and not least when this one-dimensionality, even in the admirable and desirable spirit of social alterity, appears of necessity in academe itself. In Deleuze’s terms, theory would be a particular percept–the actual life of sense and values possibly to come, unrealizable within the exigent limits of current sensibility.

 

If this sounds like Adorno again, it should. As Fredric Jameson suggests, in academic times saturated with orthodox critical moves and counters (to say nothing of the far worse orthodoxies outside academia), Adorno’s appeal to difficulty, rethought beyond order-words such as “avantgardism,” “hermeticism,” and “elitism,” might be good for nineties critics, or at least some of us, to reconsider. Certain critics are beginning to suggest that Deleuze, too (who could out-think the aforementioned list of metonymic accusations in his sleep), might offer different and even untimely things to academic criticism, yet they lack Jameson’s auto-critical agenda and edge. Deleuze, of course, has not had the same academic influence in North American literature and cultural studies departments that, among poststructuralists, Derrida and Foucault have had (and in roughly that order). Yet one can begin to sense that if our academic will-to-application has its simultaneously good and bad way with things, this might change.

 

By any critical standards, Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton, is a major “minor” event and a marker of Deleuze’s incipient influence–in my opinion, the most significant critical compilation to appear in a decade. It alone among contemporary exegetical collections has the capacity to blow the whole field of critical studies wide open, which is not to say that it will, nor that it should. Perhaps for many reasons it shouldn’t; perhaps it would betray itself, or at least something in Deleuze, if it did. (We should recall that Deleuze likes traitors, but only when they’re not “tricksters” in disguise [Dialogues 44-5].) Yet along with Constantin V. Boundas’s and Dorothea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy–as well as an increasing number of books published by somatic feminists, cultural critics, and other readers indirectedly “apprenticed” to Deleuze–there is much to indicate that the Deleuzian timebomb is about to explode, if it hasn’t already. For Deleuze is a timebomb, and can remain so in ways equal to the richness and multifariousness of his imperceptible but ubiquitous philosophy. No less rich and multiple than Derrida or Foucault, it is only a matter of times(s) before he, like them, explodes.

 

Patton’s edition urges us on to several of these “times.” Some of them happen to be ours more than others, if only in degree and never kind. What all of the provocative essays make overwhelmingly clear, sometimes more explicitly than others, is that Deleuze can move contemporary critical studies, and cultural studies in particular, beyond the simple “materialism” that at present constrains our critical sense of things toward the “radical empiricism” we find everywhere in Deleuze’s writings. Indeed, Deleuze might best be classified, if only for the most tentative pedagogical purposes, as a poststructural empiricist, just as we might see Derrida as a poststructural textualist, and Foucault as a poststructural historicist. Having made these “useful” distinctions, allow me to emphasize their limits, since to all subtle readers any one of these conceptual emphases will inevitably fail to make critical sense without supplementation from the others. The danger of such distinctions, given the pedigree of critical one-upmanship that animates “successful” academe, is that Deleuze might be read as a mere cultural-critical “corrective” to Foucault (my empiricism’s better than your historicism!), just as Foucault was read, far too simply, as a historicist corrective to Derrida’s (nonexistent) hermeticism in the 1980s and into the 90s. Admirably there is none of this in Patton’s edition, all of the contributors being far too sensitive to the richness of Deleuze’s project and to the subtleties of critical inquiry taken as a whole.

 

How, then, do the forces in this collection “take possession” of Deleuze? How do they make sense of him, and which ones are capable of making which senses? The thirteen essays in the Reader (including Patton’s erudite introduction) cover a wide variety of subject areas, and are supplemented by a bibliography of Deleuze’s works compiled by Timothy S. Murray. (Since I would like to consider the issue of Deleuze’s reception in general here, I will briefly summarize these marvelous essays, foregrounding four in particular.) Deleuze’s famous anti-Hegelianism is addressed in Catherine Malabou’s convincing piece “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves,” within which a monomaniacal version of Hegel is shown to animate Deleuze’s otherwise heterogeneous philosophy, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay demonstrates provocatively how a Hegelian can appreciate, and even identify with, Deleuze’s concept of the fold of thought. Pierre Macherey’s compelling reading of Deleuze’s reinvention of Spinoza speaks to the Althusserian investment in Spinoza that Deleuze evades; still, Macherey suggests unthought points of compatibility between Deleuze and structural Marxism, while questioning Deleuze’s notion that “passions” (think ideology here) are ever truly “joyful” in Spinoza. Jean-Clet Martin’s “Eye of the Outside” addresses Deleuze’s work on Melville in order to elucidate the philosopher’s seminal concepts of difference and exteriority, whereas Eugene A. Holland’s “Schizoanalysis and Baudelaire” develops Deleuze’s literary thinking beyond the minor literature register, or at least within a less current vocabulary. Constantin V. Boundas’s excellent contribution addresses Deleuze’s virtual ontology by way of Bergson, and suggests clearly how “ontology” and “poststructuralism” are not necessarily incompatible terms. Ronald Bogue’s impressive “Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force” develops Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism in relation to his work on Bacon’s paintings in The Logic of Sensation. Finally, Jean-Michel Salankis’s singular “Idea and Destination” examines Deleuze’s distinction between differentiation and differenciation with reference to infinitesimal calculus and Kant.

 

As outstanding as these essays are, Francois Zourabichvili’s “Six Notes on the Percept,” David W. Smith’s “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” Moira Gatens’s “Through a Spinozist Lens,” and Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” have thus far most intrigued this reader. Zourabichvili, like Martin, looks at Deleuze’s Melville, but does so in order to investigate Deleuze’s concept of the percept, and would be for this reason alone unique in Deleuze’s reception. The “percept” is Deleuze’s attempt to characterize minor (or untimely) sense in active terms, whereas most critical rhetorics at present tend to equate untimely sense, reactively and metonymically, with quietism. Smith’s stunning piece demonstrates how Deleuze’s “aesthetic” treatment of Bacon’s painting undermines Kant’s notion that sensibility is found in the qualities of objects rather than signs, and explodes the Kantian division between objective elements of sensation (the first Critique) and subjective elements of sensation (the third Critique) (Patton 29). Gatens’s contribution advances a Deleuzo-Spinozist “social cartography” (168) to extend gender criticism, somaticism, and cultural critique generally beyond the rhetorical confines of “historicism,” and it discusses how “ethological” criticism can disalign the relation of order-words to the reactive affects they coordinate, particularly with reference to the juridical categories of sexual difference. Finally, Massumi’s astounding essay, like Gatens’s, develops Deleuze’s theory of affects in the area of cultural critique. As Massumi writes, “[a]ffect holds a key to rethinking postmodern power after ideology” (235). One can assume he means “after discourse” as well, insofar as Massumi makes it overwhelmingly clear how medial representations organize affect into standard emotion. As such, we can see in Gatens and Massumi the move toward a cultural criticism that will add Deleuze’s vocabulary and procedures to the (non)methodologies of Derrideans and Foucauldians, and continue to mount much needed criticism against the hegemonic stranglehold of contemporary “good sense.” Yet one is left wondering after such a rare show of critical fireworks what points might remain for other Deleuzians to pursue.

 

My points are not that Deleuze’s currently untimely methods should be applied to the timely objectives of cultural criticism; that we combine Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault in the pursuit of this end; or that we replace Foucault with a march toward a more “comprehensive” materialism. I think Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze should be read together, but that we might also remember the forgotten radicalism of so-called “deconstruction” during its initial American reception in the 70s–a reception, a feeling, that threatened to take down the concepts of art and culture altogether, rather than simply replace an evaluative (idealist) approach to culture and its “works” with the by now orthodox, albeit pedagogically invaluable, analytic (materialist) approach, which is in effect what cultural criticism in all its modes has done. Although Patton’s edition certainly doesn’t settle for this latter, neither does it show any serious interest in the forgotten former. The untimely ends of that 70s deconstructive moment have been lost in the academic subjection of deconstruction–and poststructuralism generally–to the very categories of “culture” it once threatened to deconstruct (think of “literature,” “film” and so on). The concepts of culture and cultural works were saved and deformalized in one fell swoop. But something had to take the critical fall, and it was “aesthetics.”

 

Certainly there is plenty in Deleuze that can supplement an improved materialist approach to “culture.” In fact, Deleuze spent a lot of time and unprecedented brilliance doing this himself. But what else can Deleuze do? Can his rhetoric be used to reverse the very terms of critical sense? Can his rhetoric create untimely goals as well as untimely methodological approaches to familiar ones? Can Deleuze be “used” as a percept to overcome, in Nietzsche’s anti-apocalyptic sense, the affects and concepts that cohere–both evaluatively and analytically, centripetally and centrifugally–with all interest in “cultural work”? As Godard suggests in his film Sympathy for the Devil (itself a “work” that does not escape the indictment that goes with the following statement, with the Foucauldian daimon or difficulty that animates it): “It is urgent to replace the word ‘culture’ by another one.” Urgent for whom? No such devil is in any attendance. But might this word to come, in some future of postformalist and overcultural sympathy, be “aesthetics”? Might the word return with a different sense (since only difference “returns”)–a sense that could read all cultural lifeworlds as unconscious coordinates of affective re/action, corresponding to different degrees of sensory capitalization? Does the range of Deleuze’s rhetoric make possible an aesthetic sense that, having overcome its apprenticeship to art, would operate as an affective Marxism and deconstruction? And might this minor sense of “aesthetics” begin to return today, or tomorrow, or whenever it can?

 

Writing about the conditions that Deleuze articulates “for thinking of difference and repetition,” Foucault states that “(t)he most tenacious subjection of difference is that maintained by categories” (Foucault, 186). It isn’t that Foucault thinks we can escape categories in kind (although he argues, like all poststructuralists, that there is something acategorical about thought’s movement). Subjection to categories must always be understood in degree rather than kind, and a dominant value is always the affective trace of a dominant category, and vice versa. Each one is also the trace of a degree of lived instrumentation, or metonymic coordinate for particular capitalized sensoria. In our critical epoch–and I am speaking of the instrumental time of 20th-century art and criticism, from aestheticism to culturalism–there is no more dominant category (and value) than culture. “Culture” survived both the aestheticism and avantgardism of high Modernism quite comfortably, and has even managed to prosper as a concept during the poststructuralization of traditional humanism. Even the humanists welcomed variants of culturalism after the threat of deconstruction (better to have multicultural “works” than no works at all!). There is a definite redundancy in all this that has gotten by all but unexamined in the work of formalists, culturalists, and even poststructuralists.

 

Aesthetics (as good taste, beauty, a specious sense of universality, and so on) once “took possession” of the concept of culture, and with it all the attendant affects that culminated in high Modernism. Culture then went on to take possession of art by deconstructing, ideology-critiquing, and genealogizing the artifacts of aestheticism (by equating them metonymically, and thus sensorially, with “patriarchy,” “sexism,” “imperialism,” “racism,” “homophobia,” “elitism,” and so on–all pretty convincing charges). However, culture then went on to confuse aestheticism metonymically with the far more diffuse concept of aesthetics taken as a whole. Can the overlooked side of 18th-century aesthetics (understood as sensation, feeling, affect, and not art) now “return” in revised nonidentic form to take possession of culture–that is, to subject all culturalism to a transvaluation, rather than logic, of sense: a perpetual devaluation of all rhetorics, feelings, and “works” that subordinate, in our metonymic and evaluative reflexes, the concept of “affects”–and thus of those reflexes themselves–to the concept of “culture”? With reference to my epigraph, which force is capable of reading, living, and judging “cultural” sense from the perspective of this “aesthetic” sense? Which one can do it, can want to do it instead of something else? Which one feels, and thus makes real, Godard’s percept, his urgency yet to come?

 

For all its originality and excellence, there is no percept-ive struggle against the affects and concepts of art/culture in Deleuze: A Critical Reader. But there are no such percepts in the profession of criticism as it presently exists, so such a sensibility will hardly be missed. I anticipate that, essays such as Zourabichvili’s aside, a general disinterest in the theory of the percept will characterize Deleuze’s entry into the marketplace of post-Foucauldian ideas at the millennium: that (residually cultural) critics will be strong on affect (in order to supplement theories of “ideology” and “discourse”), less strong on concept (since the concept of “concept” remains exegetically aligned with an unpopular textualism), and virtually blind to the practical powers of the percept, since critical sense is today the indentured servant of generic culture and its counter-hegemonic critique, especially when such sense is in graduate school, when it tries to publish, and when it looks for employment. Contemporary critical affects are by inertial design incapable not only of understanding percepts as “active,” but of sensing their possible or actual existence at all, let alone where they might go.

 

Perhaps theory has always manifested different degrees of “practical” power, depending on the speed(s) in question–those that are percept-ive and minor and those that are applied and major. If so, the percept-ive powers of theory today might be those that diverge from the willingness of appliers to operate beneath the explicit or implicit sign of culture, or worse, to embrace art (as does Deleuze himself) as some antifoundational line of flight away from molarities, striated spaces, black holes, etc. We should remember that it is not merely an old category or word (such as “culture” or “art”) that applied theory returns us to, but to the old sense of which the category and its object are a sign, a symptom, an evaluative accent or trace. And what sense is the experience, and even rhetoric, of culture a symptom of in these consumer-Modernist times? The reactively certain sense, or capital sense certainty, that value is always elsewhere (on screen, in books, or “in” other attention-invested media–the real reason We gotta get out of this place), whether the valuables in question are marginal or centrist, high or low, artistic or critical.

 

Of course, “aesthetics” is an old word, too. Yet if it could return poststructuralism to the old sense (and value) of sense rather than to art, it could return eternally with an overcultural difference. It could mark how the living “currency” of culture (even in the sense of exchange value) is a mimetic devaluation of all sense that is not famous or spectacular. This holds true even of cooler-than-thou sense that despises the artifacts of “mainstream” culture, since the categories of culture still animate dutifully the sense that “rebels” uncritically against its own disciplinary sensibility (e.g., My favorite “band” is less popular than yours!). In a negating and far less interpellated way, this is true of cultural critique as well (which at least manages to turn culture into a conscious form of stupidity), and of more art-subservient theories of affective transgression, such as those we find in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and, quite differently, in other poststructuralisms. Smith’s Deleuzianism is this empiricist sort. If at moments Smith’s extraordinary essay on Kant and Deleuze promises to rethink aesthetics in overrelation to the concepts of art and culture (and thus bring culture to its senses), lo and behold, art turns out to be the categorical foreground for the percept-ual ungrounding of (es)sense once again, just as it was in Nietzsche’s evaluation a century ago, and everyone’s since. Certainly Deleuze can help us think something other than this, even if for him and his most “sympathetic” readers, art remains a way out of the prisonhouse of reactivity rather than a way in.

 

We received Derrida in the 70s and got “literary” deconstruction, applied grammatology, and so on. We received Foucault in the eighties and got New Historicism, genealogical reception theory, somatic criticism, and–add some feminism, ethnography, and Birminghamized Raymond Williams–cultural studies in general.

 

Now in the late 90s we’re receiving Deleuze, in some ways for the first “instrumentalizable” time, and we’re getting… well, what? A feminist post-Alice-Jardine Deleuze in the remarkable work of Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and Moira Gatens? A gender-critical and queer-theoretical Deleuze in the affective (rather than “performative”) somatic theories of these same authors? A postcolonial Deleuze in the groundbreaking work of Reda Bensmaia, Robert Young, and in spots even Edward Said? A cinematicist Deleuze in the pan-postmodernism of Steven Shaviro, but also implicitly in the Benjaminian (and even Taussigian) reception theory of Miriam Hansen? An emerging OCTOBERfest Deleuze in the unprecedented art criticism of Daniel W. Smith and others soon to come? A Deleuzian cultural studies in the texts of Lawrence Grossberg but, most brilliantly, in the work of Brian Massumi? Even a Deleuzian auto-critique of “careerist” theory theorized, Symplokestyle, by Sande Cohen? We’re getting all of the above, and we can expect to get a lot more.

 

What concerns me in all this is what might be left out once certain interpretations of Deleuze become official and more or less repeatable (Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of noology will itself prove “useful” here). I have no problem with timely, or even instrumental, applications of Deleuze to pre-established fields of inquiry (such as gender criticism). Without exception, I revere them for what they can do, just as long as their eventual currency and familiarity don’t make the whole of Deleuze–whatever that might be–“old-fashioned” in academic circles before a lot of it even happens, as was the unfortunate case in the U.S. with Foucault and, even more brutally “before” him, Derrida. Certainly this is not the fault of the applicants themselves, but of academia as a cutthroat marketplace of ideas and reputations. Theorists quickly become “out-dated,” but the redundant categories that critics and artists serve (such as painting) never do. It is always easier, and more immediately profitable, to apply new procedures to timely object(ive)s than to theorize new object(ive)s altogether. This latter implies reading against the affective tendencies and aims of critical studies taken as a whole–to say nothing of uncritical culture–and is as difficult critically (and even creatively as it is potentially suicidal professionally. But it is precisely the possibility of this latter (inventing new goals), as well as the actuality of the former (pursuing older ones), that Deleuze teaches us to sense and value. He reminds us that evaluation is itself active, and that theory is the form that practice takes when it has no immediate instrumental options–when sense becomes capable of thinking, feeling, and doing untimely things: material things that are not yet, and perhaps never will be, of “this” world.

 

Works Cited

 

• Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
• Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.