For Maria Angel, the becoming-other-together of Man and sensation runs up
against a shared obstacle: the face. The face is the rehumanized
surface of eye-hand coordination. The becoming-digital of vision and the
becoming-machine of the keyboard-fingering human converge on the same abstract
surface: the (inter)face. And there they stop. They are bounced back into an
eddy of smarmy humanism by, to take an ubiquitous example, the smiling-computer
icon that leers out of every Mac while the machine is whirring away behind the
screen, working its inhumanly digital, invisible magic.
[30] Similarly, the becoming-alien of Man is bounced back off
the surface of Mars in the perceived face appearing in NASA photographs. Here,
the face is the rehumanized surface of earth-space probe coordination. In every
case, where exploration seems inexorably to lead to a becoming-other of Man, the
face intercepts. This occurs most recurrently and with the most lasting effect
with the infant, whose incipient eye-hand coordination, first practiced while
suckling, is indexed to the caregiver's face in its perceptual disparity and
actual distance from the bottle or breast. The disparity between the eye and the
surrounding expanse of smooth skin recapitulate in an abstracting and humanizing
manner the disparity between the nipple and the smooth surface of the mammlian
breast (or between the protruding shape of the artificial nipple of the bottle
and the smoothness of its texture). The hand-eye coordination is enveloped by
the mammalian disparity with which it is associated, which is in turn enveloped
on the new human sur-face, to which it is indexed by the attractor of
facial expression. The envelopment in facial expression reacts
upon the disparities of departure, which also remain where they are, indexed as
oppositional differences at a positioned distance from the abstracting sur-face.
The emergence of difference and distance enables person-to-person communication
(mediated becoming-together: the space in which language will lodge). This
composition of a topo-ontological sur-face enveloping disparities converted into
distances and differences, which in turn envelop differentials of sensation, is
analyzed by Deleuze and Guattari as the developmental origin in the growth of
the individual of the eternally recurrent, collective, abstract machine of
personalization, or huManization (1987, 169-170).
[31]
This sense I had of my mother: up to the time I began to recognize
her, it was simply a feeling--"This is good." No form, no
face, just something bending over me, from which good would come ...
Pleasant ... Seeing my mother was like looking at something through the lens
of a camera. At first you can't make anything out, just a round cloudy spot
... then a face appears, then its features become sharper.
My mother picks me up ... I lie there and it feels like
"this." (Luria, 77-78; italics added)
[32]
"A cloudy spot, then something pleasant, then a face" (78). Then I,
there, this. Once the infant is hedonically personalized by its facial
indexation, its becomings-mammalian, not to mention other becomings-animal, or
becomings-machine, or becomings-alien, will automatically tend to loop back
through the connection to the abstract sur-face. They will be shortcircuited by
the sur-face: "overcoded" by it. ("Just something bending over me," engulfing
feeling in the pleasantness of its shadow: "up to the time I began to recognize
... ") Any time mammalian hand-eye coordination starts to slide back into a
becoming-tactile (as it has a reflex to do), and from there into synaesthetic
escape, the mammalian will reflect back onto the recognized sur-face of
huManization rather than proceed through becoming-animal to an unknown surface
and a new becoming. The mirroring face is the form of arrest of
becomings-other-than-huMan. In this deleuzo-guattarian end-run around Lacan's
mirror stage, all the world becomes a mirror of Man reflecting and disseminating
the pure form of Majority (which envelops the positioned distances and
oppositional difference of gender, race, and age as diacritical sub-forms of
itself). In this approach, the face is a mirroring process, not a mirrored form.
It is "faciality" that produces reflection and recognition, by
reconditioning the world of sensation to serve as a mirror. The face as a full
form of expression (filled with personalized content) is an optical effect (a
visually-dominating derivative) of the becoming-mirror of the world generated by
the abstract machine of facial indexation.
The faces that simultaneously recede into and emerge from the abstract
surface of Lichtenberg-Ettinger's paintings belong to a very different machine
of expression, running counter to faciality as the personalizing form of
Majority. Lichtenberg-Ettinger's faces re-surface from lost memory (found
photos). But they are effaced as they resurface (by endless blurrings and
repeated degenerative photocopying and rubbings and swabbings and overlays of
paint). The lost memory is not presented as a personalized content pertaining to
reflection. It remains lost. It is lost again in the painting. The
effacement of the face completes the depersonalization of lost memory that began
when the memory was encountered as a "found" object. What appears on the canvas,
then, is neither a mirroring of the world nor a memory of a person. What appears
are traces. Traces of the process of producing the painting, which may
take several years. What appears are the traces of the eye selecting the found
images, the brush applying paint to them, the hand rubbing them, the machine
photocopying them over and over again, repeatedly, obsessively, month after
month. The traces are of the body over time: the rhythm of the body
turning away from and returning to the canvas, bringing back bits and pieces of
its experience with it, over a not insignificant portion of a life. The traces
record the processual in-between of the aesthetic object and the world.
They are of embodied time, of a living in the world continually
returning to the surface. Rather than a mirroring of the world, or a memory of a
person, this return is a memory of the world: the pure form of
the body as rhythm of recursion ("objet petit a"). For
Lichtenberg-Ettinger, as an Israeli, the Holocaust is ever-present. Yet it is
not reflected in her paintings as a content of personal memory (it happened
before her birth). Rather, it is re-enacted in the collective (worlded)
effacement and forgetting of the personal and particular. That is what actually
appears in the painting. The appearing re-enactment is not a reproduction. The
world-event of the Holocaust repeats, but differentially: as part of a
creative process. The collective trauma of the Holocaust is
affirmed ("neither repressed nor forgotten," as was the personal). It
is made to return, but in drift or creative divergence from its anchoring in
history. That history is supplemented by continued embodied becoming. If the
paintings are "about" anything, it is that: having a body, continuing, being
processually in-between, becoming. Having collectively survived. The "shared
memory" of the still-living.
[33]
The richness and resonances of the work brought together in this collection
make it impossible to do justice here to each individual contribution. This
afterword-and-introduction is not intended to be an exhaustive reckoning of what
can or does go on in the volume. It is one way of weaving a rhythm through it.
The reader will find many others. There are any number of motifs that run
through the essays, like refrains, or different beats to read to. It is perhaps
not surprising that rhythm and music are themselves the most frequent refrain,
given the pride of place Deleuze and Guattari assign them in their work, not to
mention the highly "composed" symphonic nature of their writing (O'Connell,
Genosko, Dale, Guattari, Lamarre, and Murphie). Evens, whose essay is entirely
dedicated to music, provides an ontology of patterned sound that is exemplary of
Deleuze and Guattari's approach to philosophizing.
Evens returns music to its conditions of emergence: noise. Noise, he
demonstrates, is not the opposite of patterned sound (a point taken up earlier
in this essay with the distinction between a beat and beats).
Noise is the unperceived "substrate" from which sound-patterning differentiates
and against which it stands out. Noise accompanies music. At times,
noise will feed back into music as a perceptible second-order interference. It
is more accurate to say that noise, as a substrate, is not primarily heard as
and in itself, than it is to say that it is not heard. One does in fact hear "a
positive effect of noise" (Evens). The substrate of noise is vaguely perceived
as "the contraction which makes music more than a sequence of unconnected
sounds, and which draws together breath into words, phrases, meanings." "Or,
perhaps, one only feels this effect, as the movement of the music." It
is the sub-perceived sensation of noise that "give[s] force to music."
The movement-effect of the music "is not created by the chords, but produces
them as its force." "Chords do not make a progression, but are themselves
created by a force which progresses in its headlong push. Noise is the reservoir
of force which, in its repeated contractions, forces the flow of music through
the musicians, the instruments, the audience ... We hear the implicated sense of
the music, its movement." We do not hear the noise in and of itself. We hear its
contraction of chords, breath, words, phrases, meanings. We hear the world.
Flowing through the "straits" of the musicians' hands into a thousand
thought-sensations of the assembled crowd. Expression. In music, we
hear the force of expression of the world, as it contracts into a
single channel and unfolds again into a singular-multiplicity of crowded
accompaniments. We hear the background noise of existence. The
becoming-expression of the world. The becoming, in expression, of the world.
The world does not exist outside its expressions.
(Deleuze 1993, 132)
If expression is the unfolding of forces of existence, then it must be
conceived as causative in some way. Noise, Evens says, gives force to the
movement and is produced by the movement as its force. The causality is
recursive. Topo-ontological feed back. All that unfolds in the same movement
returns. The unfolding of expression and the return of the expressed are
in the same movement. A movement that envelops the world--always
through an absolutely particular local channel. The movement does not envelop
the world in something else. In envelops the world in its own
self-differentiating expression as movement, in the local-absolute.
The force of expression is the immanent cause of the world. Of all that it
becomes in its differentiation. Deleuze and Guattari's "superior empiricism"
involves returning the relation between cause and effect to immanence, as the
"real" transcendental "condition of emergence" of everything-and-everybody. The
immanence is "transcendental" because it does not coincide with the forms it
expresses, even though it is not fundamentally separate from them
("transcendental" but not "transcendent").
[34] Actual form is immanence as it has folded out of
itself. Form is the expressed. There is an ontological difference between the
expressed and the expression. This means that actual things, forms of existence,
can only be understood causally in terms of deformation. The real condition of a
thing's emergence does not resemble the thing. The expression does not resemble
the expressed (Bourassa, Murphie). As Bergson was fond of saying, in order to
explain a thing one must follow the route by which it emerged, but in the
opposite direction. Recursion: along the line of retrospective possibility back
to the potential. Generative thought does not occur to a subject. Both
recur with the object. Thought-event. Of differentiating repetition.
From unfolding to infolding, from emergence to divergent return, from form to
topo-ontological deformation. From the joy of having a body, of collectively
surviving, to the creative torture of the "body without organs." Cruelty of
thought. Affirmation of the world. As it turns. (To bring the discussion back to
banality.)
Any approach that does not take into account the ontological difference in
expression misses the real movement of the world. If the cause of the thing is
located on the same existential level as its effect, nothing can be understood
of change. Nothing can be understood of how a given form came to be, and why it
will inevitably become other than it is. Nothing is understood but the
self-sameness of form, as implying only unchanging laws of extrinsic interaction
already incumbent in the form. This is common-place empiricism, which
understands the event as a change of state: an "accident" extrinsic to the
definition of the thing. An approach of this kind has no way of conceptualizing
changes in nature, qualitative transformation, except as an accumulation of
quantitative changes. The world is reduced to variations in quantity.
Rhetorics of difference avoid this quantitative reduction of dyanomogenesis.
However, they do not go much further than avoiding it. They may recognize the
need to think in terms of immanent causality. But they misapprehend the cause as
immanent to form: as operating on the level of already form things, in
the contrast between one form and the others. They locate the generative cause
in a form's diacritical "positioning" in relation to other forms. This
transposes the form's emergent disparity (its formation) into an
opposition that can do no more than repeat its difference to the forms it
encounters. Expression is then an expression of a self-sameness through
reciprocal difference. Movement and encounter are once again treated as
extrinsic. Extrinsic to what? The "essence" of the thing? Rhetorics of
difference share a secret essentialism with common-place empiricism. Something
neither can bring itself to admit. This quasi-empirical collusion with
essentialism is why rhetorics of difference have had to assert their
anti-essentialism so loudly and so obsessively (though not nearly so
convincingly). They commit the cardinal error of thinking that the
transcendental condition of a thing's existence can be deduced from its form:
that its conditions of emergence and transformation resemble its conditions of
being. This is the basis of another secret collusion: with structuralism.
Rhetorics of difference continue to rely on structuralism's version of immanent
causality as diacritics. Contemporary theories of difference also protest too
loudly their "post"-structuralism.
Conditions of emergence and transformation do not resemble conditions of
being. In actual fact, becoming deformationally envelops being.
[35] A gender, a race, an ethnicity, any particular given
form of existence, misexpresses itself--misses its own movement--to the extent
that it clings to its being. It is only by assenting to the becoming-other from
which it emerged, and will inevitably return, that a form of existence attains
its autonomy. It is only by assenting to not-be, transformationally, that a
formation can effectively coincide with the force of its own expression.
Rhetorics and politics of difference fall sort of that creative self-cruelty of
dynamogenic thought. That is their ineradicable conservatism.
If there is one thing that binds all of the essays in this volume together,
it is an awareness of the need for a radicalized or "superior" empiricism, and a
will to nudge cultural and literary theory past rhetorics and politics of
difference towards more experimental pragmatics of becoming. It should be borne
in mind that it is not enough to think borders or in-betweens of existing
subjects and objects to reach the dimension of change. And that combining and
recombining already formed wholes or parts, however freely or artistically, or
however critically and politically, is not enough to reaccess transformational
process. Recombinant art or political practice is just reshuffling the cards
that have already been dealt. One must sense and experience limits. Not just map
borders. One must come to existential terms with the absolute contingency of
what arrives out of nowhere, at the limit-state of being. Not just glibly
"perform" clever combinations of what is already on the table. Throw the die of
becoming. The one that lands in the sky and stays in the air instead of
returning to the ground. Otherwise, you are left redealing the same old hand,
and being redealt it in return.
Perhaps it is true, as Fadi Abou-Rihan writes, that when the hand reaches
into the proverbial conceptual tool-box, all that it finds is another hand.
Perhaps the "queered" hand only finds another fist in the anus. But if that is
so, the hand that is found is in the process of drawing the hand that finds it
(as in the Escher drawing invoked by Bains). Not a repetition of the same, but a
becoming-together of the different as poles of a single process. Not the same?
As different as left and right--and as singular as the two together.
Ethico-aesthetic experimentation is not overly concerned with the "production of
the subject." It is not overarchingly concerned with difference (it is
immanently concerned with it). Ethico-aesthetic experimentation has to do with
pulling the "subjectless subjectivity" of processual autonomy out of the
conceptual toolbox. As Guattari never tired of saying, and this essay has just
as tirelessly repeated, it is about expression as differential mutual emergence.
Autopoiesis. Which, as Lichtenberg-Ettiger points out, is always co-poiesis.
So let us introduce ourselves by making the philosophical gesture of
friendship: reach into your anus, and take my hand.
Drusy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Fonds Pour la
Formation de Chercheurs et l'Aide à la Recherche, Québec (FCAR) and the
Australian Research Council. Special thanks to Shane Wilcox for his much
appreciated help and advice.
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NOTES
On capital as a time-form, see Alliez (1-25), Alliez/Feher, and
Massumi 1993.
Back
There are relatively simple one-sided topological figures that give an
intuitive sense of the surface of becoming evoked here. The best known
one-sided figure is the Moebius strip (suggestively used by Elizabeth Grosz to
express the relation of "mind" to "body"; 36, 160, 209-210). The folding of
the two-dimensional surface by which a Moebius strip is generated makes it
interdimensional (as opposed to fractionally dimensional, or fractal). If you
follow the edge with your finger, you find that even though it visually
appears to have two edges, it in fact only has one: yet it is obviously not a
line. It cuts across the three dimensions of space, but it not itself a
volume, having neither an inside nor an outside. It has two surfaces if you
take a region of the twist separately. But if you run your finger along the
length of the twist, your hand returns to the place it left from, processually
proving that the strip is one-sided as well as single-edged. The Moebius strip
has characteristics of one-, two-, and three-dimensional figures (line,
surface, volume), but is none of these ("there are surfaces that are not
topologically equivalent to any subset of three-dimensional space,"
Callender/Weingard, 23). This brings strange results when the strip is
combined with full-dimensional forms. For example, if instead of placing your
finger on the strip you projected the form of your left hand onto a patch of
the surface and moved around again, when you got back to your starting point
you'd have a right hand. Presented with a Moebius, you can only get a sense of
what kind of figure you're dealing with by moving along with it--and moving
along with it invokes qualitative transformation (left into right). The
Moebius stip is a processual figure: a topological figure. It cannot be
intuitively understood by sight alone, only by combining sight and touch over
time, with an act of imagination. Grasped as a processual figure, it is
geometrically unbounded, even though you can tell at a glance that it is
limited ("finite but unbounded," Calender/Weingard, 23). Its quasi-full
dimensional characteristics (edge, surface, volume) are its limits. It is
defined by these limits--none of which it "has" or "is" or "occupies." What it
has, is and occupies processually are patches; patches of interdimensionality.
Each patch of the twisted strip is a region of the figure's procession or
continuity. If you think of the region with a projected geometrical figure,
like the hand, passing through it, then the region presents itself as a
qualitative interdimension of continuous transformation. A patch of
becoming. This is like D'Arcy Thompson's serial transformations of form in
intensity, contracted into a single figure that is not itself a form in
the same sense as the forms that may be projected onto it (see D'Arcy Thompson
268-325). D'Arcy Thompson's transformations are themselves reminiscent of
Geoffroy St. Hilaire's foldings of organic form so dear to Deleuze (Deleuze
1994, 184-185, 215-216; Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 45-48, 254-255). One-sided
figures are extremely useful as conceptual aids in analyzing continuity of
process and transformation, and for illustrating how, from a qualitative point
of view, form must be understood in terms of deformation and evolution in
terms of involution. They are especially handy because they are visualizable
but not in a way that separates the eye and brain from the rest of the body,
and because unlike standard geometrical figures they do not lend themselves
either to dichotomization ("inside-outside," "open-closed," "finite-infinite":
"being finite or infinite are not topological properties!" cry
Calender/Weingard, 21, in spite of their own use of the terms; see citation
above: "unbounded but limited" might be more felicitous than "finite but
unbounded") or to a misrecognition of qualitative differentiation as
pertaining to extrinsic relations of difference between discrete forms. The
Moebius is not the only one-sided figure that is of potential use to
philosophy and cultural theory (see Courant/Robbins 259-264 for a
non-specialist presentation of the Moebius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein
bottle). Raymond Ruyer insists that the "pure form" or "absolute surface" of
sensation is one-sided (99). Following Ruyer, Deleuze/Guattari also describe
their "plane of immanence" as one-sided (1994, 210). Finally, in footnote
added to an early essay after the onset of his topology, Lacan (1977, 333)
deemed his "Schema R" to have been a Moebius strip all along (thanks to Shane
Wilcox for pointing this out to me).
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In this example as I have developed it, the literal crystals are not
crystalline in Deleuze's sense in Cinema 2. It is the water is the
"crystal"--liquid crystal (apologies to my laptop display).
Back
On the aesthetic as "self-standing," see O'Connell.
Back
For Deleuze's immanent conversion of Kant's idealism, see 1984.
Back
On Deleuze as a precursor to the theory of dissipative structures, see
Prigogine/Stengers 1997.
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See Lichtenberg-Ettinger for a converging Lacanian approach.
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Pessoa expressed the various rhythms of depersonalization he
experimented with along his own aesthetic continuum as "heteronyms" (simulated
actual authors in whose multiple names the singular Pessoa wrote; 213-32).
Deleuze and Guattari take up the concept of the heteronym or "conceptual
persona" in What Is Philosophy? (64).
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In a similar vein, Desmond Morris, ethologist, scientific populizer,
and surrealist painter, has spoken of the role that the awakening of
processual interest in the beautiful plays in scientific observation: "To
really understand animals and their behaviour, you must have an aesthetic
appreciation of an animal's beauty. This endows you with the patience to look
at them long enough to see something." He describes the resulting continuum of
depersonalization as "empathy" (Root-Bernstein, 8). Isabelle Stengers
discusses the role of empathy in Barbara McClintock's experimental approach to
genetics (1997, ch. 7). Aesthetics and "empathy," of course, do not ensure
good science (just well-felt science). While McClintock's work in genetics was
rewarded with a Nobel Prize, Morris's achievement is far more questionable.
For a critique of the Lorenz school of ethology to which Morris belongs, see
Genosko.
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On the distinction between perception and sensation, Massumi
1998.
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For an approach to evaluating the immanent limits of State formations,
see Dean and Massumi.
Back
On capture and regions of becoming, or "milieus," see Deleuze/Guattari
1987, 49-51.
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On the capitalist relation as directly a form of power, see Massumi
1992, 128-141 and 1997.
Back
On the limits of capitalism, in relation to "schizophrenia" rather
than the "postmodern," see Deleuze/Guattari 1983, 230-231, 247-250.
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Greg Lynn, in an entirely different domain (that of architecture),
develops a logic of morphogenesis that is extremely useful for conceptualizing
change, and is particularly suggestive in its articulation of a philosophy of
the emergence of form with information theory: "Contexts [patterns of
extrinsic interrelations between already-emerged forms] tend towards entropy.
Contexts lack specific organization and the information they provide tends to
be general. In this regard contexts might be understood as entropic in their
homogeneity and the uniform distribution of differences. Information and
difference are being used here almost interchangeably [following Gregory
Bateson's definition of information as "a difference that makes a difference":
a "differential" in the vocabulary of this essay], and homogeneity is
understood as a sameness of differences ["difference" in the present
vocabulary] or a lack of information. Thus, homogeneity and disorganization,
or lack of difference ["differential"] is a characteristic of symmetry ...
Symmetry, and any exact form for that matter, indicates a lack of order due to
a lack of interaction with larger forces and environments ... 'organized
context' requires an agent of differentiation." "Communism" is Guattari's term
for the collective agent of social differentitation.
Back
On power versus potential in political philosophy, see Negri 1991 and
1998.
Back
On the "univocity" of the coming to expression of the multiple, see
Deleuze 1990, 177-180; 1994, 35-42, 303-304.
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The classic empiricist presentation of this approach is William
James's Essays in Radical Empiricism: "There is no general
stuff of which appearance is made. It is made of that, or just what
appears (26-27) ... what I call 'pure experience' [is] only virtually or
potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain,
unqualified actuality, a simple that (23) ... experience as a whole
is self-containing and leans on nothing (193) ... object and subject
fuse in the fact of 'presentation' or sense-perception (197) ...
knower and object exist as so many ultimate thats or facts of being"
(196). As the last phrase suggests, James's "that" (or "this-that": to signal
a differential, or incipient difference) is Francis Bacon's "fact,"
which can in turn be understood in terms of Whitehead's definition of fact as
the "undifferentiated terminus of sense-awareness," the inexhaustible
unthought from which thought "diversifies" and to which it "demonstratively"
returns, as to its "ideal limit" (6-10, 13-15).
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On expression as an unfolding of possible worlds, see Deleuze 1990,
301-320 and 1994, 260-261.
Back
On distance as a topological feature of the surface, see Deleuze 1990,
173 and Bacon: "to make a Sahara of the appearance," to compose a surface
"having the distances of the Sahara" (Sylvester 56). On depth as "implex," see
Deleuze 1994, 229-232.
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"The individualized self ... is a part of the content of the world
experienced. The world experienced ... comes at all times with our body as its
centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body
is is 'here'; when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this';
all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' ... The body is the storm
centre ... The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position, just like
'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position have prerogative
emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a particular way.
The word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis": or in the present vocabulary,
the pattern of exploratory reaccess. James, 170-171n.
Back
Steven Shaviro's Cinematic Body and Doom Patrols are
exemplary studies of the intensity of affect and sensation in postmodern
culture.
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On the necessary dimension of vagueness in perception, see Evens. See
also Murphie and Deleuze 1994, 213-214 and 1993, 90-91 and Smith 39, on the
"clear-confused" and "distinct-obscure." The implicated dimension of
perception these formulas express is what is termed "sensation" in this
essay.
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On possibility as retrospective, see Bergson 1946, 107-125 and
Bourassa.
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In the Saussurean system, potential returns in language as the
nonlocalizable excess of signifier over signified that accompanies the local
realization of a conventional signifier-signified coupling. This excess is
ensconced in the "vertical" dimension of the process (understood very
differently than in the present context: as a "synchrony" rather than a
temporal disparity, the disparity that is the empty form of time). It
constitutes the immanent generative surplus from which the "horizontal" relay
to the next linguistic realization is drawn ("diachrony": also different from
the "horizontal" lines of encounter at issue here, in that diachrony is not
essentially differentiating; the system remains the same across its
realizations). An analogous surplus figures in Lévi-Strauss's anthropology as
"mana" and its structural equivalents, which constitute the specifically
cultural presentation of the staying power of processual remainder (the
reserve of potential) in many societies. It is in excess-as-remainder that a
reconciling of Deleuze and Guattari's thought and structuralisms of
signification might be found ("mana" converts into Deleuze's "dark precursor"
or "object = x"; 1979, 315-324; 1990, 113-115; 1994, 119-123). The
deleuzo-guattarian conversion of structuralism entails the signifier and
signified generating an excess by escaping down a "line of flight" away
from the "despotism" (self-sameness across its variations) of the
signifying regime--rather than the excess regenerating signifier-signified
following the chain of conventional linguistic realizations. This
amounts to an autonomization of signified-signifier coupling as a pure,
"postsignifying" form in which the matter of content melds with the manner of
expression. It is the melding that takes the lead, as an "abstract machine" of
autonomized, depersonalized expression (Deleuze/Guattari 1986, 3-8;
Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 129-135, 189-191; Haghighi).
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See the crystal-shaped diagram of "Man" in Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 544;
see also 291-294. For a feminist Lacanian appropriation of the concept of
becoming-woman, see Lichtenberg-Ettinger in this volume.
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On evolution as necessarily involving involution, see Bergson 1991 and
Ansell-Pearson 1997, 1998.
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On art as instinct and portraiture as being bound up with
becomings-animal, see Bacon in Sylvester, 18, 32, 97. See also Ansell-Pearson
1998.
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"Pathological" synaesthesia, in the view adopted here, is a
becoming-conscious in a limited way (typically, colored hearing) of a
nonconscious condition underlying all cognition. This accords with the
conclusions of Peter Grossenbacher, who argues that "normal" perception is an
inhibition of the synaesthetic dimension, an inhibition that clinical
synaesthetes have "failed" to fully develop (165). In clinical synaesthetes,
the synaethetic expression appears "in addition to, not instead of" the
"normal" perception of the object, with which it is strictly simultaneous.
This leads Grossenbach to theorize a "multimodal" nexus through which the
separate inputs of the senses are fedforward, and simultaneously fedbackward
(the "recursion" of sensation discussed in this essay; Grossenberger 163-166).
Language and "higher" cognitive functions lie at one extreme of the feedback
loop (166), folding into and out of the sensation (166). For that synaesthetic
sensation to be "simultaneous" with the object perception, the speed of its
constitutive feed would have to be greater than the smallest perceptible
interval (the "infinite speed" of self-recursion of Ruyer's "pure form" and
Deleuze and Guattari's "concept": "self-survey," as explained by Bains).
Grossenbacher, in a move again converging with the approach here, assimilates
this process to the imagination, or what experimental psychologists call
"imagery." Imagery, including clinical synaesthetic imagery, he argues,
"depends on the same [neural] mechanisms as support perceptual attention"
(153). Neurologically, there is no distinction between them. The difference
between sensation and perception, and consciousness and nonconsciousness, is
not one of kind. The distinction is processual: they are differentiated as
regions of a "simultaneous" recursion. They are different "ages" of a single
self-coincident and self-differentiating loop. They are distinctions immanent
to the absolute speed of the self-recursion. It is worth noting that the
"multimodal nexus" must be conceived as lying inbetween. Where is the
inbetween space of an integral and simultaneous self-co-presence? Saying that
the nexus is "inbetween" amounts to saying that it is nonlocalized.
The "nexus" is the processual loop. Its nonlocalizability expresses
its reality as virtual. This is the pure form of thought-sensation as
a virtual "kernal" of a "nexus of expression," as referred to earlier. The
synaesthetic "concurrent" in clinical synaesthetes (for example, the colors
induced by sound) are perceived outside the body at "middle distance," in what
Cytowic calls a "peri-personal" space (i.e., at the boundary between the
personal and the nonpersonal; 23).This is a way of saying that this perceptual
"middle" is in the same abstract space of nonlocality as the "inbetween" of
the neurological nexus of the sensation in itself (in its material mechanism).
It is a region of the same process. On "mesoperception" in its
relation to synaesthesia (in particular as it involves proprioception, which
could be argued to be the sense "closest" to the "multimodal nexus"; see
Massumi 1996). In young infants, sensation and perception are not yet
differentiated, so there is no "cross-modal" referencing of impingements
arriving by separate sensory pathways (Maurer). The world of the neonate is
synaesthesic, in an undifferentiated manner, directly (without feedback: the
pure form of experience at its purest, at its most infinitely-fast). The
multimodal nexus is everything. The separate neurological pathways of vision,
touch, hearing, etc., get tangled in the primordial neural soup of the as-yet
functionally undifferentiated matter of the emergent brain. Neonate sensation
is the actuality of the "condition" of all of the "ages" of perception (and
therefore, via proprioception, of all intentional movement and action).
Deleuze and Guattari's "childhood block" or "becoming-child"
(Deleuze/Guattari 1986, 78-79; 1987, 293-294) is a resurfacing of the
undifferentiated conditions of perception and movement alongside and in
addition to the "adult" differentiation of the senses and their
slowed-down, secondary, "intermodal" reconnection (for example, the "normal,"
functional ability to see a texture). "Adult" perception, once again, is a
slowing-down or "inhibition" of "neonate" synaesthesia (Maurer, 228). The
connection Deleuze and Guattari make between involuntary memory, as in Proust,
and the resurfacing of the childhood block accords with the assertion that
synaesthesia is "hypermnesis." Experimental psychologists have a pronounced
tendency to confuse "synaesthetic sensation" with "intermodal" or
"cross-modal" perception. Intermodal perception is a product of the
differentiation of the senses. It is when the souped senses are
selectively brought back together after having functionally separated, in
tandem with the functional differentiation of regions of maturing
brain-matter.
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Nicholas Negroponte has emerged as the consummate digital prophet of
interfacial smarm. See Massumi 1995.
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In her studies of "facedness" (the ability to recognize faces and
facial expressions), Daphne Maurer argues that the new-born infant perceives
the disparity between the "nubbiness" and the "smoothness" of the breast or
artificial nipple, and the distance between this disparity and the caregiver's
face, only as variations in "intensity" (236-237). Oppositional
difference (between nubbiness and smoothness to the touch; also expressed
visually as contrast) and distance are enveloped in synaesthetic intensity.
They become perceptible in the course of an additive differentiation of
intensity.
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Luria presents the classic case of a man whose every perception was
highly synaesthetic, and who for that reason had total recall. Since his
memory was lodged in sensation rather than in language, he could vividly
remember the time before he could speak (an impossibility according the
Lacanian scheme of things).
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For more on the art of Lichtenberg-Ettinger, see Ettinger 1995
(includes essays by Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and
Griselda Pollack).
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For more on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, and the difference
between the transcendental and the transcendent, see Goodchild 1996a, 30-37
and 1996b, 12-19 and Martin 29-50.
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On the "fact" of sensation as deformational ("distorted" and
"anti-illustrational"), see Francis Bacon in Sylvester (30, 40-41, 59), and
Deleuze 1981 (9-10).
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