Deleuze and Guattari's Philosohy of Expression temporaty file
Deleuze and Guattari's Philosohy of Expression
Brian Massumi
SURFACING (TOO LATE)
Is it possible to talk about expression without talking aesthetics? And is it possible to talk about aesthetics without talking beauty?
By and large, literary and cultural theory since structuralism has observed an embarrassed silence about all three. The terms, as commonly heard, especially the third, swing between two equally unsavory poles: the spontaneous outpourings of romantic individualism, and the tyranny of imposed judgments of taste. "Expression" and its fellow travellers are foregone, in favor of "production" (its own unsavory association, this time with functionalism, parried by the addition "of subjectivity").
Something, perhaps, is stirring in the state of theory. Over the last few years, the names Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have crescendoed in the class-rooms and conference halls, making them the latest in a continuing series of great French names to pivot English-speaking academic discourse. After a long incubation beneath Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Foucault, they have surfaced. But has it sunk in that Deleuze has always unabashedly characterized his thought as a philosophy of expression? "The world," he has gone so far as to say, "does not exist outside of its expressions" (1993, 132). Or that in his final publication Guattari summed up his life's work as advancing "a new aesthetic paradigm"? (1995, chap. 6; see also Guattari, in this volume) This will take some processing. Expression, aesthetics ... perhaps ... but if we think fast maybe we can at least spare ourselves beauty. Velvet paintings are "beautiful." What do they have to do with art, or life?
Too late. In the opening salvo of this collection, Melissa McMahon, Steven Shaviro, and Stephen O'Connell sing the "b" word in chorus, in a series of interrelated essays. For Shaviro, the concept of beauty is the key to phasing Deleuze's thought from the modernist art and literature in dialogue with which it was developed to the "postmodern" world his contemporary continuers inhabit. The way in which this is accomplished is all-important for determining how expression and aesthetics play out: whether they fall back into their familiar vacillation between individual spontaneism and cultural imposition, and what their pragmatic reverberations will be.
From the outset, it is clear that a shift has occured, creating a sustaining breach for a new thinking of expression. Beauty, most often discussed in terms of a harmony of form reflected in the imagination, is referred by McMahon to something else. The determination of beauty, she argues, is temporal before it is reflective. If beauty concerns form in any fundamental way, it is a form of time. In a move bound to frustrate the expectations of many, McMahon relates the beautiful to a flattening out of moments (taking off from the Deleuze of the Cinema books). Time is no longer a progression to and from privileged points--beginnings, climaxes and ends--that give a priori order and a depth of personal or historical meaning to the course of things. In a time after destiny and progress, one moment is much like any other. There is no overarching standard by which to prefer any particular course from one moment to the next. All moments are moments without qualities, indifferently divisible and possibly connectable, as if laid out on a single surface of availability, indeterminate until a contingent encounter makes one moment stand out or fall out. When any-moments-whatever collide: the course of things follows. It is this open-ended process of contingent time-triage that McMahon identifies with beauty. Its medium is banality, understood as a time-form, in turn understood as a mode of availability, or presentation, from which things flow, in open-endedness. Moving and opening, beauty pertains to a process that takes empirical precedence over the existing of formed things and their narratively closable coursings. "Takes empirical precedence over form." Or is it: takes deforming precedence over the empirical? A tectonic shift, ungrounding the ground of aesthetic experience.
A deforming availability that makes things flow: sounds like Capital. Beauty is the concomitant in sensation of Capital as a condition of existence of the body before its things, in an indeterminate time, after destiny and progress.[1]
As Shaviro goes on to observe, the sublime has gotten much better pomo press than velvet and beauty. Typically, the genesis of the sublime is laid to a sensation of disproportion, as before the immensity of nature. Feeling senses something beyond its ken, something so overwhelming it fails, in fact, to feel it, no matter how hard it strives. The sublime is sensation at the point at which it can no longer be felt, and is therefore only capable of being thought: a concept without a sensation. The sublime experience is feeling transgressing its limit. For Shaviro, this is a quantitative cop-out from indeterminate time. The sublime of disproportion takes for granted the impotence of the traditional qualitative means of marking time in the face of Capital banality. Yet it reintroduces qualitatively privileged moments--derived, in the absence of any convincing metanarrative, from a quantitative disjunction. These new privileged moments may well be ungrounded, and confront the incommensurable rather than imposing a standard of valuation. But for Shaviro, their privileging smacks of nostalgia: sublime moments, as moments of transgression, have truck with transcendence. They are a beginning, climax and end rolled up in a single sparkling moment. So if the conditions no longer obtain for privileged moments to unravel following an ordered course, at least they can still be thought and desired as disorder: always already after the time of progress and before any-time-whatever, forever and paradoxically lurking in the "here and now." Indeterminate time then appears simply as a flattening out of transcendence. Its indeterminacy is a negativity: the down-time between the privileged moments when transcendence comes out of lurking. The sublime subverts progressive time, while skirting any-time, reduced to a lull.
The regime of the any-moment-whatever, McMahon emphasizes, is the time of modernity. Following this reasoning, Shaviro considers the thought of the sublime not as postmodern, but as a late modern reaction against modern time. For him, the postmodern is neither in reaction against nor transgressive of the modern. Instead, it is a tonic transformation of the modern from within. It could be said that is the affect of modernity: modern time assumed, as an affect(ation), a manner of being. The postmodern is modernity converted from a crisis to a mannerism (hence its affinity with the baroque). Assuming modernity as a manner of being means living in any-time without nostalgia, living the time after destiny and progress, sublime aside. This entails assuming a certain attitude of disinterest (in the immense, in the deep, in hand-wringing over crisis and paradox), the effect of which, ironically, is to affirm contingent encounter. In the time-after, everything is available, with nonchalance, as if laid out on a single surface. Everything, it seems, has already happened. So be it. "Access to excess ... even to the point of boredom." Pastiche. Mix and match. So be it. This affirmed indeterminacy is no longer simply a flattening out. It is also a power of combination, and as such creates the conditions for an art of unlimited encounter productive of a surface complexity: a complexity of interference generated by random encounters between ordinary, unprivileged presentations of the already-available. Interference is a process of immanence. It assumes no supplementary dimension, of inspiration, judgment, or rupture. From banality to complexity: the superficial emergence of the new. If the sublime was a concept without a feeling, beauty, writes McMahon, is a feeling without a concept. What is felt is the emergence of the new. Which cannot have been thought. For if it had been, it will have been predicted, and if it will have been, it won't be new.
All of this helps explain why Deleuze calls beauty the fourth dimension of time (1989, 95-97). First: present (here and now). Second: past (presents that have passed). Third: future (presents that will have come to pass). Fourth: too late. Everything has already happened, including the new. First, second, third already and all over again: availability and emergence.
Beauty, like the sublime, enfolds the dimensions of linear time. But it does so in banality, not in anxiety, and immanently rather than transcendentally. It is this immanence that affectively translates as "disinterest" or nonchalance, manners of being easily confused for lack of encounter and subjective estrangement: not a here and now, but an ubiquitous nowhere of whatever. If this is lack, it is only the lack of a supplemental dimension from which to judge or desire: the absolute (superficial) proximity of access to excess. "Disinterest" is the impossibility, in encounter, of separating the object from the subject--because the course of things follows. In other words, object and subject, in their mutual difference and reciprocal trajectories, are consequent to the encounter. It is they that are new, already and all over again. They emerge and re-emerge together, from transformation. The everything that has already happened is emergence, registered after its fact in a subject-object relation. Where there was classically and in modernity an external opposition between object and subject, there is now a double distinction internal to the transformation. 1) After-the-fact: subject-object is to emergence as stoppage is to process. 2) In-fact: "objective" and "subjective" are inseparable, as matter of transformation to manner of transformation (the two dimensions of Matter with a capital "M": matter-energy). Not the dumb fact of two distinct entities: a double generative distinction internal to a single material process.
The process is expression. The distinction is between the expressing and the expressed. The new expressionism derivable from a rethinking of beauty is not a spontaneist individualism, far from it: it is impersonal Matter that does the expressing. What is expressed is that which emerges from matter, after a manner, as the "subject" of the process (along with a reciprocal conversion of remnant matter into "objectivity"). Double ontological articulation (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 40-45; Genosko).
This has nothing to do with imposed standards of taste. Beauty is radically tasteless. Even if beauty is immediately experienced as a judgment of value that posits itself as universal, that value, argues Shaviro, is incommunicable, precisely by virtue of its felt immediacy, and the "judgment," precursing as it does both its subject and its object, is non-cognitive, a "feeling without a concept": a singular universal, or felt absolute. Beauty may be tasteless. But it has attitude: the attitude of the absolutely in-process. Immanence.
The conclusion is not that subject and object are dead or abolished. Less apocalyptically, it will be said that their opposition follows the process. It is retrospective. It results when a participatory disinterest is replaced by an effect of distance from the process, viewed as if as if from a supplementary dimension. Distance occurs when the process, or a part of it, stops (as when a line of encounter exhausts itself). Or it may intervene in the process, as a particular form of self-interference where the course of the process is arrested or deflected by a part of itself, which then momentarily detaches from its line of encounter as a supplemental whole. Both of these things, gapping and supplementation, occur periodically, in syncopated rhythm. Judgment fills the distance, like an opportunistic infection of arrest. It may be a conforming judgment of taste (classical) or a nonconformist "critical" judgment (modern). Either way, it opportunistically returns, in arresting syncopation. This is entropy (processual exhaustion or stoppage) elevated to the status of a human faculty.
The processual rhythm modulated by judgment is already a modulation, in the plural. Not "a beat." "Beats": "an acoustical phenomenon resulting from the interference of two sound waves of slightly differenct frequencies ... heard as minute yet clearly audible intensifications of the sound at regular intervals" (Randell, 45). "Intensifications of the sound at regular intervals": a beat. The particular beat is an amplification contingent upon an encounter between unheard or less clearly heard waves, which are themselves regularly self-repeating lines of encounter. An encounter between lines of encounter. The particularity of the beat emerges from a shared non-specifity of the encountering self-repetitions: their interference (their participatory co-functioning on the same processual plane, their contingent belonging to each other). The beat stands out from that plane of contingent belonging, or multiple singularity, as an added rhythm of self-repetition. A beat is a salience, an over-beats, a derivative stand-out inseparable from the plane from which it derives, as a particular that is expressed over and above the generative multiple-singular expressing it. "With-over" would be better than "over and above," to more accurately reflect the derivative's status as an additive inseparability. Its inseparability is generative. Once a beat has been generated, it may enter into relation with others of its kind. And to the extent that it does, it separates (subtracts itself). Any judgment of contrast or similarity between particular beats occurs on a supplementary plane, of comparison subtracted from its generation, of separation subtracted from its belonging, of the already having happened separated from its under-way. After-the-fact. The derivative plane of judgment follows the plane of creative interference, of which it is an additive modulation (a modulation of modulation; see Evens and Murphie). But it can also lead back to it, its separation from the surface becoming an extension of it. Combine rather than compare two opposing beats, and you have the inseparability of interference again and, if the contingent conditions are right, a new generation of surface emergence in addition to the irreversible subtraction already accomplished: with-over all over again. Oscillation. Where waves are under way, judgment is in suspense, waiting for something, it does not yet know what, to emerge onto the plane of the comparison. Where judgment is, processual lines are in arrest. The imperceptible movement between the two planes is itself a rhythm, of inseparability and separation, feedback and irreversibility. The rhythm of existence, beats of life and death. The two planes or dimensions of existence, becoming and having-already-become (or "being" in its undecidable proximity to death) are in contingent belonging: in a mutual immanence enveloping all of the lines that emerge and return, in repeat creation.
In the definition of beats cited above, replace "two sound waves" by "whatever number of lines of encounter," "heard" by "felt," "of the sound" by "of being," "acoustical" by "ontological," and so on. All oppositional differences, including subject and object, and all judgment, and beyond judgment all dialectics, and even all diacritics, appear as secondary operations standing out from a multiply singular process. The process is that of existential amplification or intensification arising from the contingency of interference events. Opposition is a second-degree event upon event, a counter-event, a modulatory transformation of transformative modulations always already under way. "Difference," as widely understood in literary and cultural theory today, is a derived dimension of an open-ended processual multiplicity. It is a form of closure, of result, a having-been of becoming. "Difference" is a retro beat. It is the back-beat of repetition in creative expression: "difference" defined as a set of having-beens, judged from a comparative distance to be particular instances of the same becoming as opposed to other having-beens. The rhetoric of difference--in spite of (or because of)--its suspiciously modern-sounding protestations of radicality, only grasps the retro dimension of the postmodern process: the oppositional repetition of the same. It is late. But not too: late modern (like the return of the sublime accompanying rhetorics of difference).
Like subject and object, the classical and the modern are also not two distinct entities. They are planes or registers of a single process. Mutually immanent beats of collective existence. If, following Shaviro, the most enveloping plane of the process is termed the "postmodern," for lack of a better word, then the overall process cycles back into the classical, where it appears, in contraction, as a local condition. The postmodern is immanent to the classical as the local outbreaks of tastelessness that prevailing judgment needs to "arrest" in the name of good form (balance and harmony: the minimal supplementary movement consistent with entropy). The classical, in its turn, is immanent to the modern as the projection of balance and harmony into an age to end time, a utopian dialectical completion enabled, in the revolutionary mean-time, by the relentless application of critical judgment. The postmodern, once again, is immanent to the modern as its stubbornly open-ended time-form, persistently thwarting the all-too-classical completion of modernism's critical projection.
(Parenthetically, if beauty is a time-form, then an aesthetic is an abiding: a manner of abiding time and transformation; a manner of being in continuing becoming.)
If it is still possible, in view of all of this, to assign a period in linear history to the "fourth dimension of time" that is expressed as the postmodern aesthetic, it is so only superficially. The postmodern age is when the immanence of ages to each other comes out as a global condition, in a re-surfacing of process. Its aesthetic is an affectedly flattened manner of abiding immanence, after destiny and progress, the sublime and dialectics aside. An involved aside. For even transcendings of the process, gappings and supplementations and even incommensurabilities, return to the surface, to immanence. The exhaustions (of which the sublime is a special case) and the arrests repeat. They themselves string out in a line, of counter-encounter. Any supplemental wholes that may have formed feed back to become local conditions or constituent parts of the process. The whole, as a part, is engulfed, enveloped by an expanding surface composed of multiple interfering lines. The harmony of the whole returns to the surface from which it arose (see Evens, Murphie). As does anti-harmony: as when the sublime inexorably subsides into banality by dint of repetition (everything, including sublimity, having already happened, not once, but innumerable times, to the point of boredom). Form, its epiphany and its subversion, return, nonchalantly, to process.
The processual "surface" is all engulfing. It is active in and of itself. It is complex. In other words, it is a topological surface: of deformation and involution; of the availability of every thing, of every form, even the ages of humanity (and the reactions against them), to continuous transformation. Access to twisted excess.
Excess: although supplemental wholes feed back, following the manner of the overall process, there is an asymmetry to this involution. All of the ages may be immanent to each other, but only the overall process of the "postmodern" is also immanence in and of itself. The postmodern is the processual limit. That is, an inside limit: an "excess" of "access" is not a transgression, but a self-bordering taken to the extreme where it folds infinitely in on itself, so infinitely that it folds out at the same time. The processual limit is the internal envelope: a self-inning-out. Emergence in immanent return, of each and every formed thing to and from itself. This limit, as applied to each thing that emerges is what Guattari calls a "nucleus of expression" (1995 and in this volume). Applied to everything in its return, it is what Raymond Ruyer calls a "pure form" (infinite self-recursion, or "self-survey"; see Bains). It is a "pure" form because as a return from form, it is unexpressable as form. Pure form is the unexpressed of process. Process in itself. Where matter and manner meld. Absolute processuality, returning to before and thus, in addition, coming after the distinction between expressing and expressed. "Subjectivity" without a subject and, for that matter, in that manner, without an object.
Before and therefore after: if the postmodern is an always already too late (a pastness perpetually in the present, as opposed to a present that has passed), its immanent limit is downright untimely (a future-past: pastness superposed with an abiding futurity which, as such, will never come to pass). Not a time-form, but the "pure form of time," empty of any present, of whatever age: never actually presenting itself, on the side of a subject, in an object relation. Virtual: an empirically emptying recurring in addition to the actual emergence of the full to form (Bourassa; Murphie). In addition to: a supplementation. But one involving no primordial whole, dividing into no fundamental parts, wholeness folding into and out of fragmentation, in composition of a surface of transformative continuity, one-sided, asymmetrical, ontological twisting. A one with no whole: matter and manner as a boundless field of deformational transformation. Matter-energy.[2]
The internal envelope of becoming is the limitlessness of process: a negentropy immanent to entropy. The dialectical wholes which feed back "in the manner of" the overall process are simulations of this limitlessness, enclosed. They are the entropic expression of the negentropic. "Difference" can do nothing more than express this enclosure of expression, unless it is effectively fed back from wholeness and reconnected to the open process, in encounter with its own derivation. Difference twisted to witness its own emergent belonging to the multiple-singular under way. This processual self-reflection of difference is constitutive of the postmodern as a non-cognitive mode of knowledge. Not a distanced judgment on being, but the felt absolute of being many-fold a becoming ("contemplation" as defined by Deleuze 1994, 73-77 and by Deleuze/Guattari 1994, 211-213).
DRUSY
Even Kant notes the priority of process over form in aesthetic experience. Beauty, he says, is "drusy." Or more precisely, our interest in beauty is awakened by drusiness. What in the OED is "drusy"? A dusting of miniature crystals appearing on a surface: the sparkle of an appealing roughness that lures the eye to extend the hand. Although Kant does not explicitly comment upon it, this doubly returns us to process: once in the emergence of a surface disparity, and again in the relay from sight to touch. Emergence first:
Kant emphasizes that the appearance of crystalline forms does not proceed gradually, in good linear causal fashion. It is a gapping or "leap": a qualitative transformation that appears as a sudden discontinuity (1952, 218). Crystallization is an event befalling a fluid, due to internal tensions that the fluid had been carrying but had not yet expressed. The separation into solid and fluid states expresses internal tension, or self-interference, in the emergence of form. The expressed form is the past of the tension in the present, the past presented to perception as a disparity: the contrast between amorphous fluid and the rigidity it became on the surface. Not all of the fluid crytallizes. It underlies and fills the gaps between crystals, even though the conditions of its fluidity are no longer present. For example, in the case of ice, the water between ice crystals that have just formed is below freezing temperature. Yet it remains fluid, as if resisting its becoming. The unfrozen freezing water lingers as a memory of itself, stubbornly unexpressed in the fullness of form: an unformed pastness contemporaneous to the portion of itself that has passed into the present form that is its future destiny. The resistent fluid expresses lag: the uncaused, "empty form" of time, contentless differential of future-past, materialized as an anomaly within a disparity. In addition to the water that has crystallized in full form and the unbecoming water that resists the actual passing of the present by presenting the empty form of time, there is a second line of fluid transformation: water that escapes the fluid destiny of freeze time by directly vaporizing. The water-lag lies between two limits: the internalized limit of the ice crystals it bathes (access), and the enveloping limit of the mist (excess).[3] The co-functioning of these limits circumscribes the multiply singular event of the becoming of water, access to excess.
At this point, it is important to distinguish "internal" in a spatial sense from "immanent," which has only a processual sense, being too deformationally many-dimensioned to be spatial in any ordinary sense of the word. It is the internalized and enveloping limits taken together that are the "immanent" limit of water. The immanent limit is the superposition of states of extreme. These are abstractly sensible from every point of the process as attractors (by "abstractly sensible" is meant actually operative as tendencies). There is actually a third superposable extreme. It takes the form of a remaining, or processual remainder: the water-lag is fluidity at the limit of its staying power, where its being-fluid runs counter to its actual conditions, which are of becoming-solid. The anomalous in-between of the internal and enveloping limits is in its own impassive way a limit-state (on the anomalous as a limit-state, see Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 243-246). The three limits never actually coincide to form a single immanent limit. Their coincidence is virtual. In actuality, they unfold from or relay each other. It is this co-functioning of mutual envelopment and unfolding, immanently governed by the differential operation of virtual attractors, that goes by the name of complexity.
What qualifies this complex self-transformative event as "aesthetic" for Kant is that it befalls "independently of any guiding ends" (219). It is not for something outside of itself. It is entirely in and for its own process. What qualifies it as beautiful is this "autonomy" (220).[4] The drusy awakens our interest in beauty by signaling that a process of self-organizing self-differentiation has occured. It is not the drusiness that is beautiful, but the autonomy that it expresses.
This autonomy is a "subjectless (and objectless) subjectivity," paraphrasing Ruyer and Bains, that is expressed in the perception while remaining necessarily unexpressed in and of itself. This is because qualitative transformation is by nature imperceptible, always passing between perceptual encounters (entering perception as a leap settling into a disparity). Transformation is only accessible by induction. Induction should be taken here in the double sense of being available to cognition only indirectly, and of being inducible: being knowable directly only in the undivided encounter (in sensation). That means pragmatically, through experimentation integrally repeating the real conditions of the process's emergence. Experimentation draws on all aspects of the investigating body's sensibility, not just eye and cortex. It draws in the entire body, integrating its manner of proceeding into a participatory involvement with matter where, for at least a syncopated beat or two, the investigator is in too close a proximity to the process to maintain the distance enabling of cognitive subject-object relations. The definition of the object, in retrospective opposition to the subject, follows the experimentation; it is derived. As Bruno Latour has demonstrated, knowledge-encounter involves a creation of "hybrid objects" occupying a region of real indistinction between human subject and natural or artificial object.
The drusy, in awakening our interest in beauty, points us in the direction of a non-cognitive aesthetics: aesthetics as a kind of empiricism involving itself with real conditions of emergence, under-with cognitive conditions, or conditions of possibility (Deleuze 1994, 154, 231-232, 285; O'Connell). Drusiness points to the post-Kantian dimension in Kant, or what Deleuze will call a "superior empiricism" (1994, 56-57, 143-144).[5] What is "superior" about it is that subject and object integrate into a greater autonomy of participation, a matter-manner meld adding a new line of multiple-singular encounter to the world: that of a technic, an artificed between of any number of possible subjects and objects, autonomous of any given particular subject or object. This empiricism is "superior" because it is creative of reality. It adds to reality. It is a becoming of the world that is reciprocally a becoming-world of the subject and object ("devenir tout le monde," becoming "everything-and-everybody"; Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 279-280, 470, 473). The aesthetic, understood as an empiricism, is the addition of a dimension of processuality to the object that follows and of a higher degree of reality to the adjoining subject. This applies as much to science as to art, as pragmatics of experimentation. The shared participation of the arts and sciences in aesthetics necessitates a reassessment of what distinguishes them. Given their always-actually-mixed state, at what immanent limit do they return, each to itself, and virtually diverge? What are their never directly expressed "pure forms"? This reassessment is the project of Deleuze and Guattari's final collaboration (1994).
Further down the superior empirical road lie dissipative structures. Kant's thermodynamic reference was prescient. It vaguely prefigured the theory of self-organizing dissipative structures that would develop into contemporary chaos theory (Prigogine/Stengers 1984, Stengers 1997). This development was even more acutely prefigured by Deleuze in his discussions of the "chaosmos" in Difference and Repetition (57, 199, 299).[6] In his later work, Guattari developed his own highly original chaosmotic philosophy emphasizing the "autopoietic" character of expression, as impersonal worlding: self-organizing emergence and syncopated reemergence; auto-transformation in twisted contact with one's own conditions of reality-amplifying participation in the world (1995).[7]
Guattari would doubtless second Pessoa's proposition that the aesthetic experience is "dynamogenic" and involves the production of an "absolute continuum of depersonalization" (258): Latour's misleadingly named "hybrid object."[8] As Barbara McClintock put it, describing her scientific artistry:
The more I worked [with chromosomes], the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system ... As you look at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing is that you forget yourself. (cited in Root-Bernstein, 9)[9]
Guattari would probably also agree with Pessoa that this depersonalization is one with the imagination (Pessoa, 230). The imagination is the manner of subjectless subjectivity in continuity with matter, at its first effloration in expression: at its precise point of emergence out of itself, into perception, by way of sensation.[10] The beautiful, in this view of aesthetics, is the incipient perception of the vitality of matter, its dynamogenic "strength" or "force" (Pessoa, 254-255). Beauty is ontogenetic force at its newest, and most directly knowable, in a worlding integrally experienced in the suddenness of a leap into being, contracted into an in-between of qualitative transformation. Contracted: in intensity. In intensity: and depersonalized. "Disinterested," because at this level there is not yet a subject in which interest in the beautiful can be drusily awakened.
Even in its simplicity and pre-far-from-equilibrium quaintness, Kant's example of drusiness can serve as a model for dynamogenic expression, or autopoiesis. The freezing of the water was a singular event or qualitative "leap" that was no less multiple for being singular. In the event, water autonomously underwent a self-differentiation into a number of distinct lines of encounter, or processual dimensions. Each dimension (crystal, mist, water-lag) had its own consistency and time-form. Each was also a limit-state whose virtual superposition described the overall process, immanently determining the multiple dimensions of concurrent divergence as belonging to a single process. The internal limit was a becoming-solid-form (which under other conditions might be a sedimentation rather than a crystallization). The enveloping limit was a vaporization, or a becoming-molecular. And the in-between was a limit of staying-power, water too late to be what it nonetheless is, and as such, as much a reserve of becoming-solid, looming like destiny, as a remainder of fluidity. The "ages" of water. Striation, escape, and smoothness. Smoothness: an interval of indecision in a necessary becoming-other; a being in potential (understood following Agamben as a paradoxical staying-power, a power to not-be what actual prevailing conditions make-be; 1993, 35-36).
Every actual formation has at least these three limits, or limits analogous to these, which in their simultaneous superposition and divergence define its ages. This is a peculiar kind of "definition," because it is open-ended, the ages perpetually returning to and relaying each other in mutual interference. The process from which the actual formations emerge is limited and unbounded. What the limits define, in their differential immanence to each other, is an unbounded field of continuous topological--or better topo-ontological--transformation. It would be a mistake to align given actual formations in one-to-one correspondence to the internal, enveloping, and in-between limits (for example, the classical, modern and postmodern respectively). First, the limits themselves vary from formation to formation. For example, the "internal" limit of the modern is a fluidity, a smoothing and potentialization, rather than a crystallization. This limit, the postmodern, is itself defined by a complex of superposed limits, including an internal limit of its own: potentialization or staying-power taken to such an extreme that nothing ever happens any more (the rhetoric of the "end," of history in particular, is a confused sensing of this limit, which is never actually reached). The situation is far too complex for simple correspondences.
Since the limits are in continual transformation, there is a continually renewed need for experimentation in order to gauge them. This is the evaluative aspect of superior empiricism.[11] The continual necessity of evaluating limits constitutes the ethical dimension of the aesthetic. Guattari hyphenated his paradigm as the "ethico-aesthetic" (a phrase taken up as the subtitle of the English translation of Chaosmosis). Evaluation is ethical, rather than simply cognitive, because the inductive investigations of the subject re-involve it in the ontogenesis in which it is interested, yielding a continuum of depersonalization setting the stage for a new emergence. The way in which the interest awakened by the beautiful is pursued has pragmatic consequences for the subsequent unfolding of the process under exploration. Investigation deflects. Ethics is the art of processual deflection of the ages. The ethical is thus inseparable from the political, which then concerns ontology before ideology. This is an ontology that is in turn more concerned with involutions of becoming (immanent participation) than with the evolution or progress of beings (which in any event follow). It is along these lines that Deleuze speaks of conducts of time that immanently envelop the subject of knowledge in the same movement as the subject's experimentation develops or unfolds them as an object of ethico-aesthetic knowledge (Foreword to Alliez 1996, 7).
Another lesson of water is disparity. As the self-organization leaps into being or unfolds, the differential ages of process actualize as different regions of space (on the distinction between generative differentiation and the differenciation it generates, see Murphie). This means that they are never actually in topological continuity. The movement of involution is arrested with the emergence of form. Crystal is no longer in contact with mist. They are no longer available to each other. The fluid is in contact with both. But asymmetrically: its conditions determine it to lean toward ice. The actual regions of the process are struck by an ineradicable disparity of contact and availability. This irreversible disparity is compounded by the fact that one region will actualize the process more fully than another. In the case of freezing water, that region was the laggardly fluid, which remained for a moment in an in-between state mimicking the time-form of processuality, or the virtual (pure future-past). Actualized processuality is potential. Potential is always concentrated in a particular region of actuality. Every self-organizing system envelops an endemic disparity in potential in the difference between its regions. Some regions will no longer be in contact with the actual reserve of potential. These will dissipate, or solidify, or be easily engulfed by a more potentialized region of a different system altogether (capture). Capture is a usurping arrest of involution. In capture, a region of expression becomes fodder for another system, which annexes or ingests it into an alien process, where it is reprocessed to serve as a ground or energy source.[12]
The appearance of systemic disparities is the emergence of power. Every actual formation is a power formation, and every ethico-aesthetic evaluation must take this into experimental consideration. It is an illusion to think, for example, that since the postmodern is a time-form of infinite availability that it actually affords equal access (the rhetoric of the "end" of power). It is equal access only virtually, in the purity of its form (which, like every pure form, is perpetually unexpressed: a virtual attractor governing a limit-state). Even in its fullest expression, the postmodern is a globalization of localized or regional disparity. It may seem contradictory to refer to the virtuality of power, if power is an asymmetry characterizing the plane of the expressed, or of actual form. But if a disparity endures--repeats itself, reemerges at a regular beat--it is because the actual form of the disparity has become a process. It has fed back. It becomes-virtual, in return. It recurs as the regenerative kernal of a nucleus of expression. It has become a subjectless subjectivity, or abstract machine (Angel, Haghighi, Murphie).
The most virulent and enveloping expression of processualized disparity is, of course, the capitalist relation. Capital is a form of power in and of itself, even (especially) abstracted from actually existing capitalist formations.[13] Capital is the pure form of ontological disparity in its most global expression. It is the global arrest of the involution it itself accelerates, in a different and complementary twist, as a time-form presenting infinite-in-principle availability. Capital is the power-form of the time-form of the aesthetic that is the postmodern. The superposition of its two limit-states--globalized disparity and access-to-excess, expressed by its power-form and time-form respectively--are the "logic" or processual definition of capital, its immanent limit.[14]
The politics of experimentally perturbing the abstract machine of capital, in such as way as to skew the imbalance it expresses in capitalist formations toward the limit-state of access and excess, is what Guattari calls communism (Guattari/Negri). Communism, in its aesthetic dimension, is the extraction of processual beauty from capitalism, so that beauty is no longer only capital's concomitant in sensation but also, in involutionary addition to that, in another synchronous age, an irreversible escape from its disparities. Virtual communism: the abstract machine of escape from recurrent capitalism. Guattari's (and Negri's) communism differs from traditional Marxisms in construing revolution as an immanent conversion of capitalism rather than an oppositional overturning or dialectical overcoming of it (after the manner of Deleuze's immanent conversion of the thinker he termed his worst "enemy," Kant; Deleuze 1995, 6). Only this approach to communism takes into adequate consideration capital's power of recurrence, or its status as an abstract machine that does not coincide with or exhaust itself in any particular capitalist formation or period. Reciprocally, it is the only approach that attempts to give communism a power of recurrence equal to that of capitalism.
Guattari's theory is the reinvention of communism as a processual "age," or top-ontological rhythm of "depersonalized" (worlded) qualitative transformation. The political synomym of "depersonalized" is "collective." Communist collectivism is a becoming-(of the)-world, a differential becoming-(of)-everything-and-everybody, in intense mutual belonging unbounded by the disparities attendent upon the capitalist relation. This is not to say that it is without any limits, or that it is an equalization or harmonization. Imbalance, tension and disparity are endemic to becoming. Without them, world-process would wind down to an entropic end.[15] The ethical issue, then, is less equality than what forms of disparity are induced to return. The recurrent disparity consonant with communism is neither the capitalist relation nor oppositional difference. It is social differential, actualized in the untimely manner of a lag: socialized potential. The communist movement is the experimental reconversion of already-emerged differences into social differentials operating at a skew to the capital relation, or the superposed power-form of the very same differential.[16] Communism is the repotentialization of existing differences, recharged with the staying power to not-be what they capitalistically are, in order to rebecome in addition to remaining (in divergent but mutually accessible regions or planes of actuality).
This is the drusy beauty of Guattari's anomalous understanding of communism: communism as the amplification of disparity in additive differentiation and skew trajectory. The self-organizing of self-diverging differences into co-regenerating planes of collective belonging to the same multiple-singular becoming-(of the)-world. No waiting life-times for capitalism to crumble. No pretending you can just step beyond it by dint of grim critical thinking or easy cynicism, as if everything and everybody in the world weren't in some way irreversibly marked by it. The beauty of Guattari's communism is the becoming-perceptible, now and in lag, of dynamogenic potential, actualized as an expanding region of being-increasingly-different-together.[17] The hope would be that at a certain threshold of proliferation the skew social trajectories might swamp and collectively disable the capitalist relation they parasitize, inheriting the boundless body of their host. Becoming unbounded, in this world. Without transcension or transgression. But not without limits (nothing can happen without limits). Rather: through a parasitic reinvention of the limit-state, in such a way as to make it sustainable and vitally expansive, collectively liveable. This is perhaps the "becoming" Mani Haghighi appeals to in the name of a postmodern politics of "simulation" in immanent encounter, not with capital but with an altogether different abstract machine, that of Islamic "neo-archaism." Guattari's creative "aging" of communism, at any rate, is the mechanism by which his vital interest in it, and Deleuze's associated reluctance to recant his Marxism (1995, 171), weathered the widely proclaim "end" of communism after the fall of the Soviet Union (which, of course, was anything but communist by this definition).
It is worth noting that the same political process that is expressed in Guattari's work as "communism" can also express itself in the form of an anarchism. This occurs when the focus for immanent conversion is an associated expression of virulently recurrent disparity: the State-form, or the eternal return of institutionalized hierarchy (Dean and Massumi). The State-form is an abstract machine of capture (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 424-473) in intimate differential coupling with, but in no way reducible to, the abstract machine of unequal access-to-excess that is capital. The irreducibility of the power-form of the State to the power-form of capital necessitates an experimental conduct of politics that is additive, in the sense of a pragmatics of mutual supplementation. The mutual supplementation, of course, need not (should not) stop with communism and anarchism. Anywhere there is a recurrent disparity of processual access, there is a need for a politics of expression focusing on its immanent conversion (gender and feminism; racism/ethno-centrism and postcolonial politics; heterosexism and queer theory; to the name the most salient). An approach of this kind values the potential belonging-together-in-creative-tension of diverging, self-differentiating political expressions, over the crystallized differences or actual oppositions that inevitably accompany their unfolding. The Guattarian approach is non-judgmental and radically inclusionary, yet steadfastly anti-harmonic. It is this ethico-aesthetic of equal-access self-differential potential that Isabelle Stengers has termed "cosmopolitics" (1996-1997).
SOFT COGITO OF THE IMAGINATION
Beauty, it has been argued, is the presentation in perception, and the concomitant in sensation, of an encountered worlding, or ontogenetic process. But when we sense beauty, we perceive it to be a property of a formed object. We call things beautiful. What is a thing judged beautiful, reevaluated from the point of view of beauty as a process?
It is the impossibility of painting this. That is what I feel when I see a velvet painting. An alienness and an impossibility.
Can this be?
If it didn't exist, I wouldn't feel its impossibility. This beautifully tasteless thing that impinges upon me. So close that it positively hurts my eyes. Yet from so far away, no matter how hard I try, I just can't fathom how or why it could possibly be. A verified impossibility. Verified by my uncomprehending sensing of it.
This is difference, as actually encountered. Otherness: the being of a sensed impossibility.
Everything differs from us, and it is for this reason that everything exists. (Pessoa, 223)
It is not just velvet painting. It is every thing. Every thing, however banal, is, and is beautiful, insofar as it is a bearer of otherness (that) and impinges (this).
If there was an aesthetic "cogito," this-that would be it. But it is a "cogito" that is a "sentio": I feel. Although it is "I" who feel, the existence the feeling verifies is not "mine." It is immediately the world's. "I feel, therefore everything is." Everything that is felt is: that. Differs. Which is why I also am, in this feeling. The world and I exist, in difference, in the encounter. In the feeling. Being is in sensation.[18]
If being is in sensation, the sensation is not in the "I" who feels. The I is in the sensation, with the world. I and the world follow the encounter. "The given is [not] given to a subject; it is the subject that is constituted in the given" (Deleuze 1991, 87; translation modified).
The "topo-ontological" surface referred to earlier is an abstract surface of encounter, or impingement. Impression. Sensation. The softness of being. Otherwise known as the imagination: the vague perception of the world and I emerging together in sensation, differentially unfolding from a contraction in it. The surface of sensation is "abstract" because if things and I emerge from it, in itself it cannot be any thing, any more than it can be in me. It is all and only in the encounter. Which in itself is in nothing. For it is the in-which, contraction (the actual immanence of process).
The impingement is given. Cognition follows. It is tweaked into being by the encounter. This thing! This beautifully impossibly tasteless thing. This pain in the eye. Where did it come from? How can it be? What do I do now? Laugh? Critique? Buy iridescent paint?
No imagination without innervation. (Benjamin, 75)
The beauty of the thing hits like a force launching a line of thought. Beauty impells thought. It compells thought. It is thought, contracted into the encounter, prior to its differentiation from sensation. All aesthetics is aesthetics of force (Deleuze 1981, 39-43; Bogue; Smith 42-43; O'Connell; Dale; Bourassa).
To think is to have a pain in the eye. (Pessoa)
What the pain translates into sensation is distance. The thing, in its absolute impinging proximity to me, envelops an imponderable distance. It's here. It came from somewhere. But I don't know where or how. The sense of "impossibility" is the "I don't know where or how." It is a relative impossibility: a difficulty of access. I don't have access to the distant region of being that this thing brings enveloped in its arrival. The thing arrives as a roughness, an unevenness of being indicative of regions of existence out of contact with mine. It is drusy. A disparity luring the eye to the extend the hand. The impossibility of the velvet painting is now converting before my very eyes into a "possible world," a region of being I can reach into. I can extend my hand and touch the fluff, convert its roughness into the softness of a reciprocal caress. I can buy it, in the hope that it will bring the distance it envelops into my home, where it will begin to belong to the region of my being. I could even research the production of velvet painting. Meet the artist. Maybe learn how to do it myself. Get inside the head of the velvetine "other."
Or I can simply walk away and leave the thing in its abject difference. Where it in any case remains. You never get right inside the head of the other. There is always at least a kernal of residual impossibility, absolute impossibility. The impossible recedes, like a horizon, never sets, like a sun. But as it recedes, other regions of the world appear.
The beautiful is an invitation to experiment and explore (often declined, its force absorbed by entropy). This invitation is consciously staged in the installations of multi-meida artist Mathew Jones (O'Connell). The braille lettering on the walls of the gallery compels the viewer's caress. The roughness of braille, incomprehensible to the sight, lures the touch, even of those who cannot read it. The body of the viewer is drawn into the art by the finger-tips. The rest of the body follows the fingers, yielding new sensations as it shuffles after the trail of braille. Movement, shuffled sounds of movement, serially unfolding perspectives, depth. Seeing, touching, hearing, proprioception. Congeries of sensings. Synaesthesia.
The pain in the eye envelops congeries of nonvisual sensings. The sensible surface of the aesthetic object's impingement is, in implication, transvisual. Sight is merely the sense of invitation: the first to be hit by distance. The surface of sensation does not just contract thought (how can it be?) into sensation (it is!). It contracts tactility into vision, and movement into tactility, and hearing into movement, and all of them into proprioception. Aesthetic sensation is thoroughly synaesthetic (see Lamarre). As thought unfolds from the sensitive encounter, the senses unfold from each other. The invited exploration is a co-functioning divergence of differentiating lines of further encounter, in the course of which an impossible world actually expresses itself in a becoming-possible by degrees.[19] Language and conscious thought (and its varieties, judgment and critique) are just one (many) of the world's lines of expression.
"Further" encounter. "Distance." "Depth." The immediately proximate topo-ontological surface of sensation comprises distance and depth. Distance and depth are creatures of the surface. They unfold from it, in furtherance of the encounter. They are processual continuations of the surface. They are in the twist of it. Otherness is the presentation of a twist in becoming. An implex, complexly unfoldable into any number of differentiating lines.[20]
This is what it is have a body. To sense otherness. To have depth (Dale). To be depth. To feel a twist in becoming, like a force of invitation to further being. To be that ever-renewed invitation. The body is processual depth--a reserve of potential lines of encounter contracted into the surface of sensation. Sensation is not in the body. The depth of the body is on the surface of sensation. Sensation is the outside in-which that is in nothing but itself. When we think of sensation as being "in" the body, what we are apprehending is a "vertical" dimension of implex lines of potential encounter with otherness. We can move "horizontally" along the surface of sensation following lines of encounter leading into regions unknown to us, whose possibility is just beginning to unfold. Or we can "vertically" revisit sensations that have already been. The body is the reserve of the having-been-in-this-region-of-becoming of sensitive encounters. The body is processual memory. Memory is not an internal faculty of the human. It is a rhythm of recursion to the outside surface, reaccess to the already having-been-felt and -unfolded toward otherness. Memory is a self-referential rhythm of return to the outsideness of sensation: synaesthetic processual self-reflection reaccessing reserves of alterity. It is a rhythm of folding-back-onto-itself of a pattern of exploration linguistically indexed by "I."[21]
It is on the level of language that sameness is attributed to this rhythm of recursion. It is the habit of "I" to say "this," the habitual coupling of the first-person pronoun with a deictic in a recurring pattern, that identifies the roving region of reaccess as the same body, my body. Under-with this identification in language, the body remains self-difference. For reaccess is different from access. An impingement folding back on itself is not the same as an impingement arriving. Processual self-reflection is the repetition of the body's difference from "I." And from itself, as it has been. Under the aegis of a repetition of the same: a continuation of self-differentiation. Under-with language, the body is a processual return to self-alterity--a "pure form," a "subjectless subjectivity," an "abstract machine," the virtual kernal of a "nucleus of expression."
Even on the level of language, it is crucial to note that identification is not with someone or something else. It is a linguistic expression of self-reference. That is why psychoanalytic models of process as transference are false starts (Guattari), as are theories of mimickry or imitation (Genosko, Murphie)--any analysis that locates process in extrinsic resemblance between already existing things. In her contribution to this volume, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger undertakes the difficult task of the immanent conversion of Lacanian theories of transference, in encounter with Deleuze and Guattari.
As sensed, bodily depth is potential (the presentation in "I-other" disparity of divergent lines of encounter). In perception, bodily depth is possibility (lines of encounter unfolding in synaesthetic exploration doubled by linguistic expression). What is impressed as potential is expressed as possibility: what infolds unfolds; what implexifies complexifies. Impingement presents these two dimensions: the only-felt of the implex, and the about to be thought-out of the complex.
Artaud's "theatre of cruelty," as analyzed by Catherine Dale, is the "vertical" exploration of bodily depth in its only-felt dimension of potential. The conversion Artaud works is of language back into sensation. Words impinge upon him in the manner of things. What their impingement invites are breaths and howls and their gestural doubles, expressing language as it can only be felt, not understood. The expressions go nowhere, but back in, in eddies inducting the audience into the performed body, in an expanding and intensifying circle of sensational self-recursion. Artaud's "cruelty" is to collectively express the body as the subjectless subjectivity that it always is, in the depth of its processual vitality: to make it pure form, a "body without organs." This is a cruelty that has nothing to do with sadism. Like the identification it reconverts, it is self-referential. Artaud returns the body to the twist of its own becoming. To the otherness "within" (under-with identification). His theatre presents the deformational dimension of the body's vitality as its immanent limit (see also Deleuze 1981). Alan Bourassa explores the same dimension in his analysis of the immanent outside of language and the limits of the "human."
Artaudian "depth" is an important complement to the thinking of the surface in many popular models of the postmodern. In itself, postmodern pastiche, cut-up, the mix and match of recombinant art and thought, only goes so far. Recombination, no matter how perverse, leaves everything much as it was. The recombination is additive, productive of a supplementary surface dimension. The forms from which the combined parts have detached persist in other regions. It is in the sensation accompanying the pastiche that something happens. The becoming is in the intensity of the sensation--in the interference. If more far-reaching change is to occur, it is in a contagion of interferential intensity disseminating across the surface. It is sometimes useful to figure intensity as "depth." It is more accurately a folding of the surface (as in O'Connell) or a rising to the surface of the "ground" (as in McMahon's opening quote from Deleuze).[22] Standard spatial metaphors are simply inadequate to grasp the processually twisted figure of the topo-ontological surface. It doesn't much matter whether you use them, or if you do, which way you go. As Guattari says, in the aesthetic paradigm "everything works." What matters is to what effect you use whatever works for you. That is the "ethico-" of the "-aesthetic."
Just as Artaud's cruelty has nothing to do with sadism, so Pasolini's epiphany of self-crucifixion has nothing to do with masochism. Pasolini's art, as analyzed by Michael Hardt, also concerns potential, and returns sensation to the body (returns sensation to itself) through a practice of intensification. But Pasolini does not probe the depths of potential, like Artaud. Nor does he, like Mathew Jones's installation experiencer, spin it out horizontally along exploratory lines of possibility already (vaguely) perceived, just beginning to be thought-out.[23] Pasolini leaves potential right where it is: on the surface. He intensifies the anomaly of potential: its affirmative power to not-be. He gives sensation's dimension of potential staying-power by actualizing bodily recursion not as further encounter, but as remainder. It all returns, and remains. Right here, between the vertical and the horizontal (the cross). Between sensation as passion (Artaud) and sensation as thought-perception in action (Jones). Between life and death. Between dead meat and halo. Here, in pain, frozen potential incarnate. Pasolini directly expresses his anomaly by "exposing" his "inactuality" (Agamben, 44), his remaindering, his flesh-lag. Pain is the fleshly expression of staying-power: the non-resolution of the tension that is flesh-potential. Pasolini's pain, and his lag, is his being the atheist irresistably compelled to imitate Christ. Christ in return, and irrevocably abandoned. The atheist on the cross: nothing could be more intensely superficial than that. Here is a contagious alternative to depth for the postmodern aesthetic: the intensification of the surface as such. But to operate on this surface, you don't need scissors. You need nails. Pasolini is not the only artist who uses a hammer. "I want a nailing of the body," declares Francis Bacon (Sylvester, 78).
The ocular-centrism of Pessoa's formula for the arrival of thought-in-sensation ("to think is to have a pain in the eye"), and of Shaviro's related formula for the postmodern aesthetic ("beauty lies in the eye"), is only apparent. It is just that it is in vision that distance hits first. In that sense, vision has a certain priority. But it is of a different kind than the widely, and rightly, critiqued dominance of the visual in Western culture. In fact, it is an escape route from ocular-centrism. Here, being-ocular is a starting point of a cascade of transvisual communication and differentiation. The pain in the eye delivers the body to synaesthesia. The pain is an expression of potential, the actual co-presentation of virtual limit-states or attractors. In ordinary exploratory circumstances, the tension of potential resolves itself in an unfolding differentially governed by the superposition of limit-states. That unfolding is a tendential diverging-together of different sensory lines of encounter. Retrospectively, the lines of encounter are perceived by the subject that follows the unfolding to have been in the hit of potential all along.[24] The retrospective perception of possibility is the recursive unfolding into thought of sensation. It is as thought that sensation enters language, understood as a technic for the collective stockpiling of already-explored possibility. That is: that which will have been felt-possibility (sensation-in-thought) and was on impact only-felt impingement (thought-as-sensation) perceptually unfolds in a chain of action and reaction in-mixing the now actively extended and self-differentiating sensation with socially-induced habits and socially-enforced conventions that gear-shift it onto the plane of language, in its narrow Saussurean sense of a system of arbitrary paradigmatic and syntagmatic phonemic convention stockpiling socially-recognized possibility in signifier-signified couplings.[25] Artaud explores the necessity of language: of its return to sensation, in descent toward the unthought. The road to conscious reflection runs along "horizontal" lines of thought-differentiation away from the immediacy of sensation toward the socially arbitrary of language as the system of possibility.
That was a long "that is." The main point is that the eye invites the hand to extend. Being-ocular is the processual starting point of a becoming-tactile. Becoming-tactile is the "first" processual step in becoming, after the being-dominant of having seen. Becoming-tactile has a priority in the becoming-other of sensation that is analogous to controversial priority assigned by Deleuze and Guattari to becoming-woman in the becoming-other of Man (understood as the abstract machine of the "major," or the pure form of crystalized human disparity).[26] The order of the becoming of Man, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is becoming-woman, followed by becoming-animal, followed by becoming-mineral, followed by becoming-molecular, followed by becoming-imperceptible. The analogous order of the becoming of sensation is becoming-tactile, becoming-aural, becoming-proprioceptive, becoming-synaesthetic, and becoming-imperceptible. This should not be misunderstood to imply that there is any resemblance whatsoever between the corresponding terms of the co-diverging series. The "analogy" is processual, concerning intensities rather than properties of formed things: the corresponding "terms" are comparable degrees of deviation or deterritorialization from their respective dominants. The "orders" of becoming are nothing more than expressions of the relative accessibility of a certain transformative intensity or potential, given the powers of capture exerted by Man and by ocular-centrism respectively. Becoming-woman and becoming-tactile are "first" in the sense that women and touch occupy the existential regions most closely neighboring their respective major state, by the major's own paranoid definition of its perimeters (this is why women and touch are confusedly associated with each other in so many majoritarian cultural expressions, as if they did resemble each other in some way or entertained a priori relations with one another). Women and touch are defined as so intimately neighboring their majors that they almost inevitably overlap with them (hence the need for men to constantly prove to themselves and each other that they aren't womanly; and the almost irresistable reflex for sight to extend into touch). The overlap makes the major more available to immanent conversion by the "priority" (most closely dominated) becoming. Becoming-imperceptible figures as limit-state of both processual series because it is the immanent limit of life itself. It is in the abstract vitality of becoming-imperceptible--vitality outside any particular, actually-existing vital formation--that all processual lines virtually converge (matter-as-energy; evolution in involution).[27] At the mutual immanent limit, there is no "order" (except of superposition).
At the limit, forms of being materially overlap. Forms are fuzzy Matters. That is why animals and becomings-animal are a repeated concern of this volume (O'Connell, Genosko, Bourassa, Murphie). Alan Bourassa touches on animality in his inventive investigation of the limits of the human, in the course of which Deleuze and Guattari encounter other thinkers of the "outside" not-beyond: Agamben, Blanchot, Foucault, and Levinas. Gary Genosko discusses nonhuman expression at length, following the tracks of Deleuze and Guattari's most prominent ethological interlocutors, the fabled bower-bird and mysterious cosmic lobster. His informative investigations convincingly illustrate why Deleuze and Guattari refuse to draw a strict line of demarcation between instinct and expression, artist and animal.[28] The hand, as they say, is but a deterritorialized paw. (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 172) Genosko (and Angel in a different context) establish the all important connection between territory and expression (only broached in passing in this essay, in the treatment of the emergence of differenciated "regions" of being).
INTRODUCTION
The "priority" of becoming-tactile is attested to in this collection by the frequency with which analyses of touch and figures of hands recur (O'Connell, Abou-Rihan, Bains, Angel, Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Lamarre, Murphie, Massumi).
Fadi Abou-Rihan's essay hinges most integrally on hands. He critiques Deleuze's penchant for imaging the process of philosophy as an erotic approach from behind, a kind of "assfuck" begetting a "monstrous offspring" (Deleuze 1995, 6). Monstrous or no, for Abou-Rihan the image is still too organismic, too tied to whole organisms, to hierarchies between identified wholes, to notions of reproduction. Not autonomized enough. He proposes to take Deleuze's proudly perverse image of homoerotic "becoming-woman" to the next degree of deterritorialization, switching lines of becoming from the organic-form series (Man, woman, animal...) to the partial-object series (eye, hand ... ). He suggests an alternative image of theory, chosen for its role in contemporary queer practices whose conduct is as immediately political as it is erotic. From the visibility of full form to tactility engulfed in the darkness of the anus: fisting. In fist-fucking, the gender, sexual orientation, and identity of the participants do not figure in the same way as in heterosex or gay anal sex. Hands and anuses are indifferent to gender, and the practice of fisting cuts across orientations. The aim, however, is not to deny gender or sexual orientation. It is to supplement it with a co-functioning escape from it, in a way that reproblematizes it, forces it to be addressed anew. Is a lesbian still a lesbian if she fists with men? The question of gender and sexual orientation returns with a new twist, on an ethical and political level accompanying the ethics and politics of fisting as an autonomous process. The politics of fisting as such is anti-hierachical. "Top" and "bottom" lose their sense, especially when two hands clasp inside the anus, which in turn clasps them, blurring the boundary between activity and passivity, as well as undoing the very duality of sex by making part-object coupling a tripling (two hands plus sphincter). The line of becoming eddies (eye, hand ... hand-hand), closing in on itself to form a self-clasping plateau of erotic intensity, clasped again by a tightly active environment leaving no room for identity. The self-clasping, plateauing of the part objects registers the autonomy of the process as it follows its own erotic count, unsubordiated to "the organization of the organs" (Artaud). As autonomous, the three-way coupling couples with other "couplings" and non-reproductive multiplyings of connection: it forces thought, begs to be integrated into questionings of gender and orientation, as they figure in larger-group politics. (Autonomy, as always, is an autonomy of connection.) Abou-Rihan's deterritorialization of Deleuze's erotic image of philosophy is designed to renew the connection of theory to other spheres of activity. This is not a harking back to the old problem of the relation of "theory" to "practice." What Abou-Rihan does instead is to make the theory of theory immediately a practice, through its direct image-connection with a complex outside. Queer theory is the "innervating" (Benjamin) maintenance of this immediate connectibility of intellectual production to its own ever-shifting, active environment.
Lichtenberg-Ettinger establishes the necessity for visual art of escaping the dominance of the eye. In her theory and artistic practice, the eye moves into the "matrixial" space of relation, the generative in-between of subjects and objects. The interval of relation becomes the focus of the gaze, "hollowed" of its content. In the terms suggested in the present essay, this "eroticization" of the eye involves the gaze following tactility into the synaesthetic in-between of vision and proprioception (in its relation to gesture). It is following this displacement that painting can become the technic of memory Lichtenberg-Ettinger wishes to make it. In turn, it is by becoming-memory, in the sense discussed, that visual art can effectively render the pure, hollow form of the body in its own medium (as opposed to embodying full visual form, or content, in the medium of the canvas). Synaesthesia is a process of "hypermnesis." It is "an overall sensation in which the thing remembers itself" (Cytowic, 24).[29] It is a memory of the world as it unfolds as relation. Lichtenberg-Ettinger recreates visual art as an autopoietic memory of the world.
Thomas Lamarre also explores the non-representational in-between of vision and gesture in his analysis of Japanese calligraphic poetry. He uses this in-betweenness, explicitly theorized in terms of synaesthesia, to problematize the cultural and geopolitical limit between "East" and "West." Like Haghighi, he argues that cultures and geopolitical formations are best understood as unbounded. Rather than enclosures, they are differential participations: in a single-multiple process of mutual divergence. This does not mean that cultural and geopolitical differences are unreal, or that there are no boundaries. Only that the boundaries, and the rivalrous differences they circumscribe, are derived: not causes, but processual results or effects; not the expressing, but the expressed. The logic of their emergence and recurrence is missed entirely unless it is understood that in their dynamogenesis they pertain to limits more vitally than boundaries, and that all limits are ultimately immanent (as is all causality).
