Marie Maclean has recently sent two texts - one to me and one to the list
- that I think are of great interest. As I am sure you saw with the one
I am reposting here, however, Marie is having some difficulty sending her
texts in a Net-readable form. (They appear to be retaining some VMS text
formating codes, but I'm not really sure.)
I've taken the liberty of removing the "garbage" codes and reformatting
the article, hopefully without making any mistakes. Some letters get
obscured in this process, and in a couple of places I had to guess at
what the word Mary typed was. I am sure she will correct me if I have
guessed wrong at any point. I've checked the French references to make
sure I got them right, and supplied the Massumi translation of the last
few words, which for some reason did not make it through.
I am doing the same with the translation Marie has so kindly provided of
the important 1980 _L'Arc_ interview in which Deleuze discusses _Mille
Plateaux_, but that one is a bit more difficult. I hope to post it
tomorrow.
So, over to Marie. . . :)
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 1994 09:58:35 +1000
From: MACLEANM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Faire rhizome, 2
Two extracts from Marie Maclean "Many hearts will understand me: Ross
Chambers, Nerval and Rhizomatic Criticism" appearing shortly in <The
Canadian Journal of Comparative Literary Studies> ......
The result seems to me, particularly in Chambers' three latest books, to
correspond so exactly to the model of the rhizome, to use the term
favoured by Deleuze and Guattari, that I want to explore the parallels.
The ideal in this model is work which, like Chambers', is original and
yet contributes to a constantly shifting configuration of linked equals.
Rhizomatic criticism works on: 'Principes de connexion et d'heterognite:
n'importe quel point d'un rhizome peut etre connecte avec n'importe quel
autre, et doit l'etre.' [Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any
point of a rhizome may be connected with any other and should be.] (M
:13) It is to be contrasted with 'genealogical' criticism, one which
stresses strict lines of descent, hierarchies and, of course, the
'oedipal' conflict for supremacy as each generation overcomes its
predecessor. 'Le rhizome est une antigenealogie.'[The rhizome is an
antigenealogy.] (MP:18) Against the taxonomic rigidity of the father's
line we may set, in Chambers' case, the model of the veritable ' family'
of friendship which stresses shifting lines of flight rather than
authority and hierarchy. Such a family becomes not just the pattern of a
critical community, but, more importantly, a theoretical model for the
construction of criticism itself.
I see such a relationship between critics as rhizomatic, but Deleuze
would agree with Chambers that is is also dialogical in the widest sense
of the word, and it is because of their inherent dialogism that the
Nerval texts are given pride of place. Unusual in the French writer, as
in the Anglo-Saxon critic, is a heteroglossia, to use the Bakhtinian
term, which is not just 'un concours de dialectes, de paois, d'argots, de
langues speciales.' [a concourse of dialects, of patois, of slang, of
special languages] (MP:14) within a 'dominant tongue', but also between
languages. In a period where few French writers knew any other language
than Latin, Nerval was the pioneering translator of Goethe, Heine,
Schiller and the German Romantic poets. His texts were interlarded with
snatches of Arabic, Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish and Italian. Within his own
tongue he used not only the registers of different classes, peasant
dialect and working class argot infiltrating the highbrow codes of the
connoisseur and litterateur, but also the registers of different
historical eras in a syncretic view of a France where past and present
coexisted. A similar dialogism is found in the extraordinary diversity of
texts on which Ross Chambers bases his readings, taken not only from
France, Great Britain and the United States, but also from Canada, South
America, Germany, Spain and Australia.
The immense breadth of erudition and evocative play of sound and meaning,
as one language works against another to send us off on new lines of
flight, is of great value. But even more important is the role of the
translator. Here I refer not only to the actual translation of one
language to another, but to the wider role of the translator as the
mediator of culture and, of course, the mediator of theory. As a culture
is transferred and brought to life in another tongue, it is transmuted.
The fact that translation is also an act of creation is perhaps more
aparent in the free and easy appropriations of one hundred and fifty
years ago. Noone could ever accuse Nerval of a literal translation of
Faust, and yet the acculturated text he produced played an essential role
in the Europeanisation of Fren ch culture. It is not a carbon-copy, but
what Deleuze and Guttari call a 'map'. La carte est ouverte, elle est
connectable dans toutes ses dimensions, demontable, renversable,
susceptible de recevoir constamment des modifications. ' [The map is
open, it is connectable in all its dimensions, dismountable, reversible,
constantly open to modifications.] (MP:20)
While translation today is a more careful art, and few are as scrupulous
as Chambers in reading in the original the texts from the many languages
and cultures in which he works, the openness of translation persists. One
of the results of this openness is a many-layered theory which can as
readily bring English-based theory to bear on French texts as French
theory to bear on a range of texts in which English is either the
original language or the translated and transcultural medium. This brings
a new dimension to rhizomatic criticism, as the rhizome functions not
only at the intratextual but also the intertextual, interlinguistic and
intercultural levels. Nevertheless, a translated text is not a
comfortable text. It is always striving towards the impossible, always
fighting the lack of cultural and linguistic 'fit'.
Yet, just as any communication proves its viability by its adaptation to
'noise', so a text which demonstrates the noise or inevitable lack of fit
between the original text and its translated equivalent produces new
readings of both. It is no accident that Chambers refers so often to
Michel Serres and particularly to The Parasite and its meditation on
noise. Paradigmatic of the productive use of noise which both espouse is
the exploration of the meeting between translated French philosophy and a
translated Australian aboriginal text. The result, itself rhizo atic
(RM:19-26), is then incorporated in Room for Maneuver into a fam ily of
friendly texts where it links with and feeds on other translations and
transmutations.
This higher level of translation is linked with the awareness of the
indirectly discursive nature of language itself. As well as the
horizontal translation between cultures there is the vertical translation
working by means of direct or indirect quotation, which moves not so much
by direct descent as in a kind of hypertextual (or Talmudic) mode.
......
Opposition recognises authority while subverting it and bringing into
question the very concept of centrality which supports it. Oppositional
art is an n art of th ex-centric, which prefers the exception to the
rule. The rhizomatic is oppositional by its very choice of model, which
privileges no centre and no norm. Rhizomatic writing is linked by Deleuze
and Guattari to minority-becoming. Thus the rhizomatic model of the
ex-centric creates links between the writings of madness, of depression,
of the exclusion of race and class, of foreignness, of homosexuality. I
have, I hope, added to the rhizome by examining the writings of
illegitimacy, and many more branchings, such as studies of female
exclusion, are possible, since minority-becoming is linked to the
inscription of alterity. It is that inscription in the works of Nerval
which provided the first and most lasting model for Cha mbers' critical
exploration of the relation between alterity and the oppositional.
Nerval's statement: 'I am the other', predated Rimbaud's more famous: 'I
is the other', by some thirty years. It represents more than the
splitting, the capacity to stand outside oneself, which is a basic
characteristic of literary endeavour. 'La loi du livre, c'est celle de la
reflexion, le Un qui devient deux.) [The law of the book is that of
reflection, the One which becomes two.] say Deleuze an Guattari, who also
read the unity of identity as a takeover of power by a process of
subjectification.(MP:11,15) On the other hand, the questioning of
identity iself, inherent in 'I am the other', problematises the 'normal'
unified identity and the use of 'the other' to define and delimit
selfhood. If I am the other, then the other is I, there is no longer the
unmarked and the marked, an unmarked sane and a marked insane, or for
that matter an unmarked male and a marked female. We can no longer define
ourselves by what we are not. As Nerval put it: 'The jailer is also a
prisoner'.(ON:866) This radical assumption of otherness is also a
multiplicity within the self. The self is no longer singular and does not
need define itself alone. It belongs to the rhizome: Non pas en arriver
au point ou l'on ne dit plus je, mais au point ou ca n'a plus aucune
importance de dire ou de ne pas dire je. Nous ne sommes plus nous-memes.
Nous avons ete aids, aspires, multiplies. [It is not a matter of arriving
at the point where one no longer says I, but at the point where saying or
not saying I no longer has any importance. We are no longer ourselves. We
have been aided, inspired, multiplied.]
--
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
mcurrent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -or- @ins.infonet.net -or- @nyx.cs.du.edu
Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :)
737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142
"AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY
AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE
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