Faire rhizome, 2


Browsing through _Dialogues_ (English edition, Columbia UP, 1987), I
re-discovered this "Note by G.D.":

"I think this is what I wanted to to when I worked on some writers,
Sacher-Masoch, Proust or Lewis Carroll [cf. 117-119 for his
description of "diagrammatism" = "pushing a language to the plane
where 'immanent' variation no longer depends on a structure or
development, but on the combination of mutating fluxes, on their
productions of speed, on their combinations of particles (to the
point where food particles, sexual particles, verbal particles,
etc., reach their zone of proximity or indiscernability:abstract
machine"]. What interested me, or should have interested me, was
not the psychoanalysis, or the psychiatry, or the linguistics, but
the regimes of signs of a given author. This only became clear to us
when F?lix arrived, and we did a book on Kafka (...)

"_Criticism_ and _the clinic_ ought strictly to be identical: but
criticism would be, as it were, the outline of the plane of
consistence of a work, a sieve which would extract the particles
emitted or picked up, the fluxes combined, the becomings in play;
the clinic, in accordance with its precise meaning, would be the
outline of lines on this plane or the way in which the lines outline
the plane, which of them are dead-ended or blocked, which cross
voids, which continue, and most importantly the line of steepest
gradient, how it draws in the rest, toward what destination. A
clinic without psychoanalysis or interpretation, a criticism without
linguists or signifiance. Criticism, art of combinations
(_conjugaisons_) like the clinic, art of declension. It would simply
be a matter of knowing three things. (119-120)

[1) The function of the proper name (120-121); 2) [that] "It is the
regime of signs itself that will determine a particular assemblage
of enunication in the fluxes of expression [thus to study the
author's "generative component"] and a particular assemblage of
desire in the fluxes of content [the "transformational component"]"
(121-122); 3) "the essential point, in the end, is the way in which
all these regimes of signs move along a line of gradient, variable
with each other, tracing out a plane of consistence or composition
which characterizes a given work or group of works: not a plane in
the mind, but an immanent real plane, which was not pre-existent,
and which blends all the lines, the intersections of all the regimes
(_diagrammatic component_): Virginia Wolf's Wave, Lovecraft's
Hypersphere, Proust's Spider Web, Kleist's Programme, Kafka's
K-function, the Rhizosphere . . .it is here that there is no longer
any fixed distinction between content and expression" (122-123).

All this is by way of an introduction to _Critique et clinique_,
Deleuze's latest collection of "literary" essays, introduced by him
as follows:

"This collection of texts, of which some are unpublished and other
have already appeared, is organized around certain problems. the
problem of _writing_: as Proust said, the writer invents in one
language a new one, to some extent a foreign language. He introduces
new grammatical and syntaactic forces (_puissances_). He pulls the
language out of its usual grooves/ruts (_sillons_), and makes it
_speak deliriously_ (_de'lirer_). But the problem of writing also is
inseparable from a problem of _seeing_ and _hearing_: in fact, when
another language is created in one language, it is language in its
entirety that moves toward an "a-syntactic," "a-grammatical" limit,
or communicates with its own exterior/outside (_dehors_).

"The limit is not outside the languge, it is within it: the limit is
made of non-language visions or auditions, but that only language
renders possible. Also there are also a painting and a music
particular to writing, as effects of color and sonorities that rise
above words. It is through words, between words, that one sees and
hears. Beckett spoke of "drilling holes" in language in order to see
and hear "what is crouched down behind". That's what one must say
about every writer: s/he's a seer [_voyant_], s/he's a perceiver
[_entendant_], 'poorly seen, poorly spoken', s/he's a colorist, a
musician.

"These visions, these auditions are not a private matter, but form
the figures of a History and a geography ceaselessly reinvented. It
is delirium that invents them, as a _process_ pulling words from one
end of the universe to the other. These are events on the borders of
language. But the delirium falls into a _clinical state_, words no
longer result in anything [_ne de'bouchent plus en rien_], one no
longer hears or sees anything through them, except a night that has
lost its history, its colors and its songs. Litterature is a state
of health.

"These problems sketch an aggregate of paths. The texts presented
here, and the authors considered, are just such paths. Some are
short, others longer, but they overlap each other, pass through the
same sites, get closer or further away from each other, each one
providing a perspective on the others. Certain ones are dead-ends
closed off by sickness. Any work is a voyage, a trajectory, but that
pursues any particular exterior path only by virute of the
interiors paths and trajectories that compose it, that constitutes
its landscape and its concert." (9-10)

The Table of Contents (with details on prior publication):

1. "Literature and Life"
2. "Louis Wolfson, or the procedure [le proce'de']" (preface to
Wolfson's _Le schizo et les langues_ 1970)
3. "Lewis Carroll"
4. "The Greatest Irish Film ('Film' by Beckett)" (in _Beckett, Revue
d'esthe'tique_, 1986)
5. "On Four Poetic Formulae that could sum up Kantian Philosophy"
(in _Philosophie_ 9, winter 1986)
6. "Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos" (Fanny
and Gilles Deleuze, preface to D.H.Lawrence, _Apocaplypse_ 1978)
7. "Re-presentation of Masoch" (in _Libe'ration_ May 1989)
8. "Whitman"
9. "What Children Say"
10. "Bartleby, or the Formula" (postface to Melville, _Bartleby_,
1989)
11. "A misunderstod precursor of Heidegger: Alfred Jarry"
12. "Mystery of Ariane, according to Nietzsche" (in _Philosophy_ 17,
winter 1987)
13. "Stuttered He (_Be'gaya-t-il_)
14. "Shame and Glory: T.E. Lawrence"
15. "To do away with judgement"
16. "Plato, the Greeks" (in _Nos Grecs et leurs modernes_, 1992)
17. "Spinoza and the three 'Ethics'"

While this post has "nothing to do" with our "Rhizome" discussion,
it also has everything to do with the first plateau of ATP.
It was while working on notes for my own "rhizome" work (that I hope
soon to share with the list), that I came upon the
"critique"/"clinique" note in _Dialogues_, and thought the
untranslated preface to the more recent collection would be of
interest. (Please excuse typos).

Moreover, one thing that has struck me about the opening paragraphs
of "Rhizome" is the authors' preoccupation with the book (ATP and
more generally), and it helped me ask (and answer) a question: how
do they "commence" a book such as this truly _intermezzo_, in the
middle? In some ways, this is no problem at all since this _is_ vol.
II of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, and as such, the discussion is
just "picked up," as it were.

Beyond this circumstantial detail, the opening of "Rhizome" joins
other discussions, most notably the "dialogue" between Deleuze and
Claire Parnet that mutates into a _pense'e `a deux_ (a two-fold
thought) similar to what D&G are then (in mid-70s) in the process of
developing as well. See GD's preface to the English edition of
_Dialogues_ (pp. ix-x), where he describes quite clearly the
"in-between" of the "dialogues." We can extend these remarks to the
"opening" (which is but a continuation) in "Rhizome", paragraphs
that propose a radically new "intertextuality," with the term "text"
understood in the broadest imaginable senses. For the assemblage
continues even in this site, as Erik Davis points out: "We are
writing such a book now, here on the internet..."


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