Trompe-l'œil

I had this thought, one day, quite recently, and it would not go away: a photograph is like the desired object you receive only on condition of it being broken.

What does it mean? Brushing my hair with a flat, heavy palm, I thought about it, for a while. It means that you wish you could write to some office, somewhere, and ask them to replace this non-functional thing, this sad and shattered thing, with one that works. That does what it's supposed to do. What is a photograph supposed to do? That didn't make sense.

I sat down, and sighed, lightly and almost silent. The tea was hot, in the cup, on my hand, against my lip, it felt good. I didn't think about anything, except maybe that heat and the smell, and the taste that was waiting for me, but it was just a little too hot. I put it down on the table. And then I picked it back up and put it on a coaster, put it in its right place.

What was the right place for the photograph? In a frame, of course, everyone knows that. I looked at the mantelpiece, where the frames are. I mean, where the photographs are, as they should be. In pride of place, as they say. Is this pride, that I am feeling? I don't think so. I have known pride, I am sure of it. But it was just one little portion amongst all the other feelings that have crowded in and tussled around and poured out of me in the long time that I have known feelings; I cannot fully account for it, this little bit, this pride. It has been a long time, or no time at all, I can't decide. But this is not pride, to look at the mantlepiece, quietly, with tea.

And you, you are not a feeling; and you are not the photograph, but it is a photograph of you. Does this mean that you are the broken thing, which I would have replaced, which I would sit and write a letter of complaint over, or just a plaintive, humble request, to get a new one, a working one? Except that this cannot happen, of course. This is what it means to say: 'on condition of.' It means you don't get a choice in the matter. There is nothing to be done, and why cry over things like that? Nobody knows.

This does not sound quite correct, in any case. You are not a photograph, this or any other, and you were not a broken thing. Of that I am quite sure; as sure as one can be on such matters, at any rate.

Sipping, standing, I walk over to you, to the photograph, to the mantelpiece, I mean, and think a little harder; though none more clearly, I must say. For a thing to be broken, it cannot do that which you wish it would do. It does not live up to that desire you had for it. When you say 'this is broken, I want a new one,' you are saying or trying to say that you had something you wanted, and you hoped the thing would fulfil that want, or help you fulfil it; but it didn't. It let you down. Does a photograph let you down, or not? I am not sure.

I am looking at you and thinking that, it was a cold day, I didn't have something so nice as this warm tea to drink and make me feel more cosy. What did I have, except you of course, but you cannot drink a person so that they will make you feel nourished and warm, even if you would like to do that. You had a coat, long and made of like felt, in green, and you held it around yourself quite closely. I wonder if it worked for you, or if it was another thing that was broken, like a lot of things, it seems to me, now that I think of it. It is best not to think of it, though.

And on that day you said this: 'Let's sit inside, by the window.' And I said, 'Yes.' So we did, we sat inside, and read, and had something to eat, and watched the outside world and all the things that happen out there, if you watch for them, or just anyway, even if nobody at all is watching. The grey sky wasn't saying anything, no matter how closely I looked, then, or now. I am looking quite closely, but there is nothing.

You are on the left, right at the edge, the cutting edge of the frame that I am glad did not cut you, because I can only imagine that it would hurt somehow. The window shows the sky, and a path, and an old man with a bicycle, and a river, big cold grey river, it is quite forlorn. But you are well-lit and smiling. Thank goodness.

And what else could I want? Is this not my desired object? Small and rectangular, compact, not at all heavy, ideal in many ways, so it seems. I pick it up, not hot like the tea, I can hold it quite comfortably in my hand. I can put it down without a coaster, it will not make a mark. That is some kind of happiness, I think, obscurely: not to leave a mark.

Perhaps it is a broken thing because I cannot understand why it is or is not broken. Perhaps it is nothing at all, just a picture, like in a picture book, it's not a big deal, why worry about it. Looking at it, again, once more, I think that now is just now, with this picture, and then was nothing at all, like when a child asks 'what was there before the big bang?' and I say 'oh, well, I don't know...'

Because of course, this isn't you, it is not you I am looking at now, not really. I don't know where you are, but it is not here, in the living room, drinking tea with me. Sitting down, I think that I have to remember to send my uncle a birthday card, and that the clocks go back again soon, isn't that strange, and autumn is such a lovely season. And thinking is like a thing which is always ahead of you, and you can hear it moving but you cannot see it or touch it, like a game, a children's game in the dark. And then I wonder what that means, but I don't think too long about it, as my tea is going cold, and I do not like cold tea.

Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu

Oh I was a germ culture. Nothing but propagation against form, against the organism, out of bounds. Pathogenetic, a fucking mess. And I asked, Give me just one clear line, just that one rectilinear movement which would not make and remake me again, anew. Preserve me, as I fall forward, going forward good and gentle, from the unforeseen contact, the swerve and dodge... Don't let me be taken away from here again.

'For my taste for death, which was bankruptcy of the will, I will substitute a death-wish which will be the apotheosis of the will...'

And I said it, what I wanted to say, my demand: To have done with the judgement of God, to have done with it, to have done. Sighing. Who could exculpate me? Leaning back, ask again: Who would be capable, on what authority? To levy no more against me the cosmic interest on an infinite debt... There is nothing so useless as the demand of utility. And no, since you ask, I have not slept well. Every night, the dream of my transubstantiation (but only a dream), metempsychosis, body-to-become-vapour-to-become-body... And then; sitting straight, wider eyes. If I could get out of this place, this narrow band of frequencies, rhythm of exhalation-inhalation. I could get away. But then what is a dream (aggregate of signs) if not the possibility of being other? Oh I don't know. Will there be a last breath? Leaning back...

For you can tie me up if you wish,

but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

Being alive, I would say, is something like a roach pressed against the wall of a blast chamber, like an energy transfer oscillating at the threshold and spitting out radiation. You didn't ask, I understand. And when they come to tell me my request cannot be fulfilled, I don't say: I won't hold up here another night, I heard my blood rattling in my ears, last night, when the dream came, or just before, as I reached the limit, crossing over... And then I'm what, an orchid, a wasp? An acephalous block, wandering vector, the clinamen taking me... I feel the fear lay hard upon me, at my neck my throat burning drawing sharp ragged breath. Am I going? I think this is the moment, coming fast. Choking choking and my fingers at my face who will take down my last report? Oh teach us to care and not to care...

I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different

Retrospectively, that is to say, looking back, things might have been otherwise. I could have expressed myself somewhat more clearly. If I said this (could I say it): nature only ever produces bastards, its only work is the fucked up mutation of a phenotype. There are only so many ways you can bend the bones in your back. But perhaps they wouldn't ever have understood, even this one perfect axiom: no beautiful thing ever occurred without a sublime moment of deviation. And so, we will do no beautiful things. The sun is still the sun, still the sun, above us, and will we burn off like the contaminant we are? I dream, I dream, vapour and ashes, a residue. Or, to put it differently, a life. A life.

A Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table

'I dream of writing a book made up only of quotations.'

- Walter Benjamin

Since you ask, the making of a thing occurs precisely in the holding together of some relatively disparate elements. Shaking and creaking, the thing will endure for a brief period, perhaps communicating something of its form as it describes a strange and wandering vector. Perhaps somebody will spot it, approach with a squint, furtively or boldly, and select a component to steal away. Hopefully they enter it into their own minor composition, replete with all sorts of curious dissonances. This part may be some form of idealism, I'm not too sure of the terminology. When it comes to stealing, I do not speak pejoratively - we bricoleurs do not hold to personal property. You should take what you need and leave the rest, I think. Don't cite me. I'm content to disappear, or rather, get a little more imperceptible. Recognised by a trace or an inflection, what is sometimes called style... No, I'm not entirely sure either. But that's the game of it, I imagine. That ludic principle, what happened to it?

'Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.'
- Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont)

And where are we heading? The question is the same at each camp, and I'm tired of their evasive half-responses. It is late now, we've been gone a long time and following each night the day is slower in coming. Every time we rest it gets a little harder to start again, to rouse oneself. Packing bags by a creeping dawn light so thin I could not say what it is we are carrying any longer. I can hear the camels rustling, I don't know what, at night, and it wakes me. Please excuse my tiredness. If we might sit here for a while, see the land fading in a good twilight, not too long, just a minor indulgence for an old friend..? Carrying all these things is a great burden to me, you see; my back is sore and I don't move as well as I used to. I too wish to look on that unimagined foreign shore we spoke of in the early days, but I no longer expect promises. There was no contract, we didn't have time. We were young and had long, quick strides. Nevertheless we ought still to cherish some faint and outmoded hopes. Could I hope that we might come back below the snow line, hear those water mills maybe still beating in the darkness? What I'm trying to say (and old age is such a time for speaking clearly) is can we still believe in a destination? Not a homecoming of course, but I...

'...And now, if store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale...
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
'Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.'
- Lucretius

When falling in space, things may collide. Their trajectories interact in some way, I don't understand, but one can see, plotting the points that... There's something here, anyway. A set of compossibilities, a little world in an encounter (I think I read this somewhere but the citation is smudged). Two plummeting objects, the ground rearing up at them - they won't avoid it of course, but they still push one another, enter into some mutual resonance, an exchange of energy. It seems futile, I suppose, but one shouldn't judge from the perspective of the embedding space, see? Or so I'm inclined to think anyway. What I mean is that (and here my colleagues tend to sigh, or place a long finger against an imperious nose), just because from the perspective of a coordinate system one can see that this pattern of mutual interference will inevitably dissipate, that's not to say that it doesn't have some obscure significance to it or that it doesn't escape the impact... When I say 'obscure' they say I mean 'arcane' and an argument ensues. I won't abide it much longer; still, we will see, I think there's something here... I once read a word I liked in an old book left out on the campus lawn. The rain had wet the pages and I admit it was difficult to understand, but it sounded quite beautiful: καιρός. When they ask me for the manuscript perhaps I will throw it in the grate. I would love to see their faces...

'In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, in such an age aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.'
- Hugo Ball

The first time I saw it, naturally I found it repugnant. I tried to find the conductor, make my dissatisfaction heard in the sharpest of terms. But I was told he'd been missing for some time, or at least nobody had seen him, so I returned to my seat. I began to compose increasingly vitriolic apostrophes to this absent figure, sometimes imagining a physical reprimand I would subject him to. Perhaps I dozed, and I think we had entered a tunnel; the lights in the carriage came up, and now it was even more excessively visible, impinging upon my ocular field in the most egregious manner. I felt an urge to vomit, and coughed a little phlegm into my handkerchief. The air is not so good in here... I wonder when we'll be on the other side, what skies... Of course the more I avoided responding to its gaze the more intense a fascination it obtained. I writhed a little at first, clasped my hands this way and that. My fellow passengers were somewhat alarmed, but we haven't spoken for some time. I imagine they tolerate my infelicities. Nevertheless they seem to get fewer, or is it farther away? And then when I closed my eyes it was dancing there behind the lids, with me even in my own private darkness. I cannot imagine how it got there. And though I must now confess to having acquired some form of love for the blasted thing, I still resent its stealing into me so... Time passes, and it feels more a part of me with every strike of the clock, each failing to bring us back into a light I only remember as it were in a fable, or a dream...

'And I, who felt my head surrounded by horrors,
Said: 'Master, what then is it that I am hearing?
And what people are these, so crushed by pain?

He answered: 'That is the manner of existence
Endured by the sad souls of those who lived
Without occasion for infamy or praise.'
- Dante Alighieri

When I woke up at first I thought I'd gone blind but it was just the bandages on my eyes. I tore at them, and two hands came forth to restrain me. They were gentle, I did not persist. I can't imagine a thing I wanted to see. There was a soothing voice attached to the hands somehow (or so I imagine) but I was already sinking back to wherever it is that I go and I didn't catch the words. Sometime later I came to and I was back in the cubicle. Nobody commented upon my absence, so naturally neither did I. I felt angry and went at my tasks with even greater disinterest than usual. I return smiles with not-quite-improper hint of resentment at each corner. Through the window to my right is some kind of a tree and then the face of the building opposite, and quite a bland face I must say. Down below is the street, somewhere. I can't really hear it often, the extractor fan makes this awful skreeskreeskreeskree sound at all hours, even the unsociable ones. It is easy to imagine it is not there at all, that it's buildings all the way down, as they say. Once I heard a voice, projected through a megaphone. There were colours in my eyes, as when you have a migraine. I went for a lie down. Was this then or now?

'BOREDOM IS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY'
- May '68 graffito

I threw, you catch. Or drop it, turn away, take a drink, issue a thorough repudiation. But that's the game of it, isn't it?

"A Multivalent Liberation Project": Making A Life

'Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.' - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 'Anti-Oedipus'

'Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity; construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulation of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of each of its components, and in absolute respects of their own times—time for comprehending or refusing to comprehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of identification or of the most exacerbated differences.' - Felix Guattari and Toni Negri

'I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON'T NEED TO FEEL SECURE' - Raoul Vaneigem, 'The Revolution of Everyday Life'

Of course, one must live. Perpetually, this demand shrieks at us, no level of abstraction sufficient to dampen it. There is no way out of time, so what exactly am I supposed to do? It's not for nothing that Nietzsche recognised the demand of the eternal return as something that we are perhaps not yet capable of. To think the full immanence of ones life - its humble mere NOW, with no guarantor, no supplementary dimension by which we might orientate ourselves... If immanence leaves us at the mercy of the event, then we have an entirely new set of questions to plague us. No longer must we ask after the rightness of our actions. Such a question loses its sense when one no longer makes any appeals to a reckoning, the eschatological judgement which will neatly draw up the balance sheet of a life. We will not be judged, except by the wheel that will offer us our actions back to us, not once or twice but to the nth power. What might be asked of such a world, which has composed us from so many disparate elements, contracted us into a fragile and inestimable singularity and given us a life, a plane on which to trace some kind of territory, make a few hesitant moves? The most pressing perhaps is this: what are we to do with this life? from which we have tentatively been able to emerge, to say 'I', to consider ourselves capable of something, though we know not what...?

Let us say, cautiously, that the question is really one of power. We run into a terminological problem here - when we say power, there is inavariably a political inflection, a subtext of domination perhaps. A sour taste of the state, the authority, perhaps some Kantian tribunal to be set up. French offers a distinction between pouvoir and puissance which has no direct equivalence in English - they are both generally translated as power. Yet there is a distinction, played upon by both Deleuze and Foucault. With puissance we have the specific, macropolitical dimension of power - power one possesses and exercises from a certain privileged position, power as authority and discipline. With pouvoir we mean something different; we are speaking of a set of capacities, of the actions of which a thing is capable, its power to affect and be affected, the other things with which is can productively connect, the compositions it can enter into... So, before we might ask what it is we might do, how that we might live in the givenness of this life, we need to know our powers of being.

Again, we must be careful to strip this question of the traces of the subject which cling to it. We must be aware that the subject is one effect of our composition, and its fixity is entirely illusory. The question must not become an adumbration of the properties we can claim to possess, for we will always miss the real movement, the activity of being that will always be 'behind ones back'. Deleuze gives the task of knowing our powers 'schizoanalysis' or 'transcendental empiricism'. Guattari refers to the 'existential Territories' that we inhabit, along the surface of which the subject moves, capturing for itself some libidnal surplus and telling itself 'so that was me!'. The central point is this - we are social before we are personal, 'there is only desire and the social and nothing else.' You assemble yourself, you bricoleur, from whatever is offered you. And then you forget it, repress the process in the name of your sovereignity. I accuse you, but I really accuse myself. In any case, it is a task that we can take up or not. But until we know how it is we are produced - the milieus we inhabit, the territories of meaning and desire that we traverse in our daily micromovements, the becomings that we partake of and the things which threaten to dissolve us - then how can we know how we might live?

Things are still quite abstract, though that is not in itself a problem. But we need a few concrete suggestions, a few more specific concepts to deploy, to quieten the shriek of life. Perhaps our talk of territories and mileus, desires and affects, sounds pretty but altogether empty, dispersed all to easily before the furnace of a life, with all its demands and its sadnesses. Well, an experiment is in order, and we cannot guarantee success. But here is a humble suggestion, and one that expresses very well the simplicity of a 'project' and the possibility, forever denounced but always lurking at the edges of our field of vision, of a liberation:

'Our advice is to start with a small thing. First, realise that we are in a social formation; then see how it is for us and in us at the place where we are. Next, descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage. From here, you will have to make the assemblage pass over to the side of the plane of immanence. That's the hard part. Tip it gently; don't use a sledgehammer but a very fine file. Count the connections in the assemblage (there will be several), find the rhythm of its trembling (for it will tremble), slip into its mean time (for there is always time). Finally, create immanent revolutions (small ones) and lines towards the outside (fast ones) in order to deterritorialise and connect again with outside.' - Fugslang and Sorenson, 'Deleuze and the Social'

Let's be pragmatists. Don't change everything, don't push yourself to dissolution, catatonia. Just isolate a set of relations, find their points of fixity, the controls exerted; find the moments of liberation or joy, the 'trembling' that escapes any overcoding. Exert some pressure. Ultimately, the question we first pose is always too much, too far. The hubristic desire to know how to live, how life might be possible. I have said we need these utopianisms, and I believe it. But let's not destroy ourselves in their name - there is work to be done, quiet and humble work in the name of liberation or revolution. It will always be of the nature of an experiment, tentative and open; but is this not the greatest power - the greatest degree of movement, always navigating in the openness of a world never quite done?

We will always have to start again, from the middle.

Things That Quicken The Heart

I.

'He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.' - Chris Marker, 'Sans Soleil'

'A multiplicity is only in the AND, which does not have the same nature as the elements, the sets or even their relations.' - Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 'Dialogues'

To have a proper name is not to be a subject, Deleuze tells us. A proper name designates a pattern, or a style. A set of relations, held together in their heterogeneity; interpenetrating bodies upon which surface effects dance. One attains a proper name - becomes Chris Marker, perhaps, or Sandor Krasna; but the process can be botched. One can always be captured, recouped as an 'I' demanding its due attention, its love and recognition for services rendered. To have a proper name is to be the child of ones events...

Deleuze's reading of the Stoics is the point at which these themes intersect - the 'states of affairs' that are actions, passions, qualities, bodies cutting into one another, and then the surface layer of incorporeal effects, pure events that express no direction but are 'between'. Alice is both smaller than she was and larger than she will be, becoming both at the same time in the infinitive. And the true ethics is 'not being inferior to the event' - not being inferior to that which constitutes you. That is how one attains a name. And it is not a question of recognition or subjectivity precisely because we've lost the IS - nothing persists in itself but is always an litany of corporeal causes which are actualised as events in the infinitive. Not attribution of a quality but the pure activity of a becoming without subject - it rains, it reddens. Relations subsist in their heterogeneity, but something is always produced.

The question, then, is of a life. Precisely, a life; not your life, my life - the Stoical ethics would perhaps allow for such attributions, but their relevance is eminently questionable. Having 'gone beyond the aporias of the subject and the object' one has, merely, pure immanence - the most modest, humble and terrifyingly hubristic of prospects. The final stage of Nietzsche's triumvirate - camel-becoming-lion, one throws off the wait of morality, the demands of guilt and ressentiment, but that's not enough. The lion must become child, worthy of the event and capable of the dice throw that, as Mallarmé recognised, will never abolish chance. And it is only at this stage that true transformation can occur - one can explore the singular points that constitute the existential territory of this strange thing, this life. Not to interpret, but simply to name these things which quicken the heart. Perhaps, with a 'quantity of work' the territory can be made to bifurcate, connect and proliferate in new (always unpredictable) ways... Perhaps...

II.

You're going someplace without me, my life.
You're rolling away.
And I'm still waiting to make my move.
You've taken the battle somewhere
Abandoning me on the way.
I never followed, I stay.
Where you are leading me, I can't plainly see.
The very little that I want, you never bring to me.
Because of this emptiness, I want
So many things, almost everything...
Because of this emptiness, that you never fill.
- Henri Michaux, 'My Life'

In reality writing does not have its end in itself, precisely because life is not something personal. Or rather, the aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power.
- Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 'Dialogues'

I know nothing of Henri Michaux. A Belgian, well-traveled, poet and writer and perhaps many other things. It must be said that no matter how much is known, the proper name expresses only a set of chance encounters, intensive sensations, an interstitial capture. We are not coming into contact with Henri Michaux by looking at his poems and reading his wikipedia entry, any more than he was affirming a unique subjectivity by writing - a subjectivity which we must correctly interpret. Writing, as Deleuze states, is a process of entering into chance encounters, into a populous solitude, the BETWEEN where grass grows and nomads move; it is the process of a non-personal individuation - not a demand to be recognised as a person (the 'genius' who creates against life, to justify life) but to engender a becoming that is impersonal.

So what do we see in Michaux's poem? (The question is not "what does it mean?" but "how does it function?") It is this excess of life as a non-personal power from the point of view of a self, an 'I' which finds a disparity between its inheritance as locus of power and nexus of thought and the actual experience of being. Insofar as we trace the philosophical and cultural importance of the human subject to Cartesian rationalism, it is a cogito stripped of its right to possess thought. The subject finds an 'emptiness' as it remains static within the movement of life, its exteriority. We are again coming up against the risks and fear inherent in following the Nietzschean programme of self-dissolution - of affirming the eternal return as that which dissolves the self as a necessary condition of its being. Both Nietzsche and Artaud, like Michaux in this poem, found a new relation between lucidity and delirium, by clearly apprehending the rhizomatics of the mind, its impersonality. The mind recognises its own necessary disfunction.

Of course, the poem is a lament that bears a number of similarities to the tedious aesthetics of the tortured soul. The poem, in fact, is easy to dislike; but perhaps that is for the best. The clutching demand to possess life and thought, desire as wanting to possess that which one lacks, the castigation of life for failing to remain closed and circumscribed... all that agonising humanism with its undercurrent of domination and power. We can commend Michaux for presenting the subject in such an unflattering light, contrasted to the genesis of life - always 'somewhere', happening behind ones back. But nevertheless the question, echoing Nietzsche and Artaud, of danger and fear in the face of the post-subjective and the post-humanist is important.

Of course, we need our utopianisms - the singular images of life other than as it is. Two provisos, however, are required. Firstly, they must not function as the culminating point of a telos, as the necessary conclusion of an emancipatory process. Rather, they must be the motor force of a revolutionary desire, the potential difference which puts a force in motion but makes no prediction as to the means and ends appropriate to the task at hand. Secondly, and vitally, we must not forget the danger inherent in such conceptions - that this very unpredictability, undecidability of the movements such images demand of us may push us into shifts and breaks that are irrecoverable, perhaps unliveable. What did Nietzcshe know, that winter in Turin, of the demands that can be made in the name of the overhuman? He did not say, he never said anything more.

What can we ask of ourselves? Nothing but the work, a quantity of work...

Becoming-Imperceptible

Neither identification nor distance, neither proximity nor remoteness, for, in all these cases, one is led to speak for, in the place of... One must, on the contrary, speak with, write with. With a world, with a part of the world, with people. Not a talk at all, but a conspiracy, a collision of love or hatred. - Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 'Dialogues'

[A]s Nietzsche's thought unfolded, it abandoned the strictly speculative realm in order to adopt, if not simulate, the preliminary elements of a conspiracy...[T]here is a Nietzschean conspiracy which is not that of a class but that of an isolated individual...who uses the means of this class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole. - Pierre Klossowski, 'Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle'

In reality writing does not have its end in itself, precisely because life is not something personal. Or rather, the aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power.
- Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 'Dialogues'

Our starting point is, again, Chris Marker - the stranger in a strange land, whose home is perhaps the future, or another planet, but to whom all the earth seems incomprehensible. In the most positive sense, of course. Catherine Lupton reports that William Klein, upon visiting Marker in his office at Editions du Seuil, found him surrounded by spaceships dangling from wires, wearing futurist pistols on his belt: 'he looked like a Martian.' This sensibility is perhaps one way of avoiding the two traps Deleuze poses - identification ('we're the same, I understand you, we are just alike') and distance (an irreducible Other-ing, or, even worse, an objective viewpoint, the view from any-place-whatever which is that of truth).

So the question again taken up is one of being alive, being-in-the-world, and the ethical demand that is perhaps primary (though it is not a question of the first principle - life is always happening between, in the middle). A number of my friends are going travelling soon - and the notion of travel has a very specific Western advanced-capitalist sense. These trips are common (a number of companies exist purely to facilitate them) though what they offer to the individual has a variable set of components - "experience" and "knowledge" seem common, and are not of themselves reproachable, though they are woefully under-developed. We must accept that our world is smaller than it was, we can access it at will, we might feel that it lays before us ready to be plucked... But how do we confront it? Marker identifies three ways of travelling, paraphrased by Lupton as 'the gentleman traveller, the conqueror and the one who humbly accepts the random upheavals of the journey.' Of course any individual trip will implement elements of these various forms. But the legacy of imperialism and exploitation should rightly haunt anyone who wants to "experience" another culture in order to come to "know" it.

It is the aleatory mode that Marker himself adopts - being open to the chance encounters of the journey, the conjunction of AND that takes you between identity and difference and happens between you and the environment. Yet this political dimension continues to insinuate itself - the transformation that can happen in travelling is all too often an imitation, a doing-like where becoming slips into a facile sense of equality (the "global community" - or the opponents of racism who advocate the fundamental similarity of all humans). And it is frequently the economically weaker nations who find themselves compelled to enter into imitation, trapped by Western tourism to simulate various Orientalist conceptions of themselves, or to market their shrines and holy places as pure visual stimulation. Deleuze reminds us that multiplicity (which is at the heart of this thinking of 'between' and 'chance' - the way of avoiding identity/distance through a productive difference - a difference that is made, rather than stated between two irreconcilable poles) cannot simply be said, it must be performed. One must do the multiple. It is never easy.

Writing is one method by which multiplicity may be enacted. It is a transversing of the populations which constitute us, drawing in elements from everywhere, composing a territory that is always dismantling itself through its openings and lines of flight, reaching aporias and moments of irresolvability that produce new thought. We have another set of Deleuzian concepts that apply equally to travelling and to writing - the flight and the voyage. The flight refers to a movement of transformation, open to encounters and the productivity of chance; the voyage always brings the 'ego' with it, it is false movement, the translation of a static object from one point to another. With a flight, it is the line which is important, an intensive movement that is indivisible. Perhaps one can precis a novel much like one can have a travel itinerary - from London to Beijing to Manila to London; the young couple and the warring families and the clandestine marriage and the tragic end. But between these points, amidst the points of structuration and objective points of entry and exit, a whole proliferation of voices and images spreads, forming conjunctions and harmonies, multiplying connections - the missed connection, the sudden downpour, the chance conversation, the accidental detour.

The only way to travel is perhaps also the only way to write - evading the Scylla and Charybdis of identification or distance, moving in the middle by multiplying connections. If one returns from the journey with ones itenerary in hand, a set of experiences that bolster an ego, then nothing has been produced, and we have only redundancies at best, exploitations at worst. But there are always entrances to the rhizome, if we are astute enough to spot them, and perhaps move along them...

Infinitely Demanding

'I shall flee every attempt to circumscribe my consciousness with precepts or formulas, with any kind of verbal organisation' - letter to Ren Allendy, 1927

'...I demand phantasmagorical films, films that are poetic in the accurate, philosophical sense of the word, psychic films...[F]ilms in which there is a pulverising, a recombining of the things of the heart and the mind...' - reply to a questionnaire, c. 1924-25

'All problems are incomprehensible.' - private papers, 1931

Talking of Chris Marker led me to focus on an ethical impetus - his films function, partly, as a study in 'how things are going' in particular places, the manner in which people find themselves able (or unable) to live, which is the substance of all ethics (Deleuze distinguishes, on this basis, between ethics and morality; the former focuses on the concrete and immanent practices of life as lived, while the latter suggests eternal archetypes that would be strictly speaking be impossible to attain). On a note of perhaps unjustified optimism, I suggested that his films, and art more generally, might also contribute new possibilities for life - new ways of thinking and living in the world that had previously been inconceivable. An ethics of creation. But cynicism has its response, a response that is difficult to combat in spite of the ease of dismissing it as mere cynicism.

The work of Antonin Artaud has been in my mind for the last few days, and it is he I turn to in order to deal with this doubt, a disquieting sense that I was too quick to be enamoured of the possibilities of art to transform and disrupt. I want to move along three interrelated paths, as indicated by the three quotes above (all from Artaud). Firstly, the struggle against what Klossowski, in his seminal study Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, called the 'gregarious' - that is, the 'levelling' element of thought, what Deleuze refers to as 'common sense' and 'that which everybody knows.' It is thought become unremarkable to itself, residing in fixed terms of identity, the 'precepts' and 'formulas' which make a particular element of life no longer a problem, no longer in question, but nullified as given, axiomatic. Secondly, I want to talk about art as a practice of dismantling these arrangements, a 'pulverising' force which would make new forms of thought possible - and the dangers of conceiving art in such terms, or of negotiating with the outside of thought, its excesses. The third point will be this element of the problematic which inheres in thought, and must reconceived - it is not as such a limitation to thought, but rather its form and its possibility. Thought is the posing of problems that are not resolved in solutions, but create a set of solutions worthy of their posing, and this is an element of a new thought which would dismantle the formulas and precepts that are given to us, in favour of a set of plastic principles; ethics as a problematics. To close, I want to suggest some of the tension between this notion of ethical engagement and transformation through art and more direct political activism, via Nietzsche's proclaimed apoliticism and Chris Marker's comments on his disinterest in politics.

Antonin Artaud in Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)

The figure of Antonin Artaud is obscure, terrifying. The parellels with Nietzsche abound, but need not be belaboured. Both men explored with boundless intensity the relationship between lucidity and delirium, thought and the unthinkable. Both demanded the confrontation of consciousness, the excoriation of the subject, and the transformation of humanity. Walter Kaufman (never the most adventurous of Nietzsche commentators) summed up the impetus of Nietzsche as: 'You must change your life.' Artaud puts it much more fittingly: 'I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness.' Clearly, this is not a utopianism of art and theory; for Artaud and for Nietzsche, to struggle against the stable, limiting forms of thought that function around identity and negation is not an intellectual excercise, but a risking of ones whole being. To combat gregariousness, which Klossowski read as Nietzsche's principle enemy, is not to simply 'embrace diversity' (the neoliberal conception of difference and equality is something Negri and Hardt raise in Empire, and something I want to think more about - but this particular phrase strikes me as a handy shortcut to avoiding the strenuous work that rethinking difference demands). It is to radically rethink life as a process of continual creation taking place within difference as such - no ideal forms undergoing combination, but pure differences and intensities that transform each other through their interstitial interactions. The true meaning of 'becoming.' But to dissolve the figures of Self and Other in favour of multiplicity risks an annihilation - an annihilation which perhaps only those fortunate enough to be granted the legal and political comfort of assured selfhood and citizenship can be so cavalier as to dismantle. For Kristeva, it was only the male who could act as avant-garde transgressor, playing at the limits of language and comprehension. For women, the struggle was to attain a place within those boundaries in the first place.

Friedrich Nietzsche

So, in the name of this annihilation which he perhaps never chose (let us recall his lifelong struggle with madness and drug addiction, which, as the photos demonstrate, physically ravaged him), Artaud makes the demand of art that it be shattering, transformative. The ability to cut together a series of moving images to compose a whole was utterly unique and suggested entirely new possibilities of experiencing the world, and Artaud wanted nothing less than a new cinematographic sensibility that would invade the very structuration of the body, reconfigure the organs. For Deleuze, cinema wasn't merely another language that could be figured in terms of units (phonemes and morphemes becoming 'cinemes') composed into larger blocks (frame-word, shot-sentence, montage-paragraph) but a whole new configuration of movement and the image which needed entirely new concepts to conceive it. Movement-image, time-image, the set and the Open - Deleuze offers us a new set of terms, a new way to apprehend the event of cinema. But the films themselves do not transform our thought simply by their form. Artaud tells us that he likes films, but that 'all the kinds of films have yet to be created.' Deleuze, writing some fifty years later, was able to study some exemplary moments (one of them starring Artaud himself) that were unavailable to Artaud, but the demand remains, undiluted by the better part of a century. The cinema may offer us a new image of thought, but only if the film-makers demand it, insistently and impertinently demand us to think and see in ways were hitherto impossible, to make demands upon the very composition of our bodies and the functioning of our organs.

An ageing Artaud, in a mental hospital where he spent much of his later life

Films, then, must be in some sense incomprehensible. This returns us to the start, but with an opening. If comprehension is a function of precepts or formulas, of experience captured within a narrow band of pregiven and unproblematic terms, then any transformative impetus must come from without - from the incomprehensible or the unthinkable. This, of course, inheres in all thought (I recall a passage in the second of Deleuze's books on cinema in which he articulates this relation as depicted by films but only in the sense of exposing an always-present structuration of being). There is no thinking without a relationship with the outside, which demands a response by posing a problem. All problems are immanent zones of incomprehension which produce solutions that do not pre-exist them. Art, then, must imitate life only in this sense: it must pose problems that exceed all formulas, all the rules of the game, and in doing so force thought to come into contact with the outside, to enact entirely new becomings. Becoming-animal, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-imperceptible, or something else entirely.

Prehaps we have found here another utopianism. But we must not forget that rationalism has its own utopianism of thought - teleological progress, the accumulation of truth, the theory of everything. So many configurations of the urge for finality, totality, dominance. The question must be, if these urges are totalitarian, what are the political possibilities for a movement which eschews them? Artaud and Nietzsche do not presage a utopia of 'higher men' - they themselves lived in a barely-tolerable suffering, a ceaseless whipping of their innateness in the search for something outside the human. Nietzsche proclaimed himself apolitical, and for Klossowski his praxis took the form of a grand conspiracy against all of mankind. So what would be a fully problematic political activism? A transhuman or posthuman activism? Marker says the politics, the art of compromise ('which is as it should be'), bores him. Instead, he intervenes with history, configuring the past in aid of the future. Many questions of access and elitism are raised by the artistic, avant-garde interventionism that may ultimately offer only madness - problems we have yet to properly pose.