[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.
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...
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