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...