LUDIC LOG

Reading a new book of essays on French postmodernist philosopher and omni-thinker Gilles Deleuze, it seems entirely appropriate that his most famous work (with Felix Guattari) is entitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The book -- Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer -- is one of the most schizophrenic books I've ever read.

I have only myself to blame for my surprise at the book's scattergun approach to its subject. I picked it up, mistakenly thinking that it was by a single author; in fact, Keith Ansell Pearson is merely its editor. Even more alarmingly, all but a few of the essayists seem to be Pearson's students at the University of Warwick. However, this doesn't lend them the toadying sameness you might expect; quite the opposite. They read as if they were written by a group of Deleuze scholars who have never met, or even communicated, rather than people who were intimately involved in the planning of a book. As a result, it reads schizophrenically, like a cluster of misfiring synapses that simply happen to have clustered together. It's disorienting, but not in the good way, the way Deleuze suggested that moving outside patterns of inherited wisdom about the nature of thought left the thinker groundless, with the floor literally unbuilding itself beneath you: but in the bad way that suggests the absence of a talented editor.

The book wildly varies not only in content and topic, but in quality. Arbitrarily divided into sections on Deleuze the Philosopher, Deleuze the Political Thinker, Deleuze the Aesthete and Critic and Deleuze the Scientist (or pseudoscientist, more precisely, although this is perhaps inaccurate as well as unkind, but see below). In the arts section, Deepak Sawney's fascinating exhumation of Deleuze's theory of "minor" and "molecular" literature -- via the medium of a critical reading of the novel Monster: the Autobiography of an LA Gang Member -- gives way to the puerile and terribly written essay by Robin Mackay on how Deleuze's aesthetic sparring with the Kantian system shows the tragic bankruptcy of western pop culture, and how the future of aesthetics lies with "African" forms such as dance music, especially acid house. In the philosophy section, Aurelia Armstrong's cogent, fascinating reflection on Deleuze's debts to Nietzsche and, especially, Spinoza, and Tim Clark's brilliant defense of Deleuze's postmodernism and its direct growth from post-structuralist ideas sandwich a rambling, axe-grinding quasi-feminists thingamabob by Diane Beddowes, who manages to lose some very good points about Deleuze's diametric rejection of Hegel (she cogently argues that the two had more in common than most people, especially Deleuze himself, would admit) in a morass of biological-destiny posturing and decrying postmodernist culture as a "narcissistic cult". Even the tone is different from chapter to chapter; Beddoes' work is impenetrable and has an unmistakable tone of "inside baseball", while Iain Hamilton Grant's worthwhile piece on Deleuze's "demonology" is highly fictive and solidly lit-critish, and Clark's stuff, while sophisticated and intelligent, seems directed to the Intro to Philosophy crowd.

Some essays are even internally schizophrenic. Look at the very first essay, by the book's editor, Keith Ansell Pearson. Early on, he pukes up the kind of metaphysical macaroni that turns people off postmodernism in the first place, in a passage that seems designed merely to show off how clever he thinks he is:

An engagement with 'Deleuze outside/outside Deleuze does not presuppose any simple or straightforward opposition between the interior or the exterior. Rather, any 'explication' is at once an 'implication' and a 'complication' in which the 'new' spontaneously emerges out of the movements of the labyrinthine fold. The becoming of the new is never confused in Deleuze with the 'fashionable', but rather signals the variable creativity that emerges out of the complex becoming (becoming-complex) of social and technical practices, assemblages and machines that function through interpretation and reciprocal interpenetration ('communication' is always 'transversal').

It's sort of like Baudrillaud at his worst combined with Jesse Jackson. But then, a few pages later, he comes up with this amazingly cogent and clever restatement of Deleuze's aesthetic critique:

Thought-machines, machines of thinking, are never simply constructed but composed. It is a composition that brings into play sensation, perception, affectation, without reference to a determinate subject or to a fixed object. The artist who remains uninspired by realism places more value on the powers that do the forming than on the final forms themselves. Final forms are illusions of solidity and stability. The task of the artist is to show that the world in its present shape is not the only possible world; this is akin to Deleuze's comprehension of philosophy acting as a synthesizer of new values. In composing alternative worlds, the artist and philosopher do not conjure things out of thin air, even if their conceptions and productions appear as utterly fantastical. There are no points on the map, only lines.

The book is of interest for a number of reasons. It covers every aspect of Deleuze rather than focusing on only the aesthete, the philosopher, the anarchist; it shines a light on his relationship to those whose foundations he built upon and those he tore down; and it has an entire section about his "scientific" writing, not widely available in translation here, and which I had never read. (It's pretty awful, to be honest. Postmodernism is most at sea when it tries to sound like it knows what it's talking about in the world of science, and Deleuze's "philosophical biology" is no exception; it's pretty much a mishmash that doesn't do much for his reputation. Deleuze at least tried to approach the problem of reconciling subjectivism with empiricism, albeit standoffishly, and to be fair to him, he's more concerned with the philosophy of science than its particulars, but it's still pretty bad.) And it confirms my suspicions that we postmodernists are a nasty cynical lot; in keeping with my longtime belief that Roland Barthes would have found his death (he was hit by a laundry truck) packed with semiological goodies, one writer plays some vicious games with Deleuze's suicide by defenestration, making some obvious but still blackly funny parallels with the philosopher's anecdote of the tumbling dice.

But all in all, it's a hodge-podge that jumps around so randomly and with such a lack of cohesion, the only way I can recommend it is by virtue of the fact that there's not a lot of Deleuze scholarship out there. Unlike the man himself, who was interested in the whole of human experience but was smart enough to make his thoughts cohere, Deleuze and Philosophy seems less like an analysis of a philosopher's work than a dozen different springboards for a dozen different theories, with Deleuze as little more than a jumping-off point.