An [Un]Likely Alliance

An [Un]Likely Alliance An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath Cambridge Scholars Publishing An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari, Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath This book first published 2008 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0036-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0036-5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Bernd Herzogenrath Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and Politics ................................................................................................ 23 Patrick Hayden Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art .................................................................. 46 Elizabeth Grosz ‘The Instructed Third’: Processing Ecology with Deleuze........................ 52 Leyla Haferkamp The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology............ 66 Michael Mikulak How to Become a Reader: The Concept of American Literature and Deleuze ............................................................................................... 84 Antony Larson A Silent Dance: Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology ...................................................................................................... 98 Tom Greaves Deleuze and Deep Ecology...................................................................... 116 Alistair Welchman Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzian Humanism and Ecosophy................ 139 Edward Butler Rhythm Ecology: The Topological Stretching of Nature ........................ 159 Eleni Ikoniadou Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology ................................................ 176 Erick Heroux vi Table of Contents 'Strange Ecology' in Deleuze|Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus ................ 196 Irving Goh Political Ecology and Bio Art: “In the Age of Cynicism, Accompanied by a Strange Piety” ........................................................... 216 James Wiltgen Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question........................................... 245 Katherine Young Becoming Animal: The Animal as a Discursive Figure in and Beyond A Thousand Plateaus............................................................................... 266 Vincent J. Guihan The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century...... 280 Paul Lewis The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Félix Guattari.......... 297 Georgina Banita c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? Contingency, Ecology and World-History .................................................................................. 314 Jorge Camacho Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies ........................................ 339 Jussi Parikka Contributors............................................................................................. 363 INTRODUCTION BERND HERZOGENRATH In her seminal study Bodies that Matter Judith Butler stated that "some have argued that a rethinking of 'nature' as a set of dynamic interrelations suits both feminist and ecological aims (and has for some produced an otherwise unlikely alliance with the work of Gilles Deleuze" (4). While the Deleuze-Feminism Connection has already been focused on,1 a likewise response to the second one—the alliance Deleuze and ecology—is as yet still underdeveloped.2 As the essays in this collection will show, the alliance is not unlikely at all— provided that one term in the equation—the term ecology—will be re-interpreted and taken away from the hold of both more 'traditional' [essentialist] perspectives, as well as from the grip of the kind of social|linguistic constructivism that Butler herself is aligned with. A Deleuzian|Guattarian version of ecology does not see nature as distinct from, but coexistent with nature, and agency here is not restricted to one side—the human|cultural side—of the equation. 'Nature' rather is an open and dynamic whole that does not follow—as the term ecology might suggest—one logic (or even: logos); it might thus be more fitting, as Hanjo Berressem has recently suggested, to speak of "ecologics" instead (57). Although motivated differently, Butler's statement links with Luc Ferry's critique in The New Ecological Order (1993), in which he accuses French philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres of an 'antihumanist' stance which, according to Ferry, amounts to nothing less than a thinly-disguised 'new fascism.' For a neo-liberal humanist like himself, "it is insane to treat animals, beings of nature and not of freedom, as legal subjects. We consider it self-evident that only the latter are, so to speak, 'worthy of trial" (xvi). Privileging the question of 'legal status,' Ferry bypasses the more pressing problematics of what it means to be 'human' and 'free' if these categories cannot anymore be grounded in an essentialist and clear-cut separation of nature and culture, nature and 'man,' human and non-human, as Deleuze and Guattari—in both their individual and collective works—suggest: 2 Introduction we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry ... man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other—not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product. (Anti-Oedipus 4-5) 'Thinking Environment[s]' with Deleuze|Guattari is thus far removed from what might be termed '(intellectual) tree-hugging'—it is a call to think complexity, and to complex thinking, a way to think the environment [and environments] as negotiations of human and nonhuman dynamics. Such a thinking by default carefully evades [Cartesian] dualisms such as 'nature' versus 'culture,' 'technology' versus 'biology,' or 'natural' versus 'artificial'—Guattari has even called for, in his book Chaosmosis, "a science of ecosystems" (91), for a "generalized ecology—or ecosophy" (91). The fact that Guattari points out the relevance of ecosystems, of a generalized ecology, shows the importance of the notion of ecologics, not just 'one world—one ecology.' Deleuze|Guattari's concept of ecology|ecosophy offers a fresh take on 'environment[s]' as complex systems. At a time when "any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred" (Deleuze Negotiations 155), Deleuze|Guattari propose nothing less than a radical re-thinking of ecological|environmental concepts and issues from a non-dualist and non-essentialist perspective. Such a rethinking, I would argue, makes the alliance of environmental studies with Deleuze|Guattari a rather fruitful, exciting and likely one, one that allows for a single mode of articulating environmental, evolutionary and technological registers and relations and for the conceptualization of a general, non-anthropocentric ecoscience. Neither does it follow the oneway logic of social|linguistic constructivism encountered in much of today's Ecocriticism: The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis. (Kerridge|Sammels 5) A Deleuzian|Guattarian version of ecology does not see 'nature,' as the majority of 'traditional' ecological or ecocritical approaches does, as a single and unified totality, it does not at all rhyme with Al Gore's fantasy Bernd Herzogenrath 3 of The World Formerly Known as The Harmonious Universe, thrown out of its proper balance by mankind, the dominator and exploiter, and to be restored by man, its steward. Nature, seen as that dynamic, open whole is posed not in balance, but more in what Ludwig von Bertalanffy has termed "Fließgleichgewicht" (flowing, turbulent balance).3 While still focusing mainly on 'natural environments,' the essays in this volume situate these natural environments in the larger context of the 'generalized ecology' proposed by Guattari, taking 'nature' as a complex interplay of non|human dynamics into account: it is not 'the human race' that either 'stewards' or disturb an otherwise harmonious, well-balanced and stable nature—the natural environment is in itself turbulent, far from equilibrium. Discussions concerned with current ecological crises have attempted to address and to utilize poststructuralist thought, but only few studies have delineated the ecological orientation of a specific poststructuralist. In his by now classic essay (which I am really grateful to reprint here) "Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and Politics," Patrick Hayden provides a discussion of the naturalistic ontology embraced by the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, one of the most significant voices in poststructuralism. Hayden interprets Deleuze as holding an ecologically informed perspective that emphasizes the human place within nature while encouraging awareness of and respect for the differences of interconnected life on the planet. Deleuze proves to be a significant exception to poststructuralism's generally hostile attitude towards naturalism, an attitude grounded on the view that naturalism is equivalent to essentialism and thus to a dualistic metaphysics. According to Hayden, Deleuze develops a "geophilosophy" that serves as an antidote to such hostility, suggesting that naturalism is in fact compatible with the critiques of essentialism and dualism that define poststructuralism. Hayden argues that this view may be joined with Deleuze's innovative ethicalpolitical approach, which he refers to as micropolitics, to create new ways of thinking and feeling that support social and political transformation with respect to the flourishing of ecological diversity. For Deleuze we must not consider either nature or politics, as if they were mutually exclusive, but at nature and politics. Finally, Hayden I briefly shows how Deleuze's ecological orientation compares to several versions of contemporary ecopolitical theory. He argues here that Deleuze's work can help us to think how the concern with ecological destruction is a legitimate post-metaphysical political issue. 4 Introduction In her rereading of Darwin, Elizabeth Grosz addresses the relations between sexual selection and the origins of art practices by exploring the implications of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain. If the various arts are somehow linked to sexuality, sexual intensification and sexual selection, this is because art is a mode of intensification of living bodies, bodies both human and animal, a mode of resonance in which the forces of the earth, cosmological, climatological, regional directly impact on and transformed the lived forces of bodies. Our understanding of art is opened by linking art to natural rather than only cultural relations. During the post-Katrina era, ecological issues have gradually become an integral part of the 'mainstream spectacle.' Although the political implications of such a development could not be underestimated, the specific mode of popularization, revolving around a 'green and clean' lifestyle and ecological buzzwords, has also brought about a trivializing trend, rendering insignificant the intricacy of the dynamic multipolar relations in the ecological realm. To counter this trivializing tendency, it seems crucial to reconsider the ecological in philosophical terms and create concepts that match its overall complexity. In fact, from a conceptual perspective, political ecology "has not yet begun to exist:" it needs "made-to-order garb" (Latour). Situated at the interface of nature and culture, ecology figures less as a detached science than a 'permeable discipline' open to exchanges of the inter- and transdisciplinary kind; a science in need of the regular revision of its propositions and the readjustment of its tools according to changing parameters. Deleuzean philosophy, regarded as a form of process philosophy, is endowed with the capacity to develop dynamic concepts for tackling such contrasting polarities as unity and plurality, constancy and change, specificity and generality. As a conceptualizing machine, it can provide ecology with concepts that complement its scientific prospects or 'reprocess' its inherited philosophical notions. Deleuzean concepts are 'ecological' in the sense that they do not address the essences of things, but the dynamics of events and the becomings that go through them. From Whitehead to Bateson and further to Deleuze, process philosophy can provide ecology with a conceptual ground that allows for the 'complexification' of the current ecological debate. Although such a complexification would already be an important 'further step' towards a truly ecological culture, beyond these political dynamics, 'processing ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more important: the ecologization of the subject. Bernd Herzogenrath 5 In her essay "'The Instructed Third:' Processing Ecology with Deleuze," Leyla Haferkamp approaches the Deleuzian 'conception of concepts' as a useful philosophical aid for approaching ecological problems. For this purpose, she focuses on the cluster of Deleuzean concepts which, by virtue of their dynamic interrelatedness, provide appropriate tools for dealing with ecological complexity: the concept, the plane of immanence and the event. Throughout, Haferkamp regards the philosophical concept as 'the third party' in the continuous process of intermediation between philosophical categories themselves as well as between different disciplines. In his essay on "The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology," Michael Mikulak explores the complicated ways in which kinship imaginaries are (trans)formed by competing discourses. He begins by interrogating the often ludic tone surrounding the rhizome as an alternative model for kinship and politics. While many theorists have taken Deleuze and Guattari's call to strangle "the roots of the infamous tree," Mikulak examines the bioscientific origin stories and the vectors of biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative transversals. More specifically, his paper is about trees, roots and rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured, shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Darwin, Haraway, Heimlreich, and a range of ecocriticism, Mikulak interrogate how the radically open concept of subjectivity in flux characteristic of ecological models of rhizomatic kinship, transforms the political vectors of the various kinship imaginaries that tie us together. Mikulak rereads Darwin's The Origin of Species in order to show how an arborescent logic was forced upon Darwin by colonialist and racist state science. This vulnerability is present in the kinship imaginaries surrounding rhizomatic theory, and in the same ways that evolution was used to justify competition, colonialism, and capitalistic accumulation, despite clear examples refuting these positions within the text, the rhizome as a model of kinship is being usurped by the age of biotechnology. Mikulak is thus cautious in celebrating the libratory potential of the rhizome and ecological thinking, and instead, uses Darwin to produce a careful and historic contextualization that can reveal the ways in which regulatory science and corporate interests are usurping the liberated mental ecologies of rhizomatic theory. He carefully looks at examples where discourses of nature, culture, ownership and species transform each other 6 Introduction in the discovery of Archaea, a group of marine microbes that live in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and who transfer genes laterally, between individuals, as well as vertically, between generations. These microbes have shattered many conceptions of evolution and origins because they disrupt Darwin's "natural classifications" and the link between genealogy and taxonomy. They are truly rhizomatic creatures, both materially, and discursively, and are providing biotechnology companies with a justification for genetic engineering and a new means, through new vectors of gene transfer, to improve the techniques of genetic modification. By examining the way Archaea are being utilized by corporate science, Mikulak warns that rhizomatic theory is just as capable of leading to biopolitical regimentation and imperalist rhizomatics as it is to healthy, ecological assemblages. From his first published essay on the constitution of the subject in empirical philosophy through his polemical critique of psychoanalysis with Félix Guattari to his final work on immanence and life, Gilles Deleuze's philosophy aimed at disrupting the traditional Western philosophical category of the subject. At every turn of this project, from the subject-as-habitus via Hume to the biopsychic of the Anti-Oedipus to A LIFE of immanence, the goal was to move thought away from the centered, human ground of subjectivity to "fields" that extend beyond the singularly human. What distinguishes Deleuze's work in this exploration of the trans-human is his method, particularly in what it borrows from a Spinozist practice of ethology or study of capacities. For Deleuze, the crucial question in exploring a subject's constitution is not "what is a subject?" but "what can a subject do?" since the shift away from a subject's being to its capacities or powers moves one away from questions of essences and towards those of relations or compositions with other powers. While this particular shift in method is not particularly new it is important to grasp the implications such a method has for the practice of thought and of life itself, for such are the stakes of Deleuze's re-thinking of subjectivity. How can one experience the radical shift in thought that such thinking requires? This collection of essays is devoted to the environment and ecology, but Antony Larson's essay "How to Become a Reader: The Concept of American Literature and Deleuze" seeks to show that one of the consequences of this radical shift in thought is an extension or re-working of terms such as "environment" or "individual" to fields that escape simple Bernd Herzogenrath 7 binary definitions of culture/nature. Literature as a concept (in Deleuze's terms) is an experiment in this shift in thought. One of the places one might begin to look for answers to these questions is literature and one of the literatures in which this process is most visible and most livable is the literature of the Anglo-American tradition. It is important to understand Deleuze's designation of literature as Anglo-American in conceptual terms (which, in his philosophy is defined as a response to a particular set of problems) and see this concept of literature as responding to these particular questions concerning the practice of life in terms of capacities and Spinozist ethology. Larson addresses this crucial question of how to become a reader through an encounter with perhaps one of the greatest classics of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, so that one might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake. For it is in this masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of living open before the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an interpretation in which the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which it so often appears, so that a pre-existing judgment may be confirmed, mirroring the critical reading of the Puritan protagonists. On the other hand, signs are often not what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious and vital energy that upon closer examination escapes the pre-determined judgment of the reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscernibility that escapes definitive interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by Hawthorne's famous "bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a textual process has several consequences. First, moving through the two levels of reading, one discovers how the text is structured by different zones of intensity which then feed into a secondary and more important encounter between the reader and the text, opening one up to a larger textual process that goes beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger process, in its nature unforeseeable and incalculable in advance, tends toward what Deleuze would call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the intensities of the reader and the text become something that is neither textual nor "human." That this should occur in a text that so fundamentally confronts the desire to master and read in nature the signs of man brings this study back full circle to the overt and radical attack on the human subject that is Deleuzian thought. Jakob von Uexküll's biology strongly influenced Deleuze and Guattari's account of animal milieus in A Thousand Plateaus. In his essay "A Silent Dance: Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology," Tom Greaves explores the way in which the theory of "Nature as Music" is taken up and developed there, showing that although Uexküll 8 Introduction lays the groundwork for important insights in compositional ecology, he remains wedded to an account of harmony which needs to called into question. This is partially achieved by Deleuze and Guattari's account of the composition of territories and the movement of deterritorialisation. Greaves argues that this account can be helpfully supplemented by attending to ecological phenomenology's concern with the "ontological value of species" and rethinking the concept of niche in terms of the marking of differences which are themselves subject to processes of "despeciation." The appreciation of these processes leads to a thinking of the "milieu of all milieus" or chaotic world, a necessity which marks an important point of conjunction between the very different philosophical projects of Martin Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, Greaves suggests that the distinction which Deleuze and Guattari draw between the intensive line of flight of fascism and the totalitarian State can be applied to ecological compositions, allowing us to gain more precise insight into the threat of "eco-fascism." Deep Ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first is to the intrinsic value of nature, a kind of axiological antihumanism. This has always been bound up with a second central commitment, the metaphysical claim that human beings are nothing other than natural entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical antihumanism. But both of these have traditionally also been connected to some kind of practice that transforms our consciousness of nature. In his probing of the alliance "Deleuze and Deep Ecology," Alistair Welchman ivestigates the relation between the first two of these commitments, and tries to show how the third is subordinate to the first two. The upshot is that metaphysically and axiologically antihumanist claims can certainly be sustained (and have been in several historically important philosophical systems) but that they do not necessarily generate the kind of valuations that deep ecologists want. Deleuze, as Welchman shos, is a case in point. The transpersonal or transformative aspect of Deep Ecology is best interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to undo or reverse those processes. Welchman argues that the most theoretically sophisticated resources for this kind of critique come from philosophical phenomenology. But phenomenology is officially neutral about metaphysical issues and in fact conceptually hostile to any kind of metaphysical naturalism. Such theoretically sophisticated views offer a way of reconceptualising nature that is important and significant, but often in the context of a sustained and even deepened understanding of the Bernd Herzogenrath 9 metaphysical distinctness of human beings. Metaphysical naturalism on the other hand, can make use of ideological critique of the concept of nature, but does so in the service of a changed understanding not only of nature, but also of human beings as natural products. In other words, it is the first two commitments that are really conceptually distinctive of Deep Ecology; transformation is subordinated to them. What can be learned from the encounter is the importance of conceptual revision, and this applies not only to the concepts of the human person and nature, but also to the concept of valuation. According to Welchman, there are three possible ways of thinking the relation between the axiological and metaphysically antihumanist commitments of Deep Ecology. They may be separate; axiological commitments may be 'projected' onto nature; or nature may in some sense be the source of valuations. Welchman rejects the first two as ultimately incompatible with naturalism and shows that Deleuze champions the third. But Deleuze's conception of the values posited in and by nature (quite distinct from the phenomenologically projective account of a weave of fact and value based on human interests) differs significantly from the valuation deep ecologists need. Welchman proposes a diagnosis of this difference: Deep Ecology is still rooted in an understanding the axiological contribution of metaphysical naturalism based and made explicit in Schopenhauer's morality of sympathy or co-feeling. But Deleuze sees this as having undergone a successful Nietzschean critique resulting in a valuative preference not for the interests of natural entities (as in Deep Ecology) but for the interesting as such (which he—along with Guattari— gives a quite technical definition for). Edward Butler's essay "Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzean Humanism and Ecosophy" applies Deleuzean thought to the project of subverting the opposition between humanism and ecocentrism. The essay takes its title from the Hercules presented by Deleuze as the conceptual persona of Stoicism in The Logic of Sense, who "ascends or descends to the surface in every conceivable manner," who "brings back the hell-hound and the celestial hound, the serpent of hell and the serpent of the heavens … in his dual battle against both depth and height" (132). Butler takes Luc Ferry's humanistic critique of Deep Ecology as his starting point. Even if critics such as Ferry are correct that the liberating aspects of the Enlightenment project were only thinkable historically as involving a negation of the natural order as it was then conceived, nevertheless, it is not necessary to reaffirm the conditions of the historical emergence of these ideas in order for the ideas themselves to continue to operate, unless no other origin can 10 Introduction be thought for them even in principle. It is easy, however, to imagine the liberatory potential of the Enlightenment having been released without being accompanied by a conception of the human as essentially "antinatural"—namely under a different conception of Nature. A humanism worthy of the name must speak to the genuine conditions under which humans may develop their potential; and this does not come about through opposing humanity to a Nature conceived as a static realm of reified essences, because it cuts off humans from what is liberatory in human nature and in nature itself relative to reified cultural essences and imprisoning traditions. Ferry underestimates the liberatory potential of naturalistic discourses past and present. To be cosmopolitan, to be nourished by difference, is not "antinatural" at all; it is vitality and maturity. At the same time, however, Butler argues, an ecosophy which fails to locate humanity's best and worst potentials within the natural order fails as well, because it mystifies the relationship between humans and Nature and obscures human agency in the constitution of value. What is needed is not a lapsarian narrative about humanity's fall from natural grace, but a thoroughly naturalistic genealogy of morals. Furthermore, the fundamental ecosophic thesis of the intrinsic value of living beings and ecosystems loses its significance if individuals are dissolved in a totalizing conception of Nature such as is sometimes met with in the rhetoric of Deep Ecology. A Deleuzean ecosophy can contribute both to the defense of Deep Ecology from its critics, and to the internal critique and reform of Deep Ecology itself. Butler proceeds to identify some key elements of a Deleuzean ecosophy. Deleuze's basic ethical principle, derived from his reading of Spinoza, is that "the good or strong individual is the one who exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his lifetime" (Practical Philosophy 41). This fullness or intensity can, in turn, be measured by the criterion of the diversity of wills compossible with an essence, because death expresses the limitations of an essence. The more perfect essence is that in which the greater diversity of wills is compossible, individuation according to such an essence generating a plane of immanence with a greater internal complexity. Developing this calculus involves a distinction between a mere disintegration into atoms and a genuine monadological pluralism incorporating respect for the diversity of the orders of reality. Human nature is neither reified nor negated in this ecosophy, but represents a zone of contestation, just like the nature or essence of every living thing or natural system. The ecosophical concept of intrinsic value acquires its ethical force, not by positing a transcendent source for value, Bernd Herzogenrath 11 but by recognizing an individuative striving in natural beings that is at once and as such the striving to constitute a plane of immanence whose intensive complexity, by expressing the maximal multiplicity of values, approximates the absolute velocity of thought. According to Deleuze, and with Spinoza: "No one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of" (125). Existence is a test, as of chemical composition. If humanity, or a particular human, turns out not to be what it might have been, nevertheless something or someone else has that nature, that essence; hence the degree of imperfection of the world in which we live is expressed by the presence of ideals. This theory is explicated in relation to a thought-experiment about humanity and an imaginary alien race posed by Arne Naess in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989). Butler's essay concludes with a brief exposition of the sense of this particular image of the deathless essence. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Le Corbusier poses the question 'Can cities be improved by design?' prompting an era of architecture that divided the environment between natural and artificial. Consistent with traditional Western philosophy and science, modern architecture tended to equate the improvement of human condition with the harmonisation of the world's flow. Space, in this spirit of social design, was based on the idea of free movement and a desire to ease the body through it. The inherent Cartesianism within these disciplines presupposed an ocularcentric relationship between human body and environment as two different elements in communication: the perceiver and the perceived. The human body - as perceiver - assumes a central perspective in relation to the environment, while the latter - as perceived - is 'simply there before us'. However, contemporary examples of spatial regeneration in architecture and relational art are characterized by a shift from stable form to abstract force. No longer able to distinguish between the fuzzy and continuous generation of complexity between body, technology and environment, we need new theories and practices with which to conceive them together. Eleni Ikoniadou's essay "Rhythm Ecology: The Topological Stretching of Nature," poses the question: If communication (between perceiver and perceived) is conceived at the level of sensory perception, then how do we account for body and environment beyond the limits of our own experience? Can we rethink them together from the standpoint of 'rhythmic topology' within one system of potentiality? Topology, according to Massumi and DeLanda, is the branch of mathematics concerned with spatial properties preserved under bicontinuous deformation (stretching without tearing or gluing). Considered topologically, 12 Introduction a body surpasses the restriction of essences (what it is) and enters the realm of assemblages (what it can do in its entanglements with other bodies). Away from the replacement of a visual perspective of space by a sonic one, this paper explores rhythm as a relational tension between body and milieu, a mode 'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology addresses the virtuality of unfinished and unnatural bodies to conceptualise an ecological becoming that stretches beyond our knowledge of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for ecology, Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualisation of an altogether new nature. Although Félix Guattari was personally active in Green politics and published several works about "ecosophy" and the complex transversal connections between "the three ecologies" of psyche, society, and natural environment, nevertheless he is neither recognized nor discussed among ecologists and also literary ecocritics, with very few exceptions to be noted. Erick Heroux counters the silence that has failed to respond to Guattari's challenging contributions—his essay on "Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology" shows how his work borrows from an alternative tradition of theoretical biology: cybernetic systems and cognitive biology. Guattari often referred to scientists such as Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ilya Prigogine—all major figures in the early development of the contemporary science of complexity. By briefly introducing the key scientific concepts that Guattari borrows, we will more readily grasp how he also transformed and extended these concepts. For example, to comprehend what he means by "machinic assemblages" it is very helpful to know how Maturana and Varela described the biological cell as an "autopoetic machine" and how Bateson described "mind" or a cognition that was always already coextensive with simple living systems. Guattari further theorized this alternative tradition with and for his transdisciplinary and social concerns. The bulk of this essay describes the differences between the mainstream science of ecology, the alternative tradition coming out of theoretical biology, and finally Guattari's unique and extensive retheorization of these. His ecosophy of "chaosmosis" would greatly clarify and benefit contemporary political ecology, and also will most likely be of keen interest for the emerging subfield of "biosemiotics." Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus is first ecology before it is ethology or nomadology. The concepts of becominganimal, the refrain, and the nomadic war-machine, are always already born Bernd Herzogenrath 13 from a certain engagement with Nature's telluric space, its air, its wind, its landscape of flora and fauna, and its movement of waters. Any understanding of these concepts without taking account of the ecological grounding is an incomplete one. But one should not however expect an amicable relation between Nature and thought in A Thousand Plateaus. As Irving Goh, in his essay on "'Strange Ecology' in Deleuze|Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus" argues, there is a violent economy between Nature and philosophy there. Philosophy strikes out at Nature. But Nature never remains as a passive victim. In A Thousand Plateaus, it strikes back. Nature bears a violent force here. It is a movement of pure deterritorialization that sweeps up any grounded habitation [this understanding of Nature is certainly traceable to Bataille's ecology, where the life of the planet is endowed by the passage of a cosmic or solar line of luxurious energy expenditure]. And yet this "strange ecology" in A Thousand Plateaus, to use Deleuze's term in a dialogue with Claire Parnet, does not end in a nihilistic nothingness for either or both of these entities. In fact, through the combat between Nature and philosophy, each will realize that each equally needs the violence of the other not only to sustain itself but also to carry it to another level, to engender a creative line within itself. James Wiltgen's "Abstract Composition: The Problem of Thought-Art in the 4th Machinic Age," begins with a brief look at the Large Hadron Collidor as it seeks to crash subatomic particles into each other at near the speed of light, and the current (anti-) cosmological argument that the universe has increased its rate of expansion dramatically, or the latest return of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What do these forces tell us about the current relations between science, culture, and the world? Turning to Deleuze and Guattari, the question becomes how to actualize various possible assemblages, and ways in which strata can be thought in light of the conceptualization of what exists as the 'infinitely folded up infinite.' After a brief glance at Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, Wiltgen focuses on issues of abstract composition: how can composition be engaged, how to pursue abstract vital lines, and the typology of the shift from the mode of production to the mode of connection. What lies beyond the human and how can nonhumans, things, animals, monsters, phantasms, actants, and other forms of random strata be integrated in different manners. Will it be possible to, as Nietzsche posed, "let the earth become lightness"? In a second part, Wiltgen's essay examines the work of Bruno Latour, first with We Have Never Been Modern but more importantly The Politics 14 Introduction of Nature. The provocative argument in the latter seeks to jettison the concept Nature and replace it with a praxis of the 'politics of ecology.' On what does Latour base his argument, how does this translate into a set of practices, and what connections does it have with D & G, in particular the material cited above? In other words, how to understand the call for the 'progressive composition of a common world.' Isuues of materiality, flows and the regime of computation are examined via the work of N. Katherine Hayles; and the importance of sexual bifurcation and the relation between matter and life in the work of Elizabeth Grosz. The pressing issue here concerns the ways in which the world, the earth and the cosmos can be analyzed as most productive for affirmative forms of change. In the last section, Wiltgen develops a view of current artists' interventions into these areas: two points of entry—the MOMA exhibit entitled Design and the Elastic Mind, with its 'bioengineered crossbreeds, temperamental robots, and spermatozoa imprinted with secret texts' (Ourousoff); and the work of a series of bioartists, including Eduardo Kac, and the 'semi-living art' created by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. How have boundaries between the biological and the technical become fuzzy, blurred and eroded? What ways will oocyte fusion, haploidization, and human cloning alter our thinking, our politics and the means of addressing the staggering issues of sustainable modes of living? In what ways can the planet move toward what Bataille called a 'general economy'? Animals centrally appear in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980), as the impossible limit and the figurative possibility of the Body without Organs (BwO), the anti-organism that resists particular assemblage, significance and subjectification. Accordingly, animals become living metaphors for the multiplicity of human desire, or the becoming-animal of humans. In her essay "Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question," Katherine Young explores the central concern of how we can negotiate the virtual (animal bodies) and the actual (becoming-animal) in Deleuze and Guattari with a project of animal advocacy. However, instead of laying the framework for Deleuzean animal politics, Young's essay critically analyzes Deleuze and Guattari's underlying anthropocentric implications. In other words, before we can strike an uneasy alliance between Deleuze and Guattari and contemporary political projects like animal rights, we must take them to their (Deleuzean) limits with regard to the animal question. Vincent J. Guihan also focuses on 'the Animal Question,' though from a perspective different from Young's. His essay "Becoming Animal: The Bernd Herzogenrath 15 Animal as a Discursive Figure in and Beyond A Thousand Plateaus" addresses the question of "becoming animal" as a relatively small but very important part of A Thousand Plateaus. Becoming animal functions in a number of key ways, but to summarize these, it encourages the adoption and practice of a more dialogic relationship with both animals and nature with as an Other rather than merely instruments to be used. First, it draws out, like any kind of anthropomorphism (intentionally or not), the prospect that species difference is often a culturally mediated and/or socially constructed phenomena like race, gender or other elements of human subjectivity. In that sense, becoming animal provides ecocritical thinkers with a tool to trouble one of the longest standing and least-interrogated bases for domination in Western thought and one of the major justifications for environmentally unsustainable living: speciesism—the view that human beings, as human beings, have greater inherent moral worth than other species and that they in particular and the environment as a whole exist for human use. Second, it provides us with a basis to at least trouble if not actually think or work outside of the human/animal/nature dichotomies that a number of ethicists have insisted that we must begin to trouble. Becoming animal provides us with a way of comprehending ourselves as human beings within a broader framework if environmental interdependency — not just in terms of our political will and rational reflection or in terms of how to we might manage and police nature better as a superspecies — but as a ways of reimagining ourselves as beings dependent on the ecosystem (a condition that, although obviously true, has been denied to the point of becoming debatable, as the debate around global warming currently evinces). Finally, becoming animal in particular and the rhizomatic in general provides us with a way to think outside of biopower, to use Foucault's term, as the primary way of ordering the relationship between human and non-human animals and the environment. Plants, animals, and the milieu of life have all been special themes in art for many thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic. Recently, however, artists have begun to assume a more assertive and radical position in this entangled history of life, nature and art. For the past ten years, a few artists have been presenting sophisticated genetic and biological experiments as works of art. Some works are commissioned, while others are the product of research and production undertaken by the artists themselves. In any case, as Paul Lewis argues in his essay "The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century," the living organism, plant and animal tissue, the cell, the genome—all these have entered as raw materials into the practice of art. 16 Introduction Laura Cinti has exhibited genetically altered cactus plants that allegedly express human hair. Oron Catts and the Tissue Culture & Art Project have created sculptures of semi-living tissue, including several pairs of pig wings and a ¼ scale human ear. Eduardo Kac failed to produce GFP K-9, the green fluorescent dog he envisioned in 1998, but he went on to exhibit a similarly engineered transgenic rabbit two years later, borrowing from a marine jellyfish genetic material that had itself been altered in the laboratory. These gratuitous creatures occupy an uncanny place in the zoological world. Their extravagance as artworks derives from the fact that they are not representations of monstrous animals—as one sees in the works of Bosch, for example—but are in fact living constituents of the biotic community. They are alive. Whatever impact these experiments may have within art criticism, their full cultural significance is much greater still. For the "anomalous" construction of artificial life forms in art is but a cultural appropriation of "normal" practices in biomedicine, molecular biology, and agriculture. Life as an artifact first began to proliferate in the landless ecosystem of the scientific laboratory. Reflecting the artifice of its life forms, the modern biological laboratory is itself a heterogeneous ecology shaped by venture capitalists, public health initiatives, patent lawyers, government budgets, postcolonial political antagonisms, academic bureaucracies, and personal obsessions. Now artists have directly asserted some cultural rights over the play of forces that constitute life, and their works have therefore extended the already complex political ecology of the laboratory in an unexpected direction. The future of these experiments in art will undoubtedly deepen our ongoing historical confrontation with the most fundamental concepts of ecology. The important questions, according to Lewis—such as What is an organism? What is a niche or a habitat? What is natural? What is a nonhuman environment—appear now, more than ever, to be embedded in a deterritorialized struggle among social forces over a biological domain that has itself become deterritorialized. This is a schizoid collision of sociopolitical and ontological dimensions, a collision in which the natural and the artificial exist not as a duality but as a multiplicity. In many important respects, the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari address this "flow of disjunctive forces" between the natural and the artificial. Their profound and sometimes outrageous attempt to sharpen the edge of process philosophy into specific biological speculations and metaphors has left a rich, but by no means perfect, language for new conceptual problems in the science and art of ecology. The recent emergence of genetic and biological experimentation in art, itself an uneasy alliance, provides an Bernd Herzogenrath 17 irresistible opportunity to test the uneasy alliance between Deleuze, Guattari, and the future of ecology. One of the current development of traditional environmentalist thought tends toward the inclusion of an "ecology of desire" (Heller) and "mental ecology" (Guattari) under the concerted influence of the 'ethical turn' and the 'turn to affect' in the humanities and social sciences. Since it has not been shown whether such new paradigms have found an echo in parallel literary trends or can be used as a heuristic for literary criticism, it is the purpose of this essay to take a first step in that direction. Annie Dillard's novel The Maytrees marks a perspective shift from the life of nature described in Dillard's earlier eco-theological writings—such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974—to the life of the mind best showcased in this untypical narrative about a marriage and family union that does not follow the prescribed norms of moral convention. Dillard's engagement with the crisis of romantic life and its 'ecological' resolution, Georgiana Banita argues, is in keeping with Félix Guattari's transition from a natural to a personal ecosophy, as reflected in the gradual evolution of this concept in his work. While it shares with traditional ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere, ecosophy also acknowledges that 'incorporeal species' and 'mental ecology' are equally endangered and in crisis. Banita's reading of The Maytrees in her essay "The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Félix Guattari" seizes opportunities offered by ecocriticism and ecosophy to make good on literature's ethical investment and reaffirm its social responsibility. Banita reveals how the novel builds on its explicit environmental premises to develop an ecology of love relations and their impact on the characters' awareness of themselves, their natural and mental environment, as well as their complex rapport with time, both interior and exterior, subjective and concrete, psychological and narratological. In doing so, she aligns herself with Félix Guattari's tripartite ecological approach as it is espoused in his essay The Three Ecologies, where he proposes a shift from a purely technocratic perspective in ecological action toward an ethico-political articulation comprising three ecological registers: the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity (28). Dillard's novel, as Banita shows, is a hybrid illustration of Guattari's social ecosophy—which consists in "developing specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family" (34)—and his mental ecosophy, leading us "to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the 'mysteries' of life and death" (35). 18 Introduction In his essay "c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? Contingency, Ecology and World-History," Jorge Camacho follows up on Deleuze and Guattari's marginal but recurrent concern with the problem of finding a historical explanation for the development of capitalism in Europe vis-à-vis its non-development in China. Its relevance is two-fold. On the one hand, this problem—and the way it was treated in historical research between Marx or Dobb and Braudel or Chaunu—serves Deleuze and Guattari as a concrete example of a first principle that allows them to revisit and reframe the old topic of Universal History. Such principle, which they enigmatically relate to Marx's thought, entails that history ought to be conceived as the work of pure contingency. Implicit here is, of course, a particular reading and critique of a German tradition (perhaps Kant or Herder, but certainly Hegel) that stressed the role of necessity, rationality and teleology. For Deleuze and Guattari, the historical course in general and, in particular, the sequence leading to the emergence of capitalism, is a concatenation of contingent events: it could have happened differently, elsewhere, in another moment in history or not happened at all. Moreover, their universal history is retrospective from the point of view of capitalism. For them, capitalism is a potential that has haunted all forms of society and it is from this virtual position that it has shaped—negatively, as a nightmare to be warded-off—all the social machines that have emerged in this planet. This being so, what is perplexing for them is nothing but precisely its singularity, the fact that it fully developed only once and in 'one place,' thus Camacho asks with them: why in Europe? Why not in China? On the other hand, the problem is relevant in the context of this collection because it prompts Deleuze and Guattari to invoke ecological determinations for the course of world history. In the rather sweeping and marginal explanation proposed in the Treatise on Nomadology, they follow Annales-school historians like Braudel in locating the first 'deep cause' in the rather different ecological geographies of Europe and China, and the concomitant agro-technological infrastructures associated with wheat and rice cultivation. Arguably, beyond any form of determinism, Deleuze and Guattari's interest for such geohistorical explanation is precisely the role it grants to concrete contingency in detriment of abstract rationality. In this way, the objective of Camacho's essay is to revisit and disentangle this problem drawing from historical research that has put an emphasis on its ecological dimension. Most importantly, traveling along these lines it will be possible to extricate the fundamentally ecological Bernd Herzogenrath 19 character of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy; in particular, their conception of social formations as heterogeneous assemblages composed and shaped by much more than just people. The body of animals, more specifically insects, are media in their own kind. For Jussi Parikka, this means expanding the familiar notions of "media" towards a Deleuzian framework where the term resonates with an ecological understanding of bodies. Bodies are vibrations and foldings with their environments, a theme that was developed in ethological research and then adopted to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Parikka's essay "Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies" shows how this theme is useful in a reconceptualization of media as an environment of interactions, translations and foldings between heterogeneous bodies. In this context, animal bodies mediate and contract not only the rhythms of nature, but are mediated as part of the construction of modern media as well, as conceptual figures but also through the measures of biopower inherent for instance in physiological research. By excavating a certain archaeology of Deleuze's ideas, especially Bergson's notions regarding "insects technics" as elaborated recently by Elizabeth Grosz, Parikka attempts to think through some of the consequences of what a more environmental, ecological and biophilosophical understanding of "media" could entail. In this context, media is considered somewhat parallel to a Deleuzian understanding of a body: it is a force field, a potentiality, an intersection point where forces of the cosmos contract to form certain potentials for affects and percepts. Thus, as Rosi Braidotti explains, the "Deleuzian body is in fact an ecological unit." Bodies/media work only through relatedness where "this environmentally-bound intensive subject is a collective entity; it is an embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and transforms energies and forces." In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari explain how the world contracts different vibrations and how different natural entities act as condensations of the cosmos. The way a plant forms and senses itself is through contracting light, salts, carbon. Through this contracting or folding "it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its composition: it is sensation itself." Brains are not found only in the heads of humans and animals, but microbrains inhabit the inorganic world as well. The world is media, in a manner of sensation and contracting, even though Deleuze and Guattari constantly avoided using that specific term as for them it applies only to mass media of communications. Still, it is possible to continue from their philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards 20 Introduction directions of a natural philosophy of media where the term starts to encompass the recording of time in rocks, the capacities of transmission in plants and animals, the weird sensations for example in insects that perceive not only through eyes and ears, but through chemicals as well. In fact, recent years of technological innovation have embraced exactly insects and like as perfect models for media design. In the 1980s, the cyborg became a pre-eminent symbol of the late-modern conflation of biology and technology. This all too familiar figure was, however, always weighed down by a degree of anthropomorphic baggage, largely due to the widely distributed idea of Man and his prosthesis being the characteristic mode of conjoining biology and technology. Yet, since early cybernetics, a panorama of other biological examples was also discussed in a technological context, from viruses to flies and rats to insects. Indeed, at the same time as the man-machine boom was approaching its peak years, other ideas of non-human models of organization and perception were emerging both in media design and consequently in media theory as well. In this context, the epigraph above from A Thousand Plateaus [and Parikka's reading of it] becomes clear: insects, germs, bacteria and particles do not just denote biological categories of knowledge, but simultaneously can be seen as carriers of intensities and potentials. What defines an insect? Its structure, its evolutionary path, its position in the ecology of nature? Deleuze rejects in Bergson's vein any spatializing modes of understanding entities of nature and culture and opts for a more ethological brand of analysis: natural, cultural and technological bodies are defined by their potentials for interaction and enaction, the potentials of what they can do instead of what they are. As Dianne Chisholm has rightly pointed out, the geo in Deleuze|Guattari's geophilosophy "evokes no singular (geological, biological, hydrological, thermodynamical, etc.) activity but, instead, emits a multiplicity of interconnecting 'geos'—geology, geography, geophysics, and geopolitics, and emerging composites such as geophysiology, geomicrobiology, ad infinitum" … similar to the eco in the "generalized ecology," which, according to Guattari, consists of the interplay of at least "three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity" (Three Ecologies 28). Likewise, one should rather not talk about ecology, but rather of different, but nevertheless interrelated ecologics. To show—and do—precisely this is what the present anthology is aiming at. Bernd Herzogenrath 21 Notes 1 Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh UP 2000, can be read as a fit answer to the first 'unlikely alliance' in Butler's claim. 2 See however Chisholm, and Herzogenrath. 3 … and what in the English translation curiously goes as "steady state" (41). Works Cited Berressem, Hanjo. "Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and a Deleuzian Ecologics." Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008): 57-101. Buchanan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook (Eds.) Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2000). Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Chisholm, Dianne. (Ed.) "Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy." rhizomes 15 (winter 2007), see www.rhizomes.net/issue15/index.html (last accessed August 31, 2008). Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). —. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Gary Genosko (London: Athlone Press, 2000). Herzogenrath, Bernd. (Ed.) Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 22 Introduction Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammels (Eds.) Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998). von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. General Systems Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1969). GILLES DELEUZE AND NATURALISM: A CONVERGENCE WITH ECOLOGICAL THEORY AND POLITICS PATRICK HAYDEN Introduction In this paper, I examine the naturalistic and ecological orientation of Gilles Deleuze, the contemporary French philosopher who is best known as on of the leading voices of poststructuralism. The term naturalism is rarely, if ever, encountered in the writings of poststructuralist, and even then usually appears only as an object of hostile interest. The primary reason for this distain is that naturalism is taken as a straightforward equivalent to essentialism, understood as referring to predetermined orders of 'natures' or invariant essences.1 However, Deleuze proves to be a significant exception to this general attitude toward naturalism. He not only incorporates discussions of naturalism within the contexts of his many analyses of historical figures, but he also develops a philosophical perspective that, at least implicitly, forwards a version of naturalism compatible with the critiques of essentialism and dualism addressed in his numerous publications. While Deleuze has no offered a systematic account of naturalism, one purpose of this paper is to draw together some of the threads of naturalism woven into Deleuze's texts in order to demonstrate how he goes about rethinking this topic. Another purpose of this paper is practical. From his earliest works to his most recent collaborations with Félix Guattari, Deleuze insists that philosophy be conceived as a practice whose usefulness derives from the active creation of new and different ways of thinking and feeling.2 Deleuze is ultimately concerned with the kinds of effects that philosophy is able to produce, insofar as these effects encourage the creation of new lifeaffirmative values and sensibilities. It is my contention that Deleuze promotes a type of naturalism that highlights the diverse interconnections between human and nonhuman modes of life, in such a way as to provide 24 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism some overlooked philosophical resources for integrating ethical and political considerations with ecological concerns, while resisting the reductive temptation to turn nature into a static metaphysical foundation. In the end, Deleuze's view of philosophy as practical implies a commitment to, among other things, a strong environmentalist stance. With that in mind, I want to provisionally explore some of the ways Deleuze's naturalism relates to ecopolitical theory. Undoubtedly, Deleuze has yet to be recognized as a potential contributor to ecological discourse. One of my aims here, however, is to introduce this possibility for further discussion. One of the difficulties with discussing naturalism in the context of Deleuze's work is that naturalism has been so variously defined and employed throughout the history of philosophy that it is impossible to offer a single definition of the term. Some have understood naturalism to be a view that excludes any reference to supernatural or transcendent principles, beings, or entities, with possible consequences ranging from the belief that the world is explicable only in scientifically verifiable terms, to the assertion of some form of humanism or secularism. Others contend that naturalism is meant to indicate the continuity or affinity of the human and nonhuman, and stress that human behaviour and human institutions have their basis in natural phenomena such that here is no exclusive opposition between nature and society. Although there are many possible versions of naturalism with differing points of emphasis ranting from the ontological to the epistemological and the methodological, I believe that Deleuze's take on naturalism can be seen as having the most affinity with contemporary strains of American naturalism, born from the dual influences of pragmatism and empiricism.3 While it is impossible to offer here a discussion of naturalism in twentieth-century American thought, what is relevant for my purpose is to note that American naturalism, influenced by such thinkers as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Darwin, argues that naturalism can be characterized as a perspective that seeks to eliminate the dualism and transcendentalism of traditional metaphysics, in favour of the view that humans and the cultures belong within a larger natural reality that cannot be overridden by any extra-natural essence.4 In other words, this position denies that there is an independent supernatural realm having ontological priority over whatever comes into being. What I now examine is how this point of view is expressed in Deleuze's own writings. I do so in several steps. In section two, I explore a history of philosophical naturalism found in Deleuze's works of Lucretius and Spinoza. Deleuze lays constant stress on human interaction with the larger natural world, which allows him to conceive of naturalism as an Patrick Hayden 25 environmental philosophy. In section three I outline Deleuze's notion of 'geophilosophy,' which he argues is intended to relate philosophical thinking to the Earth, and demonstrate how this notion leads to an ecological perspective grounded in symbiotic relationships. Finally, in the concluding section of the paper I discuss some of the ways that Deleuze's political concepts and naturalistic ontology compare with contemporary ecological theory and politics. Deleuze on Naturalism Deleuze's support for a naturalistic ontology can be seen as a strategy to counteract the anti-naturalistic tendencies of the Platonic tradition informing much of Western thought. As described in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze proposes a "reversal" of Platonism, by which he means "the abolition of the world of essences and the world of appearances" (253).In other words, Deleuze desires to eliminate the dualism that postulates a realm of metaphysical essences separate form and more real than the natural world itself, which is consigned to the status of mere appearance. Deleuze's work is replete with analyses of the negative consequences that he sees as resulting from the legacy of Platonic representationalism. One of the most troublesome results has been the designation of an unconditioned Absolute, a pure transcendent Being, which circumscribes and rules the natural world of becoming and diversity. Yet as Deleuze sees it, one of the basic advantages of naturalism is to conjoin the diversity of the natural world with its real conditions of material difference and processes of becoming (see Logic of Sense 261-3).'Reversing' Platonism can thus be regarded as a naturalistic strategy aimed at eliminating the dualism of essence and appearance while affirming the continuous becoming of a fully natural reality that is in no way indebted to or derived from any form of hidden, metaphysical transcendence. One of the resources that Deleuze draws upon in constituting his vision of the naturalist tradition is the Epicureanism of Lucretius. Deleuze writes that Lucretius formulated the following basic principles of naturalism as an anti-Platonic philosophy: "the positivity of Nature; Naturalism as the philosophy of affirmation; pluralism linked with multiple affirmation; sensualism connected with the joy of the diverse; and the practical critique of all mystifications" (279). In the essay 'Lucretius and the Simulacrum', Deleuze proposes that a naturalism based on the changing conditions of real experience, and not a representationalism which withdraws from the empirical into a realm of formal structures, is the goal of philosophy. In this case, naturalism is 26 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism based on the presence of three intertwined aspects of natural diversity: "the diversity of species; the diversity of individuals which are members of the same species; and the diversity of the parts which together compose an individual" (266). All the elements of the natural world, the individuals, species, rivers, plants, and places which constitute, inhabit and traverse it, are inseparable from such conditions of diversity. For Lucretius, nature is understood as a distributive rather than collective power. It is that which produces the diverse; yet it does not totalize the diverse into the transcendent One, Whole, or Being to which Platonism aspires: The Epicurean thesis is entirely different: Nature as the production of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements. There is no combination capable of encompassing all the elements of Nature at once. ... Nature is not collective, but rather distributive, to the extent that the laws of Nature ... distribute parts which cannot be totalized. Nature is not attributive, but rather conjunctive: it expresses itself through 'and' and not through 'is'. ... Being an addition of indivisibles, sometimes similar and sometimes different, Nature is indeed a sum, but not a whole. With Epicurus and Lucretius the real noble acts of philosophical pluralism begin. (266-7) Because nature is differentially interrelated rather than unifying in any absolute sense, it produces itself through new combinations of its heterogeneous elements. Yet no single combination can encompass all the elements of nature at once. Rather, there are particular finite compositions of elements and relations produces in the continuous movements of becoming. In this respect naturalism can be equated with pluralism since Lucretius thinks of nature in terms of Multiplicity, as a non-totalizable sum of diverse individuals, species, and environments. Lucretius's naturalism is further expressed by two complementary points of view, what Deleuze refers to as the "speculative point of view" expressed in the atomic-physical theory of the clinamen and the "practical" or "ethical" point of view expressive of pleasure and a joyful existence (272). While it is true that the former signifies the emergence of a position strongly opposed to the dualism and transcendentalism of Platonic metaphysics, it is nonetheless the latter which becomes the primary object of naturalism, for the responsibility incumbent upon humans is respect for the diversity produced by the immanent nature within which all things reside and live. It is the primary object in recognition of the fact that if natural diversity is harmed or diminished, the potential for a joyful existence is lessened. Lucretius's naturalism also indicates that our actions are to be guided not by adherence to supernatural myths and illusions, but rather by affirmation of the positive power of an immanent and multiple nature and Patrick Hayden 27 by joy resulting from the diversity of its elements. Myths and illusions rest upon the belief in gods and eternal souls, on divine entities and transcendent forms which mysteriously escape natural existence. Such myths are themselves scornful of the material, sensuous, and temporal existence accepted by naturalism, and serve to transpose divine will into a human will (or spirit) set over and against nature. In contrast, Deleuze asserts, the naturalist "speaks about nature, rather than speaking about the gods" (278). The speculative and practical objects of naturalism coincide on this point: the enterprise of demystification through philosophical, scientific, and ethical activity intended to free humans from the illusions of ontotheological transcendence.5 It is important to notice that this position does not oppose nature to social convention, custom, and invention tout court. Instead, it is opposed to those social forces which depend upon myth and illusion in order to consolidate their poser by negating the multiplicity and diversity of nature and society, sowing sadness rather than reaping joy. The negative spirit of transcendence is that which brands the sensible as nothing more than mere secondary appearance and links the intelligible to the absolute realm of timeless essence. What appears with Lucretius's naturalism, according to Deleuze, is a critique of Platonism's antinaturalistic repression of the multiplicity of life and the diversity of nature, along with an affirmation of the flux of natural reality: One of the most profound constants of Naturalism is to denounce everything that is sadness, everything that is the cause of sadness, and everything that needs sadness to exercise its power. From Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of thought and sensibility an affirmation. It directs its attack against the prestige of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its power; it refuses to the spirit of the negative the right to speak in the name of philosophy. . . . The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just as the diverse as diverse is the object of joy. (279) A similar naturalistic emphasis in Spinoza's philosophy is embraced by Deleuze. As with Lucretius, nature is characterized by Spinoza as a positive and productive power. Whereas Cartesian metaphysics devalued nature by depriving it of its immanent power, making it the creation of a transcendent God, and placed the thinking subject outside of nature, Spinoza's positive naturalism insists that it is within infinite nature that all finite things exist as a plurality of modes: "This naturalism provides the true thrust of the Anticartesian reaction. ... [it] is a matter of re-establishing the claims of a Nature endowed with forces or power" (Deleuze, Expressionism 227-8). For Spinoza, nature is its own dynamic source of 28 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism creation which expresses itself through immanent and actual powers that, in acting, are parts of nature (see 228). The notion of an expressive nature thereby "forms the basis of a new naturalism" (232). One of the most important factors making Spinoza's naturalism 'new' is that while he finds nature to be dynamic (expressive), he denies that it is teleological. Nature is a complex process without any predetermined end, and naturalism need not account for its movement by postulating the existence of some more fundamental realm which explains this process. There is no ultimate foundation outside of nature, but powers, relations, and bodily compositions constitutive of nature itself. This position follows from Spinoza's theory of immanent causality. Immanent causality "refuses the intervention of a transcendent God" (109) no less than it does the hierarchy of emanative causality. Instead, the existence of nature as a productive causality is inseparable from its immanent essence, which is constituted by the very effects belonging to it, namely, the attributes and modes. In this way natura naturans (naturing nature) and natura naturata (natured nature) are interconnected by a mutual immanence. What is essential here is the univocity of nature: the uniquely differentiated modifications of infinite substance are expressions of formally (qualitatively) distinct but ontologically equal attributes. All things are in some way different; yet they are generated equally from a creative nature, thereby, making it possible to speak of the equality of differences without resorting to an ordering hierarchy or a reduction to sameness. Instead what are important are the relations between different modes, insofar as finite modes are dynamic compositions within immanent nature. Spinoza's naturalism fully emerges from the connection of immanent causality with univocity; "Naturalism in this case is what satisfies the three forms of univocity; the univocity of attributes ... the univocity of the cause ... and the univocity of modality" (Deleuze, Spinoza 92-3). These forms present us with a conception, akin to that found in Lucretius, of a nature that is the infinite sum of multiple relational compositions. Nature is multiple, but the multiple forms an open-ended unity because it is constituted by ever changing combinations. In Spinoza's naturalism the 'encounters' between complex bodies are also evaluated in ethical terms. As Deleuze suggests, those encounters that agree with the natures of each body are 'good' and help to form other relations between them, which allow for mutual flourishing and preservation. Other encounters that disagree with the natures of the bodies concerned are 'bad' and contribute to the destruction and decomposition of the relations that support their ability to persevere in existence. Spinoza's notion of ethical goodness lies in striving to maximize mutually Patrick Hayden 29 compatible relations and in preventing the decomposition, poisoning, and toxification of what is necessary to maintain these relationships with diverse natural bodies. We are faced, then, with the question of how to carry forward Deleuze's picture of the history of philosophical naturalism into the realm of ecological theory which addresses environmental destruction as a contemporary social and political issue. I want to suggest that Deleuze's philosophical writings contain an important and innovative extension of the naturalist sympathies exhibited in his historical analyses, and in this respect can prove useful for contemporary environmental ethics and political ecology. In the next section, I examine some of the ways that Deleuze carries out this extension. Deleuze and Geophilosophy In works written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, Deleuze continues to articulate a strongly naturalistic basis for philosophical practice. In their final work together What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari claim that "thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth" (85). They indicate that what is unique about the Earth is the it "is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize territory" (85). Even though the Earth embraces all territories, it is also the force of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, since its continuous movements of development and variation unfold new relations of materials and forces. Thus, the Earth both generates difference and exhibits continuity; yet it is neither inert nor passive. In this sense, the Earth is again considered distributively, that is, as the open-ended sum of a plurality of elements in constant interaction, rather than as an absolute order of Being transcending what is constituted in nature. What Deleuze and Guattari call "geophilosophy" is the attempt to formulate a mode of thinking in association with, and as the affirmation of, the diversity and multiplicity of the continuous becomings of a fluctuating natural reality. In effect, this attempt amounts to the effort to construct a new way of thinking that is naturalistic and ecologically oriented because it seeks to eliminate the traditional dichotomy separating humanity (as subject) and nature (as object) by "stretching out a plane of immanence," which, they write, "absorbs" the Earth, that is, bonds together with it without eliminating the singularity, uniqueness, or difference of each thing that is a part of this relationship (88). 30 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism One way that this project is pursued is by emphasizing the interaction of the human and nonhuman in terms of immanence and relationality. The notion of 'milieu,' one of the meanings of the Greek oikos from which the common eco derives, plays an important role here.6 Throughout their work Deleuze and Guattari formulate a non-teleological, non-deterministic evolutionism, according to which the immanent world is characterized by constant change that grows from within a diversity of milieux connected in various complex ways. There is, however, no progressive, preordained developmental tendency exhibited in these changes. Milieu is the word that Deleuze uses to refer to all that is involved in the interactions between elements, compounds, energy sources, and organisms from the molecular to the molar levels. Milieux grow 'from the middle' (au milieu) when molecular materials and substantial elements are exchanged and organized around a reversible boundary or membrane, forming a 'unity of composition' that is qualitatively unique: "Thus the living thing," Deleuze and Guattari inform us, "has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions" (Thousand Plateaus 313). Taking ecology to refer to the interrelationships of living things and their environments, a milieu is the site, habitat, or medium of ecological interaction and encounter. A complete milieu is made up of the relational interactions of several submilieux (climate, geography, populations, soils, microbes, and so forth). Yet it possesses a relative rather than absolute equilibrium, since the milieu is itself open to transformation on the basis of its supple boundaries and alterable relationships, with the consequence that its submilieux can be affected as well. Organisms and milieux therefore develop, grow, and change together within continuous and intersecting processes of becoming, a view with significant ecological importance. As argued by Deleuze and Guattari, the full diversity of life is exhibited through natural processes of change and becoming. The effects of these processes cannot be identified on the basis of their descent from a common origin, since the creative and transformational "aparallel" evolutionism proposed by Deleuze and Guattari regards them as the products of distinct milieux, environmental variations, and transversal interactions (see 10-1).7 They stress that we cannot account for the current forms of organisms and habitat by assuming that their features developed according to a progressive hierarchy from the primitive to the more advanced, from the weaker to the stronger, from the less intelligent to the more intelligent, or that survival is simply a matter of developing more Patrick Hayden 31 advantageous adaptive mechanisms. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari call for a rhizomatic conception of evolution based not on a centralized directionality of species development, but on the active, unfinalized flux of constantly circulation relations, interactive encounters, and shared transformations. "More generally," they write, evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent. ... Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another. (10) If so, what is significant with respect to the movements of natural reality is not whether organisms can be represented according to their progression or regression along a fixed line of descent, but whether the continuous change and diversification of life and the interrelationships of the various organisms that inhabit certain ecological milieux are to be affirmed and recognized as both necessary and desirable. This recognition involves what Deleuze and Guattari call symbiotic 'alliances' between and among the diversity of milieux and organisms: "If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms" (238). Symbiosis is the co-functioning of two or more different organisms, often in a mutually beneficial, cooperative relationship of reciprocity.8 Deleuze's treatment of relations shows that relationships cannot be reduced to the supposedly fixed essences from which they are the derived (see Hayden). Rather, the characteristics and qualities of a specific locus of interaction are attributable to the types of relations taking hold of the organisms involved, while the relations are themselves susceptible to change, transformation, or even elimination. In other words, the relationship becomes a kind of existential alliance between diverse living things in symbiosis. This alliance accompanies the becoming that happens in between whatever is related; it is initiated in the middle of their interactions within different ecological milieux. Deleuze offers as an example of symbiosis the interaction of a wasp and an orchid: The orchid seems to form a wasp-image, but in fact there is a waspbecoming of the orchid and an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture. ... The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. (Dialogues 2) Another way that Deleuze develops his naturalism is by arguing for the inclusion of ethology in his description of philosophical practice. Ethology 32 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism refers both to the study of animal behaviour and to the study of the formation and evolution of human ethos. While ethology has taken may divergent forms, from vitalism to behavioralism and sociobiology, Deleuze uses the term in several of his works in order to emphasize the nondualistic continuity of human and nonhuman life forms and their complex symbiotic interrelationships, as well as to propose an overlap between the physical, biological and chemical, and the social, ethical and political. For instance, Deleuze draws from Spinoza the conception of a "common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated" (Spinoza 122).9 This 'one Nature' is common to all things because it is here that different ways of living are simultaneously constituted. Life is understood according to its relations of movement and rest, and each body, whether human or nonhuman, by its capacity for affecting and being affected by others (see 124). The dynamic capacities of each living thing to act and be acted upon intersect at various points with those of others: some affects are shared, some are not. Each thing is different or singular; yet all are situated in the affective realm of nature, a common environment "which applies equally," Deleuze writes, "to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural" (Deleuze|Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In other words, nature is that which is common to all different human and nonhuman entities, implying as extensive spectrum of encounters between all bodies (taken broadly) together with the consequences or effects of such encounters: Ethology is first of all the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing. For each thing these relations and capacities have amplitude, thresholds (maximum and minimum). And variations or transformations that are peculiar to them. And they select, in the world or in Nature, that which corresponds to the thing; that is, they select what affects or is affected by the thing, what moves or is moved by it. For example, given an animal, what is this animal unaffected by the infinite world? What does it react to positively or negatively? What are its nutrients and its poisons? What does it 'take' in its world? Every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular individual in the world. ... Further, there is also the way in which these relations of speed and slowness re realized according to circumstances, and the way in which these capacities for being affected are filled. For they always are, but in different ways, depending on whether the present affect Patrick Hayden 33 threatens the thing ... or strengthen, accelerate, and increase it. (Deleuze, Spinoza 125-6) Nature is thus seen by Deleuze as the immanent plane of life within which all things enter into both their own unique compositions and a variety of "more or less interconnected relations" with other compositions (Deleuze|Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In fact, the Earth can be considered the fundamental yet never fixed plane of immanence on which the constitution of multiplicities takes place. Yet, it is important to note that in Deleuze's work the compositions and relations of all living things are not fixed by an invariable order and that each thing is not directly connected to every other thing. The idea that nature is that which distributes affects provides a basis of continuity between each thing in the world, but also a basis for recognizing the multiplicity of nature since it makes possible a rich differentiation of all things in terms of the kind of variations, interactions, requirements, circumstances, and capacities applicable to each thing and its habitat. This position stresses not an undivided wholeness or totality transcending particular things and milieux, but rather the complex of continuities and differences characterizing all symbiotic interconnections traversing the Earth, without falling back onto a dualism of the human and the nonhuman. However, just what relationships obtain cannot be accounted for on the basis of an indifferent and closed system, but should instead be explained in terms of the interactions and transformations of unique bodies and habitats within a dynamic nature. If different types of relationships, combinations, or symbioses were rendered indistinguishable, it would be impossible to determine whether certain beliefs and actions had either detrimental or beneficial ecological consequences. Deleuze considers this insight to be one of the most important supplied by the ethological point of view. Here the concerns of the ethologist or naturalist make an explicit shift from the assessment of existing ecological conditions to the proposal that new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting be created, informed by the knowledge of what is beneficial to the flourishing of all life on Earth. Consequently, what must be considered now are the political aspects of Deleuze's naturalism. Deleuze, Naturalism, and Ecopolitics The strength of Deleuze's affirmation of naturalism is that it focuses on the ethical and political issues associated with the destruction of the Earth's multiple environments, ranging from the degradation of urban 34 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism centres to the shrinking of arable lands, the clear cutting of old-growth forests, the mass pollution of air, water, and soil, and the forced extinction of living beings. In other words, Deleuze provides sound philosophical underpinnings for articulating ethical and political responses to the destruction of many of the Earth's combined natural-social habitats. The fundamental considerations here is that of which concepts, practices, and values best promote the collective life and interests of the diverse modes of existence inhabiting the planet. It follows that this basic consideration entails the practical evaluation of the social institutions through which humans define, assess, and intersect with nonhuman nature. Deleuze provides a political perspective to his naturalistic conceptual framework, articulated in ecological terms. The conjunction of naturalism and politics at this point is based on the view that awareness of ecologically dangerous relationships can be used to formulate active political interventions aimed at transforming or overcoming those relationships in order to create new values and interactions that are beneficial to the diversity of life on Earth. Thus, Deleuze's thought presents an important contribution to ecological politics. This is not to say that ecopolitics supplants or assimilates all other political struggles and forms of intervention, for as Deleuze insists there are "many politics" addressing a number of problems at specific points on a complex social network (see Deleuze, Dialogues 135-47). It does say, however, that certain institutionalized beliefs and practices based on disregard for the Earth and contempt for the life needs and health of its inhabitants, while appearing in different forms and shapes, constitute a serious political issue shared by many across the planet. Yet, for ecopolitical activism to engage itself effectively, it must steer clear of universalized abstractions and carefully study the specific needs and alternative possibilities within localized situations. It is for this reason that Deleuze's notion of 'micropolitics' can be especially useful for a political activism engaged with qualitatively different ecological milieux. The singularity of diverse ecological milieux calls for modes of intervention that are fluidly defined in terms of the problems and conflicts involved, and the means that are available, with respect to each local bioregion and its unique needs. This singularity does not prevent the combining or the formation of alliances between different ecopolitical movements and regions, or between ecopolitical struggles and those engaged in other forms of social and political resistance, but in fact presents the condition for doing so without the need to assimilate them into a more centralized organizational structure. Neither does the micropolitical approach rule out 'macropolitical' considerations. As Patrick Hayden 35 Deleuze acknowledged, "every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics" (Deleuze|Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 213). In other words, larger systems and forms of organization are typically generated by the intersections of multiple smaller, local practices and conditions, which are in turn themselves affected by the influences and activities of macropolitical institutions. Yet it is inaccurate to consider the micropolitical and macropolitical as corresponding symmetrically, and the one to be reducible to the other. Deleuze's point is that a more nuanced understanding of the specificity and reciprocity of the micropolitical and macropolitical, and greater attention to the diversity of the actual practices and current conditions of local situations, are required for a useful political philosophy. Thus, while existing ecological problems undoubtedly present a danger to the entire planet, a micropolitical focus on the particular needs and interests of diverse local habitats and inhabitants in light of the available knowledge of ecological conditions will perhaps better contribute to the creation of effective ecopolitical interventions than will a focus solely from a unitary, large-scale framework. Nevertheless, from the Deleuzian perspective, ecological problems are always considered to be simultaneously local and global, since local habitats overlap and combine with others at various points and have a global impact with respect to the planetary ecosystem. It should be noted that none of these considerations amounts to what Deleuze calls the "grotesque" gesture of calling for a return to "a state of nature" (Dialogues 145). Deleuze rejects the view that there is or ever was an original, non-problematic natural condition that can be reclaimed. Deleuze clearly holds that all of nature, including its human elements, is in constant flux and that there is no essential, foundational, or sacred state of nature to be found. Thus, Deleuze follows Nietzsche in demanding a "dedeification" of nature that would eliminate interpretations of nature as the site of divine purposiveness, static essences, and transcendent moral ideals.10 Deleuze's naturalism is not an essentialist theory nostalgically seeking a return to some pristine nature that is an object apart from human existence, conceptualization, and intervention. Rather, it is a critical perspective that attempts to show that humans can their cultures are, for better or worse, an integral part of the existing natural, biophysical reality which cannot be transcended, but which can be destroyed by certain exploitative, ecologically insensitive beliefs, practices, and ways of being. Human history and natural history are therefore caught up together in the same movements of change. Political intervention aimed at ecologically destructive values and practices cannot be based on any reactive appeal to transcendence, but rather must be grounded in current situations, 36 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism knowledge, and experiences, implying the active creation of, not simple return to, modes of existence that exemplify appropriate, sustainable, and beneficial relationships between human and nonhuman beings and their environments. A micropolitical approach to such issues has both similarities with and differences from some contemporary ecological or Green movements. Social ecology and deep ecology are perhaps the most visible examples today. Social ecology, pioneered by Murray Bookchin, is oriented primarily toward the examination of the relationship he sees between environmental degradation and social structure. More specifically, Bookchin argues that the human domination of nature follows from the domination of human by human as found in certain kinds of hierarchical and oppressive social arrangements. He writes that "ecological degradation is, in great part, a product of the degradation of human beings by hunger, material insecurity, class rule, hierarchical domination, patriarchy, ethnic discrimination, and competition" (Which Way for the Ecology Movement? 17). Social ecology is thus premised of the view that "the basic problems which pit society against nature emerge from within social development itself" (Remaking Society 32) and that "human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of domination nature" (44). According to Bookchin, this assumption is particularly evident in the technical-economic system of constant and aggressive expansion characteristic of modern capitalism. Referring to himself as an avowed naturalist with an aversion to "spiritualism" and "mystical" approaches to ecological problems, Bookchin argues that radical cultural, political, and economic changes in the current social order, as well as the development of a new "ecological sensibility," constitute the appropriate responses to a precarious ecological situation. Consequently, Bookchin contends that a society oriented by the "growor-die" attitude toward humans and nonhumans alike is destined to confront insurmountable natural limits. Only fundamental changes in capitalistic modes of production and consumption can avert ecological catastrophe. These changes are centred around such notions as the decentralization of communities, a complex evolutionism rooted in mutualism or symbiosis, the necessity of cultural and biophysical diversity, bioregional federalism, and the development of ecologically appropriate alternative technologies.11 The general outlook of social ecology presented so far seems to find some strong points of agreement with the naturalistic and micropolitical aspects of Deleuze's thought. Deleuze has consistently criticized the destructive effects of a 'universal capitalism,' the totalizing functions of State apparatuses, the oppression of Patrick Hayden 37 nationalist, racist, and sexist 'majoritarianisms,' and the dangers presented by the basic tendency to divorce the creative becomings of life from social existence. There are, however, important differences that would lead Deleuze to reject some of the specifics of Bookchin's position. One of these is Bookchin's excessive reliance on a rationalistic paradigm for social development. He contends that because humans are "nature rendered self-conscious" (The Ecology of Freedom 36), the perfection of human subjectivity will lead to a "rational" (The Philosophy of Social Ecology 182) society that is able to serve as a benign steward for the rest of nature. On this basis, Bookchin has taken a hostile stand against recent critiques of the category of reason as evidence of mere "irrationalism" and "antihumanism."12 He argues that any retreat from the province of reason amounts to "misanthropic" mysticism. Bookchin's unwillingness to question the generic notion of an inherent, universal reason, and his basic assessment of oppression as simply the result of "irrationality," as if rationality and domination were mutually exclusive, indicates that he retains some problematic, foundationalist assumptions that have been challenged in various ways by critical theorists, poststructuralists, and feminists, among others.13 In addition, Bookchin's rationalism has also led him to embrace a Hegelian model of progress, according to which the appearance of a truly rational society is the dialectical manifestation of a latent "potentiality" contained in nature (see Bookchin, "Ecologizing the Dialectic"). He frequently offers a picture of "nature rendered more and more aware of itself" as human societies have "organically" unfolded "from their own inner logic," proceeding from the "primitive" to the modern and ultimately to the "rational" (Remaking Society 41 and 75). For Bookchin, the realization of a rational society reveals "nature's potentiality to achieve mind and truth" (The Philosophy of Social Ecology 35). Bookchin's transcendentialist leanings are clearly in evidence with the preceding remarks, in which he indicates that a fragmented nature will gradually (re)unite with itself as it increasingly attains self-reflexivity and eliminates social contradiction. These examples are intended to dismiss Bookchin's work altogether, for these is much of value within it, but rather to point to specific positions that Deleuze would obviously reject as burdened b deterministic presuppositions of traditional essentialism, foundationalism, and humanism. The problem with such presuppositions, Deleuze might point out, is that they fail seriously to acknowledge the influence of external miliuex on the formation of individuals, species, and ecosystems in their perpetual interaction. Ironically, by relying on the notion of an inevitable 'inner logic' to explain the development of natural and social processes, thus making it difficult to 38 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism explain why we need to invent new ways of existing as well as resistance to the current social order, Bookchin weakens his critique of ecologically destructive beliefs and practices. What of deep ecology, another significant contemporary ecological theory? Perhaps the most prominent deep ecologist in the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the tern deep ecology, but others who have contributed to its development are Bill Devall, George Sessions, and Warwick Fox. As Naess conceives it, "deep" ecology is so called because of three basic points: (1) it rejects "shallow" environmentalism seeking minor reform of a few basic socio-economic practices; (2) it asks "deeper" questions about how and why these practices are in place; (3) it embraces a "total world view" based on the intrinsic, spiritual identification of self and nature (Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle 27-8, 163, and 171-6). Devall and Sessions claim that deep ecology "attempts to articulate a comprehensive religious and philosophical worldview" according to which the "spiritual and material aspects of reality fuse together" into an "organic whole" (Deep Ecology 65). What is referred to as deep ecological consciousness is the view that the world exists as an "unbroken wholeness" (Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep" 96) with no discontinuities or boundaries between human and nonhuman nature. Deep ecology insists that everything is a part of and connected to everything else in an overarching unity founded on internal relations (see Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, passim). In terms of ethical and political responses to ecological problems, deep ecology argues that 'reformist' actions such as recycling and the cleaning up of highly polluted sites are only short-term measures which leave intact the dominate paradigms legitimizing human exploitation of nature. Naess contends that self-realization and biocentric equality are two 'norms' that can aid in a radical transformation of these paradigms. As presented by Naess, self-realization is a process in which the self is identified with as much of the world as possible, since difference is taken to be a hindrance to the awareness of the "sameness" uniting all things into a "greater Self." A full realization of the individual self can only be accomplished with its integration into the larger Self of the entirety of nature: By identifying with greater wholes, we partake in the creation and maintenance of this whole. ... The ecophilosophical outlook is developed through an identification so deep that one's own self is not longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism. One experiences oneself to be a genuine part of all life. (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 173-4) Patrick Hayden 39 Naess goes on to argue that the wider identification characteristic of the "deep, comprehensive and ecological self" contributes to an understanding of biocentric equality, that all things in nature are equal with respect to their ability to achieve self-realization, implying that harming other entities is equal to harming one's own self through the elimination of potentials for self/Self-realization. It appears that there are more differences than similarities between Deleuze's naturalism and deep ecology. While Naess uses language similar to Deleuze when he claims that "diversity, complexity, and symbiosis" are fundamental "potentials," and that realizations of these potentials should be plural and qualitatively different, he assigns them this importance only insofar as they are integrated into the totality of comprehensive Selfidentification (200-2). This difference may be a consequence of Naess' assumption that difference can only inhibit the awareness of biocentric equality and is to be equated with "indifference" (174) in the sense that if a strong identification of sameness is absent only negative indifference will remain. Naess grounds this belief in the idea of "microcosm mirroring macrocosm," of each natural entity mirroring "the supreme whole" (202). This approach, again, seems to indicate a denial of difference, for the individual self and the supreme Self simply reflect one another in a mirror of sameness. I believe, however, that a position grounding concern for others in resemblance or identification presents a greater opportunity for ethical-political indifference that does an account based on respect for the coexistence of interrelated differences. Furthermore, such an attitude may fail to pay sufficient attention to the unique needs, interests, and capacities of different modes of existence; seeing them as identical (or seeing them only if the are identical) could lead to greater ecological harm than if their differences are acknowledged and understood as such. In addition, Naess openly adheres to a "back to nature" attitude and a "Nature mysticism" (183) that Deleuze also clearly rejects as dangerously reactionary, with the possibility for limiting the creation of alternative discourses and practices and for falling back into a kind of moralistic longing for the "Golden Age" (176). Finally, it is doubtful whether Deleuze would have any sympathy for the constant appeal to an essentialistic and psychologistic 'depth' in deep ecological theory. For Deleuze, it is not some vague essence that is the key to ecological understanding, but rather the various kinds of relations or interactions that each living thing is capable of entering into with others. Hence, the micropolitical appeal to analyses that are specific to particular modes and regions of existence, that is, to differences as they exist and function. 40 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism Not surprisingly, the position most compatible with Deleuze's thinking on these matters is Guattari's 'three ecologies' argument. As outlined in his book, Les trois écologies, Guattari makes the case for a series of critical and creative "ecological praxes" situated with the context of three distinct, yet interconnected ecologies: social ecology, environmental ecology, and mental ecology (all translations are my own). These three ecologies correspond to the "ecological registers" of social relations, the natural environment, and human subjectivity. When taken together, the three registers require an "ethical-political articulation" capable of addressing the dangers presented to life on Earth by the combined effects of environmental disequilibrium, progressive deterioration of social existence, and the ossification and standardization of thought and behaviour (11-2). Critical of the belief that the dominant economicpolitical systems of what Guattari calls 'integrated world capitalism' will be either willing or able to cultivate significant transformation in the planetary situation, Guattari calls for a simultaneously micropoliticalmacropolitical ecological revolution: There will not be a true response to the ecological crisis except on a planetary scale and on the condition that it brings about an authentic political, social, and cultural revolution, reorienting the objectives of the production of material and immaterial goods. This revolution must not be concerned solely with the visible relations of forces on a grand scale but equally with the molecular domains of sensibility, of intelligence, and desire. (13-5) Guattari regards the three ecological registers to be 'existential territories' characterized by unique problems and conditions requiring the construction of new fields of possibility for both human and nonhuman nature. This construction is to be undertakes in terms of the individual and collective "resingularization" (21) of the world, inspired by aesthetic as well as ethical creation. Working from the perspective that culture and nature are inseparable, Guattari argues that there are three complementary points of transversal interaction relevant to ecopolitical praxis: the socius, the psyche, and the environment. Responding ethically and politically to the "simultaneous degradation of these three areas" must be done in terms of the "contemporary conditions of the objectives and methods of each and every form of movement of the social" (32-3). Hence, the need for three ecologies. Of these ecologies, social ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the degradation of social conditions, and with the reconstruction of human relations and liberty at all levels of the socius, or social field. Such Patrick Hayden 41 phenomena as urban decay; capitalistic expansion, and exploitation of territory and labour; subjugation of women, the unemployed, immigrants, the homeless, and children; the rise of religious fundamentalisms and cultural intolerance are to be considered as effects of the decline and pollution of the social environment. These phenomena are indicators of the disappearance of "the words, expressions, and gestures of the human solidarity" (35). In comparison, environmental ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the degradation of the diverse natural conditions upon which all life inhabiting the planet depends, as will as the protection and enrichment of these conditions. The widespread ravages of the Earth's complex ecosystems and in the increasingly rapid loss of natural species and habitat enacted by the various exploitative technologies of an international market economy, or integrated world capitalism, have led to a steady deterioration of world-wide living conditions. Finally, mental ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the degradation of the conditions for creative subjectification and singularization. In Guattari's analysis, the spread of integrated world capitalism has been accompanied by the infiltration of homogenizing norms into the production of subjectivity at all levels of daily life, whether "individual, domestic, conjugal, neighbourly, creative, or personal-ethical" (44). Such norms de-singularize different modes of subjectivity and experience, and propagate images of thought as somehow 'outside nature,' centred on concepts, discourses, and regimes of control, instrumentalization, and representationalist identity. Each ecology, then, confronts a specific problem area; yet these areas are separate form one another because they are interconnected and degrading simultaneously. This position allows Guattari to propose a generalized ecology viewed through the lenses of each of the three ecologies, united by their common principle: The principle common to the three ecologies consists of the following; each of the existential territories with which they confront us, not in and of itself, closed upon itself, but as ... opening up, as a process, into praxes that enable it to be rendered 'habitable' by human projects. It is this praxicopenness that constitutes the essence of the art of the 'eco,' subsuming all the ways of domestication existential territories, concerning intimate modes of being, the body, the environment, the great contextual ensembles relative to ethnic groups, the nation, or even the general rights of humanity. (49) While the struggles and aims of each ecology are different, their common aim is to "organize new micropolitical and micro-social practices. New solidarities, a new gentleness or kindness, conjoined with 42 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism new aesthetic practices and new analytic practices of formations of the unconscious" (45-6). In this way, Guattari articulates an ecological vision aimed at developing different forms of social action "which cannot be achieved by top-down reforms" (57) on the part of professional politicians, but by the creative proliferation of new value- systems, alternative modes of subjectivity, innovative human and nonhuman relationships and forms of alliance, across the social network of local practices intersecting with the natural movements of global becomings. What has been elucidates here makes it clear that Deleuze would agree with most, but perhaps not all, of the elements of Guattari's account. What is most important is their agreement that in order to resist ecologically destructive beliefs and practices, it is necessary to engage in the creation of specific alternatives at the level of local, yet overlapping habitats, which allows for the formation of mutually beneficial alliances and relationships of ecological solidarity. On this basis, it may be possible to formulate a more extensive dialogue between Deleuze, Guattari, and other current theorists and activists concerning ecology, and to begin to develop micropolitical analyses of various ecological conditions, problems, and modes of intervention. One of the most important suggestions that I make in this paper, I hope, is that we must actively work to create a habitable world, while recognizing our place in a natural, living reality that is complex, interrelational, symbiotic, and ultimately, whose changing limits or dimensions are inseparable from our own continued existence. If that is the case, Deleuze's ecological naturalism amounts to the practical affirmation of the common destiny shared by all modes of life on Earth, not in spite of, but because of their multiple yet always intersecting and fragile lines of difference. Notes 1 Published discussions of the poststructuralist critique of essentialism and determinism are too numerous to list here. However, an accessible survey of these topics may be found in (Best and Kellner). 2 For a concise presentation of Deleuze's views here, see (Deleuze and Parnet). For Deleuze, philosophy should not ask after the 'essence' of a thing, but rather ought to look into how something functions or lives, how it relates to other things, and into what kinds of effects it has or inspires. This theme is discussed by Deleuze in his (Nietzsche and Philosophy). 3 Deleuze has characterized his philosophy as a type of pluralistic empiricism inspired by Anglo-American thought. See (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues vii-viii). 4 General accounts of philosophical naturalism can be found in (Danto), (Kirkorian), and especially (Ryder). Patrick Hayden 43 5 For more on the 'illusions of transcendence,' see (Deleuze|Guattari What is Philosophy? 49 and 73). 6 Oikos can mean house, household, family, milieu, vicinity, habitat, or environment. 7 For more on the notion of nonparallel or aparallel evolution, see (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues 2-10). 8 Michel Serres has made symbioses a central aspect of his call for a "natural contract" that is dedicated to the renewal of our relationship to the Earth. He argues that humans have maintained a "parasitical" rather than "symbiotic" relationship with the natural world, and that a global ecological revolution requires an awareness of the Earth as our "symbiont" (see Serres 35-44). 9 I refer here to the final chapter which is also published separately as "Ethology, Spinoza and Us," in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Publications, 1992). There are quite a few references to ethology scattered throughout Deleuze's writings and it is unnecessary to refer to them all in this context. However, the reader is urged to consult especially plateaus 10 and 11 of A Thousand Plateaus, entitled respectively "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ..." and "1837: Of the Refrain." 10 Nietzsche asks: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?" (The Gay Science 168-9). Significant discussions of Nietzsche's naturalism can be found in (Schatzki) and (Lampert). 11 These ideas can be found throughout the works cited above, and especially in (Toward an Ecological Society). 12 See, for example, the introductory chapter to (Remaking Society). 13 Michel Foucault clarifies that critically examining the notion of an inviolate, inherently non-oppressive rationality is not by itself evidence of irrationalism: "I think that the blackmail that has very often been at work in every critique of reason or every critical inquiry into the history of rationality (either you accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible" (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 27). The point made by Foucault is that there are different possible forms of rationality that may or may not be useful or beneficial. Works Cited Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991). Bookchin, Murray. Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal and Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1980). —. The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982). —. Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1990). 44 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism —. The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal and Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1990). —. "Ecologizing the Dialectic." Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology. Ed. John Clark (London: Green Print, 1990). —. Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1994). Danto, Arthur C. "Naturalism." Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 5 (New York, Macmillan, 1967). Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). —. The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). —. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). —. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Devall, Bill, and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985). Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1990). Hayden, Patrick. "From Relations to Practice in the Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze." Man and World 28:3 (July 1995): 283-302. Kirkorian, Yervant H. (Ed.) Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). Lampert, Lawrence. Nietzsche and Modern Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). Naess, Arne. "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement." Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100. —. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). Ryder, John. (Ed.) American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994). Patrick Hayden 45 Schatzki, Theodore R. "Ancient and Naturalistic Themes in Nietzsche's Ethics." Nietzsche-Studien 23 (1994): 146-67. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). EIGHT DELEUZIAN THESES ON ART ELIZABETH GROSZ Deleuze and Guattari have enabled us to profoundly reconsider how the human is understood and how the prevailing conceptions of subjectivity, agency, reason and language, since at least the seventeenth century if not long before, have served to divide the human from the animal in ways that must now be interrogated. From almost the beginning of Deleuze's writings, and at the heart of his various collaborations with Guattari, the place of the animal—in the human, before the human and beyond the human—has figured as central theme, as a way of perhaps displacing consciousness (and the unconscious) as the defining feature of the human. From Deleuze's, and Deleuze and Guattari's, work on Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, the animal cannot be considered that over which the human has dominion, for the animal is the internal condition, context and destination of life itself. Man, that all-too-human creature, is what the animal has created and continues to inform; and the animal is the source and force that enables the most human of all productions—art, science, philosophy—to be seen, not as the culmination of logos, but as the animal gift, the animal impetus, that the human has inherited and must makes, however provisionally, his own. Deleuze and Guattari enable us to ask: How are our conceptions of human accomplishments—whether in art, architecture, science, philosophy or in governance and in social and political relations— transformed when we place the human within the animal? What kind of crisis exists in the concept of man or the human that impels us now to seek that which man had cast aside and rendered as his to possess and govern? How and why does the animal imperil human uniqueness and dignity? What do we gain in restoring the human to the animal from which it has come and the natural in which it is, however ambiguously and complicatedly, structured. How is art to be understood when its preconditions are not cultural but natural?1 I want to proceed in a purely speculative way discussing the animal and sexual preconditions of art with some broad hypotheses which I cannot prove or even argue but which I hope will generate some new Elizabeth Grosz 47 thinking regarding Deleuze and Guattari's relevance for thinking the place of the animal in art. It is Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion, above all in 'Of the Refrain' in A Thousand Plateaus that art is entirely involved in and dependent on the animal.2 Eight Theses about Art and the Animal 1. All of the arts, from architecture to music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance are the indirect products or effects of what Darwin calls 'sexual selection' the attraction to potential sexual partners, sometimes but not always or universally for the purposes of procreation, for the purposes of some kind of sexual encounter. Sexual selection, Darwin makes clear (in ways that many of the Neo-Darwinists have forgotten), is not reducible to natural selection, the capacity to survive in given and changing environments, but is a fundamentally separate and potentially antagonistic principle which may at times imperil life for the sake of pleasure or desire. The separation of natural from sexual selection—so crucial to Darwin that he devotes two separate books to these principles (natural selection is elaborated in The Origin of Species ([1859]1996) and sexual selection is explained in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex ([1872]1981)—is regularly reduced in contemporary Darwinism, when, for example, sociobiologists suggest that sexual attraction and procreation are 'really' underneath it all, forms of maximizing the survival potential of one's genes. In such accounts, which are nearly universal at present, sexual selection is in fact an unconscious attraction to those beings who can maximize one's genes' capacity to survive. Instead, I will claim that sexual and natural selection are two quite irreducibly and potentially antagonistic principles. If natural selection can help explain the remarkable variety and adaptations of life to its specific environments then only sexual selection can explain the extravagant, often useless, sometimes imperiling qualities that have no survival value (Darwin, for example, mentions in the case of the human, hairiness or other visible differences in secondary sexual characteristics); 2. Sexual selection can be more explicitly linked to the arts than is natural selection, to the extent that it functions to highlight, to focus on, to intensify, the bodies of both the living beings exciting and the living beings excited by various forms of bodily display—such as in the courtship songs and dancing of competing birds, the dazzling displays of colors in sticklebacks and other erotically attuned fish, the loud and colorful encounters of various mammals in competition with members 48 Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art of the same sex over sexual partners. Sexual selection unhinges, deranges and imperils survival for the sake of intensification, for the sake of pleasure, providing a principle separate from that of mere survival, which for Nietzsche is the most contemptible and ignoble of aims (This notion of the separation of sexual from natural selection is the condition under which art can fully understand and appreciate its own animal genealogy); 3. Art is a form of intensification of the body (both the body of the subject of sexual display and the bodies of the observers of such display) that links the energies and intensities of the lived body to the rhythms and forces of the earth itself. Art is the result of the living creature's ability to extract something—a property, a quality, a soundtone, a color-source, a rhythm or force—from the earth, from the usually uncontained territory in which it lives and enacts its activities. Art is the extraction of territorially linked qualities and their use in intensifying the energies and forces of living bodies. So art, like technology or like science, links living bodies to the earth, not wholesale but through the connections it makes between specific qualities—those leaves that attract the attention of various showy birds, the shiny objects that appeal to bower birds—and specific bodies. But unlike technology or science which aim to extract useful principles, principles which can be used to attain specific aims or goals— regularity, predictability, order and organization—the arts redirect these forces of practical regularity through intensification to produce something no longer regular, ordered or manipulable but something, an intensity, which actively alters the very forces of the body itself, something appealing, irregular, unpredictable; 4. This emphasis on sexual selection rather than on Darwin's more privileged concept of natural selection, which is so beloved by the sociobiological tradition, not only provides us with the possibility of a non-reductive understanding of the arts that refuses to understand them in terms of their capacity to prepare us, by way of playful rehearsal, for the tasks of survival; this emphasis also makes clear that wherever art is in play, that is, wherever qualities, properties, features, forms have the capacity to brace and intensify the body, we must recognize, along with all feminisms of difference (especially that developed by Luce Irigaray), that sexual selection is the underside of sexual difference. Sexual selection, the sexual appeal and attraction of members of the same species, is always at least two-fold, resulting both in the development of at least two different kinds of morphology or bodily type, male and female, and at least two different kinds of criteria for Elizabeth Grosz 49 attractiveness. Ironically, Darwin is more a feminist of difference than the anti-feminist he has been commonly accused of being; 5. Art and especially the first and primordial of all of the arts, architecture, is thus a particular linkage between living bodies and the forces of the earth. Art is the direct connection between the forces of the living body and the forces of the earth, formed above all through rhythm. Architecture is the first art, the art that is the condition for the emergence of all the other arts, for without some cordoning off of territory from a more generically conceived earth, no qualities or properties can be extracted, no properties can resonate, intensify, effect and transform bodies. Without territory, they simple are, they are without effect. It is only to the extent that both the body and the earth are partially tamed through the creation of a provisional territory that protects the living creature, and creates a temporary 'home' that art as such can emerge. It is through the staking out of a territory in the bird's eloquent song that a space is marked between trees in which amorous encounters can take place between the songbird and those it entices, between the songbird and the rivals it repels, between a songbird and the future generations it anticipates through a nest to be built. Art is, for Deleuze, the extension of the architectural imperative to organize the space of the earth. This roots art, not in the creativity or sensibility of mankind but rather in excessiveness or abundance of nature, in nature's production of extractable qualities that have intensifying effects on living beings; 6. Art is the sexualization of survival; or equally sexuality is the rendering artistic of nature, the making of nature into more than it is, the making of a leaf into a sexual adornment rather than just a residual shedding, photosynthesizing property of a tree. Art is that ability to take a property or quality and make it resonate bodies to the extent that this quality takes bodies away from their real immersion in a particular habitat and orients them to a virtual world of attraction and seduction, a world promised or possible but never given in the real. This is why the first art is architecture—for qualities to be extractable, a territory, that is a framed and delimited space, must first exist, a space of safety, competition, courtship and flight; only within such a provisional space, a space always threatened with deterritorialization, can there be the pure joy of qualities, the immersion of the living in intensities. Architecture is the bridge between life and art, the condition under which life complicates itself and finds transportable, transformable qualities for this complication. 50 Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art 7. If art is rooted in the ways in which sexual selection deviates from natural selection, making properties, qualities, organs and muscles function, not usefully but intensively, art is the capacity of materiality to function otherwise that what is given: art is the exploration of qualities and properties not for their own sake, not for their use value or exchange value, but only insofar as these qualities and properties do something, have some effect, on living beings. Art is the means by which nature deviates itself from givenness, comes to function in other terms than the useful or the manageable: art is thus the space in which the natural and the material is the most attenuated, rendered the most visible and tangible for living beings; and 8. These qualities and properties, attractive to various forms of life, become art only to the extent that they can be moved, transferred outside of where they are found, sent on a deterritorializing trajectory, able to function elsewhere than where they originate or are found: while the conditions and raw materials for art are located within territory, as part of the earth, they become art, architecture, dance only to the extent they become transportable elsewhere, only to the extent that they intensify bodies that circulate, move, change, only to the extent that they too become subject to evolutionary transformation and spatial movement. These eight theses outline, in as brief a way as possible, how Deleuze and Guattari, inflected through Darwin's own texts on sexual selection and its productive extravagances, may provide us wit h a way of linking nature to art, not through imitation or mimesis but directly. Art is nature attenuated to attract and allure; or equally, nature is art undeveloped and requiring intensification and framing. Art is the elaboration and foregrounding of properties, the qualities—sonorous, visual, tactile, and so on—that nature provides through their deterritorialization, their framing and movement elsewhere. The animal is that world in which everything human about the human is born, accommodates and intensifies itself, and dies. Animal origin and animal destination. A human trajectory enabled and limited through the animal. Darwin opens up this trajectory, Nietzsche ironizes it, and Deleuze and Guattari celebrate it. Elizabeth Grosz 51 Notes 1 Since this anthology is focused on Deleuze and Guattari's relations to ecological thinking, I am reluctant to place my own work within a 'traditional' ecological or eco-feminist position. I have already specified my differences from eco-feminism in chapter one of Time Travels. To briefly recap here: I have carefully avoided any understanding of nature, the world, or the cosmos as a single unified entity in all of my work. Generally ecological perspectives are holistic, and they imply a concept of the world as a unified totality, a cohesive and potentially unified entity that has been primarily subjected to division through human intervention. In my understanding of the Darwinian tradition, on which I rely so strongly in this text, Darwin's understanding of nature is bifurcated, linked to divergence and the elaboration of difference, rather than being directed to the attainment of unity or cohesiveness. My concern, if it is to be in any way defined by the eco-logical, is to separate the logos from bios, to understand them as two externally linked relations: the eco has no logos, or its logos is that of the proliferation of destruction. My concern here, as elsewhere, is to complicate and elaborate differences, to insist on the impossibility of a larger term that could encompass differences, to affirm incommensurability. And equally, it is to problematize the place of human agency in either the destruction or the reconstitution of a unified and cohesive world. Ecological accounts have positioned the human as the agent of the destruction of this unity; and as the agent who, armed with a new politics, or new insights, may be the one who can repair or overcome mankind's previous acts of destruction. This is to accord man, once more, the privilege of dominion, or its more modest companion, stewardship, over all living things and over the earth as a whole. 2 This more or less recaps some of the work I have undertaken on art and the animal in Chaos, Territory, Art. Works Cited Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). —. The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). —. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans G. Gill and C. Burke (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994). 'THE INSTRUCTED THIRD': PROCESSING ECOLOGY WITH DELEUZE LEYLA HAFERKAMP In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze reads Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of monadology in terms of the model of the fold, according to which the world is considered an infinite continuum of folds and foldings, an origami world of utmost pliability; a "plastic habitat" in perpetual process, constantly "folding, unfolding, refolding" (137). "[W]hat has changed now," Deleuze writes, "is the organization of the home and its nature" (137). The two-floored edifice of the Baroque house is transformed into the 'new habitat,' situated as the new oikos beyond the dualistic distinctions of inside/outside, subject/object, public/private. Within this context, Deleuze ends his reading of The Monadology with a plea for nomadology, calling for a mode of subjectivity that is always 'in process.' Deleuze's reading of Leibniz provides, as Tom Conley has noted, powerful insights for rethinking the positio humana within the 'ecological fold:' That humans stand as triumphant subjects among inert objects no longer holds. They no longer own things as they had in the world of possessive individualism. Now it must be asked how humans select and designate what they call 'living' or 'inert.' If organic life cannot be easily demarcated from inorganic matter, it behooves subjects to look at matter from a different angle. Leibniz points towards an ethics that appends the science of ecology. In his turn, Deleuze suggests that an at once abstract and tactile sense of matter must figure at the crux of any social practice. (xiv, emphasis added) The Fold and What Is Philosophy?, published shortly afterwards and coauthored with Félix Guattari, would be hypothetical approaches to problems – population, habitat, displacement, genocide – that require urgent and practical commitment Leyla Haferkamp 53 […] And since they beg reaction of this kind, these works can also be said to orient philosophy into the future of the planet in ways that pragmatic means have yet to conceptualize.(xiv) 1 The ecological insights implicit in the 'hypothetical approaches' formulated in Deleuze's later work attain more relevance if we take into consideration a crucial metaphilosophical aspect: the Deleuzian method of 'processing' concepts; as in 'process philosophy.' In the following, I will deal with the Deleuzian 'conception of concepts' as a useful philosophical aid for tackling ecological problems.2 For this purpose, my focus will be on the cluster of Deleuzian concepts which, by virtue of their dynamic interrelatedness, provide the appropriate tools for dealing with ecological complexity: the concept, the plane of immanence and the event. If, in socio-historical terms, "the transition from ecosystem ecology to evolutionary ecology seem[ed] to reflect the generational transition from the politically conscious generation of the 1960s to the 'yuppie' generation of the 1980s" (Soderqvist in Worster 414), ecology today seems to be shifting grounds once again as the 'ecological threat' tends to become an integral part of the MTV generation's 'mainstream spectacle.' While environmental consciousness rapidly gains high-street visibility and ecolifestyle finally finds its niche in the heart of consumer culture, the popular understanding of ecology runs the risk of being confined to relations of linear causality between neatly defined phenomena, thus reducing the fundamental complexity intrinsic to the ecological to a set of analyzable complications. In scientific terms, the term Oecologie, coined by Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, originally addressed the "relations of living organisms to the external world, their habitat, customs, energies, parasites, etc." (qtd. in Worster 192). Although Haeckel's definition underlines the significance of the relationship between the biological organism and its physical environment, it fails, from a contemporary point of view, to capture the complexity of the network of parameters operative in the ecological process. It was only during the 1970s, when the science of ecology took a 'systemic turn,' that one recognized the importance of the multidirectional interconnectedness between the heterogeneous constituents that make up the ecological.3 This connectivity is not only a crucial factor operative on the intrarelational level of the ecosystem, but also an important aspect on the metalevel of ecology's interrelations to other disciplines. Situated at the interface of nature and culture, ecology figures less as a detached science than a 'permeable discipline' open to exchanges of the inter- and transdisciplinary kind; a science in need of a 54 Processing Ecology with Deleuze regular revision of its propositions and the readjustment of its tools according to changing parameters. Recent definitions of ecology point to a revival of the systemic approach and highlight the dynamic aspects of connectivity and diversity within a systemic framework that includes both organic and inorganic elements. The systems perspective – that the ecological constitutes a complex system with emergent properties – has become, with some modifications, increasingly more important for the ecological debate. As a new definition of ecology provided by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies demonstrates, ecology is [t]he scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy and matter.4 Importantly, the new definition replaces the 'relations' in Haeckel's seminal definition with bidirectional 'processes,' 'interactions' and 'transformation and flux:' It blends biological with physical aspects, thus blurring the boundary between the organic and the inorganic due to the existence of the continuous loops between the domains of interiority and exteriority so neatly separated by Haeckel. Despite this systemic complexity, within the current discourse of popular 'lifestyle ecology,' the whole range of environmental problems seems to have been downsized to the 'inconvenient truth' of global warming. While climate change does indeed pose an immense challenge to the biosphere as 'we' know it,5 the frequent use and haphazard contextualization of the phrase in the mass media contributes less to a fruitful debate in political ecology than to the psychodramatic process of soothing our 'bourgeois conscience.' To counter this extremely anthropocentric and immensely trivializing tendency that prevails in the post-Katrina era, it seems crucial to reconsider the ecological in philosophical terms that match its overall complexity and expand the ecological discourse beyond the bounds of an oscillation between technocratic faith in effective planning and outright pathetic fallacy. As Gregory Bateson has noted, the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pat to 'sell' the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight. (513) Leyla Haferkamp 55 In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres stresses, in a similar vein, the urgency to abandon the 'parasitic' position of anthropocentricism and rethink our relationship to nature in terms of a new contract: "[W]e must add to the exclusively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity in which our relationship to things would set aside mastery and possession […]" (38). This new pact, he argues, should extend beyond the scope of mere discursivity and take into account the fact that "the earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions […]" (39). Serres' contract implies an ichnographic set of horizontal relations, i.e., a flattened hierarchy that is held together by the systemic 'intercordedness' of its constituents, within which the venerable distinction between humans and nonhumans is dissolved. However, this heterarchic web of relations is defined not only by the diversity of its interconnected elements, but it also implies a systemic totality within which the seemingly opposite poles of the global and the local communicate: "The bond runs from place to place but also, at every point, expresses the totality of sites. It goes, to be sure, from the local to the local, but above all from the local to the global and from the global to the local" (107). The natural contract that follows "the recent passage from the local to the global" and sets the parameters for "our renewed relationship to the world" (38) calls for a new mode of thought that Serres sees embodied in what he calls the "the Instructed Third," who dwells in the interzone as the "traveler in [both] nature and society," while ceaselessly navigating the waters of "the Northwest Passage, those waters where scientific knowledge communicates, in rare and delicate ways, with the humanities […]" (94). In a more recent inquiry, Bruno Latour argues in a similar vein when he draws attention to the necessity of inserting "a learned community that acts as a third party" between nature and society, which "the ecological movements have sought to short-circuit […], precisely in order to accelerate their militant progress" (4). According to Latour, the shortcomings of political ecology result from the conceptual deficiency residing at its core, from its having skipped the crucial step of redefining/reorganizing conceptual parameters. This conceptual inconsistency can be traced back to the fact that political ecology has merely juxtaposed such inherited notions as oikos, physis, anthropos, etc., without further investigating their interrelatedness and interdependency within their mutual, ecophilosophical context. For the sake of a weak version of pragmatism, it has too readily 'gotten beyond' the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of law and objects of science – without observing that these entities had been 56 Processing Ecology with Deleuze shaped, profiled, and sculpted in such a way that they had gradually become incompatible. (3, emphasis added) Roughly speaking, the contemporary ecological debate can be said to be taking place in a realm marked out by two idealized extremes: a fully 'organized' technocratic culture with its valid solutions and a pristine and 'organless' nature characterized by perennial flow. The latter is an Arcadian myth in that it implies the purely intrinsic, ecocentric value of the natural, whereas the former sways into the homocentric Utopia of perfect planning. These two extremes, though fully incompatible and in themselves useless for the development of viable ecological policies and strategies,6 serve nonetheless as necessary parameters that demarcate the outermost periphery of the theoretical framework that allows for the description of ecological processes. It is within this framework that Deleuzian philosophy, regarded as a form of process philosophy with the "capacity to fuse into one unifying conception such contrasting polarities as unity and plurality, stability and change, specificity and generality […]" (Rescher 4), is well-equipped to play the role of 'the instructed third.' The planomenon of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is the plane of immanence, which provides the space on which the links between the seemingly incompatible realms of discursive abstraction and fluent materiality are established. "The plane of immanence," as they note programmatically, "has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis" (What Is Philosophy? 38). This topology of the plane implies a thoroughly monistic process philosophy, in which the notion of process, although it is not restricted to the Heraclitean notion of perennial flow, encompasses the whole range of transmutations related to the dynamics at work in the very interzone marked out by the idealized extremes of permanent form [being] and amorphous flux [becoming]. Accordingly, Deleuzian philosophy puts the emphasis on the simultaneity and interdependency of opposing forces as well as on the translational processes taking place in between them; a move that reflects the principle of dynamic reciprocity Alfred North Whitehead had developed in Process and Reality: In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts. (338) Leyla Haferkamp 57 In the Deleuzian version of process philosophy, the ontological oneness of epistemologically incompatible categories, e.g., the horizontal [planar] interconnectedness of nous and physis, constitutes the basic paradox philosophy has to deal with.7 Although Deleuze abandons the primacy of the mental in favor of a psychophysical monism, his perspective is by no means that of an eliminative materialism that fully rejects the mental component. What Deleuze does reject is any idea of transcendence that surpasses materiality, an orientation that also prevails in Bateson's writings. "In addition to the physical determinism which characterizes our universe," Bateson writes, "there is a mental determinism." This mental determinism is, however "in no sense supernatural […] [It] is not transcendent but immanent and especially complex and evident in those sections of the universe which are alive or which include living things" (472). Deleuze goes even one step further when he asserts that "[a]lthough it is always possible to invoke a transcendent that falls outside the plane of immanence, or that attributes immanence to itself, all transcendence is constituted solely in the flow of immanent consciousness […] Transcendence is always a product of immanence" ("Immanence" 31, emphasis added). As the "[i]mmanent mind has," as Bateson argues, "no separate or unearthly channels" (473), what we take to be transcendent can only emerge from within the realm of immanence, which, according to Deleuze, "is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things" ("Immanence" 27, emphasis added). Along these lines, the Deleuzian perspective comes close to that of an emergentist materialism, which regards the mental as an emergent property of the bio-physical.8 This specific mode of materialism suggests the reversal of Platonism, in which the ideas as immaculate concepts enjoy absolute primacy over all other categories of being. Such a reversal applies even more readily to Plotinus' Neo-Platonic theory of hypostases and emanation. The top-down movement of emanation, the eidetic illumination of the lower strata of being, is substituted in Deleuze by the productive force of immanation ensuing from "the new postconscious and postsubjective, impersonal and non-individual transcendental field" (Agamben 225). It is within the context of such an emergentist materialism that Deleuze understands philosophy as the discipline engaging in the continuous 'conception of concepts:' "Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting for some philosopher to come grab them. Concepts have to be produced" (Two Regimes of Madness 313). 58 Processing Ecology with Deleuze Why, then, processing ecology through Deleuze? Though lacking an explicitly ecological orientation, Deleuzian philosophy offers extremely useful conceptual tools for dealing with the translational processes that take place between the diametrically opposed 'ecological' terms such as constancy vs. change, form vs. flux, order vs. chaos. In his early work, Deleuze himself stressed the significance of the conceptual as follows: "The genius of a philosophy must first be measured by the new distribution which it imposes on beings and concepts" (Logic of Sense 89). Later, for Deleuze (and Guattari), the special vocation of the philosopher consisted primarily in the conception of concepts: "[P]hilosophy is a discipline that is just as inventive, just as creative as any other discipline, and it consists in creating or inventing concepts" (Two Regimes of Madness 313). As Deleuze and Guattari write, just as the scientist is the inventor of prospects and the artist the creator of affects and percepts, the philosopher is the inventor of concepts (What Is Philosophy? 24). What makes Deleuzian philosophy especially relevant for the ecological debate today is also its deliberately transdisciplinary positioning as a system of thought open to both the sciences and the arts. Though they produce different tools, the philosopher, the artist and the scientist interact in their effort to depict and analyze 'reality.' However, whenever there is need for conceptual clarity, it becomes the philosopher's task and the philosopher's task only to explore the domain in between the disciplines and come up with the adequate concepts. "A scientist as a scientist," Deleuze writes, "has nothing to do with concepts. That is even why – thankfully – there is philosophy" (Two Regimes of Madness 314). As a conceptualizing machine, philosophy provides ecology with concepts that complement 'its' scientific prospects, although they differ drastically from these prospects. For instance, science and philosophy differ drastically in their attitudes towards chaos, which is "defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes" (What Is Philosophy? 118). While science decelerates the infinite speed to the point of an analyzable standstill, "in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual," philosophy retains the infinite, "giv[ing] consistency to the virtual through concepts." It can do so because the plane of immanence serves as the "philosophical sieve" filled with concepts whereas science attempts at laying out its own "plane of reference" (118). Unlike scientific propositions that are based on fixed points of reference and aim at quantitative measurements, concepts are complex products of metaphysical thinking: "[T]he concept is not a simple logical being, but a metaphysical being; it is not a generality or a Leyla Haferkamp 59 universality, but an individual; it is not defined by an attribute, but by predicates-as-events" (Fold 42, emphasis added). Deleuze's 'concept of concept' can best be elaborated by virtue of its connectivity to the plane of immanence on the one hand and to the concept of the event on the other. The concept is correlative of the plane of immanence, without which it could not exist. The plane displays the constitution of the assemblages forming and filling space; it is characterized by "only speeds and slownesses between unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers."9 The components constituting its surface abide by the geometrics of "pure longitude and latitude" (Thousand Plateaus 261) and know of no dimensionality, i.e., they are located within the cartography of heterarchic directionality. Though in itself not directly a philosophical concept or "an act of thought" (What Is Philosophy? 21), the plane constitutes "the image of thought" (37) indispensable for philosophical activity; it serves as the prephilosophical basis and "the absolute ground of philosophy, […], the foundation on which it creates its concepts" (41). The notion of concept is also closely related to that of the event, probably the most important concept relating thought to process. One of the things that make Deleuzian concepts so 'ecological' is that they do not address the essences of things, but the dynamics of events and the becomings that go through them. In most general terms, "[t]he concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come" (3233). Although concepts as metaphysical entities belong to the realm of relational abstractions and have "the reality of a virtual, of an incorporeal, of an impassible, in contrast with [scientific] functions of an actual state, body functions, and lived functions" (159), the events they signal constitute the hinge between the virtual and the actual; in fact, [the event] is itself inseparable from the state of affairs, bodies, and lived reality in which it is actualized or brought about. But we can also say the converse: the state of affairs is no more separable from the event that nonetheless goes beyond its actualization in every respect. (159) Thus, the event connotes the simultaneity of incompatibles: it involves both the virtual and the actual, both the virtual concept of philosophy and the actualized function of science as its independent yet synchronous categories: "The event is actualized or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from state of affairs so as to isolate its concept" (159). The event is the intermediary, the 'meanwhile,' the interzone of thought: 60 Processing Ecology with Deleuze In every event there are heterogeneous, always simultaneous components, since each of them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that makes them communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidability: they are mediations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order. (158) The meanwhile designates neither the eternity of immanence nor the temporality of scientific actualization: In laying out the contours of events to come, the concepts address the level of pure becoming. As the elements "moving about on a plane of immanence" (143), as mere intensifications upon its fractal surface, Deleuzian concepts display indefinite contours; unlike scientific propositions with their determinate coordinates of the actualized 'freeze-frame,' concepts, in their vagueness and fuzziness, retain something of the nebulous virtuality of immanence. In fact, they cannot be thought apart from the planomenon, which constitutes the conditions of their creation. Nonetheless, Deleuze argues that "[p]hilosophical concepts are also modes of life and modes of activity for the one who invents them, or knows how to tease them out, giving them consistency" (Two Regimes of Madness 263). This claim does not only establish a quasi-phenomenological link between concepts and 'lived reality,' but also points towards a specific understanding of subjectivity prevailing in Deleuzian thinking. It does not come as a surprise, then, that Deleuze abandons the traditional image of the subject as fixity in favor of a process of subjectivation designated by "difference, variation and metamorphosis" (Foucault 106). Deleuze focuses, like Michel Foucault, the "processes of subjectivation, governed by the foldings operating in the ontological as much as the social field" (116). These processes of subjectivation are set against the two hitherto dominant modes of subjectivity, "the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed one and for all" (105-06). The new subjectivity is always one 'under construction' and 'in progress.' It is in Deleuze's reading of Leibniz that the ecological mode of protean subjectivity is integrated into a web of relations that include the concept and the event. A new theory that was based on the principle of variation and involved the concept, the event and the individual within one and the same framework was introduced during the Baroque as "[t]he concept [became] the 'concetto,' or an apex, because it [was] folded in the individual subject" (Fold 126). Deleuze traces the Leibnizian folding of the object into the subject by way of the latter's adopting a multiperspectival, hence variable 'point of view:' Leyla Haferkamp 61 The principal examples of [Leibnizian] philosophy are shown in the transformation of the object into a series of figures or aspects submitted to a law of continuity; the assignation of events that correspond to these figured aspects, and that are inscribed in propositions; the predication of these propositions to an individual subject that contains their concept, and is defined as an apex or point of view, a principle of indiscernibles assuring the interiority of the concept and the individual. (126) This reconciliation of the external world with the individual via the concept, often corresponding to the triad "scenographies-definitions-points of view," makes possible what Serres has called Leibniz's "ichnographic chart of the Universe" (161n11), made up of the network of bidirectional relations between multiplicity and unity. For Deleuze, this new and, as I have tried to show, ecological relation is the most important consequence of the fold-in: "Always a unity of the multiple, in the objective sense, the one must also have a multiplicity 'of' one and a unity 'of ' the multiple, but now in a subjective sense" (126). Apart from referring to the complex interrelations between organisms and the multiplicity of environmental components surrounding them (and even those living within them as integral 'parts'), the term 'ecology' has also come to denote any 'intricate system or complex.' All ecological crises require prompt action and a decisive attitude, but they also necessitate the insight, know-how and flexibility to deal with them as complex systems. "Organism plus environment" is, as Bateson remarked, no longer ecology's sole unit of survival; it now has a double: "the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind" (491). Ecology, then, is not only the science concerned with the overall bio-physical system and its constitutive parts, but also "the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs […] in circuits" (491). On the level of the mental, the "many catastrophic dangers which have grown out of the Occidental errors of epistemology" (495), which Bateson had warned against nearly four decades ago, not only still present a major challenge today, they do so on an amplified scale. The epistemological fallacies that posit the primacy of transcendence over immanence and/or regard immanence as immanent to 'Some Thing' other than itself, the belief in "an overall mind separate from the body, separate from the society, and separate from nature" (493) and the more banal modes of superstition and 'psychocentrism' that prevail in contemporary culture contribute immensely to the 'ecological threat.' The propagation of transcendence refutes the fact that the human agent is fully included in the decentered network of the dispersed and the interconnected, without the privilege of the hierarchical superposition of an impartial observer [n+1]; that "[w]e are not outside the ecology for 62 Processing Ecology with Deleuze which we plan" (512). In the flattened network, the human position is always that of the partial observer while some of our concepts/ideas can become "nuclear or nodal with constellations of other ideas" (510). "We are," as Foucault has observed in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, […] when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. ("Of Other Spaces" 22) Concepts, as metaphysical tools, belong to the order of understanding and they play a crucial role in facilitating our comprehension of the world. Deleuzian philosophy holds the potential to provide efficient and flexible concepts for the ecological debate precisely because it operates from within the interstices of thought and nature. The Deleuzian concept is always 'in process;' first as a product of the flow of immanence, an intensification upon its surface of chaotic directionality and, secondly, as the act of thought that signals the event, which is, in its turn, the 'meanwhile' of the interstices between the virtual and the actual. But most importantly, the philosophical concept always serves as 'the third party' in the continuous process of intermediation between philosophical categories as well as between different disciplines. It is precisely this precarious position that allows for the specific functionality of philosophy within the ecological realm. As Whitehead noted, [t]he useful function of philosophy is to promote the most general systematization of civilized thought. There is a constant reaction between specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also an enlargement of their imaginations. By providing the generic notions philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances which rest unrealized in the womb of nature. (17) From Whitehead's Process and Reality to Bateson and further to Deleuze, process philosophy can provide ecology with a conceptual ground that allows for the 'complexification' [or, in Deleuzian terms, the complication] of the current ecological debate beyond the bounds of the strict distinction between homocentrism and ecocentrism. Although such a complexification would already be an important 'further step' towards a truly ecological culture, beyond these political dynamics, 'processing Leyla Haferkamp 63 ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more important: the ecologization of the subject. The true point-of-perspective of 'processing ecology with Deleuze' lies in the processualizing and singularization of the subject, in its immersion within the horizontal planomenon of flattened hierarchies and within the overall 'mentality' – and mental ecology – of the haecceities that make up the plane of immanence. Ultimately, 'processing ecology with Deleuze' means never to forget that, in our origami world, "the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system – and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience" (Bateson 492). Notes 1 The explicitly environmental perspective is presented in Félix Guattari’s programmatically ecological writings that directly combine ecological categories with political activism. See esp. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). Guattari draws on Bateson's ecological views for developing a politically relevant ecosophy. See Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 91-107. 2 Deleuze sees Leibniz's genius in his metaconceptual innovation: "It is also widely held that Leibniz brings a new conception of the concept that transforms philosophy" (Fold 42). 3 See, for example, Eugene P. Odum, "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development," Science 164 (April 1969): 262-70. 4 http://www.ecostudies.org/definition_ecology.html 5 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was rewarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for the final proof of global warming and the assessment of its drastic consequences for the biosphere. This achievement emerged from a new form of science organization and related policies. To observe the climate system, the cooperation of hundreds of scientists all over the world is necessary. http://www.ipcc.ch (Apr 29. 2008). 6 "What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses […]. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream" (Whitehead, The Concept of Nature 30). 7 At first sight, 'immanence and transcendence,' 'the virtual and the actual,' 'the smooth and the striated,' 'deterritorialization and reterritorilization,' etc. are all conceptual pairs of seeming binary polarity. An Anti-Hegelian, Deleuze never posits them within a dialectic of sublation that blends conflicting poles into a unifying fusion. Instead, Deleuzian philosophy treats such pairs as the limits demarcating a zone of indiscernibility, i.e., the very zone of their continuous intermediation. 64 Processing Ecology with Deleuze 8 "[A]ccording to emergentist materialism the appearance and refinement of cognitive abilities, be it in the individual or in the species, far from being mysterious, is an aspect of the development or the evolution of the brain interacting with the rest of the body as well as with its natural and social environment" (Bunge 105). 9 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between two planes conceptualized as "the plane of immanence" and "the plane of transcendence." The function of the latter is restricted to the 'organized' development of forms and the formation of subjects (267-68); it accommodates the dimensionality of hierarchic developments and organizations. The plane of transcendence/organization corresponds to the planomenon's noetic facet (see What Is Philosophy? 38). Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. "Absolute Immanence." Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220-39. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). Bunge, Mario. Scientific Materialism (London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981). Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies http://www.ecostudies.org/definition_ecology.html (Apr. 27 2008) Conley, Tom. "Translator's Foreword." Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), ix-xix. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000). —. "Immanence: A Life." Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25-33. —. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004). —. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2006). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). —. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994). Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 2227. Leyla Haferkamp 65 Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001). Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1985). —. The Concept of Nature (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004). Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). THE RHIZOMATICS OF DOMINATION: FROM DARWIN TO BIOTECHNOLOGY1 MICHAEL MIKULAK In a time where global warming, pantoxicity, pesticide pollution, resource scarcity, and a whole host of environmental problems regularly appear in news headlines, the perennial question about what the relationship between humans and nature is and should be, is more pressing than ever. While it may seem trite to focus on questions of narrative, representation, agency, and subjectivity in the face of more "pressing" material concerns, the environmental crisis is more than a problem for scientists; it is a problem of narrative, ontology, and epistemology. It is as much a failure of imagination as it is a technological problem, arising from maladapted social and political ecologies that fail to establish healthy and sustainable network of kinship imaginaries2 that are capable of addressing the competing needs and desires of multiple actors within the biocultural networks humanity is always within. Kinship imaginaries are the foundation of how we relate to others, and thus are the ground upon which (bio)politics are based. They are the basis of how we imagine ourselves to be connected to the world around us, and the myriad organisms that populate this increasingly shrinking and sullied world. How we imagine ourselves in relation to nature determines, to a large extent, the power dynamics of that relationship, whether it is colonial, ownership based, or convivial and respectful. Whether the Christian narrative of Genesis that encourages Man to "increase, multiply and subdue the earth" (cf Lynn White Jr, Merchant), or Gary Snyder's blend of Eastern mysticism and Aboriginal myth which sees the world in terms of an etiquette of freedom, kinship imaginaries are the foundation of our relationship with each other and the world around us, and thus must be interrogated carefully if we are to address the source of the environmental crisis. They are the discourses, emotional ties, art and beliefs we have about our place in the world and provide the substrata and intellectual justification for our actions in the world. Although not an exhaustive sampling, this paper is about two competing kinship systems, the arboreal and the rhizomatic, and the ways Michael Mikulak 67 in which they structure and are structured by political economy, scientific knowledge, and power. The environmental crisis is a complicated interaction of all these things, and my choice to focus on kinship imaginaries derives from the belief that any solutions to the environmental crisis must also occur on the level of narrative if they are to be more than a passing fad. Neil Evernden suggests that "we are not in an environmental crisis, but are the environmental crisis," in the sense that our way of knowing and being in the world is the problem (134). As such, to address kinship imaginaries, is to approach the problem from the understanding that we must first change the way we think about nature and culture if we are to solve the problem. There are many different kinship imaginaries circulating, but I choose to focus on rhizomatics and arboreal systems for the sake of brevity, but also because of the potency of certain discourse emerging out of the biotechnological debate, and their implications for transforming the way we understand nature and culture to be related. And so this is a paper about bioscientific origin stories and the vectors of biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative transversals. More specifically, this is a paper about trees, roots and rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured, shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Darwin, Haraway, Heimlreich, and a range of ecocriticism, I will interrogate how the radically open concept of subjectivity in flux characteristic of ecological models of rhizomatic kinship, transforms the political vectors of the various kinship imaginaries that tie us together. Because the biopolitical nexus of life and politics always draws on discourses of naturecultures in order to find more efficient modes of domination, we must carefully attend to kinship imaginaries that on the surface may seem to promise connection, but which open the door to perhaps more insidious modes of domination. This is especially the case with environmentalist discourses of ecology, which often valorize an open concept of complete rhizomatic interpenetration and connectivity, without considering how vectors of category transformation may infect the body politic with yet undreamt of viruses of biopower. What I call the rhizomatics of domination are the shifting configurations of (bio)power that capitalize on ecological understandings of relationality and kinship. This is not to say that Deleuze and Guattari, and other rhizomatic theorists blindly celebrate the rhizome, but rather, that rhizomatics is being shaped by other rather arborescent discourses, namely the bioscientific narratives of biotechnology, capitalism, and solving world hunger and curing disease 68 The Rhizomatics of Domination through genetic engineering. It is thus important to understand how the rhizome is being deployed, much in the same way that Darwin's notions of evolution were transformed into racist justifications for eugenics. In terms of ecology, Donald Worster declares Darwin as the "single most important figure in the history of ecology over the past two or three centuries" (114), and as such, it is important to interrogate Darwin's contributions to rhizomatics, and the way he has been taken up. Darwin(ism) has profoundly shaped contemporary kinship imaginaries, both positively and negatively, and by examining the profound struggles and tensions Darwin faced in articulating a non-anthropocentric web of life, I hope to cast some light on current problems we face today as biotechnology, and the intensely capitalist discourses around it, rewrite both life itself, and the way we imagine our connections to the world. Roots and Rhizomes Rhizomatic theorists like Deleuze and Guattari and Stephan Helmreich tend to dichotomize the rhizome in relation to a (Darwinian) genealogical tree. For example, Helmreich argues that "at least since Charles Darwin, the family tree has been an algorithm for thinking about evolutionary genealogy, origins, and identity" (340). Such genealogical classification, he claims, are "derived from Victorian social practices of family record keeping. Reading such kinship customs onto the organic world, Darwin effectively naturalized and universalized them, suggesting through a now commonplace epistemological reversal that such practices were themselves emanations of natural logic organizing all relatedness" (340). In rejecting these practices, Deleuze and Guattari declare that they are sick of trees because in the West, "arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification" (16). They declare that we must "make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots" (24)! The arboreal is associated with linearity, hierarchy, origins, racism, rigidity, and carnophallogocentrism, while the rhizome embodies flexibility, openness, movement, and potentiality. On the one hand we have a kinship system that is vertical, appealing to origins, stages, the scala naturae (in which humans rule over dumb beasts), and on the other hand, a system that seems to be open, thrives on diversity and change, and celebrates plurality. While I agree that the rhizome as a model is potentially very libratory and politically flexible, the ludic tone of valorization that often surrounds the rhizome tends to replicate the very binaries and dualistic thinking it attempts to escape by privileging an equally abstracted notion of Michael Mikulak 69 multiplicity, lines of flight, rupture, and schizoanalysis that are potentially even more amenable to shifting configurations of biopower within the age of biotechnology. Rhizomatics seems to be the theoretical soup de jour, and in the same way that arborescence has been rigorously overcoded and dominated by certain bioscientific discourses of purity, miscegenation, and progress, the rhizome is equally vulnerable to such manipulations. As such, my paper argues that the celebration of rhizomes must be amended with careful attention to what I call the rhizomatics of domination. Echoing Haraway's notion of the "informatics of domination" (Manifesto 161),3 the point of this paper will be to reach back into Darwin in order to show how even what we consider pure models of arborescent descent, are in fact much more rhizomatic and complicated in their configuration of origins. By looking at the ways in which Darwinism was transformed by the arboreal logic of the time (social Darwinism, eugenics, degeneracy, anti-immigration), and tracing the lines of flight from his theories to the bioscientific origin stories assembled by political opportunists, we can extrapolate and begin to see how the rhizomatics of domination is effecting the landscape of late capital. With discourse of climate change, eco-apocalypse, and the recent celebration of global warming as a boon for capitalism, the struggle over kinship imaginaries will shape the terrain of the future by fundamentally setting the tone for how we deal with the environmental crisis. The way we perceive environmental damage dictates how we will react to it, who we blame, and the actions we take. Discourse shapes the way we understand our relationship to global pollution and the actions we can take to address it, and kinship imaginaries are the most basic ideas we have about how we relate to the world. It is thus my contention that the reception and use of Darwinism must stand as an example for us when we are theorizing the political potential of rhizomatic or ecological thinking, especially in the context of powerful new technologies of genetic engineering that are rewriting the social and biological fabric of the tree of life along increasingly privatized lines of rhizomatic flight. In the same way that Darwinism was (mis)construed as a bioscientific discourse of legitimation for political philosophies that fly in the face of its author's intentions, rhizomatics must attend to the fascistic potential of re-coding bios within the current biopolitical terrain. Naturecultures The purpose of most environmentalist discourse is to account for the material, epistemological, spiritual, political, and economic conditions that have resulted in the current environmental crisis. The discourse is thus 70 The Rhizomatics of Domination inherently elegiac, mourning for a lost nature, state of union, innocence, or perhaps simply a connection to a world we are increasingly alienated from. Many ecocritics and environmentalists locate environmental degradation in the separation of nature and culture—in other words, a failure of kinship imaginaries to knit together human goals and desires with those of the biosphere. For example, many critics have pointed the finger at Western rationalism and scientific objectivism for its role in objectifying Nature in a manner that denies it agency and voice and transforms it into a mere resource for human exploitation (cf Manes, Evernden). The ostensible purpose of environmental discourse is thus deconstructive in the first instance, but ultimately constructive, with hope coming from the desire to reconstitute society within a healthy and sustainable relationship to nature. The environmental crisis is thus a crisis of narrative as much as it is a crisis of technology, economy, and politics. But what is it that we are saving? What do we mourn? If Nature is dead, as Bill McKibben has stated, then what does it mean to be postnatural? How do we weave a multiplicity or assemblage with(in) Nature without engaging in the same kind of fall and recovery narrative that Carolyn Merchant identifies as essentially colonialist in "Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative"? Is Nature, thus, a useless category for creating an ecological, biocentric ethic, because the term already frames humans and nature along a binary of self and other. Is it an arboreal narrative of false origins and hierarchies? What purpose does the category serve? Have we ever been in Nature in the purest sense of the word? If we accept what Donna Haraway says about our biotechnologically saturated world of technoscience, that we live "in a world where the artificatual and the natural have imploded, Nature itself, both ideologically and materially, has been patently reconstructed" (Vampire 350), then is the source of environmentally destructive ideology the arboreal separation of nature and culture, or a rhizomatic lack of separation? In other words, do we perhaps need to insist on a more stringent separation that would thus isolate the goals of non-human nature from our own and allow us to account for it in our enumerations? Darwin's Rhizomatic Tree of Life Heisenberg Principle: "What we observe is not Nature itself, but Nature exposed to our method of questioning" —Systems Theory 336. Like anyone trying to theorize the link between nature and culture, Darwin was faced with the problem of producing "objective knowledge" Michael Mikulak 71 while being embedded within the very system he was observing. Gillian Boer addresses precisely this problem when she analyzes the disjuncture between language and content within Darwin's project, which she identifies as the decentering of humanity in the kinship chain of Nature, an effort that resonates well with ecocriticism's attempt to challenge the logic of anthropocentrism and move towards a sustainable, biocentric worldview. Donald Worster agrees, stating that "the figure of Darwin must remain the most imposing and persuasive force behind the biocentric movement" (187). However, if language is inherently anthropocentric, and we are linguistic creatures, how can we ever hope to understand a world outside of ourselves and respect the goals of non-human nature? Is biocentrism even a tenable position? Should we perhaps be seeking a stronger distinction between humans and the world, rather than collapsing the two? Or is this perceived separation simply a linguistic artifact? How can we speak of/within Nature if language predisposes us towards all sorts of humanistic biases? Does this even matter? Gillian Beer asks: "If the material world is not anthropocentric but language is so, the mind cannot be held to truly encompass and analyze the properties of the world that lie about it" (Darwin's Plots 45). Darwin seems very aware of this, frequently bringing attention to the linguistic limitation of his own theories. In The Origin of Species, he states that "I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on another" (62). Donna Haraway argues that "biology is also not a culturefree universal discourse, for all that it has considerable cultural, economic, and technical power to establish what will count as nature throughout the planet Earth" (Vampires 323). Darwin seems painfully aware of this, and perhaps for this reason, avoids mentioning humanity in the Origin of Species. However, precisely because Darwin is trying to explain something that exceeds the anthropocentric focus of language, the discourse of evolution can easily be manipulated to serve various political ends. Moreover, because the act of description and observation necessarily results in the transformation of the thing being observed, any theory of nature that does not take into account its production as a human discourse is dangerous and hugely problematic. Thus, even if one is seeking a nonanthropocentric theory, to avoid the human is to obfuscate the ideological, economic, and political conditions of emergence that necessarily shape any theory of nature or culture. It is irresponsible and naive at best, and incredibly dangerous and fascistic at worse. For example, Earth First!ers tend to look at human beings ecologically, or as one more "natural 72 The Rhizomatics of Domination population" that has exceeded the carrying capacity of its range; hence, like rabbits, algae, deer, or locusts in similar circumstances, there must be a catastrophic crash or mass die-off to re-equilibrate networks of ecological exchange. The most famous and problematic incarnation of this position was an article in the Earth First! journal that argued that AIDS was a good thing because it would reduce the pressures of human population on the earth, and consequently, governments should do nothing to help African countries with the epidemic. Although this statement was later retracted, the Earth First! tendency to take a virulently anti-humanist stance has problematic ramifications for the ethico-political communities of kinship they imagine. Although they embrace a profoundly ecological view that equates all life, they tend to exclude humans from many of their accounts, and thus cannot address issues of environmental justice and the role of hierarchical and exploitative social and political ecologies that produce the conditions of environmental degradation. Chim Blea, a pseudonym for a member of Earth First!, argues that: "We as Deep Ecologists recognize the transcendence of the community over any individual, we should deal with all individuals—animal, plant, mineral, etc. – with whom we come into contact with compassion and bonhomie" (Ecocritique 23). The (eco)fascistic tendencies emerge in the complete subsumption of the individual to an imagined community, without a framework being established for adjudicating how, what, and where one organism should live, and another die. If everyone is truly equal, then what does it matter if nature dies in order for humanity to survive? In a strange way, any biocentric theory must take a detour through anthropocentrism. And in this sense, Darwin is a key figure. He was instrumental in shattering the Arcadian view of nature based on a Romantic concept of pastoral harmony. His focus on struggle and violence unsettled people's notion of a benevolent creator and creation in place for humankind. Popular kinship imaginaries now had to contend with a natural world that was decidedly inhumane and violent, denuded of a benevolent original mover that provided all life with the means to survive, and the divine right for human domination. What emerged, according to Donald Worster, was a "dismal science" of nature red in tooth and claw, even though Darwin himself placed a high degree of emphasis on mutual aide and cooperation. This had the effect of decentring humanity and thus providing the necessary first steps towards a biocentric environmental ethic of rhizomatic interconnectivity. However, it also tended to provide the ideological naturalization of violence, competition, and hiearchalized human superiority. The same act of decentring had profoundly antithetical consequences in terms of humbling and aggrandizing humanity within the Michael Mikulak 73 networks of worldly kinship, making humans on the one hand, just one member of the great chain of being, and on the other, the rightful conquerors and creators of an earthly garden of Eden (cf Merchant). Thus, "to dwell on the violence and suffering in Nature was, from the midnineteenth century on, to be 'realistic'" (Nature's Economy 128). While Worster is correct in identifying Darwin's role in the scientific disenchantment of the Arcadian view of nature, and the shift from an economic model based on harmony, divine providence, and abundance, to an economy of competition, violence, and suffering, a careful attention to Darwin's language reveals a much more complex interaction between competition and cooperation, one that is more in line with a rhizomatic conception of nature, than an arboreal one. For example, In Descent of Man, Darwin is very biocentric, arguing that "nature appears as a world essentially held together by lines of 'mutual love and sympathy'" (182). This was very typical of Darwin's work, and he would often seek to simultaneously affirm and deny the struggle for existence as violent and competitive, attempting the delicate balance of holding mutualism and competition in a dynamic flux. For example, he argues that "a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture" (Origin 62). The notion of arboreal hierarchy often ascribed to Darwin ignores these frequent appeals to rhizomatic solidarity, and his careful attention to the way language frames our understanding of kinship networks. In one form or another, Darwin often stated: "all survival is socially determined," and nature is a "web of complex relations," in which "no individual organism or species can live independently of that web" (Nature's Economy 156). Especially if we consider Darwin's debt to Lyell, postDarwinian concepts of nature were rooted/routed through a continual flux and migration of all life. Unlike the Linnaean notion of a divine order where every organism was given a place in nature that did not change, Darwin introduced a rhizomatic motion to nature that understood it as an infinitely dynamic economy in a constant state of flux. No organism was divinely appointed to a specific niche, and no environment was immune to change. By shattering the notion of a divine mover and static creation, Darwin's so-called tree of life begins to resemble a rhizome. There is no such thing as balance and harmony: Nature is no longer static, it is a rhizomatic structure of proliferating lines of flight that multiply endlessly in perpetual de and reterritorialization between beings. So how do we read the Origin of Species? Is its appeal to an arborescent origin, or is it a prototype for rhizomatic thought? The notion of origins and order is arborescent, but the principles of evolution are 74 The Rhizomatics of Domination rhizomatic. Politically, Darwinism has become associated with an arborescent system, but from the point of view of kinship imaginaries, it is rhizomatic. Arborescence organizes, segments, and orders according to first principles. This is the Darwinism of order and origins, and the consequence of the racist reductionism by the likes of Herbert Spencer that naturalizes the fierce competition of an economic order by appealing to evolution. The rhizomatic is about flow, deterritorialization, space without boundary, edge or linearity. It is escape, flight, flux, flow, and never ceasing movement. This describes Darwin's notion of evolution quite accurately: the dynamic flux and flow of genetic information in a process of de and reterritorialization that transforms species and individuals in relation to the flux of all the forces around them. The totality is but an assemblage, an incomprehensible multiplicity that transforms itself in the act of becoming. There is no beginning or end, just ceaseless change and rhizomatic flux. Arborescent Darwinism Rockefeller: “The Growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest” —Darwin 487. All biological discourses are necessarily shaped by political economy, a perfect example of the co-constitution of nature and culture, and thus the necessity of close deconstruction. Although the phrase "survival of the fittest" is synonymous with most popular conceptions of Darwinism, the term was Herbert Spencer's and not Darwin's. So while Darwin was trying to situate humanity back in the natural order, careful to use the struggle for existence and natural selection as metaphors, many people rallied around his ideas for their own dubious ideological causes. They transformed the complicated notion of evolution as co-constitutive and dynamic, with no goal or departure point, but rather a series of endless adaptations, into a teleological narrative of perfection and progress that served various nationalistic and racist agendas. Perhaps the most influential of these interpretive appropriations was Herbert Spencer's, who began what we now know as social Darwinism, and which in effect collapsed survival and struggle into one another in a blatantly ideological tautology that applied the "implications of science to social thought and action" (The Vogue of Spencer 490). Spencer believed that "evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness" (491), and for him, this was embodied by a specific class of European gentry. Even before Darwin, he applied the Malthusian theory of Michael Mikulak 75 population to a theory of social selection that was incredibly callus to social conditions. In 1852 he stated that "the pressures of subsistence upon population must have a beneficent effect upon the human race," or in other words, starvation is good for the species as a whole because it weeds out the poor and weak (492). There are frightening similarities to Earth First!'s argument about aids, suggesting once again that we need to attend to the rhizomatics of domination before we whole-heartedly embrace the rhizome as a kinship model. Spencer vehemently attacked Benthamism and social reform on the basis that they interfered with the natural machinations of a laissez faire market place that followed the laws of evolution. He was against helping the poor because this would interfere with the "the ultimate development of the ideal man" (The Vogue of Spencer 492). The state should not interfere with the market because "the whole effort of Nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them [the poor], and make room for better" (493). We can see obvious resonances here with current discourses surrounding neoliberalism, in which the market seeks to replace the environment by mediating all social, political, and environmental interactions within a supposedly fair social Darwinism. The struggle for existence, or competition, is seen as a positive force of inevitable perfection, which, if left to its own, will act like nature and weed out the weak and unworthy, and reward the strong. The market functions as an evolutionary sieve that separates the strong from the degenerate, and thus collapses society into the choices of isolated bourgeois monads. Structural violence is ameliorated into the amoral rhetoric of survival strategies, and the rich become the legitimate bearers of evolutionary capital. Thus, it is easy for Carnegie to state: "All is well since all grows better" (The Vogue of Spencer 497), and avoid the difficult questions of privilege and artificial selection within an unjust political economy, which would throw the whole equation into question. I could see Darwin responding by stating that the arena of artificial selection pales to that of Nature, and any economic evolution would therefore be necessarily flawed and imperfect. The focus on antagonism, unsocial sociability (Kant), and competition is not only violent and callus to the inequities faced by those on the bottom of the "evolutionary rung," it also favors those who already have power by creating a reverse-teleology that naturalizes their own ascent to power. The kinship chain that emerges is one of isolated egos violently competing for limited resources. Michel Zimmerman proposes that so long as people conceive of themselves as isolated egos, only externally related to other people and nature, they inevitably tend to see life in terms of scarcity and competition. When people conceive of themselves as 76 The Rhizomatics of Domination internally related to others and to nature, however, they tend to see life in terms of bounty, not scarcity, and in terms of cooperation, not aggressive competition. (242) And thus in order to get to the heart of the environmental crisis, we must address the implications of various kinship imaginaries as they align humanity and nature along a continuum of struggle, competition, and harmony. For example, Elizabeth Behnke argues that we must resist a frontal knowledge of Nature that knows it from above and confronts "Nature as a totality of sheer things… in such a way that being known (or being-object) becomes the measure of being" (95). As an alternative to the Cartesian ontology she resists frontal knowing in favor of speaking within nature, and thus being a part of it: "We must learn to speak from within this Nature that surrounds and includes us" (95). She takes this framework and tries to apply it in order to create a practical, "embodied ethics" for interspecies peace (96). She shifts language into the body, learning to decode and recode somatic semantics, or somantics, in a way that enables and fosters interspecies peace and a kinship of life by learning to harmonize "kinetic melodies" (109) and becoming a co-participant in fluid situations. This does not mean that all encounters will be peaceful or possible; however, openness is an essential first step. She embraces the notion of an "improvisational" or "wild body" that enables us to push at the boundaries of our semiotic, cultural, and historical contexts and engage in communication with significant others (108). By taking the posture of "primordial motility" (107), we can hope to adapt and listen by abandoning the "pervasive style of seperative seeing that makes Being, Nature, Others, etc., into objects over-against a subject" (108). But how do you resist this frontal knowing and enable modes of interbeing that embrace what Haraway calls the "counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations necessary to getting on together" (Companion Species 25)? The implication of rhizomatic thought, with its emphasis on becoming and flow is one such way. Behnke echoes Deleuze and Guattari in many ways, speaking of a subjectivity that is unfixed and in constant flux and thus resistant to overcoding. The notion of an improvisational body seems to, on some fundamental level, abandon a desire to be one with nature in favor of a mixing or, like the wasp and the orchid, a kind of semiotic translation through a process of de and reterritorialization. In this context, we can see echoes of Delueze and Guattari rejecting unity: "The notion of unity (unité) appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding" (8). This artificial unity is Michael Mikulak 77 similar to viewing the world from a strictly anthropocentric standpoint: a semiotic overcoding of the human that renders the multiplicity of nature unintelligible by naturalizing the human and humanizing nature. The way in which Darwinism has been deployed politically, emphasizing the arborescent logic of purity, origins, and struggle, is a perfect example of this kind of overcoding. From a critical standpoint, rhizomatics can help us resist this overcoding by providing a language for becoming-nature that does not separate or blindly ameliorate, but rather, celebrates the messiness of becoming. The kinship imaginary that emerges is one that, on a fundamental level, is profoundly multiple and resonates with the ecological precept that everything is connected to everything else, without seeking a knee-jerk and uncritical union or unity. Narratives of origin are struggles over the future as much as the past, in that they set the initial vectors of biopower. The focus on struggle within the various appropriations of Darwinism is nothing but the use of biology to justify the Hobbesian State of Nature, the war of all against all, and as such, must be countered with more politically just narratives of origins, even if those are equally politically inflected. While many of Darwin's contemporaries transformed his theory into a justification for their political and economic climate, and therefore de-moralized questions of poverty and justice, Darwinism was also picked up by thinkers like Peter Kropotkin (1902), who emphasized the "Law of Mutual Aid" as the motive force of nature. Based on observation of animals and plants in Siberia, he concluded that when there is a large scarcity of food, "no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition" (Mutual Aid 520). Instead, he draws on a movement out of the University of St. Petersburg that focused on Darwin's observations of morality, sociability, and intellectual development within social animals. Kropotkin believed it was dangerous to "reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy" (522), and instead, proposed a theory of solidarity and sociability that did justice to the evolutionary befits of mutual aid. In essence, he rejected the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, arguing that "the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among halfstarved individuals thirsting for one another's blood" (524). Ultimately, Kropotkin argues that it was equally dangerous to view nature as pure struggle, or pure harmony, as "sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle" (525), both of which represent different evolutionary forces at work. He believed that social animals were the fittest, using the example of ants, which are among the most numerous and successful 78 The Rhizomatics of Domination insects in the world, as a case where "mutual aid has entirely taken the place of mutual struggle" (526). The emphasis on struggle, even in Darwin, was likely the result of the fact that Darwin relied on Malthus almost religiously, and thus failed to theorize fertility itself as a product of natural selection, and as such, the ratio between sexual productivity and food production remained dismal and thus favored a view of nature based on competition. However, the Malthusian ratio only applies under conditions of ecological disturbance (Nature's Economy 155), and does not adequately account for species differentiation as a force counter to competition. Thus, instead of competing for the same food source, a species can differentiate and find a new source. It can proceed rhizomatically rather than arboreally, proliferating new shoots and lines of flight. Divergence allows organisms to create new places in nature's economy without resorting to competition: "Diversity was nature's way of getting round the fiercely competitive struggle for limited resources" (Nature's Economy 161). Rhizomes, Microbes, and Trees: Towards a More Critical Rhizomatic Thinking Although a truly rhizomatic paper would resist conclusions, I am moving towards an assemblage of points, that I hope, ties things together, while also leaving them open. Thus to end is only to begin, and I propose that Darwin is both an end and a beginning to thinking about current debates within biotechnology, and the different kinship imaginaries enabled and disabled by the recent discovery of a Archaea, a group of marine microbes that live in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and who transfer genes laterally, between individuals, as well as vertically, between generations (Trees and Seas). These microbes have shattered many conceptions of evolution and origins because they disrupt Darwin's "natural classifications" and the link between genealogy and taxonomy. They are truly rhizomatic creatures, both materially, and discursively, and are providing biotechnology companies with a justification for genetic engineering and a new means, through new vectors of gene transfer, to improve the techniques of genetic modification. This strange new bacteria is very appealing to biotech firms because it allows them to work as both engineer (man the tinkerer) and as botanist (man the gatherer). The claim to the former allows for the patenting of genes based on novelty (cf Shiva), while the latter, allows these companies to avoid regulatory scrutiny by claiming substantial equivalence between the genetically modified organism and its natural counterpart. It is based on this substantial Michael Mikulak 79 equivalence that GMO foods are not labeled in Canada and the US. By shifting our understanding of the origins of the tree of life towards a rhizomatic model, a new set of kinship imaginaries emerges, with competing vectors of biopower emerging from the very same argument. Once again, Darwin's own struggles are illustrative. For example, a biocentric worldview was fostered by Darwin's removal of God from the cosmic equation, since the Genesis invocation towards domination, and the special place of man in the scala naturae was challenged (cf Merchant, Lynn White Jr). However, as God was replaced as Nature's original mover, and creation was seen as "replete with errors, weaknesses, imperfections, and misfits" (Nature's Economy 175), the human place within the order became much more amenable to a Baconian concept of absolute domination. As such, "Man must proclaim himself Nature's engineer and must then see about creating his own paradise on earth" (Nature's Economy 176). This is very much the kind of discourse within biotechnological circles, which refer to lateral gene transfer as nature's genetic engineering, and thus justify their own socially, politically, and economically mediated practice as somehow entirely natural (Trees and Seas 348). Although the idea is not new, the rhizomatic flow of Archaea provides a new mode of justification and framework for Man the (bio)engineer, one that draws on rhizomatic and ostensibly ecological kinship networks to justify unscrupulous economic, political, and biological practices. Thus, while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that rhizomes never allow themselves to be overcoded (9), we can read biotechnological uses of rhizomatic horizontal gene transfer (as a technique and as a discourse), as precisely this kind of overcoding, whereby the organism is taken over by a practice of signification and subjectification, in this case by the expansion of capital into the interior space of cells and genes through patents. The celebration of rhizomatic lines of flight fails to account for the rhizomatics of domination present in the biopolitical over and re-coding of genetic information through the patenting of life forms (IPRs), biopiracy, and biotechnological research that seeks to colonize the very interior of life itself (cf Shiva, Haraway). In a sense, the rhizome provides new inroads for corporations to claim ownership on life by setting a precedent for bioengineering in the very heart of evolution, and thereby naturalizing a deeply colonial and parasitic relationship in a manner that echoes what happened to Darwin's theories. Stephen Helmreich explores this further by examining the potential restructuring of kinship imaginaries in new scientific research on Archaea. He argues that "the taxonomic untidiness such microbes have introduced 80 The Rhizomatics of Domination through their lateral gene transfer reaches beyond issues in phylogeny and molecular systematics into arenas adjacent to kinship concerns and biopolitics" (341). By potentially shifting the meaning of bios in the biopolitical equation, these microbes may usher in a revolution of biotechnological discourse akin to Darwin's, realigning the vectors of biopower within new constellations of violence in the name of social good. The common argument launched by companies like Monsanto who claim that GMO crops, like Golden Rice, are the only way to feed the worlds hungry masses, exploit rhizomatic concepts of evolution in order to incorporate genetic codes into the informational economy. Thus, while discourses of kinship, race and origins have moved away from talk of miscegenation, this new rhizomatic openness is being greeted with a concurrent closure of the genetic commons as corporations manipulate new kinship imaginaries in order to patent life itself. This is especially the case with the thermophyllic microbe Archaea, whose main commercial use promises to increase the speed and efficiency of genetic engineering by providing new viral vectors capable of transferring genetic information at higher temperatures. Moreover, the "natural genetic engineering" (Trees and Seas 348) of these microbes is being used as a justification for human engineering, which is interpreted as natural and safe. However, as Vandana Shiva points out, this reductionist view of nature, with conveniently shifting discourses of artifice and nature used to simultaneously justify the safety of "naturally" engineered organisms, and the appeal to scientific creation and novelty for the purposes of patenting, ends with Nature being declared as "dead, inert, and valueless" (24). Corporations are thus able to recode biodiversity as a genetic investment strategy (Vampires 351), and use the flexibility of rhizomatic kinship in the same opportunistic and selective way that Darwin's contemporaries took up the struggle for existence as a justification for fierce capitalistic competition. Thus, while on the surface the conceptual untidiness of rhizomatic, lateral gene transfer has the potential to strangle "the roots of the infamous tree" (A Thousand Plateaus xiii) and provide new kinship imaginaries capable of dealing with a messy and interdependent world, it is fundamentally important that we ask "how a genetically shuffled bios might be inscribed into new biopolitics" (Trees and Seas 342). In the rhizomatics of domination characteristic of corporate funded genetic engineering and biopiracy, the benefits of rhizomatic kinship are subsumed by the hierarchical accumulation of capital, while the dangers of biological contamination, the development of super-viruses and weeds, and the devaluing of traditional forms of knowledge are felt horizontally by the entire biocultural network of organisms. Taxonomy is shifting from Michael Mikulak 81 kind to Brand, from Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer to Man™ and Woman™ (Vampires 350). So while these marine organisms challenge the genealogical origins of species and open up the possibility for the kinds of kinship connections Haraway valorizes in Cyborgs and Vampires, a radically open concept of kinship also leaves us prone to a rhizomatics of domination. We can take a lesson from the ways in which Darwinism became a justification for forms of biopower he no doubt would have found egregious. There is much in rhizomatic theory that makes it invaluable for theorizing new forms of kinship necessary for addressing the unhealthy relationships humans have with the planet in the age of ecological crisis. However, in the same way that Darwinism became used to justify fascistic and nationalistic forms of power, rhizomatic theory is very amenable to reconfigurations of bios within biotechnological discourses of life. By using Darwin as a kind of test case, we can resist the rhizomatics of domination from choking the roots of a very different kind of plant, one which, if we are careful, has the potential to knit a network of kinship capable of addressing the messy and complicated environmental crisis we now face. Notes 1 This essay was first published in Rhizomes 15 (Winter 2007) Kinship imaginaries are discourses about the relationship between nature and culture that focus on the ways in which humans relate to the world and ultimately each other. 3 I am specifically thinking about the way that systems of networks and information, while liberating us from certain older forms of oppression and domination, open up whole new systems of power that may be more difficult to locate and resist. 2 Works Cited Appleman, Philip (Ed.) Darwin (New York: Norton & Company, 1970). Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). Behnke, Elizabeth. "From Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Nature to an InterSpecies Practice of Peace." Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Ed. Peter Steves (New York: SUNY, 1999). Capra, Fritjof. "Systems Theory and the New Paradigm." Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology. Ed Carolyn Merchant (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994). 82 The Rhizomatics of Domination Darwin, Charles. Descent of Man (1871) http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/texts/descent/descent_fro nt.html, last accessed April 07, 2008. —. The Origin of Species (1859) http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin2/texts.html, last accessed April 07, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and the Environment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). —. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New (York: Routledge , 1991). —. "Universal Donor's in a Vampire Culture: It's all in the family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century US." Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996). Helmreich, Stefan. "Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship in the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology." American Ethnologist 30:3 (2003): 340-58. Hofstadter, Richard. "The Vogue of Spencer (1955)." Darwin. Ed. Philip Appleman (New York: Norton & Company, 1970). Kant, Immanuel. "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose." Kant: Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Kropotkin, Peter. "Mutual Aid (1902)." Darwin. Ed. Philip Appleman (New York: Norton & Company, 1970). Lovelock, James. "Gaia." Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology. Ed Carolyn Merchant (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994). Luke, Timothy. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Manes, Christopher. "Nature and Silence." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1996). McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). Merchant., Carolyn Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1994). Michael Mikulak 83 Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1997). Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild: Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990). White Jr, Lynn. "Historical roots of our ecologic crisis." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1996). Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Zimmerman, Michael. Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). HOW TO BECOME A READER: THE CONCEPT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AND DELEUZE ANTHONY LARSON From his first published essay on the constitution of the subject in empirical philosophy through his polemical critique of psychoanalysis with Félix Guattari to his final work on immanence and life, Gilles Deleuze's philosophy aimed at disrupting the traditional Western philosophical category of the subject. At every turn of this project, from the subject-as-habitus via Hume to the biopsychic of the Anti-Oedipus to A LIFE of immanence, the goal was to move thought away from the centered, human ground of subjectivity to "fields" that extend beyond the singularly human, leading to declarations such as the following from Difference and Repetition: "Biopsychical life implies a field of individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations" (96). While such a statement might remain curiously impenetrable, the position it implies was nothing new for certain strands of French thought at the end of the twentieth century. Jacques Derrida, notably, pushed the trans-human implications of deconstruction to questions of the animal in his later work. What distinguishes Deleuze's work in this exploration of the trans-human is his method, particularly in what it borrows from a Spinozist practice of ethology or study of capacities. For Deleuze, the crucial question in exploring a subject's constitution is not "what is a subject?" but "what can a subject do?" since the shift away from a subject's being to its capacities or powers moves one away from questions of essences and towards those of relations or compositions with other powers, notably powers of the trans-human. While this particular modification in method is not particularly novel to specialists of Deleuze and Guattari, it is important to grasp the implications such a move has for the practice of thought and of life itself, for such are the stakes of Deleuze's re-thinking of subjectivity. How can we experience the radical shift in thought that such thinking requires? Anthony Larson 85 According to Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, a shift in thought concerning our constitution in the "fields" surrounding us implies a shift in living practices, particularly where one's relationship to the environment (another way of describing "fields" of life) around oneself is concerned. How can this happen? What would such a shift feel like? One of the places one might begin to look for answers to these questions is literature, for, as Deleuze was constantly reminding his readers, "Writing is question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived" (Critical and Clinical 1). In other words, it is, paradoxically, through the cultural construction of literary textuality that one is able to beyond the limits of our daily anthropomorphic structures and touch on the larger "text" or "field" of Life itself. For Deleuze, literature offers a privileged point onto this process of life. One of the literatures in which this process is most visible and most livable is the literature of the Anglo-American tradition (which Deleuze treats memorably as being "superior" to other traditions in Dialogues). Why, after affirming literature's potential out of limiting structures such as anthropomorphic culture, would Deleuze go on to make such an outrageous affirmation concerning literature? For there are many splendid literary traditions and limiting them to their socio-historical borders seems above-all counterintuitive. However, this would be to forget Deleuze's designation of literature as Anglo-American in conceptual terms (which, in his philosophy is defined as a response to a particular set of problems) and to forget how this concept of literature responds to these particular questions concerning the practice of life in terms of capacities and Spinozist ethology. In other words, it is through this original Deleuzian concept of literature that we can begin to understand this highly practical project for changing our manner of perceiving ourselves and our surrounding environment. Before proceeding further, it will be necessary to address a concern that examining literature in a collection devoted to ecology, the environment, and Deleuze might appear frivolous. One of the stakes of Deleuze's fundamental turn away from questions of ontological status (What is a body?) to those of capacity (What can a body do?) is a reframing of the way that one separates understanding and action. As Arne Naess has noted, one of the most fundamental advances offered by Spinoza's thought is that understanding is not simply a proposition but an act (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translator's introduction ii). Reading literature with Deleuze (and Spinoza) is exactly this: inadequate 86 How to Become a Reader ideas that one initially has concerning the text are corrected and appended in such a manner that new ideas are formed that allow one to read and act in entirely novel ways. Naess says that to approach thought in such a manner "implies acts of understanding performed with the maximum perspective possible" (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translator's introduction iii). One might once again object that such talk of thought, understanding and action has little to do with ecology or the environment. This would again be a mis-reading for what occurs with this particular Deleuzian approach to thought and to that most everyday of actions which is reading and the interpretation of signs around us is a transformation of neutral terms such as "environment" or "individual." The text transmits affects but the affects are nothing without the "plane of consistency," "environment," or "individual" in which those affects act. The environment or the individual are not simple categories that require mapping and understanding in a passive manner (asking what the environment is, for example) but fields of forces, the actions of which we strive to experience. What can we experience when we read? What happens to us when we walk in the forest or on the ocean shore? What happens to the shore or the forest when we walk in it? In each of these questions, the framework of the environment changes in perhaps a superficial manner but the more profound question of understanding how such an environment acts does not. To say that "everything is the environment" would be rather reckless, but this extension of the way one thinks the environment to places such as the text and reading is important. It allows one to go beyond sophisticated repetitions of an already ancient cleavage in which the "environment" comes into existence as an epistemological object of the philosophical subject. Indeed, extending the environment outward in this manner is extremely Deleuzian in the same manner that his thought is an attempt to excavate the plane of immanence in all instances of transcendence. Perhaps the most radical "Deleuzian environmentalism" would be one in which the term "environment" disappeared and left its place to "thinking." This move is far from convincing and it is thus necessary to put this theory to the test. Practically speaking it is through an encounter with perhaps one of the greatest classics of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, that one might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake. For it is in this masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of living open before the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an interpretation in which the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which it so often appears, so that a pre-existing judgment may be confirmed, mirroring the critical reading of the Puritan protagonists. On the other Anthony Larson 87 hand, signs are often not what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious and vital energy that upon closer examination escapes the pre-determined judgment of the reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscernibility that escapes definitive interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by Hawthorne's famous "bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a textual process has several consequences. First, moving through the two levels of reading, one discovers how the text is structured by different zones of intensity which then feed into a second and more important encounter between the reader and the text, opening one up to a larger textual process that goes beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger process, in its nature un-foreseeable and incalculable in advance, tends toward what Deleuze would call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the intensities of the reader and the text become something that is neither textual nor "human." That this should occur in a text that so fundamentally confronts the desire to master and read in nature the "signs of man" brings this study back full circle to the overt and radical attack on the human subject that is Deleuzian thought. As many critics have noted one of the reasons Hawthorne's novel remains so powerful and attractive today is because it dares the reader to undertake a strategy of reading based on judgment in which one overlays one's own prejudices or worldviews in order to better "see through" the text and decipher its lessons. That is, the plot is propelled forward by the thinly hidden but nonetheless extra-textual affair between the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne for which Hester suffers and pays her debt of the scarlet letter while Dimmesdale apparently escapes his judgment but suffers another more debilitating and fateful punishment in the end. In such a plot, the reader often very willingly goes along with Hester's Puritan judges and ministers and is also only too happy to follow the investigations of Roger Chillingworth, Hester's "lost" husband who has returned to the Puritan colony to exact his revenge on Dimmesdale. Indeed, it is in this judicial equation of a debt of pain for a sin committed that Henry James finds the novel at its most interesting: The story goes on, for the most part, between the lover and the husband— the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to the misery of atonement—between this more wretched and pitiable culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, the older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with 88 How to Become a Reader his wronger, living with him, living upon him; and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things, and stimulates them by malignant arts. (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed. 232) From this critical position, it is only a small step to the next one in which the abundance of tropes in Hawthorne's novel invites the investigative and judgmental reader to fill in the textual gap and draw the pastor's secret out in the daylight, in a manner that mirrors Chillingworth's own investigation. It is just this danger that James famously finds to be the text's weakness taking as an example the remarkable scene from the twelfth chapter when Dimmesdale is drawn to the pillory in the middle of the night and calls a passing Hester and Pearl to join him: But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness of mid-day, but also the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the door-steps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green on either side; -- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with this hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another. (101-102) For James, all the subtlety and poetry of this passage is lost when Hawthorne says, "…the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter—the letter A—marked out in lines of dull red light" (102) since the appearance of the central symbol in the novel is "mechanical" and "grazes triviality" (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed. 233). In other words, James is wary of the way the text invites the reader to close the tropic and allegorical gap a little too quickly and to see in the night's "unaccustomed light" a "moral interpretation" that simply draws out the secret at the heart of the novel's plot. There is a certain amount of Anthony Larson 89 pleasure in this type of approach to the text in that it permits the reader to close in on the extra-textual mystery of the text, to determine who has done what and perhaps even to participate vicariously in Dimmesdale's punishment. "Seeing through" the text in this manner is also another way of mastering signs, and in this particular example, signs of nature. In a manner similar to that of the vicarious judgment that one feels when reading Hawthorne's text, the reader closes the textual gap offered her/him in the dichotomy set up between the Puritan civilization and the sinful wilderness into which Hester is cast. Thus, on a walk through the woods shared by Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl, Hawthorne offers a textual trap similar to the one mentioned above in that he dares the reader to read in nature's signs the mirror-image of sins, secrets and sufferings of his protagonists: Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of it amide the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tale out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. (120) Once again, the reader is dared into decoding the reasons that Hester and Pearl find themselves banished to the "wilderness" of the young colony and it is the process of this decoding itself, in that it requires the reader to set up a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning, that sets up the structuring dichotomy between Puritan civilization and "sinful" wilderness. As Hawthorne reminds his reader, "Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of the sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source" (102). Seeing through Hawthorne's symbols is to reveal things based on this supernatural and transcendent position where positions of judgment and dichotomies between Puritan civilization and wilderness are founded. Of course reading in this manner is inappropriate and the objection that James raises to Hawthorne's text is really about how it allows itself to be read by hasty and careless readers and not about the text itself. As any reader looking to get to the literal heart of Dimmesdale's suffering knows, 90 How to Become a Reader Hawthorne's text is not as satisfying as it appears for secrets are never truly exposed and when they are, they only appear so, as with the novel's conclusion where the scarlet letter seems to loom again visible behind a textual cloud of hallmark Hawthornian style made up of contradictory hypotheses, plays on points of view, tortured revision, and the undecidibility of signs: Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER—the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne—imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance, -- which afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out, -by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again—and those best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body,—whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. (162-3) Instead of closing the critical gap, the scarlet letter (both the symbol and the text itself) holds off any final and deciding interpretation, reminding us that "The reader may choose among these theories" (163). The scarlet letter is everything but the unadulterated symbol that the hasty reader hopes to find in order to fix his/her judgment once and for all. This play of words on the scarlet letter's "A" (which is anything but original and, one suspects, almost desired by Hawthorne) is the linchpin of a poor reading of the text and the desire to see through its tropes, for judgment always depends on a transcendent (or one might say, unadulterated) position outside of the text in order to make a final decision. What James sees as "mechanical" or "trivial" is the transcendent tribunal that Hawthorne's symbols (the scarlet letter itself, Hester's illegitimate daughter, Pearl, the rose that opens the first chapter of the novel, the engraved shield on the tombstone that closes the novel, Hester's exile in the wilderness, the babbling and secretive brook, etc.) tend to set in motion in the careless or poor reader. That is, where James detects what he calls a slipping from moral tragedy to physical comedy, there is the erection of a tribunal of judgment in the reader's mind in which the symbol's fluidity is reduced and narrowed to a logic of one-to-one correspondence. The logic Anthony Larson 91 of this one-dimensional reading of Hawthorne's symbol does indeed rob the text of its power in favor of a simplistic exchange of a symbol for what is considered to be its just value. To return to what was announced at the beginning of this text, such a reading is an example of a very basic and relatively un-intense "field" of intensity in which the reading subject finds his/her values justified and reinforced. Such a reading subjugates the plurality of Hawthorne's text to the "sameness" or "oneness" of the transcendent and judging subject. It is a reading that attempts to get to what the text "is" and had very little to say concerning what the text can "do." The greatness of Hawthorne's text is to undo this tribunal of judgment in a text that turns around that very theme and it is most certainly this slippery movement of judgment turning upon itself and being undone that is at the heart of so many mis-readings and dangers. If we have worked through the dangers of mis-reading this text, I have yet to respond to the questions I announced above of how literature can help us go beyond our basic and "un-intense" fields of constitution. Perhaps the best way to begin is to realize that if anything, mis-reading texts such as Hawthorne's makes us weaker and separate us from our ability to act. In order to understand how this is possible (and also to more explicitly respond to what I consider to the more important and pressing question of how we can become better readers and thus go beyond our poor and un-intense subjectivity), we need to pass more explicitly through the work of Deleuze. What does it mean to say that judgment separates us from our ability to act? For Deleuze reading Spinoza, there are two ways to consider the world: through the prism of transcendence (in which a certain instance or value is placed outside of all others) or in and through immanence (in which no transcendent point rises above any other). To take an example close to our reading of Hawthorne, the difference between these two ways of considering the world around us can be explained by morality (transcendence) or Spinozist ethics (immanence). In a system based on morality, one is judged according to one's essence and more precisely according to one's ability to achieve one's essence. For man, it is wellknown that his/her essence is reason since man is a reasonable creature. Of course, man often falls short of this essence and morality's role is to constantly remind man of his/her essence, of the need to achieve his/her essence to its fullest degree. This system of reminders or exhortations is what we call values, upon which one is then able to judge whether one has achieved or failed to live up to his/her essence. In other words, morality bases itself on a belief that life is defined by essences which morality then raises to a higher power by defining as the end of life itself. This 92 How to Become a Reader externalization of our essence is the system of values to which we are condemned to eternally answer. In a system based on Spinozist ethics, this hierarchical tribune of judgment disappears. For Spinoza, man is not defined by what he/she is (essence) but by what he/she can do. Bodies no longer have essences but rather possess powers and life is no longer an affair of realizing one's essence (and thus judging whether one has correctly or incorrectly realized this essence) but of discovering one's powers. The question is no longer one of judgment, of whether one has lived up to one's abilities (reasonable or unreasonable) but rather practical, of how can one live in such a way in order to act in such a way (reasonable or unreasonable). In order to understand such a strange way of seeing the world one has to take the further step of seeing the world through Spinozist lenses: each body, each idea, is made up of a certain number of relations that form its substance. When one body or set of relations encounters another the result is either positive and the two bodies or set of relations combine in a harmonious manner to form a higher and more complicated relation (the result of which is joy), or it is negative and both bodies are diminished in the encounter (the result of which is sadness). Food for example nourishes our body procuring joy, but poison kills it procuring sadness. For Deleuze and Spinoza, the stakes of life are to come to an adequate idea of this system of relations and encounters structuring our existence. One falls into morality and a system of judgment when one fails to adequately understand the proper structure of these relations and encounters, beginning with the effects of joy and sadness they procure. Deleuze explains this best in summarizing Spinoza's theory of the triple illusion of consciousness: Since it only takes in effects, consciousness will satisfy its ignorance by reversing the order of things, by taking effects for causes (the illusion of final causes): it will construe the effect of a body on our body as the final cause of its own actions. In this way it will take itself for the first cause, and will invoke its power over the body (the illusion of free decrees). And where consciousness can no longer imagine itself to be the first cause, nor the organizer of ends, it invokes a God endowed with understanding and volition, operating by means of final causes or free decrees in order to prepare for man a world commensurate with His glory and His punishments (the theological illusion). Nor does it suffice to say that consciousness deludes itself: consciousness is inseparable from the triple illusion that constitutes it, the illusion of finality, the illusion of freedom, and the theological illusion. Consciousness is only a dream with one's eyes open. (Spinoza 20) Anthony Larson 93 As mentioned above, the stakes of an ethics à la Spinoza is to escape this triple illusion by seeking out encounters which allow us progressively to have an adequate vision of the relations and encounters which structure our existence. We noted above that a poor reading of Hawthorne's text, based on judgment, separates us from our ability to act and in this it is highly dangerous. If we adopt a Spinozist vision of the world, new and surprising paths for discovering abilities emerge. Bodies can enter into relations with each other and this "disposition" is their power to either affect or be affected. That is, their power or ability is always a combination of the active (actions) and the passive (the passions of joy or sorrow that accompany encounters with other bodies). In order to escape the triple illusion of consciousness and the passions that accompany it, we must try to seek out encounters in which our power to affect is increased. This might sound like a simple idea but just as Deleuze's declaration that consciousness is the seat of all illusion might be shocking or surprising, this vision of our capabilities or powers is also surprising and shocking. A concrete example to understand this more clearly would be helpful: everyone has seen young children learning to swim at a swimming pool. The instructor describes the movements of a certain stroke to the children but their mind has a difficult time grasping the relatively theoretical movements. The encounter between the mind and the idea of swimming a particular stroke simply does not pass and everyone has seen (or experienced) the confusion of the children as they try to master the stroke outside of the water. What is needed is the encounter of their bodies with the water. Suddenly, when in the water (and sometimes when thrown in the water by the instructor) the children discover a capability in their body that they did not know they had or were not able to adequately understand. The encounter of the body of water with their actual bodies awakens a capability in their bodies that they did not know they possessed. The sensation of the encounter between these two bodies (that is, their swimming) provokes a greater understanding in their mind of their abilities and what they can do with them. In other words, it is through the encounter of two bodies that a greater and more adequate idea of one's abilities emerges.1 As a consequence, bodies are judged "good" or "bad" in such a situation only in relation with the other bodies they might encounter. In this instance, one can declare the water of the swimming pool good for the children who encounter it with a rudimentary but inadequate idea of what they are capable of doing. The water of the swimming pool is bad for those who have no idea of what they are capable of doing in water because of the risk of drowning. In this manner, a Spinozist vision of the world judges ourselves and others by what these 94 How to Become a Reader bodies can and cannot do and not by morality (which is, of course, the way a swimming pool is most often presented: "Forbidden and off limits!"). Once again, Deleuze explains this vision of a world beyond good and evil in exemplary terms: Hence good and bad have thus a primary, objective meaning, but one that is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature does not agree with it. And consequently, good and bad have a secondary meaning, which is subjective and modal, qualifying two types, two modes of man's existence. That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad or servile, or weak, or foolish who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one's own powerlessness and enslavement everywhere, one's own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to encounter oneself. (Spinoza 22-3) After this long detour through Deleuze's Spinoza, morality and ethics, we are at last capable of returning to our central questions concerning literature. It should be clear by now that correct or empowering readings of literature and the encounter with the text should be seen in Spinozist terms. Literature is an empowering experience and the best texts awaken abilities in us that we did not know existed. The unprepared or careless reader is quick to try to fill the critical gap between Hawthorne's symbols (especially that most central one, the scarlet letter itself) and a judging and measuring eye but if he/she is open enough and capable enough, the frustration he/she experiences in attempting to make that very judgment, to limit the scarlet letter to a simple and unadulterated truth, opens him/her up to something else. This something else is what Deleuze, unsurprisingly, calls literature's affair of health: Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health […] but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things, whose passage exhausts Anthony Larson 95 him, while nonetheless giving him becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. (Critical and Clinical 3) Following up on an observation made by Proust, Deleuze notes how literature turns language upon itself, creating a sort of foreign tongue in language itself which is the text's style. Taken to this deforming limit, the text allows the reader to see and hear the sights and sounds of an Outside of language which is what Deleuze calls the passage of Life itself (Critical and Clinical 5). Another way of putting it is that the confusion and power that we feel when confronted with a text such as Hawthorne's forces us to let go of our desire to judge, to personalize the stakes of the text. In place of a personal reading based our position as judge there is the impersonal of the text: As a general rule, fantasies simply treat the indefinite as a mask for a personal or a possessive: "a child is being beaten" is quickly transformed into "my father beat me." But literature takes the opposite path, and exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal—which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point: a man, a woman, […] a child […] [L]iterature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say "I" […]. (Critical and Clinical 4-5) When the minister gazes at the sky from the scaffold during his night vigil, he does not see the scarlet letter but an immense letter and it is this impersonal but highly singular and powerful letter/text that speaks to the empowered reader of Hawthorne's novel. As one moves from the desire to judge, to personalize the stakes of the text to this larger, stuttering (the many options that the reader is left to choose at the end of Hawthorne's text) and impersonal reading, one moves through two different "fields" or deployments in life—one weaker and servile and another stronger and freer in life. Furthermore, moving through these readings, through this passage of Life, is also something from which one never "recovers." One of the authors Deleuze is fond of citing is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in particular, his autobiographical text, The Crack-Up in which the author chronicles his fall into alcoholism. It is easy to see why such a text attracted Deleuze, especially in Fitzgerald's description of "molecular" changes that break down one's "molar" structure (another way of putting this passage of Life in literature): Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in 96 How to Become a Reader moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (69) To deploy oneself through such an apprenticeship in literature is to never go back to what one was before such an encounter and it is in this that we become more powerful and freer. This encounter or apprenticeship in literature is something that must be sought out, as Deleuze reminded us above when speaking of Spinoza. One must search out empowering encounters in life that allow the passage of Life to appear. This is important, for it implies two things: first, that the field or plane of intensities that are "deployed" in Life are never given in themselves (that is, they are not "out" there to be discovered through the text but must be constructed with the text) and must then, secondly, be assembled in relation to each other. To put it differently, Deleuze's concept of literature teaches us that our constitution within Life is always "at work" and becoming, bifurcating like Hawthorne's text in which we must always choose our endings and encounters. Much is at stake in such a concept of literature. The lesson that Deleuze gives through literature is valid for life: one may blindly judge, master and possess the signs of the text and close oneself up in the black hole of a debilitating (or, as Deleuze might say, clinical) subjectivity; or one may choose to open oneself up, to pass through the intensities of the literary and critical text and search out ever greater and ever-more liberating encounters. To read in such a manner is to read with and through Deleuze and Life. Notes 1 This is an illustration of the Spinozist theory of parallelism: there is no hierarchy between mind and body and (much like Nietzsche and Freud) Spinoza believes that it is often through the body that the mind can discover unedited powers. Deleuze explains, "There are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So it is by one and the same movement that we shall manage, if possible, to capture the power of the body beyond the given conditions of our knowledge and seize the power of the mind beyond the given conditions of our consciousness. One seeks to acquire a knowledge of the power of the body in order to discover, in a parallel fashion, the powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to compare these powers. In short, the model of the body according to Spinoza does not imply any devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important, a Anthony Larson 97 devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body" (Spinoza : Practical Philosophy 18-19). Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). —. Essays Critical and Clinical Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988). Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Crack-Up ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1993). James, Henry. "Critical Essay." The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962). Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland Person (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). A SILENT DANCE: ECO-POLITICAL COMPOSITIONS AFTER UEXKÜLL'S UMWELT BIOLOGY TOM GREAVES The German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll exerted a quiet but powerful influence on 20th Century philosophy, which has only recently been fully recognised. Like the worlds of meaning that he claims escape both the casual glance of the naturalist and the precise measurements of the physiologist, Uexküll's thought has escaped the notice of much ecological philosophy. This is perhaps not surprising for a thinker who explicitly challenged contemporary Darwinism and advocated a return to the apparently discredited idea of a "plan" underlying the history of life. Nevertheless, Uexküll's biology made a decisive contribution to two streams of philosophical thought, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the assemblage-ontology of Deleuze and Guattari, both of which have been influential on those who see the necessity of widening the scope of environmental philosophy. In this chapter I will trace some of the remarkable points of conjunction between these two fundamentally distinct philosophical programmes as they each take up Uexküll's concept of Umwelt. After outlining some of the significant and contentious features of Uexküll's theory of "Nature as Music," I consider whether Deleuze and Guattari's focus on the territorialisation of Umwelten might not be helpfully supplemented by phenomenological concerns about the ontological significance of specific difference and speciation. I then turn to the problematic notion of a chaotic world or "milieu of all milieus" and try to show why this notion remains of central importance to both accounts, although they differ markedly as to its precise significance. Finally, I discuss claims about the totalitarian and fascist tendencies to be found in musical and ecological composition, which have been associated with the notion of a milieu of all milieus. I suggest that we can use the distinction that Deleuze and Guattari make between totalitarianism and fascism to gain a more precise understanding of the threat of what is sometimes Tom Greaves 99 called "eco-fascism." Compositional ecological philosophy must become attuned to different modulations of silence, both destructive and creative. Umwelt: A Compositional Theory of Environment An Umwelt is distinguished from an environment or habitat in that it is composed of only those elements which have significance for the living being. Uexküll often expresses this by referring to the Umwelt as the subjective world of the animal. That is because he wants to point out that what physiologists miss when they analyse a reflex arc, for example, is that the relation between an animal and an object is not one of linear reception and reaction. Rather, the relation is one of an integrated "functional circle" in which meaning is carried from the object through a perceptual world and the subject in turn utilizes that meaning in an operational world (Uexküll, Stroll 322-324). Thus, there are no neutral objects in an Umwelt, but all carry significance and a certain "tone" with them. In fact, describing the Umwelt as a subjective world becomes problematic when we consider that meaning is not projected from a subject onto a neutral object. The object is itself caught up in this circle of meaning just as much as the subject. The meaningful "cue" or "tone" of an object is there by virtue of the animal listening out for it, but it nevertheless has that tone, otherwise the animal would not hear it. The idea that the living subject is a "centre of meaning" will become even more problematic when the "object" which it encounters is another living being, as is so often the case. Here two or more worlds of meaning intersect and it is surely impossible to locate the origin of meaning on one side or the other. Neither is the Umwelt subjective in the sense of being unavailable to others. The whole basis of Uexküll's research is the thought that these worlds can be systematically described, if we are able to overcome certain prejudices as to the proper objects of scientific inquiry. The famous example of a simple Umwelt that Uexküll sets out at the beginning of his short book "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men" is the Umwelt of a tick. The tick's Umwelt is made up of three receptor cues and three effector cues. The tick smells the butyric acid emanating from a passing mammal, then it drops from its watch post. If it lands on something warm, then it moves about. When it feels a hairless spot it begins to burrow and pump itself full of blood. The question is not whether each of these affective-effective cycles can be understood in terms of physiological impulses or in terms of the organic structures which are influenced by the smell of the acid or the body heat and then transmit "physical waves of excitation" through the body. They certainly can be 100 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology understood in this way. The question for a biologist, however, is how it is that out of all the possible stimuli that surround the tick these three affects produce a precisely articulated world: "The isolated impulses are coordinated into units, and these self-contained motor impulses or rhythmical impulse melodies act upon the muscles subordinated to them" (Uexküll, Stroll 323). The biological question is therefore a question of the coordination, composition or consistency that is produced by blocks of affect. Those blocks are articulated into affective and effective cues so that, "Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms of a forceps, receptor, and effector" (Uexküll, Stroll 323). The influence of this theory can be seen at various points in A Thousand Plateaus. In plateau 3 "The Geology of Morals," the figure of a pincer is reworked as a "double articulation" during the discussion of coding consistency. Deleuze and Guattari insist that we can begin to articulate various figures of the milieu, not in a line of development leading up to the fully fledged Umwelt of the tick, but as distinct moments of its articulation. There is the exterior milieu in which an exterior of amorphous material is interiorised as in the process of crystallization (55). There is also the organic interior milieu in which organisation involves membranes and limits in the interior (56). Finally, there is the figure of the annexed or associated milieu, whereby sources of energy that are different to the material that will make up the interior are annexed to the organism. Life begins to "breath," to respire in the most general sense of annexing specific energy sources (57). It is here that Deleuze and Guattari first refer to Uexküll's tick, as it displays its associated milieus in its ability to recognise only very specific chemical elements in its surroundings. Once again, this is not an evolutionary account of the Umwelten nor is it suggested that Uexküll was wrong to simply start in the midst of already constituted animal worlds. The various figures of milieu are folded into one another; they do not form an explanatory chain. That life forms articulated functional circuits and begins to "breath" is not explained by any of the preceding figures. Thus it is perfectly legitimate to proceed as Uexküll does, beginning in the midst of animal (that is, animate or breathing) worlds. The task is not one of tracing a line back to the first intake of breath, but of following the way in which these worlds play themselves out, as they involve other figures of milieu, erupting onto and folding into the animal stratum. As life takes breath, it can begin to sing. If we want to follow the composition of animal or breathing life then we must investigate the temporal articulations that constitute that life. This is where Uexküll's musical illustrations of ecological composition come into play. It will not Tom Greaves 101 only be a question of the where and how of the composition, but of the type of composition and of what transpires in the performance. In "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men" Uexküll describes a sequence that rolls forward in such a way that, "The effector cue or meaning extinguishes the receptor cue or meaning" (324). Now if each meaningful cue or "tone" were utterly extinguished as it is followed by the next then the musical composition would never hold together. Is it not the case that a meaningful cue in nature "hangs" like a musical note, whilst being transformed by the following tone? The theory of "Nature as Music" which Deleuze and Guattari refer to when they cite this text in plateau 11 of A Thousand Plateaus, is perhaps better exemplified in Uexküll's somewhat later text "Theory of Meaning."1 There each of the "meaning receptors" of the tick is set out in a table over and against the "meaning carriers" of the mammal. The first are said to be points and the latter counterpoints (Uexküll, Bedeutungslehre 146). Just as the wasp and the orchid that Deleuze and Guattari describe form an assemblage, the tick and mammal are also in concert. We are thus presented with a theory of composition in nature, which Uexküll thinks can be utilised in understanding both what he calls the "mechanics of nature," which includes ontogeny and ethology, and the "technics of nature," or phylogeny. Later in "Theory of Meaning" Uexküll describes two experiences which led him to develop the idea of parallels between biology and music. The first was at a Mahler concert in Amsterdam. During the concert he was sitting next to a young man who was studiously reading the score throughout. Uexküll, "musically uneducated" as he puts it, asked what can be gained from reading the score which cannot be immediately gained from hearing the piece played. The young man passionately replied that only those who can follow the score can see how each particular instrument and voice form a point and counterpoint, so that they then melt together into a higher form. This led Uexküll to ask himself whether it is not the task of biology to "write the score of nature" (154). Of course, this does not mean that a score is to be written for nature to follow. Uexküll is clear that the idea of a "compositional theory of nature" should not lead us to the mistaken belief that there are general rules of composition that nature itself can teach. The score that is to be written is a score composed from nature, like the musical poems of Messiaen, taken from the song of birds. Neither straightforward reproduction nor a set of general principles of composition, such a biology would allow us to find coherence in a multitude of voices, without liquidising their multiplicity. 102 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology The second musical event which inspired Uexküll to think about the idea of biological composition was a performance of the Matthew Passion played in Hamburg. The song moved forwards with a real destiny, but one which was totally unlike the progress that the "fantasies of researchers" see in the processes of nature: Why should the violent drama of nature, that has rolled on since the appearance of life on earth, in its highs and lows, not be, like the Passion, one single composition? Was the highly prized progress, that is supposed to lead living beings from incomplete beginnings to an ever greater completeness, at ground simply a petty bourgeois speculation concerning the increasing profit of business? (164) It is easy to see the power that such a fantasy still exercises. Despite the ever increasing clamor of resistance to any thought which displays the slightest hint of finalism, there is still a strong tendency to view the history of life more or less as a progression. Even if it is no longer thought as a progression from incompleteness to completeness, the complexity of living systems is still imagined to increase in a more or less linear trajectory, interrupted by the occasional catastrophe. What is thereby misunderstood is that the complexity of a composition is not to be measured by the actual diversity of is elements at any one time. It may be that we need to rethink not only the history of life but our attitude towards the conservation or cultivation of biological diversity with an ear for the overall coherence of the composition. It is that coherence, rather than any latent finalism, that Uexküll is thinking of when he continually refers to the plan of nature. He is careful not only to distinguish the idea of a plan from that of a goal, but to insist that the "will-o'-the-wisp" of a goal must be extinguished from our contemplation of Umwelten. This can only be effectively done by drawing attention towards the over-all plan, into which it is possible that certain teleological actions may be dovetailed (Uexküll, Stroll 352-3). The plan is therefore not a plan of action, nor even a fixed ground plan, but the plane of consistency where Umwelten are composed. The history of life is seen as a single composition, but this does not imply the presence of a composer other than the biologist who composes from nature and not for it. Uexküll already goes a long way towards the destratification of this plane by insisting that every Umwelt is as "complete" as another and also that, as Deleuze and Guattari put it: "Above all, there is no lesser, no higher or lower, organization" (Deleuze and Guattari, 77). Tom Greaves 103 Nevertheless, Uexküll retains a certain kind of expectation in his mode of listening. There is no higher or lower, in the sense of more or less complete, because every phrase is complete in itself. The "contrapuntal" structure of Umwelten that he insists upon ends in agreement and is bound to harmonic space. Any tension is quickly resolved. Uexküll even describes the "counterpoint" which is maintained between diverse Umwelten as the two feet of a bridge which is connected in music by harmony and in nature by meaning (Uexküll, Bedeutungslehre 157). Furthermore, the comparison between music and biology should not be confined to the notes played by the various instruments in a symphony, but the instruments are constructed with a view to one another, so that the orchestra forms a technical as well as a musical unity. Uexküll's compositional theory of environment thus leaves ecological thought with a number of pressing questions which are taken up in not altogether disparate ways by Deleuze and Guattari and thinkers in the phenomenological tradition. Firstly, is it the case that the "musical" and the "technical" can be separated even to the extent that Uexküll suggests they can? Clearly in nature the construction of the instruments takes place as part of the composition, so that we need to learn to think not in terms of an orchestra which plays a composition, but of an orchestra which composes itself as it plays. In that case, to learn to listen to that composition without demanding that it fit any musical clichés would be of the greatest importance to ecological thought. It is well known that ecology has been dogged by an image of balance and harmony which has ancient roots. Of course, that does not mean that harmony is to be abolished, although it may be freed. The diversity of contrapuntal voices need not be the answer of one instrument to another, but the piece itself can be heard to create and sustain a multiplicity of voices. Secondly, we must consider what is to be made of the plan(e) when it comes to ecological thought. Should we not confine ourselves to the diversity of environments that are played out for us and avoid apparently vapid and perhaps dangerous speculations about a "milieu of all milieus," a chaotic world or chaosmos? Are we able to think such a world, even one for which contrapuntal integrity remains paramount, without liquidising ecological multiplicity even as we do our best to recognise and respect it? Territory and Niche: Marking a Distance/Difference When we stumble into an unfamiliar habitat territories are not simply open to view. Even the closest knowledge of the features of an environment will not reveal territories unless we are able to see how 104 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology environmental and behavioural patterns mark out a territory. That is why Uexküll says that, "Territory is a pure Umwelt problem" (Uexküll, Stroll 365). It is also the ethological problem par excellence. On the other hand, the concept of niche is also an Umwelt problem, but one which belongs above all to ecology. Of course, the two problems cannot be strictly separated, but rather they belong to two different tendencies in the thinking of life. Since it is above all an ethology that Deleuze and Guattari are interested in developing, one might be tempted to think that the ecological problem of niche is set to one side or surpassed in this ethology. After all, in A Thousand Plateaus we move from milieu to territory, tracing the territorialisation of milieu in the "becoming-expressive of rhythms." When the functional milieu is territorialised, have we not left ecology behind? Or can the problem of niche be posed again, in such a way that Uexküll's distinction between the technical and the musical in nature does not apply? At first sight the problem of territory and the problem of niche seem to be distinguished by the fact that the former is intraspecific whilst the latter is interspecific. Both involve marking a critical distance, but territory marks out a distance between those who occupy precisely the same niche. Apparently niche is prior to territory and of a different order. It is crucial for ecological thought to show that this is not the case, that there is a problem of niche as well as a problem of territory. However, they are not problems that can be tackled in isolation. The problem of niche can fruitfully take its lead from Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. For Deleuze and Guattari the marking of a territory becomes far more complex than in many previous accounts. In particular, marking is no longer understood as a warning sign which points beyond itself, towards the potential consequences of transgression. They do not allow the expression of territory to become a system of signs that all tend to signify aggression. That is their challenge to Lorenz's "ambiguous thesis," with its, "dangerous political overtones" (Deleuze and Guattari, 348).2 Intraspecific aggression is not the transcendental signified of territorial markers. Rather, aggression itself is taken up into the territorial expression which marks critical distance. Aggression expresses territory rather than territory signifying aggression. Aggression is only one of the functions which is reorganised in territorialisation and we can presumably imagine a territorialisation which does not express itself in terms of aggression at all. In fact, Uexküll himself, from whom Lorenz derived many of the principles of his research, already came quite close to this view of things. He considers the case of dogs marking their territory through urination. Tom Greaves 105 Rather than necessarily signaling that aggression will be faced if a meeting occurs, Uexküll recounts the case two dogs that marked the same territory. If taken out together, they engaged in a "urinating competition" (Uexküll, Stroll 367). It is the becoming expressive of the function that counts in marking a territory, rather than the specific function of aggression. If we turn to the problem of niche, then the situation is somewhat different. Rather than following the tendency to turn the marking of distance in expression into a signification of a privileged function, niche has been understood as the function of all functions. Niche has come to be defined as an "n-dimensional hypervolume," which is to say, the volume created by plotting the species' survival range within the entire range of environmental conditions (such as moisture, temperature, light and so forth) against one another. Certainly, the volume will not have fixed dimensions, since the "realisation" of a living function within any one dimension might affect the range of any number of other dimensions. If there is more food available an animal might need less water. Nevertheless, G.E.Huchinson's formal distinction between "potential" and "realised" niche remains purely Aristotelian (see Hutchinson). The "potential" niche, that is, the full range of potentialities of a species within which the real niche of the species is realised when restrictions such as predation and competition are taken into account, becomes as unthinkable as pure matter. A potential niche has neither form nor volume unless it is already partially realised. So the distinction becomes one of the greater and lesser degrees of formation or realization. In contrast to this functionalist account, we need to begin to think niche too in terms of expression and the marking of a distance. It would be a mistake to entirely identify a niche with a milieu function, such as the annexation of an energy source. We need to begin to see and hear expressions which not only mark out territorial distances but also specific differences. Niche is not a volume carved out of unformed matter, but an expression which reorganises a multiplicity of forms. Deleuze and Guattari are already aware of a link between their discussion of the becoming-expressive of a function and something approaching what Merleau-Ponty called the problem of the "ontological value of the notion of species." (189).3 They draw our attention to the "decoded" sections of genetic material, the "junk DNA" which has no function and does not code for any protein. This material and the 'genetic drift' which it induces remain important but highly problematic phenomena. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is precisely because it is decoded and without function that territorialisation can produce a kind of indirect differentiation or speciation: 106 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialisation is precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever territoriality appears, it establishes an intraspecific critical distance between members of the same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction in relation to specific differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means of differentiation. (Deleuze and Guattari, 355) Precisely how territorialisation "lodges on the margins of the code" remains somewhat unclear here. What is clear is that the problems of territory and niche are not concerned with the intraspecific and interspecific respectively. Nor are speciation and the "potentialities of a species" which mark out its niche to be confined to the order of the coded. Rather, once the ecological niche has been freed from the strictures of functionalism, then it becomes an expression of distance which accompanies territorialisation. The task then becomes one of listening to the different rhythms whereby distances and differences are marked out. An example of this complex interplay between territorialisation and speciation is the case of the ruddy duck, a North American species which has "colonised" Britain. There is to be an attempt to exterminate the British population because of the "genetic threat" which it poses to the rare and closely related white-headed duck in Spain. The ruddy duck is known for its aggressive behaviour, marking out a territory but also a niche which it both shares with the white-headed duck and excludes it from.4 This situation is neither a pure territory nor a pure niche problem. Colonisation and hybidisation involve a complex of expressive rhythms. The real danger is the fetishisation of territorial boundary and specific difference which closes our ears to those rhythms. That is not a call for "nonintervention" or anything of the kind. It is simply a reminder that neither territories nor niches are pre-established boundaries but are rhythmically created, so that the creation, conservation or transgression of any such boundaries is best undertaken by the establishment, support or elaboration of those rhythms. Whilst not strictly separable, the varying rhythms of territorialisation and differentiation introduce dissonance into Uexküll's theory of ecological composition. On the one hand, there is the disjunction that Deleuze and Guattari find played out in romanticism, between the territory Tom Greaves 107 and the earth. The Ur-refrain of the earth beats out a rhythm which strikes against all territorial and milieu refrains: The little tune, the bird refrain, has changed: it is no longer the beginning of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the earth. It is no longer made of two consonant parts that seek and answer one another; it addresses itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also strikes against it and sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is indissolubly constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth that arises to drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the assemblages of the bird, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal breathing of the earth. (Deleuze and Guattari, 374) The rhythm of the earth takes in all of the territorial expressions but also harnesses and overwhelms them. The earth carries each territorial refrain before it and they in turn can be deterritorialised by it, although they remain under its sway. The earth founds territories, but it does not leave them behind, it forces them into continuous variation. The dissonance to be heard in the creation of specific difference, on the other hand, is not that of a pulsing earth that carries all along with it, but of the lag of those who cannot keep pace. It was Bergson who identified this rhythm of speciation. He complained that radical finalism conceives evolution on the model of, "a musical concert, wherein the seeming discords are really meant to bring out a fundamental harmony" (128). Nothing of the kind is to be found in the evolution of life. However, the mistake lies not in the musical metaphor but in the failure to hear a basic rhythmic difference: The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life in general is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead, they want to mark time. (128) Life is always lagging behind itself. That is not because of some failure to keep time, but because the very mobility which creates a path for itself must of necessity lay down a road which it is reluctant to leave behind. Rather than the deep pulse of the earth sounding behind each refrain we hear the plodding lag of living beings whose very way of life has forced them into a niche. None of this is to say that territory and niche are to be absolutely distinguished in terms of this rhythmic difference. Once more, territory and niche are each marked out rhythmically, but there is nothing to say that the marking of a distance might not also create a difference. 108 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology The rhythms of the earth and of life must both be attended to in a behavioural ecology which is able to hear the composition as a whole. Is there anything to be said about the whole complex of these rhythms, the consistency which they are able to achieve and the lines of flight by which territory and niche are deterritorialised and destructured? Can we think the whole without turning it into a totality? In such a project Deleuze and Guattari might find an unlikely ally in ecological phenomenology. The Chaotic World: What becomes of the "Milieu of all Milieus?" At first sight Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of animality and environment might seem to contrast sharply with that of phenomenology. However, both make extensive use of Uexküll's Umwelt-theory, in such a way that the central ontological concerns introduced by the thinking of animality and environment coincide at certain points. In particular, as we have begun to see already, the concept of Umwelt demands that we consider the consistency of the whole ecological interweaving of animal environments. What is the character of this consistency? How and where is it constituted? These questions led both Deleuze and Guattari and the phenomenologists to reconsider the problem of world in the light of ecological composition. In his 1957-58 lectures on "Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture" at the Collège de France, which formed part of a series of lectures on the concept of Nature, Merleau-Ponty devoted some time to an examination of Uexküll's notion of Umwelt. During his interpretation Merleau-Ponty is led to the question of the world where Umwelten are composed. If animal worlds can be "englobed" in a human Umwelt and it is precisely the task of biology to achieve this, nevertheless an Umwelt is never total, so we are all englobed in an Umgebung-the totality of natural surroundings-which we often mistakenly assume our own scientific Umwelten can grasp in its totality. Uexküll's theory then steers us towards the question: "What is the Umwelt of Umwelten?" (177). In Uexküll's works Merleau-Ponty finds two responses to this question, both of them unsatisfactory. In the earlier work, adhering more strictly to the Kantian principles which he professes allegiance to, Uexküll gives no positive determination of this environing world-in-itself and suggests that none can be given. By the time of the 1934 "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men," following what Merleau-Ponty sees as intuitions already developed by Schelling, Nature itself is determined as a unique subject which carries all Umwelten but is itself closed to them. This second view Tom Greaves 109 is of interest because, somewhat unexpectedly, by insisting on the mutual envelopment of Umwelten it avoids the implicit anthropocentrism of the view that all we can speak of comes from within an exclusively human Umwelt. Nevertheless, both of these solutions move away from the true novelty of the notion of Umwelt. Neither the sum of exterior events, nor an interior relation, the compositional event of an Umwelt, "opens on a temporal and spatial field." The constitution of the world in which these environing events "surge-forth" is not secured before the event. It is neither the suprasensible nor a nature-subject, but the theme of a melody that haunts all its realisations. The plane of ecological consistency consists in this melodic thematism, it is not a set of pre-constituted niches waiting to be filled. The problem that we are left with is how to traverse the ecological world, the Umwelt of Umwelten, without reducing it to a preconstituted field which itself could be grasped in the pincer of a particular functional-milieu. It is this problem that deeply informs both the ecologicalphenomenology that Martin Heidegger elaborated in this lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude and the account given by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Despite deep rifts between these thinkers, there are a number of points in their respective traversals of the ecological plane at which they come so close as to almost touch. First of all, there is the question of becoming-animal. What is the kind of event that brings us into the midst of an ecological composition? It is not sympathy or empathy if that means an attempt to feel the affects of another, which belong exclusively and personally to that other. That is why it is also not a question of imitating an animal, since that is also an attempt to get ourselves into the position of the animal, implying that an animal occupies a position which will itself not be affected by this becoming. Heidegger therefore asks not whether we are able to empathise with an animal, or get into the consciousness of an animal, but whether we can be transposed into the life of an animal. This transposition in turn is not the taking up of a position, but a movement of becoming which we follow through along with the animal: "Nothing other than this: whether or not we can succeed in going along with the animal in the way in which it sees and hears, the way in which it seizes its prey or evades its predators, the way in which it builds its nest and so forth" (Heidegger, 203-4). The possibility of going along with the animal is nevertheless subject to affect of a certain kind, but an impersonal affect to which the Dasein is attuned in its going along with the animal. This tune is not the exclusive property of one who becomes attuned. Such an attunement turns out to be the core 110 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology of Heidegger's infamous thesis, a thesis which he himself struggles with a great deal, that the animal is "poor-in-world." The "poverty" is a "poverty in mood [Ar-mut]" in which the Dasein comes to be attuned to animal becomings (195). Dasein can become attuned to the animal's life only because animal becomings are played out to a tune. Thus it is not in the least bit clear that there is anything more "anthropocentric" about such ecological phenomenology than the concept of becoming-animal offered by Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, Keith Ansell-Pearson has suggested that Heidegger's thinking of "animalbecomings" might be used to counterbalance a lacuna in Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Uexküll, namely that the thought of "becominganimal" has a tendency to suggest that the animal is already given in its animality and to neglect the way the idea of Umwelten demands the thorough re-thinking of how that animality comes about. Ansell-Pearson even suggests that one might argue that Deleuze and Guattari's, "attempt to disclose nonhuman becomings of the human results in a 'violent' humanization of animal worlds as well as producing an idealized account of nature and the cosmos" (Ansell-Pearson, 188). Whether or not Heidegger's account could entirely remedy such a situation is unclear, since he himself admits that his "going-along-with" the animal falters when it comes to giving a full account of what he calls animal motility and its specific kind of "historicality." (Heidegger, 265-267) Ultimately it may not just be a question of thinking animal-becomings alongside becomingsanimal, but becoming attuned to the tension that arises in both of these accounts, between being swept up by an affective becoming-along-with the animal and thinking the kind of world which is inhabited or plane that is traversed in these becomings. For Heidegger, when there is a "going-along-with" an animal, just as Deleuze and Guattari insist is the case with "becoming-animal," it is not a question of imitation or imagination. Dasein does not imagine what it is like to be an animal, nor does it play at being animal. It finds itself in the midst of an ecological dimension, so that there is never a going-along-with one animal, without at the same time going along with all those with which it is in communication and with which its Umwelt intersects: The woodworm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means together with this encircling ring of its own, finds itself in turn within the ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And this woodpecker finds itself in all this within the encircling ring of the squirrel which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness within the rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized Tom Greaves 111 by an enormous wealth of contents and relations which we can hardly imagine, but in all this it is still fundamentally different from the manifestness of beings as encountered in the world-forming Dasein of man. (277) The gulf that Heidegger insists upon here is often taken as evidence that he cannot adequately think the proximity of Dasein to animality or anything like becoming-animal. But upon closer inspection it becomes clear that although our imagination can often fail us, ecological thought is not fundamentally an exercise of any special imaginative capacity. The very movement through the worlds of woodworm and woodpecker and squirrel is that of Dasein that finds itself in the midst of these encircling rings. It is not that Dasein stands somewhere outside of this ecological interplay or tries to imagine itself in the midst of these intersecting circles. The manifestation takes place in the "going-along-with" the worm which at the same time is the traversal of the whole composition of encircling rings. "World-forming" has nothing to do with the moulding of unformed matter. It is the traversal and translation of the chaos of forms that intersect in this ecological dimension. There is an echo of the Chaosmos here. Each encircling ring persisting in what is its own, threatened by the surrounding chaos, but also in itself engulfed by the others, shot through by lines of flight from which its very own milieu is composed. In the final analysis, we may find that the boundaries that Heidegger is constantly marking and remarking are themselves composed from movements and traversals that constitute an ecological dimension without underlying unity. There is a despeciation on the ecological plane which runs alongside and intersects with deterritorialization. It is only in the intersections, the movements of traversal, that the "its own" of each specific ring is composed. That is why Heidegger too, like Deleuze and Guattari, questions the idea of a linear evolution, a straightforward unfolding of differentiation from an undifferentiated primordial slime, which does not take account of the way that differentiation is repeatedly marked out and as such open to despeciation. The contextual ring in which an animal lives out its life is not marked out for it before it begins to live. The genetic code itself, together with the all important margin of decoded code, is one of the materials taken up in the composition of what is specific to that life. Its specific meaning is produced in the movement it composes along with others. As such the specific tones which each living being can produce and become attuned to only gain their specificity as part of the whole composition. 112 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology Modulations of Silence and Ecological Annihilation The danger that threatens this return to the whole, to the world in which Umwelten compose themselves and mark out for themselves what is their own, is the dissolution of specific difference. However much Deleuze and Guattari insist that, "there is in all this no hint of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night," (78) the Earth does still threaten to engulf the singing of birds and the colour of flowers in one huge Urrefrain (378). Species are threatened with being swept up in the huge traversal of "life in general." This threat is not easily overcome and we have seen that Uexküll himself was constantly in danger of succumbing to it, especially when he introduces a great Nature-subject to describe the compositional plan, rather than allowing the plan itself to be composed between the Umwelten themselves. This danger asserts itself in strictly compositional terms. That can be illustrated by some remarks of Theodor Adorno concerning the use of counterpoint in new music. Even in the most thoroughly contrapuntal composition, in which harmony has been "freed" to the greatest degree possible whilst maintaining the consistency of the piece, there is the danger of dissolving specificity, precisely through its insistence on differentiation: It is true enough that even though the different voices are heard simultaneously, their tones and rhythms never coincide, and hence they are absolutely to be distinguished from one another. But this very absoluteness makes the differences between them problematic. Not only does everything go back to a unified, identical basic material, so that distinctions collapse into sameness; but also the all-inclusive nature of the distinguishing principle turns everything into one single thing. Differences are eroded into complimentaries; the antithetical nature of counterpoint, the representative of freedom, is submerged in synthesis without retaining its identity. (13940) Adorno is concerned with the potential totalitarianism of counterpoint. That is to say, absolute differentiation may revert to simplicity. An economy with the highest degree of division of labour is not as a consequence an economy which allows for a high degree of specificity or differentiation. This has its ecological equivalent in the thought of a living world which absolutely separates each living voice, locating each in its own "niche" within a total economy of nature. A silencing of the whole may be the effect, even as polyphony is emphasised at every turn. Tom Greaves 113 Nevertheless, the totalitarian lock-down of despeciation and the resulting dissolution of specificity itself, may not be the only or even greatest danger facing ecological composition. Along with, but thoroughly distinct from its potential totalitarianism there is the potential fascism of music. Fascism is not the blocking of lines of flight, but their turn towards destruction. Since music is composed precisely of such lines it is never immune to this potential: "Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential 'fascism'?" (Deleuze and Guattari, 330). We must recall here that Deleuze and Guattari draw a strict distinction between fascism and the totalitarian State. They concur with Virilio's observation that fascism is less totalitarian than it is suicidal. "Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition" (Deleuze and Guattari, 258). The dissolution of species and territories by means of the locking down of all lines of deterrorialisation or despeciation would therefore not be the only danger to face ecological composition. There is also the danger that its own creative movements will be swept up into a suicidal flight of destruction. The silence from out of which and within which the whole composition emerges might become overwhelmingly attractive. With this we are able to define far more precisely than has usually been possible the much discussed danger of "eco-fascism." This would now have to be distinguished from the first danger, the danger of a totalitarian locking down of all creative lines in the name of conservation or preservation. As we have seen, such a totalitarian ecology will ultimately dissolve rather than conserve what has been composed from creative lines of deterritorialisation and despeciation. The danger of eco-fascism, however, is not this conservationist lock-down, whatever the conservationist laws introduced by the Nazis might suggest, but an intense line of traversal at a global level. The perception of a global crisis brings with it the declaration of a total war. It is a line of destruction which surges through the entire Mechanosphere, bringing with it the implicit desire for death as the only way to really achieve a "zero carbon footprint." It sweeps across land creating vast tracts of bio-fuel and damming rivers, displacing millions and annihilating species such as river dolphin. It may even reach the cosmos, in the form mirrors to deflect the sun's rays away from us. This is not to say that anything like the full force of eco-fascism has as yet been unleashed. We see the potential for it in conjunction with a State apparatus that blocks creative lines whilst painting itself green and joining the environmental refrain. What we need most of all in this situation is to 114 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexküll's Umwelt Biology learn to listen. Not just to the great silence from which every musecological composition is born, the silence which penetrates the whole but which can also induce a thirst for annihilation. We need to learn to listen to the smaller but equally powerful silences which sustain the composition. "The animal is," Merleau-Ponty writes, "like a quiet force" (177). It emerges from the physiochemical conditions, but not as their effect. The whole interpenetration of strata on the plane of consistency makes up, according to Deleuze and Guattari, "a silent dance" (77). Furthermore, the very creations which can be locked-down or turn bad in annihilation arrive in silence: Is it not the nature of creations to operate in silence, locally, to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the molecular to an uncertain cosmos, whereas the processes of destruction and conservation work in bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire cosmos in order to enslave the molecular and stick it into a conservatory or a bomb? (382-3) Within the two movements which threaten dissolution and annihilation, the totalitarian conservatory and the fascist's bomb, we can perhaps still just discern the small silences of creative ecological becoming. Notes 1 Ronald Bogue also points to the significance of this later text for gaining a full understanding of Uexküll's theory. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003) 58-62. It has been published both in German and in French translation in a single volume together with "A stroll through worlds of animals and men." 2 Gary Genosko has explored Deleuze and Guattari's confrontation with Lorenz in some detail in his, "'A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression: Poster fish, bower birds, and spiny lobsters," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24 no.3 (1997): 529-42. 3 The significance of this "ontological value of species" and the central importance of Uexküll's "melodic" theory of animality for Merleau-Ponty's understanding of it has been carefully explored by Mauro Carbone in his The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004), Chapter 2 "Nature: Variation on a Theme." For our purposes the question would be whether Merleau-Ponty does not remain too "painterly" in his understanding of the problem. Does he not lock the ontological value of species into the reciprocity of vision? Does he not need to distinguish "two movements of creation" as Deleuze and Guattari do, the painterly moving from the soma to the germen and the musical moving form the germen to the soma? cf. (Deleuze and Guattari ,383-4). Tom Greaves 115 4 Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005) 108-11. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. "The Function of Counterpoint in the New Music." Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1999). Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999). Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998). Bogue, Ronald Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003). Carbone, Mauro The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's APhilosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004). Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey. Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004). Genosko, Gary. "'A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression:' Poster fish, bower birds, and spiny lobsters." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24:3 (1997): 529-42. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Hutchinson, G.E.. "Concluding Remarks." Cold Spring Harbour Symposia on Quantitative Biology 22:2 (1957): 415-27. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Trans. Robert Vallier (Evaston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). von Uexküll, Jakob. "A stroll through the worlds of animals and man: A picture book of invisible worlds." Semiotica 89:4 (1992): 319-91. — Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen/ Bedeutungslehre (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1970). DELEUZE AND DEEP ECOLOGY ALISTAIR WELCHMAN I Deep ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first is to the intrinsic value of nature.1 Surface ecology, by contrast, legitimates various broadly ecological concerns with non-human nature on the basis of their value as means for some human end. Deep ecology might for instance argue in favor of restricting or forbidding pollution on the ground that the pollution causes harm in nature; a surface ecologist might be able to support exactly the same conclusion, but only because the same pollution will cause harm to human beings. In this sense deep ecology is an ethics of nature, the denial of the axiological version of humanism, i.e. the denial of the view, exemplified by Kant, that human beings either themselves constitute the only values or else are the only source for values.2 Deep ecology can therefore be correctly described as a kind of (axiological) anti-humanism, provided it is clear that the "anti" does not negate human beings as such, but merely negates the view that human beings are the sole sources of value. From its initial formulations, deep ecology has always been bound up with a second central commitment, the metaphysical claim that human beings are nothing other than natural entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical naturalism.3 In this sense, deep ecology is the denial of the metaphysical version of humanism, i.e. a denial of the view, exemplified by Descartes, that human beings are metaphysically distinct from natural beings. Accordingly, deep ecology can also be understood as a kind of (metaphysical) anti-humanism, with a suitably modified version of the above proviso. Deep ecologists manifest an obvious affinity for naturalistic philosophical systems that assert the continuity of human beings with nonhuman nature and therefore give naturalistic accounts of human beings themselves. Naess alludes with some frequency to the work of Spinoza (e.g. "Spinoza and Ecology"). And more recently connections have been made with Nietzsche and Deleuze,4 who, not coincidentally, himself Alistair Welchman 117 devoted two monographs each to Spinoza and Nietzsche. In addition, some deep ecologists have made use of a specifically naturalistic account of ethics (Callicot). Now there is a clear (though not inferential) connection between metaphysical and axiological humanism: the metaphysical distinctness of human beings is often mobilized in support of their axiological distinctness.5 What is not so clear is the question as to whether there is a relation between the denial of metaphysical humanism and the denial of axiological humanism. It is not obvious, to say the least, how one can move from any kind of metaphysical naturalism to an axiological claim. It seems, on the face of it, quite consistent to believe that humans are natural beings and at the same time to think that the rest of nature has only instrumental and not intrinsic value in relation to human beings. In other words, deep ecology wants to be an ethics of nature, but it only supports this with a kind of naturalistic ethics. The gap between the two is not necessarily simply the result of Moore's naturalistic fallacy (see Moore 9ff). Indeed I will argue that metaphysically naturalistic systems can all be understood as presupposing or expressing values in the sense of evaluation or selection. The question that needs answering however is: what principle of valuation or selection? And the answers to this question vary with the type of metaphysical naturalism, that is, with the conception of nature. Minimally, the relations between the metaphysical and axiological anti-humanisms at play in deep ecology need to be clarified. The third central commitment of deep ecology is to some kind of practice that transforms our consciousness of nature.6 Although it sometimes takes on a meditative or even a frankly mystical tone, this transformative aspect of deep ecology can, I think, be given a quite rigorous philosophical reconstruction. The motive for this third commitment seems clearly to be an avoidance of axiological issues, at least of a certain type: "moralizing" ones (see Fox 215ff). As a practical matter, it is probably true that adopting a moralizing tone may be counterproductive. But a transformative identification with nature hardly evades all issues of valuation. Presumably the reason for identifying with nature is that people are in fact identical (in some sense) with nature, i.e. not metaphysically distinct from it: this is certainly Fox's view.7 And so the issue would devolve back into a consideration of the relation between valuation and metaphysical naturalism. 118 Deleuze and Deep Ecology II I think the transpersonal or transformative aspect of deep ecology is best interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to undo or reverse those processes. Thought of in this way, transpersonal ecology has also called upon some philosophical heavyweights, just as the metaphysical naturalism aspect did. Indeed, what have become the standard axes of ideological distortion can be deployed in this new field. Thus, Marxists may argue that our understanding of nature has been distorted by commodification, in which the non-human world comes to be understood primarily as an economic resource; similarly feminists (ecofeminists) may argue that our understanding of nature has been distorted by a patriarchal system that sustains itself by aligning women with nature as a way of legitimating male domination.8 On a more clearly philosophical plane, thinkers as diverse as Heidegger9 and Adorno,10 whose sophistication makes the term Ideologiekritiker seem rather a bad fit, nevertheless have analyses predicated on the presence of a deep distortion of nature in our experience of the world. These thinkers are doubtless difficult to interpret. But what makes them so difficult is, I think, their analysis of just how deep ideological distortion goes. In the case of Heidegger the distortion ("technology") is the only way in which Being has, historically, ever in fact been revealed to us.11 In the case of Adorno the distortion is bound up with reason itself (in the form of instrumental rationality).12 As a result, there is a certain pathos of the negative about both these writers that centers around the sheer intellectual (and even more than intellectual) difficulty of thinking beyond Western Metaphysics or Western Rationality. But at the same time their projects would make no (or at least less) sense if it were absolutely impossible to free oneself from the "ideological" distortions. However provisional it may ultimately be, there is a clear contrast in for instance Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" between the understanding of the Rhine made manifest in a hydroelectric plant and that manifest in Hölderlin's visionary poetry.13 Despite the variety of thinkers who can be positioned in place of a psychological sense of personal transformation, there is nevertheless considerable agreement on the centrality of Descartes in the construction of the false conception of nature. Descartes breaks with the medieval idea of the continuity of beings (and, a fortiori, of the continuity of human beings with nature) that had dominated Western thought since Aristotle by introducing a radical separation between human beings and what he now Alistair Welchman 119 calls "nature." The defining characteristic of human beings is their possession of consciousness, what he calls "thought", although it includes everything of which we are conscious and not just what today would be described as thoughts (as opposed to e.g. feelings or mere sensations).14 We have bodies, but only contingently. And our bodies, like animals and everything else in the universe, i.e. nature, have only the property of being extended in space.15 This conception of nature excludes not only thought and feeling, but also secondary qualities (like color), which have no real existence, according to Descartes, since they are merely subjective projections.16 Now Descartes' overall metaphysical position (metaphysical humanism, as above) involves two components: it claims that human beings are specifically distinct from nature in that we are defined by our possession of a non-natural property (thought); it also has a quite distinctive conception of what nature is – a machine. It is going to turn out, I believe, that the denial of metaphysical humanism must entail, along with its reconceptualization of human nature, a reconceptualization of both the rest of nature and of valuation. This is what can, I think, be learned from viewing the transformative aspect of (deep) ecology as a form of Ideologiekritik: at the end of the critique we will have transformed both the nature of human beings and (non-human) nature so as to see their underlying metaphysical unity in nature as such. It is from this point of view that the deep ecological reference to metaphysically naturalist philosophical systems can be brought critically into play with the question of valuation. The often phenomenological orientation of the Ideologiekritiker lends itself to the epistemic pessimism of Heidegger and Adorno: it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to escape the clutches of the false "ideology" of nature, and so most of the theoretical energy of such positions is spend in a kind of conceptual deprogramming that is the speculative analogue of Fox's appeal to psychology. Where it differs is that in Fox's case, although theoretically unsophisticated, it is clear that the culmination of the process is a consciousness of metaphysical naturalism, i.e. that "we and all other entities are aspects of a single unfolding reality" (Fox 252). Ideologiekritik however is by no means committed to any kind of metaphysical naturalism (although it may contingently accept some form of materialism, e.g. dialectical materialism). Indeed, in its most philosophically sophisticated guise, as phenomenology, it is intrinsically hostile to any form of metaphysical naturalism. Heidegger clearly wants to revolutionize our (Cartesian) conception of nature; and, at the same time, he wants to revolutionize our conception of 120 Deleuze and Deep Ecology the subject (hence his new vocabulary of Dasein); but he by no means wants to sink Dasein into the world ontologically: Being-in-the-world is the way of Being of Dasein that precisely distinguishes it from the ways of Being of non-Dasein, what he calls, after Kant the "categories", presenceat-hand and readiness-to-hand.17 Heidegger can be best understood as radicalizing Kant's critique of Descartes, which objected to Descartes' conception of the subject as a thinking thing precisely because the subject is even more different from nature than the objectlike designation "thing" can accommodate.18 This is why Kant figures so prominently in reactionary resistance to (deep) ecology.19 Heidegger transforms our conception of nature from a mere resource; but is radically committed to the ontological distinctiveness of Dasein.20 Thus Ideologiekritik is doubtless important, but it is at best a way of getting to an underlying metaphysics (and here I am only interested in naturalistic metaphysics). So an emphasis on the transformative aspect of (deep) ecology distracts attention away from its metaphysical commitments; and those metaphysical commitments entertain as yet unexplained relations with its fundamental evaluative ones, i.e. the existence and importance of non-human values. Here I will want to argue that it is not just our conceptions of human beings and nature that must be changed, but also the conception of value itself. As already mentioned, the problem of the relation of valuative commitments to metaphysical naturalism inevitably brings up the question of the application of Moore's naturalistic fallacy. In brief, Moore argued that it is impossible to infer the intrinsic goodness of something from its natural properties; from which of course he concluded that the good is an objective but non-natural property. The specter of this fallacy is raised by the very term "deep ecology." The "ecology" part of this designation refers to an apparently neutrally descriptive scientific endeavor; whereas the "deep" part brings in a range of normative principles. In Naess' formulation, this is supposed to be unproblematic because he distinguishes carefully between the scientific claims of ecology and his own system (more properly ecosophy), which, he says, like the great metaphysical systems of Spinoza and Aristotle, freely mixes normative and descriptive components (Naess 1973: 99). How this is possible still requires some clarification. Nevertheless, while Naess may have been admirably explicit about separating the normative and factual principles of this view (see "The Shallow and the Deep" 33f), there are clear dangers in an appeal to ecology. On the one hand, there is the danger that social values will be projected onto the science in the process of its constitution. Ecology has Alistair Welchman 121 hardly achieved the kind of cognitive maturity that gives it a physics-like autonomy from the nexus of human practices out of which it emerged.21 Indeed some of its most fundamental concepts were politicized at their origin and are still among the most contested of any science.22 On the other hand, there is also the inverse danger that exploits the relative authority of the scientific discipline’s epistemic position for prescriptive ends. For instance, for a long time, technical (perhaps among other) limitations made it difficult to model any but homeostatic, i.e. selfsustaining, systems. But from this it is easy to move to a view that systems should be self-sustained, a view that has conservative implications analogous to those of structuralist-functionalist sociology. Three different positions can be used to mark out the range of possibilities for thinking about the relation of valuation to metaphysical naturalism. There is, first, what appears to be Naess' position: that evaluative commitments are separate from descriptive (metaphysical ones). This position suffers from an obvious drawback: in the absence of further elaboration, our abilities to perform evaluation or identification are not explicable on the basis of the nature that we attribute intrinsic value to or on the basis of that nature with which we identify. But then, we are to that extent precisely not identical with that nature, and the only result must be a kind of humanism. Second, there is the view that valuations are "projected" into nature. This can be given an (increasingly popular) transcendental idealist gloss, so that it no longer seems as if it is just getting things wrong, i.e. the projection can be understood as in some sense constitutive of (our conception of) nature. Conceived in this way, the valuative commitments of (deep) ecology would be analogous to those of virtue theory: human experience of nature is (at least under the right conditions) always and constitutively the experience of a natural world that presents itself as inextricably shot through with valuative significance (affordances for the prosecution of human interests) in the same way that human experience of the social is (at least under the right conditions) always and constitutively the experience of a social world that presents itself as inextricably shot through with valuative significance (opportunities for kindness etc.). Thus, for both Heidegger (in thinking at least in part about nature), as for Alasdair MacIntyre (thinking about the social), the idea of the separation of fact from value (that underlies Moore's conception of the naturalistic fallacy) represents a kind of cognitive catastrophe: once valuation has been separated from description, then the two can never be put together again.23 In this sense, even to ask the question of the relation between valuation and nature is already to have deprived oneself of the resources to answer 122 Deleuze and Deep Ecology it. It should be noted however that the upshot of this position is a kind of idealism about nature. The very fact that we are able to break through the seamless interweaving of fact and value already demonstrates the contingency of this conception of nature and suggests that the seamless weave is not the real nature as it is in itself. The last option is that nature itself is, in some sense, valuative, and that this is what supports both the existence and importance of non-human values and the valuation of human beings, understood as a part of nature. This is a delicate matter, for how can it be distinguished from a selective appeal to the authority of nature adopted as legitimation for a social project? One way is to appropriate the Kantian insight offered by the above analysis comparing Heidegger and Macintyre, but to prolong it in precisely the opposite direction. Rather than retreating to nature as phenomenon, the thought of nature can be expanded beyond the phenomenal scope where it is restricted by properly scientific considerations, transforming nature this time not in relation to a synthesis of human interests, but by going beneath the phenomena, retrieving but renewing a classical sense of the metaphysical. This, I take it, is the attraction of thinkers like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze for (deep) ecology. III Deleuze's conception of nature goes to unusual lengths to establish continuity between the cultural, biological and even inorganic domains. Deleuze's early assertion of a primary monism is articulated in his later (collaborative) works in terms of an analytical vocabulary that is deployed freely across all domains.24 Thus, in a Plateau on ethology, territorial animal behavior (especially birdsong) is explained in terms derived from human cultural production (of musical styles) and vice versa with such suppleness that the twin objections of naturalizing the cultural and aestheticizing nature are simultaneously undermined. It is humanistic chauvinism not to attribute aesthetic ability to birds just as it is to deny that high art is not also nature (see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 11). In collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze defends this view by developing a thought of abstraction that is understood not as conceptual generality but as interconnection across heterogeneous domains. This difference can itself be understood using the crucial distinction between a tree and a rhizome. Tree-like or arborescent structures are organized according to a strict hierarchical principle, the most visible of which today Alistair Welchman 123 is probably the organization chart. These charts (in which the arborescent structure is upside down) start with a single trunk (the boss) who is the superior of everybody. Everyone else in the organization either reports to the boss, or reports to someone else who reports (ultimately) to the boss. The significant feature of such structures for Deleuze is that communication on one level is always mediated by someone on a higher level. Until recently, the biosphere was itself understood as a tree (the tree of life) in which present-day life forms were related by filiation through a common ancestor somewhere higher up the tree. Deleuze and Guattari were among the first philosophers to take note of the general import of the revision to this model that has now become the standard for redrawing the diagram of life, that is, the fact that genetic relatedness can also be established by direct lateral connection between life forms. When Deleuze and Guattari were writing, the only significant examples of this were viruses. But now it is widely recognized that most life forms can be assigned only a statistically approximate filiation because of the dominance of inter-"specific" genetic exchange in bacteria. This idea of lateral connectivity or networking is what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome.25 There are even rhizomatic and arborescent conceptions of abstraction itself. Conceptual classifications have, since Aristotle, followed the tree of life quite directly: higher order concepts contain or encompass lower order ones, traveling up to the most abstract concept (God, Being) and down to ever more minutely distinguished aspects of reality.26 Abstraction here carries its standard but arborescent connotation of lacking (specific) content. But Deleuze and Guattari treat abstraction rhizomatically as the possession of a greater ability to connect laterally or transversally. The more connections to the more heterogeneous elements, the more abstract.27 Abstraction therefore knits together disparate domains at the same time as it radicalizes the notion of multiple realizability by isolating "machinic" fragments that can be effectuated in disparate domains. This is what enables Deleuze and Guattari to avoid reductionism in either direction: it is not that Deleuze and Guattari are projecting or anthropomorphizing when they say that in the development of courtship and other rituals in birds, "expressive matters" or "motifs" become "autonomous" and form a "style" – even when this autonomy of the motif is immediately explicated using the example of the Wagnerian musical motif wandering away, in the score, from its assigned dramatic character on the stage (1980: 319). Nor are they (the converse) giving a reductive account of human aesthetic capacities, as if the latter were "just the same as" birdsong. Rather, the same "abstract machine" is differentially effectuated in both cases. 124 Deleuze and Deep Ecology Here Deleuze and Guattari insistently reject the idea that such interdomain assemblages result from a comparison or an analogy, a procedure that would result in the privilege of one domain over another (see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 129ff). An affinity group is not rhizomatic because it "compares itself" with couch grass or bacteria, but because all three effectuate the same abstract machine. The relative under-theorization of ecology in comparison with evolutionary biology is exactly the victory of tree over rhizome since ecology is the study of the systemic properties of the lateral connectivity (alliance) between leaf nodes in the evolutionary tree of descent (filiation). Nevertheless, despite Deleuze and Guattari's deep-seated metaphysical naturalism, implacable hostility to the humanist perspective of transcendence and detailed methodological commitment to the use of a conceptual apparatus that resists anthropocentrism, there is still an only uneasy juxtaposition between their work and (deep) ecology. It should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari would fiercely resist Warwick Fox's peon to the tree (Fox 253-4) even while acknowledging the pernicious force of arborescent formations in biohistory. But the problem is surely more general than this. Organicist interpretations of ecosystemic relations have been rife in (deep) ecology, culminating in Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. They are probably on the wane now, but their replacement by more vague terms like "interconnectedness" (e.g. Fox 245f) looks less than half-hearted in comparison with Deleuze and Guattari's onslaught against the (notion of the) organism as such in Anti-Oedipus, one of whose central theoretical terms is the body without organs. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari strenuously resist any concept of holism: the whole, far from having any priority over the parts (either valuative or ontological) is simply a part produced alongside other parts. And, despite some similarities of their work to a kind of general systems theory, they distance themselves from this through a refusal of even the idea of effective functioning.28 Perhaps most basic of all, is the singular importance in Deleuze and Guattari's work from 1972 onwards of the term "machine." Of course, as Halsey carefully notes, Deleuze and Guattari's machines, especially their desiring-machines, are not "purely mechanical" (40).29 Is this disjunction between Deleuze and (deep) ecology a merely superficial or terminological one, or is there a substantive disagreement? To answer this question will require something of a detour, starting out from the observation that it was already true for Descartes that machines were not purely mechanical. Alistair Welchman 125 Descartes arrived at his historically dominant conception of nature through a peculiar reversal of the intuitively obvious relation between science and technology. This relation would normally be understood analytically, in other words: the theoretical business of science will tell us something about the way nature works, and technology, implemented by engineers not scientists, will apply the theoretical understanding of science to the fabrication of useful instruments, machines. For Descartes, this relation is exactly reversed. His conception of science is parasitic upon his understanding of technology. In particular, he formulated his mechanical philosophy of nature as the object of scientific inquiry on the basis of his observation of technical machines, most especially the hydraulic statuary in the royal gardens at Saint-Germain, which were themselves the products not of a scientific but of an autonomously artisanal milieu.30 This leaves Descartes with a problem because the notion of a machine is irreducibly normative: its effectuation of a causal chain is to be evaluated in terms of its performance of a function. As he admits in Meditation 6: "A clock made of wheels and counter-weights follows all the laws of nature no less closely when it has been badly constructed" (AT VII: 84). As a machine, a clock is defined not just by the chain of causes it embodies, but also by its functional consistency with something outside of nature, i.e. a form of purposiveness. In the case of human or animal bodies, this purposiveness must lie in God. So, even for Descartes, machines, and hence nature, are not purely mechanical, but contain an essential reference to a purposive or teleological realm.31 Descartes' conceptual innovations are generally regarded as in part responsible for the break between facts and values that underlies both Moore's naturalistic fallacy and the difficulty of any more supple an understanding of the relation between metaphysical naturalism and general questions of axiology. His failure to effect this break cleanly however has historically opened up the possibility of giving a naturalistic account of the emergence of values in nature through the functioning of biological organisms. The phenomenological account weaves fact and value together on the presupposition that nature is constituted as phenomenon out of fundamentally human interests. In Heidegger, for instance, beings reveal themselves most primordially as ready-to-hand, i.e. as already taken up in a sphere of specifically human significances. By contrast the naturalist critique of Descartes takes the realm of divine purposes that underlie the mechanistic construal of nature, and gives a naturalistic account of just those purposes. In Kant, for instance, machines are precisely distinguished from organisms on the grounds that while the former have (as Descartes 126 Deleuze and Deep Ecology argued) extrinsic purposiveness, the latter are intrinsically purposive, i.e. they carry their purposes with them. Kant, famously, could give no account of how this possible.32 But after Darwin it becomes easy to think of organisms as positing value. Canguilhem, for instance, sees the causal pathways of organisms as incomprehensible in the absence of their homeostatic regulatory functions (see The Normal and the Pathological 126, 131, 136). Thus it becomes possible to say that e.g. methane is of value for methane-metabolizing bacteria because of the functional role it plays in maintaining the existence of such entities. It is important to note the difference between these two positions, which can at times become subtle. In the phenomenological account we (as phenomenological subjects or Dasein or whatever) construct "nature" in accordance with our interests. It may still be true that this happens in the naturalized account. If there is anything that it's like to be a methanemetabolizing bacterium, then doubtless methane will appear valuable within its phenomenology. While this example may seem fanciful, the origin of the modern science of ethology was dominated by the work of von Uexküll who made exactly this move. Uexküll emphasizes that interest-relative life-worlds are constructed phenomenologically by all organisms and have strikingly different saliencies so that the "same" ensemble of objects will appear very differently to a human, a dog and a tick.33 Nevertheless, the naturalized account does not appeal to any projective, world-constituting or phenomenological origin – not even to one of Uexküll's non-human phenomenologies -- for a valuative component in nature. Rather, the crucial element is the sheer fact that there are systems, usually understood as biological ones, whose conditions of existence involve the effectuation of a differential valuation of segments of the environment, in other words: living systems that posit values. It is not, in other words, the values constructed phenomenologically from within such systems that form the basis of a metaphysically naturalized conception of valuation, but the existence of systems that do in fact posit values. Still this does not seem to be enough to generate the valuative results that deep ecology wants to infer from its metaphysical basis. It might be possible to generate a naturalized conception of the interests of naturally occurring systems on this metaphysical basis. But the interests concerned are both inherently conservative (reminiscent of the first wave of cybernetics) and appear to have only an oblique relation to our valuations as human beings. Systems at various scales doubtless do have conditions of existence interpretable as interest-relative valuations. But on what basis ought I to respect these? It is not obvious. Indeed the phenomenology of Alistair Welchman 127 such valuations in e.g. the case of predator-prey relations suggests that the values one system posits may precisely be the abjection of another system. There are possible answers to such questions, in for instance the – sometimes now quite intricate – naturalistic ethics of evolutionary biology. Such naturalistic approaches are no longer socially Darwinist: since the 1930s, work on inclusive fitness has shown how it is possible to develop biologically based valuations that extend beyond the individual organism to those that (may) share its genes. Still these fall short of even the inclusion of all human beings, and so also fall short even of axiological humanism (see Callicot). Those deep ecologists like Callicot, who use this approach therefore still need to appeal for a transformation of consciousness that will get us to identify with not only non-kin but also non-human nature. Perhaps this can be done. But the question remains: why should we engage in such a process of identification? It cannot be just on the basis of the values posited by life (the interest of a functional system is continuing to function) since those values opened up the original gap that now needs to be closed by identification. In other words: some extra valuation is also required to motivate identification. My hypothesis is that this further move can indeed be explained on the basis of metaphysical naturalism, but only of a very specific kind. Naturalizing the extrinsic Cartesian finality of machines through the intrinsic finality of a living system yields a possible calculus of valuative interests, but nothing more. What could motivate a transformative identification with nature is not the mere fact that humans are a part of nature, but the further claim that humans are, in some way, genuinely metaphysically identical with (the rest of) nature. An example of such a metaphysical naturalism is Schopenhauer's view that individuated things (including organisms, and hence human beings) possess, in addition to their material properties, a second, phenomenally inaccessible, aspect: they are also will. For Schopenhauer individuation itself is inapplicable to the will (this is his famous and highly original interpretation of the familiar doctrine of the freedom of the will: the will is free not because it is capable of free choice, but because it is free of the form of individuation, the principium individuationis). It follows from this that the will in itself is neither singular nor plural. For Schopenhauer therefore it is false to say that each of us has a will. Rather each of us (and every separate entity in non-human nature too) is at the same time the same non-singular, non-plural, non-individuated will. Schopenhauer characterizes the will as endless striving: striving because it is willing; endless because if it had an end or aim or purpose, 128 Deleuze and Deep Ecology there would be something separate from it. Here Schopenhauer introduces the idea of a transformed nature that acts, but neither in accordance with a chain of causes nor on the basis of a purposiveness alien to it. This is the idea of a nature whose activity is properly immanent to it. From these resources it would be possible to construct a rigorous critique of the naturalization of purposes on the basis that this naturalization uncritically accepts the non-natural purposes posited e.g. by Descartes and merely asserts that just those kinds of purposes can be given a naturalistic account without going further and interrogating the structure of purposiveness itself. Of course endless striving without aim or purpose is a form of suffering, and Schopenhauer does not shrink from the implication that existence is, at a basic level, pain. Only at the level of individuated entities (what Schopenhauer calls the level of aspect of representation) does the will will anything in particular: each entity wills to sustain itself in what Schopenhauer calls the will to life. Each thing then posits the continuation of life as a value and performs an appropriate selection on its environment as a result.34 But each of us is at the same time will, and hence metaphysically identical with the other. As a result, the direct values of self-maintenance posited by life are metaphysically superficial: when I pursue my interests at your expense, when I assert my (personal) will against yours, I forget that I am really (at the deeper metaphysical level underneath the nature of mere representation) the very same will that you are and hence I really attack myself – or more accurately: I act as an instrument by means of which the will attacks itself. Je suis la plaie et le couteau! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les members et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau! [I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the members and the wheel, The victim and the executioner!]35 This metaphysical identity provides the missing link between a naturalistic account of non-human interests on the basis of organic functioning and the need for a transformed consciousness. The affinities with deep ecological thought here are clear, and indeed the metaphysically naturalist and anti-humanist ethics of Mitleid (sympathy) that Schopenhauer develops from this shades into a mysticism of self-denial Alistair Welchman 129 explicitly influenced by the philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It seems to me that only something like this can meditate between the location of valuation in the self-sustenance or Self-realization36 of the individual natural system and an analogue of Kant's "universalization" requirement, that we (as humans) recognize and value these valuations. It is because "I is another" that it makes sense to identify with the interests of self-unfolding natural systems taken as a whole.37 Now Deleuze's relation to deep ecology can be made clear, for Deleuze is the inheritor of the Schopenhauerian intellectual tradition, but only in a significantly modified form, that is, modified by Nietzsche's critique of Schopenhauer. Deleuze follows Schopenhauer in having a metaphysically enriched conception of nature, distinct from the interest-relative phenomena of phenomenology as well as from the interest-neutral terms of scientific discourse. But he follows Nietzsche in rejecting the presuppositions of the morality of sympathy that underlie Schopenhauer's rationale for our identification with nature as a whole, and hence also, the ground for recognition of the interests of functioning systems in maintaining their own functioning. This presupposition is that existence is fundamentally pain, and hence of little value. Schopenhauer's thought makes a clear bridge between a form of anti-humanist metaphysical naturalism and an anti-humanist axiology. But, for Nietzsche, it is the value of this axiology that must be brought into question on the basis of the value of life.38 What does this mean? Deleuze's interpretation is in terms of difference, both as ultimate value and metaphysically basic constituent. The idea is that conservative (i.e. homeostatic or purely self-conserving and merely self-regulatory) systems have a tendency to dissipate. They may for instance be subject to the ratchet effect, where eventual minor dysfunctions accumulate to the point of breakdown because a conservative system has no way to reverse such changes. The culmination of this tendency is the second law of thermodynamics and the eventual achievement of irreversible thermal equilibrium. Life, in so far as it resists this tendency, requires and produces differences (e.g. the pool of variation of Darwinian evolution). This is the sense that Deleuze gives to Nietzsche's eternal return, understood as a principle of selection. Conservative systems (based on identity) cannot return because, without difference, they will eventually corrode down to nothing; only difference can return because it is what enables even the identical to resist dissipation. But for difference to return is for "it" to return not as the same, but precisely as different.39 130 Deleuze and Deep Ecology By his later and collaborative work, the rather dry-sounding philosophical distinction between the different and the identical had morphed into the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent types of system discussed above. But the Nietzschean principle of evaluation and selection is still operative. It is rhizomatic systems that capture difference so as to act in a maximally exploratory way. Integrity (identity, selfmaintenance etc.) has a completely secondary relation: it is affirmed to the extent that it is necessary for the promotion of rhizomatic exploration. This is the reason for Deleuze's hostility to functional coherence (organisms, functioning, finality, holism etc.). In the polemical first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, he and Guattari prosecute Nietzsche's revaluation of values with a maximum of rigor, attacking all residual derivatives of identity; and, while the second volume is apparently more conciliatory, this is in fact a purely pragmatic response to the contention that some level of integrity may be required for the production of more difference.40 This is where Deleuze's conception of the machine finds its place. An assemblage (a "system" constituted out of intrinsically different or heterogeneous parts) is machinic at its most extremely deterritorialized edge, namely the point at which it is most in contact with a maximum number of other assemblages, at which it is maximally abstract in the sense previously elaborated.41 This is the point at which its exploratory behavior produces a new source of differences, e.g. the metabolic creativity of bacteria or the chemical creativity of protein synthesis or the expressive creativity of language. Machinic selection or valuation for Deleuze is therefore distinct from the implicit valuation of the machine in which Descartes found himself embroiled. Descartes makes all valuative judgments (including those of purpose or function) into essentially secondary qualities, projections of human mental capacities. It is possible to naturalize such capacities into the notion of the organism as intrinsically rather than extrinsically purposive; but in so doing, one retains both the ideas of extended (nature) and thinking things (human mental capacities) in substantially the same forms. The valuative commitments of this strategy are correspondingly conservative, favoring self-interested (i.e. self-maintaining) systems and the values they necessarily posit. Deleuze's conception of machinic valuation is both metaphysically and axiologically anti-humanist, but quite different from the deep ecological view that natural systems have an interest in Self-realization. Machinic valuation does not represent selection based on anything remotely approximating interests; but rather the selection of systems that are Alistair Welchman 131 interesting, in the quite specific sense of optimally productive of exploratory novelty. Notes 1 In Arne Naess and George Sessions' canonical "Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement," the first principle reads: "The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Naess in particular has tried to distance himself from any theory of intrinsic values in the style of analytic philosophy, and has instead emphasized a kind of "ordinary language" use of the term. See (Naess "Intrinsic Value" and Fox's discussion (221f). In some ways the distinction seems misplaced because many analytic philosophers use the terms "value" and "right" precisely to express the distinction between value in general (axiology) and specifically moral rightness. 2 Kant's position is that only rational beings possess intrinsic value, because they have (possibly) good wills. Strictly speaking this includes rational aliens and rational supernatural beings like angels or god. I shall ignore these possibilities in what follows. See Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). 3 Naess claims that "The ecosophies will, I suppose, be absorbed in the general traditions of philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie)" (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 210). 4 See the pieces by Acampora, Hallman and Halsey as well as Patrick Hayden's essay in this present volume. Bennett also makes use of Deleuze in her attempt to establish a kind of "active" theory of matter. Her references to ecology though are largely limited to its systems theoretic aspect rather than its "deep" aspect. 5 In The New Ecological Order, Ferry locates Descartes' metaphysical discontinuity between human beings and nature at the origin of the axiological discontinuity constitutive of humanism that he rightly associates with Kant and Sartre (see e.g. 3ff). 6 Naess' analysis of such a transformation in his conception of "identification" ("Spinoza and Ecology" 36ff). Fox's Towards and Transpersonal Ecology is a book-length attempt to orient deep ecology in terms derived from the thenfashionable transpersonal psychological analysis of Abraham Maslow. See especially pages 225ff for a wealth of evidence that this transformative approach is widespread among deep ecologists. 7 Fox claims that there are three grounds for identification with wider nature: personal contact, ontological and cosmological (249ff). The last of these involves an acknowledgement of the claim that we are all "aspects of a single unfolding reality" (252). 8 It is of course also standard for Ideologiekritiker to argue that the concept of "nature" is often deployed itself for ideological reasons, i.e. to present social choices as inevitable. Indeed this may be the basic formula for all ideology. I will 132 Deleuze and Deep Ecology address this issue below, but here the point is that such distorted conceptions of nature presuppose the at least possible accessibility of an undistorted conception of nature. 9 Heidegger has been repeatedly appropriated as an ecological thinker. See, for instance, Zimmerman ("Toward a Heideggerian Ethos"). Zimmerman regards Heidegger as a robust realist ("What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?" 217), citing Glazebrook. While not personally endorsing this interpretation of Heidegger, it does have the merit of making it clear that Heidegger wants to correct a distortion in our understanding of nature. Other, more canonical, interpreters of Heidegger have also given him an environmental gloss, see Wood (2001) who coins the term "ecopheneomenology." 10 Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is already a protoecological tract in that their critique of the Enlightenment and its self-destructive obsession with the "mastery of nature" (xvi) creates a "disenchantment" (3) of nature, i.e. a false (ideological) conception of nature (and our relation to it) that can be, in principle, subject to Ideologiekritik and corrected. 11 In his "Letter on Humanism" from 1947, Heidegger writes "As a form of truth technology [Technics] is grounded in the history of metaphysics, … which is itself a distinctive and up to now the only perceptible phase of the history of Being" (220). 12 One can see how far this goes for Horkheimer and Adorno in the theme of the second essay of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment" (43-80). Although their constant allusions to the Weberian notion of disenchantment suggest that they agree with Weber that it was Descartes who radically instrumentalized modern culture, they nevertheless argue that the deployment of myth in Homer's Odysseus is already instrumental in conception. Thus to find a model for a non-instrumental relation to nature, one would already have to go back beyond the muthos / logos distinction. 13 Heidegger writes: "In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is spoken by the two titles: 'The Rhine,' as dammed up into the power works, and 'The Rhine,' as uttered by the art work, in Hölderlin's hymn by that name' (297). 14 Descartes' theory of perception involves both a mental component and a physical component: stimulation of nerve sites causes information to be transferred to the brain where (at some point) it is converted into something of which we are conscious, a "sensing," of which he writes "But this [sensing] precisely so taken, is nothing other than thinking" (Meditations 29). In Meditation 6 he describes sensations e.g. of hunger or thirst as "nothing but confused modes of thinking" (81). 15 This is the upshot of the famous 2nd Meditation (Meditations 23-34) in which Descartes shows that there are two substances in the universe, and that human beings are (essentially) one substance (thinking substance) and everything else (including the human body) is extended substance or matter. 16 In Meditation 6 Descartes claims that there are indeed "differences corresponding to the different perceptions" of secondary qualities like colour, but that these differences "do not resemble" our perceptions of them (Meditations 81). Alistair Welchman 17 133 Heidegger writes that "Dasein's characters of Being are defined in terms of existeniality, we call them 'existentialia'. These are to be sharply distinguished from what we call 'categories'—characteristics of Being for entities whose character is not that of Dasein" (Being and Time §9, 44). 18 Kant's critique of Descartes' conception of the self as a thinking thing takes place in the "Paralogisms" section of the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (A348ff/B413ff). In §10 of Being and Time, Heidegger also mentions the "reification" (46) of the subject in Descartes and goes on to give an analysis of Max Scheler's (Kantian) attempt to distinguish persons from things (47-8) in which he is clearly approving, while at the same time maintaining that the various positive characterizations of the Being of persons (Dasein, in his terminology), e.g. "soul" or "spirit" or even "subject," have all been flawed. Later he makes it clear why: "Even if one rejects the 'soul substance' and the thinghood of consciousness, or denies that a person is an object [i.e. one takes Kant's critique on board], ontologically one is still positing something whose Being retains the meaning of present-at-hand, whether it does so explicitly or not" (§25, 114). In other words: Kant's critique does not go far enough in undoing the reification of Dasein, even terms like 'subject' are thought on the basis of the categories, that is, on the basis of the kind of being that entities unlike Dasein have. 19 Ferry is quite clear about this, defining the humanist era in Kantian terms, as involving a conception of human beings able to set aside their whole natural being: as he terms it "Antinatural Man" (3ff). 20 The term "metaphysical" is highly freighted in Heideggerian thought: it is the nexus of philosophical concepts characteristic of the West, which Heidegger wants to overturn or reinvigorate, but increasingly finds this task impossible, perhaps necessarily so. My use of the term is simply to distinguish prima facie nonaxiological from axiological claims and I do not want to enter this complex Heideggerian debate on either side. 21 In the interview "Truth and Power," Foucault distinguishes between sciences with a "low" and a "high epistemological profile" and confines his project to the former (109). 22 Sarkar describes, for instance, the classification of stochastic models of population growth as "a striking exemplar of the social determination of science." 23 See MacIntryre's "disquieting suggestion" at the beginning (1f) of his After Virtue that the social conditions required for even the perception of virtues have been eradicated and compare with Heidegger's claim that after Descartes scission of the world into extended and thinking things, we try to bridge the gap using "value-predicates" – but "Adding on value-predicates cannot tell us anything at all new about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods have pure presence-at-hand as their kind of Being" (Being and Time §20, 99). 24 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues, following Duns Scotus, that Being is "univocal" (35). In A Thousand Plateaus he infers a pluralism from this monism according to the equation "PLURALISM = MONISM" (20). 25 For all this see A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 1. Deleuze and Guattari use the biological model of arborescence (10, complicated by viruses) and contrast 134 Deleuze and Deep Ecology (arborscent) models based on filiation with (rhizomatic) ones based on "alliance, uniquely alliance" (25). 26 Schopenhauer compares such conceptual classifications to a mosaic, which can approximate reality to any given degree of accuracy, but can never quite match up to it because the mosaic pieces must always have edges, where reality does not (see Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. 1, §12, 93-4). 27 See their critique of Chomsky’s linguistic models, which are "not too abstract but, on the contrary, … not abstract enough, … they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements" (A Thousand Plateaus 7). 28 A Thousand Plateaus borrows the term "plateau" from Bateson (21-2). In AntiOedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that "in desiring-machines everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various parts together" (42). 29 It must be noted however that Halsey's assimilation of Deleuze and Guattari to "conceptual-scheme"-type linguistics (where reality is a flux essentially ungraspable by any linguistic terms, which therefore do intrinsic violence to reality) does not really do justice to their break with structuralism. 30 Descartes mentions the fountain at the royal gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Leyès in the "Treatise on Man" (AT X: 131-2). 31 It is this that prompts Canguilhem to remark that "The mechanistic conception of the body is no less anthropomorphic, despite appearances, than the teleological conception of the world" ("Machine and Organism" 64). 32 Kant distinguishes between "relative" and "inner" purposes in §61 of the Critique of Judgement (212f) and shows his skepticism about the possibility of a properly scientific biology when he declares that "it is absurd … to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who shall make comprehensible … the production of a blade of grass" (§75, 248). 33 See von Uexküll’s "Stroll through the Worlds of Men and Animals.” Von Uexküll founded the Institut für Umweltforschung at the University of Hamburg, one of the first. Interestingly enough, his term for the biologically constructed worlds of animals was Umwelten or environments. 34 Von Uexküll's debt to Kant is well-known (see his Theoretical Biology) but it would be interesting to speculate to what his notion of interest-specific and actionrelative perception owes to Schopenhauer's conception of knowledge subordinated to the will. 35 Charles Baudelaire "L'Héautontimorouménos" (poem LXXXIII in Les Fleurs du Mal). 36 This is Naess' preferred term (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 196f). 37 Rimbaud declared that "I is another" (345). Thus transformative identification with nature has practical consequences only on the supposition of a kind of egoism: the more people identify with wider nature, the less they will be likely to harm it, presumably for the same reasons people don't generally harm themselves: self-interest. Alistair Welchman 135 38 An analysis of Nietzsche’s relation to Schopenhauer (independent of Deleuze's appropriation of it) is beyond the scope of this paper. It is worth noting however that even by 1872 in The Birth of Tragedy's analysis of epic (§§3-4) Nietzsche is, in the notion of a Greek optimism based on a profound sensitivity to pain, contesting Schopenhauer's valuations even while still accepting its metaphysical outlook. 39 This interpretation is laid out in detail in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Chapter 5. 40 Deleuze and Guattari's implicit critique of Anti-Oedipus is given primarily in A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 6, where they claim that "you don't reach the BwO [body without organs] … by wildly destratifying … the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse" (160-1). 41 "Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializes it … we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the distinction we would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like the set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization and draw variations and mutations of it" (A Thousand Plateaus 333). Works Cited Acampora, Ralph. "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 16 (1994): 187-84. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings (London: Verso 1979). Bennett, Jane. "The Force of Things: Steps towards and Ecology of Matter." Political Theory 32:3 (June 2004): 347-72. Callicot, J. Baird. "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." A Companion to A Sand County Almanac Interpretive and Critical Essays. Ed. J. Baird Callicot (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press 1987): 186-214. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Gallimard 1961). Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books 1991). —. "Machine and Organism." Incorporations. Eds. S. Kwinter & J. Crary (New York: Zone Books, 1992). Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1965). —. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990). —. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press 1994). 136 Deleuze and Deep Ecology —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, City Lights 1988). —. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Thomlinson (London: Athlone Press 1983) —. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane (London: Athlone Press 1984). Descartes, René. "Treatise on Man." Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 1. Trans. John Cottingham et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985): 99-108 [page references to Descartes are to the standard Adam & Tannery edition given in marginally in the editions referred to]. —. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. from the Latin by Donald A Cress. 3rd Edition (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett 1993). Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985). Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago 1995). Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon 1980). Fox, Warwick. Toward and Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press 1995). Glazebrook, Trish. "Heidegger and Scientific Realism." Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001): 361-401. Hallman, Max. "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 13 (1991): 99-125. Halsey, Mark. "Ecology and Machinic Thought: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari." Angelaki 10:3 (December 2005): 33-55. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row 1962) [references are to section and page of the German edition, reproduced in the margins of the English]. —. "Letter on Humanism." Basic Writings. Trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (HarperSanFransicso: 1977), 189-242. —. "The Question Concerning Technology" Basic Writings. Trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (HarperSanFransicso: 1977), 287-317. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998) [references are in the standard A/B form referring to the original 1st and 2nd edition pagination reproduced in the margins of the English]. Alistair Welchman 137 —. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lews White Beck (New York: Macmillan 1959). —. Critique of Judgement. Trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press 1951). MacIntryre, Alasdair. After Virtue (London: Duckworth 1981). Moore, G.E.. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1956). Naess, Arne. "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary." Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100. —. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Trans. and ed. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986). —. "Spinoza and Ecology." Speculum Spinozanum 1677-1977. Ed. S. Hessing (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977): 418-25. —. "Intrinsic Value: Will the Defenders of Nature Please Rise?" Conservation Biology: The Science of Scarcity and Diversity. Ed. Michael Soule (Sunderland, Mass: Sinauer Associates 1986). —. "Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World." The Trumpeter 4 (1987) 3: 35-42. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. Carol Diethe and ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999). Rimbaud, Arthur. "Lettre à Paul Demeny, 15 mai 1871." Œuvres (Paris: Éditions Garnier 1960): 344-47. Sarkar, Sahotra. "Ecology." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2007 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/ecology, last accessed April 7, 2008. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I (Zürich: Diogenes Verlag 1977). von Uexküll, Jakob. "A Stroll through the Worlds of Men and Animals." Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Trans. and ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc 1957): 5-80. —. Theoretical Biology. Translated by D.L. Mackinnon (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & Company Inc. 1926) David Wood. "What is Ecophenomenology?" Research in Phenomenology 31:1 (2001): 78-95. Michael E. Zimmerman. "Toward a Heideggerian Ethos for Radical Environmentalism." Environmental Ethics 5:2 (Summer 1983): 99132. 138 Deleuze and Deep Ecology —. "What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?" Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Eds. Bruce Foltz and Robert Frodeman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004): 207-30. HERCULES OF THE SURFACE: DELEUZIAN HUMANISM AND DEEP ECOLOGY EDWARD P. BUTLER Alcmaeon says that humans die for this reason, that they cannot join the beginning [archê] to the end [telos]. —pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 17. 3. 916a33 Proponents of deep ecology, in attempting to articulate a metaphysics in support of their core intuitions, have seemingly managed instead to provide openings for critics whose attacks, though often facile, have begun for lack of an effective philosophical response to pass for conventional wisdom. Particularly damaging, although least accurate, has been the claim that deep ecology, because it opposes anthropocentrism, is thereby incompatible with humanism. In its cruder forms, this argument is simply a straw man, conflating non-anthropocentrism with misanthropy, whereas the first principle in the deep ecology platform states, "The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have a value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Ecosophists are far from failing to honor the human qua human; Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology, affirms that "[t]he richness of reality is becoming even richer through our specific human endowments; we are the first kind of living beings we know of which have the potentialities of living in community with all other living beings" (Sessions 239). The charge that deep ecology seeks to undermine the structures of normativity is itself undermined by Naess, when he plainly states that "the significant tenets of the Deep Ecology movement are clearly and forcefully normative" (Sessions 154). The charge that the principles of deep ecology are somehow irreconcilable with normativity is a different one altogether, and goes rather to the question of mistakes ecosophists have made in attempting to articulate those principles in a metaphysical structure. More salient is the criticism from friendly quarters (see, e.g., the critique of deep ecology in Hayden 126-8) that the metaphysics of deep ecology would dissolve individual living beings into an unmediated unity 140 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology with Nature conceived as a totalizing super individual. At its worst, this has amounted to a regrettable marriage of bad Spinoza and bad Vedanta, and would undermine the basic deep ecology thesis of the intrinsic value of living beings as species and as individuals. It is instructive in this respect to contrast the view of nature Deleuze traces to Spinoza and ultimately to the ancient atomists. According to Deleuze, what matters in Spinoza's thought "is no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but rather the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated" (Spinoza 122). For the atomists, nature is not a totalizing super-organism but "an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements … a sum, but not a whole" (Logic of Sense 267). Nature exists purely as "the principle of the diverse and its production," and "a principle of the production of the diverse makes sense only if it does not assemble its own elements into a whole" (266). Since the thesis of intrinsic value makes no sense without intrinsic difference, it is clear that this concept of nature is better suited to the purposes of deep ecology than one in which difference is denied. Accordingly, this essay offers suggestions toward a Deleuzian metaphysics of deep ecology incorporating basic elements of the deep ecology program, in particular the thesis of intrinsic value, into a postanthropocentric humanism. I. Ethics and the Plane of Immanence The notion of a preconceptual plane of immanence which is the principle of individuation for concepts, subjects and facts alike could be considered Deleuze's philosophical first principle.1 A plane of immanence, Deleuze explains, is "the image thought gives itself of what it means to think," which "retains only what thought can claim by right," i.e. "movement that can be carried to infinity" (What is Philosophy? 37). Deleuze characterizes such an "infinite movement" as expressing the "reversibility" of thinking and being: "movement is not the image of thought without also being the substance of being … The plane of immanence has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis" (38). A plane of immanence is not itself immanent to something, to any subject or object, but rather is a selection of "diagrammatic" or "infinite" movements yielding a field of concepts (pertaining to thinking and to being), on the one hand, and facts (whether subjective "lived contents" or objective "states of affairs"), on the other. The plane of immanence as such, which is proper to philosophy taken in the widest possible sense, has complex relationships with other planes of formation, Edward P. Butler 141 such as the artistic "plane of composition" and the scientific "plane of reference," with which the present essay will not be concerned. The plane of immanence is germane to the present discussion because it is the site of normativity and provides the possibility of a Deleuzian ethics. Deleuze's ethics depends upon the idea of a comparability of planes of immanence based upon their intensive complexity, that is, the diversity of individuals and modes of individuation they are able to encompass, not in empty universality, but in concrete and mutually sustaining relationships. In the moral framework Deleuze develops from his reading of Spinoza,2 all acts are in themselves equally natural, equally perfect, and in that respect morally neutral, but this equality does not apply to the agents of these acts, the modal essences to which they are ascribable. In this model of action, the good act is one which brings the relations constitutive of the agent into "composition"3 with the relations constitutive of another being, and such an act augments the agent's power of acting, while the evil act, insofar as it decomposes the relations characteristic of some other being, diminishes the actor's very agency. The equality of acts from the standpoint of nature expresses the fact that there are only really relations of composition, insofar as it is only of these that there are adequate ideas, i.e., ideas that express their causes rather than indicating affections. Nature is thus, metaphysically speaking, intrinsically good, although it is by no means good for all things at all times: thus, there is an "agreement" between a poison and the new disposition it produces in the body, but not between that disposition and the organism's preservation. From this perspective, beings do not decompose one another qua beings, and so insofar as there is an adequate idea of the evil act it must belong to a different being, a more universal one, as Deleuze explains: [C]onsider bodies agreeing less and less, or bodies opposed to one another: their constitutive relations can no longer be directly combined, but present such differences that any resemblance between the bodies appears to be excluded. There is still however a similarity or community of composition, but this from a more and more general viewpoint which, in the limit, brings Nature as a whole into play … As all relations are combined in Nature as a whole, Nature presents a similarity of composition that may be seen in all bodies from the most general viewpoint. (Expressionism 275) The "agreement" between the poison and the consequent disposition of the body is a chemical composition but a biological decomposition, just like the reduction of a living thing to its raw materials, either by a physical or an intellectual process. The latter may in turn enter into relations of cultural composition, just as the former may enter into the composition of 142 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology a spider. We can come to grasp the reality underlying the processes of generalization constitutive of the "biological" or the "cultural" as such through the detours of the understanding necessitated by these complex relationships of decomposition and composition: [E]ven in the case of a body that does not agree with our own, and affects us with sadness, we can form an idea of what is common to that body and our own; the common notion will simply be very universal, implying a much more general viewpoint than that of the two bodies confronting each other. It has nonetheless a practical function: it makes us understand why these two bodies in particular do not agree from their own viewpoint. (285f) The language of "viewpoints" here can make it seem as though there is no more at stake than a matter of perspective, but in fact it is a matter of individuation itself. In Deleuze's reading of Spinozist ontology, the individuation of modal essences depends wholly upon their realization in existence—this is clearly a primary reason for Deleuze's preference of Spinoza over Leibniz. Deleuze sees the two philosophers as "radically opposed" on this issue: In Leibniz an essence or individual notion is a logical possibility, inseparable from a certain metaphysical reality, that is, from a "claim to existence," a tendency to exist. In Spinoza this is not the case: an essence is not a possibility, but possesses a real existence that belongs to it itself … Neither a metaphysical reality nor a logical possibility, the essence of a mode is a pure physical reality. Modal essences therefore, no less than existing modes, have efficient causes. (193) Deleuze argues that Spinoza's modal essences are intrinsically distinct while denying that they are possibilities subsisting a priori in a divine intellect. Their intrinsic distinction, their individuation, is instead irreducibly existential—and hence assimilated by Deleuze to the atomic "swerve", or clinamen, which he refers to as "a kind of conatus" (Logic of Sense 269). This intrinsic and yet existential individuation expresses for Deleuze the peculiarly Spinozist sense of eternity: "The eternity of essence," Deleuze explains, "does not come afterwards; it is strictly contemporaneous, coexistent with existence in duration" (Spinoza 40)— neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous: "You do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination" (Spinoza 125). Edward P. Butler 143 The value of this ontological perspective for Deleuze is that it renders existence "a physical or chemical test, an experimentation" (40) in which the essence of a mode expresses itself through the unique composition of extensive parts belonging to it in duration and the combinations it enters into, which are eternal although they happen in duration. There is a real genesis in time of the essence which is nevertheless truly eternal. Individuation—which is inseparable from essentialization—is thus fundamentally ethical: If during our existence we have been able to compose these parts so as to increase our power of acting, we have at the same time experienced a proportionally greater number of affections that depend only on ourselves, that is, on the intense part of ourselves. If, on the contrary, we have always been engaged in destroying or decomposing our own parts and those of others, our intense or eternal part, our essential part, has and cannot help but have only a small number of affections that come from itself, and no happiness that depends on it. This is the ultimate difference, therefore, between the good man and the bad man: the good or strong individual is the one who exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his lifetime. (41) "Death is all the more necessary," Deleuze explains, "because it always comes from without" (42). But this exterior is defined wholly according to the limits of the plane of immanence constituted by an essence. "That a man, from the necessity of his own nature, should endeavour to become non-existent, is as impossible as that something should be made out of nothing" (Ethics IV, Prop. XX), Spinoza states. The individual in this respect is absolutely atomic, but there are individuals—or "bodies"—of many different orders and thus, as Deleuze memorably remarks, "the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior a projected interior" (Spinoza 125) —cf. the description of the plane of immanence as "the notexternal outside and the not-internal inside" (What is Philosophy? 59f). Death is defined for an essence, not by its interior limitations, but by the interior it projects. In the plane of immanence constituted by Nature itself there is no nonbeing (Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 38f); but for individual essences the situation is very complicated. Since all particular essences are comprised in the production of each (Expressionism 198), the individuation of each involves, by definition, a normative disposition to all the individuals in every order of being, and produces itself in and through this normative or ethical disposition, indeed as this ethical disposition. The fullness or intensity of such an individual essence can, in turn, be measured by the criterion of the diversity of wills compossible with it, 144 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology with death expressing the essence's limits of compossibility, a limitation which is not passive but in effect an active negation or exclusion by which it defines itself. The more perfect essence, the more living essence, is that in which the greater diversity of wills is compossible, individuation according to such an essence generating a plane of immanence with a greater intensive complexity. Individuation involves the recognition and articulation of the diverse orders of being. II. Intrinsic Value and Valuation We now possess the tools for an appraisal of deep ecology as a plane of immanence. The most fundamental principle of deep ecology is the thesis of intrinsic value. As Arne Naess remarks in his essay, "Equality, Sameness, and Rights," I have injured thousands of individuals of the tiny arctic plant, Salix herbacea, during a ten-year period of living in the high mountains of Norway, and I shall feel forced to continue stepping on them as long as I live there. But I have never felt the need to justify such behavior by thinking that they have less of a right to live and blossom (or that they have less intrinsic value as living beings) than other living beings, including myself. (Sessions 223) Notice that Naess's recognition of the intrinsic value of the plant does not force him to stop treading on them. As he states elsewhere, "We might agree upon rules such as will imply different behaviour towards different kinds of living beings without negating that there is a value inherent in living beings which is the same value for all" (Naess 168). The recognition that beings having the same value will not be valued the same is thus the threshold of an ethical maturity. The anthropocentric hypothesis that the plant only has value insofar as it serves some human purpose, whether material or aesthetic, obscures the moment of valuation by presenting it, not as an existential choice, but as something given by virtue of a reified human essence. Thus Luc Ferry, in attempting to articulate his own anthropocentric environmental ethic in opposition to deep ecology, calls upon us to create "a phenomenology of human signs in nature … to obtain a clear awareness of that which can and must be valued in it" (143).The actual moment of valuing nature has here been reduced to finding signs in nature of a reified human essence. The role of thought itself is thus devalued inasmuch as it is reduced to the anthropomorphic representation of humanity instead of its production, the labor of the spirit which was Edward P. Butler 145 embodied in Pico della Mirandola's description of humanity as the indefinite essence (on which see below, sec. III). The recognition of intrinsic value thus does not mean that one does not make relative value judgments, but rather that the judgment is explicit and the costs of the choices not hidden. Valuing other individuals in and through the concrete relationships I establish with them, I individuate myself. But this valuation has itself no assignable value if it does not begin from the recognition of intrinsic value, for it is only against this background, with these stakes, that thought and action can themselves be ethically measured or valued. Similarly, in questions of culture, to recognize that cultural formations have an intrinsic value is not to cease making value judgments concerning them and their effects; it is, rather, to begin making value judgments about them explicitly rather than obscuring them. The way in which to make these choices coherent is to understand that our own essence and individuation depend upon the harmony or dissonance we establish between the different orders of being at whose nexus we exist and act; and on this point the Deleuzian ethic of individuation and the deep ecology ethic of intrinsic value are functionally indistinguishable. While affirming the intrinsic value of species and individuals, Naess cites the "rich variety of acceptable motives for being more reluctant to injure or kill a living being of kind A rather than a being of kind B," as well as the paucity of general norms for this sort of decision: "The more narrow and specific the questions posed, the less vagueness there will be" (Sessions 224). General norms individuate whole orders of being, while individuals must be dealt with to the greatest degree of specificity possible if we are to do justice to them, and the orders of being which must be taken into account in such ethical judgments are diverse. Here is where a kind of phenomenological practice makes sense. As Naess remarks in a paper on the philosophy of wolf management, discerning the possibilities for "mixed communities" of humans and other animals is more important than the abstract concept of "a general 'life community' embracing all kinds of life" (Naess and Mysterud 24). Fundamental norms such as "severe suffering endured by a living being x is of no less negative value than severe suffering endured by a living being y, whatever the species or population of x and y" (26) have an operative value particularly when they can help to shift the terms in which a dispute is conducted. For example, as Naess points out, "wolf enthusiasts" may not always take seriously enough the suffering of sheep attacked by wolves and the effects of such attacks on entire herds. Taking up the issue in these terms does not resolve the dispute, but it individuates the sheep as objects of ethical regard 146 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology irrespective of the outcome, enriching a debate which might otherwise only value them economically and aligning argumentation with ontology. Another general norm articulated by Naess in relation to wolf management is that "Humans have an obligation not to place their domestic animals in a situation where there is a significant risk of severe suffering." Here the general norm makes the specific relationship of domesticity an object of ethical regard. The degree to which there can be an adequate idea, in the Spinozist sense, of the relationship of "domesticated animal" must be assessed in such an ethical inquiry; that is, the degree to which there is something in the machine of domestication which transcends mere domination. Insofar as there are species which exist in no other fashion than in the relationship of domestic animal, there is some degree of "composition", in the Spinozist term, in this relation. The powers and limitations of such a machine become apparent when it is put to the ethical test. The responsibility incumbent upon humans in this relationship may require, in the specific situation, hiring shepherds to protect the sheep, in which the machine of domestication meets a threat from its exterior—the wild predator—by intensifying: the shepherd brings domesticated dogs to guard the domesticated sheep. But the limitations of the domestication machine are explicit in its projected exterior, the wild predator, for whom—just as for the human consumer—the domesticated animal is decomposed into a mere captive food source. The wild predator, at the same time, is a pestilential, chaotic outsider from the viewpoint interior to the relationship of domestication, due to the impossibility of constituting the ethical relationship characteristic of humans and their domesticated animals with respect to the wild animal—and which may suggest the limitations of the attempt to constitute an ecological ethic based on the concept of "stewardship." Rather than an abstract concept, or, worse, a mystical construct, intrinsic value can thus be seen as a kind of regulative ideal. Furthermore, it can be applied beyond the confines of ecology in the narrow sense. Félix Guattari posited three ecologies, pertaining to the environment, social relations and human subjectivity respectively. The constitution of planes of immanence permitting the richest intensive complexity corresponds to what Guattari calls "singularization" or, in many cases, "resingularization." Guattari's notion of singularization has been perversely conflated by certain critics (e.g., Ferry) with nationalistic chauvinism or even with racism and fascism, or simply with a relativism incapable of critique, but these criticisms fail to understand that the ethic of singularization is applied at every level, not just on the level of nationalities. The ethic of singularization in fact represents the apex of Edward P. Butler 147 individual rights, insofar as it demands that we secure to the degree possible all of the existential territories which empower individuals in pursuing their life projects. This necessarily involves both the preservation of tradition as well as the liberation from it. Moreover, the ceaseless effort to strengthen diversity in every cultural field as well as in every order of being guarantees the relentless subversion of hegemonies. Hegemonic ideologies will always continue to exist; but where their natural antagonists flourish, hegemonic ideologies are forced back upon their own existential territories, their opportunities for expansion curtailed. The truly effective critique of hegemonic ideologies comes not from countervailing universalizing discourses but from their own projected exteriors, which undermine them existentially and locally rather than attempting to co-opt them through overcoding. The projected exterior is both exterior and interior; thus, for example, a projected exterior of religious fundamentalism is esoterism or occultism, interior to fundamentalism inasmuch as they share the latter's intensive cultivation of the text, but repressed for their recourse to transformation.4 As a broad ethical perspective, recognizing the diversity of the orders of being means recognizing that the way we make value judgments differs in different orders according to the different ways in which we participate in them. In a society that is our own, we speak and are understood and seek change from within. With the power we possess in social institutions comes an ethical demand to act on a scale commensurate with our personal influence. The more central we are in such a social group the more action is demanded of us and the less restraint, insofar as we play a larger share in constituting the group itself. Where we are peripheral, or an outsider, we have nevertheless a role to play, but there is much we cannot do or which it would be unwise to attempt. At the limits one could say we act on the basis of a common humanity; but this universal is really just a placeholder for whatever degree of understanding has already been established between myself and the other prior to the exchange—if there were a more specific basis for the intervention, one would not appeal to such a universal. The universal thus expresses the sphere of interest in which we engage the other—recall that in Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, recourse to the universal implies the relationship of antagonism or decomposition between individuals. In the relation to the other animal, there is also a universal, a common animality presupposed in the encounter and embodying relations established in many cases prior to our thematic awareness—the perception of, e.g., living motility being phenomenologically very primitive. The type of universal to be deployed here is not that which is formed by subtracting 148 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology differentiae, but that which is integral in each individual, and is transcendent in just this fashion—e.g., the Platonic autozôion, "Animal Itself", which is "one and visible, containing within itself all animals which are by nature cognate with it" (Timaeus 30 D).5 The wider sphere of interest expressed by this animality means that the most basic elements of value must hold proportionally more weight. Issues of physical integrity, habitat preservation, and so forth, thus necessarily dominate our ethical engagement with the non-human animal. When dealing with our fellow humans, by contrast, we feel free to override these matters for the sake of cultural concerns. Humans choose to make war with one another over such matters and it does not surprise us much when they sacrifice their physical integrity to an ideal. We cannot expect someone else to sacrifice herself for our ideal, however; and a fortiori we cannot ask this of another species. For we could ask the other's sacrifice as the price of being a member of our community, and upon acceptance a certain agreement would have been reached. However, no agreement is ever made solely among its immediate participants, and thus no social contract or compact achieves real, but only ideal or hypothetical closure. This failure of closure means that everyone has something to say about everyone else's culture. But to a member of another species we can only offer very limited participation, the "mixed community" of humans and other animals usually being defined more by the capacity to tolerate diverse uses of a common space than a community of purpose. Culture's role in according value to the non-human cannot therefore be absolute, and is in fact more curtailed than in the case of according value to a custom or tradition. In certain cultures the sacrificial act, inherently an act of decomposition and hence of evil, is made good upon precisely such an according of membership in the society to the non-human victim, in which the same limitations and lack of closure are to be observed as in the case of the compact according to which humans become members of society. No such compact succeeds in determining all of the "bodies" ascribable to an individual, and hence human rights form an irreducible remainder in relation to any cultural organization; and the gap in determination is of course far greater in the case of a non-human participant. It would be a mistake to fail to recognize that non-humans do participate in human culture, even above and beyond phenomena such as domestication or the "mixed community" of coexistence. The mere production of symbols pertaining to non-humans already constitutes their participation in the social, albeit to a minimal degree—but not so minimal as that it does not already compound the ethical responsibilities toward "the animal" as such with responsibilities toward a participant in a social order. The symbolic Edward P. Butler 149 order, like every other order of being, is not composed of static essences but of multiple planes of immanence proving themselves; hence there is an ethics of symbolic production which encompasses not only religious and artistic symbols but also, e.g., mathematics. III. Deep Ecology as Humanism The emergence of human ecological consciousness is a philosophically important idea: a life form has developed on Earth which is capable of understanding and appreciating its relations with all other life forms and to the Earth as a whole. (Naess 166) Far from being a challenge to humanism, deep ecology ought to be seen as its fulfillment, for the telos of humanism cannot lie in an anthropocentrism embodying a reified notion of the human essence. This truth is recognized by a "humanistic" critic of ecology such as Ferry (see Chap. 1, "Antinatural Man"), who however proceeds to use it to exacerbate the ideological opposition of humanity and nature which he regards as indispensible to preserving the democratic values of the Enlightenment. But the true value of indeterminacy in the human essence is that the latter acquires determinacy through the ethical judgments made by human beings, with the regulative ideal of a maximal coexistence and flourishing of species and individuals on the earth expressing the maximal value of the human essence itself and the individuals constituted as humans according to it. The ecosophical concept of intrinsic value derives its ethical force from affirming an individuative striving in natural beings that is at once and as such the striving to recognize others, to constitute a plane of immanence whose intensive complexity expresses the maximal multiplicity of values. The indefinite essence of humanity is the symbol of this striving, and has no inherent bond to the taxonomic designation "human." In just this fashion Kant distinguishes between the predisposition to humanity and the predisposition to personality (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, AK 6:27-28). Although Kant did not extend personhood to nonhuman animals, he did extend it beyond humans to any other rational beings, as well as criticizing anthropomorphism in morality (AK 6:65n). "Rationality" indeed is not an empirical, but an intelligible characteristic, and to that degree a rational being is the same as a being rationally conceived, conceived, that is, in its autonomy, as an autopoietic individual, rather than in its heteronomy, as either an instrument or as a mere moment or aspect of a totalizing whole. Where we recognize autonomy we recognize an end, a telos, but in the case of a living being that telos is not, 150 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology as in the case of abstract beings, expressible as a separate end of which the individual is a means, but as something unique and inseparable, that is, "existential", expressing intrinsic distinction. In autonomy of the "merely" biological kind, therefore, we also inescapably find an intrinsic value which puts us to the test, the test of the compossibility of our telos with that telos, the experiment which determines our exterior, our mortality, our own degree of "autonomy." Moreover, in the absolute positivity of nature there is a plenitude, as well as an anonymity, of "natures." Any possible nature is actual; and if humanity, or any particular human, turns out not to be what it might have been, it is necessarily the case that something or someone else, of whatever order of being, has that nature, that essence. Arne Naess expresses this intuition in a provocative thought-experiment about humanity and an imaginary alien species: Homo sapiens may be capable, in suitable circumstances, and upon the basis of a wide perspective, of recommending its own withdrawal as the dominant living being on earth. By such an act humans would confirm (just as we do in many other actions) that mankind is not bound to the values "useful for human beings" or 'suitable to human self-preservation" when "utility" and "self" are taken in a narrow sense ... Would we as human beings subject ourselves freely to the political will of an alien species which had more or less the same characteristics as us, but which lacked our tendency to torture, torment and exploit one another? The decision would perhaps take a few centuries, but I believe it would be positive. We would abdicate, if we were sure of them ... Human beings would lose something of their own essential nature if they refrained from abdication. (169) It is not a question here of some determinate other species, nor of an elite within ours, but rather of whether "humanity" is to be identified with whatever humans do or have done, however sordid, or must stand for an ideal irreducible to the all-too-human, and one which thereby cannot help but be open to the non-human other from the moment that the latter becomes distinct. What the thought-experiment affirms is that if we are not human, someone or something else nevertheless is; but what the human is, in which order(s) of being it exists, is indeterminate in order that its value might range across these orders. By contrast, Ferry, in his defense of "humanism" against the threat to it he imagines coming from deep ecology, finds it adequate to find our duties toward all other animals in the degree to which they present to us an "analogue" of humanity (54), but fails to appreciate what is radical in the Kantian notion he appropriates inasmuch as for Kant we, too, for our own Edward P. Butler 151 part possess only analogous humanity, since we are animals as well. Ferry makes humanity in the ethical sense merely a property of our species rather than a problem posed to the individual. To be human is a mere status for Ferry. But humanity is an indefinite essence, not because we are exempt from nature, but because the essence of the human is inseparable from the project of humanity, which transcends any particular species, including our own, but is nevertheless a project at once natural, metaphysical and historical. Heidegger says, with Ferry's approval, "The stone is without world, the animal is poor in world, man is creator of world" (55), but a "world" is a trivial thing indeed if only humans have one. The stone has created our world, as has the animal, in a different sense. Nothing is without world.6 The geological world, the biological world, the mathematical world—nothing has given philosophers license to hold themselves aloof from acknowledging them, nor would there be anything "humanistic" in doing so. Again, Ferry quotes with approval Philip Elder's ironic remark that it is anthropocentric to presume that objects such as mountains are opposed to the development from which ecologists would seek to preserve them, and argues that since "[a]ll valorization, including that of nature, is the deed of man … consequently, all normative ethic is in some sense humanist and anthropocentrist" (131)—but in what sense? Is it merely a question of attempting to find any sense at all in which ecology, in aspiring to transcend anthropocentrism, could be said to be anthropocentric in spite of itself? Beyond this rhetorical tactic, is it Ferry's claim that the humans who oppose the development of the mountain—or even simply those who do not stand to benefit financially from it and thus passively fail to support it—no longer human? Are their values a performative contradiction? It is reasonable to say that a mountain, taken purely as stone—that is, as the very raw materials on account of which it is being targeted for development—is not "opposed" to development, but it is irrational to suppose that the animals who would lose their habitat would favor it, or that the continued existence of the mountain as a cultural asset is compatible with such development; and so it is unclear where the contradiction is supposed to lie. Rather, it is Ferry who seems caught in a fundamental contradiction when he attempts to determine the "subjective moment" in valuation as an objectively human moment, a moment, that is, in the natural history of the human species, and to deduce from the fact that ethical discourse is a human activity that the outcome of all ethical decisions must benefit, above all, any human asserting even the most trivial claim, lest the deliberation undermine its own conditions of possibility. Just as the deep ecology thesis of intrinsic value sets a 152 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology regulative ideal of the widest possible scope for ethical-ontological individuation, so too the refusal of anthropocentrism in deep ecology ought to be seen, not as anti-humanist, but as the fulfillment of the most profound ethical potential within humanism itself, because it rejects the thanatophoric moment in which a humanism all-too-human would seek to determine with finality the limits of ethical concern according to abstract taxonomical designations. From a Deleuzian perspective, a postanthropocentric humanism is particularly desirable inasmuch as it accomodates both the becoming-animal of the human7 as well as its reciprocal movement, the becoming-human of the animal, which is a matter neither of anthropomorphism nor of domestication, but of the animal's deterritorialization of humanity via, e.g., the abstract machine of Kantian morality.8 Deleuzian humanism, as a frankly metaphysical humanism, can also be seen as expressing the conditions of the possibility of a project such as that of Halliwell and Mousley's Critical Humanisms,9 viz., their remarks concerning the "amorphous" nature of the human, which is to be conceived not as "a given entity" but as "an open-ended and mutable process"; the concept of the human is to retain its "critical edge" while resisting "becoming a reified and prescriptive category." Similarly, Deleuzian humanism as I have sought to articulate it in this essay holds open a critical space for multiple humanisms, critical because it speaks to what is at stake in any conception of the human, open and multiple because the human essence is viewed as a product of ethical individuation, as an appropriation in the Stoic sense (oikeiosis). Although Deleuzian humanism as I have described it does not fit any of the diverse humanisms Halliwell and Mousley describe, they do discuss A Thousand Plateaus briefly under the rubric of the "transhuman"—the "transhuman" being, in effect, nothing other than the metaphysics of the human properly understood. Coda: Philosophy at the Surface In the Eighteenth "series" of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze offers a sketch of three paradigmatic "images of philosophers" rooted in antiquity. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze typifies the Platonist as a philosopher of the ascent to the intelligible and the Presocratic as a philosopher of the descent into the maelstrom of the forces animating life. Deleuze sublates the Nietzschean opposition, however, by adding a third image, typifying the Hellenistic philosophical schools of Stoicism and Cynicism as philosophies of the surface. Deleuze offers here—as he does in other Edward P. Butler 153 places and in diverse ways—a genealogical account of the emergence of his own philosophical position. This particular account is an appropriate conclusion to the present essay because it offers an image of the activity of philosophy as rooted in a relationship to nature, rather than solely as the working out of the implications of a certain set of concepts. Deleuze here uses Empedocles and the Orphic theologians as exemplars of Presocratic thought. He singles out in Empedocles the complementary images of, on the one hand, the isolated limbs and organs offering themselves up for exotic combinations in a prior and also (due to the cyclical nature of becoming) future phase of cosmogenesis (Empedocles frags. 50-52 Wright); and on the other, the phrên hierê (frags. 22, 97), the "body" of divine thought into which the cosmos is formed by the waxing strength of Love, dubbing the phrên hierê the "body without organs," in the first use of this familiar Deleuzian concept (Logic of Sense 129).10 Paralleling these two Empedoclean perspectives on the "body", the one dismembering and recombining, the other an indivisible and ideal totality, Deleuze cites "two faces" of Dionysus: "his open and lacerated body, and his impassible organless head … Dionysus dismembered, but also Dionysus the impenetrable" (129).11 In the reciprocity of these two "bodies", the one disintegrated into its molecular relations while the other expresses nothing other than the mind capable of thinking all these syntheses and decompositions, Deleuze sees something requisite to Presocratic thought but which remained unthought in it, namely the torsional surface of thought which connects them, and which he sees as having been made explicit by the Hellenistic schools.12 With this shift to the surface, there comes at first a crisis of relativism as Platonic intellectual ascesis and Presocratic practices are both subsumed in the Stoic science of mixtures: This thesis … establishes that in the depth of bodies everything is mixture. There are no rules, however, according to which one mixture rather than another might be considered bad. Contrary to what Plato believed, there is no measure high above for these mixtures and combinations of Ideas which would allow us to define good and bad mixtures. Or again, contrary to what the Presocratics thought, there is no immanent measure either, capable of fixing the order and the progression of a mixture in the depths of Nature (Physis); every mixture is as good as the bodies which pervade one another and the parts which coexist. How could the world of mixtures not be that of a black depth wherein everything is permitted? (130-1) This "black depth" is a consequence of the interpenetration of everything; since all elements are contained in all things and pervade one 154 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology another, everything is impure, everything is "cannibalism" and "incest." Thus the supposed Platonic essentialism is undermined, as well as the Presocratic cosmological organization of forces. What is left appears to be solely the pure positivity and relativity of Nature. What presents itself to the Stoic as more fundamental than either abstract essentialism or "natural law" is the modes of mixture or synthesis: "imperfect mixtures which alter bodies" and "perfect mixtures which leave bodies intact and make them coexist in all their parts" (131). The ultimate "perfect" mixture is, Deleuze explains, "the unity of corporeal causes … wherein everything is exact in the cosmic present" (131). The perfect mixture, Nature, is in effect the hierê phrên of Empedocles reterritorialized. Nature is the perfect mixture because it is guided by no transcendent hidden hand but by the strivings interior to individuation, and divine thought is that which attempts to approximate this absolute polycentricity. The intelligibility of causality on the ultimate scale was, in Empedocles, the absolute transparency of the cosmos to itself at the acme of Love's power, but is now individual and contemporaneous, just as Eleatic Being and Nonbeing are reterritorialized as Atom and Void. This is the moment, in effect, when the plane of individuation transcends that of speciation—hence the significance Deleuze accords to the Epicurean doctrine of an infinity of atoms, but not of atomic shapes or sizes (270), for the metaphysical individual must be free from final determination either by the universal (shape) or by the phenomenal (size, because if the atom could be of any size, there would be sensible atoms). From a different perspective, the Empedoclean body-without-organs, the unique individual, presents itself as the precondition for the ideality of the universe in Platonic thought through a movement of eros producing the Idea in temporality. But on any level less comprehensive than the totality—a paradoxical totality, moreover, that does not assemble its elements into a whole—there are no perfect mixtures, nor absolute states of bodies which would render transformation intelligible (as, e.g., in Heraclitus frag. 36 DK: "For souls it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth; from earth water comes-to-be, and from water, soul"): Bodies caught in the particularity of their limited presents do not meet directly in line with the order of their causality, which is good only for the whole, taking into consideration all combinations at once. This is why any mixture can be called good or bad: good in the order of the whole, but imperfect, bad, or even execrable, in the order of partial encounters. (131) Edward P. Butler 155 At first, all of the moves seem to exacerbate this opposition between the universal, an apocalyptic body-without-organs, and the order of particular relations, a realm that would seem to be ungovernable by any science or morality. If everything is coherent and justifiable on the ultimate scale, then our plane lacks justice and coherence altogether. Can the Stoic science of mixtures supply a science, much less an ethics? A little later, Deleuze remarks that We moved too quickly as we presented the Stoics challenging depth and finding there only infernal mixtures corresponding to passions-bodies and to evil intentions. The Stoic system contains an entire physics, along with an ethics of this physics. If it is true that passions and evil intentions are bodies, it is true that good will, virtuous actions, true representations, and just consents are also bodies. If it is true that certain bodies form abominable, cannibalistic, and incestuous mixtures, the aggregate of bodies taken as a whole necessarily forms a perfect mixture, which is nothing other than the unity of causes among themselves or the cosmic present … If there are bodies-passions, there are also bodies-actions, unified bodies of the great Cosmos. (143) With this in mind, Deleuze formulates a fundamental Stoic problem, an index for reason and morality alike. He asks with respect to Chronos, that is, discrete time, the time of particulars, Do the bodies which fill it possess enough unity, do their mixtures possess enough justice and perfection, in order for the present to avail a principle of an immanent measure? Perhaps it does, at the level of the cosmic Zeus. But is this the case for bodies at random and for each partial mixture? (163) Stoicism, Deleuze explains, reinterprets the Presocratic cosmos "through a physics of mixtures in depth" (132). These "mixtures" are essentially ways of analyzing larger aggregates into smaller ones and composing smaller aggregates into larger ones. The heir to the Stoic science of mixtures, at once ethics and physics, is thus ecosophy and the science of testing the value of the human essence and of one's own essence as a human in the crucible of Nature. For Deleuze, therefore, the essence of the Hellenistic moment in philosophy relative to its historical predecessors is to have brought Presocratic physics and Platonic idealism alike to the "surface" of an ethical and individuating plane of immanence on which hybrid discourses concerning the ontology of ethics and the ethics of ontology come to life. 156 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology Deleuze chooses Hercules, an important symbolic figure for the Stoics, to personify this moment in the history of thought. Hercules, he explains, is always situated relative to the three realms of the infernal abyss, the celestial height and the surface of the earth … He always ascends or descends to the surface in every conceivable manner … It is no longer a question of Dionysus down below, or of Apollo up above, but of Hercules of the surface, in his dual battle against both depth and height: reorientation of the entire thought and a new geography. (131f) The "Herculean" individual—the subject of deep ecology—carries on her back at all times her own individuation in eternity, at the nexus of intrinsic value and unfathomable Nature, with nothing whatsoever to predetermine the outcome of her struggle. Notes 1 On the plane of immanence, see especially Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy? 35-60). 2 Deleuze's ethics are to be discerned chiefly through his readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and the Epicureans. In the following account, I accord a certain primacy to Deleuze's Spinozist ethical thought, because there he speaks in a more conventionally normative language of good and evil, rather than in hedonic terms of joy and sadness. Another reason to accord primacy to the Spinozist side of Deleuze's ethics is that it shall be seen from the following that it is possible from within this ethical framework to motivate Deleuze's adoption of an ontology synthesized from the Epicureans and from Hume—i.e., from two different varieties of atomism. 3 Note that the sense of "composition" in Deleuze's readings of Spinoza is completely distinct from the sense of "composition" as it applies to art (the "plane of composition"). 4 Cf. "Prohibitions on Transformation," 379-83 in Canetti. 5 Compare the Deleuzian "body without organs" as discussed in the Coda of the present essay. The universal in question expresses the complementarity of the first two kinds of universal in Simplicius's commentary on the Categories, 82. 35–83. 20, in contrast to the third; see the discussion in Lloyd, 67; see also Moyle's remarks on the problem of conceiving the commonality between humans and other animals as a generic "first nature" to which the specific difference of "second nature", or reason, is added in humans. 6 It should be noted that theorists of deep ecology have their own readings of Heidegger; see in particular Zimmerman 1983, though there is more incompatibility to be found between Heidegger and deep ecology in Zimmerman 1993. 7 See Chap. 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible…," in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (232-309). Edward P. Butler 157 8 For the characteristics of abstract machines, see A Thousand Plateaus (141ff). My thanks to Tim Matts for bringing this issue to my attention. 10 "For two branches do not spring from his back, he has no feet, no swift knees, no organs of reproduction, but is equal to himself in every direction, without any beginning or end, a rounded sphere, rejoicing in encircling stillness," (frag. 22, trans. Wright); "For he is not equipped with a human head on a body, he has no feet, no swift knees, no shaggy genitals, but he is mind alone, holy and inexpressible, darting through the whole cosmos with swift thoughts," (frag. 97). 11 In point of fact, Deleuze confuses here the fate of Dionysus, dismembered and consumed by the Titans but for his heart, preserved by Athena, with that of Orpheus, the "prophet" of Dionysus, dismembered by the Maenads while his oracular head was preserved. 12 That is, the Stoics and the Cynics. Deleuze does not discuss the Epicureans here, but would obviously regard them as capable of being assimilated to the other Hellenistic schools in the salient respects upon his own reading of them. 9 Works Cited Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosopy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988). —. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990). —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester w/Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Devall, Bill and Sessions, George. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985). Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Halliwell, Martin and Mousley, Andy. Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Hayden, Patrick. Multiplicity and Becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). Lloyd, A. C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 158 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology Moyle, Tristan. "Re-Enchanting Nature: Human and Animal Life in Later Merleau-Ponty." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38:2 (May 2007): 164-80. Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Naess, Arne and Mysterud, Ivar. "Philosophy of Wolf Policies I: General Principles and Preliminary Exploration of Selected Norms." Conservation Biology 1:1 (May 1987): 22-34. Sessions, George (Ed.) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism (London: Shambhala, 1995). Zimmerman, Michael. "Toward a Heideggerean Ethos for Radical Environmentalism." Environmental Ethics 5 (1983): 99-131. —. "Rethinking the Heidegger-Deep Ecology Relationship." Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 195-224. Wright, M. R. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995). RHYTHMIC TOPOLOGY: THE AFFECTIVE STRETCHING OF NATURE ELENI IKONIADOU Introduction Score for a Hole in the Ground is a sonic sculpture by Jem Finer, positioned in a forest at Kent's countryside. Part music score part art installation, it consists of a deep shaft next to a lake in which resonant metallic objects, of different sizes and tunings, are buried. Drips of water from the lake strike the objects ringing them like bells, while a giant brass horn pipes the sounds seven metres above ground. This project was inspired by the Japanese suikinkutsu, a type of music device and garden ornament in the country's tradition, originating from the middle of the Edo period (1603-1867). The suikinkutsu is an acoustic water chamber of subtle and minimal music, composed by the sounds of the environment. As such, it is "a literal manifestation" of the fact that "in Japan rhythm was traditionally conceived of as obeying the unpredictable qualities of nature" (Finer 41). Contra Western music's metric fixity and definiteness, Finer's installation wants to evoke an indeterminate environmental soundscape. In other words, to present an "eco dub system" that relies on environmental harmonics as its sources of energy: climatic forces, gravity, water and wind (41). According to Finer, this is a post-digital return to a prehistoric music, in which the reverberation of nature becomes the space of composition. As such this sonic sculpture needs no human intervention (other than set up) and is independent from any energy source or technology. The idea is that it becomes part of the environment that it penetrates, providing an alternative model to the computational paradigm of sound design. Its compositional value rests on the formation of potential connections between landscape, metal, and weather, as they continuously contaminate and affect each other. Score for a Hole in the Ground, for this essay, poses a conceptual aesthetic challenge to the common dichotomies between nature and culture, the biological and the artificial. These oppositions are nothing 160 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature new. Fundamental assumptions about the given natural world, at the heart of mainstream Western thought, reflect an inherent Cartesianism that philosophy and science have often been unable to shake. Within this tradition the attempt to understand a body's experience of space has relied primarily on the latter's ocularcentric conception, linking its experience to human subjectivity. Yet the rearrangement of hierarchies in sensory perception, in order to substitute visual predominance by aural experience (as in the work of Walter Ong and McLuhan) presents us with further limitations. First, that it remains confined in the dualism between perceiver and perceived as two distinct elements in communication, and, second, that it relies on the first in order to determine the latter. At the same time, a predetermined world implies that we can only ever represent it, by acquiring insight into fully formed identities and essences. According to Deleuze and Guattari, identity, analogy, resemblance, and opposition become problematic categories in constructing assemblages of the real rather than merely representing it. In the theory of assemblages a body is produced by process: its differences and relations with other bodies, within a system whose potential is never exhausted in actuality (4). A body is not defined by symmetrical parts that form a whole but by tensions, forces and speeds that melt the boundaries between internal and external worlds topologically. Topology, according to Massumi, is "the science of self-varying deformation" (Parables for the Virtual 134). Considered topologically bodies surpass the restriction of essences (what they are) and enter the realm of assemblages (what they can do in their entanglements). Following Deleuze and Guattari this essay asks, how can we account for the relationship between body and environment beyond the limits of subjective experience? Current architectural theory, neurophysiological case studies and bio-technological experimentation, provide promising fields in which to rethink a body away from essentialism. Drawing on particular instances we will argue that real and virtual, living and nonliving, natural and artificial, are vibratory milieus tied together by the concept of 'rhythmic topology.' Away from the replacement of a visual perspective of space by a sonic one, this essay explores rhythm as a relational tension between nature and culture, a mode 'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology, then, addresses the virtuality of unfinished bodies (human, animal, technological) to conceptualise a becoming of nature that stretches beyond our knowledge of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for ecology, Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualization of an altogether 'new' nature. In particular, this essay analyses the rhythmic topology of a body in three different levels: the aesthetic level of digital architecture as Eleni Ikoniadou 161 the spatiotemporal modification of bodies; the neurophysical level of rhythmic hallucinations as autogenerated bodily activity; and the biotechnological level of cellular vibration as the intensive transformation of turbulent matter. A note on rhythmic topology The idea of nature as physis, the development of living organisms outside external influences, has not only shaped our understanding of ecology as the scientific study of the environment. Rather, it has necessarily interpreted nature contra culture throughout various aspects of Western thought. This notable split between natural and artificial environmental models is part and parcel of an understanding of rhythm as split between a) physical, that is, a psycho-physiological notion of circadian body rhythms whose speed and slowness depend on external cues, expressed in breathing, walking, heart beat and so on; and b) artificial, such as the mechanical motion of the metronome, or any machine that establishes a steady tempo or pulse. In both cases, rhythm implies synchronization, balance and the metric organization of spacetime and body. However, for Deleuze and Guattari the concept of rhythm excludes any linear or metric relation in favor of 'packets of relations' and the 'superposition of disparate rhythms.' Here the relation between body and milieu is not one of identification, categorization or organization but one of rhythmic passing and transduction. Living bodies continually pass from one milieu to another, but also milieus pass into one another, tied together by a rhythmic creativity ("interrhythmicity"). Rhythm, in other words, is the critical moment that allows heterogeneous connections and the manifestation of change: Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal to humankind, yet without this series constituting a progression. (Deleuze and Guattari 313) As such rhythm is not the beat of coordination but the difference that creates linkages in-between different milieus, during which one becomes the basis for the other. Following Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhythm, we can rethink the relation between nature and culture away from hitherto dualities. This move to collapse the distance between either/or and between subject and object, involves plugging them into the abstract machine of topology.1 A topological body is not unitary but collective: a 162 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature dynamic alliance of different bodies, across species, between biology and technology. Topology, also called rubber-sheet or differential geometry, is a branch of mathematics concerned with spatial properties preserved under bicontinuous deformation. In Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi defines a topological figure "as the continuous transformation of one geometrical figure into another" (134). Topological spaces cannot be studied by the metric concepts of Euclidean geometry, such as length, shape and volume, since their distances do not remain fixed on the basis of their exact shape (DeLanda 22). Thus their analysis requires an altogether different understanding of form, under which a thing passes from one formation to another, irrespective of fundamental distinctions in shape. Studied first by Leibniz, subsequently by mathematicians such as Euler and Gauss, and established through Poincaré's differential equations, topology points to systems that are utterly different with similar long-term behavior. Deleuze extracts the topological feature of multiplicities (defined by singularities) from Poincaré, to argue for a rhizomatic model of thought, which knows no subject, object, points or positions. Considered topologically, a thing can no longer be considered as one, a unity, but as a multiplicity, always increasing its lines of connection with other things. Topology follows the continuous transformation between and within 'things' at a scale smaller than we can perceive. Rhythm is the link between things, bridging or allowing them to pass from one another, inciting the speed at which their relations unfold. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, rhythmic topology conceptualizes an affective space that cuts across the distinction between biological and artificial, unraveling microsynthetic bodies beneath their macro-organic appearances. In the specific case of Finer's project, Score for a Hole in the Ground, we see an attempt to surpass the determinism of Western models of thought, by moving away from a primarily technological and visual organization of music (composition in scores). As such the sculpture suggests an alternative understanding of rhythm as immanent to nature, expressing the latter's artificiality beyond technological interventions. The sculpture exposes the dub forces of an ecological system and in so doing reorganizes the relationship between naturality and artificiality. It is a system that continuously regenerates the micro-rhythms of sonic matter, extracting them from the guts of the earth and amplifying them noncomputationally. Sound molecules travel from water to metal and from soil to air, at different speed variations, in unpredictable and undecided ways. The anti-teleology of the system means that it will keep on playing endlessly, constituting and reconfiguring new rhythmic planes out of the Eleni Ikoniadou 163 different combinations and alterations of the molecular landscape. In Deleuze and Guattari's words, "nature appears as a rhythmic character with infinite transformations" (319). Although Finer's sonic sculpture is used here to provide an entryway to the map of rhythmic topology, as are all the different instances used in this essay, rhythm for us is not directly associated with sound nor does it strictly imply time. At the molecular level, before vibration is extracted in sound and sound becomes organized music, we may speak of spatiotemporal rhythms that populate all bodies. If we detach the notion of rhythm from the limits of beat, meter and cadence, referring to the concept as used by Deleuze and Guattari, rhythmic topology invokes a space that is affective rather than specific to the sonic or the visual. Affect, according to Massumi, is "the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other" (35). Affect is a body's capacity (power) to enter into relations with other bodies, a potential to affect and be affected (Massumi 15). For Spinoza, affects are modifications of a body (affectiones), by which the power of a body to act increases together with the ideas of these modifications. Affect thus surpasses action; it is felt by a body "toward a thing future, present, past" and draws it in different directions (Spinoza 128, 195, 190). Affect is change superimposed by a body's potential; it does not inform us of the nature or externality of a body but it is an indication – or inclination – of what it might become. Rhythmic topology is thus not a matter of sonic or visual perceptions and cognitions of a body, but of affective, nonsensorial tendencies that extend to all bodies living or not. As we have seen in the case of Score for a Hole, inorganic and organic matter share symbiotic connections that point to nature as an ongoing process away from teleology. The spatiotemporal eco architecture of this sculpture turns our understanding of nature towards an open-ended becoming of indeterminate mutations. Blob Bodies The coming together of heterogeneous realities beyond the limits of possibility and the concreteness of actuality is better expressed by the concept of potential relationality. A philosophy of potential relationality crucially argues that an opposition between nature and culture reduces the world to a function of human understanding. Soil, air, metal object and sound molecule feed into each other in a variety of ways, as their abstract formations reveal a multiple nature that we problematically reduce to the domain of the living. In architecture, contemporary practices are also 164 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature beginning to investigate the relational potential of digital design, using topology as an alternative method to building and understanding spaces. The building of space now shifts from stable form to abstract force, steering new ideas and challenges to the relationship between space, body and technology. Architects of topological surface organizations "invite us to consider a new morphological analog of the body more akin to a singlecell blob than a symmetrically articulated upright man" (Greg Lynn 176). In so doing they incite the amorphous, unfinished and underlying topological structures that bodies and spaces endure. Architectural theorist Greg Lynn's method of designing, involves programming a set of modifications before he has an object to modify. His work engages with "an alternative mathematics of form" (176), to integrate an abstract plan that cannot contain all the details of the final product. In other words, the design has to be abstract enough in order to be compatible with myriad combinations. Lynn's "soft geometry" includes curves, folds and blobs as morphological issues that emerge in the process of converting a surface into a continuous traversing line. Blobs are intensive bodies that traverse the internal/external divide (between body and world, organic and inorganic) expanding by constantly incorporating external forces. Their importance in architectural theory is that they suggest peculiar and alternative methods of structural organization and a strategy of building that connects exterior and interior topologically. In particular, Lynn uses a topological tactic that he calls 'smoothing,' the blending of heterogeneous mixtures that continuously reorganize form to expose new possibilities that were not there before. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's description of smoothness as the "continuous variation (and development) of form" (478), Lynn puts a philosophy of heterogeneous ecology to practice. He is building process not form, following the potential movement of self-variation before it settles into an exact figure. Although Lynn uses CNC (computer numerical control), digital technology in his work is not used as an architectural tool of construction but as an integral component of the environment. Hence, Lynn does not strive for a simulation of reality in artificiality or towards a perfection already present in nature. Referring to Lynn's description of computerassisted design (CAD), differential parameters that combine to govern continuities of self-varying movement and end only when the program stops running, Massumi asks: Doesn't [Lynn's] topological design method digitally repeat what our bodies do noncomputationally as we make our way to and from our workstations? Then, when we watch the program run, aren't we doing it again, slumped before the screen? Are we not immobily repeating our Eleni Ikoniadou 165 body's ability to extract form from movement? When we stare, barely seeing, into the screen, haven't we entered a 'lost' body-dimension of abstract orientation not so terribly different from the one we go to when we roll up our eyes and find ourselves in the fold? (Massumi 183-4) Lynn's abstract topological geometries of fluidity reveal an architecture of folding that engages with seemingly unrelated elements, as they become intricately connected by the external force of smoothing (or smooth mixtures). Smoothing does not eliminate difference between the elements but rather integrates it, by topologizing their surfaces. Body and milieu enter into a new alliance without losing anything of their nature, by experiencing an architecture that melts their form and diffuses their structure rather than stabilize and align them according to a general model. In a sense, blobs depart from an architecture of territories where space is designed horizontally, directing the experience of a vertical body within it. Blob models do not separate between space and object, as in Euclidean geometry, but are defined on the basis of a differential topological and gravitational relationship of equalization between body and environment. In other words, a blob is a relational sticky "thing which is neither singular nor multiple but an intelligence that…in its form can become virtually infinitely multiplied and distributed" (Lynn 172). Blob bodies are fluid (or "aqueous") hypersurfaces that internalize their surroundings by liquefying them. According to Steve Goodman, treating space as if it was a gel or liquid "opens a privileged portal into the amodal transensory" (Goodman 64). Lynn's blob tectonics, according to Goodman, become "not so much an intervention into the visual field of the built environment, but rather into its invisible, affective modulation" (63). Designing by topological relation, with a blob constantly (re)acquiring its non-stable shape by environment and movement rather than form and function, allows for the emergence of a new dynamic relation between body and space. Blobs are not grounded in any given environment but point to the latter's fluidity, mobilizing an affective relationality between floating body and liquid space. Rethought from the standpoint of weightlessness, body and space absorb each others gravity and are no longer separated by absolute terms. This aquatic experience of feeling space as it unfolds, beyond the level of perceivable structures, bares the potential of "masses to float within mass" (Lynn 107), in a sea of rhythmic matter. Away from the deconstruction of space and time, blobs point to an architecture of spatiotemporal affectivity – the realm of the virtual as it comes into being. The virtual experience of rhythmic matter does not refer to an immaterial space of analogies between the application of design and 166 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature aquatic life. Lynn develops an architectural concept of differential gravities that re-conceptualize the relationship between earth and architecture, to provide an altogether different method of building. In his own words, "buildings do not, after all, have to be structured as standing up…and have been structured on principles of bridging, hanging, stretching, squatting, leaning, lying and floating among others" (98). Looked at this way, digital architecture taps into the potential of an "actively indeterminate" nature (Massumi 237); a virtual reserve of potential open to modulation. "This is Spinoza's 'naturing nature': nature as an inexhaustible, impersonal reserve of giving self-activity" (238). Blobs are forces of viscosity, an axis of rhythmic contamination across the nature-culture continuum. They point to an ecology of "liquefaction" that topologizes exterior and interior "onto a single plane of differential vibration" (Goodman 65). Rhythmic hallucinations Neurological studies in progressive nerve deafness, argue for a direct relation between sensorial deafness and autogenerated auditory hallucinations. Neurologist Oliver Sacks argues that audio hallucinations are often not psychotic, as in schizophrenic patients, but neurological (52). Deprived of any sensory input, a body autogenerates spontaneous activity in the form of 'release' hallucinations, ranging from loud tinnitus to entire musical symphonies. This seemingly abnormal brain activity has been described by patients as 'a circuit in the head' and the hallucinating part of their body an alien autogenerating mechanism (Sacks 55 & 62). Such analogies between the hallucinations and technology refer to the fact that in every sufferer the sound initially appears to arrive from an external source (coming from a radio, television, record-player or a noisy machine). It is only when such external sources are excluded that the patient becomes aware of the noise being generated autonomously, by their own bodies. However, the relationship between biology and technology in a hallucinatory body is not exhausted in analogy. Rather, the complexity of the relationship is expressed in the fact that these hallucinations are not an organic disease of the brain, nor a subjective phenomenon, but the non-living backflow of a virtual activity. The phenomenon thus points to the actualization of a dynamic generator of rhythmic forces as it emerges from a body in the form of a seizure. These hallucinations are not restricted to nerve deafness and the deprivation of sensorial input, but can be caused during seizures or strokes. However, in every case, they appear as 'strange yet familiar' Eleni Ikoniadou 167 experiences of a body as it enters a strange superimposed state of multiple experiences known as the 'doubling of consciousness' (Sacks 20-21). The latter is compared to the feeling of a 'déjà vu,' or dreamy state, but it is actually a body feeling many different states simultaneously, amplifying its own consciousness. In other words, the seemingly abnormal defective body is a body too aware, its capacities expanding beyond temporal and sensorial perception. A hallucination does not trigger seizures it is the seizure, stretching a body towards a hyperstate or virtual state of consciousness. The superimposed, resonating hallucinatory body can no longer be approached as a unity but as a multiplicity of forces and energies that vibrate in the same topological figure. The resonances they produce are unexpected, inconsistent and have unspecified scopes, from an instant to a day or a lifetime. They are largely, but not entirely, beyond the conscious control of a body and may disappear as suddenly as they emerge. They thus point to the capacity of a body to operate as a transducer of rhythmic forces that do not belong to it as essences, or impact on it from outside; rather they are self-referential rhythmic characters in passing. These rhythms are liberated from the body-Figure, i.e. from being dependent or owned by the Figure to become the Figure: a resonating blob of rhythmic forces and self-varying matter of no specific form. In his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze explains that sensation is essentially rhythm, but the kind that is still dependent on the Figure. Yet when sensations are superimposed and form couplings, rhythm-sensations cease to be attached to specific level of the body "in order to make something appear that was irreducible to either of them" (Deleuze 67). This coupling of rhythm-sensations between the different levels of the resonant blob is a scrambler of form consistent with the concept of topology. The topologic tension between perception and hallucination is exposed in certain types of experience (as in the case of audio hallucinations) to allow for an acute conception of one's own body as "an experiment in nature through an auditory prism" (Sacks 86). Rhythmic hallucinations constitute a mode of feeling that baffles ordinary experience. They reveal a body on the edge between lived and non-lived modes of experience that is closer to affect than sensory perception. The affective potential of a body (its power to affect or be affected) leaks into actuality through the emergence of auditory defect. In hallucinating new unheard-of rhythms, a body coincides with its own potential and intensifies it. Consciousness is doubled in the process and amplified, as a body's different modes are simultaneously superimposed. The shock of auditory seizures and hallucinations is the moment of affect passing into actuality. These shocks are indicators of forces beyond organic wholeness 168 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature "that lie outside or below the level of conscious experience" and have a life of their own (Sacks 232). Defect pointing to affect. Before matter is organized in metric time and space, it lives and feels within its own potential energy. The autogenerative rhythms of a body emerge when this turbulent energy coincides with a body's capacity (or power) in the doubling of its consciousness. The topological nature of this doubling, or coupling, means that levels which hitherto seemed distant and unrelated become superimposed. "It is only in that superposition that the unity of the figure can be grasped as such, in one stroke. That one stroke is the virtual image center of the figure" (Massumi 134). For Massumi, the differentiated vagueness of the virtual is best approached topologically, through the infoldings and unfoldings of self-referential transformation, more suitable to imagination or intuition. Intuition is a thinking feeling that does not refer to anything outside it, "the mutual envelopment of thought and sensation as they arrive together" (134). For Michel Serres, intuition is also influenced by topology, the science of nearness and rifts, enabling us to conceptualise a crumpling, multiple and foldable spatiotemporal diversity (Serres 59-60). Far from a mere theory of numbers, topological thinking, according to Serres, is consistent with our crumpled experience of spacetime before we simplify and reduce it to measurement. In certain contemporary psychoanalytic studies, the concept of intuition is shifting from hitherto associations with narcissistic meanings, to a mode of felt thought integrated in coenesthetic experience. Coensesthetic experience (particularly dominant during the first six months of life) is largely visceral, strangely vague and marked by tensions, temperatures, vibrations, rhythms, durations and pitches. During this time, somatic and psychic perceptions are not yet differentiated and perception takes place on the level of sensibility. Intuition is an archaic mode of thought that is nonverbal, nondirected, and in which impressions of form become undifferentiated. It is in this sense an 'amodal mode of experience' during which a body cannot separate between the senses, the intellect, the conscious and the unconscious, express them in language or follow a single line of thought (Piha 37). An intuitive body is a polyrhythmic structure of superimposed strands that occur without a point of reference and "with the suddenness of a revelation" (24). Intuition exposes a body's qualitative transformations in experiencing space, comprised of an immeasurable number of heterogeneous but overlapping and interpenetrating subspaces. Behind the learned schemata, intuition is a rare sensitivity in bodies that can grasp the rhythmic movement of spaces "as sound streams that cannot be described in static form" (Piha 37). In Eleni Ikoniadou 169 intuition a body is thrown to uncertainty; in a non-lexical world of archaic experience that is felt in the interrhythmicity of topologized spacetime. Cellular Vibrations 'Sonocytology' is the study of cellular vibrations that, in the future, could arguably offer a closer understanding of the body and its tendency for disease. Discovered by nanoscientist James Gimzewski, sonocytology reveals that cells produce numerous miniscule vibrations per second. The breakthrough was further enabled by Gimzewski's invention of the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), an ultra-sensitive high-resolution motion detector that uses tactile sensing to detect motion at the molecular scale. When these vibrations were amplified, the state of the cells (presence or lack of movement) was found to be directly linked to their rhythmic properties. Whether living or dead a cell continues to pulsate, although its pitch changes accordingly, due to the tiny molecular motors inside it, moving things around. Using computer software, Gimzewski and his team amplified the cellular rhythms collected by the AFM to create audible sound. The interrhythmicity of the cell is affected by changes in temperature and perhaps also by contact with the needle of the AFM that acts as en extra-sensitive micro record player. Unlike optical microscopes, the AFM touches and scans the surfaces of cells recording their topography; it thus feels the rhythms of cellular vibration as an electrical signal in a liquid environment. As scientists are 'blind' at the nanoscale, the AFM's tiny 'finger' senses oscillations that occur at the membrane of a cell. "On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and approximate interpretations" (Gimzewski & Vesna The Nanomeme syndrome). According to the authors, molecular techno-science is ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality, from a culture based on vision to one of sensing and connectivity. At the molecular level matter conveys incredible complexity, concealed by the apparent simplicity of ecological equilibrium. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers argue that in the case of cellular functioning we encounter a remarkable convergence of biology and physics, through the investigation of 'complex' system at the microscopic level (Prigogine and Stengers 154). Molecular biology, in particular, has the capacity to provide the microscopic basis for the instabilities that occur in dynamic, non-linear physical systems. A living system is a complex machine of chemical transformations, space-time organizations and nonuniformity in the distribution of its biochemical material. In other 170 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature words, "not everything in a living system is alive" (156). This postulation is articulated, at the very least, out of the notion that the energy flow crossing a living system is sometimes at equilibrium and others not. Complexity reveals that both the definition of entities and the interactions between them are in continuous modification. The minute fluctuations and changes at the local levels of a system, are not only responsible for its instability and complexity but, importantly, also guarantee its order and regularity at the macrolevel (206). The bifurcations of matter then point to a continuum between the unstable and stable phases of a system, across the micro and macro levels of order. "Thus we are led to conclude that the same nonlinearities may produce an order out of the chaos of elementary processes and still, under different circumstances, be responsible for the destruction of this same order, eventually producing a new coherence beyond another bifurcation." (206) In his techno-scientific experiments, Gimzewski 'touches' the rhythmic fluctuations of cells revealing that beneath its apparent stability and organization a body is turbulent matter, undergoing intense transformation. The cell goes through a constant infolding, a rhythmic contraction that reveals its inner complexity below, as well as its potential to make multiple connections above. Cellular infolding, according to Deleuze and Guattari, always involves a double articulation between molecular and molar organizations, out of which content (formed matter) and expression (functional structure of matter) emerge, to surpass the form/substance duality (42 - 44). The relation between content and expression (rather than form and substance), exposes the dynamic microscopic instabilities that compose all macroscopic structures, enabling a departure from the model of a whole that predetermines its parts. Content and expression are two variables of stratification, a regenerative and continuous creation of the world from chaos. According to Deleuze and Guattari "chaos is the milieu of all milieus. There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-times" (313). The vibratory cell reveals that there is no given state in a body, only the potential to undergo a passage from one state to another, through the infoldings of rhythm. Probing its rhythmic topography, the scientist is faced with "the unexpected intrinsic structure of reality" at the heart of micro-nature (Prigogine and Stengers 216). Following the discovery of cellular vibration, nanoscientist Pelling and media artist Niemetz created an audio-visual event for the NANO exhibition at LACMA.2 Entitled The Dark Side of the Cell, this is an immersive environment that combines architecture, sculpture, sound and Eleni Ikoniadou 171 video art to compose an unusual concert. Its primary intention is to invite participants to move through the space and experience the spatial variances of indeterminate cellular rhythms, recorded by the AFM.3 For its creators, the discoveries and inventions of bio-technological experimentation open up new questions into the functioning of matter and uncover more mystery rather than provide answers. Conceptual media art, in this instance, may intervene to incite a space of communication between the scientific and the aesthetic in order to push these questions further. Molecular biology, nano-biotechnology, far-from-equilibrium theory and quantum research reveal the impossibility of predicting a system's exact future and the incomplete and uncertain description of nature. For Massumi, such sciences "tread on territory dangerously close to the virtual and the anomalously relational" (229). Yet this is also a limit that sciences refuse to cross in order to remain scientific, in other words, objective. Newness, virtuality and anomaly are conditions that must be kept indeterminate, vague and formless in order to invoke the potential relationality of nature. While the methodological context of scientific experimentation alone may result to predetermined outcomes, a dynamic alliance between the scientific and the aesthetic, as a symbiotic system, could construct a field of contingencies that is closer to a non-given nature. Conclusion According to Deleuze and Guattari, there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum as matter is the same across the machinic assemblage (45). Thus a body is not defined by its form, function or substance, but rather by its potential to enter in relations with other bodies. At the molar level, a body is organized to acquire a specificity, that is, to be considered as organic, or technological, as a natural or artificial whole. For Massumi the molar level is an effect: the apparent settling of movement at the macroscale and a relative concreteness that does not reveal anything about the 'swarming micromovements of matter" (203). Beneath this molar stability, we have attempted to unfold the rhythmic spreading of matter across the different layers of a body and between heterogeneous bodies. Thinking matter topologically pushes the concept of nature beyond unity and totality, away from similarity and identity, in favor of degrees of development, speeds and differential relations. Following a continuum of rhythmic intensities between nature and culture, we engaged with rhythmic topology at the aesthetic level of blob tectonics, on the edge between architecture and art, between theory and 172 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature practice. At this instance, external environment and internal body are liquefied topologically, incorporating one another in their digital engineering. The blob modifies sensory perception to a trans-sensory experience of space; a sea of vibrating matter out of which shapes are reorganized continuously and in which bodies float, instead of walking. The architecture of space, in this paper, moves beyond the notion of an exceptional cultural moment of design imposed on nature, to become a topological archive in which no part is ever finitely completed or stabilized. The blob challenges the idea of rigid spaces in order to suggest new connectivities between body, space, technology and environment, from the standpoint of rhythmic topology. In architecture, topological formations allow for inventions and interventions that, for us, point to a redefinition of architecture itself: as spatiotemporal affectivity, a mode of feeling the rhythms of space rather than perceiving the built environment. On a neurophysical level, autogenerated body rhythms point to a human body's tendency toward a dehumanized agency. Rhythmic hallucinations stretch a body's perception onto-topologically, towards those layers that assemble and infold below the senses, allowing us to rethink how a body 'hears' without ears. Auditory hallucinations unravel a body as the machinic assemblage of technological, social, sonic, visual, conscious, defective, unconscious components, as these are reconfigured in the dynamism of their potential relations. Felix Guattari explains that the assemblage does not imply any notion of bond between the components, but rather involves possible fields of both virtual and constituted elements (35). The modulatory interaction of the somatosenses and their dynamic relationship with brain, nervous system, auditory perception and non-conscious audibility, generate assemblages beyond the hierarchies of organism. In such assemblages a body discovers novel modes of feeling that are not necessarily tied to a specific mode of perception. This is not a perfectly balanced compost of elements but a heterogeneous assemblage of components "too big to fit the contours of an individual human body" (Massumi A Shock to Thought xxix). Massumi, following Deleuze and Guattari's notion of impersonal expressive agency, explains that expression is a self-movement of potential that requires allying with forces of systematic deformation. The continuing of expression across experiences always involves non-human formations, not only of components outside the human body but also within it. Viscerality, intuition, proprioception, kinesthesia, coenesthesia, synaesthesia are few of the many ways in which a body feels immediately before it acts and before it perceives itself feeling.4 Eleni Ikoniadou 173 As matter is re-engineered by techno-science, reality changes to allow for the emergence of new molecular intensities that were not there before. Yet this is not the result, or effect, of nature's domination and construction by new technoscientific discourse, but rather an event that unravels an already artificial nature. The AFM's silicon finger forms a rhizomatic connection with the vibrational membrane of a cell and a line of flight crosses over to the milieu of the musical concert. The rhythmic fluctuations located between milieus (technological, biological, aesthetic) form a map that fosters these heterogeneous connections. The connections between the different layers of the assemblage are contingent, not seamless or logical, traversed by a cellular energy that is not simply one of vitality or exclusive to the living. As its movement pushes from below and its speed increases, this energy assembles a multilayered body that is not the sum of its parts, but a swarm of 'singing' cells, atomic forces, chemical elements, catalytic actions, synthetic mutations, the continual variations of matter. According to Luciana Parisi, "a body is composed and decomposed by the activity of molecules and particles, forces and energies. It is not simply biological or cultural. A body is defined by metastable relations between microcellular and multicellular bodies, the bodies of animals and humans, the bodies of society and technological bodies merging and unleashing new mutating compositions" (27). Rather than rely on an understanding of nature versus culture and on the idea that artificial environments are at best supplements of the real, rhythmic topology proposes a middle way of conceiving their connectivities. Beyond the phenomenology of lived experience, bodies are rhythmically composed by a constant oscillation and exchange between actual and virtual elements. The in-between space of rhythm registers the ceaseless potential of a body to become: a vibrational circuit without organs, with no origin or end. Notes 1 "An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either)" (Deleuze and Guattari 141, emphasis in the original). 2 The NANO exhibit was a collaboration between LACMALab and a UCLA team of nanoscience, media arts, and humanities experts, lead by Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna in 2004. Nanoculture, Implications of the New Technoscience. (UK: Intellect Books, 2004) is a collection of essays, edited by Katherine Hayles, that complements the exhibit as well as explore the relationship between 174 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature nanotechnology and science fiction, cultural production and technoscience. For more information see http://nano.arts.ucla.edu/ 3 For more details on the project see http://www.darksideofcell.info/about.html 4 Brian Massumi understands a body's capacity to affect and be affected through interoception (viscerality, proprioception, kinesthesia), a mode of perceptions and exchanges between interoseptive and the five 'exteroceptive' senses, before the brain processes their excitations (see Parables for the Virtual 35 and 60). Michel Serres has also attempted to conceptualise internal senses in relation to 'body image', the processes below consciousness, and a topological understanding of spacetime. Serres refers to coenesthetic experience in his Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time with Bruno Latour, in his discussion of poetry, art and literature in relation to noise theory (98). Additionally, Serres discusses the folding-over of consciousness, the contact of the self with itself, in relation to kinesthesia in Five Senses. (London, New York: Continuum, 2006), 20. Works Cited DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London & New York: Continuum, 2004). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London & New York: Continuum, 2002). Finer, Jem. "Score for a Hole in the Ground." Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007). Gimzewski, Jim, and Victoria Vesna. "The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of Fact & Fiction in the Construction of a New Science." http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/publications/publications/0203/JV_nano/JV_nan o_artF5VG.htm, last accessed April 08, 2008. Goodman, Steve. "Sonic Anarchitecture." Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007). Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (USA: Indiana University Press, 1995). Lynn, Greg. Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays (Belgium: La Lettre Volée, 1998). Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (USA: Duke University Press, 2002). —. "Introduction: Like a thought." A Shock to Though: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002), xiii-xxxix. Eleni Ikoniadou 175 Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire (London & New York, Continuum, 2004). Piha, Heikki. "Intuition: A Bridge to the Coenesthetic World of Experience." Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 53:1 (March 2005): 23-49. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order out of Chaos (London: Flamingo, 1985). Sacks. Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (London: Picador, 2007). Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1995). Spinoza, Benedictus. Ethics (New York: Hafner, 1949). GUATTARI'S TRIPLEX DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY ERICK HEROUX Let us begin at the end, to see where we will have been going, and then retrace our steps to see how we got there, or rather here, with the last words of Félix Guattari in his final essay: Ecological disasters, famine, unemployment, the escalation of racism and xenophobia, haunt like so many threats . . . . [But humanity] passively contributes to the pollution of water and the air, to the destruction of forests, to the disturbance of climates, to the disappearance of a multitude of living species, to the impoverishment of the genetic capital of the biosphere . . . to the suffocation of its cities, and to the progressive abandonment of cultural values and moral references in the areas of human solidarity and fraternity . . . . Most older methods of communication, reflection and dialogue have dissolved in favor of an individualism and a solitude that are often synonymous with anxiety and neurosis. It is for this reason that I advocate—under the aegis of a new conjunction of environmental ecology, social ecology, and mental ecology—the invention of new collective assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the school, the neighborhood, etc. ("Remaking Social Practices" in The Guattari Reader 262-63) In sum, these are the three ecologies: nature, society, and psyche. Their interactive interdependence forms a triplex discourse and material effects, in sickness and in health. Also, here Guattari firmly turns to face toward the future, toward creative change, and toward new forms of solidarity. By now this is a common attitude, if still wistfully emerging and vaguely articulated, about what needs to be done. So why Guattari now? What does he offer as prospective tools for the unprecedented challenges of the twenty-first century? A few weeks after submitting this testament for publication, Guattari suddenly died in 1992 about three years before the death of his more famous colleague, Deleuze, in 1995. Then and now, he is widely assumed Erick Heroux 177 to be a sort of junior partner in their collaboration on several books. A side effect of this essay will subvert that assumption by showing that Guattari was not only a formidably productive theorist in his own work, and also by noticing that much of the supposedly Deleuzian lexicon appeared earlier in Guattari's publications. Most commentary today erroneously attributes to someone named "Deleuze" these terms, "words that Guattari invents" as Deleuze himself said (On the Line 88) and even more generously that there "is not one of these ideas that which did not come from Félix (black hole, micro-politics, deterritorialization, abstract machines, etc.)" (Dialogues II 19). Yes, Guattari's earlier solo articles2 were replete with terms such as: deterritorialization, overcoding, machinic assemblages, concrete and abstract desiring machines, molecular versus molar, transversality, diagrammatic, non-signifying semiosis, material fluxes, assemblages of enunciation, plane of consistency, the refrain, and schizoanalysis. In sum, this amounts to most of what generally gets repeated as "Deleuzian" concepts by commentators. It is telling, also, that during interviews with the two theorists, Deleuze often defers to Guattari, who then lets forth a volley of speech that is rapid, critical, fertile, uncompromising, sprinkled with neologisms and flights of theory that insist on multiplying the social potentials of desire.1 This is a unique voice that we recognize from somewhere, déjà vu. Where? Yes, in those notorious two volumes of L'Anti-Œdipe and Mille plateaux. Moreover, the main evidence of Guattari's major contribution in collaborating with Deleuze is in his recently published notebooks and working drafts in The Anti-Oedipus Papers, which is described by an editorial blurb as revealing Guattari "as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded 'conceptor,' arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today" (Guattari 2006). Likewise, Gary Genosko's booklength study gives significant evidence of Guattari's authorship.3 While Deleuze was indeed philosophically more erudite and stylistically more "poetic" than Guattari, nevertheless, the books that most of us speak of as Deleuzian theory would not be possible without Guattari's conceptual and radical contributions. Antonio Negri is a prominent exemplar of a theorist said to have been influenced by Deleuze, yet it was with Guattari that he cowrote Les nouveaux espaces de liberté (in the English edition, Communists Like Us). Therefore, while I have been slow to appreciate Guattari myself, resisting his posthumanist machinic terminology and impatient abstractions as too bristly, I have gradually come to appreciate his work as offering us extensive potentials; and for other reasons, not the least of which is that any person must be extraordinary who survived a training analysis with Lacan, collaborated 178 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology with Negri and with Deleuze, and then defined our era of late capitalist globalization in terms of its ecological degradation a full decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was not a junior partner, but rather an inspirational cowriter and a veritable fountain of new ways to do both theory and praxis. His fairly successful transformation of a 100-bed psychiatric hospital over several decades is an under appreciated example of that praxis.4 Meanwhile, here my primary aim is to provide a critique of Guattari's explicit turn toward ecology vis-à-vis the theoretical biology of Bateson, Maturana, Varela and of "complexity science" in general, and thence his enlargement of ecology, an ecology of the postindustrial mass-mediated globe by way of a political economy and psychology, resulting in something quite different for theory. We have already suggested where he winds up. The main texts in my discussion will be Guattari's booklet, The Three Ecologies, but also his passages on this topic in a later book, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm and scattered elsewhere in his occasional writings. Hence, now that we have reviewed "why Guattari?", the next question about the terms in my title should be: "What was ecology?" Ecology sans Guattari Ecology, as every school child knows, is an empirical study of the relationships between organisms and also between organisms and their physical environment. What fewer people know is that today these relationships are usually measured (often statistically) in terms of energy exchanges, flows, transformations throughout a given set of organisms and nonorganic environs. An original view within ecology defined these relationships in terms of their systemic effects much like the use of feedback and homeostasis in cybernetics and general systems theory. Ecologists then thought that ecosystems seek stability, and that biodiversity itself is a key support of this stability. While the notion of an open system and/or interlocking ecosystems remains one of the current models, it has been challenged from within the field by a younger group of ecologists who point out some of the limitations of this view and the empirical exceptions that the systems view ignores.5 Today, ecologists place more emphasis on dynamic (in)stability that is not essentially locked to biodiversity in a direct way. Whatever the future fate of the systems view, the field of ecology is like every science—if not riven by then constituted by internal debates and multiple positions which are only within the field because they address Erick Heroux 179 issues made possible by the even deeper underlying assumptions and selected sets of data that allow these assertions to make sense, a kind of "positive unconscious" as Foucault called it, the unspoken rules which form a particular scientific discursivity (xi). In other words, the field of ecology nevertheless continues to focus on an interactive overview, showing the interdependence of manifold life-forms where one's waste becomes another's food across complex networks often called food webs, and where a change in the population of one species will have secondary and tertiary effects on the population of other interconnected species, often in a nonlinear way. The earth's biosphere itself continues to reproduce the physical conditions of possibility for living organisms, a planet open to the vast input of external energy, with life driven ultimately by the cyclical dose of solar energy which then gets converted and passed along and recycled throughout the uncounted inorganic and organic subsystems at scales that are both microscopic and macroscopic. These levels are so vast and complex that ecology itself is now carved up into numerous subspecialties, each of which may take one's entire career to master, with some specializations requiring, i.e., more expertise with chemistry but others with population genetics while others with animal behavior but others with oceanography and so forth. Ecology is charged with the responsibility to explain how this all works, and then perhaps to predict when the components that sustain the conditions of life might no longer work. This focus on relationships and interdependent flows rather than on isolated organisms is a kind of (neo)holistic approach, though without committing itself to any mystical holism, and as such ecology moved slightly away from the older tendency of biology to analyze into smaller components and explain by reduction, the tradition that led toward impressive discoveries in genetics and molecular biology. A subtle tension within the biological sciences persists today between ecologists and the biologists of the latter sort, however this should not be exaggerated or taken to mean that they commonly disagree about the means and ends of science. Both remain committed to a wide range of shared traditions and, again, merely internal debates. A powerful example of this is the theory of evolution by natural selection, which while given over to different combinations of emphasis on relatively specific aspects, continues to be a shared knowledge that structures the whole field, so that the explanation provided by "adaptation" gets applied nearly everywhere, only now with many added qualifications and supplements by all sides. Much more could be said, but this is the best short description of contemporary ecology-as-a-science that I can muster here. In sum, I will 180 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology emphasize that the discipline is as empirical as the other branches of science, with the attendant use of quantification, especially statistics; that it also commonly employs computer simulations to model predictable future outcomes, and that it continues to develop competing models and to gather new data for analysis. Guattari did not discuss this field in detail, so therefore he has never been cited by ecologists. Bateson & Theoretical Ecology Now would seem to be the moment, therefore, to say that this is too bad for the field of ecology today. They may likely find themselves arriving at some version of a Deleuzoguattarian philosophy later this century if they continue to study the interconnections and flows outward and inward. Already a new subfield is slowly emerging circa 2008 called "biosemiotics" which has begun to add a semiology of information, meaning, and signification to the interdisciplinary study of ecology.6 The biosemioticians, alas, have not yet discovered Guattari, which discovery might save them a few years of puzzling through the reinvention of nonor a-signifying semiosis and/or diagrammaticism, and assemblages of enunciation from Guattari's toolbox that would seem useful at this stage. Yet surely, Guattari's aim was not to contribute to the study of natural relationships per se, but rather to the study of the human organism using a specific subset of bio-systems theories that were in themselves already more philosophically inclined than the discipline of ecology described above would seem to apprehend within its unspoken rules. He often cites and alludes to two sources: Gregory Bateson and the more recent cognitive biology of Maturana and Varela (Autopoiesis and Cognition 1980), which extends and complicates the seminal work of Bateson with their theory of "autopoesis" or the self-organizing, self-producing capacity of living systems such as a simple cell when it obtains "operational closure" but structural openness. From the innovative and transdisciplinary works of Bateson, Guattari adopted the cybernetic view that living systems enact a necessary unity of life-forms and mind, beyond or beneath any dualist division of reality, and that mind is manifested at even the simplest levels of life and all the way up to the interactivity of complex ecosystems. Mind here is not consciousness, but a form of embodied cognition-in-acting by life forms doing things with "information" or differences. That is, elementary mentality does not arrive suddenly after the brain, but rather whenever an organized pattern emerges that begins to make distinctions, e.g., between food and waste, light and dark, warm and cold, me and not-me, and so Erick Heroux 181 forth and begins to use such distinctions as maintenance or systemic feedback, developing increasingly complex levels of logical types of information, such as information-about-information is of a logically higher category. When this becomes an organic process rather than static logical types, the process depends upon and produces "orders of recursiveness" (Mind and Nature 222). I might go so far as to compress Bateson's much more colorful and elegant observations as to state that once an organic system obtains orders of recursiveness, then it has the capacity to "learn," a behavior generally attributed to mind rather than matter. Mind coevolves into brain, and does not suddenly appear after that organ magically appears on the scene. Mind is a kind of body without organs in Deleuzoguattarian terms, yet it is produced interactively by organs without a body at the same time. Furthermore, looking at the larger interactive network between organisms, once two or more of these recursive systems begin to process differences (a.k.a, information) interactively in strategic patterns of cooperation/competition, then we are at the learning process of coadaption, which Bateson also called co-evolution (51). Bateson is sometimes hastily misread as suggesting that biology shows us a Mind guiding Nature, but this is a very poor reading since Bateson explicitly warns against such transcendence repeatedly. The mind/nature or nature/mind that he did try to describe is entirely immanent, and it is only coextensive with the material systemic process that has, Guattari would say, produced it, and Bateson would add, while simultaneously being produced by it. Already of interest here is that Bateson does not write of a Subject or intentionality, but rather of complex systems that treat as information only a "difference that makes a difference" for that system, a pragmatic process (250). One of his most philosophically passionate summings up is in an essay titled "Form, Substance, and Difference" where a further step is made from the way mind is dependent upon the larger contexts, the interconnecting patterns, and that this complex unit (or assemblage) of the "organism-and-its environment" is actually what survives in natural selection. Ultimately, Bateson argues that mind is not something located inside an isolated entity, but rather "immanent in the large biological system—the ecosystem" ("Form, Substance, and Difference" 454). But because this interdependent system has co-evolved, because mind in this sense has been selected, this implies an obligation on our part to attend to the survival of the whole context, not the isolated individual or species. A vital consequence of this is summed up in Bateson's paramount conclusion that has not yet been fully taken on board: 182 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology The identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical. (460) The traditional vulgar-darwinist view of competing individuals and the survival of the most successfully adapted species in an indifferent environment is an enormous error, according to Bateson, a view that actually assists in the ongoing suicidal destruction of our environment. Bateson's solution is to think more comprehensively about the nature of nature, beyond identity and reification, so as to reconnect to the sources of one's own mind in the larger material contexts of interlocking systems in nature. Mind is on the outside, so to speak, if also the inside/outside binary is already placed under erasure to the degree that the inside (i.e., your mind) is inseparable from the outside, while the outside always already is comprised of multiple layers of insides. I might rephrase this after Guattari as the becoming-mind of the complex networks of bodies-and-theirenvironment, of systems inside of systems inside of systems all the way down as far as we can go to the molecular and even the subatomic, and all the way back up to the planetary and the cosmos. While each system is distinct, producing its own properties, there is no possible cut along the continuum of interactive mutuality, or as the theoretical biologist Varela puts it in his Buddhist terms: "codependent arising" (Embodied Mind 110). Guattari assimilated and adapted much of Bateson into his already developing theory of "desiring machines" and "machinic assemblages" (agencement), which can most readily be defined as a kind of Batesonian system. From Bateson, he will recognize the themes of immanence, process, the co-dependence of mind/nature as enacted in the connecting patterns of systems, the irrelevant lateness of a conscious subject or an isolated cogito, the way that meaning is only a pragmatic activity for a particular system of differences, and finally Bateson's urgent ethical conclusion of a what was so far an objective description. At this point, we can also more easily find the connections between those "three ecologies" of mind, society, and natural environment already insisted upon in many of Bateson's essays. Ecologies avec Guattari Now that we have the gist of this alternative theoretical biology, it should be both more obvious and more resonant that the lead epigraph for Guattari's booklet The Three Ecologies is from Bateson: "There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds." The bridge (though not the identity) between a science and a politics, between Erick Heroux 183 epistemology and ethics, between the established ecology and the Guattarian ecology begins with Bateson's insight. While science continually delimits its statements for value-neutrality in the traditional project to preserve its objectivity from subjective distortions, this approach proves to be too simplistic and inadequate as a human ecology—both for epistemology and for ethics. Guattari will thus take ecological theory through Bateson and Varela and beyond into a social praxis that he also called an "ethico-aesthetic paradigm" (the subtitle of his book, Chaosmosis). Social practices, personal practices, and environmental practices are indeed mutually influencing, but more to the urgent task at hand, Guattari repeatedly insists in several books that scientific knowledge is not the end point, but only the beginning to assist in the creative activity of making new ways of life, a social cultivation of new singularities linked to new solidarities with open, multiple, transversal connectors. Ecological practice needs empirical sources of knowledge about the natural world, but then this factual knowledge is not the fundamental ground of all human values, and must enter the complex social production of new values, becoming part of the larger ecology of ideas and the emerging autopoetic "assemblies of enunciation" as they move across the social formation. This is Guattari's gambit as the way around our current impasse, a world where we already have far more ecological knowledge than we do ecological practices, which are often blocked at the level of national politics and suppressed whenever they conflict with the profitable interests of corporations. But piecemeal reforms go nowhere near far enough to solve the planet's problems; and as soon as we begin to tamper with one specific problem, sooner or later we find that it is connected to other problems in other realms, other ecologies, which are then connected to other problems in turn, endlessly and we find that everything is connected to everything. A viable alternative to this false dilemma between the unsustainable status quo and ineffective technical reforms carried out by authorities would seem to be quite Guattarian: to set loose a "molecular revolution" of micropolitical practices that make new transversal subjectivities, assemblages, autovalorizing machines of enunciation, deand re- territorializations that are flexible, process oriented, and open to the multiple agencies involved, whether prepersonal, personal, or metapersonal. In Chaosmosis, he occasionally takes to the soapbox to deliver a rousing manifesto: With the fading antagonisms of the Cold War, we enter a period when serious threats, posed by our productivist society to the human species, appear more distinctly. Our survival on this planet is not only threatened by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social 184 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology solidarity and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be reinvented. The refoundation of politics will have to pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three ecologies—the environment, the socius and the psyche. We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society. We cannot conceive of international discipline in this domain without solving the problem of hunger and hyperinflation in the Third World. We cannot conceive of a collective recomposition of the socius, correlative to a resingularisation of subjectivity, without a new way of conceiving political and economic democracies that respect cultural differences—without multiple molecular revolutions. We cannot hope for an amelioration in the living conditions of the human species without a considerable effort to improve the feminine condition. The entire division of labor, its modes of valorization and finalities need to be rethought. Production for the sake of production—the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies—leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion. (20-21) I have quoted this passage at length because it is a rare moment in Guattari's texts when he is willing to concretely list the particular problems, suggest both their diversity and pervasiveness, and also show the holistic entanglement we are caught up in, while simultaneously point to the way forward, the "new art of living in society." Forming scientific commissions of ecologists to study the problem is very far from adequate, though of course a small step toward progress. He goes on to explain the radical break since his ecology "must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue ..." (Three Ecologies 52). A ringing echo can be heard of Marx's famous "Theses on Feuerbach," the point is change, not interpretation; creation not reiteration; experimentation not repetition. But change how and according to whom? Guattari's theory and praxis never stopped answering this: At every level, high and low, inside and out, from each according to their desire to each according to their needs. Rather than Marx's gambit for centralization and economic development, Guattari aims for a decentered, heterogenic, polyphonic transversality at all levels across the three ecologies. We now know that most people desire to create a healthier psyche, society, and environment. But they feel trapped. Yet we also know that certain conditions have led to rapid and Erick Heroux 185 dramatic change from below, just like chaotic flows in thermodynamics will unpredictably bifurcate and generate a new organized pattern, as for instance happened around the world in 1989 when masses of people poured into the streets to suddenly end the Soviet Union. Change is a process of flow from below, from each pre-individual subconscious fragment, each person, each family, locale, group, classroom, tribe, audience, and so forth all the way through international levels, with "transversal" lines crisscrossing each in multiple networks. In the fifteen or so years since this long quotation was published, we have indeed witnessed the massive spread of awareness about the global warming it mentioned, something that took about thirty years but only hundreds of individuals to communicate to the world. Today as a consequence, we witness an exploding emergence of multiple responses, groups, solutions, technologies, dreams, critiques, soul-searching, city planning, international accords, actions moving in all directions, coming from above and below in various transversal combinations. If this process could be encouraged rather than constrained (which is also happening at the same time), then another molecular revolution vis-à-vis global climate change will have happened, resulting also in new subjectivities, new agencies, new solidarities. Other current examples of how these three ecologies can be reconnected in new "machinic assemblages" are emerging in many zones. The important work of Vandana Shiva converges with Guattari's recommendations, though starting from a very different education and location. Shiva is a particle physicist, ecologist, and feminist active in India, and she has successfully helped to create new forms of solidarity among village women and farmers to avoid the devastation of their communities wrought by transnational agribusiness, genetically modified seed, the biopiracy of privatizing genetic heritage, and neoliberal economics. While speaking, writing, and organizing for environmental justice, Shiva continues to compose uncounted book after book about the interconnections between biodiversity and "bio-democracy" versus "bioimperialism" and monoculture—of both the agricultural and cultural sort.6 Her theory and practice connects ideas and materials, economics and ecology, global and local, individuals and communities, scientific knowledge and ethics, forming new assemblages of enunciation that link up democratic desires and produce new social practices. Guattari imagined a world of a billion Vandana Shivas, each a unique singularity linking up new solidarities. How to cultivate the conditions for such a renewing society is the main theme throughout Guattari's theoretical work. He does not merely remind 186 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology us that we have a serious problem and that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, like all too many writers have done. Instead he delves into the microlevel sources of change and the institutional, psychic, and ideological blockages that prevent change. Readers of this essay collection know that he moved through and beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis and in postmarxist circles for much of his career. During the last phase of his career, these too were enfolded and extrapolated into an increasingly layered theory coming out of the theoretical biology previously introduced. The complexity of Guattari's theoretical work is a consequence of his dialogue with complexity science, and at times this dialogue was literal, as in the case of a formal discussion with leading scientists, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers.8 Just as he had already been doing with Lacanism, Marxism, and semiotics, Guattari critically worked through and against complexity science, theorizing what he variously called ecosophy and chaosmosis. Prigogine is one of several founders of the new science of complexity, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on thermodynamic flows, showing the emergence of order in physical states far from equilibrium. Guattari often alludes to Prigogine and his cowriter, Isabelle Stengers. An essential book by them, one of the most important for both its philosophy of science and its contribution to a new science, is Order Out of Chaos (1984). This explains the "new science of complexity" in detail for a general reader, or at least in its thermodynamics aspect. The book makes a surprising number of enormous claims for the historical shift to a different science as it argues for the irreversibility of time, the uncertainty of prediction, a new perspective on entropy, the emergence of order from chaotic fluctuations, the priority of becoming over being, active matter, etc. Guattari reappropriated this for his psycho-socio theories, especially the emphasis on how non-equilibrium dynamic systems in chaotic flux form new self-organizing processes. He used this to correct the older cybernetic systems view he had learned from Bateson, a view which tended to emphasize a more static equilibrium or homeostasis. One can immediately guess that his dislike of Freud's deep reliance on biological homeostasis, for instance in the theory of a death drive, is paralleled in all such conservative tropes that then get reapplied as ideological containment at the social level. Now the tables were turned, and the new science of complexity was showing that while stasis is ultimately entropy, that chaos leads to the emergence of self-organization, that process and becoming are more fundamental in nature than being. Does all this borrowing from natural science make Guattari a neomaterialist who would return psychology and sociology to their evolutionary and physical ground? Is he a kind of crypto-sociobiologist in Erick Heroux 187 the E. O. Wilson camp, providing deeper foundations for social theory? A closer reading will show that the answer is no. Just as Lacan pried psychoanalysis away from biology by bringing in linguistics, the gaze, the imaginary, the symbolic structure, etc., so too did Guattari for ecology in his own way.9 The hybrid complexity of his theory also owes to his frequent citations of Bakhtin's literary theory and Hjelmslev's linguistics, which would have to be the topic of another essay. The upshot for now is to see three ontological modifications that preclude any easy reduction of one domain to another. First, his three ecologies are not simply the same, nor in a direct causal chain. Each ecology has its own distinct emergent properties, while other features do traverse the three. I will come back to this in a bit more detail below. There is left then no reduction of one to the other, as was the error of Social Darwinism for instance. Second, which "nature" are we talking about? For Guattari, the nature of nature is endlessly innovative, productive, dynamic, chaosmic, heterogenic, autopoetic, becoming. This does not preclude a neo-materialist psychology (Nietzsche is a case in point here), but it certainly complicates the traditional attempt to nail down human normality on its physical substrate, since in this case it would be hard to locate the norm. Third, the environment is selectively shaped by each organism differently; such that different species interact with a different "world" in a very materialist way, a rather elaborate point explained by Maturana and Varela (1980). This too should be clarified once we look next at Guattari's three ecologies a bit more closely. The three domains are interactive yet each operates on its own unique principles. They also parallel the three horizons found in a quite common philosophical tradition (in phenomenology, existentialism and gestalt psychology) that situated our experience of phenomena within three distinct contexts, moving outward in concentric circles: self (eigenwelt), society (mitwelt), and environment (umwelt) also translated commonly as "world". These are not objective universals, but rather situations that structure conscious experience of an inner world, a social world of being with others, and the natural world as it appears from one's position. Let us see how those three phenomenological horizons are remodeled in Guattari's version of a tripartite ecology, since he rejects phenomenology as a method (37). Still, he did retain some elements of that phenomenology or at least existentialism, when he notes a few pages later that the three ecologies do have in common that they are experienced as a "for-itself [pour-soi]" and not as a closed "in-itself [en-soi]" (53). Despite this common feature, each ecological domain also has a separate principle of 188 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology its own, and there may even be "antinomies between the ecosophical levels" (54). First, for the psyche, the principle is that it faces the world and selects the significant environmental factors through "a pre-objectal and prepersonal logic that Freud has described as being a 'primary process'" (54). I believe that Guattari had in mind his previous work on "partial objects" and "partial enunciators" that are closely related to transitional objects (between self and other, neither/nor but both/and) in psychoanalysis and the objet petit a in Lacan. But Guattari is now re-articulating this already subtle psychological point with the cognitive biology of Varela and Maturana, who argue that every organism "brings forth a world" with its own unique set of senses and interactions with particular environmental signals, energies, meanings, while it ignores or cannot perceive some other environmental signals that are the "world" for a different type of organism. One way to see the simultaneous links and separations between the psyche and its environment is through this version of a partial object somewhere in the middle between subject and object, both/and yet neither/nor. The organism brings forth its own objects, selected from the buzzing chaos as a difference that makes a difference. Thus these objects are partly subjective, and specific only to that particular umwelt. Second, the ecological principle specific to the social domain has to do of course not just with objects but rather other subjects, always already in relationships, from parents and family to larger and larger social groups out to the mysterious entity called society that seems to demand things from us and to both meet and frustrate desire. The ecology of society is informed by these entangled emotional and libidinal investments, yet also including "pragmatic cathexis" (60), or the practical internalization of social norms and habits. As this psychoanalytic description suggests, an interlocking overlap with the previous psychic ecology is everywhere apparent in Guattari's description of the social domain. He further divides the socius into two basic types of relational identification. To simplify, I might serviceably rephrase these as bad (unconsciously) versus good (autopoetically), if only we understand that Guattari does not take seriously any such binary oppositions, and that throughout his work there are no guarantees that any political ontology is inherently always "good". Readers of Deleuze and Guattari together inevitably find this caveat, that is, if they make it to the end of each chapter: deterritorialization is not always the right thing at the right time, and neither is reterritorialization always wrong; "smooth spaces" are not necessarily liberatory; lines of flight can be a danger to self and others; the "rhizome" is both "good and bad"; the "body without organs" can be an "overdose" or also "fascist" Erick Heroux 189 depending on the situation (Deleuze, On the Line 108). The same deconstructive seeing through logocentrism pertains to Guattari's struggle to articulate useful tactics that nevertheless provide no eternal guarantee for every situation. The section on social ecology then offers a longer discussion about global social problems: the imposition of a postindustrial selfhood onto undeveloped countries in monstrously awkward social formations; the failure of mass media to assist in positive social change, instead feeding the degradation of mind, society, and environment; the alternative potential for a "post-media age" that would allow everyone to produce communications, fostering "a multitude of subject-groups capable of directing [the media's] resingularization" (61); and the complex recomposition of the working classes as if they were middle-class ["embourgeoiser"] given the advent of a new mode of production in information economies (63); coupled with the off-shoring of factory line Fordist production, intersecting with an international division of labor; the dangerous probability of a bifurcation and emergence of a "fascism of the Ayatollahs" and similar reactionary capturing of social groups through fantasies of the Law, the Father, the Leader. These topics are more familiar to readers of Hardt and Negri today, but I am reminded that the date of this booklet was 1989. In winding down his global ecology, Guattari warns again that his theoretical models are not guarantees: "It must be stressed that [my] promotion of existential values and the values of desire will not present itself as a fully-fledged global alternative" (66). Something else will be at least as crucial, the "long-term shifts" in value systems that undergird sociocultural systems. Yet these too are long wave results of thousands of smaller value-systems "percolating" up over the years. The bifurcation and emergence, formerly known as the revolution, always occurred when such microrevolutions could coalesce into "new poles of valorization" (66). Now that we have seen the more distinct principles of both the mental and social domains, finally we arrive at the third, but the specific principle of environmental ecology tellingly gets the least space in his text, and it gets short shrift. In a book dedicated to ecologies, this is oddly inexplicable and the principle here does not seem to follow from his reading of Bateson and Varela, with the vital exception that he does take up that point about preserving the unit of "organism-and-its-environment" discussed above. This section does, however, seem to resemble more so his engagement with Prigogine's chaos science of unpredictability, irreversibility, and the process of dynamic disequilibrium. The natural principle is that anything can happen and probably will—"the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions" (66). Again there are no 190 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology guarantees. The upshot for human ecology in this passage could be summed up as restoration ecology and creative environmental engineering both. Since our technologies have now seriously interfered with and endangered so many ecosystems, we find ourselves thrown into a race to then use technology to manage, repair, improve our environment in order to preserve the human habitat. This is asserted briefly as a matter of fact over which it is by now too late to argue, as we are in the midst of one of the greatest mass species extinctions ever recorded in addition to global climate chaos, something the media has been shy to discuss. Scientists announced in January 2008 that we have indeed passed into a new geological era that they named the "Anthropocene Epoch."10 The new man-made epoch will be measurably visible to future geologists, a segmentation layer has already been laid down between this new epoch and the old, departing from the recent 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch, or in other words all of written history and then some. Now we begin to move into the interesting times where natural history and human history have become so interwoven that geological analysis cannot ultimately separate them. This is what I mean by being thrown into an inextricably technological ecology. Since complex systems under bifurcation are irreversible, as shown by the work of Prigogine, there is no going back. Guattari pushes us ahead, urgently. Guattari attempts to articulate the three in relationship to each other inseparably and yet also as autonomous realms given over to their unique modes, never allowing one to dominate and endanger the others. Thinking through this sort of both/and approach, Guattari advises us to "learn to think 'transversally'" (Three Ecologies 43) and to emphasize an "eco-logic" of creative process, relational systems, and experimental praxis rather than reductionist analysis. Nevertheless, the three domains are equally distressed today, and not by coincidence. Especially after 1989, what he had long before been calling "Integrated World Capitalism" increasingly dominates and endangers all three domains of psyche, society, and natural environment. To that extent, his ecosophy defends these "three ecologies" against an unsustainable system of exploitation. Articulating their needs and interests together will not be a return to Marxist totalization with its fundamental categories of the infrastructure-ideology model. Instead, for Guattari, as with virtually all of the poststructuralist postmarxists, we are beginning to create new "ecosophical assemblages of enunciation" that will redirect us away from the unhealthy "dead-end" of capitalism (53). The only escape is to encourage a praxis that embraces the three domains yet frees them to mutate and evolve simultaneously and heterogeneously (68): Erick Heroux • • • 191 A nascent subjectivity A constantly mutating socius A natural environment in the process of being reinvented Guattari concludes that the "reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in one particular domain encourages conquests in other domains--the catalyst for a gradual reforging and renewal of humanity's confidence in itself starting at the most miniscule level" (69). For a long time we were taught to see humanity at war with nature; and individuals competing against each other for scarce socio-economic rewards; and the psyche as eternally caught in discontented tension between the opposing pressures of the superego and the instincts. This new ecology breaks with all three traditional lessons of inexorable conflict by highlighting the forgotten lessons: the ways in which the stimulation of creative production in one domain often enough does support the increased vitality of the other domains. A diseased psyche destroys its own environment and thus itself, but a healthy psyche cultivates and renews its own environment, obtaining as gifts the further productivity of the natural world. Societies of open cooperation multiply the benefits for individuals in tertiary effects beyond calculation. Guattari's ecosophy argues for a theory and praxis that cultivates both mutual interdependence and heterogeneous creativity at each level simultaneously: "Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different. The same is true for the resingularization of schools, town councils, urban planning, etc." (69). Perhaps it does not go without saying that I have had to condense and simplify Guattari's more extended and complex points. His texts are interesting in their sudden shifts from abstract neologisms to the more homely examples. While he did not consider himself to be a writer, and in fact confessed that he had no patience for writing, still his books and essays are deliberately constructed to offer a new vision sincerely held and seriously thought through. His style has been dismissed frequently by the usual impatient reader. Likewise, his ecosophy has yet to be discussed in any of the major anthologies of Ecocriticism, Green Studies readers, and such that I have come across--and I collect them. Carolyn Merchant omitted him from her 1994 anthology Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory even though it contains decent sections on critical theory (Adorno, Marcuse et al) and also from "postmodern science" including Prigogine. Greg Garrard omitted him in the first book length overview of the field of ecocriticism (2004). On the other hand, Guattari was discussed appreciatively by the poststructuralist ecofeminist Verena Andermatt Conley in a chapter devoted to him in Ecopolitics (91-107), even though she wishes that he had read more Donna Haraway on the cyborg-as- 192 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology feminist, and thereby misses too much that could be read in Guattari's machinic assemblages; and she refers not at all to his Chaosmosis. I will mention one other appreciative reading of his ecosophy in passing, that in an essay for the Research on Anarchism website titled, "The Possibility of an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism" in which the author reliably if rapidly summarizes Deleuze and Guattari on the rhizome and also Guattari's Three Ecologies and largely defends the implications of these against the opposing view of the more humanist social ecology of Murray Bookchin. The essay is sketchy but makes a number of sharp distinctions along the way and in general argues that Guattari is useful. Very little has been said about his ecosophy to date, and even less has been done with it. So, does the study of Guattari repay the effort? Or are other ecologies of theory better formed and more effective? After all, it has become a commonplace among the mainstream intelligentsia that this style of theory fails to pay sufficient returns for the efforts invested. But the same class of readers said the same thing about a novel titled Ulysses when it was first published. Guattari will never become a Joyce, but I hope to have shown how his ecosophy comes out of a study of the most philosophical biology and complexity science available to date, and how Guattari adumbrated the next step ahead for human ecology from there, the first and last step with which this essay began: the remaking of social practices by increasing the disequilibrium of the current deadly organization that is frozen in a repetition-compulsion of destructive behavior, a new fostering of bifurcations toward new singularities, new subjective formations of "agencement" and new transversal interactive networks simultaneously, the very process of autopoetic self-organization out of dynamic flux. Notes 1 See the interviews with the two in Chaosophy (Guattari 1995) for instances of Guattari's input and Deleuze's reticence. 2 Many of his earlier solo articles are translated in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans., Rosemary Sheed (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984). This selects from two previous books: Psychoanalyse et transversalité (1972) and La Révolution moléculaire (1977). But even the dates of those books misrepresent the dates of composition or deliverance of many of the conference papers and articles collected here. An introduction by David Cooper notes that items taken from the first book date back to 1955 through 1970, long before and during the start of his collaboration with Deleuze. Much of the terminology here shows up later in his collaboration with Deleuze on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Erick Heroux 3 193 The leading Guattarist in the anglophone world is Gary Genosko. His booklength monograph, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, is the first major study of Guattari in English, and one done so thoroughly, including archival research, that it is a benchmark for any later effort. If any single book could begin to correct what Genosko calls "the problem of the reception of Deleuze's work as a way of erasing Guattari", then this is it. Here, I do not intend to turn the tables and claim that Deleuze was the junior partner, and in fact that would miss the point of their creative co-operation; instead, I intend to counter the odd erasure of Guattari coupled with the general apotheosis of Deleuze. In order to be for Deleuze, one need not suppress Guattari; and vice-versa of course. 4 See the almost autobiographical essay in Chaosophy about his psychoanalytic theory/praxis: "La Borde: A Clinic Like No Other" (Guattari 187-208) and also Genosko's description of the La Borde experiences ("The Life and Work of Felix Guattari" 133-139 in Guattari, Three Ecologies, 2000). This shows clearly how Guattari was more engaged in a praxis as a theoretical psychoanalyst who wanted to make the closed and disciplinary institutions in which he worked more open to participation and creativity by the staff and patients at every level. He worked in and on and through this clinic from 1955 until his death. "Empowerment" was the cliché during that era, but instead Guattari always spoke of "desiring", "molecular revolutions", "transversal" connections, and "machinic assemblages" and "singularization". What impresses me now is how successful Guattari was in transforming that clinic, which was the same size and of the same sort as a psychiatric hospital that I worked in as an aide for three years in California during the 1980s. Where I was left with a frustrating sense of hopelessness, Guattari energetically and brilliantly intervened in his institution, deftly avoiding the dead end traps of Lacanianism, romantic anti-psychiatry, Maoism, etc., while deploying his keen analytic skills on the practical transformation of the institution toward a space of participation, openness, flexibility, community, and the production of singularities by channeling desire. 5 I was first alerted to this debate about the systems view among contemporary ecologists by the ecocritic Dana Phillips' chapter on the historical shifts within the discipline, "Ecology Then and Now" in his scathing (and too often erroneous) critique of the emerging field of ecocriticism in the humanities: The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford University Press, 2003), 42-82. 6 Like every emergent specialization, biosemiotics is both very new yet paradoxically has a minor prehistory dating back decades. Key figures include Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Guenther Witzany, Marcello Barbieri, and Thomas Sebeok. The field now has an international organization, a journal, and conference proceedings. See website at http://www.biosemiotics.org/ The field is interdisciplinary yet would appear for now to be the biologist's version of a Deleuzoguattarian resurrection of Gregory Bateson, but minus the microrevolution. 7 See especially Vandana Shiva's Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (1993) and her recent Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005). 194 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology 8 This round-table dialogue with the scientists is reprinted with the title "Openness" in the valuable collection of materials about Guattari in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Vol 2. ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001), 774-794. 9 To give credit, I believe that Genosko also made this observation about Lacan's anti-biology effect and connected this to Guattari, but for now I cannot locate the exact source. 10 On our recent passage into the new geological epoch, see Robert Roy Britt, "Humans Force Earth Into New Geologic Epoch" LiveScience 27 Jan 2008, n.p. www.livescience.com/environment/080127-new-epoch.html. Three separate sources for this proposal are cited, and several other scientists are quoted. Relevant excerpts include: "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene— currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change—as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion,' Zalasiewicz's team writes. The paper calls on the International Commission on Stratigraphy to officially mark the shift . . . . In a separate paper last month in the journal Soil Science, researchers focused on soil infertility alone as a reason to dub this the Anthropocene Age. 'In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human impact is clear, large, and growing,' Alley told ScienceNow, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'A geologist from the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name, where and when our impacts show up.'" We have deterritorialized and reterritorialized a new segmentation at the geological level. Works Cited Bateson, Gregory. "Form, Substance, and Difference." Steps to An Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 448-68. —. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam Books, 1979). Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructrualist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. "On the Line." On the Line. Trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 69-114. —. Dialogues II (London: Continuum, 2002). Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004). Genosko, Gary. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002). Erick Heroux 195 —. (Ed.) Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Vol 2 (London: Routledge, 2001). Guattari, Félix. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans., Rosemary Sheed (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984). —. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000). —. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Prefanis (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). —. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvére Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995). —. The Guattari Reader. Ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). —. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans., David Sweet and Chet Wiener (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996). —. The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Ed. Stephane Nadaud (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006). Guattari, Félix, and Antonio Negri. Les nouveaux espaces de liberté (Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985). Joff. "The Possibility of an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism". Research on Anarchism website, n.d., http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article=1761, last accessed April 02, 2008. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980). Merchant, Carolyn (Ed.) Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994). Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford University Press, 2003). Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (Dehra Dun: Natraj Publishers,1993). —. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (South End Press, 2005). Varela, Francisco J., Evan T. Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991). “STRANGE ECOLOGY” IN DELEUZEGUATTARI'S A THOUSAND PLATEAUS IRVING GOH Introduction What this paper is interested in is the image of Nature, and the relation between Nature and thought in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. It could be said at the outset here that Nature in A Thousand Plateaus does not take on an image that is of an exploited, victimized, or powerless passivity. Instead, Nature takes on a violent image. It is an image of a violent force, an image of mutation, furor, and even of violence turned against itself and everything that dwells within it. Consequently, the relation between Nature and thought cannot be a benign one either. In A Thousand Plateaus, it will be shown that thought seeks a violent economy with Nature—and vice versa. Thought feeds and builds on the violence of Nature. But Nature likewise feeds on the violence of thought. This rather anomalous image of Nature and the peculiar relation between Nature and thought in A Thousand Plateaus are what this paper would like to explicate. It will also argue that the radical philosophical edge of A Thousand Plateaus is possible not only by recognizing the violence of Nature but also by striking out against Nature, by being almost antiNature, contre nature. In return, Nature, in order to sustain itself, likewise calls for a thought as radical as Deleuze and Guattari's, a call that is no less forceful, as it will be shown, that involves a violent abstraction of philosophy. Once again therefore, one must not expect in Deleuze and Guattari the passive, benign Nature that one is so inclined to safeguard and embrace, an image that most ecocriticisms or environmental movements are quick to conjure. With Deleuze and Guattari, one is in the realm of a whole other Nature, "an entirely different nature" (Thousand Plateaus 11) if not a "strange ecology" as Deleuze would say (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues 75). In a sense, this project shares the premise of Verena Conley's Ecopolitics, where she argues that "1968 thinkers," of which Deleuze and Irving Goh 197 Guattari are certainly part of, develop radical philosophies that "produce commanding changes in the way we think the world" by having an "ecological consciousness" (Conley 1). That point, for me, is especially undeniable in Deleuze and Guattari, whose concepts are ineluctable from the natural environment. I will just list a few of those concepts here in brisk fashion: becoming-animal (I will discuss this concept further on in this paper), which brings the human outside of its anthropocentric and anthropomorphic confines via a correspondence not only with animals, but also with plants, and which leads towards a cosmic line that traces the earth's surface; the refrain, which is ineluctable from the ground of the earth since it constructs a territory around itself; and nomadology, which traverses spaces or rather makes deserts of spaces, and therefore is always already engaged with a movement across environmental spaces. In other words, any thinking of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts without a sensitivity to the natural environment can only be an incomplete grasp of their philosophy. One could say that philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, is perhaps first eco-logy—in the sense of a thinking that is never detached from the earth, the sea, the sky, the climate, the cosmos that surrounds our planetary space, and all the natural elements and entities that dwell in all these spaces, including bacteria and viruses—before it is ethology or nomadology. One could say that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is always already eco-etho-philosophy.1 Where I will depart, however, from Conley's book, is the perspective on "ecological consciousness." As suggested in the opening paragraph here, if there is an "ecological consciousness" in Deleuze and Guattari, it will also take into account a consciousness of the violence of the ecological environment itself, a consciousness of the violence unleashed by Nature itself. This paper, as such, therefore also departs from conventional ecocriticisms, which generally tend to call for interventions that seek to preserve, conserve, sustain, and protect Nature, as if there is an original state of Nature with definable horizons or constant limits. In Ecocritique, Timothy W Luke has sharply pointed out that most of the times such ecocriticisms amount to "justifying anthropocentric guardianship over terrestrial processes." (Luke 198). In other words, making Nature a subject of discourse becomes just another opportunity for human subjectivity to assert its control and mastery. More recently, in Deleuze and Environmental Damage, Mark Halsey argues that the problem of ecocriticsm is that it is touching on (to) Nature too much. Taking issue with deep ecology, which seeks to re-link people back to the environment, he notes that it shares its methodology with capitalism—that force that has always been charged (rightly so) with direct and indirect 198 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus destruction of the environment—since capitalism has always predicated itself, or has been motivated by the benefits of diachronic and transgeographical relations. In other words, capitalism has always been acutely aware of shifts in environmental occupation and development brought about by movements of people across terrestrial spaces. So capitalism has as much attraction to the environment as much as radical ecology. Wary of this methodological problematic if not contradiction, Halsey will say, "lack of interconnectivity […] is not the rallying point for ecological problems" but that "ecological dilemmas result from too much contact with the Other (rivers, forests, soils, 'exotic' cultures)" (Halsey 29). Following Deleuze and Guattari, Halsey argues that any thought of ecology must free itself from any temptation, even though it is wellintended, to close in on Nature, to seek to preserve it in other words, to set it within limits even though these limits are to safeguard it. As Halsey says, "What else is environmental conflict if not the visible and audible result of attempts to constitute various portions of earth as a unity in spite of it being a multiplicity?" (Halsey 80). To this critique of ecocriticisms, Ingolfur Blühdorn in Post-ecologist Politics will add, there is a false "ecological correctness" to be aware of (Blühdorn 185). One must avoid being like "ecologists […] obsessed with—and tied by—the ideas of stability, security and rational controllability." One must "avoid being ecologically normative" (Blühdorn 171 and 15). Given these contemporary critiques expressing caution against the uncritical perception of Nature as a weak and passive realm, which then seems to justify an overexposed anthropocentric management over Nature or which therefore underestimates or refuses to acknowledge the veritable and active force of Nature, should the point for thought then, for a thought like eco-etho-philosophy, be to uproot from such safe/ saving relations with Nature? Should one instead open a field of thought where Nature (re)asserts an active force which might contest the human condition, and witness what emerges positively not only from this strife itself but also from each side of the strife? I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus inclines towards such a relation with Nature. In other words, it risks a mini-combat with Nature, albeit a combat without nihilistic ends, wills, or ambitions. If there is an "ecological consciousness" in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, then perhaps it would be more critical to discern a consciousness that uproots (from) Nature and see what new ensemble Nature and thought can form through this peculiar relation. This, to reiterate, is what this paper will take as its task to elucidate. Irving Goh 199 And just as there is no benign relation between Nature and thought, there is also no attempt at environmental conservation in Deleuze and Guattari—if by conservation one means to keep nature in check in terms of preservation. For Deleuze and Guattari, Nature is a moving force. It is even movement par excellence, always expending its energy, its outgrowth, engendering a plurality of results in Nature (and whether these are seen as positive or negative outcomes, it is always only from the point of view of an anthropocentric axis and not that of Nature itself and therefore somewhat critically inconsequential to an "ecological consciousness" that is keenly perceptive of all sorts of energies and mutations that the movement of Nature is capable of). The question of how we can save the environment will not be posed. The invocation of Nature in Deleuze and Guattari is less about solving environmental problems than how the environment and thought negotiate each other, contest each other, and despite such contest, may support each other in the end. There is, indeed, a strange alliance between thought and nature in Deleuze and Guattari. Philosophie contre Nature In Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, philosophers are like sorcerers or witches who hover at the edges of woods or fields.2 In other words, Nature is always in proximity. Nature forms not only the backdrop of philosophy, but as it will be seen, it even foregrounds philosophy, it drives philosophy forward. At Nature's edge, philosophers are attendant upon an intuitive or instinctive (mutual) attraction to a particular animal of the woods. After all, they have an affinity with such an element of nature: "The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact" (Thousand Plateaus 246). Once that is sensed, the philosophers strike, in pursuit of the animal, not for the ends of consuming it but to experiment with a tearing away of anthropomorphic structurations by entering into a molecular relation with the animal, by becoming-animal in Deleuze and Guattari's term. Becoming-animal, in short, is the correspondence by mutual desire of human and animal molecules at the frays of their respective material forms, and therefore immediately situates itself within "ecological consciousness." But in becoming-animal, the philosopher-sorcerers strike not only against the animal but also the forest, the field. In a horizontal or rather diagonal movement, the philosophers cut across the vertical lines of trees, as if cutting them down. Their zigzag movements, in contrast to the static root systems that support and found the arborescent landscape of the woods, but corresponding to the transversal dissemination of rhizomes, 200 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus seem to as if uproot trees. In the chase for the animal, in other words in the midst of the trajectory of becoming-animal philosophy, Nature is cut down. And there is no pity: "not pity, but participation against nature."3 In this tale of the philosopher-sorcerer traversing through Nature, what is immediately striking is the apparent betrayal of Nature by the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, since it has been noted previously that their philosophy bears an "ecological consciousness." If one is at this point rudely shocked by the apparent ecological insensitivity at the end of deleuzoguattarian philosophy, let one be assured that Nature will take its revenge, and so let it be said here that the philosopher-sorcerer will not be the ultimate vanquisher in his or her interactivity with Nature. There will in fact be no clear-cut winner in the contest between philosophy and Nature. I will come back in a while to the end of this equivocal philosophy-Nature negotiation. But at this moment, I would like to explicate further the engagements with Nature during the flight of Deleuze-Guattari's philosopher-sorcerer and the undeniable sense of betraying Nature as philosophy proceeds, across a forest or field, in pursuit of an animal. In a way, something of a betrayal ought to be expected in Deleuze and Guattari, since it is always an inherent mechanism in their philosophy.4 In fact, this is especially the case for any thinking of an alliance. Alliance in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is linked to becoming-animal. "Becoming […] concerns alliance" (Thousand Plateaus 238), as they say. Now, alliance in becoming-animal also proceeds by a following of what Deleuze and Guattari calls the "Anomal" or "the anomalous," an animal that strays at the edge of the animal pack, ambiguous in its role in relation to the pack as to whether it still belongs to it or is already a foot somewhere outside it. This "Anomal" will also be for Deleuze and Guattari the border that any becoming-animal must cross. In other words, any body desiring a becoming-animal will follow this "Anomal," forming an alliance with it. But forming this alliance is still not yet becominganimal per se. It is but a step towards becoming-animal. To complete the process of becoming-animal, one would ultimately need to strike at this "Anomal" according to Deleuze and Guattari. This is the stroke of betrayal in becoming-animal, in alliance. To become-animal, one must form a friendship with a particular animal, and then undo this friendship. As Deleuze and Guattari will write, "becomings-animal are there from the start, on the treason side" (Thousand Plateaus 241). So if one is to think about the alliance between Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy and the environment, as one is called to do so here, then a betrayal of the latter Irving Goh 201 must somehow show up, and hence the violent image of philosophersorcerers striking out at Nature in its flight of philosophy. But one must also ask to what ends the instances of philosophical violence against nature serve. In the elaboration of a philosophy of becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari borrow images that depict violence against Nature. The best example perhaps would be the reference to Melville's Moby Dick, where Ahab's quest to hunt down the white whale is expressed in a most fascinating or alluring and yet at the same time violent style. In Deleuze and Guattari's reading, this hunt for the whale is first not a quest for subjective revenge by Ahab, who had lost a leg to the whale during a previous expedition: there is "no revenge to take" (Thousand Plateaus 245). What is desired instead is a reaching towards more nature, towards more than a singular Moby Dick, towards a pack of whales. In this perspective, Moby Dick is but a boundary, the "Anomal" as mentioned above, a frontier to be crossed in order to reach towards a more multitudinous animal space. In other words, if there is a violence or betrayal against an element of Nature, it is only but to reach towards more of those elements. It is to go further in the experiment or experience of becoming-animal by engaging with a multiplicity of animals in the pack this time round, or to intensify further the immersion or engagement with Nature. To attain the latter then, a certain violence against Nature becomes necessary. As Deleuze and Guattari read Ahab reading the whale, "he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it" (Thousand Plateaus 245). It should be noted here in fact that the violence implicated in a becoming-animal produces more nature not only at the end of its trajectory. As Deleuze and Guattari will argue, Nature is served in the middle of becoming. Becoming is not just only the interactivity of two entities. In the midst of becoming, something else of nature can be replicated, remembered, if not created. As the rhetoric of Deleuze and Guattari goes, even a stream forms in the midst of this becoming, emerging from or in-between the bi-directional flow of molecules between the two entities. In becoming, there is "a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream [my italics] without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle" (Thousand Plateaus 25). 202 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus Nature contre Philosophie So far, the image of the philosopher-sorcerer charging through the forest or field on his or her broom-stick appears to be at first sight an ecologically care-less will or desire on the part of the philosopher-sorcerer. However, one cannot really say that a purely subjective force drives the philosopher-sorcerer forward in this path through Nature right from the beginning. According to Deleuze and Guattari, one must also recognize that the philosopher-sorcerer himself or herself is in fact caught up in a movement of Nature itself. There is a violent force of Nature that pushes the philosopher-sorcerer towards an interactivity with nature's elements, and situates him or her within Nature. As much as it is the philosophersorcerer who consciously seeks out the animal and consequently charges through Nature, this entire movement is actually also motivated by an invisible force of Nature that sweeps the philosopher-sorcerer up in a desire to become-animal and to traverse through the forest or field. There is at work too the Furor of Nature, and it is through such a recognition that one sees that the engagement between philosopher-sorcerer and Nature is not one-sided affair. As Deleuze and Guattari say, "There is a complex aggregate: the becoming-animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and rats, winds and tempests, bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor" (Thousand Plateaus 243). The interactivity here is therefore more complex than one involving an aggressively active philosopher-sorcerer on the one side and a passive helpless Nature on the other. Nature intervenes as actively, if not as violently, in the interactivity between thought and Nature. Once the Furor of Nature is recognized, there will no longer be the illusion of the human in absolute control over Nature. One must hence rethink the flight-path of the philosopher-sorcerer. Is the flight of the philosopher-sorcerer smooth throughout? Is it with arrogant confidence that the philosopher-sorcerer traverse the forest or the field? What happens to the philosopher-sorcerer in the course of its Nature-cutting flight? One notes that this line of flight is never a straight, linear, horizontal path. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari will argue, it follows the zigzag or diagonal dispersion of rhizomes. In other words, the flight-path of this philosopher-sorcerer is not a well-charted one in the sense of a systematic and meticulously coordinated precision-flying. It already puts itself at risk of being cut down by a tree, by its stem, trunk, or branches. Just as Nature drives the philosopher-sorcerer forward, it also interrupts or ruptures this flight by placing its other elements before it. Cut down, the flows of tributaries on the ground, or the water-flows that exist between plants as Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus (11), Irving Goh 203 will take over and wash the grounded philosopher-sorcerer further elsewhere. By this time, the force of Nature has already taken over. Or rather, it has always been the guiding technē of the philosopher-sorcerer, since it is the haphazard dissemination of rhizomatic outgrowth that his or her flight-path is implicitly (or unconsciously) predicated on. But here, the violence of Nature is more than evident, as it will not only cut down the philosopher-sorcerer in flight, but also sweep him or her away in the rush of water. At this point, those who were shocked initially by the violent thrust of the philosopher-sorcerer's flight-path would perhaps find in this scene of the philosopher-sorcerer's crash-landing some sort of poetic ecological justice. Recognizing this image and force of Nature now, recognizing not only its Furor of becomings but also how it places the philosopher-sorcerer before potentially disastrous ends, one would perhaps reconsider any continued interactivity between philosophy and Nature or any further investment in an eco-etho-philosophy. The question arises then, in relation to the exchange of forces between philosophy and Nature: "Toward what void does the witch's broom lead?" (Thousand Plateaus 248).5 There is a risk of an ultimate destructive nothingness in an eco-etho-philosophy therefore. For Deleuze and Guattari however, this is the risk that any act of living thought must take or must dare to take as it pursues the trajectories of Nature's forces. But must it necessarily end in tragedy or nothingness for the philosopher-sorcerer, as if like a dénouement of poetic justice for his or her violent course through Nature? Deleuze and Guattari do not think that the flight of the philosopher-sorcerer ought to necessarily crashland as such. Let me paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari here. The risk is known from the outset, to reiterate. And it will be taken. And one would proceed with an experimentation in interactivity with all forces and elements of Nature. In other words, all that come before his or her flightpath, which either cut him or her down, or lead the flight-path towards another trajectory, will not be seen as terminal obstacles. They will not be seen as impenetrable walls that violently bring everything to a crashing and fatal halt. Instead, they will be seen as borders, each one a new frontier of Nature's multiplicity and heterogeneous alterity, through which other molecular engagement, or becoming as Deleuze and Guattari would say it, with other elements and forces of Nature can take place. For example, cut down from his or flight, and now at the mercy of the rush of the stream on the ground, the philosopher-sorcerer must make a leap onto what this new accidental ecological terrain can offer to thought. From the broom-stick, the philosopher-sorcerer must now take up a surfboard with this rush of water. (Deleuze has spoken of the act of philosophy as the 204 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus athletic energy or force or élan of a surfer riding a wave. Here, it is a question of turning that élan into an élan vital.) He or she is now the philosopher-surfer. And the task from then on would be to negotiate this violent rush of water, and to think how this largely overwhelming violence gives him or her to think anew or rethink his or her negotiation with a new ecological terrain, to think how to survive this force of Nature. Seen in this way, the violence of Nature is not necessarily an image with a nihilistic horizon. It can also be a giving source, not only of survivability but also of the invention of a new thought as thought negotiates with new elements and forces of Nature. Put in another way, taking risk with Nature's trajectory sustains a continued and renewed experimentation with a philosophy and nature interactivity. In this case, there is no fatal crash-landing. The philosopher-sorcerer can survive by precisely taking the risk of going along with the stream-rush through the forest. And this trajectory would only be a consistent passage of a series of life-affirming becomings not only for the philosopher-sorcerer, but also for the ensemble between philosophy and Nature: it is always possible to have the good fortune to avoid them. Case by case, we can tell whether the line is consistent, in other words, whether the heterogeneities effectively function in a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether the multiplicities are effectively transformed through the becomings of passage. […] So experiment. (Thousand Plateaus 250-1) It should be noted too that the violent force of nature acts not only against humans. It acts against itself too. There is even a sacrificial logic to the ecological thought of Deleuze and Guattari. In the interactivity between philosophy and Nature, that is to say the flight-path of the philosopher-sorcerer through the forest or field, it had been noted that this trajectory is largely predicated on the moving cartography of rhizomes. Not only do the rhizomes underlie the zigzag or haphazard flight-path, but they also motivate the series of becomings that the philosopher-sorcerer experiences in his or her encounter or engagement with Nature. But given this predication on rhizomes, such that rhizomes can disseminate and engage in a multiplicity of heterogeneous becomings with other plants, animals, rocks, the wind, rivers, and humans, structures of vertical trees have to be cut down, as Deleuze and Guattari doubtlessly suggest. To put it in ecologically terrifying terms, they have to be deforested. One notes that this takes place at the level of rhetoric, and yet the force of violence, this time nature against nature, is still notable nonetheless. Rhizomes are favored in place of trees in A Thousand Plateaus. Rhizomes look towards "abandon[ning] the old model of the tree" (Thousand Plateaus 10). And a Irving Goh 205 little later, the image of uprooting trees is again invoked to underscore the free movement of rhizomes in contrast to the structured organization of the tree-roots-branches system: "a line of flight [enables] one to blow apart strata, cut roots [my italics], and make new connections" (Thousand Plateaus 15). In all, there is therefore also a war between rhizomes and trees in A Thousand Plateaus, "the rhizome as opposed to arborescence" (Thousand Plateaus 296), and the trees have to be defeated. Beyond the strife between rhizomes and trees, there is another recognizable scene of violence involving elements of Nature. At the beginning, we have looked at the violent mechanism of betrayal in the event of becoming-animal. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is not restricted to a human-and-animal interactivity. Instead, animal and animal, or animal and plant, or plant and plant may fold one another in a series of becomings. And as long as there is becoming, there is the "Anomal", and there is the alliance, and therefore within Nature (even in the absence of anthropomorphic Man), there will be instances of treacherous violence of Nature against itself too. Given the events of becoming in Nature, "combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations" (Thousand Plateaus 242), and therefore "Nature operates—against itself" (Thousand Plateaus 242). Eco-etho-philosophy without Subject and Natural Deterritorialization For a philosophy that engages itself with the ecological realm, that is, a philosophy that follows the dissemination of Nature's elements and forces, and which negotiates its own force with the latter, this philosophy cannot ground a Subject. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Subject is what in fact creates an obstacle to the movement of Nature, drying up a water source or arresting the flow of rivers. As they will write, the Subject is that "which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow" (Thousand Plateaus 276). If there is a potentiality of something new in eco-etho-philosophy, if there is to be a new dimension to be opened up through eco-etho-philosophy, a new world where thought and nature each continue to flourish through an active engagement between them, this cannot take place when there is a Subject that establishes his or her existence in the world as primary presence, a Subject that establishes itself as the spectacle to which everything else must gravitate towards, and which projects its subjectivity towards its field of interested perception and habitation so as to rein everything else in and to control them, to make them his or her property. In eco-etho-philosophy, one abandons any notion 206 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus of the Subject or subjectivity and disappears instead into the molecular lines of the rock, the sand, and plants. That is where the creation of a new world that involves thought and nature folding and unfolding each other also becomes possible: "thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible" (Thousand Plateaus 280). It is in this sense that Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy may be said to take on a veritable ecological consciousness. For in this situation, the figure of thought and elements of nature are almost indistinct. One has become the other. Nature and thought cross each other. "One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/ everything, into a becoming" (Thousand Plateaus 280). Eco-etho-philosophy would therefore strike against this Subject which resists such crossings. In the face of the Subject and its subjectivity, eco-etho-philosophy grapples or wrestles with it only to tear it down. Deleuze and Guattari will even deploy the image of violent nature, here the image of violent tectonic movements, to break such systems of thought: "One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation, but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it" (Thousand Plateaus 295). Or else Nature itself, in its furor or force, will strike: "nature opposes its power […] to the machines of human beings" (Thousand Plateaus 309). Philosophy and Nature in eco-etho-philosophy will dis-organize any attempt to found a notion of subjectivity. Any vision of a figure of thought that seeks to absolutely or resolutely territorialize the ground around it and the things within that ground can only be a delusion. As Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the ecological would insist, the force of Nature will win out at the end. Any gesture of territorialization, and any space that has been territorialized, will be swept up and reclaimed by the deterritorializing movement of Nature. Deterritorialization is the force proper to the universe. And this force traverses all things on this earth, connecting them all with it, rendering them of this world and not another. A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber [my italics]. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. (Thousand Plateaus 249) Deleuze and Guattari take up this point again later in What is Philosophy?. There, they will reiterate how telluric space, through which the cosmic force of the universe passes, can never be controlled or delimited by subjective wills to territorialization. Instead, the deterritorializing trajectory of the earth uproots and surpasses the latter. As Irving Goh 207 they write in What is Philosophy?, "the earth constantly carries out a movement of deterritorialization on the spot, by which it goes beyond any territory : it is deterritorializing and deterritorialized" (What is Philosophy? 85). But the sweeping up of occupied territories does not signal a catastrophic end. Instead, this sweeping movement looks towards the creation of new places, of elsewheres. In other words, it gives to new territories at other places. "Movements of deterritorialization are inseparable from territories that open onto an elsewhere; and the process of reterritorialization is inseparable from the earth, which restores territories" (What is Philosophy? 85-6). Deleuze and Guattari will note that this creative trajectory of Nature cannot be realized without it being an absolute movement of deterritorialization, i.e. a movement of unhindered flow. But Deleuze and Guattari will also argue that Nature cannot do this alone in fact. Philosophy however, that is to say a philosophy that thinks via immersing itself within the immanent heterogeneity and plurality of molecular trajectories in the world, a philosophy like ethology or nomadology in other words, can help carry through this movement of absolute deterritorialization. It is with this interactivity with philosophy that "Nature [can pass into] infinite diagrammatic movements," and that the force of nature as such can posit itself as "the creation of a future new earth" (What is Philosophy? 88). But what could be the motivation for thinking this deterritorializing force of Nature? In a way, one could argue that this is the trace of Bataille's ecological understanding in Deleuze and Guattari. In Bataille's ecology, the earth is traversed by a cosmic energy that is dissipated from the sun. The earth and forces of nature bear this energy in its dissemination across the surface of the world. And this energy-flow does not rest nor gather itself up into an accumulative reserve. In other words, this energy is a luxurious superabundance which gives itself to the world, and demands nothing in return. As Bataille writes in The Accursed Share, "Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe," and that "the sun gives without ever receiving" (29 and 28). For Bataille then, human activity (be it economic or cultural) and human interactivity with Nature must bear this expenditure without reserve in mind. What they have accumulated for themselves from natural resources, they must learn to eventually undo these accumulations without productive ends in return. An accumulation to the point of excess in contrast to what the passage of cosmic or terrestrial energy gives is impossible. In this case, the latter will call for the expenditure of the former. As Bataille writes, "energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return)." And a little later: "a surplus must be dissipated through 208 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus definite operations: the final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the movement that animates terrestrial energy" (22). Catastrophe is only imminent if one refuses these operations of expenditure. Nature just would not allow it. And human accumulation will not constrain the movement of Nature. Elements of Nature that have been delimited would only gather themselves into some sort of pressure system, which builds itself up to the day when it can no longer contain itself and would overflow or break all limits imposed by human and technological agencies. With regard to the human indifference of accumulation of natural resources, in other words with regard to the human denial of the non-accumulative flow of terrestrial energy, Bataille will write, his denial does not alter the global movement of energy in the least: the latter cannot accumulate limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually, like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us. (23) Bataille therefore insists on a certain violent force of Nature too, a line of thought that Deleuze and Guattari will follow later.6 Nature always has a way not only to escape human restrictions but also to destroy them. In this case, it delivers us even to catastrophic ends: [Nature] consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions. For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion. (24) There is always the possibility of Nature to overflow or to flood an occupied territory therefore, and Bataille gives the example of the onset of Nature swarming back to a place that had been cleared for a garden but is now abandoned: one can speak of pressure in this sense only if, by some means, the available space is increased ; this space will be immediately occupied in the same way as the adjoining space. Moreover, the same is true every time life is destroyed at some point on the globe, by a forest fire, by a volcanic phenomenon or by the hand of man. The most familiar example is that of a path that a gardener clears and maintains. Once abandoned, the pressure of the surrounding life soon covers it over again with weeds and bushes swarming with animal life. (30) Irving Goh 209 The force of Nature always returns even in spite of human intervention. And this is because it always already begins with an excess or a luxurious force to be dispensed: "On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess" (23). I believe that this understanding of a primal or cosmic force of universal energy running through earth, which is uncontainable in any absolute terms or closed limits, and which only unleashes a destructive force in return if it is delimited, is what motivates Deleuze and Guattari's inscription of Nature as absolute deterritorialization. In other words, what Deleuze and Guattari has learned from Bataille, or what Deleuze and Guattari sustains from Bataille in the understanding of the force of Nature, is the resistance against stasis, against grounding oneself absolutely within a territory, which only entails an accumulation of resources around that territory. One must instead follow the flow of terrestrial energy, follow its deterritorialization. Surely, this force gives to new spaces, as we have noted already. But as the climate and the geophysical surroundings change in that territory, which is often Nature's explicit signs for seeking an elsewhere, one must not resist this movement. One must not insist on further grounding oneself in that particular territory. One must not resist abandoning it, dispensing with it. One must follow where Nature's trajectory of deterritorialization leads to, and then there will be the possibility of witnessing a new world or territory emerging or in the midst of creation. It is as such that Deleuze and Guattari will also write that one is not in the world. One becomes with the world instead, through the interactivity of Nature and nomadic philosophy. "We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. […] We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero" (What is Philosophy? 169). In Deleuze and Guattari's ecological trajectory then, one never remains within a certain territory permanently. Swept along by the wind, tempests, flows of rivers, tectonic movements, pollens in the air, bacteria mutation, etc., one must create other territories elsewhere. Territories are always to be unframed or de-framed. And this is where Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? go beyond the project of Bernard Cache's Earth Moves. For Cache, the critical art of the earth is not one where one reduces the image of Nature into the appropriating frame of our human minds, guided by our ocular perspectives. Instead, he calls for an art of the frame which not only reflects the landscape of the outside, but also reflects vision back to the actual grandeur of the outside, where once again we recognize that objects of and in Nature have in themselves an ungraspable, non-limitable, unrepresentable immensity. Such a frame, according to 210 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus Cache, gives to the experience of the singularity of the space, which is not only constituted by the ground of the space itself but also by the multiplicity of perspectival forces or trajectories (for example, the mountains nearby, the sea at the horizon, etc.) that this space is related to. Deleuze and Guattari will indeed celebrate such an art of framing that keeps the notion of singularity open. But they will also supplement Cache's project by suggesting that framing is not enough. Rather, one must constantly de-frame and create another frame elsewhere. Instead of just calling for cadre (or framing), Deleuze and Guattari will go for a more radical de-framing or décadrage, which traces an absolute movement of deterritorialization in relation to a cosmic line: it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go from house-territory to towncosmos, and that now dissolve the identity of the place through variation of the earth, a town having not so much a place as vectors folding the abstract line of relief. (What is Philosophy? 187) Conclusion: Rethinking Sustainability and Aftershocks De-framing or deterritorialization after Nature's trajectories is perhaps how one should rethink the question of ecological sustainability today. Not only must sustainability be a question of how elements of Nature be preserved through human agencies in order that resources for continued survival and growth for both the environment and humans be constantly regenerated, but one must perhaps also give thought to how continued transformation and development of Nature itself could be given place by following the trajectories of Nature, i.e. allowing us to be borne along the unfolding of Nature rather than determining it or acting on it. There is a wisdom of plants, of rhizomes especially, that ecological thought has not critically and creatively engaged with or experimented with. And it is here that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, which is really a pedagogy in thinking with ecology as this paper has been suggesting throughout, can become instructive. The regret of not following the wisdom of Nature is only the falling behind of thought in relation to nature. The situation which Deleuze and Guattari describe as "thought lags behind nature" (Thousand Plateaus 5) is certainly something one should avoid falling into. Thought has to keep up with the trajectories of Nature, no matter how violent or seemingly chaotic they are. There is ultimately, as Deleuze and Guattari will say, a "wisdom of plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the Irving Goh 211 wind, an animal, human beings" (Thousand Plateaus 11). In other words, for Deleuze and Guattari, what is to be learnt is that forces of Nature are always mobile. Being mobile enables them to seek other free spaces. They somehow are always able to find an exit route when they find themselves restricted by certain limits. And they do this by forming rhizomes. In the wisdom of plants, rhizomes are everywhere, or rhizomes can be formed anywhere with anything, be it other natural fauna or flora or even human forms. It is a question of following, if not creating, these rhizomes. It is precisely through rhizomatic gestures or outgrowths that therein rest the potentiality of rupturing imposed limits or encroaching destruction by exterior forces: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines" (Thousand Plateaus 9). In fact, there is even the possibility of expanding one's ground in this way. As Deleuze and Guattari will say, "form a rhizome" and then one (e.g. Nature) can "increase [one's] territory by deterritorialization" (Thousand Plateaus 11). What emerges then, in the rhetoric of A Thousand Plateaus, is the event where an ecological line traverses both a figure of thought without subject and without possessive territorialization, and the multiplicity of Nature: "You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life […]—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack" (Thousand Plateaus 262). And it is not only humans that partake in a becoming-Nature. Nature likewise folds into humans and other elements of Nature. "Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them" (Thousand Plateaus 263). However, Deleuze and Guattari will think that Man in general, that is humans who have left their childhood behind, who have entered the political economy of work and of constructions of profitable habitations, have not yet learned how to access this realm of interactivity with Nature. For Deleuze and Guattari, only animals like the wolf or the horse, and children, know how to create events like these. "It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life" (Thousand Plateaus 262). But at the end of it all, critique may turn on Deleuze and Guattari's eco-etho-philosophy too. It certainly could be said that the violence of Nature's movements in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is ultimately and admittedly not as destructive, not as extreme as experienced or witnessed in the real natural environment. It may even be on the mild side, in Deleuze and Guattari. Keeping at that relatively mild level, it could be said that it is too easy for Deleuze to proclaim, as noted already, 212 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus that thought could be like the movement, the athleticism, l'élan of a surfer riding a wave. But what if the surf becomes an uncontrollable, destructive tsunami, which would certainly threaten to hurl the surfer towards an almost assured painful end, and which would also strike or destructively clear away other natural entities (trees, plants, bushes, animals, etc.) beyond the shorelines? What contour or dimension would thought take from such a wave? What would have transformed in thought when it changes from being a surfer's wave to a tsunami? What kind of thought would it be now? The violence of Nature has often generated exceptional modes of thought, gestures, actions, policies, etc. They are often in excess of their manifestations in everyday life. In response to natural catastrophe at a particular place, for example Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Asian tsunami disaster, the world has witnessed people there and around the world responding with a force equally if not more overwhelming than the force of Nature, a human force that overflows the limits, norms, and conditions of quotidian ethics, politics, and economy. It is indeed usually in the wake, in the aftermath of a natural disaster that a sense of an "international community" beyond race, nation, culture, political ideology, market frontiers, can be glimpsed at or can be thought of as a possibility. Genial, generous, giving, and hospitable as they are, there nonetheless remain many challenges to these after-thoughts, these after-actions that can be regarded as aftershocks in their own ways. The first is that what may seem to be unconditional at that time may have been predicated on an expectation of a prospective return when everyday life returns to normal. This is especially the case when a State enters the scene to aid another in crisis, one which normally does not have amicable relations with the former in ordinary times. The question here would be how to sustain these thoughts and actions as unconditional, in other words, how to maintain if not guarantee them as veritable ethics, opening oneself to another without calculating, without expecting any future returns, without counting on these present thoughts and acts and to use them for future bargaining chips in political or economic negotiations or even in interpersonal relations? Certainly, there is the potentiality for the transformation of thought, or the emergence of a new thought of the unconditional derived from the violent force of Nature.7 But there is yet another aspect to this. There is the question, and this is of greatest imperative perhaps, of how to sustain and develop these after-thoughts or after-actions without waiting for another natural shock to hit humanity. In other words, how to finally learn what thoughts or actions can be derived from the violent force of Nature. To be sure, such a thought is not that which predicates itself on a future natural Irving Goh 213 disaster or catastrophe. It is not about having an apocalyptic mindset to determine thoughts and actions. It is not driven by the demands of exceeding ethics, exceptional politics, and aneconomical economics in a time of natural disasters. This thought cannot be framed by such a priori or calculated conditions or preconceived expectations. That would only establish a distance between thought and the violent force of Nature. What is to be risked instead is to insert thought in the midst of the violent force of Nature, at the time of Nature unleashing such a force—thought as immanent violent Nature. It is perhaps a question of a future eco-ethophilosophy riding not just a surf but a tsunami. Notes 1 One notices that nomadology seems to have disappeared in the formulation of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy as eco-etho-philosophy. But nomadology is not really absent in this term. If ethology is to be understood (in Mille Plateaux and in Deleuze's Spinoza: philosophie pratique) as the philosophical science and ethics which involves a going-outside of oneself in order to engage with a plural gathering of heterogeneous entities through mutual desires, and which also therefore undoes structured, hierarchized organizations of relations (through mostly homogeneous genetic filiations), then this would also already included the sense of nomadology, which always resists structurations and stasis. 2 See especially the "Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becomingimperceptible" section in A Thousand Plateaus, especially pp. 239-52 for this image of the philosopher-sorcerer. 3 This is my translation. Massumi's goes as such: "not pity, but unnatural participation" (Thousand Plateaus 240). The French original reads « non pas pitié, mais participation contre nature » (Mille plateaux. Paris : Minuit, 1980, 293). The French construction "contre nature" certainly can be read as "unnatural." But "contre" is also "against," and I would like to keep this notion of an "against" here, since I am eliciting the sense of an undeniable violence against nature in DeleuzeGuattari here. 4 As mentioned earlier under the nomenclature of nomadology, deleuzoguattarian philosophy involves an active experiment with absolute movement, with a certain line of flight as Deleuze and Guattari would say. But as Deleuze would say in the interview with Claire Parnet, "There is always betrayal in a line of flight," and that "the experimenter is a traitor" (Dialogues 40/41). 5 In the original French text, it reads "Vers quel néant le balai des sorcières les entraîne-t-il?" (304). Evidently, I would prefer to read the French "néant" directly as "nothingness" rather than "void" as Massumi suggests. 6 And just as Bataille's Nature is indifferent to effects of human disruptions, that of Deleuze and Guattari's takes a similar approach to the latter. Even if the air or water is polluted, deleuzoguattarian becoming somehow will adapt to these mutations in Nature and use them to its benefits, i.e. Nature will improvise on its imposed destruction so as to transform the defect into an element that supports the 214 “Strange Ecology” in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus crossing of molecular trajectories in becoming. In other words, becoming always takes into account not only uncontaminated forces of Nature but also those which are supplemented by pollution. It takes into account, as A Thousand Plateaus goes, "the importance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious particles, favorable conditions for these transports" (261). 7 In Ecocritique, Timothy W Luke proposes an "ecological popularism" that calls for awareness of ecological knowledge and intervention at the levels of the personal and the communitarian more than at the State level, both of which would run on a global scale thanks to technological interconnectivity. He writes, "Making effects of environmental destruction [my italics] and preservation more personal and communal could lessen many ecological disasters happening right now" (205). As this paper has tried to suggest, perhaps all it needs are the "effects of environmental destruction," not so much in the controversial sense of human overexploitation of Nature, but rather in the sense of the violent relation between nomadological philosophy and Nature, and "environmental destruction" in the sense of re-cognizing an inherent violent force of Nature that strikes out at both thought and humans. The endeavor of "preservation" would only threaten to delimit any flow of Nature. Nonetheless, what remains laudable of Luke's proposal is the experimental perspective to it. In other words, it has the "freedom to fail" (206), though he hopes that the global communitarian aspect of it could intervene to help. Likewise, there is no guarantee that the concepts of Deleuze-Guattari, which take on aspects of violent Nature, could reduce the "ecological disasters" that are produced by human exploitation for economic ends. One can only always experiment, as Deleuze and Guattari would say. Works Cited Bataille, Georges. La part maudite. [1949] (Paris: Minuit, 1967). —. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1: Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991). Blühdorn, Ingolfur. Post-ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Trans. Anne Boyman. Ed. Michael Speaks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Deleuze, Gilles, et Claire Parnet. Dialogues (Paris : Flammarion, 1977). —. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York : Columbia University Press, 1987). Deleuze, Gilles, et Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux (Paris : Minuit, 1980). —. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987). —. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? (Paris : Minuit, 1991). Irving Goh 215 —. What is Philosophy ? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York : Columbia University Press, 1994). Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies (Paris : Galilée. 1989). —. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New Brunswick: Althone, 2000). Halsey, Mark. Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006). Luke, Timothy W.. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND BIO ART: “IN THE AGE OF CYNICISM, ACCOMPANIED BY A STRANGE PIETY”1 JAMES WILTGEN “It's not about you or me…its all about us” —Brazilian Girls (Talk to La Bomb) This essay will put the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour in a certain proximity in order to assess commonalities as well as possible divergences, most especially regarding a thinking of the earth as well as the idea of political ecology. Both might be argued to have theorized a sophisticated type of politics: while Latour seems to profess a certain "progressive" stance, Deleuze often veers more toward what might be called a "subversive" politics, one more difficult to decipher. Among those themes both thinkers address can be counted the following: the "death" of God, man, and perhaps nature, and the dangers embedded in these deaths; how to think time, most particularly via its constitutive split and "unending" dynamic; the power of the subject/object binary and its hierarchies and ordering power; the energy and force of becoming; composition and connectivity as fundamental modes of action; the impetus as well as the demands of questioning; the materiality of humans and nonhumans and the parameters of their interactions; and the "people(s) to come" or the contours of the collectives. Clearly, there will be only time to briefly outline the issues involved, but they raise questions and problems that have the possibility of becoming more and more pressing as the planet moves farther into the 21st century. The continued staggering growth of the human population, the speeds of technology, and the consumption of the planet's resources have intensified many dangers, and the threats to the world seem to have mutated from the perils of "total annihilation" during the Cold War; yet for vast populations these threats seem, at certain levels, as pernicious as ever. The argument here will be that while both theorists combine certain elements of dualism and monism, Deleuze will press more forcefully the James Wiltgen 217 implications of this layering in a way that relentlessly abjures any type of closure, and any form of totalizing control. This combination of dualism and monism provides arguable the most forceful example of the intransigence and power of paradox: critical thinking, ultimately, will have "no ally but paradox" (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 132). As example, he will combine a certain reading of Spinoza on substance and Nietzsche on the eternal recurrence/will to power in a daunting manner of simultaneity, which privileges the speeds and rhythms of deterritorialization. His own thinking will constantly be affected by its internal limits, such that difference functions as a caesura questioning its own premises as well as the construction of all other forms of knowledge. Deleuze will also critique the formation of the subject such that the current individual will, in many ways, be in constant flux; however, in part through his reading of Simondon, the processes of individuation remains absolutely crucial, and a fundamental task of thinking becomes how to both de-individualize and re-individualize. Finally, the force of the chaotic, which undergrids his reading of difference, looms as the most difficult and unsettling of concepts, and must be grappled with alongside any political efforts. Some critics have willfully misread Deleuze, in particular Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, trying to force him into a rather simplistic monism, while his thinking exhibits a complex layering of elements, of both monism and dualism: in a word, not either/or but both/and. On the other hand, Latour embarks on a relentless critique of modernity, only in some ways to re-inscribe its basic tenets via the creation of a new Constitution, under the aegis of due process and enabled by a certain transparency of language. His approach will shift the subject/object divide to that of the human/nonhuman, but in key elements this involves but a tactical shift: there will be no fundamental questioning of the position of the new questioner, other than to welcome the nonhuman into the growing collective. This focus on epistemology, the triumph of a certain rethinking of language and concepts through the prism of a type of "technocratic" and scientific aura seems predicated on a number of crucial ambiguities. Modernity seems to have been given a new boss, but in some ways it will be the same as the old boss. The position of this essay will be to acknowledge certain powerful elements of Latour's political and epistemological thought, while pointing to significant problems and limitations. Among the major problems, and the very important differences between Latour and Deleuze, will be: the perils of a shift to immanence, and a notion of abundance; how those who decide can constantly be put into question; the imperative of a critique of ressentiment 218 Political Ecology and Bio Art and morality in all their guises; the necessity of a densely articulated series of positions for those who produce knowledge, not just for science but as an amalgamation of artists, philosophers, and scientists, at the very least; finally, the tension between the construction of a cosmos and that of a chaosmos. How these questions are posed, who asks them, and how they are answered will be essential in addressing themes of political decision and ecology change. Crystalline Vibrations To begin an assessment of the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as his writings with Félix Guattari, for an analysis of ecology and the political, one of the most important points of entry would be the "primacy" of the concept of difference. This formative concept of difference subtends elements of a certain strand of poststructuralist theory, and produces a constitutive split as the fundamental movement of thought.2 In a very succinct formulation of this approach Deleuze will argue that "(i)n the beginning, at the origin, there is the difference between active and reactive forces"; more expansively, "if there were an undifferentiated qualitative state of the world or a position of equilibrium for the stars, then this would be reason never to leave it."3 The universe maintains itself in perpetual tension, in an ongoing and insistent dis-equilibrium, always riven. In an elaborate chart in his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze presents a typology of these forces at work, where he meticulously lays out the tension in a type of tetragon, with active and reactive forces in continual tension with the power of affirmation and negation.4 This chart of forces produces a schema for, among other things, the "triumph of reactive forces;" published in 1964, this book still offers a provocative way in which to read a vast panoply of issues, including, for example, the foreign and environmental policy of the United States at this moment in history. Difference perpetually splits, marking two asymmetries, not in any sense a pair of binaries but as speeds, rhythms and the interruptions of energy: various figures of this split will emerge, most tellingly as the eternal recurrence and the will to power per Nietzsche, and as the virtual and the actual in the work of Henri Bergson.5 Difference, thought in this manner, produces a radical sense of time, and Deleuze will address this crucial force via a number art forms, but for purposes of this essay the focus will be on cinema: in the "Preface to the English edition" of Cinema 2: The Time-Image he will argue that a revolution occurred in philosophy from the Greeks to Kant as "the subordination of time to movement was reversed, time…increasingly James Wiltgen 219 appears for itself and creates paradoxical movements" (Cinema 2 xi-xii). This revolution will be repeated, in a certain fashion, by cinema in a more compressed span; this emergence of the power of time will mark the perpetual and enduring split between what Deleuze calls, in another context, the pure past and that of the present; or in Cinema 2, between "sheets of past" with that of "peaks of present" (98). As example, the films of Orson Welles, profoundly influenced by Herman Melville, produce "two different states of time, time as perpetual crisis, and, at a deeper level, time as primary matter, immense and terrifying, like universal becoming" (115). The world has become untimely, time does not move in the world, the world moves in time; this time will be constituted by and through a constitutive rift. Or, in The Logic of Sense, time as a concept will engender a type of straight-line labyrinth, that of Aion, infinitely splitting in two directions simultaneously, with the present as fulcrum. As with the work of Borges, especially "The Babylonian Lottery" time continually forks, producing an "empty form" of "event-effects," one that "endlessly subdivides," producing a "subdivision ad infinitum;" this produces "two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past."6 This splitting can also be conceived as a type of folding, another way in which to think the primary processes of time and difference. Perceived from other plateaus time will be "demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god," with Hamlet as a key symptom of this shift (Difference and Repetition 88). A second marker in this transition will be Hölderlin, who held that time was now distributed unequally, riven by an caesura, and that "(h)aving abjured its empirical content, having overturned its own ground time is defined not only by a formal and empty order but also by a totality and a series" (89). This totality will be very different from what has been traditionally thought—"the idea of totality must be understood as follows: the caesura, of whatever kind, must be determined in the image of a unique and tremendous event, an act which is adequate to time as a whole" (89). This caesura will mark the "event of difference" and make any "closed" notion of totality entirely inoperative and untenable. Further, the untimely dramatically alters the constitution of the subject: "(t)he finality of the living being exists only insofar as it is essentially open onto a totality that is itself open" (Deleuze, Bergsonism 105). For Deleuze, totality must be thought simultaneously with a split, as they reciprocally presuppose each other; and, totality is never the One, nor the Whole—it will always be open, and "(w)e must…be delighted that the Whole is not given" (104). These elements contribute to the "primacy" of difference, the split that will produce the theoretical basis for an incessant 220 Political Ecology and Bio Art questioning, a perpetual attempt to grasp the contours of "that from which we come" (Difference and Repetition 74). The Insistence of Questioning, As "?-being" (64) Again, what has changed? Namely, in the move to first Kant and then Nietzsche "(m)an did not survive God"; categories which had formerly functioned now would be thrown into disarray, into a maelstrom of uncertainty, of the play of forces devoid of a "transcendental signifier" (xix). In Difference and Repetition, in the section "Note on Heidegger's Philosophy of Difference," the key factor in Deleuze's reading of Heidegger will be difference and not negation (as opposed to a certain reading of Hegel); more, there will be a fundamental relation "between difference and questioning," as the former generates the latter in perpetuity.7 In an extended examination and critique of, among other things, Heidegger's Seinsfrage, Deleuze posits a shift in the movement of the questioning process, from "the hypothetical to the apodictic" to one that features the movement "from the problematical to the question" (197). Here, the process of the question and questioning mutates, as "questions express the relation between problems and the imperative from which they proceed;" this can translate itself into both aesthetic and political spheres, where "problems are inseparable from the power of decision," and a defining task of politics as well as art involves a type of thinking which could "determine problems and creative decisions" (197 & 268). In other words, "modern ontology is inadequate" to pose the questions required of thought; because "every sensation is a question" everything will be under scrutiny in perpetuum, without certainty, fixity, or the consolations of a stable Being (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 196). As with the dynamics of time, this questioning in many ways will be an empty form, and the issue for critical analysis will be to "fill in" these empty and indiscernible structures. After this incisive critique of Heidegger Deleuze will then employ a certain reading of Nietzsche, arguing that the basis of interpretation and evaluation concerns a question of forces, of "which one?," which force will be capable of composition and creation, and the key will be to construct well-posed questions (50 & 70). For example, "what forces make up the human?;" and "how to make a world?"8 What has been created here, succinctly, involves a question-problem complex. It will be Alice's time, per Lewis Carroll, and she will also pose the question "which one?;" which direction, and by extension does it entail active or reactive force? In this situation Alice will realize that "everything happens at the border," James Wiltgen 221 and that boundaries form the key to an operative and creative approach to thinking.9 This border-thought, then, produces an incessant "discordant harmony," a tension of forces, the continual incommensurability between terms, such that any fundamental reconciliation becomes the continuing attempt to think the unthought—in a word, to think difference without the concept of identity.10 Difference, qua splitting, subtends time, and produces unending questioning. Threat Level: Thanatopolitics, or What? The dangers of contemporary existence pose serious dilemmas, both in terms of the malevolent effects they have on the planet as well as their resistance to creative change. Deleuze will argue that the lethal threats to life radiate from the "two great reactive concepts of ressentiment and bad conscience" that have established the conditions for what might be called extreme nihilism.11 In an ominous sense of the stakes involved he wonders at the "disquieting depths from which reactive forces emerge." One can speculate on these disquieting depths but certainly they bode ill for the composition of the earth and the relation between humans and the world. This dominance of ressentiment and reactive forces will manifest itself in the concept of utility, both as a mode of positivism and as the linchpin for the politic-economic system of capitalism (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 54, & 73-75). Even more to the point "(t)he misrecognition of action, of all that is active, is obvious in the sciences of man: for example, action is judged in terms of its utility" (73). Deleuze exhibits a strong sense of the dimensions of these malign forces at loose in the world, coupled with an intense concern for the vast apparatus of aggression and destruction that has been and is being constructed. For example, both AntiOedipus and A Thousand Plateaus chronicle the grave problems facing the planet and basically all species, and perhaps all materiality. There exist three, or four dangers: “first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust.” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 227). What the authors call the "fourth danger" has, abstractly, unleashed "the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple" (229, italics in the original). Even more focused, they examine the contours of the State appropriation of what they call the war machine, asserting that Clausewitz's formula has been inverted, and "it is politics that becomes the continuation of war," arguing that "it is peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war" (467). More prescient, perhaps given the current 222 Political Ecology and Bio Art moment, "(w)ars had become part of peace" and "States no longer appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of which they themselves were only the parts" (467). In Anti-Oedipus the stress will fall on the vast repressive assemblage built by a certain form of modernity, and a telling symptom of passive nihilism would be this formation driven by powerful elements of a will to nothingness as it has been utilized by the forces of capital. In one of the most trenchant and chilling analysis of the way the system functions, they link capitalism to the production of lack, or antiproduction driven by the most pernicious elements of a type of aggressive instrumentalization of the planet, seeking ever "tighter and tighter control" over all facets of life (Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus). Capitalism's true police, "money and the market," have been normalized, with the goal that "the world market extends to the galaxy"; the only mode of thinking permitted might soon be, or already is, the "thought for the market" (223-235). Besides unleashing these forces, capitalism also undertakes a vast privatization of the body's organs, and "desire" in the widest sense of the term, as a set for the crucial micro-matrix of power and control. This complex assemblage bases itself, then, on the subject-object divide—it does not need to be rehearsed here the extent to which this structuration has affected the planet, both in terms of the destructive utilization of resources as well as the densely-configured hierarchies it has established. Fully implicated in the assemblage of capital will be the sciences, at least very powerful elements, which Deleuze will assess as forces that are "passive, reactive and negative."12 In other words, there exists an internal struggle within science, most especially as it deals with the forces of chaos. One perspective, which in many ways has held sway over the past centuries, has been dominated by a "religious taste for unity or unification;" in other words, this "passionate relationship with religion" on the part of science will manifest itself in "all the attempts at scientific uniformization and universalization in the search for a single law, a single force, or a single interaction" (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 125 & 206). One can see this played out in a number of spheres, from the Big Bang, to linear evolution, to the attempt at a Grand Unified Theory. For Deleuze, the emphasis in science needs to shift from "equilibrium attractors" which abet this undue process of unification, to "strange attractors" which undermine any attempt at closure, or any appeal to a single determinate ideal. Most importantly, the sciences, like philosophy and art, must "include an I do not know that has become positive and creative, the condition of creation itself, and that consists in determining by what one does not know" (128). So, how does one address the question James Wiltgen 223 "(w)hat would a truly active science be like?;" per Deleuze it would involve "discovering active forces and also recognizing reactive forces for what they are—forces."13 Science, in conjunction with critical thought and art, must, in their pursuit of functions, concepts, and sensations, maintain an internal stance of openness, of the inability to know conclusively, or control totally, or unify completely the forces of the earth, of the cosmos, and of the chaotic. Becoming: In the Realm of Fluxes & Flows “In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities” —A Thousand Plateaus 190 While there will not be sufficient time to deal with all the myriad ramifications of the concept of becoming, it has been unleashed as a force, at least for a powerful tradition of thought, by the aforementioned "death" of God and of man. One of Deleuze's principle critiques of Kant concerns the fact that the latter, in attempting to be done with theology, sought to replace it with a type of anthropology: in other words, "by putting man in God's place" Kant utterly failed at breaking the grip of reactive forces and the attendant will to nothingness. With Nietzsche, an entirely different sense of energy has been set into motion, one capable of ungrounding traditional categories and concepts, and challenging, among other precepts, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Further, "(b)ecoming is involutionary, involution is creative:" with involution "form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds," providing a critique of any positivist evolution in favor of "(a) strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and contagion-proliferation-involution" (A Thousand Plateaus, 267-269; as an example, see Blek le raton). This machinic formation operates on the borders, boundaries, interstices, and gaps of existence. In another register, The Logic of Sense begins with the "First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming," where regarding the past and the future the definition of becoming will be "to move and pull in both directions at once"—in other words, both descent and ascent simultaneously (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 1). As has been already addressed, the crucial facet for a genealogical analysis will be to determine which forces dominate and in what ways they function. In a well-know section of A Thousand Plateaus, "1730: Becoming-Intense, BecomingAnimal, Becoming-Imperceptible…" the authors, utilizing a "worldwide intensity map," point toward the various strata of "becoming-other" including that of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and finally 224 Political Ecology and Bio Art becoming-imperceptible. These forces of the "anorganic," the "asignifying," and the "asubjective" induce perplexity, and the option of affirmation will be the act of questioning.14 Looking at the epigraph of this section, the question arises as to what might these "inhumanities" be? For Deleuze, they exist as part of "the links between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality," in zones and strata, in speeds and slownesses, as part of the processes of the continual composition of existence in the "post-man" epoch (A Thousand Plateaus, 280). He will juxtapose the idea of the "too-human" with that of "the inhuman and the superhuman – a thing, an animal or a god," as other poles of existence, other modes in which the human interacts at a fundamental level, traversing in a heterogeneous series from the molecular to the cosmic (Nietzsche and Philosophy 79). In The Logic of Sense Deleuze will cite Nietzsche, who having freed himself from the power of Schopenhauer and Wagner "explored a world of impersonal and preindividual singularities…a free and unbound energy." Further, "(t)hese are nomadic singularities which are no longer imprisoned within the fixed individuality of the infinite Being (the notorious immutability of God), nor inside the sedentary boundaries of the finite subject (the notorious limits of knowledge)" (The Logic of Sense 107). We have become, and are in the process of becoming, monsters, new forms of existence, strange mixtures of human and nonhuman elements: "(t)he forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier" (Deleuze Foucault 131132). Aesthetics, and by extension politics, moves from any sense of "truth" to an overarching frisson with the dynamics of mixing, mixtures and the impure: "(o)ne speaks always of bodies and their mixtures." Brut Art “Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other” —Elizabeth Grosz Chaos, Territory, Art 23 How, then, might these analyses impact aesthetics and artistic production, crucial elements in conceptualizing the issues involved in the construction of the world? In What is Philosophy? Deleuze will argue that in creating affects via their métier artists, responding to the ungrounding power of becoming, create zones where "living beings whirl about," where "we no longer know which is animal and which is human" (What is Philosophy? 73). Art confronts the forces outside the domain of the "human," where James Wiltgen 225 everything will be a question of "sensory becoming," energies of chaos and the cosmos that cannot be readily assimilated into current conceptual structures. This requires an openness to "inhumanities," to the unthought in all aspects of existence; it challenges the imagination at the most fundamental and elemental levels. Indeed, "(p)erhaps art begins with the animal," and before that, in "the primitive swamps of life;" difference and becoming-other must be thought simultaneously with the human, with art (173 & 177). Most forcefully, this creates "a vast plane of composition that is not abstractly preconceived but constructed as the work progresses, opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds in accordance with the penetration of cosmic forces"; what the authors call a "planomenon." Succinctly, "(c)omposition, composition is the sole definition of art" and "(c)omposition is aesthetic;" the task of this composition for art will be to "create the finite that restores the infinite," and Paul Klee's painting "Equals Infinity" forms a cogent example of this for Deleuze's analysis (188-197). The infinite here provides the force of becoming as it taps into the energy of the planet and beyond, stretching outward and inward to encompass forces that have as yet to be conceived, sensed, or analyzed. "(A)rt, science, and philosophy…cast planes over the chaos;" they tear open, slit the umbrella (of transcendence), and plunge us into the maelstrom, into pure chance, to "let in a bit of free and windy chaos" (202203). Chaos, like the infinite, will be the force of the unthought, the outside wherein reside energies, actants, monsters, all of which pose both risks and promises to the continuing and perpetual construction of the human. In response to this current moment aesthetics and epistemology have two areas of tension: the first will be the "struggle against chaos," as the unlimited energy of the multiverse; and the second as "the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself."15 The key for artists and thinkers will be "the leap that leads them from chaos to composition" in the first place; the second challenge, in some ways as daunting as the first, will be to cut through the vast layering of clichés, opinion and doxa that encrust all language, objects, and concepts. This confrontation with chaos and clichés has, finally, a political valence, based on the idea that the "the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing;" that given the power of capitalism and its methods of capture humanity has "disappeared."16 Forces of chaos can compel art, philosophy and science, if affirmatively engaged, to dispel clichés, doxa, and opinion, with the project of "people to come" and "the creation of a future new earth." One must be very careful here not to rush to any "utopian" thinking, or to fold to soon—the triumph of active forces would 226 Political Ecology and Bio Art be better suited to create the conditions for an earth linked to the forces of chaos and the emergence of an abstract and recombinant humanity—not a former people, nor the masses, and certainly not the Volk, but a new mixture of different elements of the human, the inhuman, the subhuman, and perhaps even the superhuman. New groups and groupings who will enjoy more freedom and autonomy from the vast repressive apparatus now in place, and who have challenged the received wisdom, tradition, and contemporary structures; not simply as total rejection but in the powerful crucible of composition. Call it quasi-topian thinking. From the Mode of Production to the Mode of Connection “The modern world is that in which information has replaced nature” —Deleuze, Cinema 2, 269 How does Deleuze think the concept of nature as it has been constructed by a certain reading of modernity? Beginning with at least Anti-Oedipus, one could raise doubts about the integrity of the concept, as the focus in this book will be on germinal flows, a molecular unconscious, and forces from the outside. Nature, then, will be understood "as a process of production," that "everything is production;" further, the authors argue "we make no distinction between man and nature."17 Then, in one of the most sustained examinations of the concept, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze analyzes "Lucretius And The Simulacrum," where "(n)ature will be thought of as the principle of the diverse and its production," as both plenitude and void, "not collective, but rather distributive"; it is, most particularly, "power." It will resist any attempt at being conceptualized as "Being, the One, the Whole" (The Logic of Sense 266-267). In both these works former boundaries and borders have been subjected to a serious process of questioning as a means of displacing clichés and methods of power and control. In other words, at the very least the analysis will seek to undermine a pervasive sense of the term nature, generated in part by the forces of capitalism qua utility, one that defined it as passive and inert, and as the ultimate receptacle/object/repository for the colonization of the lifeworld by the forces of discipline and control. In response to the epigraph above, the task for critical thought, for art, and for science will be to "go beyond information"; how, certainly, becomes of primary importance (Cinema-2 269). For Deleuze a crucial respond to the threat posed above will be via issues of connection, of the ways in which links can be constructed using new protocols of creativity and affirmation—in many ways from the mode James Wiltgen 227 of production to connectivity. This centrality of the "mode of connection," then, "provides the means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the homogeneous surfaces that overlay smooth space, and neutralizing the lines of death and destruction" (A Thousand Plateaus 208). Connectivity and heterogeneity will provide the primary location of artistic and political processes, and form the focus of critical thinking. How can decision and action be addressed in this hyper-complex configuration? Deleuze will use what might be termed a Spinozian ethics to argue for "that which increases the number of connections at each level of division or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending order." Indeed, we do not yet know what a "body can do," and what connections can be created (508 & 257). In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza he argues that nature has become expressive, it is now "the object that expresses itself, the thing itself that explicates itself." Further, nature has no telos, there exists no finality; and the question of ethics resides in the ability to affect, via the joyful passions, and in turn be affected by those same passions (Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza 269 & 316-320). At the end of A Thousand Plateaus the analysis will focus on the ways in which "bodies without organs connect" and how "the continuum of intensity is extended"; succinctly, "(t)he question is, therefore, the mode of connection between the different parts of the plane" (507). Art, philosophy, and science generate the conditions for connectivity: "(t)he productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature" (Anti-Oedipus 5). The concept of nature has shifted to one of forces and energy, and the aesthetic and political imperative will be to analyze those elements, connect the active, affirmative forces and disconnect those that are negative and reactive. Techno-crats “The sublime or higher man subdues monsters, poses riddles, but knows nothing of the riddle and monster that he himself is” —Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 100 At least two major crises drive the recent work of Bruno Latour, and not surprisingly they intertwine in what might be termed a type of spiral. The first involves the dramatic increase in the number of hybrids, monsters, and new actants about in the world; the specific problem concerns the fact that "if we can no longer separate the work of proliferation from the work of purification" how do we control this continuing explosion of new forms (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 67)? In other words, 228 Political Ecology and Bio Art purification has been the mode of "judging" for many centuries, judging with a hard and remarkably consistent type of exclusion; perhaps, however, the reign of this conceptual apparatus nears its end. Science, charged as one of the key arbiters in these matters of judging and exclusion, now faces severe problems in evaluating and controlling new petitioners, as the appeal to the former modes of true and false has been put into serious question. Indeed, the very formation of what Latour terms Science functions as a crucial element of the expanding problems: "Science…make(s) public life impotent by bringing to bear on it the threat of salvation by an already unified nature" (Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature, 245). More tellingly in terms of a certain approach to politics, especially regarding previous categories of thought as well as notions of "radical democratic" processes "(t)he new hybrid remains a nonhuman, but not only has it lost its material and objective character, it has acquired properties of citizenship" (249). New petitioners have emerged demanding different approaches and challenging the political and aesthetic structures that have ruled for a very long time. The other crisis, which forms arguably the central issue of Latour's book Politics of Nature, would be the crisis of objectivity, or the increasing difficulties, or perhaps the irrelevance, of that very endemic and seemingly pervasive subject-object divide (20). Succinctly, the subject-object divide proscribes exchange and prevents the processes of intensified mixing; it also controls the borders and boundaries, producing a certain type of proliferation, but only as a means of increasing power and saturation. Latour rehearses here crucial elements of a type of poststructuralist analysis: the necessity of humanity to exit the Cave and dissolve a certain Platonic approach that founds everything on the basis of a fundamental, and at this point ossified binary logic; by a critique of representation based on the premise that it has been organized by this mode of binary thought; and a detailed interrogation of the basic principles underpinning this type of thinking (We Have Never Been Modern 67). The subject-object divide, generating the overarching structures of subjectivity & objectivity, rests upon the most polemic and rigid of positions, utilizing a conceptualization of nature as that of an "unjustified process of unification of public life," propelled by a system of control with very aggressive categories, based on two distinct and separated realms, and designed to compel "the human assemblage to submit to a permanent threat of salvation by Science" (The Politics of Nature 245, 45, & 57). This "nature," formed in the Cave and property of what Latour calls the Old Regime, rests upon a singular dimension manifest in a powerful ordering, which produces not a collective but a "bicarmelism," a duality comprised of the "Heaven of James Wiltgen 229 Ideas" on one hand and "the prison of the social sphere on the other" (238). However, this insistence on a type of immanence can be very dangerous, as it creates a variety of paths that could lead toward totalizing formations. For example, in championing political ecology as the solution to the problems of the world, and as a powerful critique of any attempt to "totalize the hierarchy of beings" Latour will argue for the necessity of convoking "a single collective whose role is precisely to debate the said hierarchy"; and again, "(p)olitical ecology proposes to move the role of unifier of the respective ranks of all beings out of the dual arena of nature and politics and into the single arena of the collective" (29-30). For whatever salutary reasons the dissolving of this dualism might be proposed, the necessity of "a single collective," a type of totalizing gesture, would seem premature at best; as a question of emphasis this appears like an unjustified unification, an undue simplification. Too much work needs to be done, and thought, before a single anything should be proclaimed. Latour argues that the concept of nature, at least how it has been thought and enforced for a very long time, particularly in the West, should be jettisoned from political and pragmatic thinking. In other words: Thank God nature is going to die. Yes, the great Pan is dead. After the death of God and the death of man, nature, too, had to give up the ghost. It was time: we were about to be unable to engage in politics any more at all. (25-26) This does not mean some type of "disappearance" of the world outside and within humans into a kind of absolute relativism: like so much of the more sophisticated critical work at this time, a careful attention to context and nuance will provide the sense in which this rather dramatic assertion functions. In a word, the ‘"nature" Latour seeks to question, and to dissipate, involves the stark imposition of "the hierarchy of beings in a single ordered series;" the assemblage driven by a subject/object logic which create the conditions for a rampant intrumentalization (25). Here, modernism and the moderns will be equated with this conceptual lattice, and as "discovering an indisputable and atemporal nature;" a central problem, then, concerns what it means, in modern terms, "to naturalize" (25). What engenders such a destructive stance toward the world from this cultural and political complex, which seems capable of "unduly extending the reign of Science to other domains," as well as "paralyzing politics" (192 & 245). At some level the stakes of this debate involve the organization of the world, as well as the possibility of politics as Latour would define it. This "end of nature," then, would also be the "end of a 230 Political Ecology and Bio Art certain type of scientific certainty about nature," and it should open up an era of uncertainty, of a radical questioning of the world and the prevailing modes of cognition (245 & 63). Yet, who will do this questioning, and will only "scientific certainty" be at an end? Again, who will control this process? What do artists, or critical thinkers have to say? Will the collective bring about certainty as a foundational moment? Latour has a term for the discipline and control exercised by the concept nature as it has been developed over a number of centuries: "mononaturalism," a type of Market/Statist thought seeking both to saturate and to bind, abetted by an insidious method of homogenization and passiveness (33 & 48). The key problem will be a type of closure, or a closing off, which attempts to subsume everything into the One, or the Same, or a highly structured realm of Ideas. By way of a critique of this type of timely folding into oblivion Latour will offer a number of modalities: "prematurely unified nature," as "simplifying the situation too quickly," and as "an unjustified process of unification" (245 & 219). In a word, this sense of transcendence, of which nature serves as symptom, mandates a line of abolition which will destroy everything that does not serve directly the imperative of a unified method of (a) single thought. Here, difference and a certain approach to the outside have not been foreclosed as much as hijacked by a densely articulated power coefficient, covered over by a canopy that has a very belligerent and dominant praxis. Mononaturalism as an assemblage, as a component of modernity, will then both bring forth and permit the idea of multiculturalism, with a privileging of "difference" contoured so as to be recuperable by the forces of capitalism and capture in a nearly seamless and instantaneous manner (249). What Latour proposes to replace, or better displace the hierarchic schema of nature will be the concept of "political ecology." Once again, the analysis of profound contemporary issues seems cogent enough, but as has been stated earlier, he risks dissolving one type of transcendence only to replace it with another form of totalizing. Is it time to declare a new common dwelling, an oikos, and to restore the idea of Plato's cosmos, as a well-formed collective?19 He might be folding too soon. From "Nature" to Political Ecology On the first page of The Politics of Nature Latour speaks of political ecology by echoing Lenin's oft-remarked line "what is to be done?" What is to be done after politics has been "uncoupled" from nature and all it implies, freed from a series of parameters and paradigms? After a critique of the ways in which the current sense of political ecology has been James Wiltgen 231 misshapen, Latour's position will be that the "political chessboard" must be seriously reconfigured. His purpose here involves a move from the realm of a rigid transcendence to another formation, one whose "foundational" moment involves the collective composition of the world. This collective composition might mean a process with no stable or ultimate end, a perpetual questioning of the borders and boundaries of life, a-life, semi-life, quasi-life, almost-life, etc. The collective per se does not refer to something pre-established, as with the dominant form of transcendence, but with "a procedure for collecting associations of humans and nonhumans" (238). Political ecology functions, then, as a conceptual and political assemblage whose approach will be "to welcome nonhumans" into the collective via "due process;" further, that "humans no longer engage in their politics without nonhumans" (226). A type of exteriority would exist, perhaps not as determinate transcendence but as the temporal and spatial zones of all those elements included under a variety of different-than-human classifications, including subhuman, nonhuman, inhuman, superhuman, a-human, etc. Once again, Latour skates very close to a notion of immanence, of the single collective, which would naturalize all political thought and action. Further, this collective will be gathered as well as collected via a notion of justice embedded in the phrase "due process;" the basic premise that pulls together this formation functions "by offering the production of the common world the equivalent of a state of law" (240). In other words, per the creation of a new constitution for governance, the goal will be to "achieve a common world through due process." Achieving a common world via a state of law and due process: what would that be? Perhaps it might be time to consult Kafka. Latour seeks to effect a substantive shift in the concept of transcendence, basically undermining and putting under erasure the old approach to metaphysics, where a unifying force held sway; and of critiquing multiple modes, from purification to translation, which functioned in the service of a foundational sense of Sameness. Rather than a formation of first principles, the emphasis here will be the manner in which boundaries are drawn, policed and enforced, perhaps not a complicity with foundations but a fidelity to composition. There would appear to be a concerted effort not to replace this transcendence by a sense of immanence, as there exists "no prison of immanence either;" and even more emphatically, there is "no immanence, only networks."20 Latour seeks to dislodge what he terms the "incontestable transcendence" by "a new type of externality;" yet, this "new exteriority" would seem to involve a type of outside, or at least a new definition of the outside" (38 & 121- 232 Political Ecology and Bio Art 127). However, precisely on this point the issues of ambiguity and confusion resurface: while transcendence, moral law and the Sovereign have been swept aside by the new Constitution, in the end "(w)hen we look outside we see a whole still to be composed." And, "no moral principle is superior to the procedure of progressive composition" (126 & 124). Then, further complicating the notion of what type of outside this might be, Latour presents a chart that argues for a "Collective without outside resource;" an "objective external reality" does exist, but there seems no reason for a "big fuss" about it (37-38). Basically, transcendence has been transformed into an outside, what might be a laudable movement, one Deleuze would applaud, but then the outside, in a second movement, will become the "externalization" of the collective. By a convoluted route immanence returns, a single collective reigns. While Latour argues that Heraclitus should be more important that Heidegger, it would seem that in crucial ways he remains closer to Heidegger, and that the composition of the collective could be taken as an answer to the question of Being. In another interesting maneuver, Latour will take the notion of the pluriverse, developed by William James, as the basis for a questioning of the collective: We can start from nature, not in order to move toward the human element, but—by making a ninety-degree turn—to move toward the multiplicity of nature, redistributed by the sciences—something that might be called the pluriverse…to mark the distinction between the notion of external reality and the properly political work of unification…instead of going back and forth between nature and the human, between realism and constructivism, we can now go from the multiplicity that no collective yet collects, the pluriverse, to the collective which up to now was gathering that multiplicity under the combined names of politics and nature. (40) The pluriverse will be in contradistinction to the "'uni-verse'" which will be criticized because "unification has come about without due process." This begs a fundamental question: could unification take place with due process? It will be precisely this type of confusion in Latour's analysis that opens his entire project to serious questions. An Age of Aquarius? In seeking these seemingly vast changes how can those potential dangers be addressed? Once again, a high degree of ambiguity obtains, mortal threats might exist yet they seem to be dissipated as the dangerous appellants gain admission to the collective. Certainly, in this emerging James Wiltgen 233 world there would be "no peace nor the absence of war" (226). At the very least the set of dangers involve the shift away from an assemblage controlled by a quasi-incontestable transcendence, a singularized nature, a powerfully articulated separation between the subject and the object, the drive to purification, lethal border patrols, and the intensification of current societal and genetic patterns. Added to these dangers would be the difficulty in the articulation of a new position capable of focusing on the problems generated by the Old Regime, which has produced the current, very de-formed societal configuration. In one of his strongest political analyses, Latour links modernity and imperialism, arguing that those who followed these practices "declared they depended on no one; indebted to the entire universe, they thought they were free of any liaison" (192). This (anti)assemblage, then, has short-circuited politics, neutralized radical democracy and prevented, most importantly, efforts at composing a collective which welcomes the nonhuman into the process of creating a common world, indeed a cosmos. As again, Latour calls for the abandonment of a certain type of dualism based on this thinking, of discarding the two house structure created therein via a dramatic shift in the use of language and classification: "the name of the game is…to avoid using the subject-object distinction at all in order to talk about the folding of humans and nonhumans."21 Yet, as has been argued, this devolves far too easily into a type of immanence that may well not have the sustaining power to resist forces of totalization, and of an unjust, unjustified unification. Here a competent schizoanalysis seems warranted. Ambiguities, not paradoxes, multiply: on the one hand, when the concept of mononaturalism is jettisoned "political ecology…is only beginning to understand what wars it has to fight and what enemies it has to learn to designate" (The Politics of Nature 219). In another of his more trenchant political critiques Latour laments the rise of a globalization which he equates with the "disappearance of everything external to the human world;" and, linked to a certain type of totalitarianism which exhibits a similar methodology, they both have ruthlessly "reduced the number of concerned parties" by eliminating species, land, and other elements of the planet in the name of an unjustified simplification, of a seemingly unchecked rapaciousness.22 These constitute the effective dangers existent as "a threat of pacification worse than the evil it was fighting;" we have never left the Hobbesian state of war.23 Yet, he maintains an interestingly confident stance with regards to the possible contours of these dangers: there will be no "brutal rupture" nor big conversion, no violent shift. At another point he seems clear on the dangers of the war of the worlds, but also, in the next paragraph, fairly 234 Political Ecology and Bio Art sanguine about the possibilities of change, where "humans and nonhumans finally assembled according to due process," as "nothing proves that these externalized entities will always remain outside the collective" (218-219 & 124). He will then criticize the current regime of globalization—a laudatory endeavor—but because "nothing is less univeralizable" than this process; so, why this thinking of something which could be universalized? If the subject/object should be undermined, if the current definition of nature should be expunged, why would a notion of the "universal" not be another term that critical thinking should be extremely wary of using? As always, he will provide the requisite ambiguity, because "(t)he universal is neither behind nor above nor below, but ahead;" the question again will be at this moment does this "promise" of the universal need to be made, does it not have a whiff of the ontotheological, of religious transcendence to it? The real danger for Latour will be the danger those external to the collective pose in their clamor to be admitted—this might signal a mortal threat, yet ultimately it will be a matter for due process. Once political ecology has repositioned the chessboard the principle danger will be from those demanding entrance to the collective, not fire from the skies, and "no Apocalypse to fear" (192). If these entities want in, how much danger will they pose? Here, one might wonder what happened to ressentiment and bad conscience? Did they disappear, along with the old Constitution? Abundance, and Difference In what ways might Latour's ideas contribute to a new social formation, a new democracy if you will, a democracy extended to nonhumans, to "things"? The political theorist Jane Bennett thinks his work very important for a different approach to the political, with its acknowledgment of a "self-organizing power" on the part of the collective, capable of altering the demos in an originary manner (Jane Bennett “In the Parliament of Things” 143). Latour, in this analysis, partakes of a conceptual approach to the world Bennett sees as signifying a sense of "abundance," as opposed to another political thinker, Jacques Rancière, who she argues analyzes the world more in terms of a constitutive "lack." Briefly, for Bennett, the notion of an "ontological imaginary of lack" posits a "non-symbolisable lack" at the heart of difference, and has been most closely associated with the work of Jacques Lacan; an "ontological of abundance" would be that theoretical stance which "emphasizes networks of materiality, flows of energy, processes of becoming and experimenting modes of affirmation," and the most important thinker in this vein would be Deleuze (2-4). However, a strong argument can be made that Deleuze's James Wiltgen 235 notion of abundance must be thought simultaneously with his concept of difference, otherwise a number daunting of problems emerge, not the least of which would be a tendency toward monism and the myriad dangers of unification, whether premature or not. Continuing, Bennett argues that in posing the question of the ‘we?' the key element of change will be the realization of "humans as materialities inextricably mixed with nonhuman entities and forces," and "the relationship between human and nonhuman members of the demos is close" (137 & 143). Radical democracy in this approach consists in acknowledging the enmeshed materiality and carefully, using a sense of due process, adding more and more to the collective, all the while working the borders and boundaries with the most sophisticated processes of questioning and evaluation possible. In formal terms, "from mixed to still more mixed."24 Very salutary at some level, yet again one must be extremely careful in the ways that limits are drawn: for Deleuze this happens via the perpetual form of difference, which cannot, by definition, be fully sutured. In furthering this sense of the political and of a type of democracy per Bennett, Latour's work might be termed a form of negentrophy, seeking to combat a certain sense of inevitable decline into decadence with the idea of increasing complexity based on an enlarged collective. In his attempt to both "disinvent" and "pardon" the modern experiment this analysis seeks to fundamentally alter the notion of time: after a brisk critique of the "arrow of the moderns" which depended upon "the end of history," Latour adds to Mark Twain's certainty of only two things—death and taxes—a third element, as "tomorrow, the collective will be more intricate than it was yesterday."25 After being banished earlier, certainty returns. Continuing, there exist at least "two arrows of time": political ecology must "attack in full awareness" the "atemporal" machinery of the moderns, which bases itself on "the classic relations between subject and object," and their certainty of being able to "pry the established facts more decisively away from their matrix of desires and human fantasies" by means of the judgment of Science (Politics of Nature 192 & 188-189). Yet, Latour seems precariously close to a type of positivism, or functionalism, as those desires and fantasies might be circumvented by the arbiters of due process as they establish the institutions of the collective. Further, by "experimentation, by making morality a path of trials," political ecology evades the problems of theoretical ecology; again, why morality? Shouldn't morality be put to a severe questioning? Time, for Latour then, points in the direction of more complexity, more interaction, and an increased density in the vast networks of collective life. However, the key debate, still unresolved, would be whether this had an end point, 236 Political Ecology and Bio Art and if the goal would be the full integration of all those entities demanding admission to the collective. One might hope that the process would be, indeed, unendlichkeit, unending. Cosmos v. Chaosmos One last shift, and it might well be back to a certain reading of the Greeks, their sense of a "cosmos," and the argument that "all collectives, like Frankenstein's creature, are born deformed," and "only the trajectory of the experiment gives them a civil form" (198). In seeking to uncouple the connection between nature and politics, Latour will argue that "(n)ever, since the Greeks' earliest discussions on the excellence of public life, have people spoken about politics without speaking of nature" (28). He will use the definition of Isabelle Stengers, as well as the Greeks, for cosmos: as a "'harmony,'" a certain equilibrium that heralds the possibility of a "good common world" (237-238). The forces propelling the composition of the life-world would not be elements of chaos, which would have vast elements that defy control, or even conceptualization.26 The "progressive composition of the cosmos," would be based on an aesthetic of proportion and form, on an internalization of the external appellants, of a studied equilibrium--and once more the analysis offers a perplexing ambiguity: these institutions would not be constructed "once and for all," yet the principles for the construction of these institutions will be found, "at the end of the process" (Politics of Nature 90). Foundations do exist, we must be patient and they will ultimately materialize in the composition of the cosmos. Deleuze would seem to understand the Greeks in a different manner: rather than the construction of the cosmos as the operative idea, a confrontation with the forces of chaos will demand of art, philosophy and science their primary efforts. In other words, "what would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?;" and decision "slices the chaos" (What is Philosophy? 208 & 160). This chaos will not be seen as a threat but as "most positive," as "infinite speeds of birth and disappearance" from which our plane of consistency will be composed. By cutting, folding, and slicing, the various activities of art, philosophy, and science compose chaos, producing what Deleuze will call the "Chaosmos."27 For him thought continually vibrates, from chaos to cosmos and back; for Latour, it seems that the cosmos will be created by the move from the pluriverse to the collective, or better the collective slowing, and gradually internalizing, the new exteriority. These approaches obviously have important James Wiltgen 237 implications for thinking and for creativity, and will be explored briefly below in the form of an intriguing set of artistic practices. Transgenic Aesthetic “The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic” —A Thousand Plateaus 280 “Why hasn't the breeding of animals, still principally an economic concern, moved into the field of aesthetics?”28 So, two positions, two types of political composition. In both Deleuze and Latour these elements are present, but the question will be that of emphasis. The position of this essay has been that far too much work needs to be done before a new constitution can be proposed, before a type of due process can be put into place. Too many clichés, too much bad opinion, too many micro-complicities. For artists, and philosophers, and scientists no return to the Greeks can happen: they can certainly infuse and provoke debate, but we are on our own in a profound sense. The theme of radical democracy, especially as it applies to the current relationship between humans and the earth remains crucial, but the stress should be on the "radical." For artists, as for thinkers, one might argue for an uncompromising approach in their work, for the primacy of an encounter with the forces of chaos and difference. The following artists have been probing some of the issues raised by both Deleuze and Latour; the key will be to glean the most forceful and subversive elements from both theorists, and to put them into a complex loop between artistic practice and the thinking of aesthetics. The world abounds with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), as global corporations and the US military, predominately, conduct increasingly complex experiments on reordering and augmenting the materiality of the planet. Biodata from every corner of the globe has been subjected to processes of privatization and patenting; borders seem to proliferate and become more porous, while a powerful counter-tendency seeks to police those borders and boundaries with more invasive and controlling procedures. Commodification and relentless instrumentalization, driven by competition and profit, control many of these forces. The very molecular substratum of life and matter has been subjected to continual probing, surveillance, and manipulation, in what seems to be a very destructive, and even monomaniacal manner. These groups, abetted by powerful Nation-States which have been rapidly morphing into MarketStates, fund the labs, set the rules, and determine the composition, 238 Political Ecology and Bio Art however misshapen, of society. In response, activists such as Vandana Shiva and Eric Chivian demand a different relation to the material world, calling for an end to such practices as biopiracy, and advocating the protection and enhancement of the world's biodiversity. In a striking measure of the stakes involved, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) has recently inaugurated the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in partnership with a series of private donors and the Norwegian government, storing millions of seeds from around the world in a vault deep in the Artic, as a means of protecting the genetic richness and biodiversity of the planet from all manner of threat. It has also been called "The Doomsday Seed Vault." At another level, a group of artists and thinkers has been raising a series of questions—aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical—regarding the proliferation of genetic manipulation and the explosion of GMOs around the world. Manipulation of crops can be traced to at least the beginnings of agriculture, yet the pace and scope of the changes occurring at this moment seem to have increased dramatically. An exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, mounted in 2008, entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," featured what one pundit noted were "bioengineered crossbreeds, temperamental robots, and spermatozoa imprinted with secret texts" (www.moma.org). In one of the most astute books dealing with these issues, Eduardo Kac has assembled a striking amalgamation of writings on various aspects of bio art, called Signs of Life. Kac, himself an artist noted for his work with transgenesis, speaks of the new technologies that "will bring humans into the world through novel methods" including oocyte fusion, haploidization and human cloning (Signs of Life 86). Laying out a history of some of these processes, he argues for a careful thinking of the "life continuum" and the links and connections between humans and nonhumans.30 Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the Tissue Culture & Art Project explicitly seek to challenge the primacy of corporate agribusiness and the various military machines around the world that seek to dominate the sphere of bio-processes, what Louis Bec calls "bio-logic." Introducing what they term "semi-living" entities into the continuum of life, these artists have been taking experiments in genetic manipulation out of the laboratory, where they have been developed under the aegis of profit and conflict, and inserting them into aesthetic and political debates. Bernard Andrieu asks the question "what tolerance do we have today for transplants?" as he chronicles the history of the chimera in its trajectory toward today's incarnation as the "transgenic chimera" (Andrieu “Embodying the Chimera" 64). Further, he argues "(g)iven that the body is no more James Wiltgen 239 natural, or at least that the individual and social representation of the body defines it as entirely cultural and technical, we can deconstruct and reconstruct the body endlessly" (67). There exist a number of problems with his approach, which cannot be addressed here: however, his use of Francisco Varela's work and his questioning of the issues involved in humanity's experiments on "shaping our bodies according to our wishes" raise some of the most complex and probing trends now unfolding, as does his sense that there will be no end to these processes. As another sign of the sweeping changes on the horizon, in May of 2008 the British Parliament "voted to allow the creation of hybrid embryos, which have a combination of human and animal DNA" (www.guardian.co.uk). Louis Bec, in Signs of Life, discusses the shift to "life art," and to the "fashioning" of "new forms, new species and new behaviors" ("Life Art" 84). An expert on his self-titled specialty "Technozoosemiotics," a discipline at the crossroads of "semiotics, ethology, cognitive science, technology, computer science, and artistic practice," his question will be "(w)hat conditions are necessary for technological objects of the almostliving to become part of our reality," a stark yet elegant formulation of many of the themes being discussed in this essay (87 & 91). A "basic hypothesis" of this hybrid practice will be that "all living beings are social beings and that they have to solve a characteristic set of communication problems that fit into a panoply of stimuli and common or approximate response" (87). Bec will put forward a "biocryptographic aesthetics," based upon a sense of the "transgenic" and transgenic art which provides "a dimension of endogenous abnormality, a hidden dimension that divulges the underling pressure of degrading and impure procedures that engendered it" (86). The operative words here—abnormality, degrading and impure—signal a range of questions/problems, all of which probe the "cultural foundations" of the world, the human, and the other-thanhuman.31 As example of this, Bec points to a project headed by the scientist Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi, entitled "Half Fish/Half Robot," a "strange hybrid creature with a mechanical body controlled by the brain of a fish;" what does one make of this, a type of "technofacturing," fusing "living matter and machine" and compressing over 350 million years of "evolution" into a contemporary transgenic hybrid ("Life Art" 87 & 91)? Via the "art of manipulating processes" defined as "transgression, exploration, and auto-transformation" Bec means to provoke and produce discussion and argumentation, "a truly democratic debate about technological culture and biotechnology" (84). Artists have joined the debates about the fundamental relations between the human and the nonhuman, as well as the materiality of the planet, in 240 Political Ecology and Bio Art terms of provocative interventions as will as probative questions. They have brought crucial experimentation from the laboratories to the galleries and to the street, and are forcing critical thought about these complex issues. The correlations with the work of Deleuze and Latour should be evident, both in terms of form and in terms of content; the implications for thinking in a different way humanity's relations with the earth are clearly at stake. Succinctly, what will be the emphasis: the encounter with chaos and "infinite movement," or due process and a new Consitiution? Will these works produce creative change, or will they become curios for the very wealthy? Time, or better the untimely, will perhaps tell. Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 225. After Watergate, the chief analysis produced by the government was the Church Committee; after five years of investigation, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of the US Congress released, on 6.05.08, its report on the ways the US administration repeatedly overstated the threats to the US from Iraq: it was chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. For lack of time, this essay will conjoin the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari at pivotal moments—the separation of their thought would require a different study. 2 Splitting has a number of current uses: the Chinese continue to refer to the Dalai Lama as a "splittist" for his supposed desire to remove Tibet from Chinese rule; Newsweek magazine recently had a cover story about divorce, entitled "Splitsville;" and the Large Hadron Collider, situated on the French-Swiss border, will soon begin operations, attempting to split subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light (a type of "time-machine" close to where Nietzsche first had the flash of the “eternal recurrence" at Sils-Maria). Political, sociological, and technological splitting in other words: this essay concerns what might be called a "post-ontotheological" splitting. Finally, see Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art, where she combined the work of Deleuze and Guattari with that of Luce Irigaray. 3 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 55. Also, ibid. 46-47 for Nietzsche's fidelity to Heraclitus, but with a twist. 4 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 146. Another possible tetragon would be a crystal (anorganic)/seed (organic) dyad folded into a series of "differences" and “repetitions." 5 Other workings of this asymmetry will be chaos and cosmos, and nonsense and sense. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 64. Here might be offered, in the face of the ungrouding power of difference, a paraphrase of the authors take on Bergson: "difference (instead of duration) needs a runner" (quotation altered). In other words, following the work of Gilbert Simondon, difference, chaos, etc., all James Wiltgen 241 reciprocally presuppose "individuation," an actor/agency, as composer of the chaos. 6 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 61-65. See also Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81, where he addresses this different type of time "non-chronological time, Cronos not Chronos…the powerful, nonorganic Life which grips the world." 7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 64-67. Heidegger's Not refers…"not to negation but to questioning;" however, Deleuze will trenchantly critique Heidegger's dismissal of Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence. 8 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), 88. Also, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 280, to faire un monde. Deleuze and Guattari induce ambiguity at certain points, especially regarding the future contours of existence: the argument here is that any stable notion of a people to come, or the new earth, or to make a world will be perpetually undermined by the force of chaos, and the paradox of irreducible multiplicities. Finally, Bergson's concept of the “pure past" wll be abstract and chaotic, complicating any simple notion of immanence or monism. 9 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 9. For example, Moby Dick and Mrs. Dalloway signal important forces at the border. Also, see the provocatively titled film La Frontera Infinita, The Infinite Border (2007), about Central Americans crossing Mexico headed to the United States; certainly powerfully exclusionary borders exist within the human amalgamation as well as between humans and non-humans. One of the most pressing problems of the world is how to treat the billion to two billion poor, and how to alter the global developmental model so the resource base does not receive lethal damage, if it hasn't already been so affected. 10 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 146 & 193-194. See also xx-xxi, 13, & 23 for "difference without negation." For the unthought, see of course the work of Foucault in The Order of Things, 322-338. 11 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, x. See also the work of Sande Cohen, especially Passive Nihilism, as well as his essay "Reading Science Studies Writing," in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 12 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 73. This section is a very powerful reading, by Deleuze, of Nietzsche's critique of "Sciences of Man." 13 Ibid. 75. Active science would use three modalities—a symptomatology, a typology, and a genealogy. 14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 279. It will be important to note that becoming-other here is very different from the conceptualization of otherness. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 203, italics in the original. Also, see Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, 68, where he argues Nietzsche thought that chaos and the eternal recurrence "are not two different things." In the film Youth Without Youth, as Dominic is hit by lightning, his umbrella bursts into flames. 16 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 216, italics in the original. Also, see What is Philosophy?, 88, 99, 108, & 218. 242 17 Political Ecology and Bio Art Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 4. See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, where she problematizes the notion of nature by "alluding to the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer" (3). 19 Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature, 180-183. The title of this section is "The Common Dwelling, the Oikos"—even though Latour says that Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger, this section has a number of echoes of Heidegger. 20 Ibid. 219 & Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 128. The implications here are for the crucial importance of connectivity. 21 Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 193-194 It is worth noting that this book is dedicated to, among others, Donna Haraway. 22 Latour, The Politics of Nature, 58 & 220; "this stark reduction of accepted categories"—this relentless elimination of species around the planet, which seems to be accelerating: how far will the human species go with this? 23 Ibid. 224. Latour will single out Carl Schmitt as someone who "makes the error of completely forgetting nonhumans" (282). Latour also says that the exterior is not a nature, but an otherness—as has already been argued, this is not a conceptualization Deleuze uses. 24 Latour, The Politics of Nature, 191; and "we don't know what an environment can do," an interesting reference to Spinoza's notion that we don't know what a body can do, 197. 25 Ibid. 193-194 & 192. See also Deleuze, Cinema 1, where he cites Buñuel's work as privileging repetition over entropy (133). 26 www.nytimes.com, 6.04.08, the section of "Science Times" with the headline "Dark, Perhaps Forever," about the possibility that certain elements of the universe will never be known. 27 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (299). Chaosmos will be the composition of chaos, the basis of philosophy, art, and science. All this takes place via the "will to power"—this term, for Deleuze, does not mean to master or control, but signifies creativity, and folding. The dyad will to power and the eternal recurrence, per Deleuze's reading of Heidegger, does not signal the culmination of metaphysics, but a profound subversion of it. 28 Vilém Flusser, "On Science," in Eduardo Kac, ed., Signs of Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 371. Flusser does seem to spend too much time on a type of Disney mentality: "who will be the Disney of the future…maybe a molecular biologist." 30 Kac, Signs of Life, 3-4. Kac will cite the importance of Lynn Margulis and her notion of the dynamics of "symbiosis and cooperation" in evolution, as much as "mutation and selection." 31 There are a number of films that deal with elements of these issues: see The Intruder and Trouble Every Day, by Claire Denis; The Planet of the Apes, where there was a whiff of interspecies coupling in the kiss between Taylor and Zira; and in The Island of Dr. Moreau, where the interspecies relations would seem definitely possible, especially between Montgomery and Fox Lady, although not without problems of power. James Wiltgen 243 Works Cited Bennett, Jane. "In Parliament With Things" in Radical Democracy: Between Abundance and Lack, Ed. Lasse Thomassen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Cohen, Sande. Passive Nihilism: Historiography and the Rhetorics of Scholarship (New York: St.Martin's, 1998). —. "Reading Science Studies Writing," The Science Studies Reader, Ed. Mario Biagioli (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). —. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). —. Cinema 2, The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). —. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). —. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990). —. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). —. "Review of Simondon (1966)." Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 12, “What is Materialism?" 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). —. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993). 244 Political Ecology and Bio Art —. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999). —. Politics of Nature: How to Bring The Sciences Into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Harvard Press, 2004). Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Websites: Seed Magazine. http://seedmagazine.com/ Tissue Culture & Art Project. http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/ Stelarc._http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/ GlobalCropDiversity.http://www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=21 Louise Bec. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/prolegomena/ (Bec) CRI, Xinhua News Agency. 10.04. http://www.china.org.cn/archive/2004-10/20/content_1109829.htm Blek. %20the%20Raton.%20blekmyvibe.free.fr/ DELEUZE AND GUATTARI: THE ANIMAL QUESTION KATHERINE E. YOUNG Environmental struggles have emerged as key contemporary political issues, driving the development of a vibrant sub-genre of political thought, environmental political theory. Notably, animal rights have materialized as a valuable subset of this genre. How do animal rights scholars and activists frame their arguments? Generally, they take two routes, which mirror the theoretical underpinning of Western juridical systems: (1) we have an a priori obligation to uphold the natural rights of animals not to be harmed (deontology), or (2) animal rights are created by the law to maximize social happiness for all sentient beings (utilitarianism). Both force animals into the ethical-political space traditionally set aside for humans, pushing rights talk to its limits by forcing us to question why we value the interests of humans over those of animals. However, by relying on the very structures—law, morality, science—from which they wish to liberate animals, in order to free them, animal rights scholars find themselves in the uncomfortable space of working on juridical forms that are ultimately exploitative (or speciesist, to borrow a term from the animal rights movement).1 For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), animals (or animality) are disruptive signs, which may potentially dislocate our commonsense understandings of the world. And this theoretical line of flight opens the possibility for an intriguing alliance with contemporary animal rights projects—one that may destabilize the underlying values that, at last, damage animal life. Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari offer a post-structural, non-hierarchical appreciation of humans and nature, rendering such an alliance even more convincing.2 Given this potentiality, my task is to take Deleuze and Guattari to their limit, to craft a politics of becoming for animals. 246 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question Bodies and Desire On any given weekday in New York City’s meatpacking district, the streets are bustling with a variety bodies: models, celebrities, jetsetters, designers, butchers, factory workers, and the dead carcasses of animals in the meatpacking facilities that operate in the district. At night, the landscape of the neighborhood transforms as the butchers go home and the glamoratti arrive in full force. And, again, in the early morning hours, the different bodies that inhabit the district intersect again as the delivery vans arrive, the factory workers begin their day, and the partygoers depart for the night. This area, which runs from west 14th street to Gansevoort, was once one of the largest dressed-meat producing areas in the United States, housing hundreds of meat slaughtering and meatpacking facilities during its mid-20th century heyday. Today roughly 20 meatpacking facilities operate in the district, dotting the streets along with high-end boutiques, restaurants, and trendy clubs. In a recent article on cruelty-free fashion, the New York Times reported with little irony that a new vegan boutique had set up shop in the district (La Ferla). In this sense, the meatpacking district is a never-ending flow of bodies that intersect and interrupt one another in an amorphous flow with a seeming apathy, if not desire, for their differences. So much so, that as rents sky-rocketed at the onset of the 21st century, and the meat factories moved out and the meat markets moved in, boutique merchants pushed for historical district status in an effort to hold onto the ‘grittiness’ of the neighborhood. Yet, despite the nebulous mass of bodies that inhabit the district, one group remains largely hidden in plain view–the (dead) animals. Even as the meatpacking facilities leave the district, it derives its energy from the meat that once drove its economy–operating in plain view during the day and, arguably, recirculating in the size-zero leather and fur-clad bodies that lithely walk the streets at night. What makes the flow of the NYC meatpacking district such an interesting vignette for introducing the animal question in Deleuze and Guattari is its strangeness: animal and human bodies collide in Deleuzian fashion to create a virtual reality of becoming-animal. (Perhaps most strange and Deleuzian of all is the fact that the district, once known as Gansevoort Market, was the workplace of Herman Melville for 20 years.) 3 If we consider a street scene on a typical day in the meatpacking district, the flows of bodies assemble and disassemble depending on the day or hour. Yet the animal body is strangely missing from the configuration, only (absently) materializing in the form of meat or its image. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the animal figures as the impossible limit and Katherine E. Young 247 the figurative possibility of the Body without Organs: the anti-organism that resists particular assemblage, significance and subjectification. For them, animals and humans exist as flows of molecules on a plane of consistency. And along that plane what Deleuze and Guattari seek to inspire is "A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it" (Thousand Plateaus 255). In other words, to become-animal is to neither copy nor reproduce the animal. It does not involve wearing an animal suit or assuming an animal form. Rather, becoming-animal materializes in the locus of the event, the relation of forces that constitute a body at a particular moment. Returning to the NYC street scene described above, we can compare it to a rendering of becoming-animal from A Thousand Plateaus: It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. The street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters into composition with the air, ad the beast and the full moon enter into composition with each other… Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them and awaken with them… The becomingevening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o'clock is this animal! The animal is this place! (263) It is important to note is that in the scene that Deleuze and Guattari describe, there is a breakdown of the animal body that attracts the (human) assemblage of becoming-animal: the wolf body concealed by the night, the pack; the horse beaten on the street to the point of near death; the dying rat. This is an important distinction, because it is in the destruction of the animal body that becoming-animal transpires. A similar scene unfolds in the meatpacking district. Desire circulates and produces anomalous bodies that scramble the lines and codes of species. "The meatpacking district" is cut with blood, sweat, skin, and meat, simulated leather, and fur—a topographical animal body, all the while its center content remains empty like the meat for which it is named.4 And, this is the point: the animal is fragmented throughout the district but "present" nowhere except in its partial assemblages. In short, the "meatpacking district" is a living, volatile metaphor, which is shaped and transmuted by the multiplicity of desires that assemble within the area. In this sense, lack is positively refigured and displaced onto animals via the figurative emptiness of becoming-animal, which certainly presents the chance for an intriguing alliance with animal advocacy projects (although this is by no means Deleuze and Guattari's intent). Emptiness is a central line of flight in their work, not as the negative-dialectical construction of 248 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question lack, but as the condition of possibility for human life. More specifically, Deleuze and Guattari envision all life on a plane of consistency, in a continuous and temporal state of becoming, so that there is no distinction between humans and animals. Certainly this superficial re-figuration allows animals to take form in the most unexpected ways, potentially disrupting our molar understandings of animal nature (for example, as food, companions, scientific experiments). Yet, as the meatpacking district exemplifies, becoming-animal may have unforeseen consequences for animals, begging the question: how we can negotiate the actual (animal body) and the virtual (becoming-animal) within the context of Deleuze and Guattari. In other words, when they write, "anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool" (Thousand Plateaus 240, their emphasis) do we take this as a symbolic rejection of Oedipal desire or something else—perhaps a narrow reading of the animal body that reduces it to a manifestation of repressed desire? Moreover, if unbridled desire is an ontological truth in their work, does this imply that animals embodying "repressed will" must be "destroyed" in the wake of this totalizing desire? Any potential alliance of Deleuze and Guattari with animal advocacy or a larger project of environmentalism demands consideration of not only their intended use of the animal (as the figurative possibility for life) but also their underlying image of the animal body as juridical limit to be consumed in the path of self-generating subjects of desire.5 Becoming-Animal How does one become-animal? To create this line of flight, this movement of becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari create a loose hierarchy of animals in A Thousand Plateaus—Oedipal, State and demonic, in which the first two types point to the (egoist) regression and (heroic) mystification of the subject, respectively, and the third incites the assemblage of the Body without Organs. All center on ideas of animality, which either reify the deprivation of desire (lack) or provoke its plentitude and excess. In terms of the sorts of animals represented by each type, the categories are not reserved for any particular kind of animal—any animal considered "my little beast" becomes Oedipal and "even the dog" becomes demonic when constituting a continuously transforming population (241). Overall, the authors privilege demonic-becomings; in particular, although all becomings-animal run the risk of becoming mystifications, it is the demonic or diabolical idea of animality—wild, multiplying and transforming—that is the figurative possibility for escaping humanist classifications: Katherine E. Young 249 In short, between substantial forms and determined objects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (Thousand Plateaus 253, their emphasis) What does this mean for the animal body? Deleuze and Guattari take care to explain the difference between molar (well-defined) and molecular (dynamic) conceptions of the body and their affects on becoming-animal. The former refers to what we clearly recognize as the body, or the "real" animal trapped in its molar form and endowed with certain organs and functions (and in the case of the human molar form, assigned as a subject) (Thousand Plateaus 275). The latter are the particles or molecules emitted by an organism that come into proximity with other particles within the context of an event. Becoming-animal, as with any becoming, flows between these molar and molecular poles. For example, the disintegration of forms, the unstable haecceities of one and the pack that occurs with becoming-wolf is a line of flight toward a molecular assemblage, whereas the becoming-dog associated with Oedipal and state animals (for example, the companion or breed) moves toward a molar form: "No one can say where the line of flight will pass: Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back to the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another danger, for example, turning into a line of abolition, annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab…?" (Thousand Plateaus 250). The relations of movement and speed that transpire in the vacillation to and from molar and molecular are the process of desire: "becoming is the process of desire" (Thousand Plateaus 272). It is a pack or swarm of molecules that spreads and multiplies via contagion. As Claire Colebrook explains in her book Gilles Deleuze , becoming-animal describes the positive multiplicity of this movement of desire. Citing a child's encounter with a wolf, she notes: "the child's fascination for the wolf is not for what the wolf represents but for the wolf's entirely different mode of becoming: wolves travel in packs, at night, wandering" (134, her emphasis). In other words, the child desires not the single form of the wolf or what it represents, but the multiplicity of its potential actions (134). And within that moment, the child too trades ipseity for singularity. It is important to note that within this fluid composition of one and many, Deleuze and Guattari do not distinguish between humans and animals. Instead, we are all molecular bodies, more or less, passively or actively, inhabiting molar forms on a plane of consistency—the surface on which all events (becomings) happen (Thousand Plateaus 267). 250 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question But there is not simply one plane. Deleuze and Guattari use the image of the plane as the space of becoming, both in its molar and molecular capacities. In this sense, the plane of organization is the molar counterpart to the plane of consistency, in that it organizes molecules into a subjective form: "the plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in dimension of depth" (270). We can think of the planes of consistency and organization much like the tables of the earth and sky on which the Nietzschean dice-throw takes place: "But these two tables are not worlds. They are two hours of a single world, the two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the hour when the dice are thrown and the hour when the dice fall back" (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 25). As Deleuze explains in Nietzsche & Philosophy, the dice throw is the eternal return of life. The two moments, in which the dice are thrown (earth) and the dice fall back (sky), symbolize the accident of life and the becoming of life, respectively. In other words, life enters the world on the plane of organization marked by its molar form. As bodies, we have been selected and organized by those in power: we are the dice. And collectively we (humans) are bad players because we want to repeat the combination of the first throw and reaffirm our subjectivity; that is, bring order to chaos through dialectical resolution. It is embracing the second throw, however, that allows us to overreach the dialectic and transvalue inherited values. In this sense, to be free is to embrace the contingency of history and becoming (Colebrook 129). If we overlay the Nietzschean dice throw with becoming-animal, it is apparent that animals are open to assembling themselves with the world around them, to chance encounters. For example, dogs love to follow a scent, wherever it may lead (trash, a dead animal, another dog, etc.) creating assemblages that rupture their categorization as polite "pets." At the crass event when it sniffs a rotting bird carcass, the dog enters into an assemblage (dog-carcass-maggot) that ruptures our Oedipal configuration of "the dog." However, in order to perceive this difference, the dog must necessarily break (Oedipal) or reinforce (evolutionary) identities as "a dog." In other words, the pack delimits the condition of possibility for the animal, since animals are rendered in groups, which then defines their being (Lippit, Electric Animal 131). As Deleuze and Guattari explain in A Thousand Plateaus, individuals or species are only symbolic entities of the pack.6 More specifically, what is important for Deleuze and Guattari is the anomalous borderline of the pack. In this sense, an animal may demarcate difference as the leader of the pack, or redouble into the pack so that each Katherine E. Young 251 and every animal occupies this position (Thousand Plateaus 245). This rereading of the group or pack in terms of the borderline allows the authors to transvalue humanist conceptions of animals. "It is now even possible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding the pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they bring into play)" (Thousand Plateaus 245). This is not to say that the pack cannot be cut by planes of organization in a way that they fall back into state or Oedipal forms (Thousand Plateaus 246, 260). Indeed, this is how animals are inscribed and read by humans; for example, a toy dog dressed up to be the object of one's affection. As Steve Baker discerns in Picturing the Beast, culture allows us access to received rather than unmediated understandings of animals. For this reason, he argues, we must realize that symbolic and rhetorical uses of the animal carry as much conceptual weight as the "real" animal (10). For Baker, the challenge to re-picturing animals is rendering animal bodies "abstract, conceptual, arbitrary, unstable, and not as the site of the fixed 'real'" by amalgamating them with images of the human body (223). Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we reread and transvalue the animal form inherited from evolutionary classifications with a multiple and amorphous animality. From this transvaluation we can infer becoming-animal as the common denominator of life, or the will to power, that animates the eternal return of the Nietzschean dice throw. Colebrook explains this rereading of the animal in terms of the transversal quality of becoming-animal; that is, the mutation or variance that occurs with each molecular event or encounter. "For Deleuze, transversal becomings are key to the openness of life. Life is not composed of pre-given forms that simply evolve to becoming what they are, as though becoming could be attributed to the coming of some being… What it is depends on the life it encounters" (133, her emphasis). The animal, reread as the borderline, becomes the figure for embracing tragic gaiety. As humans we do not know what a body can do, and "lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk" (Deleuze, Spinoza 17-8). More specifically, our bodies are stolen from us in order to "fabricate opposable organisms" (Thousand Plateaus 276). In this sense, the becoming-animal of the human is recognition of the body as inscribed by a relation of multiple discursive forces that separate the body from what it can do. In terms of the cache of this animal metaphoricity, however, we must concede that there remains the ever-present danger of destroying "real" animal bodies for the (human) body without organs (a point to which we will return shortly). 252 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible For Deleuze, the actual world is the combination of virtual tendencies: what we perceive as actual or real is, in fact, one among many possible actualizations. In this sense, pure difference or becoming precedes our ontological understandings of the world. If we return to the anomalous border, it is the perception of the border that delineates an event and that contracts the flow of becoming (Colebrook 126-7). The plane of consistency is the flow of molecules that stretches from human to animal to molecular to particles, all the way to the imperceptible so that "Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization" (Thousand Plateaus 249). What this means is that becoming-animal necessarily depends on the breakdown of our timely conceptions of animality; that is, it takes the categories of the present and makes them suspect. Freedom, in the sense of becoming-animal, is not aligned with a particular line of flight or end: there is no original or stable moral vantage point from which to judge actions. Rather, freedom is possibility itself: "the virtual opens up new and possible worlds for actualization, but such openings will not automatically lead in the direction of freedom. This is nonetheless what the virtual does: it opens possibilities for new experiences, for new encounters, for new steps to be taken" (Rushton 227). More specifically, ethics replaces morality for Deleuze (Spinoza 41). Morality takes the active range of possibilities and presents it reactively, "as already determined through a system of immutable values—this is evil" (Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze 130, her emphasis). Ethics, on the other hand, recognizes: "In reality, we are never judged except by ourselves and according to our states" (Spinoza 40). Working from Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze conceives of the body as constituted out of a relation of active and reactive forces; the former combining and overreaching humanist categorizations and the latter separating active forces from this creative potential (Nietzsche & Philosophy 57). Ethics is the active reading of the body with regard to these forces. Accordingly, judgment is centered on a body's affective power, so that "badness" signals the decomposition or destruction of the capacity to be affected or the domination of the body by reactive forces (Spinoza 41, Nietzsche & Philosophy 57). According to Deleuze and Guattari, we can judge what a body can do only when it enters into relations with affects of another body: "We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, Katherine E. Young 253 either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body" (Thousand Plateaus 257). Returning to becoming-animal, this eliminates any potential for empathy with animal-others, since compassion assumes a static moral vantage point. Instead, an animal is judged on its affective capacity, and becoming-animal is constituted out of difference or anomaly. Deleuze and Guattari's loose hierarchy of animals corresponds to this view of ethics: the image of the Oedipal pet or the mythic state animal must be overreached because it separates the body from what it can do. For humans, the Oedipal animal configuration invites regression into narcissistic contemplation, while the state configuration reinforces symbolic associations that limit becomings (Thousand Plateaus 240, 248). Conversely, it is the demonic animal that delineates the anomalous border and draws human perception. Animal bodies are similarly rendered reactive, servile and submissive by means of Oedipal and state configurations. Only at the moment of death, when the limit of their affective capacity shines through, do these types of animals attract human desire. A passage from A Thousand Plateaus is instructive on this point: Little Hans's horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the individuated assemblage it is a part of… These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse 'can do.' They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). (257) What this passage suggests is that the situation or event that brings to bear the threshold of the horse does so by revealing the forces that produce and animate its actions. As a beast of burden, the horse's body is the product of forces that load its back, similar to Nietzsche's camel or the self-loading ass discussed by Deleuze in Nietzsche & Philosophy (1962). In this sense, the horse is a passive body: it is a figure of passive nihilism, a body that affirms nothing but the reactive forces which dominate it. Of course, when Nietzsche and Deleuze talk of beasts of burden, they intend to symbolize human action: the horse or camel or ass is the enlightened modern man who loads his own moral baggage via the displacement of religious or state values as his own power (Nietzsche 26-7, Nietzsche & Philsophy 181). We are unaware of our own passive nihilism as humans. Yet in witnessing the event of the horse being whipped, its consequences 254 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question are no longer separated from its productive forces. More specifically, there is recognition (which the psychoanalyst misses) of the affects or forces themselves—the animal is the production and limit in the relation of these forces (Thousand Plateaus 257-259). Animals always already occupy this (passive) position in relation to humans. Animals lack language: they have no origin story and are not aware of the values that mark them. Cruelty, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus "is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them" (145). And language is what allows for this inscription of signs into the "naked flesh" that codes flows and invests organs as part of the social machine (Anti-Oedipus 145). For this reason, humans are the sole purveyors of cruelty because it is only human values that inscribe and mark the body. Becoming-animal, for this reason, is a human-centered event that attempts to recoup the Body without Organs—the body before it is organized and dissected into Oedipal and scientific codes. Deleuze discusses this cruel transmutation in terms of animal nature in Coldness and Cruelty: It has been said that the senses become "theoreticians" and that the eye, for example, becomes a human eye when its object itself has been transformed into a human or cultural object, fashioned by and intended solely for man. Animal nature is profoundly hurt when this transmutation of its organs from the animal to the human takes place, and it is the experience of this painful process that the art of Masoch aims to represent. (69) In this passage, Deleuze describes the distinctly human touch of cruelty; that is, our painful passage into passivity. And for the masochist, animality is recovered, if only momentarily, in the fetishistic fantasy of the feminine ideal: Masoch's Venus in Furs is becoming-animal, with its openended play of "flesh, fur and mirrors" (69). As Deleuze describes, this fantastic suspension of desire allows Masoch to disavow and invert its negative element in his work (71). More specifically, the masochist recodes cruelty onto his naked flesh in order to suspend, rupture and transform Oedipal desire. And it is in the event of this sensual encounter that the masochist transforms desire and transmutes cruelty, so that it becomes productive rather than repressive (54). It is important to note that in Coldness and Cruelty, preliminary sketches of the Oedipal, state and demonic classifications emerge in Deleuze's account of the uterine (Aphroditic), Oedipal (Apollonian) and oral (Dionysian) mothers present in Masoch's novel. The becoming-animal of the masochist operates between the poles of the uterine and Oedipal mothers; that is, between the cold chaos of "mother nature" and the Katherine E. Young 255 sentimentality of the degraded maternal form. Simply put, the masochist breaks down himself, via a recoded cruelty, so the oral mother may be born of his own (paternal) lack. Deleuze describes this flight of becoming that occurs within the masochistic fantasy in Coldness and Cruelty: Most of Masoch's novels contain a hunting scene, which is described in minute detail: the ideal woman hunts a bear or a wolf and despoils it of its fur. We could interpret this symbolically as the struggle of woman against man, from which woman emerges triumphant. But this would be a mistake, since woman has already triumphed when masochism begins, the bear and the fur have already been invested with an exclusively feminine significance. The animal stands for the primitive hetaeric mother, the prebirth mother, it is hunted and despoiled for the benefit of the oral mother, with the aim of achieving a rebirth, a parthenogenetic second birth in which, as we shall see, the father has no part. (61) Here we can view that oral mother as a demonic manifestation, who necessarily depends on the symbolic organization of nature (the pack, the Aphroditic mother) in order to recode Oedipal desires. What is intriguing about this passage, however, is the destructive impulse directed at animal bodies (the wolf and bear) and later displaced onto the masochist himself: the remnants of wild animals take on this powerful feminine significance in the masochistic heroine, or the "becoming-woman" (as Deleuze and Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus) of the desiring machine suspended within the masochist's fantasy.7 In this sense, and as Deleuze concedes in Coldness and Cruelty, we can view Masoch's three feminine types in terms of their suspension of the dialectical resolution of desire (52-3).8 Indeed, cruelty is recoded, and flesh becomes fantasy during the masochistic event. Yet this is heralded by the symbolic destruction of the uterine mother, literally as animal bodies, and then re-grafted onto the oral mother in the partial assemblage of "flesh, fur, and mirrors" that Deleuze describes. Organs without Bodies What is suspect, in terms of becoming, is the "beautiful soul" at the displaced heart of Deleuze's work (setting the stage for becomings in his later projects with Guattari).9 Of course, this appears a strange symptom, given Deleuze's stance that the Hegelian dialectic crushes difference under the façade of identity. And whereas Deleuze is more than willing to take what he wants from other philosophers in order to produce strange theoretical hybrids, Hegel is strangely missing in his work. As Brian 256 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question Massumi observes in his foreword to A Thousand Plateaus: "Hegel is absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring" (x). But what if Deleuze is becoming-Hegel, as Slavoj Zizek argues in Organs without Bodies? And what if becoming-animal is yet another materialization of the logic of opposition or "the gap dividing the One from within, the inherent doublure, as the most elementary ontological fact" (Organs without Bodies 68)? Although certainly more complicated than the space of this essay will allow, what Zizek locates at work in Deleuze is a fundamental Hegelian logic of division and repetition. If we return to the virtual and actual in Deleuze, according to Zizek they represent two sides of the same Moebius strip (92). What this means is that the virtual is the caesura that separates us from the unconscious (Other), while the actual is the (empty) body that is constituted within the topography of this gap: "In this sense, One is the name of the Void. With the emergence of subjectivity, this void is posited as such—it becomes For-Itself—and the empty signifier, the mark of this void, 'represents the subject for other signifiers'" (68). Everything, in sense, is a surface effect of desire concealed by the mask of subjectivity. And, far from reconciling this gap, language exacerbates it: "Language is the supreme example here, that is to say, it is only through the enjoyment provided by the vary act of speaking, through the speaker getting caught in the closed loop of pleasurable self-affection, that humans can detach themselves from their immersion in their environs and thus acquire a proper symbolic distance toward it" (144). Applied to Deleuze, the "surface membrane" of subjectivity that delimits the actual and the virtual becomes active, or self-positing in the flow of becoming (118). Or, in Lacanian terms, it is the reflection of the subject via language that constantly disrupts the preverbal totality of being. In other words, the virtual represents the will to mastery and the actual represents the traumatic realization that we can never overcome fragmentation (lack). With regard to the symbolic castration from this trauma, Zizek explains that a fundamental paradox of symbolization emerges, in which the subject is radically de-centered via its self-identity so that "it can find itself only in a medium outside itself" (The Indivisible Remainder 47). And it is with this endless division and repetition of linguistic trauma, wherein we have the minimal freedom to act, that the subject emerges (Organs without Bodies 68). As such, becoming (becoming-subject) is clandestinely Hegelian for Zizek: "In other words, the subject is a pure virtual entity in the strict Deleuzian sense of the term: the moment it is actualized it is changed into substance. To put it yet another way, subjectivity is the sight of 'true infinity.' No wonder, then, Katherine E. Young 257 that when Deleuze asserts the infinity of pure becoming as the virtuality that encompasses every actualization, he is again secretly Hegelian" (69). With this secreted raison d'être comes a concomitant renunciation of animal bodies, sustained via language. Deleuzian freedom, in this Zizekian sense, is the minimal power to accept or reject being affected in a certain way: "'Freedom' is thus inherently retroactive. At its most elementary, it is not simply a free act that, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but rather a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me" (112). Accordingly, when he argues that language feeds difference by allowing humans to move beyond acts of mere animal survival to perceive autonomous "partial moments" of desire, Zizek imagines language as both the limit and condition of possibility for (human) freedom (143). Non-human organisms, too, have an innate power to produce rules, map relationships and limit their actions to a series of affects, but they are driven solely by their primal desires. Humans, of course, attach values to these desires via language, which allows them to take hold of the world around them. Indeed, Zizek reads this "humanization" as paradoxical, since subsequent symbolic castration works to limit human freedom (as opposed to sustaining it). Although Zizek is not explicit on this point, if we accept his reading of Deleuze, this means that becoming-animal is an attempt to break free of the fetishization of pleasure by embracing the (animal) open.10 Here it useful to discuss, if only briefly, Heidegger's implication of animals, which parallels this arrest of animal abandon. For Heidegger, animals are defined by their affects: they are poor-in-the-world. In short, animals are open to other beings, but only in an instinctive way. More specifically, animals are held captive by the world because they only relate to it as an extension of themselves—no space or gap exists between the other and the animal. And because they have no conception of others as beings-as-such, this also means that they cannot take any position over and against that to which they are instinctually drawn (Calarco 23-5). Within Heidegger's framework, animals exist in the world only in a space of exclusion (Lippit, "Afterthoughts on the Animal World" 792). Lacking language, they do not divide the world or their bodies via concepts. Humans, on the other hand, lend order and meaning to their world via their choices; that is, only humans are world forming. And because the linguistic "subject" believes it is affected by encounters with autonomous "objects" (animals, or others generally), it lives in isolation to the world. What this means is that this objective liaison is simply a veiled relationship to us, one that works to ban our worldly (and distinctly human) experience as well as close down human freedom. Granting this 258 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question schema, animals become amalgams of the forces to which they are drawn because they only sense affects as extensions of themselves; that is, they are bodies without organs. Here we can see the parallel of Heidegger and Deleuze.11 As Zizek senses, language grants us a paradoxical sense of freedom. Becoming-animal is recognition of this paradox, the embrace of animal openness, which is sensed through the recoded assemblages of human bodies and their worlds. Yet as Zizek discerns, this is a distinctly human endeavor, since animals simply live in the open, but cannot take hold of it. In fact, careful reading of Deleuze and Guattari reveals they too concede becoming-animal as an anthropocentric event: Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are werewolves and vampires, we say this with all our heart; but do not look for a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the 'real' animal is trapped in its molar form and subjectivity). (Thousand Plateaus 275) And this is precisely Giorgio Agamben's point in his book The Open, wherein he uses Heidegger's principle to cast animality and humanity as one and the same, "two sides of a single fracture" (36)—similar to the way that Zizek portrays the actual and virtual as two sides of same Moebius strip.12 For Agamben, to "let the animal be" would mean realizing this relationship for what it is—the creative force of human life. In this sense, Deleuze's becoming-animal falls back on the dialectical and paradoxical logic of politics that Agamben delineates, and Zizek gathers in terms of psychoanalytic theory: to exceed the limits imposed upon us by language—to live in the Deleuzian sense—is contingent upon our possession of language. As such, animals serve as the constitutive outside of the human world, excluded via their lack of language but included as figures that affect our human existence; that is, the animal is the borderline, receding or emitting from the pack, breaking or reifying molarity. Becoming-animal is contingent upon the over-reaching (exclusion) of molar animal forms, by destroying and taking them to their bodily limits. For the masochist, as we have seen, cruelty is recoded via the physical re-inscription of human flesh. Yet, as described above, the masochistic fantasy is a self-reflective and anthropocentric event preceded by the literal breakdown of animal bodies. Here we can return to Deleuze and Guattari's description of Little Hans's (as well as the masochist's) fascination with the various horse-producing assemblages (draft-horse- Katherine E. Young 259 omnibus-street) representing the threshold of what a horse "can do" (Thousand Plateaus 257).13 Except that in the case of the masochistic fantasy, the bit, bridle and sheath re-circulate what the masochist's body can do by annulling some organs "so that their liberated elements can enter into new relations from which the becoming-animal, and the circulation of affects within the machinic assemblage, will result" (260). Of course, this destabilizes and re-territorializes human (and animal) bodies, by calling into question the trajectory of "natural" history, similar to the way that Alphonso Lingis describes Nietzsche's evolutionary transvaluation (13).14 As Judith Butler explains in Subjects of Desire, the liberation of desire from its negative and repressive (Hegelian) elements insists not only that the law can be broken, but also that it must be broken in order to transform our human genealogy (205-7). And as we have seen, given the paradoxical "nature" of "humanization" this too entails breaking down, literally and figuratively, molar animal forms. And taken to its limits, this spells death for animal bodies. Given their implicit anthropocentrism, Deleuze and Guattari must become accountable to the contemporary political project of animal advocacy if we are to re-circulate desire for animals. In other words, without negotiating Deleuze's inscriptive line of flight with a lived animal politics, wherein animal bodies are always already at stake, we run the risk of once again becoming human, all too human.15 Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Extinct A provocative example of the danger of becoming-animal for animals is illustrated in Akira Lippit's book Electric Animal. Here Lippit takes becoming-animal to its farthest limit—extinction. For Lippit, animals serve as the imaginary position in human speech, as metaphors that exist outside the realm of ontology (26). More specifically, animals are pure medium, pure text, pure ideas, and "fleshy photographs" that are able to disrupt the flow of figurative human speech. How do they do this, according to Lippit? Lacking language, animals are incapable of determining or regulating the discourse that they transmit (21). Consequently, animals serve as living metaphors. To arrive at this position, Lippit expands Derrida's claim that animals function as absolute limits of language, since within language they can only appear as another expression—metaphor (166). More specifically, sacrificing molar animal imagery via becoming-animal allows us access to the space proscribed by reason and language, while concurrently releasing us from the realm of morality (181). In this sense, becoming-animal entails the destruction of 260 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question bodies that encapsulate or transmit categorizations that separate us (humans) from what we can do. All of this parallels the Deleuzian configuration of freedom. As Lippit explains, the multiplicity of the pack, which ultimately defines an animal, is also what lends an animal its immortal property. Using the death of a dog as an example of this eternal return, Lippit explains in Electric Animal: "Thus the dog is immortalized, preserved (taxidermically) in the slaughterhouse of being, language" (48). In other words, it is animals' lack of language that allows them the power to molecularly transpire back into the pack: "Undying, animals simply expire, transpire, shift their animus to other animal bodies" (187). Animals become pure image, literally photographs (film images) in Lippit's analysis. And it is the animetaphoric ingestion of animals via the media that allows the sacrificial moment—the imaginative flash—to live beyond the extinction of animal bodies in the modern world. As pure text, the absence of the actual animal body becomes trivial, since this re-circulated animal medium survives in a new habitat of technological media (25). More specifically, as nature recedes and animals become increasingly extinct, changes in language via media provide another realm for animals to inhabit: "It is a space made possible by the extinction of a certain form of language. The technological media can be seen as the afterlife of that language—animals survive language in the cryogenic topographies of technological reproduction" (161). Surely, Lippit wishes to acknowledge and refigure traces of animality (and animals) that destabilize human subjectivity (25-6). However, taken to its extreme, what we find in this Deleuzian call of the wild is an affirmation of (human) life founded in (animal) death. Arguably, Lippit seems to celebrate the annihilation of actual animal bodies and the emergence of the "electric animal" as a Deluezian assemblage that permits another economy of the gaze, identification, and becoming (179). Once unearthed, however, this morbid fascination exposes the narcissistic gaze of a refigured (human) subject, which writes and destroys animal bodies only to reinvent and multiply its own power. Simply put, animal bodies become newly and familiarly inscribed, freshly packaged and sold in the slaughterhouse of the rhetorical (political) economy: dead meat. Lippit stands out in his representation of the electric animal. Yet he is not alone in testing the (impossible) limits of the postmodern animal. Steve Baker, for example, similarly explores the becoming-animal of postmodern art, although with a quiet acknowledgement of the discord between its somatic and figurative implications: "the politics and philosophy of animal rights have little in common with postmodern art's representation of the Katherine E. Young 261 animal, with its apparent refusal to draw the line even at bestiality or butchery" (Postmodern Animal 174). For Baker, becoming-animal is imaginative thought that challenges the complacency and consensus thinking of contemporary politics (18-9). It is postmodern art's serious engagement with animals—its willingness to represent animals in new and dangerous ways—that marks its promise in terms of becoming-animal. Whether or not this leads to a better future for animals, or more or less humane priorities in our relationships with animals is only secondary to the type of freedom that it promises (25). A quick read of Deleuze and Guattari can certainly point to this line of flight. But to work on the surface in this way is to slip back into a complacency that is, at its roots, anti-Deleuzian. Deleuze and Guattari are clear on this point: rhizomes emerge within the plateaus of our inherited molar concepts, and freedom is contingent on rupturing or cutting across molarity: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees" (Thousand Plateaus 9). As this passage demonstrates, animals awkwardly populate these plateaus. Contemporary animal rights projects surely push the limits of traditional political discourse. Yet, if we assemble animal rights within a politics of becoming, it is clear that in accepting our juridical system as given, they do not go far enough. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari may lend a much-needed sense of openness and possibility to these projects by forcing them to take on the value of their political values. And at the same time, scratching beneath the surface of becoming-animal reveals its destructive impulses with regard to animals, as we have seen. Without these kinds of negotiations, it is easy, all too easy, to think that we can fully escape our complicity with a larger structure of domination. Becoming-animal opens a multitude of virtual possibilities for animal-human relationships, an entire (minoritarian) politics of becominganimal, which challenges our rote knowledge of animals—not to escape it, but in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, to put it to "strange new uses" (15). 262 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question Notes 1 See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. 2 Note that Guattari directly engages the link between human subjectivity and environmental issues. See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. 3 Here we are reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus of Ahab’s pursuit of the whale, as a manifestation of becoming-animal, in Melville’s novel, Moby Dick. 4 See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat. 5 Here I am playing off Judith Butler's argument in Subjects of Desire that Deleuze, following the Hegelian tradition, figures desire as the central feature of human ontology, one that is liberated when it is free of the constraints of prohibitive law (206). 6 Here we can observe a certain affinity with Derrida's work on the animal question. In a similar way, Derrida observes in "The Animal That Therefore I Am" that the "heterogeneous multiplicity of the living" is reduced to a concept of "the animal" that allows for an "original" human subjectivity (124-5). When Derrida comments, "I would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular. There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of 'living creatures' whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of animality that is simply opposed to humanity" his retort may be comparable to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal in A Thousand Plateaus (125). Although he points to the reduction of "the animal" in language, Derrida reserves a strong critique for Heidegger (and Lacan's) use of "the animal" arguably lending his work a different trajectory than that of Deleuze and Guattari (see also "And Say the Animal Responded" and "Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject" for a more comprehensive discussion of "the animal" in Derrida's work). 7 Here we can think of Deleuze and Guattari's reference in Anti-Oedipus to the continual material flow, or relations of production, that drive the pure and empty space of desire or becoming (as they later describe in A Thousand Plateaus). 8 In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze notes that Masoch's dream of Venus at the beginning of Venus in Furs was inspired by "Bachofen, as much as Hegel," in terms of the progressive disintegration of the feminine principle (the Aphroditic era) to the degenerate Dionysian form with respect to the three feminine ideals (52). In this sense, Hegel's "beautiful soul," or the suspension of the negative that digresses into madness, is represented in the oral mother of the masochist fantasy [for a more complete treatment of the beautiful soul, see Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (383-409)]. 9 Note that Deleuze does critically examine the Hegelian conception of the “beautiful soul” in Difference and Repetition. 10 Specifically, this is a reference to Giorgio Agamben's text, The Open, which will be discussed in greater detail shortly. For now, we can turn to Zizek's comment on the human fetishization of desire in Organs without Bodies: "In short, the zerodegree of 'humanization' is not a further 'mediation' of animal activity, its reinscription of a subordinated moment of higher totality (say, we eat and Katherine E. Young 263 procreate to develop higher spiritual potentials) but the radical narrowing of focus, the elevation of a minor activity into an end-in-itself" (141-2). 11 Matthew Calarco, in a subsection (aptly titled "Body without Organs") of his essay "Heidegger's Zoontology," reveals this link between Deleuze and Heidegger. Note that Calarco does not reference Deleuze in the text. Although 'body without organs' certainly and literally refers to Heidegger's consideration of the bee whose stomach has literally been removed, the reference to Deleuze seems obvious. Specifically, he cites Heidegger's appraisal of an experiment, in which the abdomen of a bee was removed to test whether the animal would continue to feed on honey unimpeded. Not only did the bee fail to recognize the presence of too much honey, it failed to notice the loss of its abdomen, leading Heidegger to conclude that the bee was held captive by its food (25). The bee was literally the body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari describe. 12 Note that Zizek does comment on biopolitics and the homo sacer, briefly referencing Agamben, in his article "From Politics to Biopolitics… and Back." 13 Also see page 8 of this essay for the full quotation from A Thousand Plateaus. 14 In "Nietzsche and Animals" Alphonso Lingis describes the Nietzschean account of evolution as an eternal return of "ancient instincts and pleasures that produces new excellences" (13). More specifically, the atavaristic survival of animal instincts (whose evolutionary goals have diminished to the point of being imperceptible in human bodies) manifests as "gratuitous expenditures of energy" or re-bridled desire in Deleuzian terms (13). 15 More specifically, I am working from the two broad theoretical approaches outlined in Elizabeth Grosz's book Space, Time and Perversion: the inscriptive approach (the likes of Foucault, Deleuze, Nietzsche) which views the body as a surface on which values are inscribed; and, the lived body approach, which refers to the lived experience of bodies, always already in terms of their social coding (33-7). Works Cited Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 2000). Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). —. The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in TwentiethCentury France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Calarco, Matthew. "Heidegger's Zoontology." Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), 18-30. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002). 264 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). —. Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1989). —. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Trans. Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Derrida, Jacques. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), 113-28. —. "And Say the Animal Responded." Trans. David Willis. Zoontologies: the Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121-46. —. "Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject." Points… Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995): 255-87. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995). Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). Hegel, GWF. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). La Ferla, Ruth. "Uncruel Beauty." New York Times 11 January 2007, Section G. Lingis, Alphonso. "Nietzsche and Animals." Animals Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), 7-14. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). —. "Afterthoughts on the Animal World." MLN 109:5 (December 1994): 786-830. Massumi, Brian. "Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy." A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) ix-xv. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Those Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1978). Katherine E. Young 265 Rushton, Richard. "What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces." Cultural Critique 51 (Spring 2002): 219-237. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. (New York: Avon Books, 1990). von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold. Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1989). Zizek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2004). —. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996). —. "From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back." The South Atlantic Quarterly. 103:2/3 (2004): 501-521. BECOMING ANIMAL: THE ANIMAL AS A DISCURSIVE FIGURE IN AND BEYOND A THOUSAND PLATEAUS VINCENT J. GUIHAN As a number of the other papers in this volume have argued, there is nothing incipiently about Deleuze and Guattari's thought that is environmentally unfriendly. It is nevertheless worth pointing out that the kind of nomadism that they envision in A Thousand Plateaus has been mostly compatible with a sustainable human relationship with the environment for several millennia. What has become environmentally unsustainable about the idea of nomadism are the technologies that are used to achieve this nomadism (jet flight, for example), the regimes of power which require and encourage it (notably Capital). However, as Marx suggests, Capital as a world-historical phenomena has only been an influential part of human history for several hundred years. Whether or not Capital, in its schizophrenia, will be able to produce an environmentally version of nomadism or even how long Capital will remain an effective regime of power remains a question. This is only to suggest that rote assumptions about the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's work and ecocriticism as mutually exclusive are problematic. It is from this starting point that my work addresses the question of "becoming animal" as a relatively small but very important part of A Thousand Plateaus. Becoming animal functions in a number of key ways, but to summarize these, it encourages the adoption and practice of a more dialogic relationship with both animals and nature with as an Other rather than merely instruments to be used. First, it draws out, like any kind of anthropomorphism (intentionally or not), the prospect that species difference is often a culturally mediated and/or socially constructed phenomena like race, gender or other elements of human subjectivity. In that sense, becoming animal provides ecocritical thinkers with a tool to trouble one of the longest standing and least-interrogated bases for domination in Western thought and one of the major justifications for environmentally unsustainable living: speciesism—the view that human Vincent J. Guihan 267 beings, as human beings, have greater inherent moral worth than other species and that they in particular and the environment as a whole exist for human use. Second, it provides us with a basis to at least trouble if not actually think or work outside of the human/animal/nature dichotomies that a number of ethicists have insisted that we must begin to trouble. Becoming animal provides us with a way of comprehending ourselves as human beings within a broader framework if environmental interdependency—not just in terms of our political will and rational reflection or in terms of how to we might manage and police nature better as a superspecies—but as a ways of reimagining ourselves as beings dependent on the ecosystem (a condition that, although obviously true, has been denied to the point of becoming debatable, as the debate around global warming currently evinces). Finally, becoming animal in particular and the rhizomatic in general provides us with a way to think outside of biopower, to use Foucault's term, as the primary way of ordering the relationship between human and non-human animals and the environment. But, first, what does "becoming animal" mean in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's thought and what is at stake in it? Deleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of becoming animal with a reading of the film Willard, a film that depicts the protagonist's life with his mother and the rats with whom they share their home. Deleuze and Guattari describe the film as a typical bildungsroman, a story of coming to age for Willard as he transitions from a friendship with the rats, particularly Ben, to a friendship with a young woman. "Willard tried to drive [Ben] away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured into the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing" (Thousand Plateaus 233). The film juxtaposes the bourgeois comedy, which typically ends in marriage, with a more gothic tale, in which nature returns to devour the Subject. From the film, Deleuze and Guattari draw out the Animal as a figure that affirms or denies the Oedipal. "(Are there Oedipal animals with which one can 'play Oedipus," play family, my little dog, my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an irresistible becoming?'" (233). The rats, in their multiplicity and ferocity represent animals that are clearly not Oedipal, which leaves us with a question as to how we should understand them in semiotic terms; how do we read them and what do they mean? Moving from the film, Deleuze and Guattari put forward a theoretical outline of as to who animals as representations function in imaginative work. They argue that: We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuate animals, 268 Becoming Animal family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own pretty history, 'my' cat, 'my' dog. These animals invite us to regress into a narcissistic contemplation. [...] And then there is a second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes: genus, classification or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models [...] Finally, there are more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale ... Or once again, cannot any animal be treated in all three ways? (241) That animals function as representations in these particular ways is not a revelation. What is of particular interest, however, is the question of multiplicity and the understanding that animals as signs may work in multiple ways. Having described how becoming animal works in basic semiotic terms, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to draw out the contours of becoming animal. What is important to note about their theorization is that they reject the importance of mimesis out right, which is very distinct from other ecocritical theorizations of animals in cultural representation. Instead, they argue that Becomings-animal are neither dreams not phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or in imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not 'really' become an animal any more than the animal 'really' becomes something else [...] Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. (238) That is, becoming-animal applies to even those beings that would not normally have a signified in nature, and even to those beings we may not normally consider animals. The result is that becoming-animal is entirely a discursive construct. Furthermore, "becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the denial the human being becomes is not" (238). That is, even in the absence of a stable signifier that we would understand as an animal, the process of becoming-animal may still describe it. In general, however, for Deleuze and Guattari, the idea of species difference is not a matter of the real relationship between human beings and animals, but primarily discursively constructed understandings of our relationship to one another as human beings, with the Animal as a figure propping up that understanding. Discussing totemism, they argue that "when analyzing the institution of the totem, we do not say that this group of people identifies Vincent J. Guihan 269 with that animal species. We say that what group A is to group B, species A is to species B" (236). Furthermore, in their view, this is always a more complicated analogy than what simple metaphor allows. They argue that "a man can never say: 'I am a bull, a wolf...' But he can say: I am to a woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep" (237). The relationship between human beings and animals is invariably a discursive one that more frequently reflects a relationship between human beings. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this is a rationalizing process tied to structuralism and modernism (237). In that sense, becoming animal in cultural representation bears a certain resemblance to traditional kinds of anthropomorphism, but it is a resemblance only; becoming undoes stable categories of being; becoming animal undoes the human-animal boundary in a way that cannot be stabilized easily by traditional metaphoric and metonymic understandings of animals in semiotic terms. Taken too literally, Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of becoming animal functions as a kind of anthropomorphism, but it is not just any kind of anthropomorphic gesture. What difference does this make? Whether or not literature functions as a counter-hegemonic practice in Gramsci's sense or a reverse discourse in Foucault's sense, is, of course, a matter determined at the location of the production of meaning: that is, with the nominal reader. But some cultural representations obviously require greater work then others to understand and account for the meaning. Some resist stabilized and stabilizing readings more than others. Becoming animal, as a representational tactic, I would suggest, troubles the boundary between human beings and animals more substantially than just indexical representations of animals as mute sufferers or the humans in animal drag in more anthropomorphic texts and genres. Becomings-animal as a representational tactic summons the reader to engage in a dialogic relationship with the animal as an Other that cannot be easily rendered internally homologous. This provides ecocritical readers with a new way of thinking outside the traditional mimetic vs. anthropomorphic representational dichotomy on which traditional thematic cultural criticism relies. Working from Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of becoming animal, it becomes clear that some that while all anthropomorphic (mis)representations of animals may be problematic, some are more problematic than others. Why is anthropomorphism problematic in general? There is, of course, a wealth of criticism on how particular Animals function as metaphor and symbols in particular texts, but there is no extensive theoretical literature on how the Animal functions as a sign within purely imaginative narratives. Most ecocritics have frowned on 270 Becoming Animal anthropomorphism, largely because anthropomorphic representation typically affirms an anthropocentric view. The most prominent, and universal, objection to anthropomorphism is that it represents animals inaccurately. However, what makes the misrepresentation implied by anthropomorphism problematic varies from theorist to theorist. This is only to say that Deleuze and Guattari are right, and in step with other ecocritical thinkers, to argue that "the politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence" (243). Similarly, in cultural representations, the Animal as a sign often comes to signify someone/something else, which effectively pushes animal body to a discursive periphery. In the case, metonymy, this periphery is almost total. With metaphor, the animal body is always present, allowing a deconstruction of whatever substitution is at play: metaphor always suggests that animals are capable of suffering in a way that is roughly equivalent to human beings, but that human suffering is a far more important question. With synecdoche, however, the animal body remains as a part of the whole that is signified. Synecdoche embodies the animal as multiplicity. However, although preferable to metonymy and metaphor, the use of synecdoche, is still problematic. Even in the use of synecdoche, the particular animal signifier ceases to represent its specific animal signified that should be understood and valued on its own terms. At best, the Animal as a synecdoche conjures empathy for human and animal suffering that includes the particular animal. As a consequence, the Animal as a signifier invariably points somewhere else, but as synecdoche, it may also point back to its animal body. This tactical deployment of the Animal in cultural representation is the most likely to affect any material changes (if this is even possible) in how we perceive the Animal as a sign within social narratives. Of course, no discussion of the Animal as a sign could be complete without some discussion of its social uses and effects in the modern West as an ontological category, and popular discourses (commercials, advertising, television, etc.) provide the most visible place for the intersection of imaginative and other kinds of narratives. The Animal is often mobilized in propaganda to regulate human behavior or to (re)form the Subject. However, what is of primary interest to me here is how the Animal is deployed as the sign of an ontological category of Being that is outside the modern Western notion of 'culture'. As object, the Animal is a homologous Other: a pet, a beast of burden, etc – the State animal. As Vincent J. Guihan 271 abject, the Animal is what is excluded from the sphere of the human Subject: ferocious wild animals, meat – the Animal represented as multiplicity. In contrast to objectification, abjection attempts to naturalize an ontological position on the boundary of discourse, as merely the body, or perhaps more appropriately, as merely the carcass. Understandably, then, the Animal serves as a perfect synecdoche for the abject, whether human, animal or ecological. Becoming animal as a theory helps us to understand this mythologization as a process, and in particular, how some representations of animals and nature may resist it. The most extensive theorization of the Animal in imaginative work comes from the work of ecofeminist and literary theorist Carol Adams. Her Sexual Politics of Meat is the only extant and extensive theoretical treatment of the politics of animal representation in literature. Drawing on Lacan's work, Carol Adams argues that anthropomorphism renders the Animal as a sign more open to metaphorical interpretation and appropriation. In particular, she suggests that the Animal as a sign functions frequently as a metaphor and as an absent referent, through which animals "become metaphors for describing people's experiences" (42). At the same time, however, as a metaphor, the animal body as absent referent "is there through inference but its meaningfulness reflects only upon what it refers to because the originating, literal experience that contributes the meaning is not there" (42). For Adams, this rendering into metaphor effectively erases animals from literary texts in the same way that 'meat' erases the Animal body from the dinner plate. For Adams, the Animal as a sign, within both literary and social narratives, functions as a primarily as a metaphor. Moreover, the erasure through metaphor of the animal body within social narratives into 'meat' recapitulates and is recapitulated by the metaphorical erasure of the animal body within literary criticism. In place of this criticism, she calls upon her readers to reinstantiate the animal body where possible within Western narrative. While certainly an insightful critique of the bulk of literary criticism, Adams' argument as a whole is not without its problems. In spite (and because) of how useful Adams' argument is, there are some obvious objections and complications. First, her argument occasionally lapses into over-generalizations—for example: "People with power have always eaten meat" (26), a clear accident fallacy with its oversimplication. Second, her notion of a text assumes the "unchangeability of the text's meaning so that through repetition the same meaning recurs" (14). Following the work of Kristeva,1 Butler,2 Bhabha,3 Foucault, 4 and so on, it is hard to imagine what text (other than a phonebook) that this definition of textuality would describe. Second, her 272 Becoming Animal somewhat misleading dichotomy between metaphoric or indexical representations elides the possibilities of the Animal as a sign to function as metonymy or synecdoche, just as it fails to acknowledge that even mimetic representations of the Animal can still be appropriated metaphorically. Third, even working solely with the question of metaphor, Adams herself contends, quite correctly, that "the absent referent is both there and not there" (42). She dismisses this remainder, but with its mention, she complicates the absoluteness of her own argument and fails to acknowledge that what allows her to deconstruct strategic (mis)representations of animals—careful reading—would allow other readers to do so as well. As whole, none of these represent outright failure on the author's part, but they do present problems and they point to the necessity of a more careful theory. On the other hand, however, there is one large problem to Adams' argument (which ties together several smaller complications). Namely, Adams posits a linear, causal relationship between anthropomorphic representation, metaphorical appropriation, erasure of the animal body, and the abjection of real animals, a formula from which neither the Reader nor the Animal can escape. This is problematic for several reasons. First, the sign is always a "deferred presence" (284) that requires an act of reading. That is to say, there is no originary 'natural' connection between the animal signifier and the animal body that it conventionally signifies— it requires a reader to make this connection, and there may be variations in how the reader does so. Second, not only does this reasoning collapse together several highly debatable assumptions (risking an ignoratio elenchi fallacy: it is unclear what has actually been show by her argument), it also poses anthropomorphism as the intrinsic cause (drawing her argument into a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, in which an historical effect in mistaken for a historical cause). Third, in what seems like a stroke of cultural idealism, this causal chain suggests that meat eating is the product of social and literary narratives, not of materials/ecological causes, which may or may not be the case. Taken literally, the close causal relationship between literary appropriation and material practice suggests that the anthropomorphic representation of cats and dogs in literature would effect an increase in the consumption of felines and canines. Without suggesting that textuality produces no material effect, the linearity and inevitability of this chain is undoubtedly an oversimplification. As I will suggest later, the Animal as a social and a literary sign do work together, but not in any absolute, predictable or causal way as Adams tends to suggest here. In spite of these considerations, however, Adams' way of theorizing the Animal as a sign Vincent J. Guihan 273 provides paramount insight into how most strategic cases of anthropomorphism under modern Western social conditions probably function. Along similar lines, Mary Midgley objects to anthropomorphism because it naturalizes human ideology through a metaphorical use of the Animal as a sign (99-102). While her work is somewhat open to the some of the same critiques as Adams', she draws out two important aspect of the Animal as a sign that will be very important to my own argument. First, that the Animal as a sign does not function merely as a metaphor but as a myth, and second, that the discourse of the Animal, whether social or literary, are also, and perhaps primarily, a discourse about the Subject. In contrast, Konrad Lorenz suggests that writers may "let the animal speak like a human being, the may even ascribe human motives to its actions", but he or she "must regard it as their most sacred duty to be properly instructed regarding those particulars in which they deviate from actual facts" (xx). But what if the conditions of possibility are changing? How then can the Animal function as a sign within cultural work? The Animal can function as an indexical sign in Peirce's sense (signifying the animal body itself), or tropologically (signifying something else, whether it is deployed as a metaphor, metonymy or synecdoche). As well, whether the Animal functions indexically or tropologically, it can also function to naturalize or denaturalize mythic structures around the Animal or the human Subject as an ontological category. In that sense, to every representation of the Animal in cultural work, anthropomorphic or not, there are at least two axes to consider. First, how much the particular representation draws the reader away from the literal animal body it conventionally signifies. Second, does the representation work naturalize or denaturalize a particular ideology (i.e., does it construct or deconstruct a myth). As well, how one perceives the sign as functioning along both axes is a matter of context—a realist novel will contextualize an anthropomorphic Animal differently from a beast fable. Of course, the sign may function in other ways. What I wish to suggest here is only that how the Animal functions as a sign in cultural work is extraordinarily complex, and not given to formulaic assumptions. The criticism of anthropomorphism proposed by Carol Adams is useful but inadequate when compared with Deleuze and Guattari. Her argument suggests a one-size-fits view of animal representation that cannot articulate the wide differences between works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Disney's Bambi. Instead, it follows from Adam's argument that the only acceptable representations of animals are 'accurate' representations, 274 Becoming Animal without problematizing the notion of the 'accurate' when the "self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly as is always on the move" (Derrida 250). Nor do they consider alternatives that may more effectively challenge the process of erasure that Midgley, Adams', and Lorenz take pains to critique. Sinclair's The Jungle is in many ways an 'accurate' representation of the animal body, but it fails to present an active challenge to the abjection of the animal body. In fact, that the animal body is represented accurately as a speechless carcass renders them up all the more easily to appropriation as metaphors. "That is why" as Deleuze and Guattari argue, "the distinction we must make is less between kinds of animals than between the difference states according to which they are integrated into family institutions, State apparatuses, war machines, etc." (243). Nevertheless, when the representation of animals in imaginative work is not accurately mindful of the differences between human and nonhuman animals (and between other species), then the 'Animal' as a representation comes to signify something other than what is, usually, but not exclusively, a metaphor for something human. In that circumstance, the 'Animal' as a sign ceases to function like any other sign and instead takes up an alternative signification, and this alternative meaning is often problematic. Where metaphorical, this transformation of the Animal is often mythological as Midgley suggests, though not always or inevitably so. Moreover, I would suggest that this 'something else' is tied discursively to both material and ecological conditions and to the ideological structures and force relations that mediate and reimagine those conditions. Further, as Midgley and Lorenz have both hinted, the misrepresentation of animals not only poses problems for the Animal but may pose problems for homo sapiens as well. In Mythologies, Barthes suggests that myth is predominantly the domain of the Right (135-7), and certainly, myths constructed around the Animal are frequently myths mobilized as part of a strategy to gain or maintain hegemony. Just as Patriarchy mobilizes discourses of sexism to constrain and regulate authorized and unauthorized genders, the discourse of species constrains and regulates human behavior with respect to other human beings and non-human animals. For now, however, I will attempt to draw out a more comprehensive theory of the Animal as a sign, positing that a tactical anthropomorphism that resists the mythologization of the Animal is possible and desirable. In Mythologies, Barthes argues that the "voluntary acceptance of myth can in fact define the whole of our traditional Literature" (134), and it would be no exaggeration at all to suggest that the mythical deployment of the 'Animal' constitutes one of the cornerstones of Western narrative. Vincent J. Guihan 275 Barthes proposes that myths involve "two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other" (115). The first is system the standard relationship between signifier and signified (e.g., the 'Animal' and the animal body), and the second system is the myth itself (115). For Barthes, "the fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated" (119). "As a type of depoliticized speech", the myth redeploys its signs in order to give "an historical intention a natural justification", to make "contingency appear eternal" (142). Generally, but not monolithically, for many of the central stories of Western culture, the Animal as a sign functions metaphorically within a mythological structure, and these stories rely upon the (mis)representations of the Animal in order to naturalize specific ideological positions. In a general sense, each of these terms involves a substitution of the animal body for another signified within the Animal as a sign. As a trope, metaphor substitutes for signified for another, in a way that suggests similarities, but is incapable of erasing all differences. 'To suggest that I was a bear this morning' connects the grouchiness of the I with the mythological grouchiness of the Bear. In this case, the metaphor trades an accurate representations of animals in favour of a mythological one, but with this process, it inevitably points to the difference between the I and a literal bear. In cases like this, metaphor is always a double movement, and as I will argue later, it is a double movement that unavoidably opens itself to detournement. A metonymy is a trope in which one term is substituted for another, in which the terms are already closely associated: the American bald eagle is one example. Tropologically speaking, metonymic representations of animals are the most mythological, the most naturalized, and the least susceptible to deconstruction. Most literary deployments of the Animal are read as metaphors, but that reflects the conditions of possibility with respect to reading more than anything else. In contrast, synecdoche is a trope in which a part is used to represent a whole, usually in the case of a body, but it can also refer to the substitution of a more inclusive term for a less inclusive one. The all-seeing eye of God, as representing the wholeness of an omniscient Being, would be one example. However, the particular Animal posed as a representative of an entire species, or for multiple, similar species (e.g., 'Great Apes', 'Big Cats', etc), or for all animals everywhere as a whole would constitute several others. The Animal as synecdoche functions negatively in the sense that it represents all animals of the species with the same, monolithically anthropomorphic, representation. On the other hand, however, synecdoche is the trope that least yields itself to mythology since it is simultaneously the most inclusive and mercurial. As a type of speech 276 Becoming Animal the synecdoche remains political in the sense that the 'hand' that represents the 'body' must represent itself in doing so. Deployed anthropomorphically as a synecdoche, the Animal can articulate and challenge the suffering of the Abject, and as a part of that whole, its own suffering as well, without, of necessity, erasing the difference between specific animals or between species. The problem of anthropomorphism lies in the strategic erasure of both the similarities and the differences between human and non-human animals. In a sense, this is as problematic in Deleuze and Guattari's thought as it is in any other kind of anthropomorphism. In fact, this strange double movement is requisite to render a human being abject as though he or she were an animal. On one hand, the Animal must function as an ontological category that bears as little similarity as possible to the human Subject in order to permit the utter abjection of the Animal. On the other, the ontological difference between the human Subject and the Animal must be erased in order for human Subjects to be constructed as 'animals'. The threat posed by the erasure of the ontological differences between human beings and animals through strategically anthropomorphic representations of the latter is what makes anthropomorphism so dangerous to both. The problem posed by erasure of their ontological similarities, however, is what allows to Adorno to lament that "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at the slaughterhouse and says: they're only animals" (qtd in Patterson 53). Together, instrumental reason and binary opposition provide what is necessary to produce a clear cut 'us' and 'them' as the basis for an abjection of 'them'. It is this structure and process that informs both the production and reception of anthropomorphism, not anthropomorphism as such, that maintains the nature/culture divide. If a tactically anthropomorphic representation of animals maintains the difference between the animals represented while calling into question the gulf between human and non-human animals, then it is not only full justified ethically, it takes on the character of a literary ethics. In its own, equally strange double movement, tactical anthropomorphisms can effect a defense of both the human Subject and the Animal. This is the important understanding to which becoming animal leads us. Finally, as an ecocritical tool, becoming as a whole stands in contrast to the modern epistemic processes of knowledge that Foucault describes in Society Must be Defended. He argues that "one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power's hold over life" (241). For Foucault, this reflects a shift from disciplinary power to biopower. Over the nineteenth century, unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary Vincent J. Guihan 277 power is applied not to man-as-body, but to the living man, to man as living being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species [...] So far a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body, but at man-as-species. After the anatomo-politics of the human body established in the course of the eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but what I would call a 'biopolitics' of the human race. (242-3) Certainly, the organizing of man-as-a-species has its consequences on the organization of other species-as-species. This organization of knowledge about animal bodies is what drive eugenics, genetics, ethology, ecology, behaviorism and other bodies of knowledge separable from one another and from zoology and psychology. The attempts to make human animals more productive also find their corollaries in attempts to make other animals species more productive, both through advances in farming, controlled breeding and with the process by which individual species were identified and cataloged. Although the shift from cataloging animals to a focus on the regulation of their birth, death and productivity are not entirely historically contiguous, it is this shift that takes us from the naturalism of early zoologists and explorers to the factory farms of the post-Second World War period. Animals (including human beings) were certainly commodities (in the sense that they could be exchange based on a monetary value, not just bartered for another good) from the sixteenth century onward. The drive of biopower to make human beings more productive reflects a broader process of making animals and nature more productive. In that sense, biopower represents a culmination of those Enlightenment discourses that saw the actualization of human Being in the domination of nature. It is in difference to this process of organization man as a species being, as well as the ordering of things required by it, that the rhizomatic stands in opposition. The rhizomatic is the trace passenger that refuses its point of origin and its destination and in so doing undoes stable categories of knowledge and meaning with multiplicity and syncretism. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating or identifying with something, neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or production through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to or lead back to 'appearing,' 'being,' 'equaling' or Becoming Animal 278 'producing.' (239) Becoming, then, is the incipiently counter to what Foucault most closely associates with the modern episteme: the product of stable and stabilizing bodies of knowledge based on series and structure that require a chain of beings or an evolution, which is, after all, a stage-managed teleology. Within that purview, becoming animal is incipiently counter to an ordering of the relationship between animals and especially between the relationship human and non-human animals in a way that already assumes anthropocentric supremacy. If abjection and objectification (the animal in multiplicity and the State and bourgeois animals respectively) represents a strategic metaphorical appropriation of the Animal, then a tactical redeployment of that sign combined with critical deconstruction of that metaphorical process unconceals the processes of objectification and abjection as a management strategy that involves the domination of all human and non-human animals as well as nature. In the end, what do we learn from Willard's story? It is Willard's turn from a dialogic relationship with Ben as an Other that is his undoing. Similarly, it is a refusal to see animals as beings to whom one owes something that drives a great deal of ecological harm. All sentient species depend on nature for survival, even human beings, although we have been able to mitigate that somewhat. The idea that we can separate ourselves and other animal species out from nature is a false dichotomy in practice; it may help us to clarify why we think things are right and wrong when we pose hypotheticals or it may serve some other function when we create cultural work. But if we take animals seriously, if we take the view that animals have rights seriously, then harming the environment on which those animals depend for their lives is a very serious moral wrong. Protecting ecosystems for non-human animals is not just compatible with the view that animals have rights; it is of the clearest and most rational ways to defend environmental protection is to argue that sentient beings (including human beings) have a right to live their lives in relatively natural habitats undisturbed. Becoming animal always draws us towards the prospect of that dialogic relationship. Notes 1 Following and expanding upon Bakhtin's work, Kristeva suggests "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absoption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double" (Kristeva 37). 2 Butler argues that "construction [of sex/gender/sexuality as a set of signs] is Vincent J. Guihan 279 neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Rather, construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration" (Butler 10). 3 In a paraphrase of Marx, Bhabha suggests that "if colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce" (Bhabha 85). This repetition with its inevitable differences produces mimicry, "one of the most and elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge" (85), "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). 4 For Foucault, discourse, including literary texts, is what "transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile" (Sexuality 101). Works Cited Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1990), 1-42. Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today." Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 109-59. Bhabha, Homi K. "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse." The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8593. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: an Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). —. Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 1997). Kristeva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue and Language". The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986, 34-61. Lorenz, Konrad. King Solomon's Ring (London and New York: Routledge, 1952). Midgley, Mary. "The Concept of Beastliness." Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Ed. Peter Singer and Tom Regan (New Jersey: PrenticeHall, 1976), 94-123. Oliver, Kelly. "Animal Body Mother." Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 53-80. THE EDGE EFFECT: ART, SCIENCE, AND ECOLOGY IN A DELEUZIAN CENTURY PAUL LEWIS Prelude: The Toad and the Bacterium In 1973 Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published their now famous hypothesis that natural history might not be best explained as a process of slow genetic drift and evolutionary gradualism, that instead it might be a history of punctuated equilibria. In the very same year Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer reported their successful efforts to cut, recombine, and splice specific segments of DNA plasmids between populations of differentially drug-resistant E. coli bacteria, an experiment which marked the advent of genetic engineering. Just months after accomplishing these first recombinant DNA trials within bacterial populations, Cohen and Boyer worked with Paul Berg to move segments of DNA from an African clawed toad across the phylogenetic gap and into the bacterial DNA. The success of these more radical transgenic experiments showed that it was possible to separate at least some hereditary elements from their historical dependency upon genealogical descent. From this point forward, the genotype of an organism would not be constrained in any absolute sense by lines of historical filiation, nor would it be constrained by the boundaries of species, genera, phyla, or kingdom. The hypothesis of Eldredge and Gould—the one about natural history as a record of intermittent but irreversible phyletic punctuations— could not have come along at a better time. There are without a doubt some profound rhetorical possibilities in the contrived association of these two scientific revolutions, one theoretical and the other experimental, which emerged almost simultaneously from the very disparate fields of molecular genetics and paleontology. The two seem to belong together. Could there be a clearer instance of punctuated equilibrium than what was actually happening in the laboratories of Paul Lewis 281 Cohen, Boyer, and Berg? In "Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA Methodology," microbiologist David Jackson put it this way: The fundamental point to understand about recombinant DNA methodology is that it allows one to construct in the laboratory new combinations of genes. Among these combinations are many that at present have no known mechanism for formation in nature. (41) Granted, this deliberate and premeditated alteration of the bacterial genetic plan in the laboratory was not the kind of punctuation Eldredge and Gould had intended to describe in their hypothesis. Nevertheless bacterial history, humming along in white noise, had indeed been punctuated—suddenly, dramatically, and with lasting consequence.1 Moreover, the natural history of the amphibian (Xenopus laevis) and the natural history of the bacterium no longer proceeded in parallel. Their historical paths collided by design, and these particular organisms fell into a deeply indeterminate position between the natural and the artificial, giving life to combinations that "have no known mechanism for formation in nature." Within a decade, in fact, the genetic future of the bacteria would be revised even more extensively, as E. coli were converted into factories used commercially and on a very large scale to synthesize human proteins such as interferon, somatostatin, growth hormone, insulin, and many others. It may appear vacuous or even insincere to ask, at this stage of the game, whether or not bacteria imbued with segments of amphibian or human genetic material are natural or artificial. The seemingly unlimited historical plasticity of these ostensibly contrasting terms has weakened our capacity to discern or to impose any robust differences between them. In its parts and taken as a whole, the world we inhabit may be freely characterized as natural, artificial, organic, mechanical, animate, holographic or whatever else, and we appear to be stuck with certain antinomies inherent in the very concept of nature. To put it another way, nature does not specify its own metaphysical significance, neither through empirical evidence nor through a priori reasoning. "That there is such a thing as nature," wrote Aristotle in Physics, "it would be ridiculous to try to show" (94). By this he simply meant that the existence of nature was self-evident, it was given, and could only be questioned out of confusion between those kinds of fact that require proof and those that do not. Nature cannot be proven—I think Aristotle was right about that—but this observation is not entirely trivial, as we shall see, nor is it merely a statement about the logic of evidence and proof. 282 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century Precisely because the existence of nature is self-evident, its mode of existence is not. The given is a historical variable—not a constant—in the development of our knowledge and experience of nature, because in what is given we can neither preserve nor recover any trace of origin. Not only do the constituent forms of life change, but more importantly the very processes of emergence, transformation, preservation, and extinction change too. The body of nature is therefore left to creep through history along the shifting seams of language and technology, representation and intervention, appearing intuitively now as one thing and later, also intuitively, as something else altogether. For this reason nature in itself appears always in the background but never in the foreground of modern scientific inquiry. What is nature?—this is simply an unscientific question. Moreover, notwithstanding the ancient adage that nature abhors a vacuum, we do not know what nature abhors. No one can say. In a manner of speaking, nature is counting on us to provide the abhorrence, approbation, or cold indifference to its ways. The case of genetic engineering is an instructive example of the historical, technological, and semiotic contingency of nature. In it we can readily observe the fragility of principles at one time or another identified as natural or biological laws. Consider Wallace's Sarawak Law, for example. While working in Borneo, in the state of Sarawak, the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace formulated a principle that has exerted considerable influence on the study of natural history ever since. Wallace published the idea in an essay of 1855 entitled "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of Species." The principle—which became known as the Sarawak Law—maintains that "every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species." Immediately following the basic statement of this principle, Wallace offered the following exposition: If the law above enunciated be true, it follows that the natural series of affinities will also represent the order in which the several species came into existence, each one having had for its immediate antitype a closely allied species existing at the time of its origin. It is evidently possible that two or three distinct species may have had a common antitype, and that each of these may again have become the antitypes from which other closely allied species were created. The effect of this would be, that so long as each species has had but one new species formed on its model, the line of affinities will be simple, and may be represented by placing the several species in direct succession in a straight line. But if two or more species have been independently formed on the plan of a common antitype, then the series of affinities will be compound, and can only be represented by a forked or many-branched line. Paul Lewis 283 But already in the first transgenic experiments of Cohen and Boyer, and even more so in later extrapolations, we see that the Sarawak Law has come to an end in some sense. The lattice of zoological relations needs no longer to be constituted by lines and forks, as Wallace imagined. Arguably, it will not be constituted thus, so we must ask: What does it become? In the case of the toad and the bacterium, the "natural series of affinities" between them—after genetic recombination—cannot possibly "represent the order in which the several species came into existence." The fact that the prokaryotic bacterial cells could be made to function, in some crucial respect, as the eukaryotic cells of an amphibian or a human, the fact that some bacteria now share an unprecedented structural affinity with the other species, tells nothing about their correlative position in phyletic history. The paleontological and retrospective relation has been severed and replaced by a relation that is technological and prospective. Whereas Wallace envisioned a branching tree of speciation as the moving process of natural history, the future history of nature promises to be something else altogether. It is as though a certain dimension or continuum of natural history has been broken. Not only is there a synchronic discontinuity of novel species constructed by recombination in the laboratory, but there is also the diachronic discontinuity of species revivified after a period of extinction. Consider the case of the woolly mammoth or the Neanderthal, from which paleontologists have excavated substantial genetic information and for which some are planning a kind of biological resurrection. Understandably, there is intense fascination and even some real scientific engagement with the prospects of reconstituting the mammoth and the Neanderthal. These prospects, negligible or even ludicrous at present, should be considered in light of the fact that the Banteng, for example, an endangered species of south Asian ox, and the Influenza A (H1N1) virus, which was responsible for the catastrophic pandemic of 1918, have already been reconstituted from long dead specimens containing still viable DNA signatures. These were not the first achievements in biological reconstitution from preserved remnants, nor will they be the last. How exactly shall we represent the genealogical descent of these evolutionary Lazaruses? Following Wallace's terms, neither the straight line nor the forked line attaches these resurrected organisms to natural history. They are dots or thread fragments, harbingers of a pointillistic taxonomy, first scrawlings and erasures of a biological palimpsest. Together, the many synchronic and diachronic genealogical disruptions 284 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century made possible by genetic engineering would seem to prefigure a rhizomatic future of zoological affiliations. The texture of natural history is indeed punctuated by scientific and technological breaks, just as it has been for thousands of years. As to the frequency and character of these breaks over time, one can identify differences of degree and differences of a more fundamental sort. We continue to look toward the animals, however, even those artificial animals conjured in the laboratory, as we stumble toward both an understanding and an engineering of nature. This seems to be a trace of instrumental continuity amidst so many biological and ecological disruptions. Between nature and embodied human experience there always stands an animal— many animals—and plants as well. Representations of life, particularly animals, therefore function as more than just another theme in art, science, and reflection. One can read them as the signs, often cryptic or distorted, of a changing historical relation to nature. This is no less true in technologically saturated societies, where an expansion of the ecologies of artificial life has given rise to an artificial ecology of life in general, where environmental conditions and cycles are quasi-stable at best, and where the punctuations promise to outnumber the equilibria by a long margin. In ecology, the proliferation of atypical life forms within areas of persistent ecological disequilibrium, or at the environmental margins called ecotones, is known as the edge effect. I want to explore this classical concept in ecology as both the metaphor and the historical condition of new life forms emerging on an edge between the natural and the artificial. Until recently this edge has been associated almost exclusively with scientific research, which has long been in the business of producing biological hybrids, mutations, and augmentations; but recently artists have staked a claim on this edge effect as well. My exploration follows some of the more dramatic instances of experimentation with biology as an art form. I also draw together the beginnings of a Deleuzian interpretation of the future of ecology, an interpretation that cuts, splices and recombines elements of an idiosyncratic ontology into the tissue of a strange animality. Deleuze and Guattari developed their own species of process philosophy in an intellectual environment of speculations and critical discoveries in anthropology, genetics and molecular biology. As a result of this effort, they have left a rich—but by no means perfect—language for new conceptual problems in the science and art of ecology. The recent emergence of genetic and biological experimentation in art, itself an uneasy alliance, provides an irresistible opportunity to test the uneasy alliance between Deleuze, Guattari, and the future of ecology. These experiments in art constitute a kind of schizoid collision of sociopolitical Paul Lewis 285 and ontological dimensions, a collision in which the natural and the artificial operate not merely as the pincers of some dialectical opposition but as the rhizomatic threads of a more complex multiplicity, as a flow of disjunctive forces between the natural and the artificial. Terror Cells: The Art of Biology Once out of Nature, I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake —Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats Plants, animals, and the milieux of life have all been special themes in art for thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic. As to the real "function" of early cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere, which are dominated by depictions of animals, we are not entitled to assert much beyond wonder and speculation. In many of these speculations, however, great significance is attached to hunting, and the paintings are thought to have recorded a gesture of primitive sympathetic magic intended to secure some advantage over the hunter's quarry. But scenes of animal mating and parturition are also widespread in the cave paintings, which suggests a more general sense of awe toward animal life itself. It is as if the Paleolithic artists were expressing a relation to nature that centered on beauty, vitality, birth and predation in the animal world. In recent years, however, artists have asserted a more direct and radical responsibility—beyond representation—for this ensemble of life and nature. Over the past decade, a few artists have been exhibiting their own quite sophisticated genetic and biological experiments as works of art. Some are completed by outside laboratories commissioned to do the wet biological work, while others are the product of research and production undertaken by the artists themselves, who have one way or another acquired the requisite scientific skills and equipment. In any case, we can say that the living organism, plant and animal tissues, the cell, the genome—these have now entered into the practice of art as raw materials. Laura Cinti has exhibited genetically altered cactus plants that express human hair. Oron Catts and the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) have created sculptures of disembodied tissue grown in vitro, including several pairs of pig wings and a ¼ scale human ear. Catts and TC&A even gilded some of the pig's wings with gold, knowingly or unknowingly putting flesh and blood into Yeats' oracular promise to "wake a drowsy 286 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century Emperor" by stepping outside nature to assume a bodily form "of hammered gold and gold enameling." Eduardo Kac failed to produce GFP K-9, the green fluorescent dog he envisioned in 1998, but went on to exhibit a similarly engineered transgenic rabbit two years later, borrowing from a marine jellyfish genetic material that had itself been altered in the laboratory. Within the narrative of art history, these works attest to a contemporary cultural condition in which art emerges from a wide open field of practices and possibilities. In these recent works of biological art, it has become increasingly difficult to express the nature of the relationship between the artist, the medium, and the artwork, perhaps because nonhuman biological agencies and forces themselves are responsible for so much of the process and the product. Jens Hauser, curator of a recent exhibition of biological art entitled "Still, Living" offered the following survey of the field: Let's step back a moment, this welcome moment of stillness in the eye of the breaking storm above an increasingly media-hyped art field. As biology's ascent to the status of hottest physical science has been accompanied by the massive use of biological metaphors in the Humanities, this has also generated a wide range of biotech procedures that are providing artists simultaneously with the topics and new expressive media: transgenics, cell and tissue culture, plant and animal selection and breeding, homografts, synthesis of artificial DNA sequences, neurophysiology, synthetic biology, visualization techniques borrowed from molecular biology and biomedical research. Artists are in the labs. The very last sentence, because of its simple declarative force, is the most potent moment in Hauser's restrained celebration. Artists are in the labs— how shall we punctuate that? And what impact will these artists have upon the various networks of life at the edge of the natural and the artificial? Now more than ever the movement "from here to there" in biological history would seem to follow a nonlinear path, where the initial conditions include artists in the labs working with cells, tissues, recombinant DNA, and other living materials. Still more emblematic of this post-medium condition, to use Rosalind Krauss' clever phrase, is the recent work of Jennifer Willet and Shawn Bailey entitled "Teratological Prototypes." Adopting the corporate identity BIOTEKNICA, Willet and Bailey collaborated with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of TC&A to produce and exhibit tissue cultures "seeded with the P19 mouse teratoma cell line." Teratomas are cancerous growths of chaotically differentiated tissue: lumps of muscle riddled with hair, teeth, gut, bone, and so on. These extraordinary tumors, which can appear naturally and Paul Lewis 287 catastrophically in organisms outside the laboratory, develop from concurrently operating ectodermal, mesodermal, and endodermal embryonic germ cell lines. They are morphological outlaws, rejecting any somatic plan that would distinguish inside from outside. Here we can speak without exaggeration of bodies without organs—or organs without bodies—growing slowly but deliberately in the thin membranous ecology between art and science. It is difficult to imagine a more graphic instance of biological abomination than these teratological prototypes, and yet something much more than an art of abjection is being undertaken here, something more, even, than the political pressure Willet and Bailey are trying to exert as "activists and cultural workers towards the democratization of the biotechnological sphere." This populist political intention is fairly typical of views expressed by other wetware hackers, as they are sometimes called, and just as often it includes a moral admonition against the uncritical surrender of our biological futurity to science and to the market. There is a feeling and perhaps a hope that in displays of biological aberration artists might communicate an effective warning against the inadequate or incoherent ethical responsibilities of biotechnology. If nothing else, they make plain the fact that experimental organisms will almost certainly come to life before they are understood—and what exactly does it mean to understand an organism in this context? But again, more than political inclusiveness is at stake in these biological interventions or soft experiments, as Willet and Bailey call them, more than just an artistic plea for the precautionary principle in science. Such works also challenge our assumptions about the present and future conditions for life and nature in an increasingly artificial world. They are ontological question marks, whose interrogative force pushes into the unfamiliar encounter with life and animality: What is this? What's really going on here? What comes next—not for art but for life? Reactions to these kinds of works within art history and art criticism have varied widely, of course. Some celebrate the new biological media on the grounds that art might now be pulled from its ineffectual games of irony and self-reflexivity. And there is a related sense that art might be freed from its often gratuitous relationship to popular culture—the sense, in other words, that it might develop as something more than mere commentary. One could still say that these works belong to a long tradition of artistic commentary on science, but saying so would conceal the historical, cultural, and aesthetic discontinuities—not necessarily discordances—between physical science in general and biological science in particular. 288 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century The public reaction to new biological artworks has also included a moral reflex that asks the question: Is this right? Outright moral hostility, though, is faint almost by necessity since the basic vocabulary for expressing moral objections to this kind of artwork is lacking. Again, the question "What is this?" eclipses the exclamation "This is wrong!" In some cases the work is seen to be a symptomatic reaction against ongoing degradations of the larger natural environment—in other words, art as an aesthetic flight from the ecological nightmare into a biological dreamworld. Seen in this light, artists producing anomalous plants and animals are among the first wave of cultural refugees from a planetary ecological crisis. A more cynical observer might understand their cellular and genetic mischief as a specific realization of Freud's diagnosis: the neurotic repeats instead of remembering.2 Separated both mentally and physically from so many corrupted environments, they are taking up their own neurotic positions at the edge of this biological diaspora. Despite the diversity of their aims and techniques, the new biological artists are stringing together a chain of disjunctions and contradictions—x is either this or that, x is neither this nor that. But they are doing so in a way that amplifies the simultaneous presence and operation of contrasting terms: natural and artificial, living and dead, human and inhuman, normal and pathological. The disjunctions, in other words, are inclusive disjunctions and belong to the eccentric ontologies of Deleuze and Guattari. It is the mutual action of their opposition and difference that engenders these works of art in an age of biological production. In a memorable passage from Repetition and Difference it is written that: "Difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing" (57). In the realm of the semi-living—a neologism favored by Catts—the nothingness behind biological difference confronts us directly—viscerally, one could say—and expresses a radically contingent future of discretionary organisms and artificial ecologies. An interesting example of this is Laura Cinti's Cactus Project, which I mentioned briefly earlier. These are the alleged transgenic cactus plants that have been designed to express human hair. In scattered online discussions about the project, some incredulous contributors identifying themselves as biologists have aimed skeptical arguments against the scientific authenticity of Cinti's work. There are imputations of fraud, in other words, maintaining that the ectopic hair of the cactus plant is not really human hair and could not have been achieved genetically, presumably because of some still unsurpassed technical limits in biological engineering. The authenticity of the hairy cactus is not exclusively a scientific question, however, and the criteria for fraudulence Paul Lewis 289 in art have until recently had very little to do with criteria for fraudulence in science. So even if the hairy cactus is genuine—that is, even if the human hair expressed is indeed the result of genetic engineering—why should we still call this hair human? Doesn't it belong now to the cactus and not in a trivial sense either? Or better still, doesn't it become just a standard biological part, to use a revealing phrase from the biological engineering laboratory at MIT? In this case, as in so many others, what makes it standard is not its elemental composition but its technical transmissibility: the apotheosis of Fordism put into service as an organizing principle for life?3 Human hair or cactus hair—the taut disjunctions asserted, especially in transgenic organisms, "do not involve any exclusions," as Deleuze and Guattari explained in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia," since exclusions can arise only as a function of inhibiters and repressers that eventually determine the support and firmly define a specific, personal subject" (38-39). It is precisely these inhibitors and repressors that are giving way, just as species-properties will gradually lose their dependent relationship to the species, a relationship that the long course of natural history proves to be spurious in any case. This decoupling and general circulation of biological parts and traits from their once specific owners is unfolding even as the very concepts of the species, the taxon, and the phenotype are becoming more unstable. Theodosius Dobzhansky summarized this development in a well known essay of 1973, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." Molecular biology, he explained, had "made possible an approach to exact measurements of degrees of biochemical similarities and differences among organisms." Reviewing the variance of amino acid sequences in proteins shared by different species, for example, Dobzhansky made the following observation: It is important to note that amino acid sequences in a given kind of protein vary within a species as well as from species to species. It is evident that the differences among proteins at the level of species, genus, family, order, class, and phylum are compounded of elements that vary also among individuals within a species. Individual and group differences are only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different. Evidence supporting the above propositions is ample and is growing rapidly. The evidence—"ample and growing rapidly"—encompasses a matrix of biological differences in degree only. For instance, human and chimpanzee hemoglobin have identical amino acid sequence profiles, the gorilla hemoglobin chain differs from these by one amino acid, the same 290 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century functional metalloprotein in cattle differs at seventeen loci, etc. To say, however, that these are differences only in degree is misleading, however, since these differences are omnipresent within as well as between taxonomic groups, according to Dobzhansky. For the individual, as for the class, difference is constitutive of life itself. The same constitutive ontological difference is written into the desiring-machines of Deleuze and Guattari, who drew upon a wide range of sources in the development of their ideas on this subject. In AntiOedipus they recognize the work of Melanie Klein, for example, particularly her concept of partial objects, as one basis for the desiringmachine: Partial objects are what make up the parts of the desiring machines; partial objects define the working machine or the working parts, but in a state of dispersion such that one part is continually referring to a part from an entirely different machine, like the red clover and the bumble bee, the wasp and the orchid, the bicycle horn and the dead rat's ass. (323) The Deleuzian fascination with flora and pollinating insects is here, as elsewhere, a mark of commitment to the idea that forces of biological production and reproduction are not confined within the selfsame individual; they are instead dispersed across fields of difference, always referring, like Klein's partial objects, to other forces. Aristotle once ventured a distinction between the natural and the artificial by contending that the former has its principle of movement within itself, while the latter does not. This distinction collapses if one concedes, as Deleuze and Guattari have, that the principles of movement are everywhere, which is to say neither inside nor outside the organism. "There is only desire and environments, fields, forms of herd instinct" (287). For Deleuze and Guattari another important line of influence came through the sciences of molecular biology, genetics, and embryology. Their engagement with the work of Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod is clear enough, and there is also an important connection to the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who wrote in The Genesis of the Individual: The individual is to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying only a certain phase of the whole being in question—a phase that therefore carries the implication of a preceding preindividual state, and that, even after individuation does not exhaust in the single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual state (87). Paul Lewis 291 Simondon's principal contention is that the individual in the living world "can be grasped as more than a unity and more than an identity" and is therefore other than "that which is identical to itself." One common way of characterizing this proliferation of constitutive differences takes human technologies as a special driving force, a force which expands the boundaries of the human phenotype. Biotechnologies are at the outermost edge of instability in what has come to be known as the extended human phenotype, where the extension here is presumed to be an extension of technological reach into the natural world. But the phenotypes of nonhuman organisms that develop within this human technological extension are also extended. This is the edge effect operating against both sides of the edge. In the biological art that flourishes there we have uncovered instances of a schizoid voice speaking prophetically of a strange biological future not in language but in flesh: biotic first, semiotic later and perhaps not at all. These works are not primarily the outcome of symbolic expression, as they were, for example, in the paranoiac or absurdist productions of Surrealism and Dada long ago. This particular advance of biotechnology is an intensification of differences that multiply edges inward and outward. It is an expansion of the ecology of life in general along newly forming seams between nature and artifice, between art and science. In a strategy of involution SymbioticA, a group established at the University of Western Australia and also directed by Oron Catts, has produced "MEART: The Semi-Living Artist." Developed and shown over the past six years, MEART is an electronic network of receptions and transmissions cybernetically connected to populations of cultured mammalian neural cells in Atlanta. Electrical impulses to and from the glass-bodied "brain" move mechanical drawing arms in remote exhibition spaces. Cameras are included in the feedback loops so that the disembodied nerve cells can "see" the work in progress. Under the scientific direction of Steve Potter at Georgia Tech University, these neural colonies grow, adapt, and allegedly "learn to make art." I call this an inversion because in this case it is not the artwork but the artist who exists as a soft experiment: artist, medium, engineer and product have fused in a triple synthesis of hardware, software, and wetware. This would not be the first time artists employed forms of animal life as intermediate agents in the production of their artwork, nor would it be the first time artists have attempted to submerge their personal and human intentions into mechanical or aleatoric machinery. In this sense, MEART is a synthesis of once radical but now familiar artistic experiments. On the other hand, because it is continuously connected to an advancing front of 292 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century techniques in biological engineering and, more importantly, because it is connected to a real and evolving life form—neither human nor nonhuman, neither plant nor animal—MEART goes beyond its closest precedents in art history. It is the manifestation of yet another kind of edge. Potter Laboratories is not the only workshop developing organicsynthetic neural interfaces. Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi has constructed a similar apparatus, but instead of using disembodied nerve cells cultured in glass, as Potter and Catts have done, Mussa-Ivaldi managed to connect the live but disembodied brain stem of a lamprey to a photosensitive robot. The strictly mechanical and optical components of this hybrid are controlled by the organic component—the brain stem—and the whole apparatus exhibits behaviors appropriate for a lamprey in the presence of variable light stimuli. In yet another research program, Miguel Nicolelis trained owl monkeys to manually control a joystick in response to images presented on a screen, as in a video game. At the same time Nicolelis opened a second channel of screen control, whereby the specific brain wave patterns accompanying the monkey's manual movements could themselves be used to control the onscreen action. In time the monkey learned to act upon the screen imagery without using its hands at all, allowing the direct expression of its will or intention to act through the brain monitors. Lastly, Sanjiv Talwar has expanded the prospects for a Skinnerian future by setting up a system of signals and stimuli that can be used to control the locomotion of rats. Rewards triggered through the pleasure center of the medial forebrain bundle prompted rats to turn right or left with timed stimulations sent to the somatosensory cortical regions for right and left whisker sensitivity. These "ratbots" can be guided from a distance, by remote control, even as they navigate completely unfamiliar terrain. On the one hand, neuro-electronic-animal-robotic networks such as these can be construed as but another instance of the extended human phenotype, like highways, wrist watches, air conditioners, and radar—just more technology, in other words. One could put MEART into this same memory hole of technical banality. On the other hand, it could be construed as something of an organism on its own terms, embedded and adaptive within an artificial ecology of scientific and artistic selective pressures. In their sympathetic reading of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Deleuze and Guattari endorse this second interpretation: the desiringmachine stands for the environment in which technologies and networks like MEART might flourish and even reproduce. The Deleuzian moment in Butler's text centers on the contrast of two arguments. The first holds that an organism is but a complicated machine; the second holds that machines are but extensions of the organism. These two arguments Paul Lewis 293 recapitulate one of the very oldest conceptual dichotomies in metaphysics. "But there is a Butlerian manner for carrying each of the arguments to an extreme point," Deleuze and Guattari explain in Anti-Oedipus, "where it can no longer be opposed to the other, a point of nondifference or dispersion." At this point, they continue, "it becomes immaterial whether one says that machines are organs, or organs, machines. The two definitions are exact equivalents: man as a "vertebro-machinate animal," or as an "aphidian parasite of machines" (284-5). The green-glowing rabbit, the cactus growing human hair, the pigs' wings, and the monstrous but still living teratoma have not yet found any clear placement in the art world. They are the early perturbations of an unforeseeable aesthetic development. But these bizarre creatures occupy an equally uncertain place in the zoological world. Their extravagance as artworks derives from the fact that they are not representations of monstrous animals—as one sees in the works of Bosch, for example—but are in fact living constituents of the biotic community. They are alive. They belong as much to the history of life as to the history of art. How should we begin to understand or even speak of their natural habitat? Can we speak of a habitat at all? Whatever impact these experiments may have on the discourse of art, their full significance will exceed this limited sphere. It already has. We know that the artists have arrived quite late to the practice of zoological tinkering: their "unprecedented" and occasionally "scandalous" use of anomalous life forms as art is an appropriation of routine practices in the biological sciences. Life as a pure artifact first began to proliferate in the landless network of the scientific laboratory, where its exploratory and instrumental value for knowledge was unproblematic, or so it was assumed. Reflecting the artifice of its life forms, the modern biological laboratory is itself a heterogeneous ecology shaped by venture capitalists, public health initiatives, patent lawyers, government budgets, ideological antagonisms, academic bureaucracies, religious exclamations, and personal obsessions.4 The biological laboratory is itself an ecology of many edges. Now artists have directly asserted some cultural rights over the play of forces that constitute life, and their works have therefore carried the already complex political ecology of the laboratory in an unexpected direction. This kind of serious work has until now been the prerogative of scientists, and doubtless it still is, but the ground of authority and interpretation has shifted somewhat to accommodate art. The science of biotechnology has already been likened to an art, not always favorably, by some of its own practitioners. Reflecting critically on the unsystematic and ad hoc techniques of biological engineering, Drew 294 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century Endy has undertaken the work of elevating this practice, which has been little more than an art so far, into a real science. Endy's discontent is quoted in "Synthetic Life," an article for Scientific American by W. Wayt Gibbs: Say I want to modify a plant so that it changes color in the presence of TNT, I can start tweaking genetic pathways in the plant to do that, and if I am lucky, then after a year or two I may get a "device"—one system. But doing that once doesn't help me build a cell that swims around and eats plaque from artery walls. It doesn't help me grow a little microlens. Basically the current practice produces pieces of art. (74-5) The recent emergence of genetic and biological art is both a widening and a deepening of the extensive system of artificial habitat for semibiological, pseudo-biological, and trans-biological organisms. This cannot easily be discounted as fashionable nonsense, I believe, nor is it even a metaphor. No longer restricted to the field of meaning and affect, art has become an ecological niche, literally. It is rather, the surplus of an older and more extensive field of biological productions operating under the auspices of science, medicine, and agriculture. As Deleuze and Guattari proclaim at the very beginning of Anti-Oedipus: "Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines" (1). The future of these experiments in art will undoubtedly deepen our ongoing historical confrontation with the most fundamental questions of ecology. What is an organism? What is a niche or a habitat? What is natural? What is a nonhuman environment? Such questions appear now, more than ever, to be embroiled in a deterritorialized struggle among social forces over a biological domain that has itself become deterritorialized. In art, specifically, the raw ontological struggle over discontinuities in nature will not be mitigated by the pragmatism and cultural authority that accompany science in the public imagination. This will widen the range of ontological habitat between life and non-life, a range populated by the pseudo-animate, the semi-living, the ontic, and the ontoid, tracing an edge between art, science, and ecology in what may (or may not) carry us toward a Deleuzian century after all. Paul Lewis 295 Notes 1 There is a great deal of natural biological hacking and genetic recombination through bacterial conjugation in the wild—outside the laboratory, that is. In "The Invisible Enemy," Steve Silberman reported the emergence of a highly drugresistant and occasionally lethal bacterium in American emergency medical facilities established along an Iraq evacuation chain: "When a team of geneticists unlocked the secret of the bug's rapid evolution in 2005, they found that one strain of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii carries the largest collection of genetic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism. Out of its 52 genes dedicated to defeating antibiotics, radiation, and other weapons of mass bacterial destruction, nearly all have been bootlegged from other bad bugs like Salmonella, Pseudomonas, and Escherichia coli." 2 The genome itself, by translation and transcription, is neurotic and repeats without remembering. Contra Dawkins it is not a selfish but a selfless replicator! 3 The Computational and Systems Biology Initiative at MIT maintains a Registry of Standard Biological Parts in order to supply a universal platform or catalog to the emerging field of synthetic biology. 4 See Paul Rabinow's Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. This ethnographic study of the invention and ascent of the polymerase chain reaction "shows how a contingently assembled practice emerged composed of distinctive subjects, the site in which they worked, and the object they invented" (2). Works Cited Aristotle. "Physics." A New Aristotle Reader. Ed. J. L. Ackrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Dobzhansky, Theodosius. "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." http://people.delphiforums.com/lordorman/light.htm, last accessed April 08, 2008. Gibbs, W. W. "Synthetic Life." Scientific American 290:5 (May 2004). Hauser, Jens. "Curator's Statement: Still, Living." www.beap.org/v8/docs/bp_symb.pdf, last accessed April 08, 2008. Jackson, David A. "Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA Methodology." The Recombinant DNA Debate. Ed. David A. Jackson and Stephen P. Stich (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1979). Rabinow, Paul. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 296 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century Silberman, Steve. "The Invisible Enemy." www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/enemy.html, last accessed April 08, 2008. Simondon, Gilbert. The Genesis of the Individual. Quoted in Todd May. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Wallace, Alfred Russel. "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of Species." www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm, last accessed April 08, 2008. Willet, Jennifer and Shawn Bailey. "Interview with Jennifer Willet and Shawn Bailey of Bioteknica." Simultaneita http://simultaneita.net/zeroonebioteknic.html, last accessed April 08, 2008. THE ECOLOGY OF LOVE: READING ANNIE DILLARD WITH FÉLIX GUATTARI GEORGIANA BANITA The title of this essay raises the issue of the interconnectedness between modern conceptualizations of deep ecology on the one hand and definitions of love as shaped by but quite separate from current theories of pleasure, desire, and need in the context of environmentalist ethics on the other hand. In her ecofeminist study Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (1999), Chaia Heller distinguishes between an ecology of need, related to production, consumption and reproduction, and an ecology of desire—subjective and qualitative—which foregrounds the sensual aspects of interpersonal and ecological relations. The sum of these desires, also referred to as the eco-erotic, is continuous with Deleuze and Guattari's discourse on desire in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), but also with the trispherical ecosophy principle formulated in Guattari's The Three Ecologies (1989). Part of Guattari's thesis, inspired by Gregory Bateson's proto-ecosophic study Steps Towards the Ecology of Mind (1972), is that mental ecology and the structures of human subjectivity to which it refers is under threat of extinction through the propagation of epistemological fallacies that reinforce ecological hierarchies. Guattari's transversalist, polyphonic conception of ecological subjectivity, informed by the author's psychoanalytical training and his continuing interest in works of art and literature, will be tested here as a heuristic for the interpretation of a literary text that shares its engagement with eco-ethical and eco-erotic paradigms. Annie Dillard's novel The Maytrees (2007), the author's merely second novel over an otherwise long and prolific literary career, gives a subdued account of acts of love that are both sacred and mundane.1 Taken in the context of Dillard's literary work, the novel clearly marks a perspective shift from the life of nature described in Dillard's earlier eco-theological writings—such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 298 The Ecology of Love (1974)—to the life of the mind best showcased in this untypical narrative about a marriage and family union that does not follow the prescribed norms of moral convention (fidelity, possessiveness, self-righteousness) but takes the path of ethical values that are as starkly individual as they are selfless. Dillard's engagement with the crisis of romantic life and its 'ecological' resolution, I argue, is in keeping with Félix Guattari's transition from a natural to a personal ecosophy, as reflected in the gradual evolution of this concept in his work. While it shares with traditional ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere, ecosophy also acknowledges that 'incorporeal species' and 'mental ecology' are equally endangered and in crisis: "how do we change mentalities," Guattari asks in Chaosmosis, "how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the Cosmos?" (119-20). My purpose in this chapter is to encourage an ecologically oriented reading of the erotic themes in Dillard's The Maytrees. This reading, escaping from the esoteric abstractness and mystic focus (see e.g. Dunn 1978; Keller 1983) that afflicts much criticism of Dillard's work, seizes opportunities offered by ecocriticism and ecosophy—which instigate discussion of the linkages between natural and cultural processes—to make good on literature's ethical investment and reaffirm its social responsibility. I will outline the essential features of such a reading by first assessing the connections between eroticism and ecological thinking in The Maytrees. My aim is to reveal how the novel builds on its explicit environmental premises to develop an ecology of love relations and their impact on the characters' awareness of themselves, their natural and mental environment, as well as their complex rapport with time, both interior and exterior, subjective and concrete, psychological and narratological. Not only, then, is an explication of the love-ecology relation long overdue, but such an explication needs to be placed in the context of its artistic realizations, where extended deployment of the two concepts becomes less and less stable and acquires a formal malleability very much in the spirit of postmodern and poststructuralist thought. In doing this, I align myself with Félix Guattari's tripartite ecological approach as it is espoused in his essay The Three Ecologies, where he famously proclaims that "it is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment" (41). Specifically, Guattari proposes a shift from a purely technocratic perspective in Georgiana Banita 299 ecological action toward an ethico-political articulation comprising three ecological registers: the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity (28). Dillard's novel, I believe, is a hybrid illustration of Guattari's social ecosophy—which consists in "developing specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family" (34)—and his mental ecosophy, leading us "to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the 'mysteries' of life and death" (35). Before I attempt to give substance to this outline, I want to disabuse readers of two misconceptions that this sketch may have aroused. First, it is not my purpose to analyze Dillard's knowledge of current environmentalist discourses or her interest in ecology as a discipline or form of political activism. As it has already been noted, "although Dillard is a good distance from the ecological vision propounded by ecofeminists, deep ecologists, and a number of environmental ethicists, she holds subtle and not-so-subtle views that should be reckoned with" (Smith 1994). In fact, I believe that Dillard developed her locale-oriented ecological understanding—or what others would call "bioregional ethics" (Murphy 24, also Cheney 1989)—as a result of her interest in the natural world and what might constitute our best relations to it. For my purposes, her work prior to The Maytrees is germane only to the fashion in which it represents experiences of natural phenomena and an ecological awareness distinct from that displayed in the novel under discussion. Second, I am not so concerned with the general importance of erotic relations in defining ecology, but rather in how a particular text hinges on such connections and therefore alerts us to the implications of extending ecology to what Guattari calls "immaterial species," which include both love relations and literature itself. The novel not only actively follows the development of a poet over several decades, but often resorts to literary and philosophical examples, textual or biographical, in an effort to abandon scientific discourse and reinvigorate aesthetic paradigms. In Guattari's The Three Ecologies it is also artists who provide the most valuable insights into the human condition, although Dillard does question the concept that 'written' or recorded experience—in painting, music, or otherwise consigned to artistic form—comprises the whole or even a representative part of human experience.2 This transversal network, rather than the possible (in)fidelity of Dillard reproducing the theoretical pronouncements of Guattari's "three ecologies," is the focus of my interest. 300 The Ecology of Love Love and Marriage We are moral creatures [...] in an amoral world. —Dillard, Pilgrim 172 Dillard sets her story in Provincetown and Downeast Maine, beginning in the 1940s. Against the background of the dunes and beaches around Provincetown, the plot unfolds around the courtship and marriage of bookish, Ingrid Bergman look-alike Lou Bigelow and the metaphysicallyminded carpenter Toby Maytree, whose romantic involvement and fourteen-year marriage begins and ends in passion, with abandonment and betrayal in-between. In the sparse economy and ecology of the dunes, Lou and Toby renounce conventional values, monetary and other purchasable goods, and restrict their serene, unencumbered lives to a barely standing dune shack, where they indulge in painting (Lou) and poetry (Toby), far from the rat race, only sparingly relying on classical forms of labor: "They embrace the rigors that go with living deeply in that landscape, and at the same time they seem idle, up to very little beyond cocktail parties, serial marriage and the reading of good books" (Robinson), the latter aspect bestowing on the characters an almost dilettantish flair verging on intellectual sobriety: between them, the Maytrees go through about 300 books a year. Until a babysitter around town (Deary Hightoe) accidentally enraptures midlife-troubled Toby and disrupts the idyll for a period of twenty years, failing, however, to lastingly interfere with the couple's inner life before and beyond her. In the meantime, Lou absorbs the shock and methodically imposes serenity on herself, also in an attempt to do better than her own mother, in her turn abandoned with similar expediency, while the couple's son, Pete, retains a lasting resentment of his father and his emotional restlessness. Listing, like Diogenes, all the things she does not need— grudges against Toby and Deary probably the top of that list—Lou becomes ever simpler and even monk-like as the years pass. Twenty years later, after Deary's crippling heart failures and an accident that leaves Toby unable to care for her, the two return to Provincetown to seek Lou's help. The forgiving wife takes them in until Deary's death two months later, when the Maytrees silently resume their marriage, with little apparent transformation but much under-the-surface adjustment. Throughout the novel, most of which features outdoor scenes, natural impressionistic settings surround the characters, who traverse shifting sands and tides or gaze at the deep-black night sky, free from ambient light, studded with accurately named constellations. So unlikely would such an unhampered view of the night sky be today that Dillard considered Georgiana Banita 301 naming her book Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution, but eventually caved in to her publishers, who did not fall for the joke. Light, however, acts as the environment for all of the novel's human and biological goingson, just as it works, on a much larger scale, as the currency of life and the universe, considered by Thomas Berry (and others, see Lovelock 1987, Dowd 1991) as "the primary sacred community" (Berry 16). "If there were such a thing as cosmic realism," Marilynne Robinson warmly quips in her review of the book, "The Maytrees would be a classic of the genre" (Robinson).3 This unflagging attention to simple natural surroundings not only acts as a counterweight to Dillard's philosophical impulses but is the main pivot around which her juxtaposition of sophisticated meditation and ordinary action revolves. The grand scales of nature, Dillard suggests, do not diffuse but reinforce the intimate and momentary sense of life unfolding before them. When she uses the term 'albedo' in reference to the look of sand by night (the albedo of an object is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from the sun; the term has its origins in the Latin 'albus' meaning 'white'), Dillard points to the subdued relation between ordinary human experience and a vast universe that seems coeval with its concrete physical incarnations in stone and sand, living and dead particle. It is a universe that appears compassionate and generous, like the characters themselves, yet free from sentimentality. By the end of the novel, we realize that the people we have watched reeling from the blows of their fortune reassume their initial posture—and resume their interrupted love—in the manner of grass springing up after a gust of wind has passed: without memory to retain the damage, or any lasting impression beyond a momentary shudder and the thrilling awareness of inevitable change, the thrill of animals' homecoming at the end of their seasonal migration: "The novel proposes that there is an involuntary, even unconscious shaping of character, individual and social, that comes with weathering, and that, in yielding to a wisdom no one could earn or choose and for which they have no language, people conform themselves in ways something like the accommodations landscape makes to weather and time" (Robinson). Already in 1980, David L. Lavery spotted Dillard's interest in and ability to notice the smallest natural details, her alertness to what he calls "major weather" (Lavery 257). The ebb and flow of love corresponds to the changing tides of nature. Even more, when she wishes to mark the passing of Toby's second wife Deary, Dillard deviates from the human perspective, otherwise eddying among Lou, Toby, and their son Pete, regarding the view through the slow eyes of a reptile who is and is not a witness to the transcendence 302 The Ecology of Love going on in the human world; all he notices is a seamless transition from life into death, as if the two were undivided, while the rift that inspires so much tension and anxiety among humans leaves him as nature left him: cold: "Yankee the turtle crawled out from under the couch and stretched his snake neck. He stood square as a pack mule waiting its load, like the lowest totem-pole animal resigned to shouldering all the rest, or resigned to lifting the seas that floated the lands, if this was that kind of world. He regarded dead Deary with the obsidian calm of a god" (181). To the witless creature human suffering seems petty, and his innocent indifference throws a derisive light on what would otherwise count as the last 'dead serious' moment of a life. Dillard's vision of creation as perhaps not the friendliest or most communitarian could not have been any clearer: "I alternate between thinking of the planet as home—dear and familiar stone hearth and garden—and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. [...] We don't know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn't seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures—from whom and with whom we have evolved—seems a mockery" (Teaching 150-51). Although Toby (and, for that matter, Lou herself) may be described as "a poet of possibly serious aspiration and minor but respectable attainment" (Robinson)—one of his poetry books, we learn, appears from Wesleyan—the novel refrains from praise or condemnation of any kind of achievement, thus relativizing poetry-writing as an occupation while stressing its features as a barometer of (self-)awareness. Moreover, after his reunion with Lou, Toby ceases to care if his work will last and gives up on acquiring what Keats called "knowledge enormous" in favor of something slighter and infinitely more satisfying, "knowledge slim" (205): dotting on his young grandson Manny, taking long walks, falling asleep as Lou cuts his hair. At this stage in his writing life, Toby reaches the status of "an inchworm leading its dimwit life" (Dillard, The Writing Life 552) floundering around, getting nowhere, just as Dillard had predicted every writer would. In his assessment of techno-scientific progress and consequent mutations in the development of labor, Guattari observes a net increase in the amount of time available to "potential human activity" (The Three Ecologies 28), which falls into two categories of leisure: "unemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and neurosis" (28) or "culture, creation, development, the reinvention of the environment and the enrichment of modes of life and sensibility" (28). It is clear where the studied simplicity of the Maytrees' existence would fit in. The novel's supporting cast also features economically nonconformist Georgiana Banita 303 characters: the party-giving Reevadare Weaver, the full-bearded dune shack dweller Cornelius Blue, and Jane, the non-dissertation writing daughter of New York professors who marries Cornelius, twenty years her senior. After Toby's defection, Lou takes pains to keep outside the world's acceleration. Faced with the question of what she should do with her day, Dillard responds "I open my eyes" (Holy the Firm 12). Silent witnessing, then, serves the greater purpose.4 Ecology and Love Vietnamese legend calls the earth the realm of desire. —Dillard, The Maytrees 40 As Guattari reminds us, the etymology of 'eco' is the Greek word oïkos, meaning 'home,' so by extrapolation, ecological balance can be said to entail a delicate symbiosis between ourselves and our homely surroundings. It is impossible to conceive of the self outside of its natural habitat, and vice-versa. In The Maytrees, Dillard not only provides a hospitable reading of this concept of ecology, but supplies the aptest testament to date of her commitment to what an early critic called her "literary ecology" (McFadden-Gerber 5), which she understood as devoted more to natural speculation than self-exploration. Literary ecology, I believe, in fact requires both in equal measure. If some have (unfairly) regarded Dillard's first nonfiction book as the "meteorological journal of an egomaniac" (Slovic 66-67), The Maytrees could be labeled 'the cosmic Kinsey report of two erotomaniacs.' Throughout the novel, the conceptualization of love—its attendant circumspection, caution, and ceremonial formality—remains central and continuous. It is, however, not without its tangles, knots, sea changes, weak points, and intersections, which in the end only make it more interesting. The Maytrees often dissolves (the word "solvent" comes up quite often) into a study of its characters' unconscious emotionality, of their minds' maneuverings in and out of love. The key signposts along the way are initial infatuation, marital sexuality, separation, and final reunion, whereby the novel lets the protagonists reclaim each other without sentimentality. The early, heady days of romance contain scenes of rapture and a certain innocence as to the workings of sentiment, Lou wondering about books' failure to have anticipated her current feelings.5 The protagonists’ impassioned life as a couple becomes even richer after the birth of their son Petie, but plunges dramatically after Toby takes up with the bohemian Deary, a crisis followed by a period of calm for Lou and guilt-ridden torment for her estranged husband, who decides to stay with 304 The Ecology of Love Deary long after his passion subsides, in an attempt to reclaim his moral high ground while mulling over love's stages in his confessional notebooks.6 Her earlier disclaimer notwithstanding—"I don't write at all about ethics. [...] The kind of art I write is shockingly uncommitted" (Yancy 960)—Dillard clearly embarks here on a form of terrestrial ethics of lived rather than ideal love, culminating in an emotional atheism, an acceptance of human and erotic mortality that corresponds to Guattari's "atheist awareness of finitude, of the mortality of the species, the planet and the entire universe, and not an illusory belief in immortality, which is only a misplaced contempt for life" (Pindar and Sutton 16). At an earlier point in her writing life, Dillard had lamented Western society's move from "pantheism to panatheism" (Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk 76), but The Maytrees recuperates a sense of the sacred from its very theological abstinence. The quest for meaning, Dillard concludes, has limits imposed by an unbridgeable gap between human beings' idea of the world and the reality of nature, one that we cannot grasp: "The boundaries of sense are actually quite clear," she observes, "we commonly (if tacitly) agree that the human world has human meaning which we can discover, and the natural world does not" (Living By Fiction 138). This limitation manifests itself in various forms of evasiveness. Foremost among these is an intriguing defacement of personal identity in the novel. What Suzanne Clark notes in relation to Dillard's subdued authorial voice also applies to the Maytrees, who seem not so much the subject of the novel's complex consciousness but subjected to it: "when we read Annie Dillard, we don't know who is writing. There is a silence in the place where there might be an image of the social self—of personality, character, or ego" (Clark 107). The novel's genealogy confirms this astringency. Eight years in the making, The Maytrees originally stretched over 1,200 pages, citing much historical and natural detail, before Dillard decided that the skeletal love story would be stifled by such richness. The 217 pages that remain occasionally do read like a best-of sammelsurium— as the exact terms of the plot often remain obscure and the sentences seem to have been clipped from other contexts and strung together, gem-like. The novel seems to shrink not only in size but also in intensity. Rather than understanding nature, love, and their interconnections by learning more, Dillard seems to say, we need to unlearn, un-know, and rely more on momentary vision in the guise of epiphany or heightened unselfconsciousness. The investigation of awareness and self-consciousness are, in fact, a significant and constant feature of Dillard's work, which displays both a Georgiana Banita 305 "sustained roar of ecstatic consciousness" (Slovic 63) and moments of ponderous self-scrutiny. Indeed, The Maytrees often describes objects that seem to lift off the page, invested as they are with dimensionality, presence, "a sharp sense of the ontological strangeness of creation and the mystery of our place in it" (Robinson) but above all an exquisite sense not only of what people are aware of, but exactly how. Dillard's attention to the quiddity of the world is thus extended to encompass thoughtful meditations on the stillness and thrift of conscious perception, its maudlin shifts and uneven temperatures. Through a careful attunement to the outer world, Dillard aspires to a state of self-transparency which in Pilgrim she labels "innocence," that is, "the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration" (Pilgrim 82). Such high-strung receptivity has been a hallmark of Dillard's fiction ever since Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, although rarely has her illuminating foray into consciousness attained this sublimity, since here, for the first time, Dillard juxtaposes the mind's monotony to a description of actual living beings, who can mouth her endless musings.7 The constant reversal of perspective from sand dunes to night skies suggests that phenomenon which Dillard earlier described as "the vertical motion of consciousness, from inside to outside and back" (Dillard, "Fashion" 57). "The interior life is in constant vertical motion," Dillard remarks, "it dreams down below; it notices up above; and it notices itself, too, and its own alertness" (57). This alternation of self-forgetfulness and self-attentiveness comes to life in the tide-like undulation of consciousness in the grips of emotion—abstract love or corporeal sexuality, the novel seldom specifies which of the two. Dillard's "commitment to awareness" (McConahay 106) therefore relies on a permanent shift between consciousness and its opposite, which in turn corresponds to the dialectic of emotion and reason as parts or successive motivators of love. Perhaps it is its very ability to grow in the rifts between one swing and another that love's potent consistency lies. Because, as John Elder remarked, what interests Dillard above all are the "shifts in human consciousness" (178) rather than its fidelity to one thing or another. Ultimately, these shifts amount to a process of fragile evolution. On numerous occasions, Dillard insisted that writing is a process of unself-conscious contemplation (Dillard, Writing Life 43), and above all a process, thus reflecting Guattari's eco-logic, concerned as it is with "the movement and intensity of evolutive processes" (The Three Ecologies 44): "It is a logic of intensities, of auto-referential existential assemblages engaging in irreversible durations. It is the logic not only of human subjects constituted as totalized bodies, but also as psychoanalytic partial 306 The Ecology of Love objects—what Winnicott calls 'transitional objects, institutional objects ('subject-groups'), faces and landscapes, etc." (The Three Ecologies 44).8 In Dillard as in Guattari, contact with nature is evidenced by its intensity rather than its duration, the conscious knowledge of biological systems or the formal detection of ecological design. This is especially significant if we consider that Dillard, like Guattari, is familiar with scientific concepts such as the Darwinian evolution, Big Bang theory, Einstein's relativity and quantum physics, which compel her to arrive at and accept the human observer's unsure footing in the world, a vision of chaos, starkly "dysteleological" (Becker 411) and as a result she remains quite ambivalent about the cohesiveness of the natural world. The emotions of heightened vitality which emerge in The Maytrees appear likewise in The Three Ecologies, as Guattari pits rationality against attentiveness, favoring the latter. By retaining a constant attention to the world outside and within, the mind latches onto fragments of the world which encapsulate and make scrutable those sensations that would otherwise overflow the mind's container. Such fragments resurface in the form of musical motifs, descending figures, or what Guattari calls refrains: "Under the generic term of refrain, I would place reiterative discursive sequences that are closed in upon themselves and whose function is an extrinsic catalyzing of existential affects. Refrains can find substance in rhythmic and plastic forms, in prosodic segments, in facial traits, in the emblems of recognition, in leitmotifs, signatures, proper names or their invocational equivalents" (Guattari, Cartographies 257; Guattari Reader 162).9 "The Scandal of Particularity"10 Destiny is not inscribed in an infrastructure. Capitalist societies secrete a society, a subjectivity which is in no way natural, in no way necessary. One could very well do something else. What I refuse is the idea of an inevitable and necessary program. —Guattari, Soft Subversions 277 The novel's micropolitics of desire (in Guattari's sense)11 runs in sync with ecological practices, allowing emotional betrayal to function as vector of 'dissent' in Guattari's understanding of the term. According to Guattari, ecological praxes "generally seek something that runs counter to the 'normal' order of things, a counter-repetition, an intense given which invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations" (The Three Ecologies 45). To use Guattari's theoretically inflected vocabulary, the deterritorialization—also literally, as Maytree relocates to Maine— enables the assemblage of connubial desire to evolve in a constructive, Georgiana Banita 307 processual fashion (45). Just as Progogine and Stengers referred to the necessity of introducing into physics a "narrative element" seen as indispensable for the theoretization of irreversible evolution, the haphazard events in Dillard's novel introduce progressive elements in the course of "lasting love," where periods of estrangement punctuate and exacerbate an emotion, propelling it to maturation. The "a-signifying rupture" of marital betrayal may well be the root of anxiety and guilt, but at the same time it "summons forth a creative repetition that forges incorporeal objects, abstract machines and Universes of value that make their presence felt as though they had been always 'already there,' although they are entirely dependent on the existential event that brings them into play" (45)—i.e., Maytree's unexpected elopement with Deary, and his 'accidental' return twenty years later. Not 'accidentally,' Toby leaves his wife Lou for Deary (and Maine) the day after Petie is hurt in a bicycle accident, his decision bolstered by his wife's willingness to forgive the criminal driver. Toby thereby mistakes her capacity for forgiveness, in fact a refusal to take on the role of piteous victim, as weakness. Twenty years later he himself would be the one hurt and in need of sympathy. As existentializing event, his accident opens up "new fields of virtuality" for Maytree, who renews contact with his estranged wife and thereby regains his self-confidence, his "event-centered singularity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 7) in the manner of Guattari's patient who takes up driving and thereupon undergoes an existential transformation. The suddenness of the accident brings about an organic change, the singular event reactivating a hidden pool of sensation over which twenty years' repeated shamefulness and guilt have stratified into a crust of passivity. The catalyzing power and enormous repercussions of the event in fact stand in stark contrast to the actual corporeal change it causes, namely Maytree's physical impairment and helplessness, as an extension of Deary's already terminal paralysis. Under these circumstances, to put it with Guattari, not only does exception prove the rule, but it can just as easily deflect or recreate it (52). By according the husband a means of venting his frustrations with the inescapable doldrums of a lasting relationship, the more-than-temporary affair distills a kind of mental ecology that does not overlap with a strict adherence to morality, but even runs against the grain of received notions of partnership and the "cycle of deathly repetition" (The Three Ecologies 39) imposed by emotional dogmatism; or, as Guattari argues, "rather than tirelessly implementing procedures of censorship and contention in the name of great moral principles, we should learn how to promote a true ecology of the phantasm, one that works through the transference, 308 The Ecology of Love translation and redeployment of their matters of expression" (57). The Maytrees' separation and reunion marks a resingularization of their "lasting love" against both moralist manufacture imposed by social conventions but also, or primarily, by internalized preconceptions that place anxiety, guilt, and shame in the way of singularity. As Guattari laments through an apt metaphor of self-consummation, "human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating [...] family and married life are frequently 'ossified' by a sort of standardization of behavior [...] It is the relation between subjectivity and its exteriority [...] that is compromised in this way, in a sort of general movement of implosion and regressive infantalization" (27). Guattari's response to this crisis is a call to action. And this is where he diverges most clearly from Dillard's mostly non-interventionist approach, as it transpires from three decades' work that records without judging, witnesses without protesting. Nowhere does she betray the slightest willingness to overcome a fundamental passivity, which she explains by resorting to her favorite themes of detachment and inscrutability: "I looked detached, apparently, or hard, or calm, or focused, still. I don't know. [...] These things are not issues; they are mysteries" (Teaching 64). Everything she sees—violence among animals, emotional violence among humans— she accepts. Like Lou, she tolerates everything as a fact of life, takes no course of action and refrains from recommending one, resigns herself to the "amoral careen of nature" (Ronda 486) and continues to lavish her sympathy on Toby, Deary, Pete, and everyone else, indiscriminately, and thus somewhat impersonally. Hence, perhaps, the notable absence of dialogue in the novel, the long, non-interactive passages of meditation, the significance of paralysis as a recurrent trope. When the Maytrees find tenderness again, the overwhelming sense of separateness almost cancels out their reunion: "Now in compassion they bore, between them, their solitudes each the size of the raveled globe" (199). Just as familiarity bred contempt—and drove Toby away for a long intermission—it is contempt that forges this new familial alliance, one of mutual estrangement, beset with friendly but uneasy alienation. The novel thus yields the sense communicated in all of Dillard's work that "the lot of the human on this planet is to look around, arrange things a bit, make peace insofar as possible with whatever is, face the inevitability of death, and just live" (Smith 1995). In other words, the ethics of care propounded by Dillard is quite different from an idea of responsibility on behalf of the environment (see Fuller 1992). For Dillard, 'caring for' does not mean taking up the cause of ecology, but merely developing a fondness for life in its multiple forms. Georgiana Banita 309 Furthermore, it seems to me that what Dillard also shares with Guattari is a reliance on a shift from a human-centered to a nature-centered system of values, which is the core tenet of deep ecology: "Deep ecology is concerned with encouraging an egalitarian attitude on the part of humans not only toward all members of the ecosphere, but even toward all identifiable entities or forms in the ecosphere. Thus, this attitude is intended to extend, for example, to such entities (or forms) as rivers, landscapes, and even species and social systems considered in their own right" (Sessions 270, emphasis in original). This even-handedness seems to empty emotionality—be it with regard to localities such as the Provincetown dunes or to human beings, lost or recovered—of all substantive content: if value and worth reside everywhere, it resides nowhere and ceases to be the basis for making distinctions and decisions. To the extent that it applies this notion of generalized 'inherent worth' to intersubjective relationships, Dillard's novel illustrates the disturbing effects of deep ecology on human relations. It is in this context that the novel's shifting conception of the relation between love and will gains significance. From a staunch supporter of romantic notions that chart the bifurcation of emotion and reason, Maytree ultimately reaches the conclusion that some form of conscious and rational, even ethical12 investment always underpins emotional decisions. This complex connection is, in fact, the engine of temporal progression and the yardstick by which normality and dissent, fidelity and betrayal, departure and return can be measured, although not fixed in the kind of erotic catechism that would preclude fluid 'inter-course' between these artificial categories. Guattari's argument runs along very similar lines: "The unconscious remains bound to archaic fixations only as long as there is no investment directing it towards the future" (38); "as a general rule, and however little one works on them, individual and collective subjective assemblages are capable, potentially, of developing and proliferating well beyond their ordinary equilibrium" (40).13 If we take this equilibrium to arise from a polarization or "hyperseparation" (Plumwood 1993) of morality vs. betrayal, commitment vs. libertinism, and other culturally constructed terms that always imply a hidden power relationship of the superior term to the inferior, the Maytrees' unconventional choices in love can be said to undermine such mastery models, opting for an idea of love that denies strict polarizations and overcomes the hyperseparations at the heart of anti-ecological thinking. This view converges with Guattari's perspective of environmental ecology, with its focus on the world in its biological diversity, as only part of a larger ecological endeavor that would ideally include a mental 310 The Ecology of Love ecology regulating the habitats and systems of human relationships as well. "Here is a solid planet," Dillard muses, "among these fixed and enduring features wander the flimsy people. The earth rolls down and the people die; their survivors derive solace from clinging, not to the rocks, not to the cliffs, not to the trees, but to each other" (The Living 351).14 Notes 1 Dillard's first novel, The Living, was published in 1992. "Decades' reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only—but it was something—that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample" (119). 3 Consider for example this magnificent passage: "The planet rolled into its shadow. On the high dune, sky ran down to his ankles. Everything he saw was lower than his socks. Across a long horizon, parabolic dunes cut sky as rogue waves do. The silence of permanence lay on the scene. He found a Cambrian calm as if the world had not yet come; he found a posthumous hush as if humans had gone" (33). 4 For a detailed analysis of ocular metaphors in Dillard's works see Fritzell 1990 and Legler 2000. 5 "Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again." (31) 6 Here are some of the most striking erotic contentions: "Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them" (2); "There in her garden under a locust, Reevadare told Lou her favorite part of marriage:—It's a marvelous way to get to know someone!" (26); "Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness" (117-18). 7 Before the publication of this novel, critics could safely assert that humans made only "cameo appearances" in Dillard's work (see Smith 1995). 8 Guattari has repeatedly stressed this processual conception of society and subjectivity, perhaps most eloquently in the following statement: "(The) idea of process if fundamental. It assumes that one has discarded the idea that one must absolutely master an object or a subject—and that [...] analytical research is given a dimension of finitude, singularity, existential delimitation, precariousness in relation to time and values [...] There are neither ends nor means; only processes; processes auto-constructing life, auto-constructing the world, with mutant, unforeseen, unheard-of affects" (Soft Subversions 277). 9 See also the section "Of the Refrain" in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 310-350. 10 Pilgrim 80. 2 Georgiana Banita 311 11 "Desire is everything that exists before the opposition between subject and object, before representation and production. It's everything whereby the world and affects constitute us outside of ourselves, in spite of ourselves." (Guattari, "A Liberation of Desire" 205) 12 "Wishing and doing, within the realm of the possible, was willing; love was an act of will. Not forced obeisance, but—what? The obvious course of decency? Innate knowledge of goodness? Was it reasonable to love the good and good to love the reasonable?" (187) 13 Instead of a unity or series of coherent structures, Deleuze and Guattari see the world as a system in which "everything escapes, everything creates" (A Thousand Plateaus 142), where the social "is something that never stops slipping away" (Deleuze, "Codes" 271, cited in Halsey 39). In this world "there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine" (A Thousand Plateaus 216). 14 One sentence in The Maytrees reads almost like an intentional reply to this, or wiser continuation: "The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock" (34). Works Cited Becker, John E. "Science and the Sacred: From Walden to Tinker Creek." Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas 62 (1987): 400-413. Berry, Thomas, and Thomas Clarke. Befriending the Earth: A Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth (Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications, 1991). Cheney, Jim. "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative." Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117-34. Clark, Suzanne. "Annie Dillard: The Woman in Nature and the Subject of Nonfiction." in Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Ed. Chris Anderson (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Dillard, Annie. "To Fashion a Text." in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987): 53-76. —. Living By Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). —. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). —. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row 1982). —. The Living (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 312 The Ecology of Love —. The Maytrees (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). —. The Writing Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). Dowd, Michael. Earthspirit: A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Christianity (Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications, 1991). Dunn, Robert Paul. "The Artist as Nun: Theme, Tone and Vision in the Writing of Annie Dillard." Studia Mystica 1 (1978): 17-31. Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Fritzell, Peter. Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990). Fuller, Robert C. Ecology of Care: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Self and Moral Obligation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992). Guattari, Félix. "A Liberation of Desire." The Guattari Reader. Ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 204-214. —. Cartographies schizoanalitiques (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989). —. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). —. Soft Subversions. Trans. David Sweet and Chet Wiener, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996). —. The Guattari Reader. ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). —. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). Halsey, Mark. "Ecology and Machinic Thought: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari" Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10.3 (December 2005): 33-54. Keller, Joseph. "The Function of Paradox in Mystical Discourse." Studia Mystica 6 (Fall 1983): 3-19. Lavery, David L. "Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard." The Massachussetts Review 21 (Summer 1980): 255-70. Legler, Gretchen. "'I Am a Transparent Eyeball:' The Politics of Vision in American Nature Writing." Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism. Ed. John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2000): 243-50. Lovelock, James E. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). McConahay, Mary Davidson. "'Into the Bladelike Arms of God:' The Quest for Meaning in Thoreau and Annie Dillard." Denver Quarterly 20 (Fall 1985): 103-16. McFadden-Gerber, Margaret. "The I in Nature." American Notes & Queries 16 (September 1977): 13-15. Georgiana Banita 313 Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995). Pindar, Ian, and Paul Sutton. "Translators' Introduction." Félix Guattari. Three Ecologies (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 1-20. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993). Robinson, Marilynne. "The Nature of Love: Annie Dillard on Family, Cape Cod and a 20-Year Love Affair." Washington Post (June 24, 2007): BW05. Ronda, Bruce A. "Annie Dillard's Fictions to Live By." Christian Century 101 (1984). Sessions, George (Ed.) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism (London: Shambhala, 1995). Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992). Smith, Pamela A. "The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard: A Study in Ambivalence." Cross Currents 45:3 (Fall 1995): 341-59. Yancy, Philip. "A Face Aflame." Christianity Today 22 (1978): 960-61. C. 1315 - 1640: WHY EUROPE? WHY NOT CHINA? CONTINGENCY, ECOLOGY AND WORLD-HISTORY JORGE CAMACHO When Deleuze and Guattari revived that old monster of speculative thought, the Philosophy of Universal or World History, they did so following a rule seemingly intended to exorcise the ghosts of previous metaphysical excesses. "First of all," they affirmed, "universal history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessities" (AntiOedipus 154). With this philosophical manoeuvre they intend to open for thought a complex vision of history, full of unpredictable accidents and unnecessary encounters that may have happened there and then but might as well have happened elsewhere in other times or, as they said, "might never have happened" (Anti-Oedipus 154). Perhaps more than anything else, we may argue, it is this condition alone what makes possible a contemporary philosophical appropriation of historical material. To construct their version of such appropriation, Deleuze and Guattari took their cue from a major puzzle ("an eminently contingent question," they wrote), dear to historians and widely debated by their contemporaries: "why Europe, why not China?" (Anti-Oedipus 244). This couple of questions (which may be in turn almost infinitely sub-divided) refers broadly to the theme of 'the rise of the West': the development and consolidation of a European dominance—economic, political, scientific and technological—across the world. Most importantly, it refers concretely to a process generally acknowledged to lie at the heart of this puzzle: the conformation of a modern capitalist economy, or worldeconomy, out of the dissolving structures of feudalism marking the end of the medieval period. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is only from the point of view of capitalism that a universal or world history may be retrospectively generated. Jorge Camacho 315 Three times, once in each volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and the other in What Is Philosophy?, they conjured up this puzzle. In Anti-Oedipus, the solid power of a Chinese despotic State (exemplified by its curb on navigational expansion) is contrasted with the generalised process of dissolution that in Western Europe allowed for the well-known conjunction—explained by Marx and later on by Maurice Dobb—of two decoded and deterritorialized elements or flows, free workers and moneycapital, giving rise to capitalist production (245-46). Up to this point, Deleuze and Guattari remained within the limits of a Marxist historical perspective for the definition of the problem and the answer provided. Later on, in A Thousand Plateaus, the puzzle suddenly reappears, this time in the context of a discussion about the spatial or geographical determinations of the nomadic war machine and the various instances of the State apparatus (384). New and wider paths are explored this time. Following the work of Annales historians—Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu and Maurice Lombard—the answer is enriched by considering the agro-ecological infrastructures of rice and wheat cultivation as determinants for the divergent paths of development that State apparatus and capitalist machine followed in China and Europe. It is certainly true that, despite its recurrence, the concern for this historical problem and their ultimate acceptance of an ecological or 'geohistorical' explanation remained largely tangential within Deleuze and Guattari's work. Moreover, contemporary environmental history is already capable of telling us much more than what these French philosophers and, indeed, those Annales historians, could tell us about the ecological processes involved in the aforementioned historical sequence. As we will see below, problems of demography, epidemiology and climatic change are also necessary considerations in a full account of the process of dissolution at the end of the Middle Ages. The problem of proper philosophical interest is that, introducing variables of natural geography and ecology, Deleuze and Guattari seem to be aiming at reinforcing the idea of a material contingency or even precariousness at the heart of the world-historical process vis-à-vis all remnants of faith in rationality thereof. Even if their ecologically informed historical explanation needs to be updated, complemented, and perhaps even, in some respects, corrected, their philosophical framework seems uniquely suited—at least in the context of contemporary European philosophy—to integrate the insights of recent ecological history into a philosophy of (contingent) world history and, furthermore, to explore a much needed articulation between ecology and political theory. 316 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? In the course of their brief discussion about the ecologies of European and Chinese civilizations, Deleuze and Guattari spelled out, largely in passing, a conclusion that may be taken as a basic principle for ecological history and, for that matter, for a possible conceptualisation of political ecology. They wrote: "States are made up not only of people, but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities" (Thousand Plateaus 385) Such a simple enunciation must be taken as a principle for it reminds us that: first, ecology is thoroughly implicated in the problems of social formation, and thus, should occupy an important place within political theory; second, heterogeneity, or more precisely, an ontology of heterogeneous assemblages or associations, is the condition sine qua non of ecological thinking. It is particularly in this second aspect that the eminently ecological character of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is to be found. It is mostly certain that when Deleuze and Guattari revisited the problem of universal history and, supposedly following Marx's rules, exorcised the ghosts of metaphysical necessity in the name of a history of concrete contingencies they were aiming at Hegel more than any other figure in the tradition of philosophy of history. In this respect, it is hard to avoid recalling and putting to play the most common rendering of Hegel's thoughts on world history as precisely that monster which (at least from the point of view of the analytical tradition) philosophy of history must not become—neither in content nor in its methodology: an a priori, hyperrationalist exercise of thought that imposes its scaffolding onto the historical material, conceptualising the course of historical development as a progressive achievement which displays a thoroughly necessary and coherent structure. For many Hegelians, past and contemporary, this caricature is simply the outcome of a superficial approximation to the master's intricate conceptual domain. Precisely on the problem of contingency, Emil Fackenheim argued: "the entire Hegelian philosophy, far from denying the contingent, on the contrary, seeks to demonstrate its inescapability" (quoted in Forbes' introduction to Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of World History xi). If that is the case, the misconception is to be found right at the root of Hegel's reception for, in the very notes to his Lectures, the idea is captured: "The sole aim of philosophical enquiry is to eliminate the contingent" (28). This problematic relationship between philosophy or, indeed, Reason, whose natural territory would seem to be necessity, and the apparently contingent individual events and actions of men, is Jorge Camacho 317 precisely the object and particularity of Universal History as approached by Hegel. He wrote: It is only an inference from the history of the World, that its development has been a rational process; that the history in question has constituted the rational necessary course of the World-Spirit. (Philosophy of History 54) It seems quite correct, then, to argue that the manoeuvre employed in Hegel's framework is not the elimination of the contingent but, to be clear: its subordination under a higher principle, namely, the realization of Spirit in history. In this sense, the particular events or individual actions that compose historical development are not of the order of the necessary: in and on themselves they may as well have happened differently or not happened at all. It is for this reason that there appears in Hegel nothing like a predestined structure of historical development. What belongs to the realm of necessity is the design of the spiritual process: what those events and individual actions have achieved in being instruments to the 'cunning of Reason'. The recognition of such intricate relationship between contingency and necessity in Hegel's philosophical history allows us to better grasp what Deleuze and Guattari are after when they proclaim universal history as a theatre of bare contingency. Ostensibly, what they invite us to do is to take contingency in its own terms without subsuming it under any higher metaphysical principle: no essential destiny and no ultimate design. Whereas in Hegel's thought, arguably, what matters is not so much the contingent individual facts but the higher principle that supposedly acts in them or in spite of them, in a philosophy of history such as the one advocated by Deleuze and Guattari (whether or not they actually accomplished the feat is a different question) what matter are precisely the brute historical contingencies in themselves devoid of any meta-historical principle. In this sense, one is even tempted to say that Hegelianism remains a philosophical history whereas a philosophy of pure historical contingency would achieve the status of a properly historical philosophy. It is interesting to note from the point of view of our present concerns that Hegel's framework was already very close to 'geohistory' or maybe even to geophilosophy in the sense advocated by Deleuze and Guattari under the influence of Braudel (What is Philosophy? 96). The German philosopher would have certainly agreed with these latter in the contention that geography or 'geohistory' provides a 'milieu' for philosophy or, in the terms appropriate for his conceptual framework, for Spiritual development. The structure of the historical process is laid out by Hegel over the two dimensions of history and geography: the historical 318 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? development of the Idea is, at the same time, a geographically coherent movement. "The History of the World travels from East to West," he wrote, "for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning" (Philosophy of History 163). Even more interestingly, many of the geographical and ecological features that he considers important from the point of view of his philosophical World-History are the same that will reappear later on, devoid of metaphysical garments, in our discussion of contemporary explanations for the rise of Europe. Surely, in the face of these coincidences, at least two important aspects that distinguish it from what must be a truly contemporary 'geohistorical' perspective must be strongly stated: first, the aforementioned subordination of historical data to a metaphysical inference, namely, the higher principle and agency of Spirit or Reason; second, the consideration of natural or geographic conditions as a backdrop or stage, for the most part static, and external to the properly Spiritual realm of World History. For Hegel, Physical Nature in itself is a Rational System and thus, "the natural connection that helps to produce the Spirit of a People ... is an essential and necessary basis" (61, 134). However, geographical or natural conditions, Hegel tells us, are extrinsic to the process of Universal History that properly "belongs to the realm of Spirit" (61). Where Hegel spoke of Nature as a theatre for the worldhistorical process, today, as we will conclude, we can speak of it as an actor proper. Hegel's 'geohistory' works its way in a process of elimination: torrid and frigid lands, the Southern ends of continents, the New World, Africa, "the Unhistorical" (157), are all deemed irrelevant for the world-historical development. In Asia, with its river-plains, the appearance of agriculture commands the development of legal structures and thus the dawn of World History, but no more. Finally, it is in Europe where Spiritual development will find the appropriate milieu: a milder inter-mingling of naturalgeographical types (upland and steppes, valleys and river-plains). Most importantly, it is only there that coastal land takes full historical significance: stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land is wanting to the splendid political edifices of Asiatic State, although they themselves border on the sea—as, for example, China. (Philosophy of History 147) Ultimately, then, the rationality of the European destiny of the WorldHistorical development is grounded on these "essential and necessary" geographical conditions. If there is in Hegel an answer to the questions "Why Europe? Why not China?" it is already a 'geohistorical' one. But even Europe as a whole is no unity for the consummation of Universal Jorge Camacho 319 History and further eliminations are required: northern and eastern regions that perpetuate the connection with Asia, as well as the Southern regions or, indeed, the whole of Catholic Europe (were development was fettered by religious subjugation and conflict) are discarded by Hegel. Finally, even England (and perhaps the Netherlands, we could say), was no match for the Hegelian ideal for it was there that "particular Rights and particular privileges" (566) contravened most forcefully the development of common Right or Objective Freedom—the Spiritual achievement of the German monarchy. From a present point of view, it is obvious that the inclination towards 'particular rights and privileges' that Hegel found in the England of his time corresponded with the development of a concrete political and economic process that would acquire significance well beyond Hegel's consideration. Isn't it possible to argue that capitalism—and the worldhistorical import of its development—remained something of a blind spot in Hegel's teleology? Or, more precisely, that it was the historical emergence of capitalism first and foremost, more than any philosophical quarrel, what had already disproved Hegel's World History—in its substantive content if not in its form—and fundamentally transformed the conditions for the conceptualization of an alternative version? An early but clear exposition of the philosophical alternative followed by Deleuze and Guattari, the one proposed by Marx, appears in The German Ideology. The possibility of World History is now predicated on the basis of an empirically established (and thus, contingent, we are to think) premise: the world-wide intercourse of otherwise local people made possible by the development of the capitalist world market. As Marx and Engels write: only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established ... and finally has put worldhistorical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. (German Ideology 47) In this way, a philosophy of history is intended to be replaced by a properly materialist and scientific endeavour: a theory of world history whose primary condition is the empirical study of the development of the single historical element or force capable of establishing a universality of human relations. Here, the postulation of historical finalism or teleology gives way to a properly scientific and political prediction that, nevertheless, seems to reinstate necessity perhaps more forcefully than in Kant or Hegel's philosophical histories; a prediction later stated in Capital in this way: "the immanent laws of capitalist production itself" produce its 320 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? own negation "with the inexorability of a natural process" (1:929). Such a reference to the laws of natural causality was by no means intended as a simple analogy. From that early exposition of the materialist outlook, it is clear that Marx thoroughly conceives human history and the history of capitalist development as a veritable fragment of natural history at large. The first fact to be established is the physical organisation of [human] individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature ... The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. (German Ideology 31) For the most part, however, the study of those natural conditions remained extrinsic to historical materialism as a science of social formations. A passage from political economy to political ecology was still wanting.1 What is certain is that, from Marx onwards, the possibility of a World History (at least of the modern period) cannot but be predicated upon an account of the origins and development of a capitalist economy—in itself, an empirically established and thus contingent fact entirely dependent of natural history. Interestingly enough, a certain consensus exists about Marx's failure to produce a coherent explanation of the historical process that produced and brought together the elements of a capitalist economy: monetary wealth and 'free' labourers/means of production. According to Jean Baechler, for example, Marx explanation oscillates between two poles: either the elements "can crop up only within the framework of the capitalist system," and thus what is offered is really a theoretically closed tautology; Or, they are mutually independent but have been completed by being joined to each other; in this case, the birth of capitalism is the result of pure chance, a conjunction of several series of causes, a conjunction that, in other respects, is altogether highly improbable. (21) Quite significantly, in rejecting altogether the Marxist definition and explanation of the problem, Baechler seems also to conjure away this second possibility. As for Marx, it is certain that, at least in the mode of theorization proposed in Capital, concerned with the necessity of natural laws, he seems to evade such contingent explanation in favour of the model of a seemingly necessary tendency: from small private property in the hands of labourers to the expropriation of it by capitalists (and the subsequent concentration in a few hands) to the expropriation of capitalist Jorge Camacho 321 property by a communist revolution (1:927). Yet, there is in Marx, specifically in the loose and scribbled character of the Grundrisse, a frame of mind tamed only later that seems more receptive to the precariousness of the historical process. All the same, with or beyond him, it is precisely in the direction of that second option, favouring the contingent if not chance encounter, where we are moving. Against Baechler's argument, it is possible to argue that there is in fact a consistency linking the explanations propounded in Grundrisse and Capital; a consistency, moreover, in tracing the proper origins of the capitalist mode not to some internal or tautological presupposition but to a veritable pre-history in which, it is true, more often than not Marx seems unwilling or unable to dive. The historical sequence is, at least in an abstract and descriptive mode, quite clearly expounded. Capital, Marx tells us, begins with money or, more precisely, "with wealth in the form of money" (Grundrisse 505) The source of that wealth is circulation; in concrete historical terms, the formation of capital is made possible, first of all, by the accumulation of two kinds of wealth or capital: one emerging from trade or commerce, merchant wealth, and the other from usury (Capital 1:914). Marx recognised already, as Deleuze and Guattari do along with almost any contemporary historian, that if this accumulation of wealth was a sufficient condition capitalism would have sprung up anywhere and much sooner than it did: in Greece, in China, etc. What accumulates towards the end of the Middle Ages in the hands of merchants and usurers in Europe only takes historical significance when it finds available to buy means of production and 'free' labourers—in the double sense of propertyless and emancipated from the structures of serfdom and guilds (Grundrisse 507; Capital 1:874). This points, of course, to the precondition for the process of 'primitive accumulation' that, as Marx wrote: "is not the product of capital, but the presupposition for it" (Grundrisse 505). As Marx explains: "Only in the period of the decline and fall of the feudal system is there a gold mine for labour in the process of becoming emancipated" (510). Here lies really the crux of the problem: the dissolution of feudalism. The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former. (Capital 1:875) In the Grundrisse, Marx provides only some general remarks about how monetary wealth or the extension of an economy of money slowly but steadily transforms the old modes of production—originally focused in use-value or production for immediate consumption and only marginally 322 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? trading on the surplus production—to the new modes explicitly focused on exchange-value or the production of commodities. Later on, in Capital, he mentions "the rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool" (1:878) as the main driving force behind the dissolution of feudal structures in England. Nevertheless, the explanation of the economic problem involved in this dissolution is substituted by a description of the political and violent solution it required: expropriations, evictions and enclosures. He wrote: "We leave on one side here the purely economic driving forces behind the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the violent means employed" (Capital 1:883). As we pointed out before, in Deleuze and Guattari's work the recommencement of Universal History is predicated on the possibility of an analysis of the development of capitalism (Anti-Oedipus 153-54). This mode of history, they explain, must be retrospective since—as Marx and Engels also thought—it is only the emergence of capitalism what creates the conditions for universality. And yet, it could be argued, if this is the case, universal or world history proper should only be predicated of the period that opens up with the emergence of capitalism. However, for Deleuze and Guattari capitalism has always virtually existed, that is, it has existed as a potential haunting all forms of society. For this reason, their universal history is a retrospective account of the different forms of socius or social machines that World and History have witnessed as so many solutions for maintaining coded and territorialized the flows that would otherwise actualize the terrifying potential. The historian Fernand Braudel explicitly agrees with them at least in this key aspect: I am tempted to agree with Deleuze and Guattari that 'after a fashion, capitalism has been a spectre haunting every form of society'—capitalism, that is, as I have defined it. (Wheels Commerce 581)2 Most importantly, their formulation of history is contingent because, over and above the concrete conjunction that gave rise to capitalism, there is no essential destiny or reason: capitalism is no telos or final cause for historical development. Finally, it is also singular because for Deleuze and Guattari the conjunction that actualized the capitalist machine has occurred geohistorically only once. This the real puzzle; as Braudel points out, capitalism—a full-blown capitalist economy, that is—while it emerged and succeeded in Europe during a specific, if long-extending period failed to do so almost everywhere else in the world (Wheels Commerce 582). And thus, the questions are posed: "Why Europe? Why not China?" (Anti-Oedipus 244). Jorge Camacho 323 Regarding the second question, Deleuze and Guattari follow Braudel in highlighting the problem of navigation: why did the Europeans and not the Chinese (or the Arabs for that matter) conquer the high seas? And while they quote the historian giving a geohistorical explanation—the West is confined on its "narrow 'Cape of Asia' [and thus] it 'needed' the rest of the world"—they go beyond into the libidinal dimension to argue that in China "desire remains caught in the nets of the despotic State" (AntiOedipus 244). Contemporary historians highlight at least three large-scale, inextricably related conditions that may have acted as hindrances for the development of a capitalist world-economy centred in China: geography, agro-ecology and the power of its Imperial or Despotic political apparatus. All of these bear upon the widely debated issues of Chinese navigation, circulation and trade, and the possibility of accumulation of capital. Circulation is, according to Braudel, the first and foremost precondition for the emergence of capitalism in the stage of world history. "The wider circulation stretched its net, the more profitable it was" (Wheels Commerce 582). Likewise, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that geographical expansion was a "key pre-requisite" for the development of capitalism or, more precisely, of the capitalist world-economy that constituted the solution to the problems emerging in the dissolution of feudalism (38). Considering this, the brute geographical determinations of China, when compared to those of Europe, may be seen as the most primary constraint. The point is simply that the distances to be covered in China, and Asia more generally, are enormous in comparison with those of Western Europe, particularly with the state of transport technology of the time: overland journeys, sea-voyages and half-wild zones of underdevelopment were all of exaggerated proportions ... By comparison with the great wastes, the thriving zones seemed even narrower, lying along the routes travelled by ships, merchandise and men. (Wheels Commerce 582) Quite accordingly, Braudel finds precisely in some provinces with coastal strips exceptional examples of a "certain form of Chinese capitalism" that never fully managed to escape the gravity exerted by the power established in the inward-looking expanses of China's mainland (Wheels Commerce 582). Taking this kind of geographical considerations even further, David Cosandey has proposed a singular explanation for the divergent paths of East and West in terms of what he calls "thassalographie" (271-315). According to his theory, the divergent fate of Europe and China finds its most primary determination in the 324 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? differences between the complex coastline of Western Europe, characterised by inland seas, gulfs and peninsulas—correspondingly conducive to maritime navigation and thus to trade—and that of China, exhibiting less of these richly articulated geographical contours. The second type of long–enduring structures that contemporary historians highlight to explain the fate of Europe and China in the decisive period that gave birth to the modern world is associated with the fundamentally different agro-ecologies of the two regions. Indeed, it is precisely this point that Deleuze and Guattari invoke in the Treatise on Nomadology to introduce ecological determinations in the explanation "for the victory of the West over the Orient" (Thousand Plateaus 384-5). According to them, the "more rigid agency" characteristic of Oriental or despotic formations of the State is to a great extent the solution required to maintain captured a series of natural or bio-geographic, technological and human components. Working comparatively, they characterise first such components as they are found in the European State-form providing a sweeping picture of the agro-ecological infrastructure of late Middle Ages feudalism: forest-clearing of fields; agriculture-grid laying; animal raising subordinated to agricultural work and sedentary food production; commerce based on a constellation of town-country (polis-nomos) communications. (Thousand Plateaus 384) To this European medieval techno-agro-ecological formation, they contrast the components found in China: deforestation rather than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult to extract or even to find wood; cultivation of the type 'rice paddy and garden' rather than arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part outside the control of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked animal power and meat foods; the low communication content of the towncountry relation, making commerce far less flexible. (Thousand Plateaus 385) Certainly, in this argument they were closely following not only the much-disputed thesis of Karl Wittfogel but also Braudel's work. The latter writes regarding rice cultivation: All in all, an enormous concentration of work, human capital and careful adaptation was involved. Even then nothing would have held together if the broad lines of this irrigation system had not been firmly integrated and Jorge Camacho 325 supervised from above. This implies a stable society, state authority and constant large-scale works. (Structures Everyday 149) Travelling along similar lines, Wallerstein has included these series of factors to explain the lack of a wide-expanding navigational thrust in China around the 15th century. Following Annaliste historian Pierre Chaunu, Wallerstein connects the development and characteristics of rice cultivation in China with its lack of motivations for expanding overseas. In general terms, the agro-ecological 'choices' (as Braudel would have put it) of Europe—that is, wheat and cattle—were geographically extensive while rice cultivation in China was intensive: "requiring less space but more men" (Wallerstein 63). Surely, however, geographical constraints and agro-ecological infrastructures are not sufficient to account for the problem of a somehow crippled Chinese navigation or, for that matter, the non-development of capitalism in the Oriental counter-power of Europe. Even if agroecological structures are thought to account in some way for the character of an Oriental despotic formation, there are also properly socio-political features that contemporary historians, including Braudel himself, adduce to characterise Chinese Imperial power as a hindrance for navigation and the development of capitalism. For example, much in the same way that Cosandey did later, John A. Hall argued that a fundamental difference between Europe and China was one of political fragmentation vis-à-vis unity. In the latter, political and military power was at least equally extensive than the underlying Chinese society or societies. Although it wasn't totalitarian as some have imagined—being constantly challenged by internal and external groups and in constant need for restoration—the Chinese Empire, according to Hall, acted like a "capstone" and prevented "horizontal linkages" from forming (23). Such power asserted itself most forcefully during the late medieval and early modern period: it controlled the autonomy of cities, curbed down an early-developed naval strength and, between 1371 and 1567, forbade all foreign trade. Wallerstein has also emphasized the historical importance of the difference between China's Empire and the medieval Christian civilization, which was not an empire, for it lacked political unity or centralization, but also not yet a world-economy. Regarding navigation once more, he goes on to argue that not only Chinese agronomy for the most part hindered all motivations for geographical expansion but, had Chinese society actually needed to engage in oceanic exploration and trade (as, indeed, certain groups did), it would have been 326 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? restrained by the fact that crucial decisions were centralized in an imperial framework that had to concern itself first and foremost with short-run maintenance of the political equilibrium of its world-system. (63) Nonetheless, and just in order to distance ourselves from Hegel's vision of China irremediably closed upon itself, it is worth remembering the case of the great admiral Cheng Huo (Zheng He). During the fifteenth century, the Muslim and eunuch engaged in a series of voyages that lead him as far as the island of Hormuz, at the doorstep of the Arab world. After his dead in 1434, all further attempts to resume sea exploration were curtailed by the official bureaucracy of mandarins. Commenting on this case and reinstating to a certain degree the precariousness of this historical problem, Braudel writes: we can for a moment imagine what would have been the result of a possible spread of Chinese junks towards the Cape of Good Hope, or better still to Cape Agulhas which served as a southern gateway between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. (Structures Everyday 407) An overview of the structural hindrances found in China, however, only partially points to the almost opposed structural advantages found in Europe. Michael Mann provides a great synthetic overview when he writes: In the medieval era, agricultural-cum-navigational opportunities were exploitable by a historically conjunctural, but internally patterned, set of overlapping power networks. These were (1) the normative pacification of Christendom; (2) small, weak political states ... and (3) a multiplicity of partly autonomous and competitive, local economic power networks— peasant communities, lordly manors, towns, and merchant and artisan guilds. (18, emphasis added) Braudel mentions two further features found in Europe but absent in China that may have proved to be the decisive socio-political structure allowing for the development of capitalism. European nobility and bourgeoisie, unlike their Chinese counterparts and Imperial bureaucracy, had "the faculty of accumulating wealth and of passing on this wealth from generation to generation in a snowball process." Moreover, in Europe, merchant families constituted initially only a second-best class that took advantage of economic and political opportunities to acquire power by means of "parasitism, exploitation and finally absorption" (Wheels Commerce 595). Jorge Camacho 327 Nonetheless, even such a large-scale structural overview disentangles neither the actual historical conjuncture that witnessed feudal dissolution and capitalist conjunction nor the mechanisms involved. The first question remains: Why Europe? Specifically, as Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "Why [or, better, How] did capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?" (Thousand Plateaus, 558n60). In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia they follow Marx's classic account as put forward in Capital, which locates the origin of capitalism in the conjunction of two elements or flows: on one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labour capacity; and, on the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying it. (Anti-Oedipus 245) As we have seen before, to account for such conjunction it is necessary first to account for the release (deterritorialization and decoding) of those flows. Following Marxist economist and historian Maurice Dobb, Deleuze and Guattari reject the previously widespread idea (which arguably underlies Marx's explanation in all its versions) that simply the growth of commerce and the extension of a money economy had been sufficient to bring about the dissolution of feudal relations—whose first signs were the commutation of labour-services for money payment and the lease of the manorial demesne for money-rent. As they recognize, "capitalism does not lead to the dissolution of feudalism, but rather the contrary, and that is why so much time was required between the two" (243). Commerce and the money-economy, they argue, are not sufficient to bring about the transformation of the socius, "that is, to induce the birth of capitalism" (242-3). But then, in a sleight of hand that prompts us to recall Baechler's critique of Marx's explanation, Deleuze and Guattari conjure away the explanation of the crucial step in the process. Dissolutions, they point out, "are defined by a simple decoding of flows," and these decodings, they go on, "have always existed; history is full of them" (244). Strictly speaking, they reject one explanation (the extension of commerce) for no explanation at all: as if feudalism had simply died or dissolved of 'natural causes'. And while certainly we can't blame Deleuze and Guattari, as philosophers, for failing to offer an historical explanation, isn't an answer like this somehow disappointing in the context of a universal history of contingencies? If the premise for their philosophy of history is the actualization of capitalism, and the conjunction that allows for such actualization is intelligible only as a product of the dissolution of feudalism, isn't something important missing in their contingent universal history? Interestingly enough, recent research has proposed novel 328 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? explanations that may allow us to continue along the lines proposed by Deleuze and Guattari and reinstate, even more forcefully than they did, the problems contingency and ecology in this world-historical process. Dobb himself—despite Deleuze and Guattari's lack of attention to it— postulates a first step in the progressive assemblage of the capitalist mode of production. Extending roughly over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this transitional period is characterised by the two parallel—but not, for him, causally connected—processes we have been encountering: on one hand, a generalised crisis and even "advanced stage of disintegration" of feudal economic structures based on serfdom; on the other hand, the rise of corporate towns, the expansion of trade and the concomitant emergence of a merchant class (19-20). To account for the first of these he put forward this explanation: such evidence as we posses strongly indicates that it was the inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production, coupled with the growing needs of the ruling class for revenue that was primarily responsible for its decline. (42) An important point of Dobb's hypothesis was that the landlords' growing need for revenue was met, up to the fourteenth century, by a growing population that severely declined afterwards precipitating the economic crisis of the feudal system (48). North and Thomas have followed this route to propose a broadly Malthusian explanation for the crisis of feudalism. According to them, the classic form of the manor and the economic relations on which it was based were originally dependant upon the existence of abundant land (and thus relatively scarce labour force), political fragmentation and the centrality of an economy of production for immediate consumption vis-à-vis a still incipient market economy during the Middle Ages. However, the late medieval period (characterised by all those geographical, agro-ecological, technological, economic and political features mentioned above) witnessed a spectacular frontier movement. Population expanded, regional and interregional commerce revived, new techniques were developed, and the classic institutions of both manorialism and feudalism changed beyond recognition. (North and Thomas 33) During this period, the development of the market and the changing ratio between land and labour began to push transformations in the economic relations: even if the "customs of the manor," acting as sedimented structures, Jorge Camacho 329 reduced the speed of the transition, the lords and serfs … were increasingly willing to commute labour dues to money payments on an annual basis, and the lords to rent out their demesnes. (North and Thomas 22) Reaching the thirteenth century, the best available land in Western Europe had for the most part been colonized; geographical expansion had either ceased or continued only on marginal lands but population expansion continued until the beginning of the fourteenth century. Then the feudal order centred on the manor reached a critical conjuncture: Population growth, increasing land scarcity, and diminishing returns to a growing population in this period proved to be a fall in the living standards to the point where famine and pestilence pressed on society, returning the cycle once more to a ratio of labour scarcity and land abundance. (North and Thomas 23) As an outcome of the dramatic fall in population, the ratio between the relative factor prices of agricultural labour and land tipped in favour of the former. This time around, however, given that the market did not retreated completely and the conditions of political fragmentation remained, the landlords were incapable of maintaining territorialized the flows by colluding to reinstate a 'second serfdom' as it later occurred in Eastern Europe. Given that the possibility for the peasants of escaping to the town was also a constant threat, this process brought about a "momentary impoverishment of the seigniorial class" (Bloch in Wallerstein 26), accompanied by a generalised cessation of clearings, recession of settlements, the beginning of the process of enclosure and engrossing of lands, and the renting or selling of estates to better-off peasants; in sum, all the characteristic features of the dissolution of feudalism that set free the elements brought together by the capitalist conjunction. In Dobb's as well as in North and Thomas' account, the order of the cycle that lead to crisis and dissolution took the classic form—fama, pestus et bellum—posited as the inescapable outcome or secular trend driven by the inherently expansionist character of the medieval system of production: all good land having been occupied and population still growing, a drop in productivity and diminishing returns brought about famines that set the stage for the Black Death and violent conflicts to prey on the remaining population. Following historian Gustaf Utterström, Wallerstein considers another important variable that prompts him to characterise the crisis of feudalism as a veritable "socio-physical conjuncture" (35). According to the former, climatic cycles or changes were "decisive factors" causally connected to the demographic and 330 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? economic cycles that marked the period: severe winters in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, corresponding to economic recession, mild winters between the later fifteenth and middle sixteenth century, corresponding to economic expansion, and severe winters again in the late seventeenth century. And while Wallerstein follows other historians like Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in expressing doubt about the explanatory primacy of climatic change over other factors, more recent research has insisted upon the important role played by climatic cycles in the crisis precipitated at the end of the Middle Ages. "The year 1315," writes Hubert Lamb, when the grain failed to ripen all across Europe, was probably the worst of the evil sequence which followed. The cumulative effect produced famine in many parts of the continent so dire that there where deaths from hunger and disease on a very great scale, and incidents of cannibalism were reported even in the countries of western Europe ... Thereafter the fourteenth century seems to have brought wild, and rather long-lasting variations of weather in western and central Europe. (195) According to him, the generalised wetness of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought with it an "unhealthy time" with a multiplicity of diseases preying on mankind, but also on animals and crops: murrains of all kinds, ergotism, and most notably, of course, the bubonic plague (199). Given that climatic variations brought about as well a widespread desertion of farms and village settlements and transformations in agriculture and husbandry, Lamb feels entitled to conclude that There was a complex of factors in which climate was deeply involved, rather than the Black Death and economic troubles alone or the intellectual questionings of the time, which brought the end of the old medieval era. (200) Walking alone the same lines, Neville Brown has developed an even more interesting account of the "bad weather crisis of 1314-22 in Northern Europe," a period he calls "the Dantean anomaly" (251).3 Following Lamb, he locates the origin of this climatic anomaly in a ridge displacing southwards a polar front that, recurring during this period, sustained "quasi-continuously a wide cyclonic circulation of moist and unstable air, polar in origin" (251-2). Most significantly, Brown argues that a climatedriven "downturn from 1275 or thereabouts undoubtedly played a part in the economic turndown or levelling out of Europe in the late thirteenth century" (256). Stepping once more into those counterfactual hypothesis that serve only to highlight the contingency and precariousness of the Jorge Camacho 331 course of history, we find Brown arguing that Europe as it existed could have, "in principle," come out of the economic recession: in principle, that is, "except for the Dantean anomaly" (256). As it may be clear now, the historical 'plateau' to which the title of this piece makes reference includes the "medieval prelude" to the assembling of the capitalist machine: an historical conjuncture in which the complex network of factors differentiating Europe from China and other worldcivilizations proved decisive. According to Braudel, Wallerstein (67-8) and others, as we move into the long sixteenth century, c. 1450-1640, it is possible to witness already the progressive actualisation of a capitalist world-economy and thus to start thinking about something like such 'victory of the West over the Orient' that most intrigued Deleuze and Guattari. At this point, however, and despite the fact that it is during this period that the proper history of the capitalist conjunction begins, our historical account must give way to some theoretical or philosophical conclusions. Perhaps noticeably, we have constructed the account of the process almost in a regressive and upside-down fashion in order to highlight the intervening variables that may allow us to conceive the historical sequence as a thoroughly socio-ecological process. Despite the fact that Deleuze and Guattari only partially hinted upon this dimension, a mutually enhancing relationship can be established between their philosophy and an ecologically informed historical perspective. Immediately following their brief discussion of the agro-ecologies of wheat and rice as determinants for the rather different development and organization of the State-form in Europe and China, Deleuze and Guattari propound a singular conclusion: "States are made up not only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities" (Thousand Plateaus 385). By relating the political form, development and organization of Chinese and European civilizations to a complex of components that includes much more than just human individuals, Deleuze and Guattari point to what cannot but be conceived as a veritable political ecology where the natural (and technical) ecologies that subtend, surround or, more precisely, intermingle with humans in social formations may be said to be not only politically shaped but also politically shaping. Moreover, while such ecologically oriented perspective remained for the most part marginal within their Universal History and their theory of social formations, it may be seen as an underdeveloped but entirely consistent extension to political theory of their general ontology of assemblages. 332 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? They return to the problem of feudalism precisely in one of the expositions of their tetravalent theory of assemblages. For Deleuze and Guattari, an assemblage—the name given to the multiplicities that compose being across all strata of reality—may be characterised along two lines or axes. Over the horizontal axis, it is comprised of two segments or dimensions: on the side of content, there is a "machinic assemblage of ... bodies reacting to one another"; on the side of expression, we have a "collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations" (Thousand Plateaus 88). Over the vertical axis, assemblages have, on the one hand, vectors of territorialization or reterritorialization, which stabilize and bind them to their actual configuration; on the other, they have vectors of deterritorialization that pull them towards movements of mutation and open them towards the virtual. Manuel DeLanda has followed Deleuze and Guattari in proposing the concept of assemblage and such tetravalent model as a viable building block for ontology, particularly social ontology (New Philosophy 8-25). Of special interest for our discussion is the corporeal dimension of content or, in DeLanda's phrasing, that of "components playing a material role" because it is there that the problems of political ecology, as defined above, are largely played out. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari relate "the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage" to a complex field of relations between bodies of all kinds (Thousand Plateaus 90). In the context of a social or political ecology, such complex would include not only human bodies— and certainly human bodies of all types—but also nonhuman natural bodies and technical ones. "Tools are inseparable from symbioses or amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage" (Thousand Plateaus 90). It is thus that Deleuze and Guattari provide a nonexhaustive inventory of the components to be found in a machinic assemblage of feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies. (Thousand Plateaus 89) To these, many others could be added: the heavy plough, the harness and the horseshoe; the biogeographic components of the European continent, especially those found in the North, with its forests and wetter soils; the articulated coastline that allowed for the expansion of trade; perhaps even the mild winds that according to Utterström allowed for all the growth in the medieval period; all these should be considered components of the machinic assemblage under question. Jorge Camacho 333 At this point, it is possible to enunciate a first principle for the political ecology that appears from this perspective: social or political formations are heterogeneous assemblages of human and nonhuman components. When Deleuze and Guattari affirm that "States are made up not only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities", when they characterise the material or machinic aspect of assemblages as an intermingling of bodies of all kinds, they are pointing to what is perhaps the main feature of assemblages in general: heterogeneity. Deleuze explained: What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between ... different natures. (quoted in DeLanda, New Philosophy 121n9) Indeed, if there is one feature that most clearly expresses the ecological character of Deleuze's ontology as well as Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy in general—revealed in their constant references to transversal relations across natures, like the famous image of the wasp and the orchid—is precisely the importance given to heterogeneity and heterogeneous relations.4 As one ecologist recently argued: Heterogeneity is ubiquitous, and almost nothing in ecology can be understood without taking account of it. Far from being merely a source of inconvenient noise in our experimental results, heterogeneity is the very essence of ecology. (Thompson 559) This is precisely what the term 'assemblage,' which enjoys a wide currency in ecological studies, most perfectly captures—perhaps even better than the original French agencement used by Deleuze and Guattari. The issue of the heterogeneity of social formations or the role of nonhuman components in them has been most clearly developed by the social theorists loosely gathered under the umbrella-term of actor-network theory (ANT). As John Law explained: the crucial analytic move made by actor-network writers [is] the suggestion that the social is nothing other than patterned networks of heterogeneous materials. This is a radical claim because it says that these networks are composed not only of people, but also of machines, animals, texts, money, architectures—any material that you care to mention. (Law, Notes Theory 2) Did not Deleuze and Guattari glimpsed the same problems later developed by actor-network theory when they wrote, once more, "States 334 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? are made up not only of people ... " or when they delineate the machinic and material aspect of social assemblages? In a recent exposition of their theoretical framework, Bruno Latour proposes a series of conditions to recognize the work explicitly belonging to the ANT framework or that could be implicitly associated with it. The main one is precisely the recognition of nonhumans as proper actors within the social world, that is, components capable of bringing about a difference within the association or assemblage in question (Latour 10-1, 46-7, 67-72). This may be taken as the second principle of the political ecology advocated above: not only are social assemblages heterogeneous, that is, composed of human and nonhuman components, but according to the particular configuration, these latter may play a determinative role. In the framework of actor-network theory, this recognition requires the adoption of what Law calls the 'principle of generalized symmetry.' "Depending, of course, on the contingent circumstances, the natural world and artefacts may enter the account as an explanans" (Law, Technology Heterogeneous Engineering 130-1). The decision to include nonhuman actors in an account of social formations emerged, for actor-network theorists, out of the intuition that human social relations alone are not sufficient to sustain the patterns that we may call a social order. As Latour explains: "It's the power exerted through entities that don't sleep and associations that don't break down that allow power to last longer and expand further" (70, see also Law, Notes Theory 2). Deleuze and Guattari's reference to a complex field of human and nonhuman components to account for the more rigid, stratified, and territorialized power of the Chinese Empire is largely concurrent with such perspective. Most importantly, the role of nonhuman material components (natural and technical) may not be only to territorialize or reterritorialize political assemblages but, according to the contingent configuration, to drive them towards processes of deterritorialization. This is clearly illustrated in Law's analysis of the Portuguese maritime expansion that coincided with the medieval prelude to the capitalist conjunction. According to such analysis, the nonhuman components that were involved in the "heterogeneous engineering" of the Portuguese deterritorialization included: the sailing ship in its fourteenth and early fifteenth century design as well as the caravel used later, the then recently available magnetic compass and even the winds and currents between Portugal and the Canary Islands (Technology Heterogeneous Engineering 118-9). It is possible to revisit, from this perspective, the problem of the dissolution of feudalism. What were, according to the account proposed above, the material components driving vectors of deterritorialization Jorge Camacho 335 through the machinic assemblage of feudalism or, more precisely, through the population of assemblages characteristic of European feudalism? As we have seen—interacting, of course, with the economic and political structures we mentioned—these were: the agro-ecology of wheat and cattle driving an extensive, frontier movement; the 'geographical-cumnavigational opportunities' found in Western and Northern Europe for commercial circulation; finally, and perhaps most significantly, the climatic front feeding what Brown calls 'the Dantean anomaly' and the plagues that followed it to prey on the population proving decisive for the final dissolution that set free the elements for the capitalist conjunction. At this point it seems that we have, for the most part, superseded the postulates of an old philosophy of history represented by Kant, Hegel, perhaps even by Marx himself. As Deleuze and Guattari argued, geography—be it ecological or natural, human, social, mental: wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency. It wrest it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the power of a 'milieu.' (What is Philosophy? 96) A history of long-enduring structures, dissolutions and conjunctions— all of them contingent—substitutes a history of reason, necessity and finality. History as a theatre of exclusively human and spiritual development is supplanted by a history of heterogeneous assemblages or associations between the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the worldhistorical character of this development is conditioned only by the configuration a capitalist world-economy; more precisely conceived, according to Jason W. Moore, as a veritable "world-ecology" (431). It is reasonable to think that, in world-history, what holds for the past will hold for the future. As Deleuze and Guattari recognized, those in charge of the axiomatic scaffolding of our capitalist world-ecology are "tormented" by all kinds of flows: certainly of goods and money and people but also of matter and energy (Thousand Plateaus 468)— coincidentally, of these latter, major relevance have acquired the flows and fluctuations of an atmospheric tendency that conditions the survival of the very world-ecology that precipitated it. As it’s always the case, from the point of view of the current historical conjuncture it is impossible to foresee for how long the world-historical process will continue and, if so, what vectors will prove decisive, what dissolutions and conjunctions, deterritorializations and reterritorializations will be required to warrant such continuation. Ecological contingencies, in any case, will most probably be determinant. 336 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? This piece has made use of Deleuze and Guattari's work in order to argue for a re-visiting and re-conception of the philosophy of world history that integrates the insights coming out from ecological or environmental history. As it has been pointed out, the outcome would be a vision that highlights material contingency (as opposed to rational necessity) and the heterogeneous associations between human and nonhuman nature. Moreover, a concern for heterogeneous relations understood in the widest possible sense—which is well in place in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy—was proposed as the particular trait of all proper ecological thinking. Given that the emphasis has been on the role of nonhuman nature as an efficient (although never sufficient) cause within human history, the effect has been to invert the usual direction of ecological concerns, which most often and appropriately focus on the much more urgent problem of human action as determinant for the 'fate' of nonhuman nature. It should go without saying that these two aspects, the natural future of humanity and the human future of nature, are one within an immanent plane that was rediscovered for philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari. It is precisely such plane what must constitute the measure for any properly contemporary thought. Notes 1 Some work has been recently devoted either to rediscover the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought in general or to specifically integrate ecological considerations within a Marxist theory of capitalist development. See, for example: Foster’s Marx’s Ecology and O’Connor’s Natural Causes. 2 Braudel’s qualification is important: Deleuze and Guattari, following a certain Marxist orthodoxy, restrict historically the definition of capitalism to refer to a later stage where it constituted a proper industrial mode of production: Around the sixteenth or seventeenth century? Perhaps even as late as the eighteenth century, given their reference to industrialism. In the same movement, they extend it ontologically to cover the whole social field: as a “full social body” (Anti-Oedipus 246). For Braudel, as is well known, capitalism in the past—but always in principle—was not a ‘system’ extending over or below the whole of society (Wheels Commerce 238) Thus, he finds it much earlier in history—already between the thirteenth century (in the Italian city-states) and the sixteenth century, a period where it was more ‘at home’ in commerce—while restricting it ontologically: for him, capitalism proper appears only at the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, both in exchange and production, “as the realm of investment and of a high rate of capital formation.” (232; see also Braudel, Perspective World 57) 3 The Florentine poet Dante Alighieri died in 1321. 4 In DeLanda’s version of this ontology of assemblages, heterogeneity is not “a constant property of assemblages but ... a variable that may take different values” Jorge Camacho 337 (New Philosophy 11). This manoeuvre is intended to conceptualise organisms and species as assemblages. We do not fully agree with DeLanda’s call to treat species as assemblages in themselves and thus, effectively, as mereological sums or “larger individual whole[s]” as if individual organisms had a relationship of parts to whole with the species to which they belong (27). For this reason, we maintain heterogeneity as perhaps the main property of assemblages. Works Cited Baechler, Jean. The Origins of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century Vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1981). —. The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century Vol. 2 (London: Collins, 1982). —. The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century Vol. 3 (London: Collins, 1984). Brown, Neville. History and Climate Change: A Eurocentric Perspective (London: Routledge, 2001). Cosandey, David. Le Secret De L'Occident: Du Miracle Passe Au Marasme Presente (Paris: Arlea, 1997). Delanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988). —. What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994). —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004). Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1963). Foster, John Bellamy. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999). Hall, John. "States and Societies: The Miracle in Comparative Perspective," in Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, ed. Jean Baechler, John Hall and Michael Mann (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 20-38. Hegel, G. W. F.. Philosophy of History (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1902). —. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Lamb, Hubert. Climate, History and the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1995). Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- 338 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Law, John. "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity." Centre for Science Studies Lancaster University 1992, http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/LawNotes-on-ANT.pdf, last accessed April 08, 2008. —. "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of the Portuguese Expansion," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and T. J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 110-34. Mann, Michael. "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation," in Europe and the Rise of Capitalism. Ed. Jean Baechler, John Hall and Michael Mann (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 6-19. Marx, Karl. The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968). —. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Pelican and New Left Review, 1973). —. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1 (London: Pelican and New Left Review, 1976). —. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 3 (London: Pelican and New Left Review, 1981). Moore, Jason W. "Capitalism as World-Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History." Organization & Environment 16:4 (2003): 431-58. North, Douglass C. and Robert P. Thomas. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). O'Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, Democracy and Ecology (New York: Guilford Press, 1998). Thompson, Ken. "Heterogeneity: The Essence of Ecology." Journal of Biogeography 29:4 (2002): 559-60. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). INSECT TECHNICS: INTENSITIES OF ANIMAL BODIES JUSSI PARIKKA […] cultural and technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects … . —Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 69 This essay addresses the bodies of animals, more specifically those of insects, as media. In other words, the essay approaches the notion of "ecology" through an overlapping of media ecologies and "natural" ecologies framed through the discourses of entomology and physiology. Furthermore, this formulation means expanding the familiar notions of "media" towards a Deleuzian framework where the term resonates with an ecological understanding of bodies. In such a take, bodies are vibrations and foldings with their environments, a theme that was developed in ethological research and then adopted by Deleuze and Guattari. In this essay we will see how this theme is useful in a reconceptualization of media as environment of interactions, translations and foldings between heterogeneous bodies. In this context, animal bodies mediate and contract not only the rhythms of nature, but are mediated as part of the construction of modern media as well, as conceptual figures but also through the measures of biopower in physiological research. We need the concept of ecology to understand the complex translations between animal bodies and modern technical media and we need an understanding of environmental relations not as determining structures but as potentials of interaction. A body's mode of being emerges and develops in the midst of a resonating milieu. There is no body without another body, which implies vibration, variation and movement as primary synthesizers of bodies in ecological relations. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari explain how the world contracts different vibrations and how different natural entities act as condensations of the cosmos. The way a plant forms and senses itself is through contracting light, salts, carbon. Through this contracting or folding 340 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies "it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its composition: it is sensation itself" (What Is Philosophy? 212). Brains are not found only in the heads of humans and animals, but microbrains inhabit the inorganic world as well. The world is media, in a manner of sensation and contracting, even though Deleuze and Guattari constantly avoided using the specific term of "media" as for them it applies only to mass media of communications. Still, it is possible to continue from their philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards directions of a natural philosophy of media where the term starts to encompass the recording of time in rocks, the capacities of transmission in plants and animals, and the weird sensations of insects that perceive not only through eyes and ears, but through chemicals as well. In fact, recent years of technological innovation have embraced exactly insects and the like as perfect models for media design. In the 1980s, the cyborg became a pre-eminent symbol of the late-modern conflation of biology and technology. This all too familiar figure was, however, always weighed down by a degree of anthropomorphic baggage, largely due to the widely distributed idea of Man and his prosthesis being the characteristic mode of conjoining biology and technology. Yet, since early cybernetics, a panorama of other biological examples was also discussed in a technological context, from viruses to flies and rats to insects. Indeed, at the same time as the man-machine boom was approaching its peak years, other ideas of non-human models of organization and perception were emerging both in media design and consequently in media theory as well. In this context, the epigraph above from A Thousand Plateaus becomes clear: insects, germs, bacteria and particles do not just denote biological categories of knowledge, but can simultaneously be seen as carriers of intensities and potentials. What defines an insect? Its structure, its evolutionary path, its position in the ecology? Deleuze rejects in Henri Bergson's vein any such spatializing modes of understanding entities of nature and culture and opts for a more ethological brand of analysis: natural, cultural and technological bodies are defined by their potentials for interaction and enaction, the potentials of what they can do instead of what they are. However, the insect/technology-coupling can be found already from the nineteenth century onward. In entomological research and popular cultural discourses of the nineteenth century, insects suddenly emerged not only as interesting examples of the animal world, God's tiny creations, but also as entities that expressed alien forms of perception, sensation and organization. Books on entomology can be read as curiosity cabinets: they are filled with descriptions and tales about different ways of perceiving the world, Jussi Parikka 341 uncanny affects and alternative environmental relations. Think of the cicada that stays almost inert in a state of waiting for 17 years before coming out of the soil to mate for a brief period. Or think of the insects that sense primarily through chemicals instead of for example vision as we humans. Similar examples are the reason why Jacob von Uexküll, who was a big influence for Deleuze's Spinozian ethology, was enthusiastic about all those different animal worlds that folded the cosmos so differently than the human senses. In this essay, I focus on the idea of looking at insects as media themselves. By excavating a certain archaeology of Deleuze's ideas, especially Bergson's notions on "insects technics" as elaborated recently by Elizabeth Grosz, the point is to think through some of the consequences of what a more environmental, ecological and biophilosophical understanding of "media" could entail. In this framework, media is considered somewhat parallel to a Deleuzian understanding of a body: it is a force field, a potentiality, an intersection point where forces of the cosmos contract to form certain potentials for affects and percepts. Or, perhaps more accurately, the body is formed at the crossroads of affects and percepts, a superject in the sense Deleuze adopted from A.N.Whitehead. Thus, as Rosi Braidotti explains, the "Deleuzian body is in fact an ecological unit." Bodies/media work only through relatedness where "this environmentally-bound intensive subject is a collective entity; it is an embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and transforms energies and forces" (Braidotti, "Politics + Ecology" 211). This ecological ontology challenges fundamentals of media theory, especially the anthropomorphic models of the philosophy of technology from Ernst Kapp's prosthesis theory at the end of the nineteenth century to Marshall McLuhan and the subsequent ideas of prostheses and humans as the key models for analysis of media. Instead, a turn towards Deleuzian intensive environmental relations and Bergson's early ideas concerning insects from 1907 gives rise to new, non-anthropomorphic modes of cultural analysis (Grosz, The Nick of Time).1 The essay focuses especially on two themes: the capturing of animal intensities as a key goal of modern biopolitics, and the grounding of an understanding of media technologies not in the human body, but in that of insects. In this task, Bergson's philosophy of instinct provides a good grounding for an understanding of technics of nature where technology is not just tied to the genesis of the human being, as so many of Bergson's contemporaries suggested. 342 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies Insect Technics The modern entomological discourse offered since the early nineteenth century a curious view into microworlds of animals. In this context, insects were often grasped through their weird capacities for perception and interaction. However, a much more ontologically interesting take that tried to dispense with the long tradition of theological and teleological thought was introduced in Bergson's Creative Evolution in 1907. For Bergson, the insect offered an immanent form of original technics, with the body of the insect acting as an instrument in its own right. Instead of limiting the concept of technology to the work of intelligence only, Bergson proposed that there exists several potential ways for engaging with the materiality of the world. This exhibits the dynamic creativity of nature—hence the notion of "creative evolution." Bergson thought that intelligence (as with humans) expressed perhaps the ability to create instruments as flexible tools for the control of nature, but instinct2 (as with insects) was an altogether different mode of connecting with the environment; turning oneself into a tool by folding with the immanent milieu. As Bergson illustrates, the insect is less a haphazard biological curiosity than an important figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for opening up questions of ontology, materiality and technology that are still relevant in the context of contemporary culture of technical media. Darwin had given the original impetus to think of nature as a force of "perfection" in his Origin of Species (1859). For him, natural selection was a kind of immanent process that allowed structures to evolve into perfected forms. This evolution was a continuous and continuing process, implying nature as a perfection machine.3 Nonetheless, Bergson suggested that we could differentiate the diverse modes of organisms and tools to shed light on the problem of evolution, offering a vocabulary of technics to help with the ontology of dynamic nature. Bergson was a diligent critic of certain modes of Darwinism that were too keen on imposing passivity and habituation with the environment as the goals of organisms and evolution. Instead, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, for Bergson, life has no goal or telos. It is a mode of differentiation whose future forms we are unable to decipher. This approach implies a radical openness to a variety of forms of life beyond our perceptual world or even carbon-based life as we know it (Grosz, The Nick of Time, 215-6). Here Grosz points towards Bergson's philosophy as a precursor to contemporary artificial life scientists and the quest for potential forms of life. In fact, Bergson seems to occupy a key position in the realization that more primitive forms of life could be integrated into a novel understanding of life, artifice and matter. Deleuze Jussi Parikka 343 underlines a similar point in his reading of Bergson. The environment is not only an external condition for an emergence of an organism (matter/life) but something through which "the living being manufactures a body, a form, for itself" (Bergsonism 103). Deleuze continues to explain that this is the problematic of life, or, life as a problematic, or a "stating of a problem" that matter poses. Grosz writes that for Bergson life is a process of overcoming itself. Bergson reads this into a diagram of differentiation where 1) animal life is differentiated from plant life (immobile), and 2) animal life is divided into instinctive and intelligent. However, the divisions are not mutually exclusive. There remains a potential of becoming-plant in animals and that of becoming-animal in plants, which suggests the continuously openended orientation of the world that defies pre-determined mechanistics or thinking in terms of "essences"4 (Grosz, The Nick of Time 218). A temporal approach to the intensive becoming of entities bypasses the dangers of mechanistic and finalistic modes of understanding: the world as an open-ended becoming, something that Deleuze tried to understand through Bergson, but Grosz claims we can find already in Darwin's thought. Bergson argues that in animals two tendencies reign: instinct and intelligence. Bergson insists on seeing the mode of instinct not merely as an automated response a primitive animal (like insect) structure gives to a stimulus, but also as a mode involving "discernment and attunement" with the environment (Grosz, The Nick of Time, 224; Bergson 142). The insect has for Bergson "two modes of action on the material world", either by creating a direct means via its own organism or by constructing an indirect assemblage which acts as an instrument with which to fashion "inorganic matter" (142). This two-fold solution represents the interlinked nature of instinct and intelligence where insects as well are at times "accompanied by gleams of intelligence." Bergson's examples are the bees who can "invent new and really intelligent arrangements to adapt themselves to such new conditions" (142). The body and structure of an insect can become its natural tool even if they would have to "extend" their bodies as part of arrangements with their changing environment, as Bergson writes. The main difference to tools as they were understood in early twentieth century culture is that with insects, the tools are their own bodies and tendencies. In this context, Bergson's ideas of the force of natural instinct as a machine of perfection indeed sound close to Darwin: Instinct finds the appropriate instrument at hand: this instrument, which makes and repairs itself, which presents, like all works of nature, an infinite complexity of detail combined with a marvellous simplicity of 344 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies function, does at once, when required, what it is called upon to do, without difficulty and with a perfection that is wonderful. (140) Bergson thus offered an early translation and explication of insect capacities in terms of technics of nature. The force of insects was due to their capacities of smooth interaction with nature and its materials, a tracing of the intensive qualities of the surrounding environment. Considering the topic of this essay, Bergson's enthusiasm for instincts and animals provided an early theorization of the insect body as a technology, or media, in itself. The insect turned from a biological object into a sign of creative technics of nature, an alternative solution to problems posited by life. The insect's body becoming a medium in itself should be understood then as a variation on a Bergsonian theme. The insect's body was disclosed as an alternative way of relaying the impulses and problems of the environment and producing itself as a novel "technological" solution. Here technology turns from a human cultural enterprise into a folding of intensive forces in environmental relations. It signals a creative tension between life and matter as intertwined. Life is conceptualized in the Bergsonian ontology as a process of articulating or responding to problems posed by matter. "The construction of an eye, for example, is primarily the solution to a problem posed in terms of light" (Deleuze, Bergsonism 103). Construction becomes detached from a social constructionism to refer to a process of ontogenesis where evolution is understood as a fabrication, a technics of a kind. Next I will turn to early theories of technology and how they articulated the idea of technological evolution as springing from the human form and how a Deleuzian-Bergsonian focus might help us to bypass that anthropocentrism prevalent in such theories of media and technology. Origins of Technics Throughout the nineteenth century insects spread from biology to various other cultural discourses. Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes how the Victorian enthusiasm for entomology and insect worlds is related to a general discourse of natural history that as a genre defined the century. Through the themes of "exploration" and "taxonomy" Lecercle claims that Alice in Wonderland can be read as a key novel of the era in its evaluation and classification of various life worlds beyond the human. Like Alice in the 1865 novel, new landscapes and exotic species are offered as an armchair exploration of worlds not merely extensive but also opened up by an intensive gaze into microcosms that endlessly vary in size and shape. Jussi Parikka 345 Uncanny phenomenal worlds tie together the entomological quest; Darwinian perspectives inspired both biological accounts of curious species and Alice's adventures into imaginative worlds of twisting logic. In taxonomic terms, the entomologist is surrounded by a new cult of archiving in private and public collections. New modes of visualizing and representing insect forms of life produced a new phase of taxonomy as public craze instead of a mere scientific tool. But here again, the wonder worlds of Alice or the nonsense poet Edward Lear are the ideal points of reference for the nineteenth century natural historian and entomologist: And it is part of a craze for discovering and classifying new species. Its advantage over natural history is that it can invent those species (like the Snap-dragon-fly) in the imaginative sense, whereas natural history can invent them only in the archaeological sense, that is discover what already exists. Nonsense is the entomologist's dream come true, or the Linnaean classification gone mad, because gone creative … . (Lecercle 204) For Alice, the feeling of not being herself and "being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing" (Carroll 42),5 which of course is something incomprehensible to the Caterpillar she encounters. It is not queer for the Caterpillar whose mode of being is defined by metamorphosis and the various perception/action-modulations that transformation brings about. It is only the suddenness of the becominginsect of Alice that dizzies her. The insect body suggests here an alternative composition of forces and capacities. Whereas Alice is used to being defined by a certain stability of her human body, the continuous metamorphoses in the novel gesture towards worlds more familiar to insects, like the caterpillar. As precursors of ethology, such natural historical quests (whether archaeological, entomological or imaginative) expressed an appreciation of phenomenal worlds differing from that of the human with its two hands, two eyes and two feet. The bodies analyzed and mapped were not restricted to already defined capabilities, structural forms or mere evolutionary trees. Instead, in a manner of Deleuzian ethology of forces, these explorations were after the potentials, affects of bodies. In a way, this entailed a kind of extended Kantianism interested in the a priori conditions of alternative life worlds. Curiously the obsession with new phenomenal worlds was connected to the emergence of new technologies of movements, sensation and communication (all challenging the Kantian apperception of Man as the historically constant basis of knowledge and perception). Nature, viewed through a technological lens, was gradually becoming the new "storehouse of invention" (New York Times, 4 August 346 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies 1901)6 that was to entice inventors into perfecting their developments. This shift also reveals a change in the contemporary understanding of technology—one that marks the rise of modern technology by the end of the nineteenth century—which has usually been attributed to an anthropological and ethnological turn. As Georges Canguilhem notes, the new appreciation of technology as art decoupled it from a strictly rational register. This then connected technology as part of the telos of humanity as defined historically through anthropology: technology became the defining threshold of the human being in contrast to animals. Unlike Descartes' understanding of the equivalence of mechanics and living organisms, Kant suggested at the end of the eighteenth century a reconsideration of technics in terms of human history. Skill preceded knowledge, just like machines preceded the scientific knowledge of them. Canguilhem quotes Kant: Art, regarded as a human skill, differs from science (as ability differs from knowledge) in the same way that a practical aptitude differs from a theoretical faculty, as technique differs from theory. What one is capable of doing, as soon as we merely know what ought to be done and therefore are sufficiently cognizant of the desired effect, is not called art. Only that which man, even if he knows it completely, may not therefore have the skill to accomplish belongs to art. (Canguilhem 60) Canguilhem maps the advent of a philosophy of technology that sought to find the origins of such a skill as art (as a productive, practical faculty) in the anthropological layers of human nature. As one of the key thinkers of early philosophy of technology, Ernst Kapp introduced his famous theories of technology as an extension of the human species in 1877 in Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. In this early precursor of later cyborg theories and ideas of organ projection, Kapp proceeded to think technology as based on the human body. The human being is the measure of all things (Der Mensch das Maass der Dinge), a proposition that was meant as a continuation of the Kantian theme of perceptual worlds. There is no way to break beyond what we as anthropological human beings perceive, which was not a reason for mourning, but instead an instance of pride. For Kapp, loyal to the Western tradition of thought, the human being as a self-conscious mind was the privileged caretaker of the natural world. Yet, Man is his physiological body, which extends as part of the world, interfacing inner with the outer reality. Kapp was highly appreciative of the physiological understanding of the bodily substance of being, but regarded the human being not emerging from the animal but coming after the animal (Kapp 21).7 This paradigm relates to his curious Jussi Parikka 347 interpretation of the recapitulation thesis, proposed by Ernst Häckel. For Häckel, the embryo of any organism recapitulates in its ontogenesis the phylogenetic history of its species, a theory that underlined how every individual was in a way a perfect condensation of the whole history of its species. Kapp adapts this theory to an anthropological and world historical frame: each human being is a recapitulation of the whole of animal kingdom, being the potential of any animal whatsoever (Kapp 18-20).8 Through the human form, technology and animal kingdom are hence continuously connected. Yet for Kapp, the human hand remained the "urform" of technics. The creating and laboring Man was, for this contemporary of Karl Marx and former student of the Prussian state education system, qualified as superior to the non-reflexive animal. The anthropological notion of technology valued the hand as the "natural tool" from which artificial creation stems. Human history was the history of labor where work was logically one mode of activity (Thätigkeit), but only conscious activity was valued as work. Hence, for animals, work does not exist, even though bees and ants might seem industrious (Kapp 34). This recalls Heidegger's later claims that the animal is poor in the world and without a self-reflective possibility to understand the world as worlding. For Kapp, technology was a priori fixed as part of the human body, perhaps not as a simple organ projection, but in any case as a co-evolution of the human and the technological. The eye provides the model for the camera obscura and other artificial modes of visualization, and the muscles work in concert with new machines of industry. The telegraph is formed in parallel with the nerve system as a co-evolutionary system, thereby resonating with Kapp's general anthropology of human culture. The media technological exteriorization leads to a Hegelian kind of a dialectical emergence to new levels of self-consciousness, echoing later twentieth century McLuhanite and Teilhard de Chardin inspired views (Kapp. Hartmann). Canguilhem notes, however, that this theory encountered already early on severe "stumbling blocks" with such technologies as fire and the wheel, which clearly do not stem from the human body (Canguilhem 61). The insect media perspective provokes another challenge: how about looking at media in radically ecological terms as intensive potentials? What if the human being as a media form is only one mode of carrying potentials, and different animal and cosmic forces are to be seen as lessons in "alien media"? Such themes have been elaborated not only in science fiction9 but also in ethology and meticulous biological and ethological research into animal worlds of perception and communication. However, despite the emphasis on extracting a critical understanding and ontology of media from such ideas, much of animal 348 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies affects have been defined and captured in terms of the biopolitics of modernity. This context ties closely with the above-mentioned theories of technology but also feeds towards an understanding of the intensive potentials of animal bodies, as I will illustrate further below. Animal Captures In the physiological research so dear to Kapp, the thresholds of human sensation and perception became a crucial field of research for the aspiring media culture. This development emerged alongside the need to provide information on the human-animal physiology for the new rationalization and organization of labour and what spun-off into new creations of modes of sensing in visual media culture. The physiological understanding of the human organism provided the necessary impetus for research focused specifically on perception severed from the human observer, leading to the subsequent rationalization, reproduction and control of physiological events. This can be deciphered as a key field of biopolitics of modern media technological culture (see Crary). In physiological research, the human being served as the storehouse of sensation and perception, as in Johannes Müller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (from 1833 on). Müller's work exemplifies research that focused on the interfacing layer of sense organs between the outer world and the inner consciousness. Senses were seen as the indispensable layer that informed animals of the environment outside them, an interface that also determined the mode of orientation for a specific animal. Tones perceived are determined by the quality of the sense of hearing, just as light and colors are qualified by the specific energy of nerves of vision (Müller 255). Senses are seen as tools with which to grasp the world, world-forming probes and modes of folding the inside with the outside. In developmental biology, resonating views of organs as tools and organisms as complexes of instruments were proposed by Wilhelm Roux at the turn of the century, later criticized by Heidegger (213). What Heidegger embraced, however, at least to a certain extent, was Jacob von Uexküll's 1920s appreciation and development of Müller's ideas into his own ethological approach to the world. As Jonathan Crary explains, Müller understood the body as resembling a factory of decentralized actions, "run by measurable amounts of energy and labour" (88). Life was primarily a set of interconnected physiochemical processes, and the body became an inventory of mechanical capacities (Crary 89). Indeed, not just human beings, but also animals and insects, were seen as part of this storehouse. In the early 1826 work Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinns, Müller addresses Jussi Parikka 349 the sense thresholds of insects. The later work Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, and especially its second part, similarly addresses the visual capacities of insects, spiders and other "lower animals," noting the peculiar aggregate vision of insects. (Müller 305-312). Consider Crary's observation of how Müller, also writing as part of the Kantian legacy concerning the perceptional apparatus of human beings, nevertheless already stands at the crumbling point of Kant's apperception as the crucial and indispensable synthesis of perception: When Müller distinguishes the human eye from the compound eyes of crustacea and insects, he seems to be citing our optical equipment as a kind of Kantian faculty that organizes sensory experience in a necessary and unchanging way. But his work, in spite of his praise of Kant, implies something quite different. Far from being apodictic or universal in nature, like the "spectacles" of time and space, our physiological apparatus is again and again shown to be defective, inconsistent, prey to illusion, and, in a crucial manner, susceptible to external procedures of manipulation and stimulation that have the essential capacity to produce experience for the subject. (92) Physiological research was keen on animal modes of perception as well. Important in addition to Müller's early remarks concerning animal perception and movement were the famous later experiments by ÉtienneJules Marey. Marey, known for his pre-cinematic research on the nature of perception and movement, occupied himself early on with animal motion. In La Machine Animale (1873) the creator of various mechanisms for tracing the movements of the animal body addressed comprehensively the muscular and mechanical characteristics of movement and flight of numerous classes of animals. Even though Marey acknowledges the long history of analogies between machines and animals, he underlines the importance of this parallel for the research this specific era of technological measurement of animal bodies. It is not only a valid parallel, writes Marey, but also of practical use: studying animals allows us to engage with the basic principles of how mechanics work, with the additional possibility of offering a synthetic counterpart for the moving, sensing animal (Marey, La Machine Animale VI). In an age of technical speed and movement (railroads but also navigation and flight), Marey's underlining of the importance of research on nature and natural movement for the progress of Mankind seemed to offer insights into the physical interactions of bodies with their environment. Accurate research provided a tool for optimizing certain repetitive acts and movements, which resonated with the emerging sciences of optimizing labor movements, for 350 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies example. The work of cutting (into) time from Marey's work to devices such as the Phenakistoscope, the Thaumatrope and the Zoetrope (note the direct reference to animal life) provided a new understanding of the nature of time but also of space that could now be optimized and rationalized, as in the factories or the emerging entertainment industry (most evidently cinema). Yet, this did not exhaust the contingency and chance inherent in the tensions of time and media technologies as argued by Mary Ann Doane. In addition to a number of other interests, Marey stands as one of the early pioneers of insect media. For example human bi-pedal locomotion remained merely one potential example of how movement could be conducted (contrasted with for example the four-legged movement of the horse), opening up a panorama of nature to be analyzed in their discrete moments of movement. Insects were a special case of flight for Marey, interesting due to the huge pace of wing movement as well as the sounds emitted from that process. In La Machine Animale, the questions regarding insect flight were: 1) the frequency of wing movement, 2) the successive positions the wings take as part of the loop of movement, 3) how the power of motion that moves and upkeeps the movement develops. The same key questions were also expressed in various other publications reporting on Marey's insect studies (La Machine Animale 188; "Note sur le vol des insectes" 136-9; "Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the animal kingdom" 226-85).10 The practical dilemma was how to record the movement that was beyond the human eye to perceive. On the one hand, Marey saw the acoustic traces left by movement as indexes of the frequency, but on the other hand, more accurate research equipment was needed. Proceeding from observation to potential causes, the so-called graphic method, and especially Hermann von Helmholz's invention of the myograph in the early 1850s for registering movement in graphical form, provided invaluable assistance in turning continuous movement into distinctive and analyzable units ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the animal kingdom" 227). The actual wings were taken here as indexes and harnessed so as to leave wing marks on a blackened paper, traces of the points of the continuous movement ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the animal kingdom" 235).11 The result was a graphical representation of various kinds of movements, at best like beautiful abstract lithographic art. Thus, it is no wonder, as Marta Braun argues in her book Picturing Time, that Marey's way of capturing temporal intensities into a media technological form found resonance later in modernist art, for example in Marcel Duchamp's work, where Marey's positivism was turned into a fascination for temporal perception detached Jussi Parikka 351 from the everyday habitual human way of seeing the world. A new way of seeing articulated in scientific and media technological contexts (later celebrated by such filmmakers and writers as Jean Epstein) was connected to a search for new perception/action-connections that moved beyond the human eye/hand-couple. Perception moves beyond the human perception to contexts technological (the nonhuman eye of the movie camera) but also animal (the nonhuman affects and percepts lived through for example insects.) This represents the new phase in perceptual techniques tensed between the animal and the technological where beyond registering the non-human we can talk about the ontogenetic potential these machines express (see Manning 85). An expression of Marey's interests of particular relevance here was his artificial insect creation (1869), a tool for theoretical study. In a model construct of wings moved by an air pump and inserted on a drum, Marey was capable of reproducing the flight patterns of insects (wing stroke patterns in the form of an eight) that allowed him to measure the capacities of animals in their environments even better than the originals. The question was how the wings and their potential allowed such a "rapid translation of motive force" ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the animal kingdom" 246). Marey's experiments soon attracted interest beyond France. For example, various U.S. newspapers and publications were keen to report on curious interfacing of animal locomotion and artificial creation. The papers expressed the undoubted potential in Marey's research for the emerging topic of human flying. Scientific American underlined how Marey's experiments are useful to aeronauts "and those aspiring to be aeronauts" ("The Velocity of Insects' Wings during Flight" 241-56).12 Certainly, war and the continuous effort put into finding aerial solutions to warfare is a key context for understanding the interest in flying and aerial movement of bodies. The U.S. had just come out of the Civil War and France and Prussia were on the verge of their war around that time. War provides an exemplary context of the workings of biopolitics as a mobilization of population(s) but also research into efficient solutions in organization and projectiles for example. If a crucial part of the analysis of moving bodies with Marey and others was to focus on the problem of perceiving bodies in motion, then the solutions in military context to producing bodies into motion and subsequently catching them in their motion was of utmost importance.13 352 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies Marey's artificial insect creation. (La Machine Animale 207) In another example, Harper's monthly underlined the fascinating prospects of the apparatus of Marey which also demonstrated the importance of coupling of organs with their surroundings: By an improved artificial apparatus, Professor Marey has succeeded in simulating with entire accuracy the movement of the membranous wings of insect in flight, to wit: the raising of the body above a given level, and its forward motion in space. The apparatus shows clearly that it is the resistance of the air which imparts to the wings the figure-of-eight motion referred to, as the same curve was described by the wing of the artificial insect, which, of course, only received as its motor rectilineal movements of elevation and depression in the wings. It is, therefore, erroneous to say that a movement of torsion is voluntary on the part of the insect, and assimilated to the effect of the action of a helix, in screwing its way through the air. ("Flight of Birds and Insects") Animal bodies were seen as potentialities that could exceed themselves, raising the body above a given level, to quote a line from the Harper's Monthly article. The flying, intensive animal bodies were surpassing the level of the human body eager to tap into the possibility of accelerating itself beyond its everyday movements on two legs. By analyzing the defining thresholds of human perceptions and movements the physiological agenda was able to pinpoint the differing potentials of Jussi Parikka 353 diverse animal bodies. This phase of analyzing and (re)producing machinic and insectoid perceptions marks a special phase of capturing of affects (pre-personal, a-human) as intensive capacities. As a form of bioproduction that instead of limiting cultivates processes of life, the intensive qualities of even primitive life were understood early on. Naturally this represents a very different epistemological framework from that of Deleuze's or Bergson's. In biopolitical production, even though the nonhuman forces are acknowledged, the intensive potentials are translated in terms of spatialized modes of knowledge and reproduction. They freeze the intensive forces of the cosmos as Deleuze and Guattari characterize the mode of production of science in comparison to for example art and philosophy. All of them are "forms of thought or creation" (What is Philosophy? 208), but they work in different modes and with different relations to the forces of the world: it is the "task" of science to slow down the variations and bring about functions and prospects. In addition, such scientific translations parallel with the rise of modern media technologies. As Pasi Väliaho has argued, Marey's work stands as an interesting interface of experimentalization of life (sensation, locomotion, etc.) and cinema. For Väliaho ("Simulation, Automata, Cinema: A Critique of Gestures" 15), both are defined by their quest to "quantify, enhance and perhaps even to (re)produce the 'animal machine.'"14 Through the creation of measurable abstract yardsticks, the animal became translated from an intensive assemblage into an extensive, spatialized temporality that could be repeated—even without the animal. In a corresponding fashion, Akira Mizuta Lippit has referred to the appropriation of animals by (and into) technical media as an emblematic part of modernization. The disappearance of animals from the actual living worlds of urbanized Western societies was paralleled by the incorporation of animal affects and intensities in the emerging media technologies of modernity, cinema in the forefront. The graphic inscription machines of Marey (and of the whole field of physiology dedicated to excavating the energies of the body) worked beyond the hermeneutic register of meaning and obediently translated the language of nature into visual form. Väliaho argues this to be a creation of a certain kind of a "degree zero" of perception, severed from the human observer, registering life before the intervention of hermeneutic meaningmaking. Writing of the registering machines, Marey notes These machines are not only destined to replace the observer, in which case they perform their role with overwhelming supremacy, but they also have their own domain where nothing can replace them. When the eye ceases seeing, the ear hearing and the sense of touch feeling, or when our 354 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies senses give us deceptive appearances, these machines are like new senses of astounding precision. (La Méthode graphique 108, qtd. in Väliaho, "Simulation, Automata, Cinema" 19) But if the graphic method of registering animal life referred to and created a technological plane severed from the conscious observer, it also implied the intensity inherent in other forms of life than human. The machines marked for Marey a new mode of sensation of "astounding precision" but in a parallel movement, animal life introduced the idea that the Kantian determination of the perceptive qualities of the human being were not the only ones possible. Instead, there was something akin to a foreign planet of perceptions waiting to be excavated and reproduced. This relates to alternative ways of understanding technology. ‘Intelligence' can be seen as the ability to select and reproduce wanted actions and ‘instinct' as non-reflexive, continuous folding with the world. The capturing of instinctive life by analytic intelligence is one way to express the interfacing of continuous life processes with quantifying discrete units of analysis. Insect Media: From Intelligence to Instinct Biopolitics has been in the wake of Foucault defined as the key field of modern politics. Following Foucault's work of the late 1970s, when he mapped the modern emergence of sovereign power, capturing human life through the notion of species and its generic capacities has been a key theme of research into biopolitics. In Giorgio Agamben's influential take, this has lead to an analysis of how politics takes as its subject not only the speaking human being but the interface towards bare life as well. In this context, biopolitics can be seen as focusing on the thresholds of society and the biological, of bios and zoe. However, this should lead to a more radical take on the politics of life where life is not only the bare life of the human being, but more generally the intensive animal life that is depersonal and that human beings share with animals. In this context, the work by such scholars like Jonathan Crary has been exemplary in expanding the field of biopolitics to encompass the emergence of modern media culture in the nineteenth century and the practices and discourses of capturing of intensive qualities in perception and sensation. What I want to suggest is to expand this inquiry into the animal bodies and figures that have been central to a politics of life that is non-anthropomorphic—a theme that I feel can contribute a lot to theories of media as well. Theories of technology and media are parallel discursive constructions to the biopolitical practices of modernity and hence merit to be integrated to a Jussi Parikka 355 cultural mapping of the origins of modern media culture. Hence, a Deleuzian and Bergsonian perspective on the intensive potentials of nonhuman actors can provide a way to understand the environmental, ecological relations nature and media are embedded in. Even though Friedrich Kittler has noted how early technical media in a way filled in "[w]hat people can no longer see or hear" (648), insects (coupled with technical media) also functioned as media. Animals provided insights into the previously unseen, unheard, unsensed. The figures of the insect functioned as a weird reality in themselves where the familiar notions regarding perception and movement did not hold. Instead, in a parallel enterprise to the emergence of technical media that likewise challenged the phenomenological world of the human being, insects' capacities paved the way for experimental takes on folding with the world, of finding novel action-perception circuits. Quite concretely, nonhuman models of capacities of bodies—swarming, novel sensations and movements, etc.—have been emerging in the recent years in media theory and design. This parallels with the philosophical work done by Deleuze where the question of the nonhuman becomes a motor for theories of ontogenesis beyond the phenomenological human form. As Grosz explains, Deleuze was not so much interested in affects of a human subject which leads to his distancing from phenomenology: [Deleuze is] interested in that affect that opens us up to what is unliveable, whereas phenomenology is interested only in that which we can live and experience even if it remains the latent structure of our lived experience. So in place of Husserl and his place at the origin of contemporary phenomenology, we always have to put Nietzsche, because he shows that force is greater than affect, and force is unliveable by a subject. Deleuze is interested in intensities which are unliveable by a subject and which open the subject up to an inhuman power. He talks a lot about the inhuman powers of the universe itself, of cosmic forces, for example. (Kontturi and Tiainen 252) In this sense that follows Grosz's understanding of Deleuze, I argue that we can use various nonhuman entities as vectors towards such "inhuman powers." What is fascinating about animals is exactly their capacity to inhabit alternative territorial relations to that of the humans as well as live through alternative affect worlds (such as the famous tick's). In various ways, this is parallel to the fascination with technical media that works much beyond our phenomenology in terms of speed, memory and calculation. But crucial notions relating to ecology, the intensive environmental relation and the animal or insect question can be tracked already from an 356 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies "archaeology" of Deleuze's thought, especially Bergson. Hence I want to push further the aforementioned idea that the Bergsonian perspective can in fact bring about a novel understanding of technology as insect technics. Technology and culture can be seen as carrying similar intensities and potentials as insects, bacteria and the like, and furthermore—to reiterate the main thesis of this essay—insects and animals can be seen as media in themselves, understood in the sense of intense environmental relations. As Grosz explains in her rehabilitation of Bergson as part of current considerations concerning the nature of technology and materiality, for Bergson various forms of life (plants, insects and vertebrates) were ways of responding to the events and problems that "nature addresses to the living" (Nick of Time 13).15 In this context, one way of conceptualizing this would be in terms of technology, which Grosz sees as the "inevitable result of the encounter between life and matter, life and things, the consequence of the living's capacity to utilize the nonliving (and the living) prosthetically" (Time Travels 137). Instinct becomes then one prosthetic/technological solution to a coupling with an environment and the plane of problems it posits. Curiously, we thus find from Bergson an orientation towards instinct-insect-technology where tools are not separated from the whole of the living organism. Instead, there is a new form of holistic assemblage that acts as a technics in itself beyond a binary setting of natural instincts vs. intelligent technics. Bergson was very familiar with Marey's work and the two were also personally acquainted when working on psychic phenomena in experiments organized by the Psychological Institute of Paris in the early years of twentieth century (Braun 279-280.) Yet, Bergson's ideas gave a radically different emphasis compared to those of Marey who believed in the overcoming of the limitations of human vision by dissecting movement into discrete observable images and graphs. For Bergson (28-31), the surpassing of the human senses was rather part of the ontology of duration and continuity that defines the way bodies fold and mutate with the world. In contrast to instinct, intelligence is another form of technology / orientation, but it is not, however, any better: "Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing organizing instruments; intelligence perfected the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments" (Bergson 140). Actually, tools constructed by reflexive and intelligent orientation are not organically coupled to the user and remain "imperfect." Paraphrasing Bergson, tools of intelligence might be hard to handle, but as they are molded from "unorganized matter", they can be adjusted to a diverse number of goals and uses, which simultaneously raises the user ("the living being") to a new level of capability in relation Jussi Parikka 357 to its surroundings, giving it "an unlimited number of powers" (Bergson 140-1; see Grosz, Time Travels 137-8). The notion of abstracting "intelligence" can be relayed to the agenda of biopolitics framed above. Biopolitics as the capture of the intensive potentials of (animal) life resonates with the idea of reflexive reproduction and abstraction of the capacities of the human being, but also of animal life. Bergson's idea of instincts, and prosthetic technologies based on the embodied instinctive lives of for example insects, proves a crucial theoretization of the minoritarian theme of insect technics. In contrast to Kapp, and the dominating understanding of the anthropology of technics, the intensive non-personal animal life points towards a biopolitics of life what-so-ever, which historically has been a theme since the emergence of technical media during the nineteenth century (of bodies and technological capacities not modeled merely on the human being) and mediatheoretically emerges with the novel philosophies of time and evolution, as with Bergson—as emphasized repeatedly above. The body of the insect is a body capable of such affects and perceptions that the human body is not—a fact that has wider implications for any theories of technology reliant on the centrality of the human being. To be exact, for Bergson qualities precede the bodies they are attached to and thus have a certain ideal existence that only coincides with its variation. Perception tries to keep up with this continuity of change by fixing it on entities that are the mobiles in movement, but the primacy is in the movement. The bodies of for example arthropods are special ways of cutting the material continuity of the world where their bodies also stem from a much wider continuity of variation. This cutting, then, affords them specific possibilities for action (Bergson 300-1, 367). In this sense, the body of the insect—or in general the animal bodies in modernity—are becoming "media" in themselves: serving as important mediators within the frames of modern biopolitics, acting as packets of capacities to be "reverse-engineered" but also "mediating" percepts and affects previously unheard or unseen. In this context I am proposing, we could argue following Braidotti's (Transpositions 37) Deleuzian perspective that life as the raw animal zoe, not just the social life of bios, becomes perhaps both an object of capture for biopolitics, and also in a sense its subject: mechanisms of capture tracing the intensive life of animals as blocs of capacities. Animals are not interesting as examples of organic unity or "naturalness" but due to the power of differentiation of nature, their ability to come up with new, unimagined solutions. In this sense, the idea of looking at insects—and other animals—as media inthemselves follows from the ecological immanence of Deleuze's ontology 358 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies which refuses the dualism of nature vs. culture, or human vs. non-human. Instead, bodies are products of ethological, environmental forces and exhibit various potentials through experimentation in their relatedness. As Braidotti argues, this signals the core of Deleuze's political ecology as ecosophy which looks for potentials of bodies beyond the human organization ("Politics + Ecology). Notes 1 In addition, on insects and contemporary cultural analysis, see for example Eugene Thacker's article "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes. Part Two" and Rosi Braidotti's book Metamorphoses. Braidotti has recently continued on similar ideas as Grosz when emphasizing the immanent and multimodal lessons that we could learn from animals: "The strength of animals is that they are immanent in their territories and environmentally bound: insects and animals mark their territories acoustically, olfactorily, by their own sign system" (Transpositions 111). 2 Instinct was a much-debated theme during that period. Often referred to as a mechanical reaction to external impulse, contemporaries of Bergson were continuously also keen on debating a strict distinction between instinct and intelligence. Instinct was often divided into further two more precise modes: open and close, where only the latter was deemed as a mechanical and predictable reaction to external stimuli, as John Mullarkey (78) explains. However, despite the seemingly dualist nature of Bergson's division, the two are more in the manner of tendencies than clear-cut categories. 3 "When we see any structure perfected for any particular habit, as the wings of a bird for flight, we should bear in mind that animals displaying early transitional grades of the structure will seldom continue to exist to the present day, for they will have been supplanted by the very process of perfection through natural selection" (Darwin 149). 4 Bergson addresses this in terms of tendencies. Even though life is differentiation and emergence of specialized tendencies, the traits of elementary directions are preserved. Bergson (136) writes how "[t]here is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more especially no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence … all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover, neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition: they are tendencies, and not things" (112-9). 5 In a style to some extent reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, in E. van Bruyssel's The Population of an Old-Pear Tree, or Stories of insect life an everyday meadow is disclosed as a vivacious microcosm in itself. The harmonious scene, "like a great amphitheatre" (2), is filled with life that easily escapes the (human) eye. Like Alice, the protagonist wandering in the meadow is "lulled and benumbed by dreamy sensations" (4) which, however, transport him suddenly into new perceptions and bodily affects. Jussi Parikka 6 359 Later, in the 1920s, William Wheeler saw this even as a special defining instinct of ants: the instinct of craftsmanship (and also the instinct of communication). "Scientific Observations of Ants and Etymologists." New York Times, 29 July 1928. 7 In Kapp's anthropological philosophy of technology, the human being's key focus was to be on itself: "[D]er Gegenstand des Menschen nichts anders ist, als sein gegenständliches Wesen selbst" (138). Kapp's influence was later acknowledged by for example Alfred Espinas, in 1897, who adapted Kapp's ideas of organ projection as the key element of philosophy of technology centered on action (what he called praxeologie). The worker remains unconscious of his intertwining with the tools, which seem as natural extensions of his capabilities. The machinic ensemble is not merely an extension but an articulation. As Espinas notes, the machine is a coordinating system which has to remain unconscious for the worker in order to function properly (45-6; 84-5.) 8 The ideas also amounted to a hierarchy of morphological elements so to speak, cultivated later in France by Espinas. Lowest were the reflexive and instinctive forms of will, and highest the voluntary and (self-)conscious appropriation of technology as a mastering of nature. (Espinas 281-3.) 9 As Deleuze and Guattari write: "Science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible" (A Thousand Plateaus 248.) 10 Even though Marey's studies on insects took place fairly early in his career, end of the 1860s, he returned to the analysis of their movements in the 1890s, cutting into their movements at a camera speed of 1/25000 of a second. (Braun, 166; Marey, "Le vol des insects étudié par la chronophotographie" 135-8.) 11 For Marey, insect flight was not a phenomenon of the muscles and organization, but their interaction with especially currents of air. The insect wings for example in the dragon-fly were optimized to adjust to air currents: "Thus the reaction of the air, which combines its effect and acts perpendicularly upon the surface which it strikes, can be decomposed into two forces, a vertical and a horizontal force; one serving to elevate, and the second to propel the animal" (244). The insect was a folding of forces of physiological organization and the environment. 12 Marey himself also engaged with plans of engine powered aircrafts. Around the end of the 1870s he collaborated on such plans with his assistant Victor Tatin (Braun 49-51). 13 This is related to Paul Virilio's often mentioned ideas relating to war and logistics of perception (Virilio 63.) For example the French War Ministry was supporting research into flying apparatuses at the end of the nineteenth century. One of the examples that could be cited include Clément Ader's 1890s design that was modelled on biological movements (resembling a bat) and aimed to produce a new kind of a war machine—Avion III (Siukonen 53-6.) 14 On the biopolitics of modern cinematic technologies, see Väliaho, The Moving Image. Gesture and Logos circa 1900. 15 Grosz herself has recently developed these ideas towards a neomaterialist appreciation of art that stems from a wider ontology of nature, rhythm and 360 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies vibration. Bodies and art are contractions of the vibrations of the world (see Kontturi and Tiainen). Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Anon. "Editor's Scientific Record." Harper's New Monthly Magazine 41:246 (Nov. 1870): 936-7. 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Gesture and Logos circa 1900 (Turku: University of Turku Publications, 2007). CONTRIBUTORS BERND HERZOGENRATH teaches American Literature and Culture at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt and at the University of Cologne (Germany). He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi 1999), and the editor of From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today (Rodopi 2001), The Cinema of Tod Browning (Black Dog 2006), and Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (Palgrave 2008). His fields of interest are 19ththand 20th Century American Literature, Critical Theory, and Cultural|Media Studies. Future publications include Edgar G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of the B's (McFarland 2009), Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries (Mellen Press 2009), and An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (University of New England Press 2009). PATRICK HAYDEN is Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. He teaches and researches in the fields of political theory, critical theory, the history of political philosophy, international political theory, and globalization. He is now working on a new book that builds upon the thought of Hannah Arendt to examine dimensions of political evil in a global age. ELIZABETH GROSZ teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. She is the author of The Nick of Time (2004) and most recently, Chaos,Territory, Art (2008), texts linked to the place of the human body in nature, culture and art. LEYLA HAFERKAMP was born in Istanbul, Turkey, where she attended Istanbul American Robert College and Istanbul Technical University. She received her M.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of Aachen with the thesis "Towards a New Anthropo(morpho)logy: Transformations of 'Artificial Man' in American SF." Besides teaching American Literature|Culture at the University of Cologne, she is currently working on her PhD thesis on "The Poetics of Immanence: Deleuzian Perspectives on Contemporary American Eco-Writing (Dillard, Snyder, 364 Contributors Hiaasen)." While her fields of interest include American literature (esp. 19th and 20th century), critical theory and process philosophy, her research focuses on the intersections of literature, philosophy and science. Forthcoming publications include texts on Pynchon, Deleuze and ecocriticism. MICHAEL MIKULAK is a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His current interests revolve around ecocriticism, cultural studies, globalization, urban wilderness, critical theory, food politics, and ecotourism. His thesis is about the convergence of discourses in food politics and global warming and the ways in which capitalism is responding to the environmental crisis. In addition to examining the growth of a green corporate culture, his thesis explores the limitations and possibilities of a politics of the pantry in addressing broader questions of ecological modernization, sustainability, and the politics of the everyday. He has published on topics ranging from bioregionalism, radical environmentalism, Marxism, and Deep Ecology. ANTHONY LARSON is Maître de Conférences in English Studies at the Université du Maine in Le Mans, France where he teaches American literature and contemporary theory. TOM GREAVES gained his PhD from the University of Warwick with a thesis on the ecological thought of Martin Heidegger. His research interests include ecological phenomenology, philosophy of nature and ecological poetics. He has been active in various environmental campaigns, including the international movement against large dams. He is currently writing an introduction to Heidegger entitled Starting with Heidegger and is associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, UK. ALISTAIR WELCHMAN is a professor of philosophy at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He has written widely on Deleuze, Schelling and Kant, and is co-editor of The New Schelling. He is currently co-translating Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation. EDWARD P. BUTLER received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 2004 for his dissertation The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus. Since then, his articles have appeared in Dionysius; Méthexis; The Pomegranate; and Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft. His research interests include individuation and An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/Guattari 365 multiplicity in philosophy, the ontological dimensions of theistic cosmologies, and the ethical disposition toward the non-human. ELENI IKONIADOU is a PhD candidate at the University of East London. Her research addresses the digital impact on spacetime and expansive perception, through a symbiotic relationship between technoscience and new media art. Eleni's research interests include contemporary philosophy in relation to art practice and new technologies, theories of affect, machinic materialism, and technoculture. Heroux IRVING GOH is with the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His research focus is in continental philosophy, and its intersections with other disciplines such as literature, politics, culture, architecture, etc. His articles have appeared in Cultural Politics, Theory Culture & Society, Social Identities, Fast Capitalism, genre, and Jordan Crandall's Under Fire 2. He has published on Deleuze-Guattari and politics in CTheory. His two essays on the question of community and friendship in Deleuze and Guattari are currently being published by symplokē (2007 and 2008). In 2006, he was Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, and Visiting Scholar at the Asia Research Institute-National University of Singapore from May-Aug 2007. JAMES WILTGEN received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA, where he focused on the development of television in Brazil. He teaches in the Department of Critical Studies at the California of Arts in Valencia, California, offering courses in critical theory, film, and political economy. He has written articles on contemporary theory, film, and the contours of Sado-monetarism. At the present time he is working on a book addressing genealogical, ethno-historical, and schizo-analytic issues of war, peace, and the state. KATHERINE E. YOUNG is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Colorado State University. Her dissertation, entitled The Animal Paradox: Toward an Animal-Centered Politics, looks at the animal subtext within the Western canon that renders animal bodies exceptionally and ironically political. VINCENT J. GUIHAN is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Mediations Program at the Institute of Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. His work addresses the representation of 366 Contributors animals in imaginative work, particularly the contemporary Canadian novel. PAUL LEWIS teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. His principle research interests are in the philosophy of science and technology, social theory, and occasionally aesthetics. He is also a founding member, with Jennifer Khoshbin, of Refarm Spectacle, a conceptual arts group. GEORGIANA BANITA is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Constance, Germany. She studied English and American Literature and German literature at Yale University and the University of Constance, where she also held a lecturer position. Her dissertation (The Ethics of Seeing in 9/11 Representation) and other writings address the confluences of ethics, literature, and the media after 9/11, as well as contemporary discourses of diversity and globalization. She has published several articles on American poetry (among them "The Same, Identical Woman: Sylvia Plath in the Media," M/MLA Journal 2007), the fiction of Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, and Khaled Hosseini, as well as essays on the theoretical works of Charles Taylor, Michael Ignatieff, and Raymond Williams. Her most recent publications include "Decency, Torture and the Words that Tell us Nothing" (Peace Review 2008) and "Scorched Earth Tactics: Preemptive Ecopolitics in the Aftermath of 9/11" (Parallax, 2008). JORGE CAMACHO was born in Mexico where he studied for an undergraduate degree in Communications at the Universidad Iberoamericana. Having spent a few years as a practitioner in digital media and film, and following a brief experience in the editorial field, he made a move towards academic research. Residing now in London, he completed an MA Cybernetic Culture: Media, Digital Arts and the Body-Machine at the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies of the University of East London. After graduation, he received a postgraduate scholarship to undertake doctoral research at the same institution. His PhD thesis is engaging with the problem of control, as theorised by Deleuze, in relation to the techno-political ecology of contemporary urbanism. His forthcoming publications include an article on the political ontologies of Deleuze and Antonio Negri, in the light of recent social movements in Argentina, for a special issue of New Formations dedicated to the theme of Deleuze and politics. An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/Guattari 367 JUSSI PARIKKA teaches and writes on the cultural theory and history of new media. He has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He is also the Co-Director of the recently founded Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ARCDigital). Parikka has published a book on "cultural theory in the age of digital machines" (Koneoppi, in Finnish) and his Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, Digital Formations-series (2007). Parikka is currently working on a book on "Insect Media", which focuses on the media theoretical and historical interconnections of biology and technology. In addition, two co-edited books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Hampton Press) and Media Archaeologies. Homepage: http://www.jussiparikka.com.