<<TRANSMATHOME

3.3 Fiction, Philosophy, Language

3.3.1

What are the lines of flight that extend from fiction, as opposed to philosophy? In other words, what can be said about the abstract machines obtaining in the domain of fiction and poetry? One which can be taken as an example  is the abstract machine which A Thousand Plateaus names as such (in passing) in its final section – the abstract machine in effect in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (TP p.513). This extremely powerful work is an expression of a singular and very important mode of engagement (this mode could also be called the Woolf abstract machine, which is the converse of the fact that the Nietzsche abstract machine could equally well be determined by the name Zarathustra).

The way of seeing and working embodied in The Waves involves understanding human groups as deeply inter-fused zones, and understanding individuals as profoundly multiple on the basis of their connections to people, singular events, etc. More importantly, it involves, firstly, seeing  the difference between the ‘waves’ of occurences of habituated actions and processes, and the ‘waves’ of recurring intense experiences or modes of engagement, and, secondly, seeing that the zones involved in the breakaway engagements form a ‘beyond’ which can suffuse - like an ocean, as opposed to a wave – the whole field of connections of an (intensive) body. Finally (in the context of this brief account) it involves seeing both that surrounding landscapes or milieus are crucial in understanding human groups and individuals, and that these landscapes can be described without the humans, in a way which is an engagement in its own right, but which is simultaneously an engagement with the human (a question of taking the sea, or the atmosphere, or a flock of birds as a model, rather than a social domain, or some other field with a dominatory centre or centres).  The figures or characters of The Waves are  seven friends, plus a complex ‘character’ which seems initially to be a particular landscape, but at a deeper level is the whole planet, with its oceans, land, atmosphere, animals and human constructions. Each section of the book starts with a description of  a place or locale by the sea (or a place which is both the land and the sea) at a particular point in a day, where this description starts each time with the sea and the light, but then goes on to include the land and elements on the land. The things on the land include objects on the shoreline, a house, trees, insects and – in particular – birds (groups of flying and swimming creatures have an important place in the book: at an early stage in its composition Woolf considered calling it The Moths). However, by the end of the book the initial focus on this particular place has spread out toward ‘mid-ocean’ and  toward distant mountains that could be the Himalayas.

At the level of composition what can be said is that the language emergent from this mode of engagement is a language of sensations, encounters and of fluid and multiple human  bodies (involving a continual shift between different voices belonging to the different individuals), where this language is woven together or interspersed with a language of waves, flows, territories, animals and landscapes. At one point – as a child - Bernard thinks of proximity with Susan in a language of vapour and terrain: “’But when we sit together [...] we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory’.[6] At another point he thinks of himself as ‘buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly vagrant’,[7] and at another point a disturbing  encounter is given the ‘refrain’ language of shore and waves: Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence – dragging me open, laying bare the pebbless ...It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones’.[8] The extraordinary figure of Rhoda (the figure who goes furthest in her escapes from constrained contact with the world) experiences herself in terms of a complex journey, with multiple and shifting aims, and in terms of the sea: ‘there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin-can, here on a spike of the mailed sea-holly, or a bone...’[9] When at one point Rhoda reaches (through contact with the group of which she is a part) a heightened sense of an  immanent ‘beyond’ –  beyond  habituated and de-intensificatory connections - her intensified understanding is described in terms of the sea, and in terms of a fluid, white shape (‘moving, perhaps alive’) which mutatively has properties of water, of solids, and of geometrical form:

I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. [...] When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright – a column; now a fountain falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea.[10]

The weaving of the elements from the different zones of language is not extrinsic to the fact that the writing is emergent from a specific mode of seeing the world, but is strictly inseparable from this fact (anything else would be random dabbling using a principle of contrast). It is a question of a particular mode of grasping the world in terms  of multiplicities (as is indicated in a section about multiplicities and The Waves in ‘Becoming –Intense, Becoming-Animal’, which also engages with the passage that has just been quoted (TP p.252)), in terms of intensive connections, and in terms of waves of events, re-emergences, and habituated processes. And in turn it is a question of this modus having a manifestation in language involving the fusing of the different domains of language which have been detailed (the language of sensation, emotion, thought, creativity; the language of flows, swarms, distributions, landscapes).

3.3.2

Giving a more complex account of abstract machines has dramatically  posed the question of the difference between philosophy and fiction. It is necessary to move on in this direction partly because the analyses which have just taken place will be deepened through giving an account of language which deals with these two domains, and partly because a major thread of this chapter will turn out to be the problem of language. Also, however, it is clearly a pressing and fascinating issue which has been raised by the fact that the modes of engagement of Nietzsche and Woolf  are not in any way divided by a border-line involving the terms ‘fiction’, or ‘truth’, but are instead  located alongside each other as modes of  intensive cartography. As modes of engagement Sophocles and Plato come into focus as being alongside each other as close relations in a field of intensive cartography, with only a diference of strategy at the level of language separating them. However, it is evidently important not to go too fast at this point. If truth is a determination on the side of intensive cartography (and therefore on the side of both fiction and philosophy), and if the negative is to be understood as forms of over-coding which are equally in effect in the fields of  fictional/poetic and philosophical compositions, then what is the distinction between these two forms of language?

There are two stages to the answer. The first part of the answer is  differential in a complex way, and involves different functionings or modalities of language, which are spread tendentially (and in no way mutually exclusively) across the domain of language in question. The second part of the answer concerns the institutions or assemblages which have been in effect  in the domain, and which have generated and supervised an ‘a posteriori’ division in a field which is a kind of continuum, as opposed to it being split by a rift down the middle.

The pre-eminent difference that cross-cuts this field of language lies in the fact that fiction functions pre-eminently through aphoristic blocks of cartographic writing and through character-functions, or recurring personae (of whatever kind), whereas philosophy functions pre-eminently through the construction of meshed fields of new sequences for terms, or, in other words, through the invention of concepts (the idea that philosophy intrinsically involves the creation of concepts is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?[11]). A better way of stating this, is that these two modalities are both in effect (not mutually exclusively) in the domain. The first kind of writing can be exemplified by the majority of the aspects of the writing in Woolf’s The Waves, and the second by the majority of aspects of the writing in Spinoza’s Ethics. It can be seen that the border-zone between the two is writing in the form of the aphorism in a more conventional sense of the term, such as Nietzsche’s aphorisms, and writing involving ‘conceptual personae’, such as Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or indeed A Thousand Plateaus (‘The Geology of Morals’ is partly constructed in the form of an account of a lecture by a figure called ‘Professor Challenger’). At one end of the continuum there is writing which has set loose all or most of the terms involved from their moorings in the cartographic process, but where it is not possible to detach concepts. At the other end is writing involving terms being placed into new domains of sequences.  For example, with ‘substance’ in the Ethics the major sequences are  ‘substance, attribute, mode’, and ‘substance, god, nature, eternity’. The conceptual invention involved here shades into the invention of conceptual personae (where a character can be easily identified with some position or set of positions, such that the name can be used in way which is similar to the functioning of a concept-term), and this in turn shades into the domain of more complex character-functions found in fictional language, where only the names of the separate affects pertaining to the characters could be taken up into conceptual sequences. The dysjunction between the two forms is an ‘included’ dysjunction, rather than an ‘excluded’ one (to use terms from Anti-Oedipus[12]), which is to say that a block of writing which is primarily in the fictional mode can be threaded through with inventions of concepts, and writing primarily in the philosophical mode can be threaded through with passages that have to be taken up in their entirety, as opposed to disengaging concepts from them, or with passages involving complex character-functions (for instance, in a dialogue). 

In  ‘transfigurative’ or aphoristic language  fields of individual terms  are freed from their moorings in customary uses, and go into effect in new ways, or in ways which were virtual but sporadically actualised within the field of the language, rather than predomominantly actual, or conventional. In ‘concept-generative’ language, transformed functionings of terms occur in shifting refrains which set out a field of sequences or connections between a domain of different terms (this field of sequences can also have been virtual within the language, and as with the case of isolated tranfigured functionings of terms, it passes in the composition into being locally  actualised, in a way where it can both go on to become more broadly actualised, and to become ‘frozen’ in a related, but conventionalised or de-intensified form). Aphoristic language tends to be extremely ‘rich’ (in the very best sense of this word), and if it is to be interpellated it is easiest by far  to draw on it by taking up whole ‘blocks’. In contrast, concept-generative language is not composed of transfigured uses of terms to the same degree, but by the same token  it is easier to draw upon it by taking up individual terms, or fields of individual terms. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an acutely rich domain of thought finding expression in language, but it is far easier to quote from one of its poetic or prose passages, or to take up one of its ‘proverbs’, than to draw on a field of its individual terms. On the other hand, the Ethics - while not providing powerful aphoristic blocks in the same way - is a composition which has recurring kinds of uses of terms which make it easy (in relative terms) to take up concepts from it.

In relation to assemblages or institutions the initial point  is  that in a strong sense the institutionalised forms of philosophy and fiction  are twin formations. They both have lines of emergence from mythological modes  of language obtaining in despotic or tribal societies (these lines of emergence at the deepest level are really lines of connection, in that the transitions involved  can in fact work in either direction), and they exist alongside each other at a high level of activity in societies involving  a pronounced functioning of the trade-network or urban-network assemblage. However the relationship between these ‘twins’ is one involving a complex tension, and, in particular, a recurrent tendency for philosophy to disown its counterpart on the basis that fiction is something else entirely (catharsis, for instance, or entertainment), or that it in one way or another falls short of philosophy, or through a combination of these positions. Meanwhile, at the deepest level philosophy all along is a  cartography of the cosmos and of human bodies, which as such  is a pragmatics of  freedom and intensification involving lines of flight from assemblages of power (this is not what the establisment powers want to hear). And at the same time, beyond its own modes of stratification, exactly the same is the case  with fiction. The question on both sides of the divide is one of pragmatics, intensive cartographies, and pass-word compositions of language, where these can come in many forms. Alongside Plato’s cartography there is that of Sophocles. With great precision Sophocles’s Oedipus trilogy sets out an intricately figured world of rogue, immanent  forces (the fates, the plague, the Sphinx, the gods) and a threshold involving the emergence of wisdom, and of free contact with forces which do not involve immolation or crippling subjugation (Oedipus’s escape to the world of the gods is figured as a point of emergence of wisdom, in that he passes on knowledge of ‘great mysteries’ to Theseus before he leaves[13]). And directly alongside this can be placed Plato’s cartography  in The Republic of the ‘beyond’ of constrained experience where the most telling figure is that of the man who escapes from the cave into a world of singular forces (the wider account being that these forces have always been ‘virtually’ known). The nature of the over-coding  or stratification is different in the two bodies of writing, but it remains the case that the Oedipus trilogy and The Republic  are both extraordinary instances of intensive cartography.

It is evident that it is not a question of a random process of invention of new functionings of terms (although, on a separate level, a ‘cut up’ pragmatics of random  re-arrangement or dislocation is also valuable). Instead, it is a question of the new uses and concepts emerging directly from a process of engagement with zones, bodies, affects, and fields of relations (etc.), where this process includes an engagement with fields of virtual  and actual linguistic functionings, and can involve not only the incorporation of anomalous terms and uses, but also neologistic constructions. An explanation is being provided here for the fact that acknowledged great compositions in the domains of fiction and philosophy are recurrently manifestly anomalous across a whole series of different levels. There is no shortage of telling examples: Bataille’s Inner Experience; Wittgenstein’s Philosphical Investigations; Burroughs’s Naked Lunch; Kant’s Critiques; Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman; Spinoza’s Ethics; Artaud’s works in general; The Waves; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; The Gay Science... Again, the degree of ‘oddness’ of a piece of writing is of course no indication of anything on its own, but instead the issue is that the anomalous nature of language increases with the degree of incorporation of engagement with different attributes, and also with the degree to which the stratificatory modes of  particular faculty-affects are being left behind. In actualised engagement along these lines a writer is a point of expression where what emerges are virtual, re-effectuated functionings and new terms.  This is the nature of the emergence of new conceptual fields, new conceptual figures, new language-blocks densely and effectively consisting predominantly of anomalous functionings of terms, and new ways of clustering and sequencing terms.

3.3.3

A point that is implicit in this account of language (and implicit or explicit in the thesis as a whole) is that concepts are not in any way constitutive or ‘foundational’ in relation to thought, but are instead meshed elements of the field which goes into effect in the case of one mode of thought – the faculty-affect of language. Furthermore, what needs to be added to this is the point that ‘breakthrough’ modes of thought involving concepts take the form of the invention or re-working of concepts (far from being ‘based’ on concepts), in a process which involves  other faculty-affects alongside language. As has been seen the notion  that concepts, ‘categories’, or semantic/syntactic structures are constitutive of thought is a  mode of over-coding  belonging, narrowly, to the projective regime of signs, and more broadly, to the abstract machines of order-words and of stratificatory reason. What is in question is a  fixation  on the heterogeneous dominatory points of the trading-network assemblage, on  regimes of signs,  and overall on gravitational, dominatory fields (including the simple case of the grasping of objects, and the use of tools). Concepts do not form constitutive, ur-networks of heterogeneous principles (a fantasy of the projective regime). Concepts do not grasp.  Instead, concepts help to trigger lines of engagement (thought), and they are modulated and invented by processes of  thought which have concepts only as elements of one field of the engagement involved.

<<Back to CONTENTS | Chapter 3.4 Stratificatory Reason, Time and the Plane of Consistency>>

We had never stopped asking this question previously [what is philosphy?], and we already had the answer, which has not changed: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.

...an unknown force of the disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be exclusive or restrictive, but fully affirmative, nonrestrictive, inclusive. A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the disjoined terms, that affirms them throughout their entire distance, without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one... (p. 76)