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Chapter Two

What use are Deleuze and Guattari to Literary Criticism?

The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 109)

1 Introduction: Literature , Literary Criticism, Minor Criticism

In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus, the third of their four jointly-

authored texts, Deleuze and Guattari report that they ‘have been criticized for

overquoting literary authors’ (1988: 4).1 Although it is perhaps not immediately

apparent why this should draw censure, it is at least quite plain what has prompted

such a charge. Their texts show them to be inheritors of a particularly French way of

philosophising which leads them, along with contemporaries such as Derrida,

Foucault, and Lyotard, to make literature one of their principal concerns. Indeed,

their investment in literature is so prominent that Buchanan and Marks have recently

suggested, in their introduction to Deleuze and Literature, that ‘it would be impossible

to overestimate the importance of literature to Gilles Deleuze’ (2000: 1). The most

obvious evidence of this is that one of Deleuze and Guattari’s four philosophical texts

is about the work of novelist Franz Kafka. Equally difficult to miss are the exhaustive

literary citations and allusions within Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, as well

as the equal footing with philosophy and science that is given to ‘art’ in What is

1 Part of this chapter has been presented as a conference paper, ‘“A theory is not exactly like a box of tools”: Minor Use in Deleuze and Guattari’ (Ou va la théorie?/ Whither Theory?, Paris X- Nanterre, 19.06.03). It will also be published online at http://www.whither-theory.com.

33

Philosophy?. The first twenty-five pages of Anti-Oedipus, for example, quote or

allude directly to literary texts by Georg Büchner, Samuel Beckett, D. H. Lawrence,

Henry Miller, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe,

Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, Villiers, and Friedrich Hölderlin.2 The density of

such explicit references is entirely typical and there is also a great deal of more

indirect allusion, such as, for example, the ‘solar anus’ mentioned in the first

paragraph, which is the name of a text by Georges Bataille (1985: 5-9).3 In A

Thousand Plateaus, things are taken even further: the third ‘plateau’, entitled ‘10,000

B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)’, is framed as the

narrative of a lecture given by ‘the same Professor Challenger who made the Earth

scream with his pain machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle’ (1988: 40).4 In a

move beyond citation or allusion, a literary character is given new life as a

‘conceptual persona’ within the text.5 Indeed, even the title of this plateau, with its

unexplained date, its inspired pun on Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals,6 and the

strange question it poses in parenthesis, indicates the working of a remarkably

‘literary’ sensibility.

2 These quotations and allusions can be found in Deleuze and Guattari 1984 as follows: Georg Büchner (2); Samuel Beckett (2-3, 12, 14, 20, 23); D. H. Lawrence (5, 24); Henry Miller (5); Henri Michaux (6-7); Antonin Artaud (8-9, 14-15); Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry and Villiers (18); Friedrich Hölderlin (21). The name ‘Villiers’ refers to French writer Jean Marie Mathias Phillippe August Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1840-89), author of The Future Eve. 3 It should be noted that the classification of this piece as ‘literature’ is not entirely unproblematic, since it is also a philosophical essay of sorts. 4 Professor Challenger first appeared in The Lost World (1912). He also appears in the novel The Land of Mists and the short stories ‘The Disintegration Machine’ and ‘The Poison Belt’. The story that Deleuze and Guattari refer to in A Thousand Plateaus is ‘When the World Screamed’, in which Professor Challenger drills down to the core of the Earth in order to prove his hypothesis that the planet is itself a living being. All these stories are collected in Doyle 1995, sadly without the original illustrations. 5 The idea of ‘conceptual persona’ is discussed in What Is Philosophy? (1994: 2-3, 61-83). 6 Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral, first published in 1887, is commonly known in English as The Genealogy of Morals (from the 1956 Francis Goffling translation) or as On The Genealogy of Morals (from the 1967 Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale translation). The sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s pun is clear from these titles, and so has been used here. However, the English translation that will be used in this thesis renders the title as On The Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 1994a), and it is by this title that the text will be referred to below.

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The prominence of literature within these philosophical texts is usually traced

back through Deleuze’s 1964 study of Marcel Proust, Proust and Signs (2000); his

1967 essay on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, translated as ‘Coldness and Cruelty’

(1991d); The Logic of Sense, which explores the work of Lewis Carroll (1990); his

1977 essay ‘On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature’ (Deleuze and Parnet

2002: 36-76); and his last book, Essays Critical and Clinical, published in 1993,

which discusses authors such as Jarry, Beckett, Louis Wolfson and T. E. Lawrence

(1998a). But this ‘overquoting of literary authors’ cannot be seen as solely the result

of Deleuze’s interests. While Guattari’s solo publications do not provide such

obvious or concentrated examples, his Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics

(1984), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995), the texts collected

together in The Guattari Reader (1996a), and the interviews given with Deleuze

published in Negotiations (Deleuze 1995), all amply demonstrate that the literary

analyses made in Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, and A Thousand Plateaus, as well as

Deleuze’s revisions to the second (1972) and third (1973) editions of Proust and

Signs, are greatly indebted to his ideas about, amongst other things, machines, signs,

and the unconscious.7 Moreover, as is discussed further in the next chapter, there is

another way in which Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus can be said to exhibit

an interest or relationship to literature. As numerous as references to literature of all

kinds are in these texts, they also engage with ‘the literary’ at moments other than

when writers such as Beckett, Proust or Kafka are explicitly being discussed – in

terms of their style, which is extremely unusual for books of ‘nothing but philosophy’

(Massumi 1988: ix).8 To say that the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia

7 In the French edition of Molecular Revolution, which differs considerably from the English version in its selection of texts, there is also a long essay by Guattari on Proust. 8 Massumi, in his ‘Translator’s Foreword’, is quoting Deleuze’s comments in an interview with Catherine Clément, L’Arc 49 (revised ed., 1980), 99.

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have a rhetorical playfulness more usually associated with literature than philosophy

is something of an understatement in relation to a text like Anti-Oedipus, which

begins:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at all times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.

(1984: 1)9

Kafka and What is Philosophy?, it is true, are more sober in this respect. Nonetheless,

from the perspective of Anglo-American philosophy and criticism, all these texts have

a very unusual relationship to literature and to literary style. If the above perhaps

appears to have lent support to criticism of Deleuze and Guattari based on the idea

that they are guilty of ‘overquoting literary authors’, this is not out of any sympathy

with such a view. Rather, it is as a prelude to Chapter Three, which, considering this

stylistic dimension in the name of mounting a proper defence, suggests what might be

at stake in such criticism.

These different forms of engagement with literature and the literary suggest

that Anglo-American literary criticism might have much to gain from a closer

examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the great majority of which is now

available in English translation. However, if it is a straightforward enough matter to

establish, even in a few paragraphs, that literature is of paramount importance to

Deleuze and Guattari, to conclude from this that Deleuze and Guattari have a similar

importance for contemporary literary criticism would be hasty. To do so would be to

employ a kind of faulty ‘syllogism’ where because (i) literary critics are interested in

9 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Deleuze and Language for a detailed discussion of this opening paragraph in terms of literature (2002: 8-19).

36

literature, and (ii) Deleuze and Guattari are interested in literature, ‘therefore’ (iii)

literary critics will find it useful to take an interest in Deleuze and Guattari. Perhaps

this is not so completely irrational a conclusion as that way of putting it makes it

appear, but there is still every reason to be cautious of such a formulation: being

interested in literature and being a literary critic are not at all the same thing. To take

an example from the French philosophical tradition invoked above: Jean-Paul Sartre’s

passionate interest in and engagement with literature, which cannot be doubted, does

not mean that critics will necessarily be able to gain much practical use from his

suggestion in What is Literature?, first published in 1948, that the act of writing is ‘a

certain way of wanting freedom’ (2001: 49). The same applies to Deleuze and

Guattari: if their interest in literature, manifested in the ways mentioned above, is

certain, this does not by any means guarantee that they will prove useful to literary

critics who engage with their work. Here the distinction between a (theoretical)

‘interest’ and a (practical) ‘use’ which Claude Lévi-Strauss takes up in The Savage

Mind is not without a certain resonance (1966: 1-33); but, for reasons discussed in

more detail in Chapter Five, in relation to the idea of bricolage, it is far from

unproblematic. It can at least serve to suggest that this interest in literature is not

necessarily the best place to begin answering the question ‘What use are Deleuze and

Guattari to literary criticism?’.

Instead of tracking and explicating this ‘interest’ in literature in relation to

these allusions to and citations of the work of particular authors, this chapter explores

two different trajectories, aiming in each case to illuminate the question of Deleuze

and Guattari’s possible usefulness to literary criticism. First, and most obvious, this

requires looking at attempts to examine and make use of Deleuze and Guattari in

relation to literature within contemporary criticism. What is the actual use made of

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Deleuze and Guattari by, or in relation to, literary criticism? What can be concluded

from this about how literary critics might be able to use Deleuze and Guattari in the

future? Second, the results of this critical survey lead to a consideration of the idea of

use itself. In emphasising ‘use’ rather than ‘meaning’, from Anti-Oedipus onwards,

Deleuze and Guattari make it necessary to consider not only what use can be made of

their work, but also what exactly the concept of use involves. This chapter begins to

address these issues by constructing a ‘minor’ concept of use that lays the foundation

for a fuller discussion of the way Deleuze and Guattari might affect and transform

literary criticism. If a different concept of use can be extracted from their work and

installed within criticism, the result, this thesis argues, would be the creation of a

‘minor criticism’: a minor mode within criticism that acted against its conventional or

‘major’ assumptions.

These terms require some explanation. The idea of a ‘minor criticism’ is

based upon Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ in Kafka (1986: 16-

27) and ‘minor’ and ‘major’ languages in A Thousand Plateaus (1988: 100-6).10 In

Kafka, a ‘minor literature’ is defined according to three characteristics. First, ‘in it

language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (16). This can be

seen, they argue, in Kafka’s ‘minor’ use of Prague German (16; 1988: 104), African-

American uses of English (17; 1988: 102-5), in Beckett and Joyce (19), and in the

10 For a different concept of the ‘minor’ and ‘major’, see ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ (Derrida 1990: 251-77). In this essay on Bataille, Derrida also introduces a distinction between ‘two forms of writing’, one ‘major’ and the other ‘minor’ (265). In his schema, the major relates to a writing that attains ‘sovereignty’ in non-meaning, ‘in sacrificing meaning’ and ‘uncovering the limit of discourse’ (261), while a minor writing is ‘the loss of sovereignty itself’, ‘attributing a meaning, within discourse, to the absence of meaning’ and thus remaining ‘servile’ in its ‘desire for meaning’ (262). Obviously, the opposition of meaning to non-meaning in Derrida’s text resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of representation. But this would require so a profound shift of emphasis that it is difficult to give the choice of the terms ‘minor’ and ‘major’ common to both much significance. While interesting parallels can be drawn between these two uses of these terms, and, as will be discussed below, Bataille is an important influence on Deleuze and Guattari, it would therefore be a mistake to conflate these two instances.

Another approach to these terms can be found in ‘On Tendencies and Signs: Major and Minor Deconstruction’ (Boundas 2000).

38

texts of Artaud, Celine, and Proust (26). These examples indicate the creation by

minority groups of ‘minor’ uses that transform the ‘major’ language, that is, of uses

that enable resistance to dominant values and meanings. However, this resistance is

not a matter of challenging dominant representations at the level of signifier or

signified—by offering an alternative representation of the same situation or enlarging

the scope of what is represented to include previously excluded signifieds or

signifiers—but of transforming the way language works altogether. ‘There are not,

therefore, two kinds of language’, Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘but two possible

treatments of the same languages’, or ‘two usages or functions of language’ (1988:

103-4). In the case of literature, this leads Deleuze and Guattari to draw attention to

the potential of language’s sonorous and material qualities to exceed any signifying

function and carry language beyond meaning and into affect and intensity. What

interests them in Kafka’s work, for example, is the moment when ‘language stops

being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits’ (1986:

23).

Second, ‘everything in [a minor literature] is political’ (1986: 17). Here the

word ‘political’ seems to signify in its opposition to the ‘major literatures’, where ‘the

individual concern (familial, marital, and so on)’ is paramount, and only ever ‘joins

with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere

environment or a background’ (17). Of course, in privileging the individual subject—

understood as a natural, sovereign unity possessed of an interior, rational agency—a

major literature is also political. The minor, however, is political in the sense that it

connects the individual to the ‘social milieu’ in a way that challenges the importance

given to the individual subject and to individual enunciation within the dominant or

‘major’ literature and culture. In other words, to say that a minor literature is

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‘political’ means that it is ‘revolutionary’: ‘the revolutionary force for all literature’

(19). Third, as a consequence of the above, ‘in [a minor literature] everything takes

on a collective value’ (17). The importance of individual authors that is characteristic

of a major literature is replaced by a ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ (18). The

collective nature of a minor literature is not a matter of some sort of collaborative

effort, of pulling together, or pooling one’s resources in a communitarian manner, but

concerns the unconscious. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that:

There are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally libidinal and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming- inhuman … Each of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we speak in our own name when we produce its statement.

(1988: 36)11

What is ‘collective’ in a minor literature is that ‘the message doesn’t refer back to an

enunciating subject who would be its cause, no more than to a subject of the statement

(sujet d’énoncé) who would be its effect’ (1986: 18), but to assemblages

(agencements) that are immediately libidinal and social. Not just a particular

individual, or a particular set of hierarchical relations between individuals, but the

whole concept of the individual as the source of their own unique or sovereign

statements is challenged by the ‘collective’ aspect of minor literature.

In short, as defined by these three characteristics the idea of ‘minor literature’

does not designate ‘specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every

literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature’ (1986: 18),

11 See also Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 79-80 and Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 83-4.

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while ‘minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in relation to a

major language and are also investments of that language for the purpose of making it

minor’ (1988: 105). How these ideas can be applied to literary criticism, rather than

literature, is explored in more detail in the following chapters, where ‘minor’ readings

of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts are developed in relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy,

but also in relation to Marx and, to a lesser degree, psychoanalysis. Since the focus is

criticism, it is also important to address the work of Jacques Derrida, both in terms of

the similarities between a ‘minor criticism’ and deconstruction, which are already

noticeable in the above few paragraphs, and the differences. At the same time as it

distinguishes deconstruction from a minor criticism, both in terms of its approach to

the ‘outside’ of textuality and in its understanding of ‘the tragic’, this thesis identifies

an important, and surprising ally: Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern in ‘Answer

to the question: what is the Postmodern?’ (1992: 11-25). Read through the lens of

Deleuze and Guattari’s project, Lyotard’s essay indicates, with great clarity, the need

for a minor criticism.

Before beginning to address the uses made of Deleuze and Guattari by

literary criticism, it is also necessary to define more precisely what is meant by the

term ‘literary criticism’ itself. That this term cannot simply denote the criticism or

study of literature is well known: first, because criticism plays a role in determining

what constitutes ‘literature’ and, second, because the terms ‘criticism’ and ‘study’

have an uncertain meaning here. What is their relationship to the criticism or study of

history, medicine, or physics? What does such a criticism or study aim to discover

and what practical purposes does it serve? It seems unlikely that a definition can be

found that would please every reader, and so a minimal, negative, and no doubt rather

conventional definition is perhaps the best solution. Inadequate as this must be, it

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aims to delimit a certain method of approaching texts which constitutes a ‘literary

criticism’ and not, for example, historical, linguistic, or philosophical analysis. The

term ‘literary criticism’ will therefore be defined by the three following oppositions:

what distinguishes literary criticism from theology and philosophy is that it takes as

its ‘object’ a written text, and not (directly) God, Being, Truth, Reason, ‘Man’, and so

on;12 what distinguishes it from historical or archaeological translation and

interpretation is that it not only interprets texts but wants to understand these

interpretative acts as much as the texts themselves; what distinguishes it from

linguistics is that it wants to extract new values from the texts it interprets. It is

therefore always political (implicitly or explicitly).

These formulations need immediate refinement and clarification. The first

opposition made above has been problematised by many poststructuralist texts,

perhaps most famously by Derrida’s Of Grammatology, with its declaration that ‘il

n’y a pas de hors-texte’, translated by Spivak as ‘there is nothing outside of the text’,

with the alternative ‘there is no outside-text’ offered in parenthesis (1997: 158) and by

Holland as ‘there is no outside to textuality’ (2000: 260). Even for those who reject

the idea of an ‘endless deferral’ of meaning, it is obvious that philosophy and

theology also deal with representations, with texts, and have no unmediated access to

their supposed objects of study. However, while these discourses try to elide this

textual dimension or to treat it as an unfortunate but inessential limitation, literary

criticism privileges the textual and makes reading the text as text central.

Deconstruction’s influence on literary criticism is largely possible because in this

12 The word ‘text’ refers here, and in what follows, to written documents. However, this use is not intended to exclude the broader sense of ‘text’ offered by Catherine Belsey in ‘Reading Cultural History’, where she suggests that we treat any ‘signifying practice—maps, houses, clothing, tombs—as texts’ (2000: 113). The narrower use of the term indicates the particular focus of this thesis, but much of what will be said about written texts applies to other kinds of texts as well. This should not, however, be misconstrued as privileging a linguistic model/approach.

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respect it adopts the methods of literary criticism rather than philosophy. 13 The

second opposition made above seems to ignore the fact that historians are also

involved in the issues surrounding textual practice when they interpret texts, and it

could not be applied, for example, to works like Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of

History (1988) or Paul Veyne’s Did The Greeks Believe In Their Myths? (1988).

Granted that contemporary historians are fully aware that what they deal with are texts

and are far from naïve about the possibility of directly accessing ‘history’—not to

mention the fact that literary critics could hardly avoid engaging with historical

issues—it remains true that historians and literary critics engage with these questions

in a different manner, as a look in any book of history or criticism will attest.14

Another objection to the second opposition made above is that it attributes a self-

reflexivity to older literary criticism which is in fact only an attribute of today’s

(deconstructed) criticism; but, in some form, the legitimacy and therefore the nature

of the act of interpretation, as well as of the thing interpreted, has always been a part

of criticism. If in both these first two oppositions the boundaries between literary

criticism, philosophy and history seem unstable, it must be noted that the result is to

enlarge the scope of criticism without diminishing its specificity, which remains

rooted in an attention to textuality (though not to any definition of ‘literature’ – the

prefix ‘literary’ is kept here only to indicate, in a wholly conventional way, that the

focus is on written texts).

13 That is, it aims for some sort of fidelity to the text. Of course, that it simultaneously discloses the impossibility of ever bringing the text fully to account, of ever fully rendering its meaning, also undoes the method of much literary criticism inasmuch as it makes precisely such fidelity impossible. But, in a general sense, the text remains the ‘object’ of criticism – even if it is not understood in terms of a being a plenitude or ‘thing’ in the ordinary sense of these words. 14 Another way of making this distinction would be through looking at the very different senses of the (literary-critical) term ‘text’ as opposed to the (historical) term ‘document’. (This point was drawn to my attention by Judith Pryor).

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As for the third opposition: that criticism today, as ever, remains orientated by

a political concern is shown by its inseparability from critical projects like feminism,

post-colonialism, queer theory, race and gender studies, and Marxism. This political

dimension is different from that of philosophy because it attempts to ground itself

within textuality and representation, rather than ontology; different from linguistics in

that, free of any claim to ‘science’, it is self-consciously situated at the level of

culture, rather than attempting to ground itself in an idea of nature or a natural order.

On the other hand, it could be argued that, although in a very different manner and not

in a way it would necessarily wish to acknowledge, this political aspect continues the

Western tradition of moral criticism. The difference, at least in theory, is that a

political criticism, unlike a moral or ethical criticism, does not appeal to transcendent

principles in order to pass judgement on literature; it does not judge or attempt to

‘correct’ the text. Nonetheless, it is a motivated reading, a selection, and cannot

pretend disinterest.

In summary, ‘literary criticism’ here denotes a methodological attention to ‘the

textuality of the text’ (Belsey 2000: 114), a self-reflexivity concerning those methods,

and a political investment (although this investment may not be explicitly formulated

as such – in which case it appears as a moral or ethical investment). Literary criticism

interprets written texts, asks questions about that act of interpretation, and always

reads in relation to an extra-literary, political project. The construction of a ‘minor

criticism’ is not a matter of overturning these restraints, which, to borrow a phrase

from Judith Butler, might be considered the ‘enabling conditions’ that are constitutive

of criticism as such (1990: 143). Rather, it is a question of showing that they can be

approached in either a major or a minor mode, depending on how the relationship

between the subject (as grammatical addressee, agent, and cogito) and the concept of

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use is understood. This relationship is examined in terms of a politics of style

(Chapter Three), the subject and (textual) resistances (Chapter Four), and affirmation

(Chapter Five). In the Conclusion, these ideas are related to Nietzsche’s ‘tragic

thought’, deconstruction, and Lyotard’s idea of the postmodern. This thesis thus aims

to show that the idea of a minor use, along with the re-evaluation of the ideas of style,

reading, the subject, and ‘the tragic’ that it prompts, are what is most ‘useful’ for

literary criticism in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

2 Deleuze and Guattari in Contemporary Criticism

While looking at texts by or about Deleuze and Guattari shows that literature

and the literary are central concerns, thus making it seem at least plausible to assume

both that their work is of interest and that it may prove useful to literary criticism,

contemporary Anglo-American critics do not seem to have registered this situation.

In fact, looking at recent literary criticism a completely different impression emerges:

that Deleuze and Guattari either have nothing, or nothing of any great importance, to

say about literature. Or, if they are exerting any great influence on critics, it is

certainly not being acknowledged in print. Here are eleven suggestive examples from

the last two decades.

First, in Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction (Jefferson and

Robey 1982), Deleuze and Guattari are not mentioned in the text nor does their work

appear in the bibliography, although they might easily have fallen under the headings :

‘Structuralism and Post-structuralism’ (Chapter Four), ‘Modern Psychoanalytic

Criticism’ (Chapter Five), or ‘Marxist Literary Theories’ (Chapter Six). Given the

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early date of publication, this absence can of course be understood in terms of the

relative lack of English translations, although in fact L’Anti-Œdipe (1972) had been

translated and published as Anti-Oedipus by Viking Penguin five years earlier, in

1977. In the second edition, published in 1986 (the year Kafka was translated) the

situation is unchanged. What makes this particularly surprising is that in both editions

Chapter Four, ‘Modern Psychoanalytic Criticism’, is written by Elisabeth Wright,

whose Psychoanalytic Criticism, first published between these two editions of Modern

Literary Theory in 1984, does deal with Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 162-74). Any

explanation of the reasons for this would be purely speculative, but it at least indicates

that no shift in the critical landscape had made Deleuze and Guattari’s inclusion in the

second edition of Modern Literary Theory a necessity; and in this it is not by any

means an isolated example. Thus, second, in Literary Theory: An Introduction, there

is no discussion of Deleuze and Guattari and the reader is offered a portrait of

poststructuralism without them (Eagleton 1983). In the 1996 second edition, despite

extensive revisions, there is still no mention of their work.

Third, in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Deleuze and

Guattari are cited in passing and the Viking Penguin edition of Anti-Oedipus is listed

in a bibliography (Selden 1985: 48, 102). However, Deleuze and Guattari are only

introduced as influences on the work of Fredric Jameson, which is the subject of an

extended discussion. In the second edition, this aspect of the text is reproduced

unchanged (Selden 1989: 47, 110). Fourth, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A

Reader (Lodge 1988), Deleuze and Guattari are briefly discussed in an extract from

Terry Eagleton’s work entitled ‘Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism’ (384-

98). Eagleton does not address their work in order to recommend its interest to

critics: rather, he launches an attack against them. In doing so he provides a valuable

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example of a view that was and remains widely held: that Deleuze and Guattari treat

desire as a ‘full-blown metaphys ical positivism’ (393), and are guilty of ‘covert

essentialism’ and ‘banal anarchist rhetoric’ (394). Moreover, Eagleton considers that

they embrace a postmodern ‘mystical positivism’ that accepts the world as it is and

thus lacks a radical politics. In his view, Deleuze and Guattari are of no use to

criticism. Fifth, in the first edition of Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (Rice and

Waugh 1989) Deleuze and Guattari are absent, while by the third edition they are

mentioned only by Frederic Jameson, in his 1984 essay ‘Periodizing the 60s’ (1996:

300, 308). Sixth, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism devotes just

one of its 1299 pages to a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari – a short entry on

‘Schizoanalysis’, written by Elizabeth Wright as part of a section on psychoanalytic

criticism (Coyle and Garside et al. 1990: 772).

Seventh, still in the 1990s, the first edition of An Introduction to Literature,

Criticism and Theory: Key Critical Concepts makes no reference to Deleuze and

Guattari (Bennet and Royle 1995), while the second edition includes one sentence that

makes reference to Kafka and lists both that text and Anti-Oedipus in the bibliography

(1999: 209, 280). By way of contrast, Derrida has eleven entries in the bibliography

of the first edition, and seventeen entries in the second edition. Eighth, in Literary

Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Culler 1997), no mention is made of Deleuze and

Guattari whatsoever, and this remains unchanged in the version reissued in 2000.

Ninth, in Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, there is a one-sentence reference to

Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and, perhaps not without some irony, given the

two philosophers’ profound differences, a passing reference to Deleuze in Jean

Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (Wolfreys 1999: 326, 380-94). Tenth,

providing the only positive example, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

47

devotes seventeen pages to Deleuze and Guattari, providing a biographical and

bibliographical introduction and printing two short extracts, one from Kafka and one

from A Thousand Plateaus (2001: 1593-1608). While this is obviously in dramatic

contrast when compared to the texts surveyed above, it must be noted that, in the same

text, 63 pages are allotted to Derrida (1815-76), and 56 to Foucault (1615-69). Last,

there is no discussion of Deleuze and Guattari in Belsey’s influential Critical Practice,

a text which, between its first edition (1980) and its second edition (2002), covers the

period of all the above books.

Such a brief survey is undoubtedly a limited and inconclusive exercise, but it

is also a revealing one. On the evidence of these introductory texts, at least, it seems

that Deleuze and Guattari remain, as T. Hugh Crawford has noted, ‘at best marginal’

to Anglo-American literary criticism in comparison to the other ‘stars’ of French

structuralist and poststructuralist thought (1997: 219). While Deleuze and Guattari

are not altogether absent figures, the work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland

Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and, above all, Jacques Derrida, casts a formidable shadow

over their work. Indeed, under the label of ‘postmodernity’ even Jean Baudrillard and

Jean-François Lyotard, who can hardly be considered literary critics, have attained a

far higher profile in Anglo-American criticism. Only one of these introductory texts,

anthologies and readers contains any substantial discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s

work, and it is alone in suggesting that there might be anything to gain from a more

thorough examination. Despite the increasing interest in Deleuze and Guattari noted

in Chapter One, this remains equally true over a period of twenty-two years. Such a

long silence suggests an almost total lack of engagement by literary critics which,

when put next to the importance attributed to literature by Deleuze and Guattari, and

by their commentators, is something of a puzzle.

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3 ‘Deleuzean’ literary criticism

Several explanatory narratives can be imagined: the issue of the delay in

English- language reception created by the need for translations, the overwhelming

influence of Derrida and deconstruction, and the strength of Lacanian psychoanalytic

criticism all seem likely candidates. These explanations have obvious limits, as, for

example, Derrida’s rapid translation and uneasy alliance with Lacanian criticism

readily demonstrate. However, although those possible explanations for the strange

disjunction between the centrality of literature to Deleuze and Guattari and the virtual

silence about Deleuze and Guattari within literary criticism must be dismissed, there

is no mystery in this situation. Simply, there is little in the way of ‘Deleuzean’

literary criticism for the editors or authors of such introductory texts to include or

discuss. Relatively few critics have attempted to use Deleuze and Guattari and, where

they have, the results suggest that it is most plausible to locate the causes of their

apparent ‘exclusion’ from literary theory in Deleuze and Guattari’s own approach –

particularly in their critique of representation (discussed in more detail in the

following chapters). This point is made in Routledge Critical Thinkers: Gilles

Deleuze, a recent introduction to Deleuze aimed at ‘any student of literature’

(Colebrook 2002: i). In her concluding chapter, ‘After Deleuze’, Claire Colebrook

suggests that ‘Deleuzean criticism’ is ‘in its early days’ and notes that ‘only two book

length studies of Deleuze in relation to specific authors’ have been produced (150).

She adds that:

Deleuze’s work on literature—his books on Proust, Sacher-Masoch and Kafka and his frequent literary references—[is] frequently mentioned in books about Deleuze. But the consequences for Deleuze and literary studies have yet to be spelled out with the degree of intensity that characterises film, political and feminist theory … As yet, though, there is not a ‘Deleuzean’ movement in

49

literary criticism: there is no equivalent to Jacques Derrida’s creation of deconstruction … Just what ‘Deleuzean’ literary criticism would be remains an open question.

(Colebrook 2002: 150)

Colebrook’s book could itself be seen as symptomatic of a growing interest within

Anglo-American criticism in this ‘open question’, also demonstrated by the recent

publication of Deleuze and Literature (Buchanan and Marks 2000), Deleuze and

Language (Lecercle 2002), Deleuze on Literature (Bogue 2003), and some of the

essays in Between Derrida and Deleuze (Patton and Protevi 2003). Given that it is

over 25 years since L’Anti-Œdipe was translated into English, however, the fact

remains that very little has been written addressing this issue even outside

introductory texts of the sort discussed above.

What can be said about the texts that have addressed the question of

‘Deleuzean’ (‘Deleuzian’ or ‘Deleuzoguattarian’) literary criticism? What use do

they make of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts? The two ‘book length studies’ Colebrook

refers to are Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: the Sociopoetics of Modernism (Holland

1993) and Lines of Flight: Reading Deleuze with Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, Woolf

(Hughes 1997). Eugene Holland’s Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis attempts to use the

socio-political analysis outlined in Anti-Oedipus to produce a complex reading of

Baudelaire, at once historical, political, and libidinal, which takes into account factors

that an ordinary psychoanalytic or historicist reading would either neglect or treat as

entirely separate. Despite its merits, from the perspective of the question this chapter

has posed, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis is problematic both in its use of Deleuze

and Guattari and in its relation to literary criticism. In seeming to re- inscribe

Baudelaire within an Oedipal triangle, the book turns the author and his biography

50

into a kind of key to the texts, and thus risks effacing textuality altogether.15 John

Hughes’ Lines of Flight, a very different kind of book, attempts to read Deleuze

‘with’ the authors it selects, the first half of the book offering an explication of

Deleuze’s philosophy in relation to literature, the second half consisting of four

author-based readings. The presentation of Deleuze is reliable and interesting, but in

the second half of the book a much more traditional style of reading comes to the fore.

While it certainly pays close attention to the texts it reads, an implicit divide in the

way ‘literary’ and ‘philosophical’ texts are read leads to Deleuze and Guattari being

treated as a resource for tracking and ‘explaining’ certain resemblances or themes in

literary texts.16

Despite such problems, these are, as Colebrook suggests, some of the texts

closest to examples of ‘Deleuzean’ literary criticism yet produced. Also important in

this respect but not touched upon by Colebrook are The Two-Fold Thought of

Deleuze and Guattari (Stivale 1998) and two books by Ronald Bogue: Deleuze and

Guattari (1989), and Deleuze on Literature (2003) – the latter obviously having been

published after Colebrook’s account. Charles Stivale’s book is a rather experimental

exploration of film, cyberspace, and Cajun dance as well as literature and, while

precisely this breadth of subject-matter makes it problematic as an example of literary

criticism, it does traverse many relevant issues. Of greater interest, though, are his

articles on ‘Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Schizoanalysis and Literary Discourse’

15 Holland concludes that ‘only someone whose doting mother had remarried an ambitious military officer could register as intensely as Baudelaire the fall of the Second Republic to the authoritarian Napoleon III; only someone who had lived a care-free life of leisure and luxury but was then subjected by his stepfather to financial tutelage … could register as intensely as Baudelaire the antinomies of buying and selling in market society’ (1993: 259). 16 Thus, for example, a passage from Woolf is followed by some passages from a commentator on Woolf connecting her to Bergson, before all these texts are referred to a passage by Deleuze on Bergson (Hughes 1997: 158-62). Deleuze’s ideas act here only at the level of representation and Hughes’ analysis works at the level of resemb lances. Deleuze’s concept of a sub-representative power of repetition-in-itself here becomes a matter of repetition at the level of representation – a repeated word in a novel or a book of philosophy, a matter of tracing correspondences and analogies.

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(1981), and ‘The Literary Element in Mille Plateaux: The New Cartography of

Deleuze and Guattari’ (1984), both of which address questions that were otherwise

largely neglected before being taken up by more recent scholarship. Ronald Bogue’s

Deleuze and Guattari, a rigorous philosophical account, is the first sustained attempt

in English to think through Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to literature and, in

many ways, it provides the blueprint for Colebrook’s own account of Deleuze.

Meanwhile, in Deleuze and Literature, Bogue attempts to track Deleuze’s

involvement with literature through his entire corpus, making insightful and detailed

readings of his work on Sacher-Masoch (Chapter One), Proust (Chapter Two), Kafka

(Chapters Three and Four), Kleist and Bene (Chapter Five). He shows the system in

Deleuze’s approach, beginning with his early interpretation of Nietzsche (Chapter

One) and pursuing various problematics through to the late Essays Critical and

Clinical (Chapter Six). However, while Bogue’s reading powerfully demonstrates

both the coherence of Deleuze’s writing on literature and its importance within his

philosophy, the result is entirely focussed upon the figure of the writer and the

question ‘what does it mean to write?’ (2003: 153). Deleuze on Literature thus

approaches Deleuze’s work in a way that, from the point of view of a minor criticism,

is frustratingly silent when it comes to reading and interpretation.

Apart from these five longer texts, the discussion of literature in Deleuze and

Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Goodchild 1996) and The Deleuze

Connections (Rajchman 2000) is of note, and few texts on Deleuze or Deleuze and

Guattari neglect to mention it entirely. However, while all attribute importance to

Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of literature, and recognise the importance given to

literature by these philosophers, none of these texts consider the implications of this

for literary criticism in any concerted way. Instead, quite understandably, they treat

52

Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers, in relation to various philosophical

problematics. The essays that have been published in journals, critical readers, and

anthologies share this emphasis. ‘Literature’ is a recurrent theme in Gilles Deleuze

and the Theater of Philosophy (Boundas and Olkowski 1994), Deleuze: A Critical

Reader (Patton 1996), Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy

and Culture (Kaufman and Heller 1998), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments

of Leading Philosophers (Genosko 2001), Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading

the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (Pisters 2001), and A Shock to Thought:

Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Massumi 2002). However, this is rarely in

the context of considering Deleuze and Guattari’s implications for literary criticism:

looking at the work of a particular author or the nature of writing are far more

common approaches.

Although this body of criticism is by no means homogeneous, the way literary

texts are generally treated nonetheless makes it difficult to see what use Deleuze and

Guattari can be to literary criticism. In this respect, the essays collected in Buchanan

and Marks’ Deleuze and Literature (2000), which includes contributions by many of

the critics included in the books cited above, are quite representative. From the

perspective of literary criticism, there are two main points to be made about the kind

of interpretative strategies the essays employ. First, these essays present themselves

as working by explication, in two different modes; second, they focus upon an idea of

literature that is centred upon the author, using various biographical and author-based

methods of interpretation. In both cases, any real contact with the concerns of literary

criticism is short-circuited by the way the textuality of the texts under consideration is

elided.

53

The first mode of explication found in Deleuze and Literature focuses on

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy—or a particular aspect of it (a theory of signs,

aesthetics, becoming, and so on)—with literature playing an illustrative role by

providing a series of exemplary instances in a philosophical argument. The most

obvious example of this is André Pierre Colombat’s essay ‘Deleuze and Signs’, which

presents itself as a philosophically-rooted explication of Deleuze’s concept of the

sign. He argues that Deleuze ‘rejected any conception of signs limited to the

linguistic model’ and ‘incorporated the question of signs into much larger problems of

expression and expressivity’ related to Spinoza (Colombat 2000: 14). Thus the

textual specificity of literary texts is subsumed in one direction by a more general,

philosophical project and in the other direction by an idea of the linguistic sign as only

a particular instance of Deleuze’s theory of signs as what ‘appears like lightning

between two different intensities’ (27). In both cases, the object of criticism, the text

to be interpreted, is completely secondary.

In the second mode of explication, the opposite relationship is established.

Deleuze and Guattari’s own texts are used to illustrate and authorise a certain

interpretation of a literary text (although it is claimed that this is not ‘interpretation’),

in the sense that they take on the normative role of backing-up the critic’s view of

what is empirically valid. This can be seen in T. Hugh Crawford’s ‘The Paterson

Plateau: Deleuze, Guattari and William Carlos Williams’. Crawford argues that

Deleuze and Guattari share various points of agreement with Carlos Williams,

weaving passages from A Thousand Plateaus and Carlos Williams’ poetry together to

create an effect of verisimilitude, each set of texts giving weight to the other. Thus he

writes that:

54

In Deleuze, a line of escape is never a ‘running away’, but instead is a fleeing to. Williams also resists ‘composition’ as a territorialisation (the sentences of schoolmen), emphasising instead writing as expressive possibility. His line of escape (and his poetic line) is through foulness, the ‘stinking ischio-rectal abscesses’ of his medical practice and his nomadic life, his life as a poetic artisan: ‘The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to intinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action’ [Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 409].

(2000: 72)

Despite Crawford’s claim not to be interpreting but ‘folding these texts together’ to

produce ‘useful juxtapositions’ (58), this passage uses Deleuze and Guattari to offer

what are obviously a series of interpretative glosses of Carlos Williams’ work:

Williams is resisting ‘territorialization’, he follows a ‘line of escape’, he is an ‘artisan’

and a ‘nomad’…. Although Crawford is well aware that ‘texts are necessarily

linguistic constructions’ (64), this approach, like the first mode of explication

discussed above, overlooks the textuality of the texts it uses.

Working in one or other of these two modes of explication, the essays in

Deleuze and Literature demonstrate a conventional philosophical investment in

assuming the transparency of language, which would be the only guarantee that such a

thing as ‘explication’ was possible.17 Crucially, this commitment to ‘explication’

creates a distance from the aims of literary criticism, as it requires that the textuality

of Deleuze and Guattari’s own philosophical writings be neglected. In other words,

‘explication’ takes place not only on the assumption that ‘what Deleuze and Guattari

really meant’ can be extracted and represented as a unified totality, but also on the

basis of an effacement of the texts as texts – in terms of style. The result is that the

essays in Deleuze and Literature present their interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari

as if they were self-evident and certain: they trace genealogies in order to find the one,

17 For reasons discussed in more detail in Chapter Three, it would perhaps be more accurate to talk of an ‘explication-effect’ as the product of a certain kind of language-game.

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‘proper’ reading. Far from abandoning interpretation, as they claim, in trying to elide

the textuality of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts and also their own status as texts, the

essays employ rather traditional interpretative forms. By the same token, they close

down the possibilities for discussing the specific language of the texts they discuss. A

striking example of this can be seen in the way Bruce Baugh’s essay, ‘How Deleuze

can help us make Literature work’, summarises, rather than quotes, a long passage

from Fugitive Pieces, the novel by Anne Michaels it goes on to discuss (Baugh 2000:

50-1). The implication is that the specific language of Fugitive Pieces can be passed

over, that a summary can extract what is essential; nothing could be more of an

anathema to literary criticism, as defined above. An even more explicit aversion to

getting entangled in the textuality of texts is also evident in the way some of the

essays take up a rather suspicious stance in relation to deconstruction.18

In what seems to be a consequence of this attempt to ‘explicate’ Deleuze and

Guattari’s texts, the majority of essays in Deleuze and Literature either address

themselves to the author rather than the text, treat the two as interchangeable, or

explicitly introduce biography to ‘explain’ certain aspects of the literary texts they

discuss; some do all three. These kinds of reading strategies are very problematic

from the point of view of a literary criticism concerned with texts and textuality. So,

for example, Crawford at one point infers from Carlos Williams’ biography that ‘as a

physician, Williams was acutely aware of the inadequacy of representational systems

when faced with the complex materiality of disease’ (Crawford 2000: 58). Similarly,

in ‘Transvestism, Drag and Becomings: A Deleuzian Analysis of the Fictions of

Timothy Findley’, Marlene Goldman writes that ‘Findley, who pursued a successful

career as an actor before embarking on his career as a writer, repeatedly links

18 See, for example, Colombat 2000: 22 and Surin 2000: 172-4.

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transgressive behaviour with this type of playful, non-essentialist attitude towards

one’s role’ (Goldman 2000: 200). If Crawford and Goldman imply that the

explanation for the literary is to be found in biography, Eugene Holland, in ‘Nizan’s

Diagnosis of Existentialism and the Perversion of Death’, introduces the author’s

intentions directly, going so far as to assert that ‘Nizan’s point in the novel is not to

deny that all men may fear death but rather to explain why death would become an

obsessive theme for a certain class of men’ (Holland 2000: 253). In each case,

personal experience ‘explains’ the text in a more or less simplistic reduction, and

reading is focussed on deciphering what the author ‘really meant’. The essays treat

the author as the focal point of an act of writing which is understood as the key to

literature and so almost completely neglect not only textuality but also reading, the

reader, and interpretation. Gregg Lambert’s ‘On the Uses and Abuses of Literature

for Life’ is typical in its emphasis on ‘the act of writing and the figure of the writer’,

‘the writer’s encounter’, the way ‘the writer often returns from the land of the dead’,

‘the writer’s strangeness’, and so on (Lambert 2000: 143). Similarly, John Marks’

essay, ‘Underworld : The People are Missing’, gives the author a central role, the

subject of every other sentence: ‘DeLillo uses the fractured and episodic narrative

style of the novel to install himself in the event of immanence and becoming’,

‘DeLillo seeks’, ‘DeLillo emphasises’, ‘as DeLillo puts it’, ‘the writer wants to find a

way of being inserted into becomings’, ‘for DeLillo’, ‘DeLillo takes’ (Marks 2000:

90-1). Here, as with the question of ‘explication’, the result of a focus on the writer or

author is that the textuality of both the literary texts and of Deleuze and Guattari’s

texts is effaced. If, given the difficulties involved in purging language of such

references, it seems trivial or self-contradictory to chastise these essays for falling into

the ‘intentional fallacy’ of making the author the ‘cause’ of the text and the key to

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unlocking its meaning (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 3-18), it must be noted that to

treat the author of a text in this way above all implies a process of interpretation,

which these essays claim to reject.19

In both cases, then, whether in terms of ‘explication’ or by focussing on the

author, these essays tend to trip themselves up by denying their own textual status.

The attention given to the author is in fact doubly problematic from the point of view

of a minor criticism: not only does it efface textuality but, as is discussed further in

Chapter Four, it invests the individual subject, as a natural, sovereign unity,

reinforcing in criticism the focus on ‘the individual concern’ characteristic of a major

literature.

That these essays are, after all, interpretative, does not make it possible to see

them as literary criticism in the sense defined earlier, given their philosophically-

based disavowal of the textual. Rather than blurring these distinctions, it signifies an

investment within philosophical discourse: the assumption that a correct method is

possible; a true interpretation that, because it is true, would not be an ‘interpretation’

at all. However, if the distinction between philosophy, literary criticism, and

literature can be made by assigning to philosophy this kind of special access to truth,

thereby effacing the textuality common to all three, it can also be made by noting the

different ways these discourses internally mark this separation (textually). This

appears to be what these essays do: by creating explication-effects and investing the

author, they subscribe to the rules of a philosophical language-game. In a sense, all

19 Wimsatt and Beardsley sum up the ‘intentional fallacy’ at the beginning of the ‘The Affective Fallacy’, the second essay collected in the same volume: ‘The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) … It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear’ (1954: 21).

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that can really be said is that these essays are problematic fo r literary criticism

because they treat literature according to the rules of a completely different—

philosophical—language-game. The result of this is that while a great deal is said

about ‘literature’, not just in Deleuze and Literature but in all the texts mentioned

above, very little is said about interpretation (except negatively), textuality, or what

use literary critics can make of Deleuze and Guattari short of abandoning the entire

critical enterprise. In these essays, the idea of ‘literature’ refers to Deleuze and

Guattari’s conception of literature as a revolutionary process through which a writer

becomes ‘a sort of stranger within [their] own language’ (1986: 26) and ‘foreigners in

their own tongue’ (1988: 105); but the ontology of writing, its mode of being as an

act, is not primarily the concern of literary criticism as it was defined earlier.

Here it must be noted that the problems which, from the point of view of

literary criticism, seem clear in the essays collected in Deleuze and Literature are

derived in part from Deleuze and Guattari’s own texts. The treatment of textuality,

the illustrative use of literature in the course of philosophical arguments, and the

handling of the author that are to be found in these essays do make sense given the

way Deleuze and Guattari write about literature. As some of the contributors to

Deleuze and Literature argue, the treatment of literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s

work does not readily translate into any kind of use for literary criticism. 20 Most

importantly, the passages where Deleuze and Guattari use literary texts are difficult to

see as examples of ‘literary criticism’.

This is true even when they focus explicitly on literary texts, as they do in

‘1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”’ (1988: 192-207). While the plateau

begins by suggesting that ‘the essence of the “novella” as a literary genre’ is that

20 See, for example, Buchanan and Marks 2000: 1-13, Crawford 2000: 57-8, and Lambert 2000: 136-7.

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‘everything is organised around the question, “What happened? Whatever could have

happened?”’ (192), it quickly becomes obvious that the novella, as text, is not really

what is at stake. Rather, the three novellas that are discussed—‘In the Cage’ by

Henry James, ‘The Crack-up’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and ‘The Story of the Abyss and

the Spyglass’ by Pierrette Fleutiaux—serve to demonstrate three kinds of ‘lines’ and

the ‘dangers’ or ‘problems’ posed by each line (204-7). Moreover:

it should be borne in mind that these lines mean nothing … It is certain that they have nothing to do with language; it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must take sustenance from them, between its own lines. It is certain that they have nothing to do with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the signifier; instead, the signifier arises at the most rigidified level of one of the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level.

(1988: 203)

Even though we are looking at novellas, Deleuze and Guattari seem to be saying, this

has nothing to do with language or literature, or involves it only in a secondary way.

This apparent disinterest in the textual is also immediately evident in Deleuze’s

remarks about deconstruction at the 1972 Cerisy colloquium on Nietzsche :

I see clearly what it is, I admire it a lot, but it has nothing to do with my own method. I do not present myself as a commentator on texts. For me, a text is merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a question of commentating on the text by a method of deconstruction, or by a method of textual practice, or by other methods; it is a question of what use it has in the extra-textual practice that prolongs the text.

(Smith 1998: xv-xvi)21

Even outside the limits of the definition given earlier in this chapter, a literary

criticism that did not comment on texts and which rejected any method of textual

practice is rather difficult to imagine.

21 This quotation is part of a comment made by Deleuze, ‘responding to a question posed to him during the Cerisy colloquium on Nietzsche in 1972’ about Derrida (Smith 1998: xvi, note 24).

60

The above discussion suggests that despite their obvious investment in

literature, the question ‘What use are Deleuze and Guattari to literary criticism?’ has a

disappointing answer. However, just as it would have been a mistake to assume that

their interest in literature meant that Deleuze and Guattari were necessarily useful to

literary criticism, it would also be a mistake to suggest that their declared disinterest

in any ‘textual practice’ means that critics should forget about them. What this

situation signifies is simply that criticism cannot expect to extract a ready-made

literary theory from the way Deleuze and Guattari use literature in their texts.

Focussing only upon, or attempting to reproduce, as a system, the kind of ‘readings’

they make of literary texts can only have a limited value; not only because of the risk

of being too reductive, but because those readings tend to efface textuality. As was

suggested at the beginning of this chapter, rather than concentrating on these explicit

references to literature, a ‘minor’ criticism must begin elsewhere: by asking what this

‘extra-textual’ use might be. Having pursued the first sense of the question of what

use Deleuze and Guattari can be to criticism to this negative conclusion, it is

necessary to consider what could be meant by the concept of use as Deleuze employs

it here. This serves as the theoretical prelude to the following chapters, which attempt

to formulate a positive answer to the same question, ultimately in terms of ‘the tragic’.

4 Use

Many commentators have already noted that in all Deleuze and Guattari’s

texts the concept of use is frequently connected not only with desire, but also with

speaking, writing, and reading (usually in opposition to ‘representation’, ‘meaning’,

and ‘interpretation’). Perhaps the best-known passage, from Anti-Oedipus, states that:

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reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.

(1984: 106)

Similarly, in Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly stress that they ‘aren’t

interpreting’ (1986: 4), ‘aren’t even trying to interpret, to say this means that’ (7), and

argue that ‘minor’ writers, such as Kafka, make a ‘minor or intensive use’ of language

(27). This minor use, like the ‘productive use’ mentioned in Anti-Oedipus, has a

‘revolutionary force’ (19), as opposed to the ‘ordinary use’, which is ‘extensive or

representative’ (20). The opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus formulate the same

ideas:

A book is an assemblage … We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what other bodies without organs it makes its own converge.

(1988: 4)

The vocabulary in this passage invokes ‘intensities’, ‘multiplicities’, and ‘bodies

without organs’, rather than a ‘montage of desiring-machines’ or a ‘productive’,

‘minor’ use (these terms are discussed in more detail in Chapter Four, below). But, in

each case, these different terms are aligned in opposition to ‘meaning’ as a different

kind of use of writing, literature and language.

This emphasis on use continues in What is Philosophy?, in which the question

‘What is philosophy?’ is not a matter of determining what philosophy—or

‘philosophy’—means, but of ‘philosophy’s use or usefulness’ (1994: 7). According to

Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is ‘knowledge through pure concepts’ (7), ‘the art

of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (2), and this means that:

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We always come back to the question of the use of this activity of creating concepts, in its difference from scientific or artistic activity. Why, through what necessity, and for what use must concepts, and always new concepts, be created? And in order to do what? To say that the greatness of philosophy lies precisely in its not having any use is a frivolous answer that not even young people find amusing any more.

(1994: 8-9)

These examples could be multiplied and expanded upon; for the moment they are

simply meant to illustrate that Deleuze’s invocation of use in relation to an ‘extra-

textual practice that prolongs the text’ is not an isolated instance. Rather, use is a

constant theme in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

How is the term ‘use’ to be understood in these texts? What does it mean to

talk about ‘prolonging’ a text, extracting its ‘revolutionary force’, or treating it as an

‘assemblage’? What, indeed, are the ordinary significations of ‘use’? Before trying

to answer these questions, it is worth emphasizing that to make the question ‘What

use are Deleuze and Guattari to literary criticism?’ seem to turn upon the meaning of

‘use’ is not (only) a matter of wordplay. That is, it is not a deconstructive strategy

aimed at placing ‘use’ en abyme or exposing levels of metaphor and deferral. Clearly,

the question could have been posed in different terms (what advantage, what benefit);

but, as will be shown below, ‘use’ in fact comprehends the meaning of these other

terms. Equally, foregrounding the word ‘use’ is more than just a rhetorical echo of

Deleuze and Guattari’s own strategy of asking ‘How does it work?’ instead of ‘What

does it mean?’ (1984: 109), since the different meanings of ‘use’ are of interest here

as well. Rather, the object is to construct concepts of a ‘major’ and a ‘minor’ use

which, rather than being applicable only within the representational order of reading

and writing, instead act to connect the texts with the material and political forces that

constitute their very possibility. In other words, it is not only the meanings of ‘use’

within discourse, as signifier or signified, that are of interest, but also the non-

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discursive, institutional apparatus that constitutes these meanings. Putting the ‘use of

use’ under scrutiny is a question of politics, not just of semantics; in fact, it is a way

of showing that semantics is always already political, and vice versa. The question

could, recalling Nietzsche’s critique of the value of morality, be put in terms of the

value of use. It involves not just asking what the word ‘use’ means, but also what

power-relations it presupposes or produces when considered as a concept.

Nevertheless, the place to begin such an analysis is by looking at what the

word ‘use’ means. The various meanings of use given in the Oxford English

Dictionary are articulated according to its two main senses as a noun: ‘the use of’, and

a verb: ‘to use’ (Simpson and Weiner 1989: 350-6). As a noun, ‘use’ (ju9s) is defined

as (i) the ‘act of using, or fact of being used’ to ‘some aim or purpose’ (350), (ii) the

‘habit of using’ (351), (iii) the ‘manner of using’, ‘mode’ or ‘method’ of ‘using,

utilizing, or employing’ something (352), and (iv) the ‘purpose served by the thing

used’, a ‘purpose, object, or end’ (352). As a verb, ‘use’ (ju9z) is defined as (i) to

‘celebrate, keep, or observe (a rite, custom, etc.) … to observe or comply with (a law,

rule, etc.)’ (353), (ii) to ‘make use of (some immaterial thing) as a means or

instrument; to employ for a certain end or purpose’ (353), (iii) to ‘speak or converse

in (a language); write or talk’ (354), (iv) to ‘habituate, accustom; to inure’ (354).

Accompanying ‘use’ are the ‘useful’: ‘helpful for any purpose; serviceable’,

‘advantageous, profitable, beneficial’; and the ‘useless’: ‘destitute of useful qualities;

serving no good end or profitable purpose’ (356).

A concept of use in its everyday senses can be constructed from these

semantic definitions. First, it has an extraordinarily wide range of applicability across

a whole spectrum of activities and discourses: in fact, any goal-directed act

whatsoever can be understood as a matter of use. Thus, a rock, a metal or mineral, a

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plant, an animal, a person, a hammer, a drug, a word, or an idea can all equally be

subject to use; in fact, all things can be used, or made useful, given the appropriate

object or end. Second, the teleological and technological character of use positions it

within the sphere of rationality and reason: it involves rational, purposive action. To

‘use’ involves acting in one’s own best interests to reach a rational end—one that is

‘good’, advantageous’, and ‘beneficial’—through appropriate means. ‘Use’

comprehends all goal-orientated activity. Third, use therefore implies an agent with

rational aims, the one who acts to achieve these particular ends. In other words, as an

act or a way of acting, use is inseparable from a subject who uses, who determines or

recognises what the use of a thing is; ‘use’ involves a subject who, having aims,

decides what is useful or useless based on a particular perspective. This subject is a

grammatical subject, the subject of the verb ‘to use’, but within the Western

philosophical tradition this also means that it is both a sovereign consciousness, an

interior cogito who can decide for itself what is useful, determine its own rational

aims, and an agent, able to act on these decisions, to affect the exterior world in

accordance with its will. This definition of ‘use’ does not just imply a subject, but the

subject: the concept of use rearranges the world around this figure, ‘Man’, understood

as a self-conscious, unified, rational being.

Some of the implications of this concept of use can be seen in the pragmatist

philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1991 essay, ‘Texts and Lumps’.22 By extending the

everyday sense of ‘use’ discussed above, Rorty reveals that certain aspects of the

conventional concept of use are in stark contrast with the entire orientation of Deleuze

and Guattari’s thought. His starting point is the claim that literary critics are mistaken

when they believe that philosophy can provide the answers to theoretical problems.

22 Thanks are due to Professor Christopher Norris for drawing my attention to this text.

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In the wake of recent theoretical developments, Rorty suggests, critics all too often

believe that philosophy can ground literary theory by producing epistemological or

even ontological ‘results’ which can be incorporated into critical practice (1991: 78).

In other words, underlying this appeal to philosophy is the belief that a sure method

for untangling texts can be discovered: a way of establishing the true meaning of a

text (79). Rorty suggests that, on the contrary, philosophical discourse is no more

privileged than literary discourse, the only difference being that it appeals to a

different ‘interpretative community’ (80). Furthermore, neither philosophy nor

literary criticism should continue to believe in the possibility of truth in this way.

This idea of finding a method to discover the truth, Rorty argues, is enviously

modelled on a false conception of scientific method as having this sort of access to the

‘hard facts’.

While he is at pains to distinguish his position from ‘a kind of silly relativism’

(89), from a common-sense perspective this is nonetheless a fairly radical sort of

stance. On a strong reading of his argument, ‘Truth’ becomes a matter of fragmented

discourses, of only partial consensus within communities of speakers who ‘happen’ to

acknowledge the same traditions. Rorty does not want to endorse this sort of

interpretation, however, and the essay offers two moderating qualifications. First, a

certain power is granted to the institutional nature of discourse: Rorty quotes with

approval Stanley Fish’s claim that ‘all facts are institutional, are facts only by virtue

of the prior institution of some such [socially conceived dimensions of assessment]’

(84). In a footnote he adds that: ‘as soon as we ask for facts about the object, we are

asking how the object should be described in a particular language, and that language

is an institution’ (84; note 5). This institutional aspect is intended to bypass the

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‘anything goes’ approach of Feyerabend, and also the question of an undercutting

nihilism which Rorty deftly (and quite sensibly) omits altogether.23

Second, the essay introduces the idea that, rather than an interpretation that

discovers the truth, ‘a “good interpretation for certain purposes” … is all we need’

(89). It is this claim that is particularly of interest in relation to the concept of use.

Having begun with a question about the proper relationship between literary criticism

and philosophy, then having argued that neither is a privileged arena for producing

truth and, finally, that our interpretations can only be meaningfully situated within

specialised ‘interpretative communities’, Rorty invokes the criteria of usefulness as an

alternative. Theories and interpretations, he argues, whether literary, philosophical, or

even scientific, should be assessed according to the criterion of usefulness ‘for certain

purposes’. Now, since he describes himself as a pragmatist, this assertion is not all

that surprising. However, Rorty’s elevation of the category of use simultaneously

brings his position into proximity with that offered by Deleuze and Guattari’s texts

and also requires that the two not be confused with one another.

It is true that parallels can be drawn between Rorty’s position and that taken

by Deleuze and Guattari, as Paul Patton has shown in his essay, ‘Redescriptive

Philosophy: Deleuze and Guattari’s Critical Pragmatism’ (2001). Furthermore, a

refusal to privilege one discipline over another, a stress on the institutional nature of

language, a privileging of the concept of use, and an insistence on pragmatics all

appear common to these thinkers. However, this apparent agreement falters when it

comes to conceptualising the subject in relation to interpretation and the concept of

use. Proposing to soothe the nerves of literary critics by showing that science, too, is

23 The ‘idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings’, but, ‘there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes ’ (Feyerabend 1975: 27-8).

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a matter of discursive convention, with no more purchase on ‘the facts’, ‘Texts and

Lumps’ recommends that critics should:

neither be afraid of subjectivity nor anxious for methodology, but simply proceed to praise our heroes and damn our villains by making invidious comparisons. [Pragmatism] urges that we not try to show that our choice of heroes is imposed on us by, or underwritten by, antecedently plausible principles.

(Rorty 1991: 79)

Rorty’s pragmatism can thus be seen to operate from a centre in a naturalised

subjectivity, in a freely choosing, unified subject which, apparently motivated by

aesthetic judgements, creates alliances and lineages for itself. In ‘Texts and Lumps’,

criticism—writing, thinking—is determined entirely in a relation to its use for a

subject. Pragmatism, Rorty writes, uses the metaphor of ‘linguistic behaviour as tool-

using, of language as a way of grabbing hold of causal forces and making them do

what we want, altering ourselves and our environment to suit our aspirations’ (81).

Literary criticism and philosophy, like literature and even science, thus appear to be

nothing more than one ‘kind of writing’ (Rorty 1978). That is, they are just

something a subject uses to make the world ‘do what we want’. Rorty treats language

as technical, as a tool that a sovereign subject can set to various uses.

This kind of instrumentalist pragmatics, assuming that language is an inert tool

that a rational, unified subject always has total control over, is vulnerable to serious

objections in relation to two of the strongest theoretical investments of contemporary

critical discourse, which are as influential in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as

elsewhere. First, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, it must be asked where

desire and the unconscious can enter such a schema. The mastery of Rorty’s

pragmatist subject, its ability to decide what is useful, and to make good this potential

utility in full consciousness, is simply assumed. Second, from the perspective of

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Althusser’s Marxism, despite an acknowledgement of the institutional nature of

language, the social and historical production of the subject as an ideological

category, and its specific investment within capitalism, is effaced by Rorty’s analysis

(Althusser 1973). In ‘Texts and Lumps’, history, culture, and desire are all entirely

secondary in relation to a deciding subject who should ‘simply have favorite

philosophers … picked by consonance with their own desiderata’ (1991: 78). In

treating criticism as a matter of ‘making use’ of a text or language, in accordance with

rational intentions, Rorty continues the Western humanist tradition of both privileging

and naturalising the subject-position implied in the dictionary definition of use. The

sovereign agency and interior consciousness offered by this subject-position are

turned into a unified subject or identity: ‘Man’. Both in its everyday meanings and

within the pragmatic tradition to which Rorty belongs, the concept of use is indexed to

a rational subject or to the utility of a thing for that subject; subject, use, and reason

are inextricably linked, a trinity of humanist thought.

In this respect, what Rorty’s essay shows is that the concept of use in Deleuze

and Guattari’s work must be carefully distinguished both from its everyday sense and

from its meaning within the pragmatist tradition, which in fact only extends this

common meaning. It is true that the stress on ‘use’ in Anti-Oedipus becomes a

commitment to a ‘pragmatics’ in A Thousand Plateaus,24 which perhaps makes it

24 In A Thousand Plateaus, the idea of ‘pragmatics’ is prominent in ‘November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics’ (1988: 75-110) and ‘587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs’ (111-48).

In the former, it relates to the primacy of parole over langue. Deleuze and Gu attari argue that one major consequence of the idea of the performative (Austin 1970) is that: ‘Pragmatics ceases to be a “trash heap” … Instead, pragmatics becomes the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself into everything … it makes it impossible to maintain the distinction between language [langue] and speech [parole] because speech [parole] can no longer be defined simply as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification, or the variable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning and syntax of language [langue] can no longer be defined independently of the speech acts they presuppose’ (77-8). In the latter, the emphasis on pragmatics is developed in relation to ‘the object of Pragmatics’: the machinic and collective assemblages that create various different ‘regimes of signs’ or ‘semiotics’ (145). This kind of ‘pragmatics’ consists in ‘[1] making a tracing of the mixed semiotics … [2] making the transformational map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and creation … [3] making the diagram of the abstract machines that are in

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seem as if Deleuze’s opposition between textual ‘commentary’ and ‘extra-textual use’

could be understood as a familiar philosophical gesture – not just found in Rorty’s

pragmatism but also in Wittgenstein’s dictum that ‘meaning is use’ (1973), or even

John Stuart Mill’s ‘Principle of Happiness’ (1998). However, when Deleuze, an anti-

humanist thinker who agrees with Foucault that ‘there is no point in crying over the

death of man’ (Deleuze 1999: 130), invokes ‘extra-textual use’, it would, to say the

least, be extremely strange to interpret this in terms of the mastery of a rational

subject pursuing a particular aim. As discussed further in Chapter Four, an anti-

humanist critique of the subject is constant in Deleuze’s text s. In a sense, Difference

and Repetition is in its entirety an attack on the subject, since the ‘image of thought’

that the book critiques rests upon the ‘transcendental illusion’ of representation, and:

This illusion comes in several forms … In effect, thought is covered over by an ‘image’ made up of postulates which distort both its operation and its genesis. These postulates culminate in the position of an identical thinking subject, which functions as a principle of identity for concepts in general … When difference is subordinated by the thinking subject to the identity of the concept … difference in thought disappears. … To restore difference in thought is to untie this first knot which consists of representing difference through the identity of the concept and the thinking subject.

(1994: 265-6)

The concept of the subject is displaced from the centre of Deleuze’s ‘image of

thought’, which is rather a ‘thought without an Image’ that does without the subject

(1994: 132). Consequently, the emphasis on use in Anti-Oedipus is accompanied by a

play in each case … [4] outlining the program of the assemblages that distribute everything’ (146-7). Throughout both plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that ‘regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine’ (148). That is, language is ‘only one regime of signs among others, and not the most important one’ (111); it is ‘not the first’ regime of signs and there is ‘no reason to accord it any particular privilege’ (117).

It is also worth noting that Deleuze, in a 1980 interview, ‘On A Thousand Plateaus’, said that: ‘I don’t personally think the linguistics is fundamental. Maybe Félix, if he were here, would disagree’. He goes on to contrast their ‘pragmatics’ of ‘language-use’ with linguistics, adding (with a hint of irony regarding the category of ‘competence’) that ‘I don’t think we, for our part, are particularly competent to pronounce on linguistics’ (Deleuze 1995: 28).

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relegation of the subject to a mere ‘residual subject’ or ‘residuum’ of the other, more

primary processes of desiring-production (1984: 20, 285, 330). Equally, the definition

of a ‘minor literature’ as a ‘minor use’ of language, in Kafka, stresses that the ‘minor’

does not relate to an individual subject, but to collective assemblages, multiplicities,

and the unconscious.

Deleuze and Guattari have no trouble inventing concepts that allow a ‘thought

without an Image’ to function without a fixed, unified subject at its centre. In A

Thousand Plateaus, the ideas of assemblages and multiplicities—present in Anti-

Oedipus but marginal in comparison to Oedipus and psychoanalysis, desiring-

machines, and the distinction between ‘molar’ and molecular’—are extended, and

concepts such as ‘haecceity’ and ‘rhizome’ are developed, allowing for alternative

‘modes of individuation proceeding neither by form nor by the subject’ (1988: 507).

In ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal…’, for example, Deleuze and

Guattari write that:

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.

(1988: 261)

This sort of individuation, as an intensive multiplicity or rhizome rather than as a

unified subject, is not just ‘very different’ from the idea of a subject, however, since

for Deleuze and Guattari the concept of the sub ject does not designate a true

individuation, but precisely the ‘residuum’ of such a process. This means that:

You will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that … It should not be thought that a haecceity

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consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity…

(1988: 262)

Thus, the concept of the subject is replaced by collective assemblages, which are

individuated as ‘haecceities’ or ‘events’ of a rhizome type.

These concepts are explored further in Chapter Four; the rest of this chapter

addresses the question of where this conceptual creation leaves the concept of use. It

is obviously deeply problematic to interpret Deleuze’s idea of a use that is part of an

‘extra-textual practice’ as in any way appealing to the aims of an empowered reading

subject who makes use of (or understands) a text according to their aims, goals, or

‘desiderata’. Rather, when it is understood as ‘use for a subject’, use seems to be

what could be called a ‘major’ use, in the sense ‘major’ is used in Kafka: a use that

reinforces and naturalises ‘the individual concern’. Because it posits this relationship

to a rational, unified subject as a natural fact, this ‘major’ concept of use only makes

more problematic its repeated invocation by Deleuze and Guattari. But what can the

concept of use signify if not ‘use for a subject’? What can be understood by the idea

of a use that involves an ‘extra-textual practice that prolongs the text’, a ‘schizoid

exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force’? Given its apparently

inextricable relationship to a subject, how can any concept of use incorporate the

psychoanalytic and Marxist critiques of the subject that operate in Deleuze and

Guattari’s work?

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5 Minor Use

If a concept of use that rests on and naturalises the category of the subject is

rejected or at least placed under scrutiny, another way of understanding use—a ‘minor

use’ rather than a ‘major use’—is needed. A ‘minor’ concept of use would be one

that does not correspond to the rational aims of the subject, but relates to the three

characteristics of ‘minor literature’ outlined in Kafka: a different use of language

‘affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (1986: 16), a different politics

that challenges ‘the individual concern’ (17), and a situation where ‘everything takes

on a collective value’ (17). And, although something remains counter- intuitive about

the idea of a use that does not relate to a subject’s advantage, this ‘minor’ sense can in

fact be located first of all in the way the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word

‘use’. If this definition constitutes a subject-position defined by rational decision-

making and action, it also encompasses at least two contrary senses that trouble this

position. First, while the subject appears primarily as an empowered ‘user’, it also

occupies the position of the ‘used’, the one who is subject or subjected to the aims of

others: all the ambiguity of the idea of a ‘subject’, as both agent and oppressed, bears

down upon the concept of use at this point. The subject who supposedly uses

language as a tool is also subject to language, being constituted as a subject only

within language, through the ideological statements produced by institutional

practices.25

Second, ‘use’ can mean to consume, exploit, or expend, and this sense of the

word complicates its relationship to the rational subject it seems to constitute. To

25 Although, as Foucault suggests, it is these two possibilities taken together, as two aspects of the same power relation, that indicate the functioning of the disciplinary institutions which characterise the modern state-form (1982: 212-3).

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consume, exploit, or expend can be considered rational aims, at least in some

circumstances, but these significations also introduce an irrational or only apparently

rational kind of action that leads to (self-) destructive results, as in, for example, the

‘uses’ made of nuclear technology, fossil fuels, narcotic substances, or of workers

under capitalism (or any number of other things). It is difficult to see how this sense

of ‘use’ can be either squared with or separated from the idea of rational ends and

aims or ‘good results’; these examples seem, from the perspective of a ‘major’

concept of use, to be misuse or abuse. Thought runs in a circle here: if the concept of

use is indexed to a rational subject with particular aims, or to the object that can fulfil

such aims, it only ever involves the useful – which is defined precisely by its harmony

with the rational aims of a subject. In this way, the ‘major’ concept of use not only

affirms a rational subject, but also excludes the useless, misuse, and abuse; in effect,

anything that is not useful to a subject falls outside of the sphere of use as such. A

‘minor use’, on the other hand, would neither depend upon the subject nor would it

treat the useless, abuse, and misuse as exterior to the structure of use itself.

A precedent for this way of thinking about a ‘minor use’ can be found in

Georges Bataille’s 1967 text, The Accursed Share (1988). Bataille suggests that the

idea of ‘economy’ is severely limited by the perspective of human utility, since:

A movement is produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this point in the universe. The economic activity of men appropriates this movement, making use of the resulting possibilities for certain ends. But this movement has a pattern and laws with which, as a rule, those who use them and depend on them are unacquainted. Thus the question arises: is the general determination of energy circulating in the biosphere altered by man’s activity? Or rather, isn’t the latter’s intention vitiated by a determination of which it is ignorant, which it overlooks and cannot change?

(20-1)

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Bataille’s answer to this question is that ‘beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity

in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfilment of the universe’ (21). Although the

‘economic man’ cannot see it:

Economic science merely generalizes the isolated situation; it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end ... It does not take into consideration a play of energy that no particular end limits: the play of living matter in general, involved in the movement of light of which it is the result.

(23)

Bataille posits a ‘general economy’ that exceeds and yet simultaneously drives a

‘particular’ or ‘restricted economy’ of aims and ends, forming the condition of its

possibility. From the perspective of restricted economy, the movement of general

economy is nothing, useless, the impossib le – it cannot be thought or represented by

the rational consciousness of ‘economic man’. However, from the perspective of

general economy, this excluded, supposedly negative absence is the driving force of

any restricted economy. For Bataille it is not simply that reason cannot think this

‘nothing’ but that it cannot bear it, the rational subject is destroyed by it; it is an

‘accursed share’ that must be uselessly expended because it cannot be exchanged or

made useful. The ‘general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter impels

him [i.e. ‘man’], and he cannot stop it’ (23). In other words, this general economy

involves a minor use that perpetually threatens and undoes the sovereignty and unity

of the subject: its actions are not, after all, under its own control. Within the restricted

economy of human utility, a major concept of use holds true; but this restricted

economy, which affirms the subject’s mastery, is driven by a general economy that

both exceeds the subject and turns all its efforts, ultimately, into a useless expenditure.

This minor concept of use thus not only threatens the major concept, but also forms

the very condition of its possibility. While the movement of general economy is what

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a restricted economy must exclude, uselessly consume or destroy, it is simultaneously

what makes it work.

According to Nick Land’s The Thirst for Annihilation, Bataille’s idea of

general and restricted economy is best understood not just in relation to Hegel, as

Derrida and other commentators have often assumed, but also, more directly, in

relation to Kant (1992: 3-4).26 Although Land’s book pursues a very different project

to this thesis, its exploration of the opposition between the phenomenal and noumenal

highlights aspects of the Critique of Pure Reason that, in relation to Bataille’s thought,

allow a rethinking of the concept of use. Kant writes:

when we designate certain objects as appearance or sensible existences (phenomena), thus distinguishing our mode of intuiting them from their own nature as things in themselves, it is evident that by this very distinction we as it were place the latter, considered in this their own nature, although we do not so intuit them, in opposition to the former, or, on the other hand, we do so place other possible things, which are not the objects of our senses, but are thought by the understanding alone, and call them intelligible existences (noumena).

(1993: 211; B306)

However, this distinction between phenomenal and noumenal objects must be

understood as ‘problematical’ and only in a negative sense, that is, as a ‘limitative

concept of sensibility’ (213; A255/B311) since:

things in themselves, which lie beyond [sensible intuition’s] province, are called noumena for the very purpose of indicating that knowledge does not extend its application to all that the understanding thinks. But, after all, the possibility of such noumena is quite incomprehensible, and beyond the sphere of appearances, all is for us a mere void…

(213; A255/B311)

By linking knowledge and the phenomenal together in this way, Kant’s schema limits

the concept of use to the order of sensible intuitions and synthetic representations. On

26 Derrida writes about Bataille’s relation to Hegel in ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ (1990: 251-77).

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this view, therefore, the use of a thing can exist and originate only within the

phenomenal world, as a representation defined in relation to a rational subject. In this

respect, it underwrites the understanding of use both as it is defined in the dictionary,

and as it is understood by Rorty’s pragmatics. In Bataille’s work, however, use or

utility involves a dynamic ‘noumenal’ force that, although it is never phenomenal and

thus cannot be represented, nonetheless drives the phenomenal world of reason,

representation and ‘economic man’. For the rational subject, then, there is no longer

only a relationship to representation, phenomena, and use, as in Kant’s thought, but

also to the unpresentable, noumenal, and useless; and, if the former is characterized

by mastery and control, the latter is a matter of being undermined, consumed, or

expended. That is, the senses of the word ‘use’ that seemed to be ‘misuse’ or

‘abuse’—destructive or useless expenditure, the using up or wearing out of a thing or

person—here appear not only as part of the structure of use, but as the driving ‘force’

of use. Although it is never phenomenal and cannot be represented or experienced by

a subject, this excessive force nonetheless drives the phenomenal world of

representation and, in doing so, continually denies the subject the possibility of real

mastery or sovereignty.

Eccentric—and deeply logocentric—though Bataille’s thought seems, it

illuminates both the way a concept of use can signify other than in relation to a

rational, sovereign subject and what Deleuze and Guattari might be indicating when

they privilege use.27 Furthermore, it provides a way of understanding any system as

27 In a footnote to Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari state that the third, conjunctive synthesis of the unconscious (the production of consumption) relates to Bataille’s ‘accursed share’: ‘When Georges Bataille speaks of sumptuary, nonproductive expenditures or consumptions in connection with the energy of nature, these are expenditures or consumptions that are not part of the supposedly independent sphere of human production, insofar as the latter is determined by “the useful.” They therefore have to do with what we call the production of consumption’ (1984: 4). The three syntheses are discussed in more detail in Chapter Four.

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both inseparable from and driven by its outside – by whatever it represents to itself as

exterior and other, what cannot ‘appear’ within its logic. In Deleuze and Guattari’s

thought, this structure can be related to desire, or ‘desiring production’. Rather than

involving thinking from the perspective of a solar economy, as it does for Bataille, the

idea of general and a restricted economy can be understood in relation to desire (as

‘difference of force’ (Deleuze 1983) or ‘difference in itself’ (Deleuze 1994)); that is,

as a way of conceptualising a dynamic interaction between an active unconscious and

reactive consciousness. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘the subject

is produced’ (1984: 17) by a desiring-process, rather than pre-existing and ‘owning’

its desires:

It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state.

(16)

At first, there is no sovereign subject that determines use rationally or possesses a

sense of mastery, but rather a ‘nomadic’ subject, produced by a dynamic process of

desiring, which occupies mobile subject-positions. Of course, at certain moments this

subject can act according to rational aims and affect the environment; but it is

primarily driven by an irrational and non-teleological process of desiring-production:

How can we sum up this entire vital progression? Let us trace it along a first path (the shortest route): the points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that converge on the desiring-machines; then the subject—produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine—passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. The subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes.

(20)

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At least, this is how it appears from the perspective of desire. In what amounts to a

re-writing of Lacan’s ‘The mirror stage’ (1977: 1-7), the subject, however, ‘confuses’

itself with this ‘conjunctive synthesis of consummation in the form of a wonderstruck

“So that’s what it was!”’ (17-8), concluding that ‘It’s me, and so it’s mine…’ (16).28

In this sense, which is taken up in Chapter Four, ‘the subject’ can been seen in terms

of a kind of restricted economy constituted within the general economy of desiring-

production, and ‘consciousness’ can been seen as a restricted economy constituted

within the general economy of the unconscious. With the aim of destroying this

static, transcendent subject, which has become purely reactive—‘Destroy, destroy.

The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction … Destroy Oedipus, the

illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration’ (311)—

Deleuze and Guattari develop a concept of use that is not ‘use for a subject’ but

applies precisely to that which undermines and troubles the subject – a ‘minor’ use.

6 Conclusion: Towards a Minor Criticism

If a concept of use that depends on totalising and unifying the subject,

representation, and rationality can be called a ‘major’ concept of use, Deleuze and

Guattari’s texts explore a ‘minor’ concept of use that shatters the unity of the subject.

Like the major concept of use defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, this concept

of a minor use applies across many fields and levels; it thus has important

consequences for criticism. If, despite their interest in literature, Deleuze and Guattari

are not literary critics, nor ‘of use’ to criticism in any straightforward way, the idea of

28 This phrasing (‘It’s me, and so it’s mine…’) is perhaps an allusion to a section of R. D. Laing’s Knots (1972: 41-7).

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minor use nonetheless provides the resources for a minor politics that resists unifying,

totalising forces that seek to reduce the function of criticism to the (re)production of

dominant ideological values. This ideological reduction is not only a matter of the

author as genius or as the unity of the work, but also of the hegemonic power of the

category of the subject, as a sovereign unity, which threatens to reduce all criticism to

individual opinion and utility. Criticism must be a becoming-minor within the major,

a language of resistance within the language of power. As with a ‘minor literature’, a

minor criticism is one in which ‘language is affected with a high coefficient of

deterritorialization’, ‘everything … is political’, and ‘everything takes on a collective

value’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16-7). Or rather, the term ‘minor criticism’

designates ‘the revolutionary conditions for every [criticism] within the heart of what

is called great (or established) [criticism]’ (1986: 18).

How might criticism become ‘minor’? This is the question explored in the

following chapters, but a few misperceptions can be dismissed at once. First,

although Deleuze and Guattari’s work is both a theoretical resource and a privileged

model, it is not an example of minor criticism; equally, minor criticism is not simply

the explication or even application of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literature or

criticism. Second, minor criticism does not aim to overturn literary criticism as it was

defined earlier—as a methodological attention to textuality, a self- reflexivity

concerning those methods, and a political investment—nor, third, is it a criticism with

a different object, that is, a criticism which talks about ‘minorities’ (for example,

religious or ethnic minorities) in literature. A minor criticism is a minor use of

criticism. Since the first characteristic of a minor literature concerns language, and

since language, spoken or written, is the very matter of criticism, a minor criticism is

first of all defined by its attention to a minor use of language – which is discussed in

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the next chapter. Criticism deals with texts; a text not only has a minor or a major

use, in a wider institutional context, it is also an example of the major or minor use of

language. But, fourth, the major and the minor should not be interpreted too

dualistically or dialectically, as it is not a matter of categorising or codifying texts as

being either one or the other: the major or a minor reading of any text is possible, and

the minor and major uses of language are not strictly separable line-by- line or word-

by-word. The minor also concerns that which produces the major, and the major is

always open to a minor use, a becoming-minor. Nonetheless, these two uses of

language are distinguishable at the level of a text by the different ways they construct

and address the subject, and therefore imply above all a minor politics of writing and

reading.