Love, Language and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds in Deleuze

Transcription

1 Love, Language and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds in Deleuze Joseph Barker Penn State University Abstract Dramatization has been conceived by some Deleuze scholars as dramatizing the mode of existence of a subject. This paper argues, on the contrary, dramatization involves the very creation of a viewpoint on the world. The ethical significance of dramatization is not the ability to evaluate certain subjective modes of existence, but to produce ways of unfolding the world in which we do not imprison others and in which multiple perspectives are allowed to unfold. Love is incapable of such a truly ethical comportment, because the lover is always thrown back onto their own world, trapped within subjectivity, unable to see from two viewpoints at once. A world is most precisely a set of signs, a set of relationships between things and meanings (senses); therefore, in order to produce more ethical worlds, worlds in which we do not explicate or imprison ourselves and others too much, we must turn to art. Art is precisely a unity in which multiple perspectives are allowed to unfold at their own rhythm. Language perfects this insofar as the creation of new modes of grammatical relation in writing is nothing more than the unification of a multiplicity of relationships between meaning and things. Keywords: dramatization, ethics, language, art, love, Deleuze Deleuze defines ethics, throughout his career, in terms of three Nietzschean themes: (1) the affirmation of intensities, (2) the increase of what a body can do and (3) the creation of new modes of life. 1 Daniel W. Smith has isolated these themes and related them to dramatization in the following way: actions or propositions dramatize the mode Deleuze Studies 10.1 (2016): DOI: /dls Edinburgh University Press

2 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 101 of existence of the speaker or actor, and therefore we can use those actions to evaluate that mode of existence according to the three ethical criteria (Smith 2012: 147). 2 Smith s reading of dramatization remains too limited to do justice to Deleuze s own conception of dramatization. Deleuze s broader conception of dramatization has to do with worlds rather than subjects. On Smith s reading, dramatization simply dramatizes a mode of existence of a speaker or actor; this suggests a kind of disconnect between the mode of existence and the drama. On our reading, however, dramatization is nothing other than the creation of a viewpoint upon the world or a pure existence, which is prior to the constitution of identifiable actors or speakers. The ethical importance of dramatization is not therefore that it allows us to evaluate the mode of existence of a speaker or actor. We will suggest that dramatization takes on a much more substantive ethical role because it truly allows us to produce a more ethical world, a world in which we do not imprison others, but in which various viewpoints upon the world are allowed to coexist within one world. The production of this more ethical world will not remain a vague concept, but will be specified according to Deleuze s most precise ethical criteria. The argument will proceed as follows: dramatization is the production of an internal space, like a theatre set in which every object refers to a meaning. Most precisely, this internal space is an organisation of signs, signs being relations between objects and meanings. We will call this system of signs a world. Dramatization precisely concerns how signs are organised, how a meaningful space is set up, or how a world is created. A world set up by dramatization can be more or less ethical depending on whether it allows a wide variety of viewpoints on the world to coexist or whether we imprison ourselves and others inside one viewpoint on the world. We will ethically evaluate the signs of love and of art according to this ethical criterion. The signs of love give us access to the possible world of the person we love. The face and the words of the beloved sweep us into a completely different viewpoint on the world, another possible way of unfolding the relations or consistencies between signs. However, at the same time, we are forced to unfold the meanings of the gestures or words of the other person in terms of our own world, because our viewpoint on the world can never be identical with that of the other person. Because we have to unfold or explain the meanings of the words and gestures of the other person in terms of our own viewpoint on the world, we end up imprisoning the person we love inside our own world of meaning, and we remain imprisoned within our own world, failing to truly see the world from

3 102 Joseph Barker the viewpoint of the other person. Thus, the world of signs set up by love is not a truly ethical world because it does not allow multiple viewpoints to coexist within the same world. On the other hand, the essential attribute of a work of art is to allow multiple viewpoints on the world to coexist within one world. Art discovers viewpoints in the world which it kneads together in such a way that they coexist within a new viewpoint, but they coexist at their own pace, they are not forced into a system of signs which is alien to them. In this way, art both frees us from being imprisoned in our own viewpoints on the world, and allows our viewpoint to coexist with the viewpoints of others. Whilst music carries out this possibility of coexisting viewpoint most purely among the arts, language is more important philosophically because our consciousness, our experience of the world, is modelled upon linguistic propositions. Thus, when art, philosophy and science set up new relations between words, new grammatical consistencies, they can make it possible to think in a way which allows for the coexistence of various viewpoints upon the world as opposed to imprisoning ourselves within a single viewpoint. Thus, experimentation within language is perhaps the most potent ethical mode of existence, insofar as it dramatizes a world in which it is possible to experience things without imprisoning oneself or others within a single world, within a single set of relations between things and meanings. I. Worlds and Signs As opposed to dramatization concerning the mode of existence of a subject, dramatization is, most generally, the creation of a theatrical space in which all the objects refer to meanings; that is, dramatization involves setting up a space of signs, because signs are what relate objects to meanings. This is why Deleuze can write that signs are the true elements of theatre (Deleuze 1994: 23) and that the true theatre involves the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs (10). This space in which all objects refer to meanings is, most basically put, a world. We can illuminate this notion of the world as a world of signs through a long passage from A Thousand Plateaus about a certain type of world in which there are only signs; no one does anything, and none of the signs mean anything other than being signs: Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you

4 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 103 stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks on the sidewalk positioned like the hands of a watch. They were whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 112) 3 In this dreary world, the world emits signs, but no one knows what these signs signify or what they refer to; it is just sign after sign after sign and so there is a kind of impotence and uncertainty to them (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 112, 116). However, this empty world does make clear that a world as such is defined by the signs within it. Signs are fundamental to Deleuze s philosophy, and to dramatization, because they bring together an object and a meaning, or in Deleuze s terms an Idea and an intensity; this is a new kind of duality, irreducible to subjects or objects. The system of signs, relations between objects and meanings, cannot be reduced either to an objective state of the world or to a set of connections in the mind of the subject who experiences the world. The independence of signs from both subjects and objects allows Deleuze to create a conception of thought which does not presuppose its correspondence with objects. Signs are outside of thought, but it is only by unfolding signs that we can begin to understand the meaning of things. Furthermore, in order to show how signs are irreducible to either objects or meanings, Deleuze has to create a new conception of matter and of ideality, in which neither is reducible to the other; this is the duality of intensity and Ideas. Intensity is like a field of spatial depth in which fragmentary individuals have no relation to one another except for their difference, the impossibility of their fitting together. Ideas are like structures or diagrams of relations which are prior to any atomic elements; these relations must be determined step by step, and eventually we can see important points of the diagram or structure, which are called singularities. The intensive field of spatial depth always resists being structured or brought into determinate relations, and thus any Idea, any abstract structure of relations, will fail to completely capture intensity. This is how Deleuze avoids the error he diagnoses in all prior philosophy, whereby thought and being are said to correspond to one another, with the consequence that anyone who thinks properly, or through the opinions of a common sense, can discover the truth. 4 Despite never corresponding absolutely, intensity and Ideas are brought into relation in order that we can experience a world of objects with meanings; this relation between intensity and Ideas occurs through signs, which we can now understand as the basis of dramatization, the production of a world. Dramatization is, most generally, the creation of an internal space, which we can specify as a system of signs or of things in relation to

5 104 Joseph Barker meanings. The internal space created by dramatization is modelled on theatre. In the theatre, each aspect of the staging, the set, refers to the Ideas of the play. The whole space is imbued with a kind of meaning, but that meaning is internal to the series of Ideas of the play. Objects on the stage are no longer dominated by their everyday, functional meaning. 5 This is why Deleuze can say that in theatrical spaces, the Ideas dominate the spaces (Deleuze 1994: 216). The objects in the space of the theatre are thus no longer everyday objects of perception; they are signs referring only to Ideas. This is why Deleuze can write that signs are the true elements of theatre (23) and that the true theatre involves the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs (10). Having seen that dramatization is about the creation of a world or a system of signs, we can understand this idea further insofar as a viewpoint upon the world is precisely an absolute, radical beginning of the world (Deleuze 2000: 44). We must now differentiate between a world and a viewpoint on the world, according to Deleuze. One way of seeing the difference between worlds and viewpoints is that when we occupy a certain viewpoint, we see the unfolding of new relations between signs in a new world over time, whereas a world is simply an organisation of signs, and thus lacks the unfolding temporal dimension of the viewpoint. In order to occupy a viewpoint, a completely unforeseen unfolding of a sign is necessary, whereas in order to see a world, we simply need to know that one sign relates to another in a particular way. Worlds signify some meaning even before we know what that meaning is, whereas to occupy a viewpoint, we need to unfold what signs mean. The viewpoint is the radically new beginning of a world, as opposed to the finished set of relations between signs which constitutes a world. We see a good example of a new viewpoint on the world in what Deleuze calls famous works of nomad art, for example early Gothic woodwork as analysed by Wilhelm Worringer or certain tendencies in Arabic art. Deleuze writes that monadological points of view can be interlinked, and we see this interlinking where the twisted animals have no land beneath them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the body is turned upside down (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 494). There is no central viewpoint in this world of nomadic art, no global border, no organisation of signs and meanings which unfold around a central view. Any circle of signs which might come to surround or imprison each of us and give our worlds a global meaning is broken in the constant inhabiting of new viewpoints in nomadic art (Deleuze

6 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds : 122). However, as individual selves, we necessarily inhabit only one way of seeing the world, even if we move through many worlds (the world of love, the world of art, the world of sensuous objects). When we enter a new viewpoint, our worlds fall apart and new ones are constituted. Thus, whilst worlds are ordered circles of signs, those orders fall apart when they are forced into a new organisation; on the other hand, viewpoints or essences are essentially variable and violently imbricated with one another (122). This takes us to the central problem of love and ethics: each self can inhabit only one viewpoint, so is it ever possible to inhabit the viewpoint of another person? Is it possible to act in such a way that you can avoid violating and imprisoning the viewpoint of another person? II. Love One type of world which is particularly illuminating in regards to ethics is that of love. The eyes and the face of the person you love express a possible world or worlds, landscapes and places, ways of life (Deleuze 2000: 120); love s signs, the important parts of the loved person, express the origin of an unknown world (9). We find this conception not only in Proust and Signs but also in A Thousand Plateaus: the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 173). We can understand this, following the above analysis, as a possible formation of a sign system; in other words, a way in which the things and people around us refer to meanings. When we are taken up into this universe of the beloved, the beloved s viewpoint takes supremacy over the world or landscape (Deleuze 2000: 120). It is not only the system of signs of the other which we see, but the way in which this system of signs is formed, how the signs themselves hold together, in their development over time, as opposed to seeing the entire system of signs at once. This is because the viewpoint is always the product of the development of an Idea which is progressive and temporal as opposed to an eternal and spatial system. Deleuze tells us that we get taken up into this unfolding of the world of the beloved when they speak our name (120); why is this? It is because words are fragments of a world. 6 Thus, when our name is spoken by a lover without regard for any communicative or grammatical function, the proper name spoken in the midst of passion ( Gilles! ) transports us directly into the system of signs of the beloved. As Deleuze says, an utterance (or a statistical distribution of words) testifies to the secret

7 106 Joseph Barker worlds of the speaker (125); when we are placed at the centre of that secret world, we find ourselves taken into the world of the other person. Although we are taken up into the world of another when they speak our name, that does not mean we can yet see the world from their viewpoint. In order to see the world from the viewpoint of the other person, that viewpoint must be explicated (Deleuze 2000: 120). To explicate a world is to attempt to develop the signs of the other person, to understand what everything means; however, you, the lover, can only do that within your own world of signs. In other words, to develop all the signs we get from the other person, we have to develop them based on our own Ideas, relations which are based upon our own view of the world. As Deleuze writes, to love is to try to explicate, to develop [the] unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved (7). In this way, we imprison the other person in our own world, within our own world of meaning or sense. 7 This imprisoning of the person you love in your own world of meaning is inevitable because each individual self inhabits a viewpoint on the world which is absolutely different from every other viewpoint. 8 Thus Deleuze can write that an essence is a final quality at the heart of a subject: an internal difference that is in the way the world looks to us (41). Each viewpoint excludes all others, because each one is absolutely different, and thus all love is doomed to the enchantment of another possible world followed by the disappointment of the impossibility of our self inhabiting that world. The result is that love is ultimately always an imprisoning of the other person, because we explicate their world within the terms of our own. Although love is disappointing because each person is excluded from the viewpoint of another, there is a way of doing justice to the world of another person, and that is through art, which is not just the formation of a new self, but the production of a new type of viewpoint upon the world. We have found that dramatization involves the creation of a world, a world being an organisation of signs around a viewpoint. Signs are ways in which intensive fragmented individuals and viewpoints or Ideas are brought together; they are ways in which viewpoints are embodied. Thus, in a world, many embodiments of viewpoints are organised around a single viewpoint. Love is not adequate to dramatization, because it merely takes us into a world which is not ours, as opposed to leading to the creation of a new viewpoint. On an ethical level also, love is inadequate because we end up imprisoning the other person, 9 and explicating or unfolding a new self for ourselves. Only art is adequate to the ethical imperative not to unfold ourselves and others too much,

8 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 107 not to imprison ourselves and others inside fixed worlds, fixed systems of signs. 10 III. Art First, we must note that it is necessary that all present worlds are dissolved in order that any new world can be dramatized or produced. Thus, the work of art produces... the idea of death ; in other words, absolute change, the removal of our world, of everything which holds our world together; art is absolutely catastrophic (Deleuze 2000: 160, 158). The idea of death uniformly imbu[es] all fragments with the movement towards a universal end, that of fragmentation, the differentiation of all intensive individuals in the field of individuation (157). No Idea, no single viewpoint in itself can hold all the fragments, all the intensive individuals within sensation together in a world. This is why Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition that art leads us to the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out (Deleuze 1994: 293). Freedom here is not the free will of an individual, of course, but is precisely consistent with the account we have given so far: it is the freedom for the dramatization of new worlds, or as Deleuze puts it, art is a freedom for the end of a world (293). The example Deleuze gives in regard to this is Warhol s remarkable serial series, in which all the repetitions of habit, memory and death are conjugated (294). Warhol s serial prints of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley extract little differences from our daily life [which] appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption (293). In these little differences, Warhol produces a resonance between our habits of consumption and our death: the degradation of each stereotyped repetition of the face of a dead celebrity points towards the necessity of the collapse of every world. Warhol s idea of death reaches a purity of expression in the Campbell s soup series: he is presenting nothing other than the degradation in the printing process, the very degradation and death inherent in all material repetition, and ultimately Warhol is presenting the movement of time itself. We can now understand why, in dramatization or the ultimate theatre, the work of art must destroy everything, because such destruction is necessary for the creation of a new world (293). If art was merely the destruction of all prior worlds, there would be nothing to stop one of those worlds returning to impose its organisation of signs; thus, art necessarily involves the creation of a new world

9 108 Joseph Barker alongside the destruction of all prior worlds. Art dramatizes or creates a world by presenting the quality of an original world common to two previously distinct objects (Deleuze 2000: 47). For example, the objects of the sea and the land in the paintings of Elstir, where we find a new world of signs in which the sea is described only in urban terms and the land only in marine terms (48). In the work of art, all the determinations of one object, the entire way of seeing the world wrapped up in one sign, are exchanged with the determinations of another object or sign: in Elstir, the way of seeing the world wrapped up in the sea is exchanged with the viewpoint wrapped up in the city. In this way, in the work of art, each point of view must itself be the object, or the object must belong to the point of view (Deleuze 1994: 56). Because art brings together two different objects which are now points of view, art implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments (56). All the elements, varieties of relations and singular points of these ways of seeing the world coexist in the work (209). However, because art involves the death of all previous viewpoints, it is impossible to designate a point of view privileged over others, a centre which would unify the other centres (209). Rather, we can now understand Deleuze s statement early in Difference and Repetition that to every perspective or point of view there must correspond an autonomous work with its own self-sufficient sense (69). Thus, the work of art brings together various objects which embody viewpoints and create a new way of seeing the world, the beginning of a new system of signs which allows many other viewpoints to coexist, in a way love cannot. To make the idea of setting up a resonance between two objects clearer, we can distinguish it from a mere description of two objects which produces no resonance. In regards to description, Deleuze quotes Proust saying that one can string out in indefinite succession, in a description, the objects that figured in the described place. Clearly, this succession of objects in a description is not the creation of a new world. Proust goes on to describe how art can set up a new world between two objects: the truth [the viewpoint upon the world] will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, posits their relation [... ] and envelops them in the necessary rings of a great style (Proust 1989: 889, cited in Deleuze 2000: 47 8). The realization of an original world common to two objects occurs when the objects are kneaded together in the art work, which is a single, luminous substance (Deleuze 1994: 47). In bringing the worlds of two objects together to form a new world, we no longer see the world only in terms of our own system of

10 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 109 signs: art forms a specific world absolutely different from the others (Deleuze 2000: 110). Thus, Deleuze can cite Proust writing that only by art can we emerge from ourselves, can we know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours ; thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply (Proust 1989: 895 6, cited in Deleuze 2000: 42). The question now is: does art produce new ways of unfolding the signs which constitute a world, or does it simply discover pre-existing ways of unfolding the signs of a world? This question is what marks the fundamental difference between Deleuze s 1965 and 1972 essays on Proust. 11 Famously, Deleuze writes in the preface to the 1972 version that he is concerned, in the later essay, with the production of signs as opposed to merely their interpretation. What this really comes down to is a difference in his conception of art. In 1965, Deleuze writes that art merely renders objects adequate to essences and reproduces what occurs in essences; art therefore regains or refracts the birth of a world (Deleuze 2000: ). Even in Difference and Repetition, this reproduction of essences seems to persist, as Deleuze uses the language of correspondence to describe the relationship of the art work to the point of view: to every perspective or point of view there must correspond an autonomous work with its own selfsufficient sense (Deleuze 1994: 69). In the earlier essay, then, and in Difference and Repetition, art does not produce the way of unfolding signs, the viewpoint; thus, there remains a kind of residue of Platonism, insofar as those ways of seeing the world must pre-exist, in order to then be reproduced by art. In the 1972 essay Deleuze attempts to combat the residue of Platonism in the earlier work; this attempt explains the new importance of the themes of antilogos, the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, and the opposition between Greek and modern conceptions of law. We must now look at the positive production of essences in more detail, as this is ultimately how Deleuze moves his earlier essay beyond any pre-existing viewpoints on the world. The theme of the production of essence, the production of a new way of unfolding the signs of the world, only comes out in Deleuze s 1972 essay on Proust. 13 This change from the reproduction of viewpoints to the production of viewpoints is not as simple as it first appears: we must find out how the artist can discover a kind of new viewpoint without imposing his or her own viewpoint, but at the same time bringing those various ways of seeing the world together into a unity without presupposing the existence of that viewpoint in the world outside of

11 110 Joseph Barker thought. We will find this problem is resolved by the unity of style, but first we must ask the question: how does Deleuze, in 1972, think viewpoints are produced? What produces Essence is, most specifically, the resonance between two objects (Deleuze 2000: 152). We can see this very purely once again in the simplicity of Warhol s Campbell s soup series: the object of consumption (the soup can) is made to resonate with the material object as such (the canvas). In this resonance between two objects, a new way in which the world can appear is not merely regained, but is produced: the infinite and absolutely identical principle of reproduction within consumption and the degradation of materiality exchange their determinations, such that consumption is no longer infinite but is torn apart from inside into a spiralling repetition which constantly undoes itself. Resonance does not just accept whatever fragments or objects come to it; it extracts its own fragments from an absolutely dispersed field and sets up a resonance between them; for example, the soup can and the printed canvas are very specific types of object. The resonance between these two objects produces a kind of ecstasy in the artistic experimentation which produces a new world; once you walk around Warhol s soup cans, you feel a kind of ecstasy at the new connections produced between all sorts of stereotyped objects; almost every object in the contemporary world begins to resonate differently with you (153). New meanings are produced in this resonance, which means producing new relations between things and new ways of unfolding the organisation of the world. Whilst resonances produce new viewpoints, art itself produces resonances themselves. There is, of course, a kind of unity to this production of resonances; there must be unity in order for there to be a way of seeing the world, as opposed to simply there being a collection or succession of otherwise disconnected fragments. If Warhol had merely set a soup can and a canvas side by side, the resonance set up between consumption and materiality would not have been as intense; if he had attempted a naturalistic portrait of the soup cans in their natural habitat, the specific resonance of consumption and materiality would also not have been as precisely foregrounded. Rather, Warhol s passion for both death and capitalist consumption means that he manages to bring together the very form of the object of consumption and the form of painting itself, the material canvas. Warhol allows to each object its own set of meanings: the stereotypical repetition and infinite, identical reproduction of the soup can, and the degradation or impossibility of reproduction of the material print upon the canvas.

12 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 111 The unity Warhol brings is the unity of style (Deleuze 2000: 115). Style explicates signs but retains the chains of association specific to each sign; it does not impose any associations from the outside. In other words, the viewpoint of the specific object is retained in style, so that it is as if the new viewpoint produced by style is divided into a thousand noncommunicating viewpoints (166). We perhaps can imagine that terrified confusion on the faces of the suburban shoppers and the art connoisseurs wandering around Warhol s early exhibitions, faced by a viewpoint which seems to fragment into other, previously completely incompatible viewpoints. Style thus involves a kind of terrifying confusion without regard for any harmony between the viewpoints; any harmony, any pre-existing wholeness would return to a kind of Platonism of viewpoints. It is thus a viewpoint which sets various other viewpoints, even infinite viewpoints, within each other (167). To be most precise, the unity of style is thus not imposed upon various other viewpoints, but style discovers a kind of unity in the way that viewpoints fit together. This is a very special kind of unity that appears afterwards ; it is a unity which Deleuze calls transversality, the communication of many objects or signs and the viewpoints they contain, wrapped up within themselves (167). We can state the point we have reached as follows: art makes possible the dramatization of a way of seeing the world which retains other ways of seeing the world in their originality; in other words, art does not imprison other ways of seeing the world within its own viewpoint, but grants them a genuine coexistence within a new viewpoint. Thus, we can now understand more clearly why Deleuze attaches so much importance to Proust writing that only by art can we emerge from ourselves, can we know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours ; thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply (Proust 1989: 895 6, cited Deleuze 2000: 42). Thus, art meets the two ethical criteria set out by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: firstly, by preserving multiple viewpoints on the world, art prevents us from explicating or unfolding ourselves or others to the point where we become trapped in a single world. 14 Secondly, art causes the highest intensive fragments to affirm the lowest: it makes possible a coexistence of various fragments or individuals without forcing the lowest to be subsumed into the viewpoint of the highest. Warhol s soup can series, for example, brings together the most powerful intensities, those of death and destruction, with the most menial intensities, the infinite reproduction of consumption, without imposing a pre-existing unity upon them, but rather discovering a new unity, kneading them

13 112 Joseph Barker together. 15 We find confirmation of this reading when Deleuze tells us that art make[s] the two extremes resonate namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death (Deleuze 1994: 293). All of these themes come together insofar as this ethical aspect of art in fact leads into a political transformation of civilisation which acts as a real dramatization of the entire dominant world, the world system of automated capitalism: [art] aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications which make up the real essence of this civilisation, in order that Difference may at last be expressed with a force of anger which is itself repetitive and capable of introducing the strangest selection, even if this is only a contraction here and there in other words, a freedom for the end of a world. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 292) That is, an end of the world of the majority, that world in which the white, male, adult, rational, man is made into the standard viewpoint upon all things in the universe (Deleuze 1994: 293). Art frees us from explicating ourselves too much in terms of the illusions of our civilisation, yet does not simply impose a new unity (for example, the unity of humanism, communism or religion), but forms a unity from out of all the fragments composing contemporary civilisation, not imprisoning us in one vision of the world, but kneading many visions together. Language has a special place in Deleuze s account of art because it can directly create new relationships of meaning or sense which force us to think differently, as opposed to art as such which can create new relationships between sensations that make us feel differently. We can begin to understand this by considering a passage about music from what Deleuze calls the ultimate cosmic book, Sexus by Henry Miller: 16 In the distance a band was playing; it brought back memories of my childhood, stifled dreams, longings, regrets. A sultry, passionate rebellion filled my veins (Miller 1993: 7). Music works at the level of memory and dream to give rise to a sensation, a passionate rebellion. On the other hand, language gives rise to a chain of thoughts: The little phrase Why don t you try to write? involved me, as it had from the very beginning, in a hopeless bog of confusion. I wanted to enchant but not to enslave; I wanted a greater, richer life, but not at the expense of others; I wanted to free the imagination of all men at once because without the support of the whole world, without a world imaginatively unified, the freedom of the imagination becomes a vice. (Miller 1993: 17)

14 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 113 Firstly, we can note that a phrase involves Miller; at this point, language and other forms of artistic expression are not so distant, as both a picture and a poem can involve us. Yet, the phrase Why don t you try to write? involves Miller in a bog of confusion. Whatisthis bog of confusion composed of? A proliferating chain of thoughts: the thought of enchanting other people; the thought of a greater, richer life; the thought of freeing the imagination of all men. A phrase has made Miller think differently. This is precisely what Deleuze thinks is important about language: it changes the way we think. Language is basically formed by syntax, in other words, explicit relationships between meaningful elements, words, as opposed to painting, in which the relationships between meaningful elements remain implicit. To modify the structures of meaning is to force us to think differently, as happens to Henry Miller in relation to the phrase: Why don t you try to write? This modification of the relationships between meanings can occur at the level of the language of sensations, as in art, or at the level of events, as in philosophy, or at the level of states of affairs, as in science. 17 What is crucial is the modification of sense itself, which constitutes the entire unconscious of thought. This is why Deleuze can say that the form of exteriority of thought is the necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one s own tongue, which means a lack of control of the variation of viewpoints inherent within words. This lack of control would not simply enforce a single world of meaning but would bring something incomprehensible into the world (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 378). Whilst we have discovered that language involves the modification of the structures of thought and meaning themselves, we must add a qualification to this: the importance of writing. Speaking is always caught up with a social command in a specific situation; the father commands the son to act in a certain way. However, writing is pure, as Deleuze says, because it is not forced into making a social command. Writing can be a pure modification of syntax and meaning, and thus it is only truly writing which makes us think differently. To write is thus to select the whispering voices... and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi), the self being the content of the I think (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 84). Not only that, but the direct discourse which constitutes my world of meanings in relation to things is, in writing, still the free indirect discourse running through me. What this means is that my writing is now coming from other worlds or other planets. Writing is not tied to the command of speech but rather can bring into my world a whole flow of meaning from other worlds. Writing

15 114 Joseph Barker speaks to the dead by referencing and bringing into play past works, and it brings their worlds into our world; perhaps one could say writing makes the dead live again. We discover, in the variation of our world in writing, a morality capable of perpetuating life within language and giving reasons to believe in this world, this newly dramatized world in which we no longer imprison others but in which the multiple rhythms of various viewpoints are gathered in their proper dispersion (Deleuze 1989: 172). In conclusion, we can say that language, and specifically writing, brings together a whole set of different viewpoints which are condensed within the various worlds of language into a coherent system of signs. This also has the power to change our consciousness, our world of meaning, because writing plays directly upon meaning; it is thus like the outside of thought which engenders thinking within thought (or our system of meanings). Thus, language is something like the height of ethics insofar as it makes it possible for us to experience a world in which we do not impose a single vision of the world but allow for many possible points of view. This modification of consciousness by language is like the insertion of art into everyday life, which for Deleuze is the highest aesthetic project, but which is also, as we have seen, the highest ethical project. If ethics is defined by the affirmation of the lowest by the highest, language, and most specifically writing, can gather together all of the various points of view embodied in the fragments of language, whilst retaining their own ways of unfolding signs and understanding the world. Thus, thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply (Proust 1989: 895 6, cited in Deleuze 2000: 42), we dramatize a world in which dramatization itself can occur, in which new worlds can arise, and this occurs with most efficacy within language. Notes 1. See, for example, the ethical selection of differential quantities in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962; Deleuze 1983), the ethics of affirming intensive quantities in Difference and Repetition (1967; Deleuze 1994), the Ethics of increasing affects and powers in the Becoming chapter of A Thousand Plateaus (1980; Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and the interpretation of Nietzschean life-affirming ethics in Cinema 2 (1985; Deleuze 1989). 2. For Smith s take on the three ethical criteria, see Smith 2012: In Deleuze s Proust and Signs (2000), he defines this kind of world of signs as that of worldly signs, because they simply reproduce a world, they stand in for actions and thoughts. 4. As Deleuze emphasises throughout chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition: conceptual philosophical thought has as its implicit presupposition a prephilosophical and natural Image of thought, borrowed from the pure element

16 Love, Art and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds 115 of common sense, and the only thing which can persuade us of this natural image of thought in line with common sense is morality (Deleuze 1994: 131 2). Deleuze had explored a very similar theme three years earlier in the 1965 version of his Proust book, where he claims that if intelligence comes before the encounter with the sign, then it [intelligence] presupposes its own natural correspondence with the sign, or its own good will to discover the truth (Deleuze 2000: 23). 5. The Ideas of a theatrical play will of course have a certain relation to the everyday meaning of objects, but will not be dominated by that meaning, so long as the Ideas of the play are truly creative. In this regard Deleuze s concept of cliché in the Cinema books would be an example of the everyday meanings of things in relation to the space of dramatization. 6. Words themselves are world-fragments like unmatching puzzle-pieces and they correspond to other fragments of the same world (Deleuze 2000: 125). 7. In a sense, there is a new self which is formed when we try to explicate the signs of the other person in terms of our own meanings, because those signs, by their other nature, are impossible to fully integrate. However, it is always a new self which is formed which is not that of the other person; thus, we imprison the other when we explicate them too much and we bring our self a new kind of life which excludes the other person. 8. See Deleuze 2000: As Deleuze famously says in his talk What Is the Creative Act? What other people dream is very dangerous. Dreams are a terrifying will to power. Each of us is more or less a victim of other people s dreams. Even the most graceful young woman is a horrific ravager, not because of her soul, but because of her dreams. Beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for (Deleuze 2006: 318). 10. The ethics of intensive quantities has only two principles: affirm even the lowest, do not explicate oneself (too much) (Deleuze 1994: 244). 11. We might also suggest that Deleuze s new conception of the production of essences or Ideas explains why, from Anti-Oedipus onwards, Deleuze becomes hostile to the notion of theatricalisation and no longer employs the notion of dramatization (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). For example, Deleuze valorises the notion of production and opposes it to the notion of the unconscious as theatre in the section D for désir in his A to Z interviews with Claire Parnet (Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, 2011). In the 1967 essay on dramatization, Deleuze is clear that through dramatization, the Idea is incarnated or actualized, it differentiates itself (Deleuze 2004: 94); yet, in the resonance between two viewpoints upon a world, we now find that Ideas (or essences) are not only re-produced by actualisation, but are also, in very specific cases (for example, art), produced. However, there is still a world, a world of art which must be set up (hence the relation between art and the production of a territory), and that is why the theme of theatre does recur in the discussion of art in the Ritournelle chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. 12. The 1965 and 1972 versions of the essay were published together in one volume as Proust and Signs: The Complete Text (Deleuze 2000). 13. The obvious point to note is that, between 1965 (and indeed 1968) and 1972, Deleuze has met Guattari; further investigation would be required to establish whether the production of new ways of unfolding signs is developed in Anti- Oedipus in the same way that we see in the 1972 Proust essay. We find a relationship between the sign and production insofar as the one vocation of the sign is to produce desire, engineering it in every direction (Deleuze 1983: 39).

17 116 Joseph Barker 14. See note 10 above. 15. Against some who might criticise Warhol for his proximity to consumerism, and by extension Deleuze, we can quote Zourabichvili: the best point of view does not ignore the base points of view, but lives them intensely, and considers the ensemble of existential possibilities from out of them, even at the cost of then inverting its perspective and ending up with the other kind of distance (baseness seen from on high) (Zourabichvili 2012: 126). 16. It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in Sexus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 512 n.56). 17. Deleuze s use of language in relation to sensations makes it unclear precisely what Deleuze wants to suggest is specific to language. References Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans.richardhoward, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2004) The Method of Dramatization, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, , ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, New York: Columbia University Press, pp Deleuze, Gilles (2006) What Is the Creative Act?, in Two Regimes of Madness, New York: Columbia University Press. pp Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, with Claire Parnet, DVD, directed by Pierre-André Boutang, trans. Charles J. Stivale. France: Semiotext(e), Miller, Henry [1962] (1993) Sexus, London: Flamingo. Proust, Marcel [1913] (1989) À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Smith, Daniel W. (2012) Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zourabichvili, François (2012) Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze, ed. Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, trans. Kieron Aarons, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.