Contours and case studies for a dissenting subjectivity

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Notes

1. Our model for this collaboration – and for this notion of collectivity – is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's collaborative project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and especially A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). As Deleuze and Guattari remark at the very beginning of the latter: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (ibid. 3). What follows is indebted to this philosophical benchmark in collaboration.

2. We take this notion of an “ecology” of subjectivity (and indeed of an “internal” and “external” collectivity) from Guattari's The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone, 2000).

3. Spinoza writes, in the third book of the Ethics, that: “[N]obody as yet has determined the limits of the body's capabilities: that is, nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do, without being determined by mind, solely from the laws of its nature insofar as it is considered as corporeal” (“Ethics,” trans. Samuel Shirley, in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2002) 280).

4. An ethical trajectory – the construction of life through joyful encounters that increase the collective capacity to act – always involves an aesthetic moment or event of experimentation in the sense of a test or programme that inevitably runs the risk of failure. Under the conditions of a capitalist distribution of affects, for instance, an ethical programme often involves a rupture, which may at times appear violent but from which an ethical trajectory emerges as the potential of a future kind of politics.

5. As for the relation between bodies, spaces and nature, we are indebted to the work of Spinoza, but also to the Spinozism deployed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus; see, for example, 253–60.

6. These three proposals are extracted from Spinoza's writing on bodies – and in particular the two notions of corpora simplicissima (single or simple body) and corpora composita (composite body). See the second book of the Ethics 243–77.

7. The use of the prefix “alt” here is not simply short for “alternative” but designates a kind of minor or sub-function – in much the same sense as the alt key on a computer keyboard.

8. See, for example, Antonio Negri's Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London: Continuum, 2003) esp. 23–29.

9. At the very end of Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), Deleuze returns to this notion of the dice throw, linking it to a Spinozism and to a univocal infinity generative of differentiation (see 303–04).

10. We might make a point about capitalism, and its own deterritorialising function here. Aesthetic and creative practices operate against the axiomatic functioning of capital but plug into its own logics of invention and innovation. As Deleuze and Guattari remark, it is less a question of a “withdrawal from the world market” but of proceeding “in the opposite direction … To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization” (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984) 239). This is not simply to affirm the capitalist mode of production but rather to affirm that which the latter unleashes, “the awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy and charge, against which it [capitalism] brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism's limit” (ibid. 34).

11. The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork – situated in the Great Salt Lake, Utah – built in the 1970s by the artist Robert Smithson. Shortly after the work was completed the waters of the Lake rose and the Jetty disappeared. A prolonged drought in Utah means that the Jetty has now re-emerged and taken on a new aspect, encrusted as it is with white salt crystals.

12. This notion of art's future orientation, that it invokes a people-yet-to-come, is a constant refrain in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. For a couple of indicative passages, see Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan and Reda Bensmaia (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 17–18, and What is Philosophy?, trans Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 1994) 218.

13. The Sun Tunnels, four massive tubes of concrete studded with holes that reflect various constellations of stars, were built by the artist Nancy Holt in the 1970s. They are positioned in a specific formation about a day's drive from the Spiral Jetty, in the barren Utah landscape.

14. In relation to this, Henri Bergson writes on the suspension of normal motor activity that in itself allows other “planes” of reality to become perceivable (this is an opening up to the world beyond utilitarian interests) (see Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988) esp. 101–02). See also Deleuze's Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991) esp. 106–13.

15. We take this framework from Guattari's important work on the production of subjectivity. See Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power, 1995), and especially the first chapter, “On the Production of Subjectivity” 1–32. The quotes appear on pages 5 and 18.

16. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” trans. Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, in Michel Foucault – The Essential Works, vol. 2: Aesthetics, ed. James Faubion (London, Penguin, 1998) 373. In this essay, Foucault makes numerous links between the body and genealogy; for example: “The body is the surface of the inscription of events […]. Genealogy […] is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body” (ibid. 376).

17. See Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of “the Untimely” and of a becoming that is irreducible to history, but premised on it, in What is Philosophy? 112–13.

18. Deleuze refers to this strange nature of festivals – that they do not represent a past, but repeat in advance the original event – at the very beginning of Difference and Repetition (“… it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days …” (1)).

19. The text here, and in the following sentences, is by the artist collective C.CRED, produced as part of a wider art project entitled permanent ignition, which also included walks and installations/interventions in public spaces around Turin. This citation also includes a quote by Marco Scavino, in conversation with C.CRED at the permanent ignition symposium, BIG Torino 2002 – BIG Social Game, 15 May 2002. The Italian phrase “Agnelli fascista sei il primo della lista” is referring to Gianni Agnelli, principal shareholder of the FIAT corporation, and translates approximately as: “Agnelli, you fascist, you’re the first one on the list.”

20. See Bergson's Matter and Memory, especially chapter 2, “Of the Recognition of Images: Memory and the Brain” 77–131.

21. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, storytelling can operate as a kind of precondition that allows new forms of experience to emerge. See the essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999) 83–107, where Benjamin writes of the boredom of storytelling being the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (90).

22. The three different kinds of knowledge are addressed by Spinoza in the Ethics, in a general sense in book 2 (243–77), and with regard to the third kind of knowledge in book 5 (363–82). See also Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988) for a tracking through of these three knowledges, and see the last section, “Beatitude,” of Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone, 1992) 303–20, for a more in-depth account of the “third kind of knowledge.”

23. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone, 1993) 13.

24. Communities, like subjectivities, are refrains in this sense (constituted territories that allow for the possibility of deterritorialisations). See the plateau “1837: Of the Refrain” in A Thousand Plateaus 310–50.

25. We take this notion of “probe-heads” from the plateau “Year Zero: Faciality” (A Thousand Plateaus 167–91), where they are described as those practices/forms of organisation that disrupt the particular conjunction of the signifying and subjectifying regimes (faciality) that constitutes us as human. As Deleuze and Guattari remark: “probe-heads (têtes chercheuses, guidance devices) … dismantle the strata in their wake, break through walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favour of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight” (190).

26. John Coltrane, in interview with Carl-Gustav Lindgren, quoted in Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder, 1998) 277–92.