Pragmatics for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for Probe‐Heads

Abstract

This article attends to the collaborative project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and specifically to their concept of “probe‐head” as mapped out in A Thousand Plateaus. Probe‐head names the rupturing of, and production of alternative modes of organisation to, the mixed semiotic of faciality that determines much of our lived life, in fact that constitutes us as “human”. In exploring this alternative “production of subjectivity” the essay attends also to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “several regimes of signs”, and to the idea of an experimental “pragmatics” of living. The essay goes on to map out what might be called two operating terrains of probe‐heads, in fact two different “times” of the contemporary – the past and the future – and looks at how these might be deployed against the impasses of the present. As far as the latter goes the essay looks at case studies of myth/modern paganism and contemporary art production.

Notes

1. The mass media presents events in such a way as to produce a climate – or landscape – of anxiety (always the fear of rupture, of interruption, of “death” (however this latter is figured)). This is particularly the case with so‐called news programmes, which select, isolate and exaggerate apparent threats and in so doing contribute to the alienation of contemporary life (we become spectators on a fearful world). A case study of this, especially today, would be the “terrorist threat”. As regards the mass media, little attention is given to the complexities of any given geopolitical situation, or indeed the different “terrorisms” that are invariably grouped together (in legal and popular terms), and instead “terrorists” are presented as personifications – faces – of evil that may strike anyone in any place at any time. The enemy is amongst us in this sense; anyone and everyone might be the potential suicide bomber. It is the apparently arbitrary nature of this threat that constitutes it force. Paradoxically these faces of evil operate to reassure a public that evil does indeed have a face, although it is not the white man’s face, hence the emphasis on “terrorist” “leaders”, the obsession with the face of Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden for example. In fact, the real threat (but also the hope of a kind of liberation) is of the faceless, of that which might disrupt the face, and with it the typical norms and procedures of subject‐production (that is, the faciality machine).

2. Although I do not look at it in this essay, Buddhism might be seen as a diagnosis of this situation produced by the faciality machine, and as a series of strategies for living “against” it. It is in this sense that practices of Western Buddhism in particular might be said to operate as probe‐heads. See my article “In Violence: Three Case Studies Against the Stratum” (O’Sullivan 2000) for the beginnings of an account of Deleuze’s resonances with Western Buddhist practices.

3. The plateau, “November 28, 1947: How Do You Build Yourself a Body Without Organs?” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988, pp. 149–66), offers a series of case studies of just such a programme. The Body Without Organs (BwO) is a parallel concept to probe‐heads, both being names for those constructive and experimental practices that involve living against that strata that binds us and constitutes us as human:

Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body – otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted – otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement – otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification) (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 159).

Importantly, the BwO plateau also alerts us to the need for caution in such experimental practices. Building yourself a BwO, and we might say the same about constructing probe‐heads, is an art of dosages. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “Staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen; the worse that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988, p. 161).

4. As Deleuze remarks:

As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two. For the face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent on the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination … Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face. (Deleuze 2003, pp. 20–1)

5. For Negri, this future orientation/creation begins with naming (Negri 2003, pp. 147–58). Although it is not within the scope of this essay, an interesting comparison might be made between Negri’s act of naming and the work of art as understood by Deleuze and Guattari. A crucial question would be whether a people can be called into being without a linguistic utterance (that is, through a bloc of sensations that is irreducible to signification).

6. Deleuze and Guattari note a further “countersignifying semiotic” of “a nomad war‐machine directed against the state apparatus” that proceeds by an asignifying numeration: “breaks, transitions, migration and accumulation” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988, p. 118). See Chapter 3, “Art and the Political: Minor Literature, The War Machine and the Production of Subjectivity”, of my Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari (O’Sullivan 2005) for an exploration of this semiotic in relation to the Red Army Faction guerrilla formation.

7. For Deleuze’s account of the fold of modern subjectivity, see the section “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)”, pp. 94–123, in Foucault (1988a). See also Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993), and especially “The Two Floors”, pp. 100–21, for a more complex account of the baroque fold of subjectivity.

8. We see a similar ambivalence towards modernity in Walter Benjamin’s writings, the oft‐quoted loss of aura and replacement of the sorcerer by the surgeon. See Benjamin (1999, pp. 226–7). Again, there is no call for a return here, indeed Benjamin’s essay precisely affirms, at least in one sense, the technological developments of modernity and the subsequent democratisation of art. There is however a call to the past as a corrective to a simple celebration of the regime of the present.

9. See Deleuze and Guattari 1986, especially pp. 16–19.

10. For a more sustained account of art’s relation to the production of subjectivity, and for a series of case studies that bring Deleuze into contact with modern and contemporary art, see my Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (O’Sullivan 2005).

11. See Deleuze and Parnet (1977, pp. 36–76), for a discussion of the traitor in this sense.

12. See “Beatitude”, the final section of Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Deleuze 1991, pp. 303–20), for an account of this third kind of knowledge and what can only be described as the trans human state it produces.