Deleuze's Way

DELEUZE’S WAY
Addressing the essential question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in
Deleuze’s philosophy this book provides clear indications of the practical implications
of Deleuze’s approach to the arts through detailed analyses of the ethical dimension
of artistic activity in literature, music, and film.
Bogue examines Deleuze’s “transverse way” of interrelating the ethical and the
aesthetic, the transverse way being both a mode of thought and a practice of living.
Among the issues examined are those of the relationship of music to literature, the
political vocation of the arts, violence in popular music, the ethics and aesthetics
of education, the use of music and sound in film, the role of the visual in literary
invention, the function of the arts in cross cultural interactions, and the future of
Deleuzian analysis as a means of forming an open, reciprocally self-constituting,
transcultural global culture.
Drawing on years of insight into the works of Gilles Deleuze, Ronald Bogue provides
a careful and systematic study of Deleuze’s transverse way, the myriad diagonal paths
connecting seemingly incommunicable domains: Deleuze’s immanent ethics as they
correspond to the themes of the “minor” in literature and music; the construction of
concepts through a pedagogy of images and the efficacy of fabulation; nomadology
considered both as an expression of actual nomadic practices and as a comparative
poetics for understanding globalization. Through this exploration of the Deleuzian
method, Bogue reveals how these transversal connections constitute so many ways
of thinking, of creating, and of multiplying variations that enliven and conjoin the
arts and philosophy.
Charles J. Stivale, Distinguished Professor of French,
Wayne State University, USA

For my sister, Cynthia Bogue

Deleuze’s Way
Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics
RONALD BOGUE
University of Georgia, USA

© Ronald Bogue 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Ronald Bogue has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Gower House Suite 420
Croft Road 101 Cherry Street
Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405
Hampshire GU11 3HR USA
England
Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bogue, Ronald, 1948-
Deleuze’s way : essays in transverse ethics and aesthetics
1. Deleuze, Gilles 2. Deleuze, Gilles - Aesthetics
3. Ethics
I. Title
194
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bogue, Ronald, 1948-
Deleuze’s way : essays in transverse ethics and aesthetics / Ronald Bogue.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-6032-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2.
Ethics. 3. Aesthetics. I. Title.
B2430.D454B65 2007
194--dc22
ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-6032-3
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.
2006026857

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction The Transverse Way: Du côté de chez Deleuze 1
1 Immanent Ethics 7
2 Minority, Territory, Music 17
3 Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 35
4 Search, Swim and See: Deleuze’s Apprenticeship
in Signs and Pedagogy of Images 53
5 Tragedy, Sight and Sound: The Birth of Godard’s
Prénom Carmen from the Nietzschean Spirit of Music 69
6 Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 91
7 Re-Viewing Deleuze’s Sacher-Masoch 107
8 Apology for Nomadology 113
9 Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 123
10 Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 137
Bibliography 167
Index 171

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
and the University of Georgia Research Foundation for their generous support of
this project. For their encouragement and advice, I would like to thank Constantin V.
Boundas, Ian Buchanan, Hanping Chiu, David Jones, Jean Khalfa, John K. Noyes,
Michael Schwartz, Inna Semetsky, Marcel Swiboda and Jason Wirth. I am also
grateful for permission to publish modified versions of essays that appeared in the
following:
“The Immanent Ethics of Gilles Deleuze,” in A Feast of Logos: Essays in
Commemoration of the Tenth Anniversary of the Georgia Continental Philosophy
Circle, eds Jason Wirth, Michael Schwartz, and David Jones (Atlanta: Georgia
Philosophy Series, 2005), pp. 87–99. © Georgia Philosophy Series, reprinted with
permission.
“Minority, Territory, Music,” in An Introduction to the Complete Work of Gilles
Deleuze, ed. Jean Khalfa (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 114–32. © Ronald
Bogue, reprinted with kind permission of the publisher.
“Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom, and Black,” in Deleuze and
Music, eds Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004), pp. 95–117. © Ronald Bogue, reprinted with permission of the
publisher.
“Search, Swim and See: Deleuze’s Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of
Images,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36/3 (2004): 327–42. © Blackwell
Publishing, reprinted with permission.
“Apology for Nomadology,” Interventions, 6/2 (2004): 169–79. © Taylor and Francis
, reprinted with permission.
“Nomadic Flows: Globalism and the Local Absolute,” Concentric, 31/1 (2005):
7–25. © Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, reprinted
with permission.
“Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed.
Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). © Ronald
Bogue, reprinted with permission of the publisher.

This page intentionally left blank

List of Abbreviations
All translations from Deleuze, Guattari and Deleuze-Guattari are my own. For works
that have appeared in English translation, citations include page numbers of the
original French edition followed by the page numbers of the corresponding passages
in the English translation.
AO Deleuze and Guattari. L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie I.
Paris: Minuit, 1972. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and
Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
B Deleuze. Le Bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966.
Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York:
Zone Books, 1991.
CC Deleuze. Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit, 1993. Essays Critical and
Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
D Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Dialogues.
Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987.
DR Deleuze. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1968. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
DRF Deleuze. Deux régimes de foux: textes et entretiens 1975–1995. Ed. David
Lapoujade. Paris: Minuit, 2003. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and
Interviews 1975–1995. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New
York: Semiotext(e), 2006.
E Deleuze. L’Épuisé (published with Samuel Beckett’s Quad). Paris: Minuit,
1992. “The Exhausted,” in Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W.
Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997, pp. 152–74.
FB Deleuze. Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Vol. 1. Paris: Editions de
la différence, 1981. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel
W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

x
Deleuze’s Way
ID Deleuze. L’Île déserte et autres textes: textes et entretiens 1953–1974. Ed.
David Lapoujade. Paris: Minuit, 2002. Desert Islands and Other Texts
1953–1974. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.
IT Deleuze. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris, Minuit, 1985. Cinema 2: The
Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
K Deleuze and Guattari. Kafka: pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit,
1975. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
LP Deleuze. Le Pli. Leibniz et la baroque. Paris: Minuit, 1988. The Fold.
Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
LS Deleuze. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. The Logic of Sense. Trans.
Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990.
MP Deleuze and Guattari. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, II.
Paris: Minuit, 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
NP Deleuze. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1962. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
PP Deleuze. Pourparlers. Paris: Minuit, 1990. Negotiations. Trans. Martin
Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
PS Deleuze. Proust et les signes. 3rd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1976. Proust and Signs. The Complete Text. Trans. Richard Howard.
London: Athlone, 2000.
PT Guattari. Psychanalyse et transversalité. Paris: Maspero, 1972. Selected
essays published in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans.
Rosemary Sheed. London: Penguin, 1984.
PV Deleuze. Périclès et Verdi. La Philosophie de François Châtelet. Paris:
Minuit, 1988.
QP Deleuze and Guattari. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. Paris: Minuit, 1991.
What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

List of Abbreviations xi
RM Guattari. La Révolution moléculaire. Paris: Recherches, 1977. Selected
essays published in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans.
Rosemary Sheed. London: Penguin, 1984.
S Deleuze. Spinoza: Philosophie pratique. 2nd edn. Paris: Minuit, 1981.
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA:
City Lights, 1988.
SM Deleuze. Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Masochism:
An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York:
G. Braziller, 1971.
SP Deleuze and Carmelo Bene. Superpositions. Paris: Minuit, 1979. “One
Less Manifesto,” trans. in The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction
The Transverse Way
Du côté de chez Deleuze
Near the end of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, as the narrator
reflects on time and the complex interconnections among events that surge forth in
involuntary memory, he considers the figure of Mlle de Saint-Loup, and asks:
Was she not – are not, indeed, the majority of human beings? – like one of those starshaped
cross-roads in a forest where roads converge that have come, in the forest as in our
lives, from the most diverse quarter? Numerous for me were the roads which led to Mlle
de Saint-Loup and which radiated around her. Firstly the two great “ways” themselves,
where on many walks I had dreamed so many dreams, both led to her: through her father
Robert de Saint-Loup, the Guermantes way; through Gilberte, her mother, the Méséglise
way which was also “Swann’s way.” One of them took me, by way of this girl’s mother
and the Champs-Elysées, to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to Méséglise itself; the
other, by way of her father, to those afternoons at Balbec where even now I saw him again
near the sun-bright sea. And then between these two high roads a network of transversals
was set up. 1
A network of transversals, of crisscrossing diagonal paths, interconnects the two
“ways” that structure the book, the Guermantes way and the Méséglise way. Yet
what is striking about these transversals is not simply that they interconnect. As
Deleuze points out in his Proust and Signs, they interconnect entities that are closed
in upon themselves, seemingly without communication with anything outside
themselves. The Guermantes way and the Méséglise way, says the narrator, were
like vases clos, chemical retorts, or sealed glass vessels. The two ways existed “far
apart from one another and unaware of each other’s existence, in the sealed vessels
of separate afternoons” (vol. 1, p. 147, translation modified). The same is true of
every experience of involuntary memory in the Recherche. As the narrator observes
when he reflects on the multiple associations tied to a given sensation
… the act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of
them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one
from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years,
during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are
situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily
diverse atmospheres. [vol. 3, p. 903]
1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin (New York, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 1084–85.

2
Deleuze’s Way
Transversals provide communication among incommunicables. The multiple sealed
glass vessels of the Recherche are interconnected, says Deleuze
… by transversals, which make us leap from one profile of Albertine to another, from one
Albertine to another, from one world to another, from one word to another, without ever
gathering the multiple within the One, without ever reassembling the multiple in a whole,
but affirming the very original unity of this particular multiple, affirming without uniting
all [tous] these irreducible fragments within a Whole [Tout]. [PS 153/126]
The function of transversals is to assemble multiplicities, yet in such a way that the
differences among entities are not effaced but intensified. As Proust’s narrator says
of a railway trip, “the specific attraction of a journey lies not in our being able to
alight at places on the way and to stop altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in
its making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as
intense as possible.” 2 Transversals, like Proust’s railway journeys, are the passages
that render maximum intensity to the differences between multiple locations.
Deleuze’s way is the transverse way, the diagonal path connecting
incommunicable ways, a trajectory that intensifies the distances between locations.
His way is also a way of doing – a practice of making transverse connections, of
assembling multiplicities that affirm their differences through their connections. In
Proust, Deleuze first came upon the notion of transversality, but he met it as well,
in a different guise, in the early work of his frequent collaborator, Félix Guattari. In
Psychoanalysis and Transversality (1972), which assembles Guattari’s papers and
interventions from the 1960s, Guattari reflects on the difficulty of bringing genuine
change to the structure and operation of psychiatric institutions. He identifies two
dimensions in psychiatric institutions, “a verticality that you find for example in an
organizational diagram with a pyramidal structure (directors, subdirectors, etc.),”
and “a horizontality like that which takes form in the hospital courtyard, in the ward
for the disturbed, even more so in the wards for the senile, that is, a certain state
of affairs in which things and people arrange themselves as best they can in the
situation in which they find themselves” (PT 79/17). The problem, as he sees it, is to
change both vertical hierarchies of authority and horizontal modes of interaction, to
put into effect a “maximum communication … among different levels and above all
in different directions” (PT 80/18). In a hospital, “the ‘coefficient of transversality’
is [measured by] the degree of blindness of the staff,” and the modification of the
institution involves an intensification of transversality such that blindness decreases
and there is “a structural redefinition of the role of each individual and a reorientation
of the whole group [ensemble]” (PT 80/18). Transversality is “a contrary and
complementary dimension to the generative structures of pyramidal hierarchization
and sterilizing modes of transmitting messages” (PT 84/22). By increasing an
institution’s coefficient of transversality Guattari hopes to form a “group-subject”
(as opposed to a “subjected group”), one capable of shaping itself according to its
own needs and desires.
Proust’s transversals and Guattari’s transversality might seem distant from one
another, but both may be seen as dimensions of Deleuze’s transverse way. Proust’s
2 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, p. 693.

The Transverse Way: Du côté de chez Deleuze 3
transversals provide connections in experience, linking sensations and memories, and
thereby putting in communication incommunicable worlds and durations. They also
make possible the work of art that is the Recherche, itself a structuring of transversals
that emphasizes the singleness of the work as a heterogeneous multiplicity. Hence
Proust’s transversals concern the domain of the aesthetic in its largest sense, that
is, the realm of sense experience and the realm of art. Guattari’s transversality is
primarily a social and political concept, but in Deleuze’s view, and in Guattari’s,
the social and the political are inseparable from sensation and creation, whether that
creation takes place in the arts, the sciences, politics, or any other sphere of human
endeavor.
The term “transversality” does not occupy a central place in Deleuze and
Guattari’s collaborative works, but it does appear in Anti-Oedipus during the
authors’ exposition of the goals they foresee for “schizoanalysis.” One of these goals
is the formation of a group subject, whose “libidinal investments are themselves
revolutionary.” Against the stratified libidinal investments of subjected groups, it
“opposes real coefficients of transversality, with neither hierarchy nor group superego”
(AO 417–18/348–9). In their next book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
Deleuze and Guattari do not mention the group subject or transversality, but they do
speak about the immediately social and collective nature of Kafka’s work and of his
desire to form a “people to come.” This “people to come” clearly is a version of the
group subject shaped by “real coefficients of transversality,” and in Kafka they argue
that literature as a whole has as one of its primary aims that of inventing a people to
come. Finally, in their last collaborative effort, What Is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze
and Guattari go even further and state that the arts, the sciences and philosophy,
despite their fundamental differences, share the common task of creating a people to
come (QP 206/218).
The line of thought from “transversality” to the “people to come,” then, leads to a
consideration of the social and political dimensions of the arts, and, ultimately, to the
fundamental question of the relationship between the ethical, which I take in a broad
sense as the domain of values and action, and the aesthetic. Proust’s transversals are
constituents of experience and means of artistic construction, but they also are the
tools for forming connections, and hence modes of thought that might be extended
to any domain. One might say that the transverse way as mode of thought, finally,
is the activity of forming transverse connections that intensify differences and bring
forth new possibilities for life, in the arts, the sciences, politics, philosophy, and all
other spheres of action. My effort in this volume is to explore Deleuze’s transverse
way of thinking and some of the transverse pathways he traces within the aesthetic
and between the aesthetic and the ethical.
Although Deleuze does not develop a formal ethics as a discrete component of
his philosophy, there is a sense in which the ethical permeates all his work. In the
first essay of this volume, I trace the outlines of what might be deemed Deleuze’s
immanent ethics, in which value emerges as a constituent of the unfolding real. From
the vantage of this immanent ethics, I consider a series of subjects involving the arts
and social practice. In “Minority, Territory, Music,” I examine the concept of “the
minor” in literature and music, using “territory” as a means of connecting the two.
Deleuze is an advocate of minor literature, whose ethical dimension lies in its effort

4
Deleuze’s Way
to invent a new collectivity, an as yet nonexistent “people to come.” I argue that for
Deleuze music shares minor literature’s basic ends, and that both have as their project
the deterritorialization of territories and the invention of a future collectivity that
only coheres to the extent that it remains a force of deterritorialization. The ethical
concern of the second essay, “Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom
and Black,” is that of violence in popular culture, specifically that of violence in
three forms of heavy metal music: “death metal,” “doom metal” and “black metal.”
My argument here is that Deleuze’s approach to music and deterritorialization helps
clarify the relationship between violent action and artistic practice, and that death,
doom and black metal are not direct forms of violence, but, like all modes of artistic
practice, ways of shaping materials that can be appropriated for any number of social
ends.
In “Search, Swim and See: Deleuze’s Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy
of Images,” I approach the ethics of art through a consideration of Deleuze’s
scattered remarks on education. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze follows the course
of the narrator’s apprenticeship in signs, which Deleuze regards as a training in
the art of “thinking otherwise.” That apprenticeship, I show, resembles the process
whereby one learns to swim, as Deleuze describes it in Difference and Repetition.
Learning to think and to swim, I then argue, may be connected to Deleuze’s cinema
theory, in which learning to think otherwise is a matter of learning to see in a new
way. And it is in Godard’s “pedagogy of images,” I conclude, that Deleuze finds an
especially effective method of inducing new modes of vision that function as new
modes of thought. Godard’s pedagogy of images involves both sight and sound, and
in “Tragedy, Sight and Sound,” I offer a Deleuzian analysis of the interrelationship
of the visual and the aural in Godard’s Prénom Carmen (1983). Godard’s pedagogy
of visual and sonic images, I try to show, teaches us to stop seeing and hearing the
clichés that clutter the world and to see and hear the new that is already there.
In his later writings, Deleuze approaches the topic of the people to come via
the concept of “fabulation,” a notion he takes from Bergson’s The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion, in which Bergson identifies a function of fabulation, or mythmaking,
that he sees as essential to the formation of the morality and religion of
traditional, closed societies. In “Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come,” I
show first how Deleuze turns what is a negative function in Bergson into a positive
force by redefining fabulation as an activation of the “powers of the false,” a way of
falsifying orthodox truths and fashioning new truths, with the ethical aim of fostering
a people to come. I then consider the curious fact that in both Bergson and Deleuze
fabulation involves no genuine fabula, or story, concluding that for Bergson, music
is the paradigmatic creative art, since it has no ties to the myth-making function
of fabulation, whereas for Deleuze, the visual arts have a special privilege, since
they render the new visible without structuring it through any pre-existing stories.
In “Re-viewing Deleuze’s Sacher-Masoch,” I turn to Deleuze’s 1967 study of the
novelist Sacher-Masoch and his brief reprise of that study in 1991, treating these
texts as particularly striking examples of Deleuze’s preference for the visual over the
narrative. I conclude that what attracts Deleuze to Sacher-Masoch, finally, is the antinarrative
nature of Sacher-Masoch’s narratives, in which an aesthetic of suspended
temporality, of perpetual deferral and frozen tableaus, proves to be an aesthetic of

The Transverse Way: Du côté de chez Deleuze 5
the untimely event, and in this regard, an aesthetic that may be seen as an instance
of Deleuzian fabulation.
The last three essays of this volume focus on “nomadology,” the subject of an
extended section of A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Deleuzian nomadism, one might
say, is a version of the transverse way, a means of forming connections across the
spheres of the arts, politics, the sciences, and culture in general. At first glance,
nomadology seems to have little to do with actual nomads, but I argue in “Apology
for Nomadology” that a proper understanding of the concept of the nomadic allows
us to engage in meaningful analysis of actual nomadic practices in a number of
cultural spheres. As an example, I consider gypsy music, first as the product of a
wandering people, then as a component of popular and high art culture in East Central
Europe, and finally as an element against which Bartók reacts in developing his own
Hungarian version of European modernist music. In “Nomadism, Globalism, and
Cultural Studies,” I propose nomadism as a means of approaching the phenomenon
of globalization, the “nomadic” providing the model of an “open whole” that might
lead to a “globalism” that stands in opposition to a Western-dominant process of
globalization. I suggest a way in which this nomadic globalism might be related
to cultural studies by offering a program for research in comparative poetics, one
that would seek to formulate a transcultural poetics through a process of acentered
cultural interaction. In my final essay, I review an essay by Christopher L. Miller, in
which he offers an extended critique of nomadology that condemns nomadic thought
and cultural analysis as arrogant and irresponsible. I argue that nomadology’s claims
are not as arrogant as they might seem, and that nomadic thought does not entail an
abandonment of rigor or ethical responsibility. Rather, it offers a mode of thought
with genuine possibilities for innovative analysis of aesthetics and culture as a
whole.
The transverse way is the path in between, the diagonal across the grids of
horizontal and vertical coordinates, the zigzag of a line of continuous variation. Its
time is that of the entre-temps, the meantime or meanwhile, and its space is the
middle, in medias res, always underway among things. The transverse way connects
by affirming differences, constructing transversals that set the incommunicable in
communication. Its transversals are agents of transversality, forces with the social
and political function of bringing forth group subjects and inventing a people to
come. The transverse way is a way of thinking, a way of making (poiesis), and a
way of acting, and hence a pathway across the domains of philosophy, aesthetics and
ethics. Deleuze’s transverse way is methodic and systematic, but open-ended in its
method and system, only to be seized in its ongoing practice. In these essays, I have
tried to examine that transverse way in some of its variations, to follow its paths and
connections across the arts and into other fields. Each of the essays is intended to be
comprehensible by itself, and as a result, some of Deleuze’s concepts are set forth
more than once. My hope is that multiple passes at Deleuze’s often difficult ideas will
prove more of a blessing than a burden to readers, both in comprehending the ideas
themselves, and in observing the ways in which the ideas take on new dimensions in
differing contexts. But above all, my object is to articulate some fundamental aspects
of Deleuze’s art of thinking, his transverse practice of an immanent ethics of creation
that opens new possibilities for life.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1
Immanent Ethics
By the time of his death on November 4, 1995, Deleuze had published twenty-three
books touching on subjects as varied as painting, metallurgy, mathematics, geology,
anthropology and cinema. As someone who valued the discipline and history of
philosophy in his own idiosyncratic way, he had commented on many key figures
and prominent issues in the Western philosophical tradition. Seldom, however, did
he directly address the topic of ethics, despite its centrality in what is conventionally
considered to be “philosophy.” Yet there is a sense in which all of Deleuze’s work
is concerned with ethics, in that ethical principles inform his basic conception of
thought and what it means to think.
Giorgio Agamben has suggested that we may reconstruct a genealogy of modern
French philosophy along two lines of descent, a “line of transcendence” from Kant
through Husserl to Levinas and Derrida, and a “line of immanence” from Spinoza
through Nietzsche to Deleuze and Foucault, with Heidegger participating in both
lines of descent. 1 The theme of transcendence is perhaps most strikingly evident in
Levinas, whose philosophy focuses on the confrontation with the radical Other. The
Other is transcendent in that it is necessarily “otherwise” than Being, and hence for
Levinas ethics precedes ontology. The motif of immanence, by contrast, is constant
in Deleuze – indeed, he argues in What Is Philosophy? that the entire history of
philosophy may be read as an effort to establish a “plane of immanence” (QP 47/46–
7). Deleuze regards Spinoza as “the prince of philosophers,” since he is perhaps
the sole philosopher to make “no compromise with transcendence” (QP 49/48). For
Spinoza, ethics is ontology, a point Deleuze stresses when he observes that Spinoza’s
magnum opus of pure ontology is titled Ethics, and when he asserts that Spinoza’s
Ethics is really an “ethology,” that is, a science of the species behavior of humans
in the natural lifeworld. I believe that for Deleuze, as well as for Spinoza, ethics
is ontology, and that for this reason his ethics is best conceived of as an immanent
ethics. 2
1 Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA, 1999), p. 239.
2 For an extended treatment of the theme of immanence in Deleuze’s thought, see
Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in
Recent French Thought,” in Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds), Between Deleuze and Derrida
(London, 2003), pp. 46–66.

8
Past, Present, Future
Deleuze’s Way
We may first approach the ethics of Deleuze’s thought through three themes, which
may somewhat artificially be associated with stances toward the past, present and
future: amor fati (the past); vice-diction (the present); and belief in this world (the
future).
In his early book Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Deleuze argues that
Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati, or “love of fate,” provides an ethical principle that
may replace Kant’s categorical imperative: whatever you will, also will its eternal
return. What Deleuze means by this dictum is made evident in his discussion of
chance and the throw of the dice. Most gamblers are bad players who want to control
chance. They throw the dice and only affirm the outcome that they like. If they
shoot craps, they roll again in an effort to overcome the unlucky roll and erase its
consequences. Nietzsche’s good players, by contrast, roll only once, and whatever
the result, they affirm that result and will its eternal return. In this way, good players
avoid the ressentiment of finding the world guilty of frustrating their desires, and
thereby genuinely affirm the play of the world.
This Nietzschean principle of amor fati takes on a specifically Deleuzian cast
in The Logic of Sense (1969) when Deleuze relates the concept to a Stoic ethics of
the event. Central to Deleuze’s thought is the distinction between the virtual and the
actual. The actual consists of the commonsense world of discrete forms, Newtonian
space and chronological time. The virtual is a dimension of self-differentiating
differences, one that is real without being actual, immanent within the actual without
being reducible to it. It is a domain of individuating metamorphic processes, of a
disorienting “spatializing” space, and a floating time of a simultaneous before-after.
The virtual perpetually passes into the actual, that is, becomes actualized, but it is not
thereby exhausted or erased, for it continues to subsist or insist within the actual. The
virtual eludes our commonsense understanding, but it impinges on us in moments of
vertigo when rational spatiotemporal coordinates are scrambled and a pure “event”
emerges.
Consider the growth of a biological organism. The single-celled ovum is
traversed by multiple gradients, or zones of potential division, any one of which may
be actualized through fertilization. Once cell division is initiated, an individuating
process occurs whereby virtual differences become actualized in specific forms (two
cells, then four, then eight), but the individuating process of becoming precedes
the actually individuated forms, and that process continues throughout the life of
the organism as cells are formed, nourished and replaced. The virtual is a kind of
structure of self-differentiating differences that unfolds itself into the actual but
remains elusively “present” within the actual, hovering over its surface, as it were.
The virtual is something like the “problem” of which the actual organism is a specific
solution, and at every point in the ongoing emergence of the organism the problem
of that structure of self-differentiating differences persists, or insists, as a set of copresent
zones of oscillating variation and potential becoming. The virtual organism
is a sort of verbal infinitive, “to become dog,” “to become frog,” a differential
structuring immanent within the actual dog or frog, passing into the actual in a

Immanent Ethics 9
dynamic becoming at every point of the creature’s emergence, yet persisting as a
problematic field of differential vectors.
The world is an egg, says Deleuze (DR 323/251), and everywhere the virtual
is passing into the actual while remaining immanent within it. Deleuze’s version
of Nietzsche’s amor fati is an ethic of willing the virtual, of willing the virtual
“event,” which is immanent within the actual and which impinges on us in moments
of disequilibrium and disorientation. The quintessential event, says Deleuze, is
the battle, something that hovers over the battlefield like a fog, everywhere being
actualized in the bodies of the soldiers, but nowhere specifically present except as
a kind of unfolding “problem” of that battle (see LS 122–3/100–101). The event of
the battle is an infinitive, a “to battle,” anonymous, elusive, outside conventional
time, a floating immanent aura guiding the processes of actualization but becoming
manifest only as a kind of secondary emanation from the bodies that actualize it.
Deleuze’s ethic is one of being worthy of that which happens, in other words, of
willing the event (LS 174–9/148–53). What soldiers should affirm in the battle is not
so much any specific outcome as the pure event of the battle, the virtual “to battle”
that plays through any of the diverse actualizations of the battle that may take place.
To be worthy of what happens is to will the virtual event immanent within one’s
ongoing actualization in the world.
In identifying this ethic of the event with amor fati, I am stressing its orientation
toward the past. To be worthy of what happens is to will the difference, multiplicity
and chance of the virtual and thereby avoid ressentiment and affirm the past events
that have shaped one’s present. But one must also act in the present, and Deleuze
by no means advocates a passive acceptance of everything that befalls us. One’s
orientation toward the present in Deleuzian ethics we might approach through his
concept of “vice-diction” (DR 245–7/189–91), as opposed to contra-diction. (In
The Logic of Sense [LS 176–8/150–52], the concept goes by the name of contreeffectuation,
“counter-actualization.”) Vice-diction is the process whereby one
identifies and engages the virtual events immanent within one’s present world,
whereby one “counter-actualizes” the virtual. Deleuze divides this process into
two complementary movements, “the specification of adjunct fields” and “the
condensation of singularities” (DR 245–6/190), which he likens to an Empedoclean
expansion and contraction of love and hate. The specification of adjunct fields requires
an outward exploration of the virtual networks of multiple connections that come
together in each present moment, as well as a critique of our representations of that
present moment. The virtual eludes our commonsense representations of the world,
and only in moments of disequilibrium and disorientation do we sense the virtual in
its passage into the actual. One task of vice-diction is to respond to this moment of
disequilibrium, this unsettling “event,” first by undoing conventional representations
of our situation, and second by teasing out the proliferating interconnections among
self-differentiating differences that are enveloped in this particular moment of
disequilibrium. Each unsettling element of a disorienting experience reveals what
Deleuze calls variously a “zone of indiscernibility,” a “line of continuous variation,”
or a “singularity,” a singular, remarkable difference that generates the regular forms
and shapes of the commonsense world. The virtual may be conceived of as an infinite
plane of singular points, each point being a zone of indiscernibility or vector of

10
Deleuze’s Way
continuous variation. The process of specifying adjunct fields consists of connecting
singularities and thereby exploring the expanding surface of that infinite plane.
But vice-diction involves a second moment as well: a condensation of singularities
whereby one experiments on the real. We might say that vice-diction’s first moment,
the specification of adjunct fields, entails an assessment of the configuration of
singularities in the grand dice-throw of our present situation, and that vice-diction’s
second moment, the condensation of singularities, involves a reconfiguration of
singularities as we make of ourselves and our situation a second dice-throw. The
object of vice-diction is not simply to comprehend the virtual differences at work
in our world but also to transform them, or rather to enter into the play of virtual
differences and experiment with them. Such an experimentation is a condensation
of singularities in that it is an effort to engage the infinite plane of singular points
and contract those points into a single event, an explosive big bang that creates new,
unpredictable configurations of singularities. Vice-diction thus entails both a process
of exploring and hence constructing connections among differences, and a process
of undoing connections in an effort to form new ones.
The concept of amor fati, then, allows us to think of the virtual in terms
of an attitude toward the past, an absence of ressentiment and an affirmation of
the sequence of virtual events that have come to form the actualized state of the
present situation. Vice-diction frames the virtual in terms of the present moment, in
which one explores the connections enveloped in the event that impinges on one’s
situation and then experimentally induces metamorphic alterations of that situation.
Yet implicit as well in this second moment of vice-diction is an attitude toward
the future, an affirmation of the possibility of creating something new. One of the
controlling themes in Deleuze’s work is that of “thinking otherwise,” of finding
ways of inventing new possibilities for life, and such possibilities issue not ex nihilo
but from the virtual lines of continuous variation immanent in the real. The creative
side of vice-diction, the experimental activation of the disruptive potential of the
virtual, implies an orientation toward the future which we may label, in Deleuze’s
words, a “belief in this world.”
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) Deleuze argues that the classic cinema
testifies to a bond between humans and the world, whereas the modern cinema does
not. “The modern fact,” Deleuze remarks, “is that we no longer believe in this world.
We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only
half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us
like a bad film” (IT 223/171). The “power of modern cinema,” when it ceases to be
bad cinema, is to restore “our belief in the world” (IT 223/171), not “another world”
or a “transformed world,” but “this world, as it is” (IT 224/172). The world as bad
film is the world of clichés, of received opinion (doxa), of that which goes without
saying, of static forms and institutions, of intractable facts and inevitable results – in
short, a tired world devoid of possibilities. What the great modern directors restore to
us is a world within which something new can emerge, and they do so by activating
virtual self-differentiating differences immanent within the real. In this activity,
cinema directors do as any other artists and as do any other creators – philosophers,
scientists, politicians – they experiment on the real, on the virtual’s immanent lines

Immanent Ethics 11
of continuous variation. And when they do so, they affirm the creative potential
immanent within the real and thereby exhibit a belief in this world.
Deleuze’s immanent ethics is ultimately an ethics of the virtual, and what I have
called amor fati, vice-diction and belief in this world are simply three ways of looking
at the virtual. Amor fati is a backward glance that affirms the virtual within the events
that have culminated in the present. Vice-diction is a topical survey of proliferating
virtual connections and an activation of their potential for reconfiguration through a
condensation of singularities. Belief in this world is a view through the present and
toward the future, one that envisions nothing specific in that future, but that trusts in
the possibilities immanent within the real to produce something genuinely new.
Collectivity
To this point, my focus has been on the ethics of the individual, with little direct
reference to the individual’s relationship with others – a decidedly odd emphasis, one
might think, given Deleuze’s enduring hostility toward the notion of the autonomous
subject and any subject-grounded thought. How, then, might the social implications
of an immanent ethics be considered? Three Deleuzian motifs suggest themselves:
the body as domain of speeds and affects; the other as disclosure of the possible; and
the invention of a people to come.
Throughout his writings, Deleuze returns frequently to a remark by Spinoza that
we do not yet know “what a body can and cannot do,” and hence, we do not know
the extent of “the body’s capabilities.” 3 In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981),
Deleuze offers his most succinct explanation of the significance of this remark.
Deleuze points out that Spinoza defines the body in two ways: in terms of relations
of slowness and speed between an infinite number of particles; and in terms of a
body’s capacities for affecting and being affected. By characterizing the body in
terms of differential speeds, Spinoza emphasizes the body’s participation in a single
“plane of immanence” (S 164/122), a dimension of rhythms, movements, pauses,
accelerations and decelerations, in which each body’s form and function emerge as
secondary products of kinetic relations among particles. By approaching the body in
terms of its capacities, or powers, of affecting and being affected, Spinoza imbues
the plane of immanence with a pervasive affectivity generated through interactions
among multiple forces.
In this analysis of bodies as affective rhythms, Deleuze finds the theoretical
foundations of “what is today called ethology” (S 168/125), the study of animal
behavior (a notion that in Deleuze’s usage might better be labeled “ecology”). The
tick, for example, has limited capacities for affecting and being affected, its world
determined solely by its receptivity to light (as it climbs a stalk or branch), to heat (as
it senses an approaching mammal), to butyric acid (the substance excreted from the
follicles of mammals), and to limited tactile stimuli (specifically, those provided by
the hair and skin of its prey). The tick’s powers select a world, picking out a highly
3 Baruch Spinoza, Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan
(Indianapolis, IN, 2002), p. 280.

12
Deleuze’s Way
restricted set of relational elements, excluding everything else. The tick combines
with its world, taking in certain substances (light, scents, blood), emitting others
(anticoagulants, bacteria), connecting with some organisms, defending itself from
others, and ignoring the rest. The tick’s relations with its selected world constitute a
type of musical counterpoint, its diverse powers forming a point in counterpoint to
each of the elements with which it is capable of forming a connection.
Humans, like ticks, select a world and form contrapuntal relations with that
world’s elements. In the case of humans, however, the selected world is much wider
and fuller than the tick’s, and the elements with which our powers can combine are
in large measure unspecified. We do not know what a body can do, what connections
the powers of the body make possible. We must therefore experiment with our
bodies and seek those relations that increase our capacities. What is important to
note is that the ethical imperative in bodily experimentation is not that of an increase
in power over a world, but an increase in powers of affecting and being affected,
a responsiveness to a selected world and an openness to interaction. As Deleuze
insists in his Spinozistic reading of Nietzsche (NP 97/85), will to power manifests
itself as a desire for power over others only in the reactive mentality of slaves, of
those who seek to restrict others’ powers and to close themselves off from competing
forces. The affirmative will to power, by contrast, seeks to extend its capacities
through reciprocities of forces that combine in interconnecting affirmations of one
another, and this is the will that Deleuze discerns in Spinoza’s ethology of bodies as
configurations of speeds and affective intensities.
Deleuze argues that Spinoza’s account of the body calls us not simply to an
experimentation with the individual body in its connections with a selected world
but also to the formation of more complex collective bodies, social assemblages of
differential speeds and affective intensities. Rather than merely testing the relations
that augment the powers of individual bodies or threaten their dissolution, we must
also determine the powers that may emerge in the generation of compound bodies:
It is no longer a question of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities.
How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher
individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, but while
preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and its world? … It is no longer a
question of point to counterpoint, or of the selection of a world, but of a symphony of
Nature, of a constitution of an increasingly wide and intense world. [S 169–70/126]
The ethical question for Deleuze is not “what must we do?” but “what can we
do?” What assemblages allow the formation of collective bodies that expand their
capacities, that open new modes of affecting and being affected? This question
is not one of imposing limits from without, but of exploring potential for growth
from within. In this sense, ethics is immanent to the creation of worlds, a matter
more of mutual affinities and intensities among bodies than of mutual duties and
obligations.
Yet is there no duty to the other in an immanent ethics? Not in the sense of
a necessary restriction of one’s powers, or of the other’s, but perhaps a form of
duty, a certain ethic of responsiveness or attentiveness, may be seen as consistent
with Deleuze’s general ethical orientation. In Difference and Repetition (DR 333–

Immanent Ethics 13
5/259–61), Deleuze remarks briefly on the Other as expression of possible worlds,
taking as his example that of a terrified face which I perceive without perceiving the
cause of its terror. 4 That face serves as a sign, not as signifier to signified, but as the
moon’s visible surface to its dark side. The face points toward possible worlds yet
unspecified, and if I am to encounter that sign, rather than simply classify it (ignore
it, reject it, imitate it), I must enter with it into the composition of a world enfolded
in its possibilities. To do so, I must construct a plane of immanence in which I and
other are no longer fixed entities, but instead residual points of emergence within
an unfolding ensemble of speeds and affects. The actualization of a specific world
that arises from the unfolding of the other’s possible worlds may eventuate in a
discrete self and a definite other, but the encounter itself, in which possible worlds
become manifest, opens up in a dimension of apersonal affects and speeds. The
encounter, if it is genuinely an encounter, is a dislocating meeting of affects – the
terror of a screaming face, the startled reaction to that terror. And if it is to be a
productive encounter, it will be one of mutual disturbance, in which possible worlds
yet unspecified in the terror and in the shocked reaction to that terror interconnect
and interact to generate an actual world. 5
The duty to the other (if one must speak of duty) is to affect and be affected, to
suspend, as much as one can, the categorization and comprehension of the other, and
then open oneself to the undetermined, hidden possible worlds that are expressed
in the affective signs of the other. The practical consequences of this openness to
the other may be discerned in Deleuze’s remarks in a 1985 interview on the need
for “intercessors” in various domains – in philosophy, the arts, science and politics:
“Intercessors are essential. Creation is all about intercessors. Without them, there
is no creative work. They can be people – for a philosopher, artists or scientists;
for a scientist, philosophers or artists – but also things, even plants or animals, as
in Castaneda” (PP 171/125). To intercede, for Deleuze, is not simply to advocate
for the other, but also to “go between” (Latin: inter + cedere), to assist the other by
intervening in the other’s world and producing creative interference (in the sense
of an interference between sound or light waves). Deleuze says that “Félix Guattari
and I, we are intercessors of one another” (PP 171/125), and they are so in that they
do not fully understand one another. Deleuze argues that the notion that truth is
created is “obvious in the sciences, for instance. Even in physics, there is no truth
that does not presuppose a system of symbols, be they only coordinates. There’s no
truth that doesn’t ‘falsify’ established ideas” (PP 172/126). When he and Guattari
interact as mutual intercessors, each falsifies the other, “which is to say that each of
us understands notions put forward by the other in his own way” (PP 172/126). The
generative process of their collaboration requires an openness to the other’s different
understanding of a concept, and a subsequent development of understandings through
4 Deleuze and Guattari also discuss the concept of the other and the screaming face in
What Is Philosophy? (QP 21–3/16–19). My own analysis of the Other combines elements
found in both Difference and Repetition and What Is Philosophy?.
5 I am indebted to James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A
Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 208–10, for pointing out the ethical
implications of Deleuze’s discussion of the Other.

14
Deleuze’s Way
a mutual undoing of each other’s initial understandings. Intercession is a form of
positive dissonance, made possible through an openness to interferences that disturb
one’s regular harmonic vibrations. Intercessors falsify one another in various ways,
via divergences in concepts (philosophy), sensations (the arts), theoretical models
(the sciences), strategies (politics), via interventions across boundaries delimiting
conventional fields of activity, and so on: “These powers of the false [Ces puissances
du faux] to produce truth, that is what intercessors are about” (PP 172/126).
Deleuze relates the process of intercession not only to individual creativity in
diverse domains but also to the formation of community, to “the constitution of a
people” (PP 171/125–6). Deleuze frequently cites Paul Klee’s observation that the
modern artist cannot simply engage “the people” since it is precisely “the people”
that is missing. Hence, Deleuze sees the need to fashion a “people to come” (QP
206/218), a future, yet-to-be collectivity that has a genuine cohesiveness and
functionality. As we saw earlier, Spinoza’s notion of the body as a composite of
differential speeds and affects invites a conception of community as a compound
body, one in which the point and counterpoint of multiple organisms produce a
larger “symphony of Nature.” Such a compound body is not something stable but
an essentially dynamic, metamorphic process, a mutual becoming-other of multiple
bodies engaged in unpredictable unshapings and reshapings of one another. A people
to come “is not exactly a people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor
people, eternally minor, taken up in a becoming-revolutionary” (CC 14/4). The object
of art is to fashion a people to come, and to do so artists engage in what Deleuze calls
“fabulation,” an activation of the “powers of the false” that dissolves conventional
social categories and codes and invents new possibilities for life. Artists cannot
fabulate alone, however. They must have intercessors who help them undo their
own presuppositions, intercessors who themselves enter into fabulation with artists
in the formation of a collectivity as process. Nor is the creation of a people to come
the responsibility of artists alone. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari
distinguish philosophy from non-philosophy by emphasizing the differences among
philosophy, the sciences and the arts, but they conclude that all three domains meet
in the common goal of inventing a people. The three domains extract
… from chaos the shadow of the “people to come,” such as that which art, but also
philosophy and science, summon forth: mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaospeople.
Nonthinking thought that lodges in the three, like Klee’s nonconceptual concept
or Kandinsky’s internal silence. It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become
undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible, as if
they shared the same shadow, which extends itself across their different nature and never
ceases to accompany them. [QP 206/218]
Immanence
Clearly, the partition of Deleuze’s immanent ethics into discrete components is
artificial at best. My assignment of amor fati to the past, vice-diction to the present,
and belief in this world to the future is designed only to highlight shades of emphasis
in these interrelated concepts, no one of which can be understood outside a single

Immanent Ethics 15
conception of time as the unfolding of the immanent event. My separation of
individual from collective motifs in Deleuze’s ethical thought is likewise merely
provisional, for the individual taking form in amor fati, vice-diction, and belief
in this world is always merging with a multiplicity-in-formation. The body of
differential speeds and affective intensities is inseparable from the world it selects,
and its contrapuntal relations are always available for the constitution of compound
bodies of indeterminate size. The Other is never a single other, but always the sign of
many possible worlds, and, in a genuine encounter, self and other mutually dissolve
in a plane of immanence from which emerges an actual world, itself a multiplicity.
The invention of a people to come is the goal of philosophy, but also of thought in
general, whether in the arts, sciences, politics, or any number of other domains, for
the invention of a people is one with the creation of possibilities for life. To think and
to act creatively is to enter into the creative unfolding of the cosmos, to participate in
a metamorphic experimentation on ourselves and our world in the hopes of bringing
forth something new that enhances our capacities for affecting and being affected.
Deleuze’s ethics is immanent in that it is inseparable from the universe’s ongoing
self-creation, from the virtual event’s perpetual actualization of possible worlds.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2
Minority, Territory, Music
Deleuze and Guattari remark that in a rhizome as opposed to an arborescence,
any point “can be connected to anything other, and must be” (MP 13/7). In their
own rhizomatic thought, the concepts of minority and territory in general are not
intimately conjoined, yet the two points can be usefully related – and indeed, as we
are told, they must be. The concept of minority engages the conventional idea of a
statistically small ethnic or racial group, but extends far beyond that to the broad
category of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “minor,” which includes the notions
of minor literature, minor culture, and the minor usage of language. 1 The concept
of territory, which Deleuze and Guattari discuss in its narrow ethological sense in
A Thousand Plateaus, is inseparable from the general notions of territorialization,
reterritorialization and deterritorialization, which play through their thought in a
wide range of contexts. The path from minority to territory runs from literature to
music and suggests some of the ways Deleuze and Guattari connect the two arts.
Both literature and music, we shall find, prove to be arts capable of a minor usage,
whereby lines of continuous variation and a general chromaticism are engaged in a
process of deterritorialization.
Minority
Kafka
Deleuze and Guattari’s first extended treatment of the topic of “the minor” can be
found in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). Their discussion has its point
of origin in a lengthy diary entry of Kafka’s, dated December 25, 1911, in which he
reflects on such minor literatures as Czech literature and Jewish literature in Warsaw,
noting that the absence of dominant great writers within these traditions has certain
positive consequences. No single genius silences other writers, and as a result the
literary community is especially lively, competitive and active. No towering figure
serves as an easily emulated model, and hence the untalented are discouraged from
writing, and those with talent are able to maintain their mutual independence. When
such minor traditions come to construct their literary histories, no great writers
arouse multiple and changing interpretations that vary with fluctuations in taste;
1 We might note as well that the French word mineur(e) bears the connotation of
immaturity, as in the case of an individual who has not attained his or her majority, and hence
of a lack of seriousness, whereas the substantive minorité has an immediately demographic
connotation.

18
Deleuze’s Way
thus, their histories offer “an unchangeable, dependable whole that is hardly affected
by the taste of the day.” 2 The end result is that literature in such minor traditions
takes on a much more collective function than in major traditions. The contentions of
competing schools, journals, cabals and camps become the focus of national concern,
the literary and the political become intertwined as literature assumes a central role
in the formation of national identity, aesthetic polemics become “a matter of life
and death” (Diaries 194), and literature becomes “less a concern of literary history
than of the people” (Diaries 193). Thus Kafka concludes his “character sketch of the
literature of small peoples” with the following outline: “1. Liveliness: a. Conflict. b.
Schools. c. Magazines. 2. Less constraint: a. Absence of principles. b. Minor themes.
c. Easy formation of symbols. d. Throwing off of the untalented. 3. Popularity: a.
Connection with politics. b. Literary history. c. Faith in literature, can make up their
own laws” (vol. 1, p. 195).
Deleuze and Guattari identify three basic characteristics of minor literature: “in
it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”; “everything in
[it] is political”; and “in it everything takes on a collective value” (K 29–31/16–17).
The second and third characteristics clearly echo the features delineated by Kafka
in his discussion of minor literature. In a major literature, the personal, familial and
conjugal can remain detached from the sociopolitical sphere, which tends to function
as a mere background or environment. In a minor literature, by contrast, “its cramped
space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (K 30/17).
When Kafka identifies as one of the benefits of minor literature “the dignification
of the antithesis between fathers and sons and the possibility of discussing this”
(vol. 1, p. 192), he is simply stressing the inextricability of the personal and the
political in such traditions. In this political treatment of the familial, relations take on
a collective significance and immediately extend to other spheres – the “commercial,
economic, bureaucratic, juridical” (K 30/17). The “collective value” of minor
literature is closely related to its immediately political nature, but what Deleuze
and Guattari emphasize in this third characteristic is not simply the interpenetration
of social and personal relations, but also the possibility of a collective enunciation
of a group solidarity and a “revolutionary machine-to-come” (K 32/18). As Kafka
points out, in minor traditions literature can bring about “the coherence of national
consciousness,” which otherwise is “often unrealized in public life and always
tending to disintegrate” (vol. 1, p. 191). The marginal situation of minor writers
allows them “all the more the possibility to express another possible community and
to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (K 32/17). And
in the absence of great stylists whose individualized, personalized voices serve as
models of emulation in major literatures, minor writers tend to articulate “collective
assemblages of enunciation” (K 33/18) that belong to no individual subject.
It might seem that Deleuze and Guattari are simply elaborating on Kafka’s
empirical observations of the features of literary traditions devoid of great writers,
but what they argue is that minor literature is less a matter of specific cultural
communities than of a general usage of language, a minor usage that can be found
2 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New
York, 1948), vol. 1, p. 193.

Minority, Territory, Music 19
in any social group and in any language. Herein lies the importance of the first
characteristic of minor literature – that “in it language is affected with a high
coefficient of deterritorialization” – and it is in Kafka’s minor usage of German
that Deleuze and Guattari find an exemplary instance of minor literature’s
deterritorialization of language. At the turn of the century, many Prague Jews felt
distanced from their peasant roots and uncomfortable with the Czech language
(Kafka being an exception among his contemporaries in the latter respect). Yet the
German they spoke was a “paper language,” artificial and formal, as well as being the
language of an oppressive minority, itself removed from its native cultural milieu.
The Prague dialect, influenced by Czech, was in many regards an impoverished
German, characterized by
… the incorrect use of prepositions; the abuse of the pronominal; the employment of
malleable verbs (such as geben, which is used for the series ‘put, sit, place, take away’
and which thereby becomes intensive); the multiplication and succession of adverbs; the
use of pain-filled connotations; the importance of the accent as a tension internal to the
word; and the distribution of consonants and vowels as part of an internal discordance.
[K 42/23] 3
Prague German, then, displayed “a high coefficient of deterritorialization” in that it
was at once detached from its native context and rendered artificial through its heavy
bureaucratic associations, and at the same time destabilized by the way it was used –
through ungrammatical constructions, words with multiple and shifting nonstandard
meanings, accents and gestures that lend an elusive aura of affective intensity to the
language, and so on. Prague Jews found themselves foreigners in their own tongue,
and they responded in one of two ways. Some chose “to artificially enrich this German,
to swell it up through all the resources of symbolism, of oneirism, of esoteric sense,
of a hidden signifier” (K 34/19). Kafka, by contrast, sought to impoverish Prague
German further, to destabilize it and imbue it with affective intensity through an
ascetic limitation of vocabulary, an avoidance of metaphor, symbols and esoteric
allusions, and a distribution of accents and rhythms that render the language both
unsettlingly irregular and fastidiously obsessive. 4 Kafka’s response, in short, was to
take advantage of the tendencies already present in the minor usage of German by
Prague Jews, and to manipulate, develop, modify and exaggerate those tendencies in
his own minor usage of the language.
3 Deleuze and Guattari base their remarks on Prague German on Klaus Wagenbach’s
extended discussion of the subject in Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie Seiner Jugend 1883–1912
(Bern, 1958), pp. 83–95.
4 Deleuze and Guattari argue that Joyce and Beckett, as Irishmen writing in English,
faced a dilemma similar to that of Prague Jews at the turn of the century, and that their
differing strategies for deterritorializing English resemble those adopted by Kafka and his
contemporaries, Joyce artificially enriching the language, Beckett by contrast proceeding “by
dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that
nothing remains but intensities” (K 19/35).

20
Language
Deleuze’s Way
In the fourth section of A Thousand Plateaus, “November 20, 1923: Postulates of
Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattari outline a general theory of language that helps
clarify the notion of a minor usage of language. The primary function of language,
they argue, is not to communicate information but to impose power relations. To
learn a language is to learn a host of categories, classifications, binary oppositions,
associations, codes, concepts, logical relations and so on, whereby the world is given
a certain coherence and organization. Far from being neutral, the order imposed by
a language is part of a complex network of practices, institutions, goods, tools and
materials imbued with relations of force. Following the line of analysis developed by
speech-act theorists, Deleuze and Guattari insist that language is a mode of action, a
way of doing things, and the condition of possibility of any language is the complex
network of practices and material elements that shape a given world. This complex
network is made up of what Deleuze and Guattari call “assemblages” (agencements),
heterogeneous collections of actions and entities that somehow function together. 5
These may be divided into two broad categories that function as a level of content
and a level of expression, the first consisting of nondiscursive machinic assemblages
of bodies, “of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one
another,” the second of discursive collective assemblages of enunciation, “of acts
and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (MP 112/88).
Machinic assemblages are the various patterns of practices and elements through
which a world’s bodies are formed, and collective assemblages of enunciation are the
patterns of actions, institutions and entities that make possible linguistic statements.
Collective assemblages of enunciation induce “incorporeal transformations” of
bodies in that they transform elements and configurations of the world through
speech acts. 6 When the minister says, “I thee wed,” or the judge says, “I pronounce
you guilty,” a transformation takes place, a body is changed from bride to wife, from
defendant to felon. Although collective assemblages of enunciation and machinic
assemblages are related to one another as expression to content, they are not to be
understood in terms of the Saussurean categories of signifier and signified. The two
5 The term agencement, translated variously as “assemblage,” “arrangement,” or
“organization,” can denote both a particular arrangement of entities and the act of assembling
or combining elements in a given configuration. Particularly useful are Deleuze’s remarks
about language and assemblages in Dialogues: “The minimum real unit is not the word,
the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage which
produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their cause a subject which would act as a
subject of enunciation, any more than they are related to subjects as subjects of utterance. The
utterance is the product of an assemblage – which is always collective, which brings into play
within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events” (D
51; 65).
6 The term “incorporeal transformations” Deleuze and Guattari take from the Stoic theory
of incorporeals, which Deleuze discusses at several points of The Logic of Sense, especially
series two, twenty and twenty-three. Deleuze’s primary sources for his understanding of the
Stoics are Emile Bréhier’s La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (Paris, 1928),
and Victor Goldschmidt’s Le Système stoïcien et l’idée de temps (Paris, 1953).

Minority, Territory, Music 21
types of assemblages are independent and heterogeneous: “One can never assign
the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a
corresponding content … In expressing the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token
attributing it to the body, one is not representing or referring but intervening in a
way; it is a speech act” (MP 109–10/86).
Collective assemblages of enunciation intervene in machinic assemblages, and
that which puts the two forms of assemblages in relation to one another in any
given instance Deleuze and Guattari call an “abstract machine,” which consists of
unformed matter and nonformalized functions that are virtual without being actual,
yet are immanent within the real. One means of approaching this difficult concept
is by situating it within a linguistic context, and for our purposes a specific example
may suffice – that of the phrase “I swear!,” a statement with varying significance in
Kafka’s work. Consider first the phonemic aspect of this statement. The word “swear”
may be pronounced with diverse accents and intonations, and its acoustic attributes
will differ with the physiological characteristics of each speaker. Conventionally, the
phoneme is thought of as a mental constant determined by its differential relations
with other phonemes. Different pronunciations of the same phoneme are merely
insignificant variations of a single constant; only differences that impose meaningful
distinctions are pertinent, such as those that transform “swear” into “sweat” or “sway.”
Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, that the constant derives from the variations,
not the reverse. The multiple, heterogeneous pronunciations of the word “swear” are
so many actualizations of an immanent “line of continuous variation” that passes
through all potential pronunciations of the word. This line of continuous variation
is a continuum of sonic possibilities that is real but not actual; it is virtual, and each
pronunciation of a given phoneme may be thought of as a concrete actualization of
a specific point along the continuum. This virtual line of continuous variation is a
component of an abstract machine.
All elements of language must likewise be regarded as determined by immanent
lines of continuous variation. Thus, grammatical and syntactical rules, which are
conventionally viewed as the generative causes of a well-formed statement such as
“I swear!,” must instead be seen as derivative effects of grammatical/syntactical lines
of continuous variation, in this instance a continuum of forms that might include “I
swear,” “I do swear,” “So do I swear,” “Swear I,” “I do so swear, do I.” But most
important, the semantic dimension of language must also be understood in terms
of lines of continuous variation. The statement “I swear!” has a different meaning
when pronounced by a son before his father (as in Kafka’s “The Judgment”), by
a reluctant fiancé before a “family tribunal” (as in Kafka’s letter describing his
meeting with disappointed relatives over his indefinitely postponed marriage), or
by a defendant before a judge (as in The Trial). Conventionally, a single denotative
core of meaning is thought to inform various utilizations of a given semantic unit, its
diverse contextualizations being simply contingent variations on a basic stable sense.
Deleuze and Guattari counter that each enunciation of “I swear!” is an actualization
of a line of continuous variation immanent within the real, “a continuum of ‘I swear!’
with the corresponding transformations” (MP 119/94). This semantic continuum is
inseparable from a wide range of practices, institutions, and entities that make up
the contents of the diverse, contextually embedded speech acts distributed along

22
Deleuze’s Way
that continuum. Not only is each performance of “I swear!” an actualization of
phonemic, grammatical, syntactical and semantic lines of continuous variation, but
it is also an action within a situation, a means of intervening in bodies and inducing
incorporeal transformations in them. Each “I swear!” presupposes patterns of actions
and elements that make up a collective assemblage of enunciation as well as networks
of practices and entities that constitute nondiscursive machinic assemblages. And the
lines of continuous variation that play through these assemblages function together
as an abstract machine.
One can see then that the common notions of grammatical rules, correct
pronunciations, syntactical regularities, proper meanings, standard usage, and so on,
are not the essential constituents of language, but the secondary effects of power.
The lines of continuous variation within a given social field can be used in two basic
ways. They can be constricted, regulated, organized, controlled and disciplined, or
they can be set in oscillation, intensified, amplified and ramified. The inculcation of a
standard, correct, proper language instills a thorough coding of the world according
to a dominant order. It also entails a stabilization of inherently unstable elements and
a valorization of elements in terms of a hierarchy of norms and deviations – correct
vs incorrect usage; standard speech vs dialect, patois, jargon, slang; prestigious vs
unprestigious discourse, and so on. A standard language does not exist by itself as a
static, self-enclosed, rule-governed system; rather, it issues from multiple patterns
of actions and entities organized in such a way as to restrict variation and regularize
relations of force. But lines of variation may be used in other ways as well. The
“impoverished” German of Prague Jews, the creoles of Caribbean islanders, the
Black English of African-Americans, are diverse usages of major languages that
destabilize linguistic regularities and intensify lines of continuous variation. In a
similar fashion, the experimentations of writers such as Kafka, Beckett, Céline
and Gherasim Luca (to name but a few of Deleuze and Guattari’s favorite authors)
make “language itself stammer” by placing “all linguistic, and even nonlinguistic,
elements in variation, both variables of expression and variables of content” (MP
124/98). Each of these writers invents a minor usage of language, a way of being “a
foreigner, but in one’s own tongue,” of being “bilingual, multilingual, but in one and
the same language, without even a dialect or patois” (MP 124–5/98).
Minorities
We can now see what relation there is between a minor usage of language and the
notion of a minority. The opposition of majority and minority is not strictly a matter
of numbers but of “a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure
by which to evaluate it” (MP 133/105). The majority is defined by a hierarchical
set of values embedded in language. One might say that the dominant standard “is
the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language
(Joyce’s or Ezra Pound’s Ulysses)” (MP 133/105). The linguistic oppositions of
adult/child, white/colored, heterosexual/homosexual, European/non-European,
male/female encode power relations, and the dominant term of each opposition
serves as a norm against which deviations are measured. Each norm is a constant,
stable and unchanging, and each is reinforced by the system of linguistic constants of

Minority, Territory, Music 23
a standard language, be they semantic, syntactic, grammatical, lexical, or phonemic
(in that “correct speech” or “standard usage” is always value-laden). Women may
outnumber men, and blacks may outnumber whites, but the majority remains male
and white: “Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way
around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way around” (MP 133/105).
Yet curiously the majority is like Odysseus, who tells the Cyclops he is “Nobody”
[Personne], whereas the minority is “everybody” [tout le monde]. The analytic
standard/norm against which deviation is measured is an abstract, unchanging
ideal embodied in no individual. No one measures up, everyone falls short to some
extent, but most importantly, everybody changes, and change, flux, metamorphosis,
becoming are the paths of creation: “That is why we must distinguish between: the
majoritarian as a constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and
the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming” (MP 134/105–106).
This is not to deny that numerically small minorities are frequently oppressed by
majorities, or that majorities often deem themselves worthy of the norms they
represent. It means, however, that the problem of minorities is not to restore a
counter-identity, to return to a long-lost pure culture and tongue, but to enter into a
process of becoming whereby the constants and norms of the dominant, majoritarian
order are put into continuous variation. This process of becoming is a potential open
to everyone, but no one automatically enters it by virtue of his or her social position.
Minorities can easily inculcate their own constants and norms. As a result, they, too,
must construct their own means of becoming-other, their own lines of continuous
variation:
All becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a minority, definable
as a state or subset; but they create only by making possible a becoming over which they
do not have ownership, into which they themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman
affecting all of humankind, men and women both. The same goes for minor languages:
they are not simply sublanguages, idiolects or dialects, but potential agents of the major
language’s entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of its dimensions and elements.
[MP 134/106]
If we return to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of minor literature in Kafka, we may
now see more fully the logical relationship between its three basic characteristics,
“the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political
immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (K 33/18). Language is a
mode of action informed by relations of power. The abstract machine’s virtual lines
of continuous variation are actualized in collective assemblages of enunciation and
nondiscursive machinic assemblages. A major usage of language fixes, regularizes
and stabilizes forms and meanings, and thereby territorializes variations. It reinforces
categories and distinctions that compartmentalize existence, thereby fostering an
isolation of the personal and the political. It also encourages both the reinforcement of
the dominant views of the majority and the illusion of the autonomy of the individual
voice. By contrast, a minor usage deterritorializes language by disturbing dominant
regularities and setting them in variation. In disrupting majoritarian categories, a
minor usage connects the personal and the political in proliferating networks of
becoming. And in activating real (albeit virtual) lines of continuous variation, a

24
Deleuze’s Way
minor usage directly engages collective assemblages of enunciation, fashioning not
an individual voice but the voice of a people to come, that is, a people in the process
of becoming other. It is in this sense that in minor literature “there isn’t a subject;
there are only collective assemblages of enunciation, and literatures expresses these
assemblages insofar as they’re not imposed from without and insofar as they exist
only as diabolical powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed” (K
33/18).
Bene
In his 1979 essay “One Less Manifesto,” Deleuze elaborates on the concept of minor
literature, reiterating many of the points made in Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus,
but also indicating ways in which the concept may be applied to the theater. The
essay appears in a volume titled Superpositions, which also includes the text of the
drama Richard III, or the Horrible Night of a Man of War, by the Italian playwright
and filmmaker Carmelo Bene. A significant figure in the Italian theater, Bene has
written and produced a number of plays based on earlier dramas, including Arden of
Feversham, Othello, Macbeth and Lorenzaccio, as well as films inspired by earlier
works, such as Don Giovanni, Salome and One Less Hamlet. Bene’s Richard III
takes Shakespeare’s history play as its point of departure, incorporating selected
characters, scenes and lines from the original, but deforming them through extended
textual additions, incongruous gestures and actions, surreal sets and props, and
various devices for manipulating and denaturalizing the spoken word. In Deleuze’s
analysis, Bene’s Richard III, like many of his other plays and films, has a “critical
function” (SP 87/204) that is both subtractive and constitutive. What Bene subtracts
from Shakespeare are “the elements of power” (SP 93/206), both those represented
in the drama – history, the state, royal authority – and those inherent in drama as a
mode of representation – structure, standard language, lucid text, dialogue, and so
on. From what remains, Bene constitutes a different set of characters – a different
Richard, Lady Anne, Duchess of York, Marguerite, Elizabeth and Jane Shore
(Richard III is the only male Bene retains from Shakespeare) – none of which is a
coherent and consistent “subject” but instead a line of continuous variation through
which the “character” and actor pass as an unfolding field of dramatic events is
constructed. Bene constitutes as well as a different language, different forms of
enunciation, new patterns of gesture, and new relations between speech, setting and
action. In sum, from the “subtraction of the stable elements of Power,” Bene releases
“a new potentiality of theater, a nonrepresentative force forever in disequilibrium”
(SP 94/207).
Deleuze finds in Bene’s Italian a minor usage of language, a means of making
language itself stammer. Bene manages “to impose on language, as it is perfectly
and soberly spoken, this line of variation that will make you a foreigner in your
own language or make a foreign language your own or make your language an
immanent bilingualism for your foreignness” (SP 109/213).Bene also makes use of
various possibilities for metamorphosing language in oral performance, inducing
a general “aphasia” through whispers, stammers, cries, groans, barely audible
lines, deafeningly amplified tirades, lip-sync playback, and so on. He abandons the

Minority, Territory, Music 25
conventions of properly constructed dialogue, with its rules of opening and closure,
continuity and proper sequencing of exchanges. Instead:
… there is no dialogue in this theater of Bene’s; for voices, simultaneous or successive,
superimposed or transposed, are caught in this spatiotemporal continuity of variation. It is
a kind of Sprechgesang. In song, it is a matter of maintaining the pitch, but in Sprechgesang
one always varies the pitch with a dip or a rise. [SP 105/211]
Bene induces as well a transmutation of speech acts through the shifting and unstable
tones and attitudes with which the actors deliver their lines. Deleuze notes that Lady
Anne’s statement “You disgust me!” is a different speech act when pronounced by
“a woman at war, a child facing a toad, or a young girl sensing an already consenting
and loving pity” (SP 104–105/211). In her extended interaction with Richard, the
actress playing Lady Anne moves through all these variables at once, managing “to
stand erect like a woman warrior, regress to a childlike state, and come to life again
as a young girl – on a line of continuous variation, and as quickly as possible” (SP
105/211). The result is a “You disgust me!” that unfixes its social coordinates and
oscillates among its diverse virtual positions, entering into multiple combinations
with the other oscillating speech acts of the scene.
Bene’s minor use of language necessarily affects nonlinguistic aspects of his
drama, among which gesture particularly interests Deleuze. One critic notes that
gestures and objects in Bene’s theater often obstruct action, the actors’ bodies
impinging on one another, costumes restricting their movements, objects blocking
their movements. But Deleuze argues that obstruction and opposition are not central
to the gestures of this theater, for these characteristics imply relations of power, and
“the relations of force and opposition are part of what is shown only that it may be
subtracted, cut away, neutralized” (SP 113/215). Instead, Bene treats gesture in a
musical fashion, according to relations of speed and slowness that vary in irregular
and unpredictable ways. Bene admires certain Italian saints, “the saints sanctified
by grace: Saint Joseph of Copertino, the imbeciles, the idiot saints, Saint Francis
of Assisi dancing before the Pope” (cited in SP 97–8/208), identifying “their grace
with the movement of disgrace” (SP 114/215). Bene sees these saints as sanctified
by that which disgraces them in the eyes of social authority, but he also regards
them as imbued with a physical grace of movement determined by their departure
from conventional behavior, with its regular, prescribed habits of comportment and
interaction. Likewise, Richard’s constant stumbling, falling, tottering, collapse and
resuscitation (noted at several points in Bene’s text) are elements of the construction
of Richard’s grace through movements of disgrace, means whereby he deforms
the forms of proper behavior and discovers new gestural velocities and directions.
The result is that the same gesture or word is never repeated “without obtaining
different characteristics of time. This is the musical formula of continuity, or of
form as transformation” (SP 113/215). The abandonment of conventional gestures
entails a departure from pre-established forms, but also from socially constructed
roles and identities (the gestures appropriate, say, for a king, an adult, a man). In his
deformation of standard gestures, Richard replaces forms with speeds and social roles
with affects and intensities unassociated with any subjective identity. In this regard,

26
Deleuze’s Way
his gestures fulfill what Deleuze regards as “two essential aims of the arts,” “the
subordination of form to speed, to the variation of speed, and the subordination of
the subject to intensity or to affect, to the intense variation of affects” (SP 114/215).
Deleuze traces an illustrative sequence of gestures in the scene of Richard’s
courtship of Lady Anne. Shakespeare’s original is not parodied by Bene, “but
multiplied according to the variable speeds or developments that will be combined
in a single continuity of constitution (not a unity of representation)” (SP 117/216).
While Richard delivers his lines of love, the actor playing the character “begins
to begin to understand” (SP 31), according to Bene’s stage directions – that is, he
begins to construct the gestural trajectory of a new set of movements. He takes
winding sheets from the corpse of Henry VI, whose coffin is at the back of the stage,
picks up various prosthetic limbs and artificial body parts stashed in cabinet drawers
and strewn across the stage, and wraps them one by one to his body with the winding
sheets as he speaks with Lady Anne. The prosthetic devices, signs of deformity and
corporeal subtraction, gradually become part of Richard’s gestural comportment,
costumes of an action that takes him beyond his historical and political role and
destiny. Lady Anne reacts with disgust to Richard as the representative of state
power, but as he accrues various deformities she responds with pity, sympathy, and
an increasing eroticism. Gradually she helps him find prosthetics and wrap them to
his body, and she herself accelerates an eccentric sequence of gestures, “continually
undressing and dressing herself in a rhythm of regression-progression that responds
to Richard’s subtractions-constructions” (SP 118/217). Finally, as the characters
develop their separate lines of gestural variation, the two lines enter into relation
with one another and form a single continuum, itself composed of indissociably
related discursive and nondiscursive elements: “And each one’s vocal variations,
phonemes and tonalities, form a tighter and tighter line infringing on each one’s
gestures, and vice versa,” at which point there are not “two intersecting continuities
but one and the same continuum in which words and gestures play the roles of
variables in transformation” (SP 118/217).
The theater might seem to provide exceptional instances of minor literature,
in that drama necessarily involves a wide range of nonlinguistic elements that are
not a part of other literary forms. But in actuality, drama simply makes evident
what is implicit in all literature. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the discursive and
the nondiscursive are inseparable (though by no means identical). Language is a
mode of action informed by the interplay of machinic assemblages and collective
assemblages of enunciation. Words intervene in bodies, and all the elements of
language – phonemic, syntactic, semantic – derive their function from patterns
of practices, institutions and material objects. Kafka’s minor usage of German
intensifies the linguistic practices of Prague Jews, but in so doing it necessarily
engages all the elements inherent in varying speech situations. The continuum of “I
swear!” passes through words, intonations, gestures, bodies, buildings and locales,
and Kafka’s minor usage of that continuum sends reverberations through all those
elements. Bene’s minor theater likewise intensifies lines of variation inherent in the
Italian language, and through the actors’ delivery and diverse sonic manipulations
of their speech, deformations in the performance of language are induced, while
the elements of gesture, costume and setting are denaturalized, transmuted and

Minority, Territory, Music 27
recombined in unexpected arrangements. Yet Richard’s stammerings and groans, his
constant staggering and stumbling, his prosthetic modifications of his body and his
interactions with props and stage furniture, are not fully isolable from his words. A
minor usage of language engages relations of action and power, which interconnect
meanings, sounds, movements, bodies and decor. Bene’s minor theater dramatizes
the pragmatic nature of language. In this sense it may be viewed as the theater of
minor literature, a staging of the full range of elements implicit in the minor usage of
language engaged in by all minor writers in all forms of literary invention.
Territory
The Refrain
As we have seen, the concepts of minority and territory are interrelated, in that a minor
usage of language effects a deterritorialization of linguistic regularities, but what
this notion of “deterritorialization” has to do with concrete geographical territories
remains to be determined. Throughout their collaborative works, Deleuze and
Guattari make frequent use of the terms deterritorialization and reterritorialization,
but it is only in section eleven of A Thousand Plateaus, “1837: Of the Refrain,”
that they address the topic of territory per se, engaging the subject via an analysis
of music’s relation to animal ethology. 7 Music, they assert, “is a creative, active
operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain [la ritournelle],” whereas the
refrain “is essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing” (MP 369/300).
Deleuze and Guattari identify three basic aspects of the refrain, which we may label a
point of order; a circle of control; and a line of flight toward the outside. An instance
of a point of order is that of the tune a child sings to comfort herself when she’s
alone and afraid in the dark. A circle of control is evident in the perimeter of a cat’s
domain marked by his spray. And a line of flight is met with in the mass movements
of lemmings, birds, or lobsters. Although the point of order, circle of control and
line of flight are most easily understood in terms of diverse moments and scenarios,
Deleuze and Guattari insist that they are not “successive moments in an evolution,”
but “three aspects of a single thing, the Refrain” (MP 383/312). Nevertheless, these
three aspects of the refrain vary in their relative importance when considered in the
context of different animals and their environments. The refrain in its broadest sense
is a rhythmic regularity that brings order out of chaos. All animals interact with
the world to fashion environments, or milieus, and each milieu is defined by the
components of which it is composed; “Every milieu is vibratory, that is, a block of
space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component” (MP 384/313).
Milieus confront chaos, and rhythm “is the milieus’ answer to chaos” (MP 385/313).
The amoeba’s inner metabolic rhythms, its movements in its aqueous medium, its
absorptions of nutrients and reactions to external stimuli, the fluctuating waves of
7 For a more extended discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to music and
territoriality, see Chapters One and Three of my Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts
(New York, 2003).

28
Deleuze’s Way
forces and particles that impinge on its surface – all may be seen as components of
an interactive system of rhythms, or regular patterns of space-time, which together
constitute the refrain that characterizes a milieu. 8
All animals inhabit milieus, but only some occupy territories. A territory emerges
when a milieu component ceases to be merely functional and becomes expressive.
The bright coloration of the male stickleback fish, for example, is not simply a
mating stimulus for the female, but it serves also as a placard signaling the male’s
territorial rights. The color is “both a quality and a property, quale and proprium”
(MP 387/315), the qualitative expression of the territory and the signature of its
possessor. What is functional in mating behavior gains autonomy, becomes detached
from its milieu context. In a similar fashion, the stagemaker bird marks its territory
by pulling leaves from trees and placing them in patterns on the ground. Here, leaves
cease to function as parts of a tree habitat and become signs of the bird’s domain. The
territory is “an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that ‘territorializes’ rhythms”
(MP 386/314). Paradoxically, the territorializing act proceeds via a detachment,
decoding, or “deterritorialization” of milieu components and a reinscription,
recoding, or “reterritorialization” of those components as expressive qualities
within a territory. Nor is the territorial act performed exclusively by the territory’s
possessors. Territorialization “is an act of rhythm that has become expressive,
or of milieu components that have become qualitative” (MP 388/315). Rhythm
itself territorializes, which is a somewhat enigmatic way of saying that territories
are emergent features of the regular patterns of complex ecological systems. The
patterns are rhythms, melodies, refrains, and though produced by animals and their
environments, they are relations between elements, and hence features of the system
as a whole rather than any of its separate components.
The “T factor, the territorializing factor,” then is found “precisely in the becomingexpressive
of rhythm or melody, in other words, in the emergence of proper qualities
(color, odor, sound, silhouette … )” (MP 388/316). Rhythms that are fixed and
functionally coded in milieus become detached and assume new roles as expressive,
proper qualities. These qualities serve as signs of the territory and its occupant’s
possession of the domain, but the rhythms of a territory also tend to take on a life
of their own and become more than mere signatures of ownership. Territorial motifs
“form rhythmic faces or characters,” and territorial counterpoints “form melodic
landscapes,” motifs and counterpoints becoming autonomous patterns that follow
“an autodevelopment, in other words, a style” (MP 391–3/318–19). Further, every
territory is open to an outside, and its rhythms and patterns include “lines of flight,”
unstable vectors that serve both as constituents of the territory and sources of its
potential dissolution. In this regard, the long-distance migrations of spiny lobsters,
Alaskan salmon and Canadian geese are simply extreme instances of a general
tendency of every territory to move beyond itself toward the surrounding world.
8 Deleuze’s first published book, Instincts et institutions, assembles a number of brief
texts on this topic, by authors as diverse as Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Darwin, Cuvier, Bergson,
Malinowski, Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Eliade. Deleuze’s short introduction on the relationship
between animal instincts and social institutions (ID 24–7/19–21) inaugurates a line of
speculation that reappears with some frequency throughout his thought.

Minority, Territory, Music 29
One can see, then, that the three aspects of the refrain correspond to three degrees
of increasing deterritorialization that are met with in the generation of a territory.
The refrain as point of order is a rhythmic regularity that organizes milieus in fixed
patterns. Since territories encompass milieus and possess lines of flight, the refrain
appears in territories in all its guises – point of order, circle of control, line of flight,
“three aspects of a single thing” (MP 383/312).
Music
Many birds are territorial, and birdsong is often recognized as having a territorial
function. Ornithologists distinguish between calls, or communicational signals of
imminent danger, presence of food, proximity of mates or foes, and so on, and songs
proper, which, depending on the species, may vary in length and complexity from
two-to-three-second repeated motifs to extended, multisectional, improvisatory
performances. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, bird calls are largely milieu
components, fixed to specific functions, whereas birdsongs are territorial elements,
sonic components of milieus that have been unfixed and reconfigured in a more
autonomous fashion. Ethologists debate whether birds are musicians, some arguing
that birds sing only in response to hormonal stimuli, others insisting that birds have
an aesthetic sense, take pleasure in singing for its own sake, and in a few cases,
create original sonic compositions. Deleuze and Guattari concur that birds are artists,
though they do not treat the issue as one of instinctual versus free activity. Art has its
origin in the emergence of qualities as expressions of a territory. The stickleback’s
coloration and the stagemaker’s leaves are artworks, whether produced primarily
by instinct or volition. What counts are the object and its status within the act of
territorialization. Birdsongs likewise are artworks, for they are deterritorialized
milieu components that express a territory and a property, and in their extended
and elaborate forms they become part of autonomous “rhythmic characters” and
“melodic landscapes” that tend beyond the territory toward the cosmos as a whole.
The bird sings its territory, or rather, the territory as relational rhythmic act sings
itself through the bird, as the refrain actualizes musical points of order, circles of
control and lines of flight.
What relation does birdsong have to human music? Certain compositional practices
of the composer Olivier Messiaen suggest an answer. 9 In a series of works from the
1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Messiaen incorporates birdsongs into his music, rendering
as accurately as possible through conventional musical instruments the intervals,
rhythms, articulations and timbres of the melodies of various species of birds. Yet
Messiaen admits that much is changed when one transfers to human instruments
the microintervals and rapid tempi of birdsongs, as well as those articulations
and timbres peculiar to avian physiology. 10 Once the intervals are stretched to fit
9 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari make reference to Messiaen’s music,
his use of birdsong, and his concept of “rhythmic characters.” See especially MP 299–
309/367–80 and 316–20/388–94. See also Deleuze, FB 48/60.
10 Messiaen says of his citations of birdsongs in his music: “Personally, I’m very proud
of the exactitude of my work; perhaps I’m wrong, because even people who really know the

30
Deleuze’s Way
the chromatic scale, the tempos slowed to human speeds, and the attack and tone
adapted to suit orchestral instruments, the melodies are virtually unrecognizable to
the most discerning of ornithologists, and once the birdsong motifs are combined
in polyphonic patterns and manipulated to become parts of a compositional whole,
they are even further transformed. Despite Messiaen’s efforts to imitate birdsong, his
musical practice is that of a “becoming-bird,” a passage between bird and human that
produces something new and unexpected, not an imitation but a deterritorialization
of birdsong.
Music “is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain”
(MP 369/300). What might seem an idiosyncratic technique in Messiaen is actually
paradigmatic of all musical composition. To the extent that they create genuine
music, all musicians – even birds – deterritorialize the refrain. And they are able to
do so because the refrain deterritorializes itself. In its first guise as point of order,
the refrain manifests itself in various milieu rhythms, which are fixed to specific
functions (eating, mating, fighting, and so on). In its second guise as territorial
motif, the refrain is itself a deterritorialization of milieu rhythms, and in its third
aspect as line of flight, it is a deterritorialization of territorial rhythms. Even the most
rudimentary of birdsongs is a deterritorialization of the milieu refrain, an unfixing and
decoding of calls with particular functions, and the most complex birdsongs further
deterritorialize rhythms that have been fixed and coded within territories and open
them toward an outside. The compositions of Messiaen simply extend this process of
deterritorialization, taking as their material the refrains of birds and submitting them
to diverse operations and procedures that produce new sonic events.
Yet we must not think that Deleuze and Guattari’s point is that composers simply
render human analogs of the sounds of nature. The example of Messiaen’s use of
birdsong is instructive, in that it suggests a direct way in which music deterritorializes
the refrain, but it is potentially misleading if we do not keep in mind that the refrain
is not exclusively sonic. Refrains are rhythms, relational patterns that shape milieus
and territories. 11 The rhythms of mating, feeding, reproduction, nurture, play, struggle
and exploration; the periodic fluctuations of weather, seasons, tides, or currents; the
recurrent flows of gestures, movements, sights, sounds, smells, tastes – all combine
in refrains. The task of music is less to convert natural sounds to human sounds than
to render sonorous the nonsonorous forces that play through nature, and to do so by
deterritorializing the rhythmic relations of the world, transforming them, and inventing
new modes for their interconnection and interaction. In his monumental orchestral
work From the Canyons to the Stars ... (1974), for example, Messiaen makes use of
a number of birdsongs, but he also claims to render sonorous the multiple rhythms of
birds might not recognize them in my music, yet I assure you that everything is real” (Olivier
Messiaen, Music and Color. Conversations with Claude Samuel, trans. E. Thomas Glasow
(Portland, OR, 1994), p. 94).
11 Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of territorialization as an “act of rhythm” suggests
that they take “rhythm” in its broadest sense, to include both temporal and spatial patterns (as
one speaks of the rhythm of the elements of a painting, sculpture or building, for example).
Hence, all the relational patterns of music may be subsumed within the general category of
rhythm.

Minority, Territory, Music 31
the birds’ habitats throughout the course of a day, the slow rhythms of the geological
formations of the Utah canyons, and the extended rhythms of the constellations. His
composition engages these various refrains not by “imitating” birds, sagebrush, rocks
and stars, but by extracting from milieu components their rhythmic relations and
submitting these relations to processes of creative metamorphosis, first fashioning
nonmimetic analogs of those relations in the form of melodic and harmonic motifs,
then combining, transforming, dividing, inverting those motifs, and finally shaping
them into a structurally coherent sequence of interconnected movements. Although
Messiaen provides evocative titles for each of the twelve movements of this work
– for example, “The Desert,” “Orioles,” “Interstellar Call,” “Zion Park and the
Celestial City” – the resulting composition is less a musical evocation of a setting
than a self-organized sonic response to a set of abstract relations. And though other
composers may not articulate their practice in such terms, they too manipulate and
transform the rhythms that surround them and pervade them whenever they create
music. 12
Minority and territory
What, then, is the relation between minority and territory, between literature as a minor
usage of language and music as the deterritorialization of the refrain? Language is a
mode of action informed by relations of power. Machinic assemblages and collective
assemblages of enunciation constitute patterns of practices, institutions and material
objects that organize and regulate the immanent lines of continuous variation that
play through the phonemic, grammatical, syntactic and semantic elements of speech
and writing. The patterns of the relations of power that infuse and shape language
may also be termed refrains, periodic rhythms that compose milieus and territories
(as well as other forms of social-environmental organization, which we would need
to detail in a thorough analysis of this problem). A minor usage of language induces
a destabilization of linguistic constants, an unfixing of semiotic regularities, and in
this sense it may be seen as a deterritorialization of the refrains immanent within
various speech-act events. Both literature and music are experimentations on the
real, means of capturing, dissolving and transmuting existing relations of force and
then reshaping and reconstructing them in new configurations. Literature works
with a linguistic medium, music with a sonic medium, but both engage rhythms and
forces that extend through fields that include the discursive and the nondiscursive,
the sonic and the nonsonic. Writers manipulate words, but words function as
components of context-specific speech-acts, which are made up of multiple linguistic
12 A thorough treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to music would include a
review of their differentiation of Classical, Romantic and Modern compositional practices
in A Thousand Plateaus (MP 337–50; 416–33). Deleuze discusses music as well in the final
Chapter of The Fold (LP 164–87/121–37), concentrating primarily on music’s relation to
the other arts in the Baroque, and in Périclès et Verdi. La philosophie de François Châtelet
(PV). Also of interest are Deleuze’s brief articles “Making Inaudible Forces Audible” (DRF
142–6.156–60) and “Occupy Time Without Counting: Boulez, Proust and Time” (DRF 272–
9/292–9).

32
Deleuze’s Way
and nonlinguistic elements. A minor usage of language affects all the components
of speech-acts, and in the theater one sees an explicit demonstration of literature’s
implicit deterritorialization of diction, gesture, movement and setting through the
manipulation of the word. Similarly, in Messiaen’s experimentations with birdsong,
he necessarily engages elements beyond those of mere sound, for each birdsong
is part of a complex territorial assemblage of interrelated rhythms that constitute
patterns of courtship, mating, reproduction, feeding, and so on. In this sense, music’s
deterritorialization of the refrain, like literature’s minor usage of language, entails an
engagement of proliferating networks of relations that stretch across heterogeneous
domains, the refrain incorporating sonic and nonsonic components alike, just as
speech-acts involve variables of language, gesture, action, and all the nondiscursive
components of the given contexts of their performance.
To a certain extent, humans are territorial animals, and works of literature and
music often have specifically territorial associations. Languages arise in concrete
regions; tales, myths and legends are created by peoples inhabiting their native soils.
The rhythmic and melodic modes of ancient Greece belong to specific locales, as
do the talas (basic rhythmic units) of traditional Indian music. (Indeed, the complex
relations between a geographic area and its artistic creations are such that a territory
and its literature and music may be seen as mutually defining one another.) As birds
sing their territory, so do humans speak or sing theirs. But the literature and music
of a given territory are transfused by relations of power, and to the extent that they
are territorial arts, they reinforce the domination of the majority, that is, those who
represent the standard and norm against which all deviation is measured. No matter
how oppressed a given group may be, a return to its native soil, to the tales and
songs of the homeland, remains a return to a major culture and a major usage of
language and sound. The minor is essentially homeless, nomadic, vagabond. A
minor usage of language puts constants in variation, disengages them from their
territorial roots, and sets them in perpetual movement. The aim of minor literature is
to set all the constants of language in such continuous variation, just as it is the aim
of music to deterritorialize all aspects of the refrain. In a brief remark about Viennese
atonal music, Deleuze and Guattari observe that in the works of composers like
Schoenberg, twelve-tone rows may deterritorialize tonality, but the other elements
of music – rhythm, dynamics, attack, timbre – receive a relatively conventional
treatment. What Deleuze and Guattari call for is an experimentation on all aspects
of music, a “generalized chromaticism” (MP 123/97) that puts all musical constants
in variation. Likewise, they support in literary creation a parallel experimentation
on all aspects of language. As Deleuze remarks in “One Less Manifesto,” “a minor
language contains only minimal structural constancy and homogeneity. It is not,
however, a porridge, a mixture of dialects, since it finds its rules in the construction
of a continuum. Indeed, the continuous variation will apply to all the sonorous and
linguistic components in a sort of generalized chromaticism” (SP 100/209). Deleuze
observes that Bene’s “writing and gestures are musical,” in that Bene treats all the
components of drama as variations in speed and intensity. “This is the musical
formula of continuity, or of form as transformation” (SP 113/215). At a certain level
of abstraction, experimentations on the lines of continuous variation immanent
within language and those immanent within territorial refrains may be seen as

Minority, Territory, Music 33
experimentations on speeds and intensities, on relational patterns and rhythms, on
oscillations, vibrations and modulations in a spatiotemporal continuum. At that level,
both literature and music have a common function as minor usages of relations of
power and as deterritorializations of territorial forces.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3
Violence in Three Shades of Metal
Death, Doom and Black
The role of violence in contemporary culture has often been raised in discussions
of popular music, and this question is particularly germane to three closely related
forms of heavy metal music known as death metal, doom metal and black metal. The
music of all three forms is extremely loud, somber and modal, highly percussive, and
often fast, with vocals generally delivered in guttural shouts, grunts, moans, screams,
or whispers. The lyrics frequently offer images of mayhem, dismemberment, bodily
decay and disease. And in the case of black metal, a few of its better-known artists
have been convicted of arson and murder. Deleuze says little directly about popular
music, and his analyses of music as an art are less copious than those of other arts,
especially literature and cinema. Nonetheless, his thought, especially as developed
with Guattari, provides an incisive means of articulating the issues surrounding the
social dimension of music in general and those related to violence in these three
forms of heavy metal music in particular.
Deleuze and Music
Deleuze’s most extended treatment of music is to be found in Plateaus 10 and 11
of A Thousand Plateaus, where he and Guattari develop the concept of music as
the “creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain” (MP
369/300). 1 Deleuze and Guattari’s fundamental goal is to situate music within the
processes of the natural world and conceive of it as a specific mode of engaging
patterns of action, relation and development. The refrain may be defined loosely
as any rhythmic pattern that forms part of a network of relations among creatures
and their environment within a milieu, territory, or social domain. Each organism
traces a “developmental melody” as it grows, matures and eventually dies, and the
regular rhythms of its activities function as so many motifs in counterpoint with the
motifs produced by surrounding organisms and inorganic forces. Organisms possess
varying degrees of autonomy in relation to their environment; milieu creatures are
closely tied to their surrounding world, territorial animals less so, and certain species
(such as humans) even less so again (in that humans, though showing territorial
tendencies, finally are capable of inhabiting spaces in much more unfixed and shifting
patterns than such territorial species as the stickleback fish or the Australian grass
1 For a detailed discussion of Deleuze’s approach to music, see my Deleuze on Music,
Painting, and the Arts (New York, 2003), pp. 13–76.

36
Deleuze’s Way
finch). Relative degrees of autonomy among organisms are made possible by the
“deterritorialization” of refrains, by the uncoding or unfixing of rhythmic patterns
within one context, and by their “reterritorialization” within another. The song of the
stagemaker bird, for example, is a sonic pattern that has been “deterritorialized” from
any single function – say, that of signaling danger – and has been “reterritorialized” as
a multi-functional refrain integrated within diverse refrains traced in the activities of
nest-building, mating, food-gathering, predator-signaling, territorial defense, and so
on. The stagemaker’s song emerges within its territory as part of its lifeworld, and the
bird’s overall degree of autonomy, its relative flexibility in the organization of a given
block of space-time, is a function of the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of
its multiple refrains.
Human music is significantly less fixed in its function than is birdsong, and music’s
greater degree of deterritorialization is inseparable from the human species’ general
degree of flexibility in its relation to its lifeworld. Human music may be involved in
any number of activities – courtship, war, ritual, worship, lament, labor, celebration,
dance, intoxication, amusement – but music possesses no necessary relationship to
any of these, and it tends toward an autonomy that is beyond any function other than
its own process. Indeed, music’s reterritorialization of sound is largely a recoding of
sound in terms of itself, that is, in terms of formal systems such as those of traditional
harmony and counterpoint in Western tonal music. Yet human music is not simply
a collection of deterritorialized refrains, for it is also a deterritorializing force that
interacts with nonmusical rhythmic patterns and provides them with sonic analogs
within musical works. For Deleuze and Guattari, all deterritorialization proceeds
via a process of becoming-other, a passage between entities or categories that sets
them in metamorphic disequilibrium. In Olivier Messiaen’s use of birdsong in his
musical compositions, Deleuze and Guattari find an apt example of music’s function
as a deterritorializing force interacting with refrains in a process of becoming-other. 2
In many of his compositions, especially those of the 1950s and 1960s, Messiaen
constructs motifs from various birdsongs, rendering them with what Messiaen
regards as great accuracy. Yet Messiaen observes that the high pitches, rapid tempos
and peculiar timbres of birdsongs require that he enlarge the intervals between
tones, slow the tempos, and find substitute timbres among human instruments in
order to provide musical counterparts to the original birdsongs. The result, Messiaen
concedes, is a music filled with birdsongs that the most practiced of ornithologists
seldom can recognize. For Deleuze and Guattari, Messiaen’s interaction with
birdsong is a paradigmatic instance of the musical process of becoming-other, a
becoming-bird in which something passes between the fixed coordinates of human
music and birdsong to produce new sounds. Messiaen’s musical rendering of the
bird’s refrain deterritorializes that refrain, extracts it from its territorial function, and
then incorporates it within a musical composition that unfolds along its own lines of
development. Messiaen does not imitate the birdsong but provides a sonic analog of
2 Messiaen’s remarks on birdsong and their function in his music may be found in
Claude Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, trans. Felix Aprahamian (London,
1976), especially pp. 62 and 75.

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 37
the song, thereby giving musical embodiment to the extra-musical force of the bird’s
territorial refrain.
A musical becoming-other is not simply a matter of undoing fixed refrains,
however, for in becoming-other one engages a dimension of reality that is qualitatively
distinct from ordinary experience. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between two
domains in the real world, an actual domain of commonsense spatiotemporal entities
and processes, and a virtual domain of pure becoming and self-differentiating
difference. The virtual may be conceived of loosely as a field of vectors of potential
development and metamorphosis, each vector a line of continuous variation along
which an actual process of development and metamorphosis might unfold. The
virtual is immanent within the real, and every concrete, commonsense process is an
actualization of an immanent virtual line of force. As I noted in Chapter 1, the virtualactual
relationship is most easily understood via the example of the genesis and
growth of a biological entity. The initial single-cell ovum is crisscrossed by multiple
lines of potential cleavage, only one of which is actualized upon fertilization. As the
single cell divides into two cells, potential lines of further division emerge within each
of the new cells, again only one of which is actualized as each new cell in turn splits
in two. Rather than seeing this process of division as the mechanical implementation
of a preprogrammed blueprint, Deleuze and Guattari treat it as the unfolding of an
immanent vector of differentiation, whereby a virtual, self-differentiating force is
continuously actualized within concrete developmental processes.
“The world is an egg,” Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition (DR 323/251),
in that this process of actualization of virtual lines of force is manifest throughout
the real. Usually, the virtual domain of becoming and self-differentiating difference
escapes us, but in moments of disequilibrium and disorientation we gain access to
that realm. Then we encounter a world not of discrete objects, fixed coordinates and
chronometric time, but of flows and fluxes, topological spaces and floating durations.
Entities within this virtual domain may be characterized solely by “pure relations
of speed and slowness between particles” and by “pure affects” (MP 270/330), or
powers of affecting and being affected by other elements. The time of the virtual
is not that of Chronos, or regularly measured clock time, but that of Aeon, a time
like that of an infinitive, “to swim,” “to sleep,” a becoming that is unfixed and nonpulsed,
unfolding in no specifiable direction and in relation to no clear coordinates.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari designate the domain of the virtual
by various names, including the body without organs, the plane of consistency, and
the smooth space of the nomadic war machine. By calling it a body without organs,
Deleuze and Guattari stress the affective nature of the virtual and its connection to the
human body, but they caution that the body without organs is not strictly speaking an
individual or human body, for the body without organs is immediately social (capital,
for example, is the body without organs of the capitalist social formation) and it is
always made up of flows and fluxes that include human and nonhuman elements
alike. By labeling the virtual a plane of consistency, Deleuze and Guattari avoid
associations with the human body entirely and highlight abstract continuities between
elements, while insisting that the elements are irreducibly multiple and held together
only through a loose cohesion, or glue-like consistency, emerging from relations of
speed and affective intensity. And by speaking of the virtual as a smooth space (as

38
Deleuze’s Way
opposed to one that is “striated,” or graphed and gridded), which is generated by the
nomadic war machine, they emphasize the fluid, ever-changing quality of the virtual,
as well as its connection to forces of transformation and potential destruction.
Thus, when Messiaen enters into a process of becoming-other and deterritorializes
a birdsong refrain, he engages a virtual line of continuous variation that is
immanent within the real, and that specific line of variation, or vector of potential
development and differentiation, is interconnected with other such lines across a
plane of consistency, or field of virtual vectorial forces. Messiaen’s goal (and that
of all composers generally, and of modern composers especially) is to capture these
virtual forces, “the forces of an immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos” (MP
342–3/423), and give them sonic embodiment. He seeks to render sonorous that
which is nonsonorous, to address “a problem of consistency or consolidation: How
to consolidate the material, make it consistent, so that it can harness unthinkable,
invisible, nonsonorous forces,” such as those of “Duration and Intensity” (MP
343/423). In one sense, then, Messiaen’s compositions are directly connected
to the actual material world, in that he generates thematic material through a
deterritorialization of actual birdsong refrains. But in another sense, his compositions
partake of a different realm – the virtual – rendering sonorous the nonsonorous
forces immanent within the real. In this regard, his compositions may be seen as
sonic bodies without organs, palpable planes of consistency that render perceptible
what usually escapes perception – the speeds, affects and floating time of the virtual.
I believe that the music of death, doom and black metal groups likewise aims at the
creation of sonic bodies without organs, or palpable planes of consistency, though of
a decidedly different quality than those of Messiaen.
The Music of Death, Doom and Black Metal
Death, doom and black metal are sub-genres of heavy metal music, a form of
popular music whose origin most commentators trace to the 1969–70 release of
Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin II, Deep Purple’s Deep Purple in Rock, and Black
Sabbath’s Paranoid. 3 Of these three, Black Sabbath’s was the album that fostered
the development of death, doom and black metal. England’s Venom produced what
some regard as the first death metal album, Welcome to Hell, in 1981, with other
early efforts in a death vein including those of Los Angeles’ Slayer (Show No Mercy
[1983], Hell Awaits [1985], and Reign in Blood [1986]), Switzerland’s Hellhammer
(Apocalyptic Raids [1985]), and Florida’s Death (Scream Bloody Gore [1987],
3 The best introduction to heavy metal music as a whole is Robert Walser, Running
with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, 1993). Deena
Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (New York, 1991) also provides useful
information about heavy metal culture, but her sociological analysis pays little heed to the
music per se. Neither Walser nor Weinstein explicitly discusses the sub-genres of death, doom
and black metal. The portraits of heavy metal listeners in Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Metalheads:
Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation (Boulder, CO, 1996) are of limited interest,
especially since only one of his subjects listens to music that might be remotely classified as
death, doom or black metal.

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 39
Leprosy [1988]). By the early 1990s, death had become established as a prominent
form of heavy metal music, leading performers during the 1990s including Morbid
Angel, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, Obituary, Monstrosity, Cryptopsy, Suffocation,
Dying Fetus and Vader. At present, several hundred death bands are performing and
recording worldwide.
Devotees of doom metal often cite as early instances of the sub-genre mid-
1980s albums by Saint Vitus and Candlemass, the title of Candlemass’ 1986 Epicus
Doomicus Metallicus perhaps inspiring the sub-genre’s eventual designation. But
only in the early 1990s did doom become firmly established as an important form
of heavy metal music, as groups such as Paradise Lost (Lost Paradise [1990]), My
Dying Bride (As the Flower Withers [1992], Turn Loose the Swans [1993]), and
Anathema (Serenade [1993], Enigma [1995]) fused elements of death metal with the
somber, slow-paced strains of groups such as Saint Vitus and Candlemass. Though
perhaps less popular than death metal, doom continues to thrive, with at least two
hundred groups active in the Americas and Europe.
Black metal is often said to have arisen alongside death metal, Sweden’s Bathory
showing characteristics of the sub-genre in such releases as The Return … (1985),
Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987) and Blood Fire Death (1988), but the
groups most closely associated with the establishment of black metal as a distinct
category, Norway’s Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone and Emperor, developed their
music in direct response to death metal. These groups’ releases from the early 1990s
inspired the formation of hundreds of black metal bands in the next decade, black
metal now perhaps rivaling death in popularity among metal audiences. In addition
to Darkthrone, Emperor and Mayhem, important black metal groups active in the last
decade include Dark Funeral, Enslaved, Gorgoroth, Immortal, Impaled Nazarene,
Marduk, Rotting Christ and Satyricon. 4
4 The categories of death, doom and black are somewhat fluid, and classification of
individual groups within these categories is often disputed by listeners. Nor are these the only
divisions of heavy metal music that might be brought to bear on a study of the three sub-genres;
thrash, grindcore, stoner rock, and speed metal, for example, are other classifications often
invoked in heavy metal discussions. Assessments of the popularity of death, doom and black
metal are difficult to make. The sub-genres receive virtually no television or radio airplay.
CDs are produced and distributed not by major manufacturers but by a number of small labels
in various countries, and in many instances by the groups themselves. Communication about
the music is carried on among musicians and listeners through a few glossy publications,
numerous ‘fanzines’ produced by enthusiasts of the sub-genres, several websites devoted
to the music, and personal correspondence among band members and their audiences.
Especially useful websites include Dark Legions Archive (www.anus.com/metal), Doommetal.com
(www.doom-metal.com), American Black Metal List (www.usbmlist.cjb.net) and
DarkLyrics.com (www.darklyics.com). Perhaps some rough measure of the popularity of the
sub-genres may be gathered from the following data: Doom-metal.com offers detailed profiles
and discographies of 291 doom metal groups, over 200 of which are currently active; the
American Black Metal List includes entries for 490 black metal groups from the United States
alone; and DarkLyrics archives lyrics by over 1,100 bands, at least 60 per cent of which are
death, doom or black metal bands.

40
Deleuze’s Way
Fundamental to death, doom and black metal, as to all heavy metal music, is
the highly amplified sound of electric guitars, electric basses and drums. The basic
sound is aptly named “heavy metal,” for both words convey something essential
about the music. It is heavy in that it is emphatically percussive, “thick” in texture,
and highly amplified in the lower registers. It is metal in that its sound is dominated
by a particular gamut of high-distortion, low-frequency “grinding,” “crunching”
timbres produced by amplified solid-body electric guitars. The language of timbres,
of course, like the language of tastes or smells, is crude at best, but whether one can
precisely name the sound or not, one can easily discriminate a basic “feel” to the
sound of all death, doom and black metal. What is crucial is that the sub-genres’
core sound bears little relation to any sounds produced by conventional acoustic
instruments, including the guitar. It is decidedly “unnatural,” non-organic, metallic.
If rock ’n’ roll generally depends for its existence on electric industrial technology,
death, doom and black metal take as their fundamental sound that of the electric
guitar treated as an electric industrial machine.
Death, doom and black metal do not imitate the sounds of industrial machines,
but they produce sonic analogs of the sounds, rhythms and patterns of the modern
technological lifeworld. In this sense, death, doom and black metal may be seen as
music that attempts a deterritorialization of the diverse refrains of contemporary
industrial machine culture. But such an observation, besides being rather clichéd
(though nonetheless true, I believe), says little about the music beyond its basic
timbral qualities. If music deterritorializes non-musical refrains, it also reterritorializes
sounds within conventional systems of relations: “it is through a system of melodic
and harmonic coordinates by means of which music reterritorializes upon itself, qua
music” (MP 372/303). Deleuze and Guattari argue that genuine creativity in music
requires not simply a deterritorialization of refrains in the outside world, but also
a deterritorialization of the conventions of standard musical practice, which in the
case of metal music, are those of traditional seventeenth–nineteenth-century Western
tonal harmony and counterpoint. Deleuze and Guattari advocate what they call a
“generalized chromaticism,” a deterritorialization
… affecting not only pitches but all sound components – durations, intensities, timbre,
attacks … By placing all its components in continuous variation, music itself becomes
a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of a tree, and enters the service of a virtual
cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part. [MP
120–21/95]
Yet they recognize as well that a deterritorialization of all musical components at the
same time leads only to a muddled chaos of white noise: “Sometimes one overdoes it,
puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds; then instead of producing
a cosmic machine capable of ‘rendering sonorous,’ one lapses back to a machine of
reproduction that ends up reproducing nothing but a scribble effacing all lines, a
scramble effacing all sounds” (MP 424/343–4). All elements of music must be open
to experimentation, but only a selected few may be worked with at a time. What is
needed is “a maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate elements
and the parameters,” a “sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture, or extraction

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 41
that works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively
limited, selected” (MP 425–6/344–5). And as Deleuze and Guattari observe of
literary experimentation in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, innovation may
proceed through proliferation (as in Joyce) but also through ascetic impoverishment
(as in Beckett). Hence, in musical as in literary experimentation, not only does
innovation require a limitation of the elements to be subjected to deterritorialization,
but it also may operate through a deliberately ascetic impoverishment of elements,
an intensification of musical components through their simplification.
Death, doom and black metal explore a deliberately restricted range of possibilities
within heavy metal music, each in its own way. Although the relationship among the
three sub-genres is complex and shifting, perhaps the easiest means of characterizing
them is first to delineate death metal practices and then to approach doom and black
metal as responses to death. 5 One finds in death metal a concerted effort to eliminate
all sweetness, tenderness and niceness from popular music – witness the repeated
description of the sub-genre by its performers and listeners as “extreme” and “brutal”
– and to fashion a music of frenetic speed and constant intensity. The intensity of the
music is conveyed through the sheer volume of the sound, variations in volume level
arising almost exclusively through brief antiphonal exchanges of solo power chords
between guitarists or shifts from chord sections to monophonic sections played in
unison by bass and guitars. The bass generally doubles the guitar motifs, providing
a full low-frequency reinforcement of the guitars’ deep sounds, while the “bite” of
the guitar attack ensures a relatively clear articulation of the rapid figures executed
by the guitarists. The drums emphasize virtually every subdivision within each highspeed
rhythmic motif, the highly amplified double kick-drums frequently delivering
a near sub-sonic punch to each note of the prestissimo bass-guitar figures. The sound
is not simply processed by the ears but also felt in the body (especially the chest), and
though the ears might subordinate elements of a rhythmic motif into accented and
unaccented components, the body feels each element as a distinct percussive event.
The result is a music that is experienced as an unrelenting, high-speed assault of lowfrequency
and mid-range pulses grouped in massive blocks or slabs of sound.
Death’s harmonic palette is quite limited. Major triads are avoided, and even
minor triads tend to be replaced by the open fourths and fifths of power chords.
Motifs generally are based on the intervals of the blues pentatonic scale (E-G-A-
B-D in the key of E), with frequent emphasis given as well to the intervals of the
minor second (E-F) and augmented fourth (E-A#) characteristic of the “exotic”
Phrygian and Locrian modes. There is little genuine harmonic movement in death
compositions; standard blues progressions and even common metal progressions
(for example, C-D-Em in E) give way to tonic-centered sections of monophony or
polyphonic sections based on a single chord or on a repeated alternation of two or
three open fifths that reinforce the tonic within each phrase unit. Death compositions
5 I discuss death metal music at greater length in “Becoming Metal, Becoming Death
…” in Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (Albany, NY, 2004). Other helpful treatments
of death metal music include Jack Harrell, “The Poetics of Destruction: Death Metal Rock,”
Popular Music and Society, 18 (1994): 91–104, and Harris M. Berger, “Death Metal Tonality
and the Act of Listening,” Popular Music, 18/2 (1999): 161–76.

42
Deleuze’s Way
are usually organized in discrete sections, each section based on a complex rhythmic
motif. And if a shift in tonality occurs, it coincides with a sectional break, such that
the shift provides little sense of a movement linking one tonal area to another, instead
merely signaling an abrupt break between tonal blocks. The sectional organization
seldom conforms to the standard verse-chorus-bridge structure of popular songs;
rather, section follows section in a paratactic sequence of multiple, loosely related
units, one unit simply being added on to the next. The result of these harmonic and
structural practices is that in death songs a curious stasis pervades the ubiquitous
high-speed motifs. Each section is like a plateau of intense constant energy, with
its own mood (generally minor-modal, sometimes vaguely non-Western), full of
motion but going nowhere in particular, section following section in a series of
discontinuous shifts from one plateau to another, those shifts themselves possessing
no identifiable developmental drive or direction.
Ultimately, this interplay of speed and stasis points toward the presence of two
different kinds of time in death metal, the time of Chronos and that of Aeon, as well
as two different ways of understanding the concept of speed. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari cite Pierre Boulez’s distinction between pulsed and nonpulsed
time in music (MP 320/262), pulsed time being the time of conventional meters and
regular beats, nonpulsed time being the floating, unmarked time exhibited in certain
modern compositions (Boulez’s among them) in which, for example, performers
freely execute motifs within a given duration (say, fifteen seconds) at their own pace,
with no pulse provided by the conductor. Deleuze and Guattari link this distinction
to one drawn often by Messiaen between meter and rhythm. 6 Meter, for Messiaen,
denotes a regular, measured repetition of equal pulses, whereas rhythm is a matter
of incommensurable durations, irregular sequences of unequally spaced pulses. In
Messiaen’s judgment, a march is the least rhythmic form of music, and it is rhythm,
not meter, that he regards as the vital force of musical time. What Deleuze and
Guattari call Chronos, the time of the commonsense, actual world, is a pulsed,
metrical time of regular repeated intervals, whereas Aeon, the time of the virtual, is
a nonpulsed rhythmic time of irregular, incommensurable intervals.
It is on the basis of this distinction between pulsed, metrical Chronos and
nonpulsed, rhythmic Aeon that Deleuze and Guattari make what might at first seem a
paradoxical opposition of movement and speed. Speed, they argue, is not necessarily
a matter of a quantitative measure of movement. Indeed, “a movement may be very
fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile,
yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive” (MP 473/381). To
phrase the distinction somewhat differently, we might say that there is a quantitative
speed of measurable velocities germane to the actual (an “extensive” speed, in that
it belongs to the realm of Cartesian spatiotemporal extension), but that there is also
a qualitative speed that defies measure and opens us to the intensive dimension of
the virtual. Qualitative speed is movement out of control, and it may be encountered
in extremes of mobility and immobility. Deleuze and Guattari suggest the nature
of those extremes in their remarks on Kleist, who gives “time a new rhythm” in
6 For more on Messiaen’s distinction between meter and rhythm, see Bogue, Deleuze
on Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 25.

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 43
literature. His fiction and drama present “an endless succession of catatonic episodes
or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is: ‘This affect is too strong for
me,’ and a flash is: ‘The power of this affect sweeps me away,’ so that the Self [Moi]
is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified,
perhaps even to the point of death” (MP 440/356). A rush is an acceleration that
runs out of control, catatonia a vertiginous suspension of time, and the two extremes
ultimately shade into one another. Just as the spokes of a wheel, moving faster and
faster as the velocity of the wheel’s rotation increases, at a certain point begin to blur
and form a single, still shape; so acceleration beyond commonsense perception at a
certain point is transformed into a constant, vibrating hum that paradoxically seems
to freeze duration while still participating in a dimension of becoming. In this sense,
every intensive moment of temporal disequilibrium, even a frozen, catatonic stupor,
is a moment of qualitative speed.
Nearly all music involves both meter and rhythm, both pulsed and nonpulsed
time; few compositions dispense entirely with evenly repeated beats and regular
measures. In Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, this is not surprising, for Chronos
and Aeon, though qualitatively distinct from one another, are only experienced as
tendencies within an inextricable mixture of the two. There is no experience of
chronometric time that does not have at least a tincture of vertiginous becoming
within it, and no experience of a floating, suspended time that does not retain at
least a hint of some regular measure. What varies in music is the handling of meter
and rhythm, pulsed and nonpulsed time, and the relative emphasis placed on each
factor. All rock ’n’ roll has its roots in the regular meters of dance music, and death
metal is no exception. The “givens” of rock ’n’ roll are the standard meters (2/4, 3/4,
4/4, 6/8, 9/8, 12/8) and four-, eight-, twelve-, and sixteen-bar rhythmic groupings of
Western dance forms, and death musicians accept these conventions, attempting in
individual sections of their compositions to exploit a specific rhythmic motif within
a standard meter, imbue it with an emphatic “heaviness,” and render it at a high rate
of quantitative speed. But they also manage to create effects of qualitative speed, and
through several techniques and practices.
As we have already seen, one method is to avoid virtually all harmonic movement
and any developmental organization of sectional units, thereby imparting to each highspeed
unit a concomitant aura of atemporal stasis. A second, less common, technique
is to repeat a hyper-regular figure until it becomes a hypnotic, trance-like drone (a
strategy one meets in minimalists like Philip Glass, as in any number of jam bands).
More important is a third technique of structuring songs in discrete rhythmic blocks
that are connected by no common measure but simply placed in abrupt juxtaposition
to one another. Rather than gradually accelerating or decelerating between sections,
or doubling (or tripling, or halving) the pulse from one section to another, or using a
common pulse to move, say, from a duple to a triple meter – all standard techniques
for relating one metrical unit to another – death musicians frequently change tempo
or meter from brief section to brief section (each section generally lasting between
fifteen and thirty seconds) in such a way that there is no logical relation between
sections, each coexisting with the others as an autonomous temporal unit. What one
encounters in compositions of this sort is a series of self-contained, intensely pulsed
rhythmic units punctuated by a sequence of erratic, spasmodic jolts, fits and starts. If,

44
Deleuze’s Way
in each discrete section a hyper-Chronos of quantitative speed is manifest, the time
between each section is that of an Aeon of qualitative speed and incommensurable
rhythm. And yet a fourth device, used sparingly but to telling effect, is to accelerate a
rapid duple figure until the individually distinct rhythmic elements of the bass, guitar
and drum parts merge in a nonpulsed tremolo of whirring chaos. In these moments,
quantitative turns into qualitative speed, the previously pulsed units blurring in a
tremolo rush that is at the same time a catatonic skid.
The music of doom metal might be characterized as death metal on Quaaludes,
death slowed to a funereal pace and stretched out in songs lasting sometimes as
long as twenty-five or thirty minutes. The same minor-modal harmonies prevail
in both, as do static chord relations within sections and loose paratactic structures
linking sections to one another. The basic timbres of doom resemble those of death,
and most doom metal, despite its slow pace, is insistently “heavy.” 7 But doom has
a melodic component that is largely absent in death. Even monophonic motifs in
death, despite their linearity, tend to function less as melodies than as percussive
bass lines, whereas in doom the guitars and bass frequently articulate extended
legato lines that conform to standard notions of “tunefulness.” Often the legato lines
are doubled by a violin, flute or female vocalist, instruments and sounds almost
never used in death. The melodies of doom, however, exploit a narrow range of
expressivity, their function being primarily to establish a somber, modal exotic mood
and provide continuity within sections. Doom seeks above all to create atmospheric
auras, to imbue each section with its own “feel” while at the same time maintaining
the heaviness of an emphatically pulsed sound. 8 Doom melodies serve to meld
components within a section and give them a floating, hazy continuity, thereby
creating what Deleuze and Guattari call a “haecceity,” a “thisness,” an atmosphere
like a “season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date,” with an identity that partakes of
the time of Aeon, “the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only
speeds” (MP 318, 320/261–2). The atmospheric speed sought by doom, ultimately,
7 There is some question among doom listeners as to whether some forms of socalled
“atmospheric doom,” less “heavy” than the norm, even qualify as genuine doom.
John Del Russi of Heirophant, when asked to define doom, comments: “I stand firmly in
my resolution that doom should always maintain the earth-shattering heaviness the likes of
diSEMBOWELMENT, Evoken, Thergothon etc. While there are those who strive to achieve
a more ‘serene’ form of doom, attempting to express purely the sorrowful side, I find it most
lacking in power in the absence of the pulverizing heaviness of the afore-mentioned pioneers
of doom. … While I have no qualms with ‘calmer’ moments throughout the journey of doom,
which genuinely add to the atmospheres of doom, I believe there should be a quality of
‘brutality’ to its composition” .
8 All music, of course, creates some sort of atmosphere, but doom (and black) metal
exploit specific techniques of late-Romantic chromatic programme music and tone poems that
have heavily influenced film scores and become standard elements of suspense and horror
movies. The atmospheres they evoke are hence those typically associated with cinematic
images of foggy landscapes, dark, mysterious spaces, graveyards, haunted houses, and so on,
all conveyed musically through passages with relatively little temporal drive.

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 45
is the qualitative speed of catatonia, the immobile speed of a paradoxically intense
suspended animation.
Black metal comes in two varieties, one fairly close to death, the other with
some similarities to doom. Like doom, black metal shares the timbres, harmonies,
sectional construction and overall organizational structure of death. Much of black
metal, like death, is fast paced, although the range of tempos in black tends to be
broader than that in death. What many black metal bands reject is death’s emphasis
on virtuosity and musicianship. They strive for a messier, grungier sound, something
more chaotic and raw than the precise and intricate percussive complexities of death.
Such groups tend to emphasize a rhythmic figure at greater length and change tempo
less frequently than do death bands, and they often replace death’s quick monophonic
lines with rapid flat-pick reiterations of massive, muddy triads. One extreme of black
metal, then, might be very loosely designated grunge death (Burzum and Mayhem
being examples of this strain). The other extreme might be thought of as fast doom.
In this form of black metal, legato melodies executed by a violin, flute or organ
often lend continuity to a high-tempo section, and at times synthesizers are used to
provide a vaguely choral, sustained harmonic “wash” to a section (early Emperor
provides numerous examples of this latter practice). But what is common to all black
metal is a concentration on mood and atmosphere. Many black metal musicians
dress in black robes and wear exaggerated white-and-black “corpsepaint” on their
faces, and though such practices are strictly extra-musical, they point to the basically
ritual and theatrical conception of black metal music, which is meant to evoke vague
auras, climates and affective settings. Like doom, black metal seeks to elicit the
floating time of a catatonic Aeon, while simultaneously, like death, it pursues both
quantitative speed and the qualitative speed of a hyper-accelerated rush.
Voice, Words and Action
In a special issue of Guitar Presents, Marc Shapiro characterizes death metal with
what he calls a fairly simple equation: “It’s guitar tuned down so low that only dogs
can hear it. It’s songs about the Devil, revenge from the grave, death by garden tools
and other tales from the dark side delivered, for the most part, in a Linda Blair/
Exorcist-like satanic growl.” 9 The satanic growl is indeed a distinctive feature of
much death metal, and many doom and black vocalists adopt the same low-pitched,
guttural, raspy, bark of death. Some black metal vocalists opt for incessant fullvoiced
or high-pitched screams over the death growl, and doom performers often
combine growls, screams and grunts with deep murmurs and slow whispers. But
what is common to most death, doom and black metal is the anti-melodic, nonnatural
treatment of the voice (though so-called “clean” vocals have been gradually
showing up in a few groups over the last decade). If, as Deleuze and Guattari assert,
“the first musical operation” is “to machine the voice” (MP 373/303), that is, to
deterritorialize the voice from its ordinary, “natural” speaking function, then death,
9 Marc Shapiro, “The Birth of Death: A Speed Demonology,” Guitar Presents: Speed
Demons of Metal (1993), p. 8.

46
Deleuze’s Way
doom and black vocalists are fundamentally – indeed, primally – musical in their
anti-lyrical non-singing, in that their growls, screams and grunts simply push music’s
de-naturalization of the speaking voice to extremes (which most listeners hostile to
the sub-genres would deem beyond the limits of the musical).
Though death, doom and black vocalists articulate words, seldom are the words
readily understandable, especially in live performance, and even in the slowest
tempos of doom. The most important function of the vocals is to provide a broadly
affective, percussive reinforcement of accents and phrases, to fuse vocal noises with
the instrumental sounds and create semi-human, semi-machine, blocks of sound.
Nonetheless, lyrics do exist (most groups provide lyrics sheets with their CDs),
and they have an important musical purpose. As Shapiro suggests, death lyrics tend
to focus on the dark side, the grave, corporeal decay and physical violence. These
staples of horror films are common in black metal as well, with satanic themes being
somewhat more prevalent in black than in death. Doom lyrics often offer sepulchral
expressions of Poe-esque Liebestod (My Dying Bride’s lyrics read largely as an
extended explication of the group’s name), though frequently doom bands simply
voice melancholy sentiments of vague despair and hopelessness (November’s Doom
is one such group). Although the lyrics of the three sub-genres often summon up
dramatic tableaus, they seldom offer plots or stories, for their main purpose is to
evoke emotions, moods and attitudes through highly charged images, raw, profane
diction, and diverse first-person expressions of anti-social desire. In Section Four
of A Thousand Plateaus, “Postulates of Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattari argue
that words do not represent things so much as they intervene in things, performing
“incorporeal transformations” of bodies through speech-actions (MP 110/86).
Similarly, death, doom and black lyrics intervene in the music, providing an
affective specificity to what is only vaguely generated by the music. There is no
inherently evil, violent, or even aggressive music (loud, yes, assertive, perhaps, but
not inherently aggressive), and what the lyrics attempt is to narrow the sound’s range
of affective associations, imbue the music with more precisely delineated moods
grounded in concrete situations – situations, it happens, that frequently involve evil,
violence and aggression.
Not all songs dwell on violence and mayhem, however. Doom lyrics as a whole
tend to involve violence less than do those of death and black, and even within death
and black there are wide variations in the frequency and intensity of violence in the
lyrics. Satanic motifs are not uncommon in death and black lyrics, but they are far
from ubiquitous, and often such motifs evidence less an obsession with evil than
a fascination with non-Christian, broadly pagan sensibilities, a fascination shared
with bands that draw themes and imagery for their songs from Norse mythology
(Emperor, among many Scandinavian groups), Babylonian mythology (Morbid
Angel), or Egyptian mythology (Nile). It is clear, then, that there is no inherent
relation between the music and the lyrics, that the manifest continuities in musical
practices across the sub-genres do not have equally consistent continuities in the
handling of lyrics. Yet when lyricists do choose to focus on violence and mayhem,
one may well ask why. In such cases, if the music is not inherently violent or
evil, has it been co-opted for violent or evil purposes? The difficulties of relating
representations of violence (especially in film, fiction, or art) to actual violence are

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 47
well-known, and they are no less problematic in the case of death, doom and black
metal music. Clearly, much of the impetus behind the sub-genres’ lyrics is to shock
and offend – to offend fundamentalist Christians with Satanic hymns, to offend
liberals with sexist profanities, to offend just about everyone with descriptions of
putrefying flesh, evisceration, blood and gore. Often, the lyrics seem to function
merely as the expression of a defiant anarchistic hedonism or the cathartic release
of strong emotion. Occasionally, the performers adopt a mimetic stance and argue
that they are not advocating violence but simply reflecting the violence around them
in their songs. And frequently one detects an ironic, and at times parodic, sense of
humor in the excesses of the imagery and the exaggerated postures of the songs’
personas (not unlike the humor one finds in many horror films).
All of which suggests, not that art is separate from life, but that the connection
between the two is complex and determinable only in specific circumstances.
Representations of violence need have no relation to violent actions, but they may,
though specifying causal relations must be approached with great caution and may
well prove impossible. Consider the notorious case of the Norwegian black metal
scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, documented at length in Moynihan and
Søderlind’s sometimes lurid Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal
Underground. 10 Here are the facts. On April 8, 1991, the lead singer of Mayhem,
“Dead” (Per Ohlin), committed suicide with a shotgun blast to the head. Before
the police arrived, “Euronymous” (Øystein Aarseth), Mayhem’s founder and lead
guitarist, photographed Dead’s corpse, later bragging that he also ate pieces of
Dead’s brain and gathered scraps of Dead’s skull to use as necklace decorations. In
May 1992, the first of some forty-five to sixty church burnings took place, most of
the subsequent incidents occurring over a three-year period, at least one-third with
documented connections to the black metal scene. On August 21, 1992, “Faust”
(Bård Eithun), then drummer of Emperor, murdered Magne Andreassen, a gay man
who, according to Faust, approached him for sex. On August 10, 1993, “Count
Grishnackh” (Varg Vikernes), guitarist of Burzum, murdered Euronymous. Later
that month, Grishnackh and Faust were arrested for their respective murders. In
September 1994, both were found guilty; Grishnackh was sentenced to twenty-one
years in prison, Faust to a fourteen-year term. In subsequent trials, other black metal
scene members were convicted of arson, including Samoth, Emperor’s lead guitarist,
who received a two-year sentence.
10 I am not able to address here the question of Norwegian black metal’s connection
to Nazism. Since his incarceration in 1994, Varg Vikernes (Count Grishnackh) has issued
statements of an increasingly racist, white-supremacist nature that have led some to associate
Norwegian black metal and black metal as a whole with Nazism. In the liner notes to their
1995 release, Panzerfaust, Darkthrone felt compelled to add a postscript that “Darkthrone
is certainly not a Nazi-band nor a political band.” Although black metal bands with Nazi
leanings do exist, they are relatively few, and many black metal fans resent the assumption
among some critics that the music has an inherent tie to Nazism. For a critique of black
metal as a racist form of music (an attack based largely on Vikernes’ remarks in Moynihan
and Søderlind, it should be noted), see Karl Beckwith, “‘Black Metal Music is for White
People’: Constructs of Colour and Identity with the Extreme Metal Scene,” M/C Journal,
(2002).

48
Deleuze’s Way
What is evident from Moynihan and Søderlind’s account is that during this
period in Oslo, black metal music was an important part of a genuine “scene,” a
multidimensional social milieu in which musicians lived with one another, performers
and fans socialized with one another at concerts and especially at Euronymous’
record store, Helvet, and participants embraced modes of dress, discourse and
interaction commonly associated with evil, death, the demonic and other dark
forces. Euronymous was a charismatic promoter, recording and distributing CDs
of various black metal bands, cleverly boosting Norwegian black metal in fanzine
interviews that stressed the evil, dangerous nature of the music and of the performers
(especially himself). Grishnackh, Euronymous’s junior by six years, was an equally
charismatic, forceful individual, and the two of them became friends for awhile,
eventually assembling around themselves a conspiratorial group of arsonists intent
on demonstrating to each other how evil they could be. Grishnackh clearly resented
Euronymous’s popularity and eventually came to regard Euronymous as a poseur
(as well as a dishonest business associate). When Grishnackh learned that Faust
had killed someone, he seemed to envy Faust’s status as a murderer, and some of
Grishnackh’s associates attribute his slaying of Euronymous as much to a desire for
renown among his peers as to personal and professional animosities.
To deny that black metal music had any connection with the Norwegian black
metal scene and its incidents of arson and murder would be foolish. But to claim
that the music or the lyrics somehow caused the crimes would be equally absurd. A
unique culture involving a shifting network of individuals with a host of interests,
motives and desires took shape in a particular place and time, and music was an
inextricable component of that culture. In Deleuze and Guattari’s ethological terms,
black metal functioned as a complex of refrains in counterpoint with numerous extramusical
refrains in a specific social and natural lifeworld. Just as a bird’s song may
combine with postures, actions and surrounding materials (trees, twigs, worms, and
so on) in patterns involved in mating, nesting, or foraging, so black metal combined
with other elements to form patterns of interaction that eventually involved, among
other things, arson and murder.
That music can be a powerful accompaniment to violent behavior is undeniable,
but the range of forms of musical expression capable of fulfilling such a role seems
unlimited. (One thinks, for example, of “Helter Skelter” among the Manson family,
but also of Schubert in the Nazi death camps.) Conversely, there seems to be no hard
evidence that any form of music is more closely associated with violent action than
any other. Black metal music was an important part of the lives of Norway’s black
metal arsonists and murderers, but neither black metal as a whole, nor the related
forms of death and doom metal, have been shown to have a higher incidence of
suicide, assault or murder among the sub-genres’ performers or listeners than other
forms of popular music. Still, one may ask, why do death, doom and black metal
lyrics focus so often on gore, decay, corpses and destruction? Why this pervasive
fascination with death?
The answer, I believe, is that the lyrics are designed to evoke what the music
seeks to create: the experience of the body without organs. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze
and Guattari describe the body without organs as a decentered body that has ceased
to function as a coherently regulated organism, one that is sensed as an ecstatic,

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 49
catatonic, apersonal zero-degree of intensity that is in no way negative but has a
positive existence. They argue that “the body without organs is the model of death”
(AO 393/329), by which they mean that the ecstatic trance-like state of this zerodegree
of intensity is the experiential analog of what is never truly experienced, at
least as part of one’s ongoing being, but is sensed only as the disappearing edge of
existence. Hence the human fascination with death, so widespread and multifarious in
its manifestations, may be seen from this vantage as an affirmation of a fundamental
dimension of experience, that of the virtual, which is encountered as a paradoxical
catatonic rush or immobile whir of differential speeds and intensive affects. But
Deleuze and Guattari recognize as well that there are great risks and perils in the
pursuit of a body without organs, and thus in A Thousand Plateaus they speak of
both a suicidal and a cancerous body without organs, each with its specific dangers.
Individuals produce a body without organs by becoming-other, by deterritorializing
all the ossified, sedimented strata of regular codes and structures, but if “you free
[the body without organs] with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata
without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane [of consistency] you
will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe” (MP
199/161). In short, the fascination with the “model of death,” the body without
organs, may become a fascination with real death, a suicidal dive into an all-absorbent
black hole. The cancerous body without organs, by contrast, is produced not by an
incautious, precipitous deterritorialization of all coordinates, but by a fostering of
partial, “totalitarian,” or “fascist” deterritorializations that are “terrifying caricatures
of the plane of consistency” (MP 201/163). The virtual is immanent and everywhere
manifest within the real, and hence the plane of consistency, or the body without
organs, is immanent within even the most rigid and oppressive of institutions. There
is thus a “BwO [body without organs] of money (inflation), but also a BwO of the
State, army, factory, city, Party, etc.” (MP 201/163), and each of these bodies without
organs may become an object of fascination for the individual, a kind of tumor that
may proliferate and eventually take over. Deleuze and Guattari see the production of
a body without organs as the only means of genuine creation, but they ask, “How can
we fabricate a BwO for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist
inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How
can we tell the three Bodies apart?” (MP 202/163).
Death, doom and black metal’s fascination with death, one might say, is a
fascination with the problem of the three bodies without organs, with the liminal
areas where the three shade into one another. “The BwO is desire,” say Deleuze and
Guattari:
Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destratification, or into the proliferation
of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own
annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire,
fascist desire, even fascism is desire. [And the problem is] to distinguish the BwO from
its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. [MP 203–
204/165]

50
Deleuze’s Way
The pursuit of an ecstatic, apersonal affective intensity can all too easily turn into a
thirst for self-annihilation or a will to annihilate, and death, doom and black metal
lyrics explore those moments when such desires interpenetrate.
Deleuze and Guattari also say that the body without organs may function as
a “war machine,” and here especially we see highlighted the dangerous relation
deterritorialization may have with violence. Deleuze and Guattari posit a fundamental
opposition between nomadic and sedentary modes of social life, to which correspond
respectively the institutions of the war machine and the apparatus of the state.
Commonly, war is taken to be a state function, but Deleuze and Guattari argue that
the informing principle of war, that of a mutative, chaotic force of transformation
(and this is what they mean by the term “war machine”), is antithetical to the state,
and that the history of state-sponsored violence is one of an uneasy and perpetually
unstable capture of this force of transformation. They note that in Indo-European
mythology the warrior frequently is contrasted with such state figures as the king,
lawgiver, or priest, the warrior often betraying social alliances and operating
as an anarchic locus of unpredictable action. They see this mythic opposition of
warrior versus king/lawgiver/priest as symptomatic of an opposition of two modes
of existence, each with its own means of creating, inhabiting and propagating a
specific “space,” one “smooth,” the other “striated.” Smooth space is essentially
fluid, heterogeneous, without center or dimensional coordinates, whereas striated
space is stable, homogeneous and crisscrossed with organizational grids. The
nomads’ smooth habitat of shifting desert sands, for example, differs qualitatively
from the striated fields of the sedentary state dwellers. Yet this contrast of smooth
and striated spaces, though initially framed in geographic terms, Deleuze and
Guattari extend in a number of ways, to include different artifacts (felt vs fabric),
different kinds of time (unpulsed rhythm vs pulsed meter), different forms of thought
(nomad science vs royal science, fractal geometry vs Euclidean geometry), different
approaches to the arts (Egyptian, Gothic or Byzantine art vs Greco-Roman art) and
so on. Ultimately, the “war machine” is simply a term for the metamorphic force of
deterritorialization, and “smooth space” the name of the body without organs, or
plane of consistency, created and permeated by that metamorphic force. As Deleuze
explains in an interview on A Thousand Plateaus:
We define the “war machine” as a linear assemblage which constructs itself on lines of
flight. In this sense, the war machine does not at all have war as its object; it has as its
object a very special space, smooth space, which it composes, occupies and propagates.
Nomadism is precisely this combination “war machine-smooth space.” We try to show
how and in what case the war machine takes war for its object (when the apparatuses of
the State appropriate the war machine which does not initially belong to them). A war
machine tends to be revolutionary, or artistic, much more so than military. [PP 50–51/33]
The war machine does not have war as its object, yet still it is called the war machine,
and though its function is primarily revolutionary or artistic, its name is inseparable
from a military domain. What Deleuze and Guattari reinforce through this term is
the problematic relation between deterritorializing metamorphosis and violence,
which, as we have seen, they also frame in terms of the body without organs and its
dangerous doubles, the suicidal and cancerous bodies without organs. The dangers

Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 51
of constructing a body without organs are dangers of violence, risks that a creative,
metamorphic war machine will turn into a veritable machine of war, a negative force
bent solely on destruction. It is striking how frequently images of war, especially of
an apocalyptic sort, appear in the lyrics of death and black metal (and occasionally
doom as well). Often the persona in death and black metal songs adopts the pose of
a warrior and espouses an ethos of unrestrained destruction. The warriors imagined
in these songs, however, are not representatives of an organized military regime
but embodiments of an anarchic force of chaos. They inhabit a space outside the
regular order of any state apparatus and serve as mythic figures of a dimension of
unrestrained social upheaval. What this recurring imagery of warriors, battlefields
and Armageddon suggests, finally, is that the music of death, doom and black metal
is a war machine ever becoming machine of war, a machine of war perpetually
turning back into a war machine, a music focused on the perilous relation between
ecstatic deterritorialization and suicidal or fascistic annihilation.
Music “is never tragic, music is joy,” Deleuze and Guattari claim, yet there are
times when music “necessarily gives us a taste for death … Music has a thirst for
destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not
its potential ‘fascism’?” (MP 367–68/299). This thirst for destruction Deleuze and
Guattari tie to music’s power as a deterritorializing force. Compared to painting,
music “seems to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once more intense
and much more collective,” which perhaps explains “the collective fascination
exerted by music, and even the potentiality of the ‘fascist’ danger we mentioned
a little earlier: music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that
can go all the way to the abyss” (MP 371/302). Music, one might say, is at once
more abstract and more elemental than painting. As Deleuze remarks in Francis
Bacon, music indeed “deeply traverses our bodies, and puts an ear in our belly, in our
lungs, etc.,” but ultimately it “rids bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their
presence. It disincarnates bodies” (FB 38/47). In turn, through the manipulation
of its sonic matter, it “gives the most mental [spirituelles] entities a disincarnated,
dematerialized body” (FB 38/47). Music, in short, through its heightened and yet
somehow dispersed, intangible sensuality, has the power of undoing the coordinates
of the commonsense world and creating a sonic body of speeds and affective
intensities, that sonic body traversing listeners and turning their organized, material
bodies into dematerialized vectors spread out across an apersonal, trans-individual
body without organs. But in music’s great power as a deterritorializing force lies its
danger. Its dissolution of codes, structures and conventions can expand, accelerate
and form part of an undifferentiated will to annihilation and destruction. And its
abstract, dematerializing affectivity can be channeled into any number of violent,
repressive and reactionary circuits of power.
Like all forms of music, death, doom and black metal are modes of
experimentation on the real. Their timbres, rhythms and textures are sonic analogs of
the patterns and processes of contemporary electronic, industrial, machine culture.
Their deterritorialization of such extra-musical refrains, however, takes place within
a musical deterritorialization of popular music conventions, those conventions
themselves functioning as refrains within the real. By deliberately adopting a limited
musical idiom and pushing its elements to an extreme, death, doom and black metal

52
Deleuze’s Way
develop inventive deformations of standard popular music practices, concentrating
especially on timbre and rhythm rather than melody and harmony. Death metal seeks
a music of intensity and speed, both a quantitative speed of emphatic rapid pulses
and a qualitative speed of rushes and catatonic whirs. Doom pursues a music of
atmospheric auras, at once immobile and yet heavily pulsed, whereas black combines
elements of death and doom to fashion raw blocks of atmospheric speed. The lyrics
of death, doom and black metal intervene in the music, suggesting specific moods,
emotions and attitudes as correlates of the broad and underdetermined affective
dimension of the sounds. The lyrics in various ways evoke the experience of the body
without organs, especially in its liminal forms in which the positive, creative body
without organs merges with its violent suicidal or cancerous caricatures. The songs
of death, doom and black metal are composed, performed, recorded, circulated and
enjoyed within complex, multidimensional social situations, and those songs may
or may not serve as refrains in counterpoint with extra-musical refrains involving
violent action.
The final ethical measure of any music is its ability to create new possibilities
for life, and such is the measure that must be applied to an assessment of the social
practices within which death, doom and black metal music and lyrics are given
concrete actualization. Neither wholesale condemnation nor blanket approval of the
sub-genres is called for, but instead a careful delineation of their musical, verbal and
pragmatic methods and purposes, as well as an appraisal of their function within
particular contexts. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the refrain, deterritorialization
and reterritorialization, the body without organs, speeds and intensities, haecceities,
and so on, provide us with significant tools for undertaking such an analysis.

Chapter 4
Search, Swim and See
Deleuze’s Apprenticeship in Signs
and Pedagogy of Images
Deleuze was a remarkable polymath, capable of bringing penetrating insights to a
wide variety of disciplines. The number of topics addressed during his career was
considerable, ranging from mathematics, biology, psychology, political science and
anthropology to logic, ethics, painting, literature, metallurgy and the decorative
arts. One might assume that as a lifelong academic Deleuze would have turned his
attention to the subject of education with some frequency, but in fact he dedicated
only a small portion of his energies to this field. He did, however, devote a few
passages of Difference and Repetition (1969) to the relationship between thought
and learning that are especially suggestive. These passages summarize the salient
points he had developed in his 1964 study Proust and Signs, in which he approached
Proust’s massive A la recherche du temps perdu as an extended apprenticeship in the
explication of signs. The question of teaching and its relationship to learning he left
largely unexamined in these two works, but in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985),
Deleuze spoke briefly of a “pedagogy” of images in the films of Godard, and from
these remarks on Godard’s treatment of sound and sight one can discern the outlines
of what might constitute a Deleuzian theory of teaching. Taken together, Deleuze’s
studies of learning in Proust and teaching in Godard provide a map of directions one
might pursue in developing a Deleuzian philosophy of education.
Searching
Proust’s Recherche, as its French title indicates, is a search for lost time, but Deleuze
insists that this search is oriented toward the future rather than the past. Marcel, the
hero of the Recherche, indeed explores memories of the past, but only as part of an
apprenticeship that eventuates in his becoming an artist. His exploration of lost time
is merely part of a search for the truth of time, which is one with the truth of signs.
Signs for Deleuze are not transparent media for the communication of information.
Rather, they are hieroglyphs, enigmas that point beyond themselves to something
hidden. In this sense, the moon as sign is a bright surface gesturing toward its dark
side. Every sign has something enfolded within it, something “other,” that must be
unfolded if it is to be understood. The interpretation of signs, then, is a matter of
“explicating,” or unfolding (from Latin plicare: to fold), that which is “implicated,”
or enfolded.

54
Deleuze’s Way
Deleuze identifies four kinds of signs in the Recherche: the worldly signs of
polite society, the amorous signs of passion and jealousy, the evanescent sensual
signs of involuntary memory, and the immaterial signs of art. Worldly signs are
vacuous, with no genuine content, but they force Marcel to unfold their mysteries,
to determine why one person is admitted to a given social circle, why another is
snubbed, who belongs to which milieu, what constitutes the tone and relative prestige
of a particular coterie, and so on. Amorous signs point toward the worlds hidden in
the beloved, toward all those places the beloved inhabits when the lover is absent.
The truth of these signs is revealed through jealousy, which compels the lover to
unfold the mysteries of the worlds which are enfolded in the beloved and from which
the lover is forever excluded. The sensual signs of involuntary memory are like
the madeleine, whose taste suddenly fills Marcel with great joy as the unexpected
presence of the Combray of his childhood comes over him. Such signs Marcel
compares to tiny pieces of Japanese paper that, when placed in water, unfold and
expand to reveal hidden landscapes imprinted on their surfaces. As Marcel observes
of the savor of the madeleine he has just dipped in his lime tea, “in a moment all the
flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne
and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and
the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into
being, towns and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” 1 The signs of art, finally, are
signs of essences, manifestations of originary worlds that unfold within the material
form of a given artwork but transcend that matter and reveal the truth of the cosmos
as a dynamic process of self-differentiation.
Deleuze reads the Recherche as the record of an apprenticeship (apprentissage
in French), or process of learning (French apprendre: to learn), and all learning, he
asserts, proceeds via the interpretation of signs: “Everything that teaches us something
emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or hieroglyphs. Proust’s
work is based not on the exposition of memory, but on the apprenticeship in signs”
(PS 11/4). By “learning” Deleuze clearly does not mean the mere acquisition of any
new skill or bit of information, but instead the accession to a new way of perceiving
and understanding the world. To interpret signs is to overcome “stock notions,”
“natural” or “habitual” modes of comprehending reality (PS 37/27). What often
passes for learning is simply the reinforcement of commonsense notions, standard
codes and orthodox beliefs. But the commonsense, conventional, orthodox world is
ultimately illusory. Genuine learning, the learning through signs, takes us beyond the
illusions of habit and common sense to the truths of what Proust calls “essences” and
Deleuze labels “differences.”
The usual assumption is that thought voluntarily seeks truth through the exercise
of “good will,” but what Proust shows is that the search for truth always commences
with a disruptive event that compels thought into action. Philosophy’s mistake, says
Deleuze, “is to presuppose within us a benevolence of thought [une bonne volonté de
penser], a natural love of truth” (PS 24/16). The ideas of the philosophical intelligence
“are valid only because of their explicit, hence, conventional, signification,” and
1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin (New York, 1982), vol. 1, p. 51.

Search, Swim and See 55
“explicit and conventional significations are never profound; the only profound
meaning is the one that is enveloped, implicated in an external sign” (PS 24/16).
Philosophy’s intellectual truths are “abstract and conventional” (PS 41/30) whereas
the truths of signs are “fortuitous and inevitable” (PS 25/16). Only through a chance
encounter with an unsettling sign can thought be jolted from its routine patterns,
and only through such an encounter will the object of thought cease to be arbitrarily
selected and attain the necessity of something that itself chooses thought, that
constrains thought and sets it in motion.
Common sense organizes the world according to fixed identities and stable
spatial and temporal coordinates, but for Proust and Deleuze the dynamic unfolding
of the world is a process that escapes common sense and defies its set categories.
That process is a ceaseless becoming in which things perpetually metamorphose
into something else and thereby elude identification and specification, but it is also
one informed by a virtual domain of “essences” or “differences” that are, in Proust’s
words, “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” 2 It is through signs
that Marcel learns the truth of essences, and that truth is disclosed initially through
revelations of the different forms of time related to each kind of sign.
Worldly signs exhibit the “lost time” of frivolous activity, inevitable decline and
universal alteration and annihilation. Amorous signs reveal another type of “lost
time,” that of “wasted time” [le temps qu’on perd, literally, “the time one loses”]
(PS 30/21), a time of deception and disappointment which can only be absorbed in
retrospect, after the love relationship has come to an end. To an extent, such forms
of “lost time” may be accommodated within traditional temporal schemas, but not so
the time that emerges in the sensual signs of involuntary memory. The time evoked
through the madeleine, the uneven paving stones of Venice, and other such sensual
signs is “time regained” [le temps qu’on retrouve, literally “the time one finds again”],
which in Deleuze’s reading is a version of the time of Henri Bergson’s virtual past. 3
Bergson argues that a memory is not simply a faded or less complex version of an
experience that once was present, but something that is qualitatively distinct from
any present experience. The past is a single domain in which all past events coexist
with one another. This domain is real, though it is virtual rather than actual. At each
present moment, time splits in two, into a dynamic actual present thrusting toward
a future, and a “memory of the present,” a virtual double of the present moment
(something like a virtual mirror image of the present) that immediately forms part of
the single domain of all past events. According to Bergson, when we try to remember
something we leap into the virtual past as if entering a different medium. Once we
find the memory we are seeking, we bring it back into the present, but usually in
such a way that the memory is made to fit in with our actual, commonsense purposes
and activities. As a result, the virtual character of the memory tends to escape our
awareness. Only in dreams, moments of déjà-vu and other unusual experiences are
we able to perceive the virtual past as it exists in itself.
2 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, pp. 905–906.
3 For a detailed discussion of Bergson’s virtual past, see Chapter Three of Deleuze’s
Bergsonism (B 45–70/51–72).

56
Deleuze’s Way
Deleuze insists that Proust’s moments of involuntary memory are not mere
reminiscences but experiences that disclose such a Bergsonian virtual past. In the case
of the madeleine, a common quality – the taste of the madeleine – links a present and
a past moment, but in such a way that an “essence of Combray” is released, a virtual
Combray that has never been present, save as a virtual “memory of the present.” The
great joy that fills Marcel comes from this sudden chance encounter with what Proust
calls “a fragment of time in the pure state,” 4 time outside the ordinary coordinates
of temporal succession. Yet Marcel’s accession to the virtual past teaches more than
a simple lesson about time, Deleuze insists, for in the experience of the madeleine
Marcel encounters “internalized difference, which becomes immanent” (PS 75/60).
The virtual Combray is embodied in the taste of the madeleine, made internal to that
taste, immanent within it, and in this sense the madeleine internalizes something
different, but that virtual Combray itself is an unfolding difference, an entity whose
paradoxical kind of time is merely one aspect of its being as essence.
It is only in the signs of art that Marcel learns the full truth of essences and
their relationship to time. The time of art is “recovered time” [le temps retrouvé,
literally “time found again,” the title of the last volume of the Recherche] (PS 34/24).
Recovered time is the pure form of time, an unspecified temporal medium within
which various temporal experiences may be actualized. Its time is like that of the
verbal infinitive – “to work,” “to sleep,” “to dream” – a floating time unmoored
from any tense, person, mood, or direction, an essence of temporality that serves
as a generative medium from which different specific temporal configurations may
issue (“I had worked,” “she was to have slept,” “we will have been dreaming,” etc.).
Such time, says Deleuze, is “complicated” (PS 58/45), a term he takes from certain
Neoplatonic philosophers who speak of the cosmos as an enfolded, implicated One
that unfolds, or explicates itself in the multiple, the originary state of which, before
any explication, is a “complication, which envelops the many in the One and affirms
the unity of the multiple” (PS 58/45). The time of art is a pure essence of time,
a perpetual origin of time, as if with each work of art the world were once again
coming into being for the first time.
The time of art, however, is only one dimension of essences, which are enfolded
virtual differences that unfold themselves in the actual world. To a certain extent
Proust is Leibnizian, Deleuze claims, in that “essences are veritable monads, each
defined by the viewpoint to which it expresses the world” (PS 55/41). Leibniz’s logic
of “expression” is one of explication and implication, the whole expressing itself by
unfolding itself in individual monads, each monad in turn expressing the whole by
enfolding the whole as a specific vantage on that totality. In this sense, the world
is like a city (to take a Leibnizian figure), which unfolds itself in particular places,
each place enfolding the city from a given point of view. Yet in Proust there is no
pre-established harmony coordinating all points of view, and hence each monad-site
reveals a different city. And each such city is the expression of “difference itself, the
absolute internal difference” (PS 55/42). What Deleuze means by absolute internal
difference is perhaps best understood through the example of a single-cell ovum,
which I presented in Chapter 1. Before fertilization, the ovum is crisscrossed by
4 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, p. 905.

Search, Swim and See 57
multiple gradients, zones of surface tension and lines of possible division. Of these
virtual lines of potential division only one becomes actualized upon fertilization.
At that point, a process of differentiation begins, whereby the one cell splits into
two. Rather than regarding this process of meiosis as the mechanical construction
of a preformed whole, Deleuze sees it as the unfolding of an internal difference that
differentiates itself in an ongoing cascade of divisions. As the one cell divides into
two, a process of individuation takes place, but the individuals formed – the two
cells – are the result of the process, not its cause. Individuation precedes individuals,
and individuation is a process of metamorphosis and becoming, one that produces
individuated entities but always continues in further metamorphic activity.
“The world is an egg” (DR 279/216) in that the world is a dynamic process
of metamorphosis through which virtual difference differentiates itself into actual
multiple entities while itself remaining immanent within each of those entities.
Everywhere difference explicates itself in multiple entities, and difference remains
immanent within each entity, implicated within it. Hence, if the world is a city, it is
also an egg, not a static collection of edifices but a living entity in formation. Further,
it is neither a single city nor a single egg. Each locus looks out on a different city in
formation, and there is no single originary ovum from which the city-organism arises.
Differentiation proceeds in all directions at once, and wherever one finds oneself,
there a different city is in a process of dynamic emergence. What Marcel ultimately
learns through art is that the world is a city-egg in metamorphosis, each locus of which
enfolds a difference that is actively unfolding itself. Common sense grasps the world
in terms of stable entities and fixed relations, thereby misunderstanding difference
in two ways, both as it manifests itself in the metamorphic process of becoming (the
passage of the virtual into the actual) and as it exists in itself, as a virtual immanent
within the actual. What art reveals is that immanent virtual domain, the domain of
difference in itself, something that is “real without being actual, ideal without being
abstract,” something that exists outside temporal markers, in a perpetual infinitive of
multiple potential temporal unfoldings.
Marcel’s apprenticeship in signs proceeds in two stages and two directions, the
first stage leading him from worldly through amorous and sensual signs to the signs
of art, the second following a reverse order as he learns to interpret all signs as
varying manifestations of internal absolute difference. In the first stage, Marcel must
overcome two illusions, those of objectivism and subjectivism. The first is the illusion
that the object emitting the sign holds the secret of the sign, as if, for example, the
madeleine itself somehow possessed the virtual Combray within its physical being.
To make such an illusory attribution is unavoidable, for “Everything encourages us
to do so: perception, passion, intelligence, even self-esteem … We think that the
‘object’ itself has the secret of the signs it emits. We scrutinize the object, we return
to it in order to decipher the sign” (PS 37/27). Yet once Marcel overcomes this
illusion, he falls into a second, the belief that the secret of the sign is merely a matter
of subjective association. The problem here is that with subjective associations,
anything goes. Any object may be associated with any other object, in which case
signs are merely symptoms of their interpreters. What Marcel must finally learn is
that the truth of signs is neither in the objects that emit them nor in the subjects who
interpret them but in the differences that are immanent in objects and subjects alike.

58
Deleuze’s Way
Art leads Marcel to this truth since in each great art work a unique world is disclosed
from a specific point of view, but in such a way that the artist-subject is produced
by the point of view rather than himself or herself bringing the point of view into
existence. Hence, if the world revealed by the great art work is a city, its revealing
point of view is like a tower from which an anonymous and apersonal “one” views
the dynamic unfolding of the city and the artist-subject below, and that “one” is
difference itself in a process of self-differentiation.
Once art has taught Marcel the truth of signs, he is able to reinterpret the signs
of sensual experience, love and the world and see that all are manifestations of
differences, though in varying degrees of materiality and generality. The signs of
involuntary memory, such as the madeleine, are close to the signs of art, in that
they unfold a world (such as the virtual Combray) and a non-chronological time
(the virtual past of the madeleine being a subset of the “complicated” pure form
of time of difference). Yet such signs are contingent on circumstances for their
emergence, since they are thoroughly enmeshed in the matter in which they appear,
unlike the signs of art, which manage to “dematerialize” the medium – the physical
paint, sounds, words – in which they are embodied. The signs of love and the world
are likewise contingent and embedded in intractable matter, while the worlds they
disclose are even less specific than those brought forth in sensual signs. Marcel’s love
of Albertine forms a series with his love of his mother, Swann’s love of Odette, and
other loves, such that Marcel comes to see all these loves as the general unfolding of a
“theme,” an anonymous structure of love that plays through the various heterosexual
and homosexual liaisons of the Recherche. The signs of the world, finally, disclose
social laws, broad regularities of thought and behavior that the sophisticates of the
Recherche unconsciously reproduce as they themselves are structured and produced
by these regularities.
Swimming
Proust’s Recherche traces the path of a very specific apprenticeship, that of a young
man discovering his vocation as a writer. His training proceeds via dinners and
receptions, unhappy loves, unsettling recollections, and performances of powerful
works of art – hardly the standard curriculum of what is generally thought of as
an education. Yet in this aesthetic apprenticeship Deleuze finds the essence of
learning, which “is essentially concerned with signs” (PS 10/4). Signs are enfolded
differences that impinge on thought and force thought to unfold those differences.
Encounters with such signs are fortuitous yet necessary, chance moments that
defy common sense and choose the interpreter rather than themselves being freely
chosen as objects of interpretation. In the course of explicating signs, the interpreter
necessarily passes through two illusions, that objects possess the truth of signs, and
that their truth arises from subjective associations. Once beyond these illusions, the
interpreter discovers the virtual domain of differences, which unfold themselves
within the actual through a process of metamorphic self-differentiation, while at the
same time remaining immanent within the actual.

Search, Swim and See 59
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze incorporates many of the points raised
in Proust and Signs within an extended treatment of what he calls the orthodox
“image of thought,” or the unstated preconceptions of thought implicit in traditional
philosophy, and what might be called an “imageless,” genuine thought. As in his
earlier study of Proust, Deleuze here observes that the standard assumption in
philosophy is that thought voluntarily, with a free and good will, pursues truth. Good
sense protects thought from nonsense and leads thought in the proper direction
(sens in French having a possible meaning of “direction”), while common sense
provides for a common functioning of the faculties, a sensus communis whereby the
senses and mental processes are coordinated in their mutual apprehensions (as when,
for example, the sight, touch, sound, memory and analysis of a given experience
confirm that they are related to a single and same object of experience). Implicit
in this notion of common sense is the model of thought as a form of recognition,
recognition being defined through “the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon
a supposed same object” (DR 174/133). Recognition in turn grounds the notion of
thought as representation, every representation presuming a unified perspective
and stable objects governed by the complementary principles of “the Same and
the Similar, the Analogous and the Opposed” (DR 217/167). Thought’s goal in a
world of recognition and representation is to eliminate problems and find solutions,
to pass from non-knowledge to knowledge. Learning in such a world is simply the
passage from non-knowledge to knowledge, a process with a definite beginning and
ending, in which thought, like a dutiful pupil, responds to preformulated questions
and eventually arrives at pre-existing answers.
What escapes orthodox thought is difference, or the genuinely “new,” which
can only be engaged through an “imageless thought.” Rather than arising from a
conscious exercise of good will, genuine thought must be forced into action through
the disruption of ordinary habits and notions. That which is new is not orthodox
but paradoxical, and hence its sense seems nonsense, not good sense. Its paradoxes
include those of becoming, the virtual past, and the pure form of time, in which time’s
arrow is reversed or destroyed and thought as a result proceeds not in a single, right
direction but in all directions at once. Rather than reinforcing the common functioning
of the senses and faculties, difference splits them apart and pushes each sense or
faculty to its limits, no single and selfsame object confirming the unified operation
of a sensus communis. The object of an imageless thought defies recognition, for
“the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not
the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other
model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita” (DR 177/136).
Such an object is understood not through representation but through explication, for
the object is a sign, an internalized difference pointing toward something other than
itself. Rather than eliminating problems, the thought of difference is itself a thought
of problems, and learning, rather than occupying the gap between non-knowledge
and knowledge, is the process whereby thought explores the domain of problems.
We have already encountered many of the characteristics of such an imageless
thought in our examination of Marcel’s experience of the madeleine. Marcel
is jolted from his routines by the taste of the madeleine. Its savor paradoxically
enfolds a virtual Combray, whose time is an a-directional coexisting past. That

60
Deleuze’s Way
virtual Combray is something different within the madeleine, and itself a difference
engaged in a process of self-unfolding. The virtual Combray differs from any seen,
heard, or touched Combray, for it is a pure object of memory, one that memory
alone can grasp and that divides memory from the other faculties as the object is
apprehended. The madeleine defies ready recognition and representation, signifying
only by pointing beyond itself to something other and without resemblance to itself.
But in what regard does the madeleine disclose a domain of problems, and how is
learning related to such a domain? This we can determine by looking a little further
at Deleuze’s discussion of problems in Difference and Repetition.
Often philosophers act as if “problems are given ready-made, and that they
disappear in the responses or the solution” (DR 205/158), which perhaps accounts
for dogmatic philosophy’s frequent “puerile examples taken out of context and
arbitrarily erected into models” and its “infantile” proceedings in which “the master
sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is accredited true or false by a
powerful authority” (DR 205/158). Deleuze contends, however, that problems must
be both invented and discovered, and that they produce the conditions under which
solutions may be judged true or false. Hence, each problem is “at once both the site
of an originary truth and the genesis of a derived truth” (DR 207/159). Problems must
be evaluated not according to their “resolvability,” as often happens in philosophy,
but according to their importance, their ability to generate new questions and the
solutions related to those questions.
But problems for Deleuze are more than mere Kuhnean paradigms, for they are
differential events that “do not exist only in our heads but occur here and there in
the production of an actual historical world” (DR 246/190). Problems exist in a
virtual domain of difference, and each problem may be characterized in terms of its
“differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond
to them” (DR 271–2/209). Deleuze draws this vocabulary of differential relations
and singular points from the language of differential calculus. He notes that the basic
formula for the derivative of a function, dy / dx, allows one to describe a relation
between elements without determining their separate identities or specifying their
values: “In relation to x, dx is completely undetermined, as dy is to y, but they are
perfectly determinable in relation to one another … Each term exists absolutely only
in its relation to the other” (DR 223/172). The elements of a given problem are
like the x and y of the formula dy / dx, undetermined elements that become capable
of determination (though still without having any specified values) through their
differential relation with one another. Hence, each problem delineates “a system
of ideal connections – in other words, a system of differential relations between
reciprocally determined genetic elements” (DR 225/173–4). Deleuze also observes
that in the geometric interpretation of the theory of differential equations one may
characterize different equations in terms of their singular points, the focus of a given
parabola, for example, being the singular point of the parabola generated by that
equation. What is crucial for Deleuze is that one may determine the existence of such
singular points and their distribution within a field of vectors without specifying
their precise values or even what figures they might determine – whether a parabola,
a curve, an ellipse, and so on.

Search, Swim and See 61
A problem, then, is not an amorphous muddle, nor a kind of shadowy double
of its eventual resolution within a specific solution, but a structured field of
potential actualizations, a system of differentially related elements and their
corresponding singular points. The system of reciprocally determinable relations
of a given problem establishes its fundamental elements, and the singular points
demarcate various zones of potential actualization. The problem is virtual – real
without being actual – yet it is always engaged in a process of actualization, and it
is immanent within its various actualizations. The problem of differential calculus
consists of its elements (at the most rudimentary level, x and y as related through
the formula for the derivative, dy / dx) and the singular points distributed within
a field of vectors. The elements and singular points only have an actual existence
in specific equations and solutions, which may be mapped in particular figures (a
given parabola or curve, say) with precise values. But the problematic domain of
differentially related elements and singular zones of potential actualization remains
immanent within actual equations and solutions, each equation being a concrete
manifestation of a generative zone of potential differentiation. If one considers
the phonemic dimension of language, one may characterize its problem in terms
of the broad field of reciprocally determinable phonemic oppositions that belong
to all languages, and the particular set of pertinent differences, or singular points,
that find actualization in a given language. Each enunciation of a given phoneme
is a concrete and specific sonic manifestation of a zone of potential enunciations
delimited by a given pertinent difference, such that variations in timbre, pitch and
pronunciation of a given phoneme by different speakers “count” as enunciations of
the same phoneme. One may also regard the development of a biological organism
as an actualization of a problem, the reciprocally determinable elements being the
differential relations common to animals in general, the singular points being zones
of potential differentiation that may be actualized in the components of a dog or a
cat, and that have actual embodiment in this dog or that cat. 5
As should be clear from these examples, problems are not simply mental,
subjective entities, at least in the common sense of those terms. They are ideal, in
that they are virtual, but they are manifest in human and nonhuman, organic and
even inorganic, systems alike. 6 Problems are “ideal ‘objecticities’ possessing their
own sufficiency and implying acts of constitution and investment in their respective
symbolic fields” (DR 206/159). Human thought obviously involves human subjects,
5 In some regards, Deleuze’s concept of the problem may be related to that of “structure”
in some forms of structuralism. In “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (ID 238–69/170–
92), Deleuze characterizes structures in terms of differential relations and singular points, and
he argues that the structural analyses of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and others
may be understood in terms of this model. One should be cautious in assimilating Deleuze to
this tradition, however, for he departs from most structuralists in his emphasis on the virtual,
the positive nature of difference, and the generative force of self-differentiating difference
within structures.
6 It should be evident that Deleuze uses the term “Idea” in an unconventional way,
drawing his concept of ideas from what he identifies as Kant’s “profound theory of Ideas as
problematizing and problematic” (DR 209/161). Ideas for Deleuze are in no sense transcendent,
essential or eternal entities, but instead virtual problems immanent within the real.

62
Deleuze’s Way
yet, though problems do not come ready-made, and hence must be created, at the
same time they are not mere fabrications of the mind, for they have a real, albeit
virtual, existence as “objecticities” that manifest themselves throughout the world.
Thus, when Deleuze turns to the subject of learning, he says that “Learning is the
appropriate name for the subjective acts carried out when one is confronted with the
objecticity of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge designates only the generality
of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions” (DR 213–14/164).
Learning and problems belong to the domain of the virtual, whereas knowledge and
solutions belong to the separate domain of the actual; and learning is a matter of
opening thought to the virtual domain of problems, which has its own autonomous
existence, not a matter of solving specific questions and securing a permanent body
of knowledge.
At three different points in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze offers as an
example of learning that of learning to swim. 7 In the most extended treatment of
this example, Deleuze remarks first that “to learn is to enter into the universal of the
relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities” (DR
214/165). In other words, one must immerse oneself in a problem, with its system of
differential relations (“the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea”) and
their corresponding singular points. The sea may be considered one such problem:
“The idea of the sea, for example, as Leibniz showed, is a system of liaisons or
differential relations between particles, and singularities corresponding to the degrees
of variation among these relations – the totality of the system being incarnated in
the real movement of the waves” (DR 214/165). 8 One may say that the problem of
the sea in general, its universal problem, is that of differential relations between
dynamically interacting water particles, and that the problem’s singular points are
the nadir and apex of diverse potential wave functions. Each concrete, physical wave
is an actualization of one particular set of singular points, and the whole of the sea
is an embodiment of the system of differential relations that constitute the problem
of the sea. “To learn to swim,” continues Deleuze, “is to conjugate the distinctive
points [points remarquables, a synonym for singular points] of our bodies with
the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field” (DR
214/165). Through contact with the sea, then, the singular points which are incarnate
in the swimmer’s body are conjoined with the singular points embodied in the sea,
and the complex of singular points belonging to swimmer and sea together form a
virtual, problematic field. The swimmer, of course, possesses an actual body, the
sea has an actual material existence, and the swimmer learns to interact with actual
waves. But it is this conjugation of singular points that “determines for us a threshold
7 Although Deleuze nowhere says as much, it seems likely that he draws the example of
swimming from Henri Bergson, who in Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York,
1911), pp. 192–4, describes the effort to think something new in terms of learning to swim.
8 Deleuze’s identification of the sea as a Leibnizian problem hinges on a rather
unconventional reading of Leibniz’s remarks about the sound of the ocean (as, for example,
in Leibniz’s Preface to New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and
Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 54–5). Deleuze develops this reading of Leibniz in
Difference and Repetition (DR 275–6/213–14).

Search, Swim and See 63
of consciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real
relations, thereby providing a solution to the problem” (DR 214/165).
Consciousness, however, does not afford us direct access to problems and their
singular points. Consciousness operates via good-will, good sense and common sense,
all of which distort difference and reinforce an interpretation of the world in terms
of ready-made questions and pre-existing solutions. Only through an involuntary
confrontation with something other does thought engage difference, and that which
provokes the thought of difference is a sign (as we saw earlier in our examination
of Proust). Hence, “problems and their symbolic fields stand in a relationship with
signs,” for signs are those entities “which ‘cause problems’ and are developed in a
symbolic field” (DR 213/164). If to learn is to conjugate singular points “in order to
form a problematic field” (DR 214/165), then we may say as well that “to learn is
indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with signs” (DR 35/23). In the case of
swimming, the encounter with signs leads to the discovery of singular points in both
the swimmer and the sea. The singular points immanent within the swimmer’s body
become manifest through the body’s disorienting, subliminal micro-perceptions of
an alien element. Through that body’s attempts to adjust its motions with those of
the sea, thought unfolds the singular points that are enfolded in the sign-particles of
the sea, and as the body and the sea together form an interactive system of motions,
a problematic field emerges, one of differential relations and singular points that
extend across swimmer and sea. Thus, though learning to swim entails a passage to
“a threshold of consciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions
of the real relations [of the sea]” (DR 214/165), problems are:
… the ultimate elements of nature [those of the sea, in the swimming example] and the
subliminal objects of little perceptions [that is, micro-perceptions below the threshold of
consciousness]. As a result, “learning” always takes place in and through the unconscious,
thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind. [DR
214/165]
To learn, then, is to immerse oneself within an alien element and thereby open oneself
to an encounter with signs. (Think here of Marcel’s taste of the madeleine as analogous
to the neophyte swimmer’s initial dive into the sea.) Signs “cause problems” through
their disorienting shock, forcing thought to deal with experiences that disrupt the
common, coordinated functioning of the senses and faculties (Marcel’s strange
gustatory sensations resembling the swimmer’s initial unorganized tactile microperceptions).
Through this encounter with signs, thought discovers a problematic
field of differential relations and singular points that exists both within and without
(the reminiscence field of Marcel-madeleine-virtual Combray being like the fluid
sensori-motor field of swimmer-sea). Though it is within the actual that thought
participates in the dynamic unfolding of the differential relations and singular points
of the virtual domain of problems, that virtual domain remains apersonal and preindividual,
an ideal structure of potential zones of individuation that establishes “the
bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind” (DR 214/165).

64
Seeing
Deleuze’s Way
In Proust and Signs, Deleuze notes that Marcel learns little from his teachers – indeed,
in the encounter with the madeleine, he has no teacher other than the madeleine
itself. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze assigns the swimming teacher a rather
limited role, for “the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce
on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal
with only by grasping the former in practice as signs” (DR 35/23). It would seem
that for Deleuze the best that teachers can do is to invite their students to participate
along with them in an activity rather than show them what to do or how to do it. “We
learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do,’” says Deleuze. “Our only teachers
are those who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in
heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce” (DR 35/23). There is
finally a basic mystery to learning, in that “We never know in advance how someone
will learn: by means of what loves someone becomes good at Latin, what encounters
make them a philosopher, or in what dictionaries they learn to think” (DR 215/165).
Still, although we cannot know in advance what paths learning will take, nor can we
induce genuine learning through precept and example, there is perhaps a function
for the teacher in this form of education, one that Deleuze hints at when he says
that our only teachers are those who “are able to emit signs” (DR 35/23). Deleuze
does not develop this insight any further in Difference and Repetition, but we might
be able to discern the outlines of a pedagogy of sign emission by looking briefly at
his treatment of modern film in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and specifically at the
practice of one of Deleuze’s favorite directors, Jean-Luc Godard.
Deleuze divides the history of film into two basic phases, the classic cinema
and modern cinema. Classic cinema is dominated by an organization of space and
time according to a rational, commonsense, Newtonian/Cartesian “sensory-motor
schema” (IT 40/26). Modern cinema, by contrast, is marked by the breakdown of
the sensory-motor schema and the creation of images that no longer conform to a
single unified spatio-temporal structure. In the classic cinema, images are linked
through their ordinary, “natural” connections with one another, “according to laws
of association, of continuity, resemblance, contrast or opposition” (IT 361/276),
whereas in the modern cinema images are juxtaposed in such a way that the gap
between images becomes primary, “the interval is set free, the interstice becomes
irreducible and stands on its own” (IT 362/277). Modern directors, however, do not
simply disconnect images from their orthodox, commonsense chains of association;
they also re-link images, yet in such a way that a productive difference emerges
between images. Godard is for Deleuze an exemplary director in this regard:
For in Godard’s method, it is not a question of association. Given one image, another
image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an
operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disparation,
as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but
in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be
productive of a third or of something new. [IT 234/179–80]

Search, Swim and See 65
The modern cinematic re-linking of images, then, is not arbitrary, but guided by
a principle of maximum interaction, whereby the interstice between images is
emphasized while at the same time the juxtaposed images are themselves altered
and something new emerges in each “image-interstice-image” unit as a whole. For
audiences, such differentially related “image-interstice-image” sequences pose
problems, since the sequences are not readily assimilable within standard interpretive
schemas. Modern cinematic images must be “read,” in the sense that they must
be construed through an active interrogation of the forces connecting the images.
For each sequence, the audience must ask, What specific difference motivates this
connection? What new movement is created through this juxtaposition? How does
this sequence interact with other sequences? How do the sequences form part of
an assemblage of multiple “image-interstice-image” units that maintain a certain
consistency, a specific cohesiveness of multiple parts in dynamic interaction? Such
a “reading” of images is complicated by the fact that modern directors emphasize
not only the gaps between images, but also the gaps of silence between sounds, the
gaps separating sound effects, music and dialogue from each other, as well as the gap
between the visual and audio elements of film (such that there is in modern films a
constant back-and-forth of the visual and the sonic in dynamic disequilibrium rather
than a mutual doubling or reinforcement of sight and sound). As a result, “a whole
pedagogy is required here, because we have to read the visual image as well as hear
the speech-act in a new way” (IT 322/247) and interrelate sight and sound through
their differential relations with one another.
Deleuze observes that over the course of his career, Godard develops “his
own pedagogy, his own didacticism” (IT 323/248), one that combines a method
of differentially juxtaposing images and sounds and a self-conscious reflection on
that method within the film itself: “Godard’s strength is not just in using this mode
of construction in all his work (constructivism) but in making it a method which
cinema must ponder at the same time as it uses it” (IT 234/179). The film that “marks
a first peak in this reflection” (IT 234/179) for Deleuze is Here and Elsewhere (Ici et
ailleurs), a collaborative effort directed by Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-
Pierre Gorin that began in 1970 as a documentary about the Palestinian struggle and
ended in 1974 as a meditation on images, sounds and what the film’s narrator calls
the “uninterrupted chains of images enslaving one another,” a chain that assigns us
our place “in the chain of events in which we have lost all power.”
Here and Elsewhere is a film about “and,” about the links that combine images
and sounds in associative chains. (The French word “chaîne,” besides denoting
various kinds of physical and mental links, has associations as well with consumer
and media culture – travail à la chaîne: assembly-line work; chaîne: [TV] channel.)
The film moves back and forth between images of the Palestinian camps and a French
family watching TV, with interspersed sections presenting a complex of sights and
sounds in various formats – blank screens, screens with nothing but words (key
words flashing), montages of stills (documents of the workers’ movement, photos
of Nixon, Brezhnev, Hitler, Golda Meir, the Holocaust, advertisements, and so on),
shots of one, four or nine television screen broadcasts, an extended shot of three
slides side by side with a disembodied hand replacing one slide after another, comic
didactic sequences demonstrating the nature of filmmaking, and so on. The film’s

66
Deleuze’s Way
sequences in some ways confirm well-worn chains of association, many of which
are dominated by the binary oppositions recited by the narrator (victory and defeat,
foreign and national, order and disorder, black and white, here and elsewhere). But
the narrator’s insistent enunciation of “and,” the repeated flashing of “and” and
“+” in the intertitle messages, and the several prolonged shots of two wood blocks
forming the word “et” (“and”) that fill the screen, all call into question such links
while raising the possibility of other connections, other uses of “and,” connections
of one thing after another in an additive, non-totalizing fashion, x and p, and b,
and y … . The juxtaposition of Palestinian fighters and the French family watching
TV invites a propagandistic reading of this relation as one of an authentic, active
and natural culture versus a media-saturated, passive, consumerist culture, just as
the alternating stills of Hitler and Golda Meir suggest a facile equation of the two
figures. But as the narrator states, it is “too simple and too easy to simply divide the
world in two,” “too easy or too simple to say simply that the wealthy are wrong and
the poor are right,” for “there are no simple images, only simple people, who will be
forced to stay quiet, like an image.”
Midway through the film, the narrator offers an analysis of the “enchaining” of
images whereby one image displaces another in a constant flow, and consumers of
the images are invited to find their place in the flow. He also remarks on sounds –
how one sound dominates another, and how sounds gain power by being represented
by images. The film’s critique of images, however, is not restricted to mass media
images, for in the film’s final section, a female narrator subjects the directors’ own
Palestinian footage to a critical interrogation. As a close-up sequence of a Palestinian
woman occupies the screen, the female narrator points out that the woman is a young,
beautiful actress chosen by the directors to play a pregnant woman, though she is not
pregnant herself. Footage of another woman haltingly reciting lines fed to her by an
off-screen prompter is accompanied by the narrator’s remarks on the woman’s initial
enthusiasm at participating in the Palestinian cause and her evident boredom and
unease as the recitation continues and she seemingly longs for a humbler, less elitist
role in the struggle. As we watch a young girl loudly declaim a patriotic poem, the
narrator comments that the girl may be innocent but her theatrical manner is not, for
it echoes the poses of a revolutionary theater whose images are tired and clichéd.
Besides providing a direct verbal critique of images, though, the film also offers
an implicit rethinking of images through their isolation, their disconnection from
conventional chains, and their reconnection in unorthodox series. The sequences of
the “pregnant” actress, the stuttering reciter, and the histrionic young girl cease to
function within some revolutionary saga. Isolated from narrative chains of association,
the sequences function as singular points, loci of potential development that are
not pre-judged and pre-viewed. The stills and documentary footage of Palestinian
corpses, workers’ demonstrations and Holocaust victims interjected in unexpected
patterns throughout the film finally block ready assimilation within an ideological
framework, but instead force a rethinking of the meaningful differences that pertain
to the violence that extends from the Russian Revolution to the present. By the close
of the film, the juxtaposition of a circle of soldiers in quiet conversation and the
French family watching TV has lost its clear ideological bearings. The insistent long
takes of the two groups provide no new pre-digested information about the images,

Search, Swim and See 67
the undercoded shots asking the audience to make its own connections between the
images. The male narrator finally comments that the filmmakers were unable truly
to see and hear the Palestinians when they shot their footage because they sought
elsewhere the revolutionary solution to problems they could not see and hear at
home. The challenge, he concludes, is “to learn to see in order to hear elsewhere. To
learn to hear oneself speaking, in order to see what the others are doing. The others,
the elsewhere [ailleurs] of our here [ici].”
Learning to Think
Learning for Deleuze is a subset of what we usually mean by learning, just as thought
for him is a subset of what generally passes for thinking. What Deleuze deems
genuine learning and genuine thought belong to the domain of signs, problems and
the virtual, a domain that is, in Proust’s words, “real without being actual, ideal
without being abstract.” To learn is to encounter signs, to undergo the disorienting
jolt of something new, different, truly other, and then to explicate those signs, to
unfold the differences they enfold. As one does so, one passes through objective and
subjective interpretative illusions until one grasps difference itself in its immanent
differentiation within the actual. Then one sees the world as an a-centered city-egg
engaged in metamorphic becoming in all directions at once, but one sees as well
the virtual domain of difference in itself, which is not an amorphous chaos, but an
infinite collection of structured problems. Each problem consists of a general set
of differentially related elements and their corresponding singular points, or zones
of potential actualization. Genuine learning involves an engagement with such
problems, a re-orientation of thought following its initial disorientation, such that
thought may comprehend something new in its newness, as a structured field of
potential metamorphic forces rather than a pre-formed body of knowledge to be
mastered. One cannot teach the truly new in its newness, but one can attempt to
induce an encounter with the new by emitting signs, by creating problematic objects,
experiences, or concepts. Hence, the pedagogy of signs entails first a critique of
codes and conventions, an undoing of orthodox connections, and then a reconnection
of elements such that the gaps between them generate problems, fields of differential
relations and singular points. Such teaching, however, is itself a form of learning,
for it proceeds via an encounter with signs and an engagement with problems. To
teach is to learn, finally, since for Deleuze genuine teaching and learning are simply
names for genuine thought. The goal of teaching and learning is to think otherwise,
to engage the force of that which is other, different and new. What Deleuze details in
his accounts of learning and teaching is that dimension of education that inspires all
true students and teachers – the dimension of discovery and creation within the everunfolding
domain of the new. It is also the dimension of freedom, in which thought
escapes its preconceptions and explores new possibilities for life.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5
Tragedy, Sight and Sound
The Birth of Godard’s Prénom Carmen
from the Nietzschean Spirit of Music
In Chapter Nine of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, “The Components of the Image,”
Deleuze offers a provocative account of the relationship between sonic and visual
elements in silent film, classic sound film and modern film. The silent cinema is not so
much silent as it is mute, says Deleuze. Certain images suggest sounds (steam coming
from a whistle), other suggest speech (an actor’s moving lips). But ultimately, the
visual images of silent film retain a certain naturalness through their separation from
actual sound, especially from speech. Speech itself is presented through intertitles,
the result being that all speech becomes indirect speech. For even when the title says
“I love you!,” Deleuze argues, the audience reads it as “he says that he loves her.”
With the advent of sound, the visual image loses something of its naturalness. Voices
of characters, both on and off camera, affect the postures of the characters, the angles
from which they are shot, the movements of the camera, the rhythms of the editing,
such that the sounds of speech interact with the visual images, thereby shaping,
modifying and reshaping the visual images. Verbal innuendos, lies, ironic asides,
deceptive phrases, all force a suspicious reading of visual images, a questioning
of appearances, and in this sense words denaturalize visual images. Speech now
becomes direct, and at the same time speech itself takes on a degree of autonomy,
in that a logic of pure sociability is made possible through conversation, that loose,
free-form, sometimes randomly assembled discourse that tends to take on a life of
its own, passing among characters as if they were simply vehicles of its production.
And in the modern cinema, finally, the visual and the sonic become autonomous.
Cinema, at this point, says Deleuze, is truly audio-visual. Speech in the modern
cinema is neither indirect (as in silent films) nor direct (as in classic films) but free
indirect. 1 What this amounts to in cinematic terms is that in the modern cinema
the speech of the characters becomes denaturalized, no longer fully belonging to
the characters who speak or the fictional context in which they act. Actors recite
lines as if spoken by a third person. They adopt literary tones or artificial modes of
enunciation. Their lines switch registers from high formality to low slang to a flat
recitation of impersonal data. They mingle speech about themselves as actors or as
1 Deleuze takes the term “free indirect speech” from literary criticism, in which it refers
to discourse in which one cannot tell whether the words are the narrator’s or a character’s,
such as in the sentences, “He felt great pain, what suffering! How could she do this? What
would come next?”

70
Deleuze’s Way
real personages within their fictional exchanges. The effect of all these strategies is
to create a free-floating, separate aural-verbal element that interacts with the visual
images without surrendering its autonomy.
It is within the context of this discussion that Deleuze speaks about the role of
music in film. My concern here is to consider the practical implications of his analysis
by examining from a Deleuzian perspective the use of music as a sonic element in
a single film – Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen (1983). Deleuze’s account of
music’s role in the classic sound cinema hinges on an observation of Nietzsche’s from
The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche appropriates Schopenhauer’s conception
of music for his own theory of tragedy. It happens that Godard’s film, besides being
a profound meditation on music, may also be regarded as an insightful reflection on
tragedy. And that understanding of tragedy proves to be intertwined with Godard’s
approach to sight and sound in cinema, and especially to his handling of music.
Hence, my Deleuzian examination of music in Godard entails as well a reflection on
the possibilities of a Nietzschean tragic sensibility in the modern cinema.
Music, Tragedy, Images
What Nietzsche means by his 1872 title “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of
Music” is perhaps nowhere more clearly indicated than in sections 16 and 17 of The
Birth of Tragedy. Here, Nietzsche cites at length a passage from Schopenhauer, in
which music is described as the direct expression of the will (by which Schopenhauer
means something like “universal force”). Music is “an expression of the world,” a
“universal language,” 2 in some regards like the language of concepts, yet one that is
not abstract. Music “resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are universal
forms of all possible experience … and yet are not abstract but perceptible and
thoroughly determinate” (p. 101). Music expresses the “inmost soul” of phenomena,
for it is “an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore complements everything
physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical,
the thing in itself.” For this reason, says Schopenhauer, “we might just as well call the
world embodied music as embodied will” (p. 102). Melodies, like concepts, are to a
certain extent abstractions of the actual, but whereas concepts are universals derived
from experience, and hence abstractions that come after phenomena, melodies give
us the universal before phenomena, “the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or
the heart of things” (p. 102).
According to Schopenhauer, then, will is the universal, undifferentiated force
that expresses itself in the embodied, individuated forms of phenomena, and music
is the direct representation of that universal will. Nietzsche concludes from this that
music not only expresses “the immediate language of the will” (p. 103) but also
stimulates the creative faculties to fashion individuated concepts and images that
embody the will. The Dionysian medium of music stimulates the Apollonian creation
of individuated forms, just as the universal will generates and plays through the
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter
Kauffman (New York, 1967), p. 101.

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 71
individuated things of the phenomenal world. The highest Apollonian manifestation
of the Dionysian will is in the tragic myth of the annihilation of the hero. Music gives
birth to tragic myth, “the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols”
(p. 103). Hence, “it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy
involved in the annihilation of the individual. … The metaphysical joy in the tragic
is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language
of images: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure,
because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected
by his annihilation” (p. 104). Through tragedy, “we are forced to look into the terrors
[in die Schrecken] of the individual existence – yet we are not to become rigid with
fear,” since by way of the drama “we are really for a brief moment primordial being
itself” (p. 104).
In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche’s Schopenhauerian approach
to music holds the key to an understanding of music’s function in classic sound
cinema. Deleuze notes that some cinema critics treat music as a component of a
“sonic continuum,” made up of sounds, words and music, that is interfused with and
inseparable from visual images, whereas others regard music as a kind of “‘foreign
body’ in the visual image, a little like dust in the eye” (IT 311/239). Deleuze argues
that both views are true, but that they are often imperfectly articulated. For Deleuze,
the “moving pictures,” or “movement-images,” on the screen are merely mobile
“slices” or “chunks” of a moving, open Whole of fluctuating, metamorphosing
time-space. Each actual movement-image on the screen extends into an off-screen
world continuous with the on-screen space (for example, the character looks offcamera
to her interlocutor across the room), and that continuous off-screen world
Deleuze calls a “relative out of frame.” But each on-screen movement-image also
is part of the open Whole, which in the classic cinema is never directly presented,
but only indirectly expressed through the images on the screen. Unlike the space of
the “relative-out-of-frame,” which may be revealed in the next shot, what Deleuze
calls the “absolute-out-of-frame” of the open Whole remains undisclosed on the
screen in any direct fashion. Sounds, words and music may be part of the relativeout-of-frame,
as when the off-camera noise of a breaking glass, the curse of an angry
sailor, or the strum of a guitar, is shown in the next shot to issue from an actual
glass, sailor or guitar inhabiting the same space as the preceding shot. But words
may also issue from some unspecified realm outside the screen-space, as in the case
of a voice-over narration, or a character’s flashback reminiscence. Likewise, music
may accompany images without ever being “justified” by an off-screen source that
belongs to the screen-world. In these cases, words and music are part of the absoluteout-of-frame,
inhabiting the fluctuating time-space of the open Whole. Within the
relative-out-of-frame space, music is part of a sonic continuum. Music may also
remain within a sonic continuum in the absolute-out-of-frame space (as in a voiceover
with accompanying music), yet music has the capacity as well to function as
a “foreign body” within the visual image. Eisenstein argues that music and visual
images should express a harmonious totality, but Eisner and others object that music
often is most effective when it contrasts with the screen images, as when a soft lullaby
accompanies a battle scene. Deleuze argues that the range of musical effects, from
a unifying reinforcement and “echoing” of visual images to a disruptive contrast

72
Deleuze’s Way
and “irritation” of images, is made possible by music’s relation to the open Whole.
In the classic cinema, music is capable of presenting a direct image of the open
Whole, what Deleuze calls a direct “time-image,” which is incommensurable with
the open Whole indirectly expressed by the visual images. Just as Nietzsche regards
music as the immediate expression of the Dionysian will, so Deleuze treats it as the
immediate expression of the open Whole. “In [Nietzschean] tragedy,” says Deleuze,
“the immediate musical image is like the kernel of fire that surrounds the Apollonian
visual images, and which cannot do without their unfolding parade. In the case of
cinema, which is first a visual art, one may say that music adds the immediate image
to the mediate images that represent the Whole indirectly” (IT 311/239). There is
a relation between music and visual images, but it is not one of correspondence,
for the direct expression (music) and the indirect expression (visual images) of the
Whole are incommensurable.
With the advent of modern cinema, however, Deleuze sees music taking on
a different role. Modern directors create direct visual images of the open Whole
– “time-images” – by disrupting the coordinates of commonsense time-space. Our
experience is organized by a “sensory-motor schema” that allows us to function
in a predictable, manageable world, yet that schema hides from us the paradoxical
reality of the universe as an open time-space flux. Modern directors create images
of “sheets of the past,” in which pasts coexist in a single, virtual plane; images of
“peaks of the present,” in which incommensurable present moments simultaneously
occur; and images of “series of time,” in which past, present and future interpenetrate
in single images of becoming. They do so by disarticulating and disconnecting
the continuities and regularities of the commonsense world and rearticulating and
reconnecting images in non-rational assemblages, such that the gap between images,
the difference between images, serves as the principle of their connection. The
sequences of images in modern films force viewers to comprehend the relations
produced by the non-rational juxtaposition of images. In this fashion, viewers
encounter images unassimilated within conventional codes, standard narratives, or
commonsense coordinates, and are thereby able to see direct images of time. As part
of their effort to undo the sensory-motor schema, modern directors tend to emphasize
the difference between sound and sight. They approach the sonic continuum and the
visual continuum as autonomous materials, which they juxtapose in non-rational
configurations within each continuum and in non-rational relations between the two
continuums. Hence music in the modern cinema, though still capable of directly
expressing the open Whole as it did in the classic cinema, takes on new relations
to other elements of the sonic continuum as well as to the images of the visual
continuum.
Godard and Beethoven
Jean-Luc Godard is among the modern directors Deleuze most admires, and Godard’s
Prénom Carmen (1983) is perhaps Godard’s most extended meditation on music

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 73
and its role in film. 3 Prénom Carmen also provides an apt occasion for a reflection
on Nietzschean tragedy in modern cinema, for in many ways the film is a parodic
disarticulation of the Carmen myth and the tragedy of fate. We recall, of course, that
when Nietzsche renounces his early Wagnerism in The Case of Wagner (1888), it is
Bizet’s Carmen he salutes as the antidote to the “damp north” and “the steam of the
Wagnerian ideal.” 4 Of Bizet’s opera, Nietzsche remarks, “I know no case where the
tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, translated with
equal terror into a formula, as in Don José’s last cry, which concludes the work: ‘Yes,
I have killed her, / I – my adored Carmen!’” (p. 159). Godard’s film mocks the terror
and tragedy of fatal love, but through its handling of images and sounds, I believe,
it ultimately creates a certain terror and ecstatic joy that accord in some ways with
the Nietzschean ideal of The Birth of Tragedy. And that terrifying, ecstatic joy is one
with the experience of the separation and defamiliarization of sight and sound that
Deleuze regards as central to the modern cinema.
If, for the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, it is myth that is missing in modern
art (indeed, in art from Euripides on), for Godard myth is all too present in the
world around us. Early in Prénom Carmen, Godard, in the role of Carmen’s Uncle
Jean, a washed-up film director, types the words “mal vu mal dit” (AS 22) on his
asylum typewriter, these Beckettian phrases succinctly summing up the modern
filmmaker’s problem. The world is “ill seen” and “ill said,” saturated with visual and
verbal clichés, with ready-made, prepackaged images and formulas that structure
and organize experience in ideological patterns. And the world is often “ill seen”
because “ill said,” visual clichés arising from the narrative myths that script daily
life. Godard undermines the Carmen myth of tragic love and the femme fatale
through various parodic Verfremdungseffekten, including multiple visual and verbal
citations, sudden shifts from high seriousness to pop informality or blunt profanity, a
deliberately amateurish handling of action sequences, incongruous elements within
scenes (such as the unperturbed bank customers surrounded by a raging gun battle),
de-realizing references to the filmmaking process itself, and so on. Godard’s object,
however, is not simply to parody myth, but also to create something new. As Godard
is wont to say, he seeks not “une image juste,” but “juste une image,” an image cut
off from myth and cliché, one granted a certain elemental nakedness and purity. At
one point Carmen asks Joseph, “what comes before the name [le nom],” to which he
responds, “Le prénom.” “No, before” she replies, “before you’re called anything”
[avant qu’on vous appelle] (AS 56). Beyond the dismantling of the Carmen myth,
3 A splendid shot-by-shot description of the film is available in a special 1984 issue
of L’Avant scène cinema, 323/324 (1984): 19–64, and all citations, abbreviated as AS, are
from this edition (translations my own). Although I speak of the film as essentially a work by
Godard, it is important to note that the “scenario and adaptation” are credited to Anne-Marie
Miéville, his collaborator on a number of important films. This fact, I believe, is especially
important if one is to consider the implications of gender in the film, an issue that I do not
address directly. See Verena Andermatt Conley, “A Fraying of Voices: Jean-Luc Godard’s
Prénom Carmen,” L’esprit créateur, 30/2 (1990): 68–80, and Phil Powrie, “Godard’s Prénom
Carmen (1984), Masochism, and the Male Gaze,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 31/1
(1995): 64–73, for discussion of this question.
4 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, p. 158.

74
Deleuze’s Way
Prénom Carmen is above all an effort to extract simple, direct images from a coded
network of “ill-seen” and “ill-said” visual clichés, to fashion images before names,
pré-noms.
Yet Prénom Carmen is also a film about sight and sound, about visual images
and their relationship to what might loosely be called, after Deleuze, “sonic images,”
or discrete sonic elements. One might expect Godard’s parody of Carmen to focus
on Bizet’s score, but aside from two fleeting citations of the Habañera, whistled and
hummed by minor characters, the opera’s music is absent from the film. Instead,
Godard uses portions of Beethoven’s 9th, 10th, 14th, 15th and 16th String Quartets
as the primary musical elements of his soundtrack. In a broad sense, Prénom Carmen
is two films: a film of the Carmen story, and a film of a string quartet rehearsing
several passages from Beethoven. The fiction that holds the two plots together is that
Carmen’s lover Joseph is also the boyfriend of Claire, a member of the quartet. The
film intercuts between the quartet’s rehearsals and the Carmen plot, with an early
scene after a rehearsal establishing the relationship between Claire and Joseph. The
two plots converge when the quartet performs in the same Intercontinental Hotel
restaurant in which Carmen’s gang attempts its ill-fated kidnapping of a Polish
ambassador. With only one exception, the visual images of the quartet match up with
the soundtrack of the Beethoven quartets. 5 The musicians on screen, save Claire, are
professional musicians (members of the Prat Quartet, as the opening credits of the
film indicate) actually performing the Quartets, and the soundtrack is a live recording
of their performance. (Claire’s bowing is obviously the unskilled imitations of a
violinist’s actions, typical of a non-musician actor playing the role of a musician.
Godard calls attention to this fact by having the first violinist chide Claire for making
too many mistakes during the rehearsals.) The music, however, also accompanies the
Carmen-plot images for extended stretches of the film. Clearly, Godard is playing
with the notion of “sound-in” and “sound-off” camera, Beethoven now functioning
as “sound-in” when the quartet is seen playing, now as “sound-off” when, for
example, the music accompanies the bank heist. The ambiguity of the “sound-off”
element emerges in the interplay of the images of the rehearsal and the images of the
Carmen plot, the Beethoven accompaniment to the bank heist functioning both as a
constituent of the “absolute-out-of-field” of a standard cinematic score and as a sonic
element of the “relative-out-of-field” of the rehearsal space improbably “leaking”
into the space of the bank heist.
Why Beethoven?, one might ask. Pure chance, Godard suggests in one interview,
since the story takes place by the sea and it was “at the seashore that I discovered, at
age twenty, the quartets of Beethoven.” 6 But he also says that he sought “a fundamental
5 The exception occurs midway through the film, when for eight seconds the soundtrack
is dead while images of the performing quartet fill the screen. The effect is jarring, whereas at
other points in the film when the visual ambient sound is missing and music accompanies the
images, the effect is unremarkable because normalized within cinematic conventions. Clearly,
Godard in this eight-second sequence is calling attention to the arbitrary nature of these sonic
conventions in representational narrative cinema.
6 Jean-Luc Godard, “Les signes du mal à vivre,” L’avant scène cinema, 323/324
(1984), p. 5.

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 75
music, a music that had marked the history of music. A music that is both practice
and theory of music. That was the case of Beethoven.” 7 In this regard, the Beethoven
Quartets provide Godard with instances of “Music” writ large, paradigmatic
compositions fit for an exploration of the theoretical relationship between visual
images and music in general. The Quartets are also quintessential chamber-pieces,
and one might argue that Prénom Carmen is itself a kind of cinematic chamber
music, a work composed of a limited set of materials – created, as the film’s closing
title card states, “IN MEMORIAM SMALL MOVIES” (AS 64). Yet perhaps the
primary reason the Beethoven Quartets are chosen is that they are not associated
with the Carmen story. And most important, they lack any relation to Bizet’s musical
blending of exoticism and eroticism, instead exploiting a strictly Western art music
idiom largely devoid of extra-musical associations. 8 Hence, the juxtaposition of the
Beethoven Quartets and the Carmen images forces a confrontation of differences,
creating unexpected resonances and frequent incongruities between sound and sight,
while instigating a reflection on the relation between “pure,” self-referential, nonprogrammatic
art music and the realm of the visual.
Still, if there is no pre-existing relation between the Beethoven Quartets and the
Carmen story, such a relation may be created after the fact, as it were, and Godard
not only proceeds to fashion such a relation between sounds and images but also
offers a verbal commentary on the process of that formation through the remarks
of Claire and the other musicians. The quartet leader’s first comment, as the group
begins its rehearsal, is “With the body” [Avec le corps] (AS 21), which suggests that
the body is the medium through which image and music may be related. Shortly
after the leader asks that the music be performed “avec le corps,” “Uncle Jean”
Godard appears on the screen, tapping the window of his room, the metal bars of
his bed, the table, the walls, the keys of his typewriter, his own chest, his head, the
table again, the bars of the bed, and the mattress. With each distinctly audible tap,
Godard demonstrates the corporeal dimension of sound, indicating that it is from
bodies that sounds issue, and that it is with and from the body that music is produced.
To underline the relation between bodies, sounds and music, Godard repeats the
tapping movements near the close of the film, this time lightly striking four wine
glasses with a fork in the hotel dining room. 9 The first violinist also makes musical
comments that have relevance for the action unfolding in the Carmen plot. At one
point, for example, he tells the other players, “It has to be more violent” (AS 26),
7 Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris,
1985), p. 576.
8 The only exception might be the third movement of the 15th Quartet, the “Song of
Thanksgiving of a Convalescence, in the Lydian Mode.” Although the movement is decidedly
modal, I doubt that few listeners would describe it as exotic or non-Western. At most, listeners
might possibly characterize it as monastic and typically Renaissance in its handling of
harmony.
9 Deleuze argues that there is a strictly visual link between the bodies of the musicians
and the bodies of the Carmen plot actors. Indeed, he claims that the film repeatedly forces
viewers to ask such questions as, what is the relation between the violinist’s bowing and
Joseph’s embrace of Carmen?, the arch of the cellist’s fingers and the posture of the banks
guard? and so on. See Deleuze, IM 253–4; 194–5.

76
Deleuze’s Way
and in the ensuing shots the bank heist escalates into a gun battle. At another, he calls
for more passion, exhorting the quartet, “Push … one, two … rise … nothing more
… pull … and vibrate” (that is, play with vibrato, but also literally, “vibrate”) (AS
31), and in the following sequences the sensual relationship between Carmen and
Joseph intensifies.
But perhaps the most complex verbal links between the music and the Carmen
plot issue from Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–18, which Godard cites seven
times in the film (see the Appendix to this Chapter). One such citation is the rather
innocuous interjection of the first violinist as he stops the rehearsal, “No, no.
Take the best phrase built on the harmony” (AS 29; notebook entry no. 37). Other
citations, however, are more significant, and all but one are delivered by Claire (the
obvious counterpart to Bizet’s Micaëla, the virginal opposite of the femme fatale
Carmen). The film’s first citation from the Tagebuch occurs after the leader observes
that “Claire makes too many mistakes” [Claire fait trop de fautes], to which she
responds, “This I know well. I recognize it clearly. Life is not the supreme good.
Among evils, the supreme evil is the mistake [la faute]” (AS 25; notebook entry no.
118). Here, Godard playfully emphasizes the importance of art, as Claire indirectly
suggests that artistic perfection is the supreme good, and hence superior to life. 10
Yet Claire’s observation also bears on the Carmen story, for the supreme evil, as we
shall see later, may be said to be “guilt,” or “culpability,” both possible translations
of faute (and closer to the Tagebuch’s original Schuld). 11
Claire’s next Tagebuch citation comes from an obscure 1802 “Fate tragedy” by
Zacharias Werner, in which one character implores another to act and fulfill his being.
Claire’s interjection, “Act instead of asking,” cleverly meshes with the rehearsal
discussion of a passage from the 10th Quartet, and her continuation of the Werner
citation functions neatly as a comment on the marvels of the creative imagination
and its centrality in the artist’s life: “Do miracles first, if you want to unveil them,
thus alone will you fulfill all your destiny” (AS 27). 12 Claire’s most extended
citation reiterates the theme of destiny, in this case with a comment that enunciates
the traditional theme of the Carmen myth: “Show your power, Destiny. We are not
masters of ourselves. That which has been decided … let it be so” (AS 31–2). Here
10 In several entries that Godard does not cite, Beethoven expresses his devotion to his
art and laments the sacrifices his art demands of his personal life. “You must not be a human
being, not for yourself, but only for others: for you there is no longer any happiness except
within yourself, in your art” (no. 1). “Everything that is called life should be sacrificed to the
sublime and be a sanctuary of art” (no. 40). “Sacrifice once and for all the trivialities of social
life to your art” (no. 169).
11 Actually, the lines Godard cites from Tagebuch, entry no. 118, are Beethoven’s
transcription of the closing lines of Schiller’s The Bride of Messina. In the context of the play,
Schuld clearly means “guilt” rather than “mistake.”
12 It is worth noting that in Werner (and in the Tagebuch citation), the character is
implored to fulfill his “Daseyn,” his “existence,” not his “destiny,” as the French translation
has it. Claire’s reference here to “toute ta destinée” echoes her pronouncement later from
entry no. 73, “Montre ta puissance, Destin,” “Zeige deine Gewalt Schicksal!” (Show your
power, Fate!), a significant echo given the standard reading of the Carmen story as a tragedy
of fate and destiny.

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 77
Godard suggests that Beethoven, at least in his Tagebuch, shares Merimée’s and
Bizet’s sentiments about fate, and to the extent that the Quartets express Beethoven’s
sense of the power of destiny, we have articulated in this phrase a direct connection
between the film’s music and its central plot.
Claire’s final two citations are pronounced in close succession as she pencils
notations into her part. She first intones the Tagebuch’s cryptic fourth entry, “Verify
all in the evening” (AS 32), and as she finishes the phrase a shot of the ocean shore
at night comes on the screen. In the following shot, Claire is seen writing in her
part, as she comments to herself, “And the clouds … the clouds, would they reveal
torrents of life? [feraient-ils voir des torrents de vie, literally, ‘would they make
seen torrents of life?’]” (AS 32; notebook entry no. 6). Here Godard is playfully
mapping a line of association that proceeds from Beethoven’s Quartets to the film’s
visual motifs. Godard inserts two shots of a cloud-filled sky in the film (shots 8 and
116), in both cases in close proximity to a shot of the ocean shore. The first sky shot
follows the opening shot of the sea, itself preceded by Carmen’s voiceover comment
(accompanied by the sound of waves and gulls), “It’s in me, in you that it produces
terrible waves [des vagues terribles]” (AS 21). A complex of verbal and visual
associations, it would seem, brings together “torrents of life,” “terrible waves,”
and images of the ocean and the sky, with the implication that Beethoven’s musical
nighttime clouds motivate the appearance of the visual clouds. Implicit as well is
that the torrents of life in Beethoven’s Quartets communicate with the terrible waves
of passion that course through Carmen and Joseph – Joseph tells Claire midway
through the film that “there is something taboo, a sort of force that pushes me … the
tide swells [la marée monte]” (AS 53) – those waves taking on literal embodiment
in the film’s twenty shots of the sea.
Music and the Sonic Continuum
For the most part, Godard does not directly tamper with Beethoven’s music. He
does briefly allow the Beethoven score to play over Tom Waits’s ballad “Ruby’s
Arms,” and at the moment that the Claire plot and the Carmen plot converge, for a
few seconds two dissonant passages from the 16th Quartet are superimposed. 13 (The
13 The Beethoven Quartets are the primary musical components of the film, but the
importance of Waits’s ballad is not to be discounted. Clearly, the primary function of “Ruby’s
Arms” is to provide a contrast to the quartets – in Deleuze’s terms, to serve as a productive
difference. The Waits–Beethoven opposition is one of popular to classical music, but Waits’s
ballad is hardly a prototypical piece of pop music. Waits occupies an odd niche in the popular
music landscape, his work having strong ties to traditional blues as well as basic rock, while
his vocal style must by any standards be deemed idiosyncratic. “Ruby’s Arms” utilizes a
simple tonal harmony, somewhat more complex than the basic three-chord vocabulary of roots
rock, but not especially adventurous in its harmonic idiom. Though clearly in the ballad style
– slow tempo, expressive lyrics and emotional delivery – the song does not make reference to
the harmonies typical of popular ballads from the 1930s and 1940s or those found in musicals.
Despite its obvious differences from the Quartet scores, the ballad shares some characteristics
with them. Its slow pace and straightforward progressions are compatible with the tempo

78
Deleuze’s Way
opening of the fourth movement overlaps the close of the third.) Occasionally, there
are shifts in the volume levels of the recording, which also affect Beethoven’s music.
Otherwise, however, the Quartets are presented as if they were being played by a
conventional ensemble in rehearsal. The Quartet selections proceed in chronological
order, from the 9th to the 10th Quartet, and then from the 14th through the 16th.
Changes in lighting in the shots of the musicians suggest that we are viewing a series
of rehearsals in which the players work their way through the corpus of the Quartets,
movement by movement. The continuities in the musical passages tend to unify
sections of the film, and the changes from one Quartet to another coincide with the
broad structural divisions of the plot. 14
and harmonies of the third movement of Beethoven’s 15th Quartet, and Waits’s use of an
orchestral score links it broadly to the classical tradition. The ballad accompanies the action
without interruption for 4 minutes 15 seconds. Godard denaturalizes the ballad somewhat
by abruptly dropping the volume level at two points and alternating sections of relatively
normal soundtrack reproduction with sections of hollow, low-bass, high-reverb reproduction,
thereby calling attention to the sonic element of the film. He also superimposes a brief motif
from the first movement of the 16th Quartet on the ballad. The ballad is introduced as one
of the film’s most arresting and bizarre images fills the screen, that of a hand outline on a
flickering blue background. The hand proves to be that of Joseph, and when the close-up of
the screen (a thirty second shot) gives way to a medium shot, the blue field is shown to be a
television screen. (The flickering blue screen of the television is visible in the background of
the preceding hotel scenes, but the shots do not call attention to the television. I personally
did not consciously note the television on a first viewing of the film, and I confess to thorough
confusion when the hand/blue field image initially appeared on the screen.) Joseph is draped
over the television set, his hand stroking the screen, as if he were caressing Carmen, who
has left him alone in the hotel room overnight. The ballad continues to play after Carmen
returns and the couple quarrel as Carmen rebuffs Joseph’s advances. The ballad is obviously
associated with Joseph and expressive of his unrequited passion for Carmen, and in this regard
the song has a prototypical pop-music social function. Joseph’s embrace of the television
suggests that he is enamored by images and that his passion for Carmen is informed by
simulacral media stereotypes. The hand-television juxtaposition might also suggest a broad
association of Joseph and the domain of hand-tool “techne,” instrumental rationality and the
dominance of the visible by the pragmatic. We might conclude, then, that Waits’s ballad and
Beethoven’s Quartets represent a polar opposition of Joseph/popular culture/mediated images/
technology and Carmen/art culture/unmediated images/nature. But such a schematization is
too crude, especially in terms of its polarization of values. Godard does not mock the Waits
ballad; indeed, the song seems to express genuine emotion. Conversely, though Godard treats
Beethoven’s music with respect, his thoroughgoing irony makes it difficult to take anything in
the film with absolute seriousness, including Beethoven.
14 The sequence of quartet passages and corresponding plot elements is as follows: 9th
Quartet, second movement (Andante con molto quasi Allegretto): opening rehearsal, hospital
scenes with Godard and Carmen; 9th Quartet, fourth movement (Trio) coda, moving directly
into the fifth movement (Allegro molto): transitional scenes, conclusion of Godard-Carmen
conversation and Carmen leaving the hospital; 10th Quartet, first movement, second section
(Allegro): bank heist (up to the first embrace of Carmen and Joseph); 10th Quartet, second
movement (Adagio ma non troppo): Carmen and Joseph embrace on bank floor, scenes in
the getaway car; 14th Quartet, fifth movement (Presto), final three notes: brief punctuation of
restroom scene; 14th Quartet, sixth movement (Adagio quasi un poco andante): Carmen and

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 79
But often the musical accompaniment to the Carmen story abruptly stops and
then resumes without clear motivation from the plot, such discontinuities in the
score calling attention to the music as an arbitrary, “foreign body” intervening in
the visual image. At the same time, the frequent intermingling of the Quartets and
sound effects forces recognition of music’s participation in a sonic continuum.
The primary non-musical sound effects – ocean waves, traffic noises and seagull
cries – are themselves treated like elements of a musical composition, the ocean
and traffic sounds occasionally merging; ocean waves now surging over the music,
now subsiding to form a background motif; seagull cries appearing sporadically,
sometimes along with wave sounds, sometimes with traffic sounds, sometimes
alone. 15 Visual images of waves and cars occasionally occupy the screen, but the
sounds of ocean, traffic and gulls often are not aligned with their standard visual
counterparts – indeed, in the case of the gull cries, perhaps the most intrusive of
the film’s sound effects, no visual images of seagulls ever appear on screen. 16 As a
result, one becomes aware of the soundtrack as an autonomous sonic milieu, whose
compositional elements are ocean, traffic and gull sounds, dialogue sounds, ambient
sounds of various settings, and passages from the Beethoven Quartets. 17
The ocean, traffic and gull sounds serve as aural punctuation marks, discrete
elements, with little relationship to the plot, that draw attention to the formal
Joseph on the way to the beach apartment; 15th Quartet, third movement (Heiliger Dankgesang
eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart/ Neue kraft fühlend): Carmen and
Joseph’s romance in the beach apartment, with a reprise of the movement when the two
meet again in Paris; 16th Quartet, first movement (Allegretto): brief passages during hotelroom
quarrel (over Waits ballad); 16th Quartet, second movement (Vivace): Joseph pursuing
Carmen, shower scene; 16th Quartet, third movement (Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo):
quartet performance in hotel dining room; 16th Quartet, fourth movement (Grave ma non
troppo tratto – dramatic tremolo chords): Carmen’s death; 16th Quartet, fourth movement
(Grave ma non troppo tratto): Valet’s closing lines, ocean shot, final credits.
15 Shortly following the last burst of seagull cries, which abruptly and improbably is
heard during a scene in the gang’s Paris hotel room, Joseph transgresses the narrative frame
as he comments, “There wasn’t any sea sound with it” [il y avait pas le bruit de la mer avec]
(AS 60).
16 In an intriguing interview, “Les Mouettes d’Austerlitz: Entretien avec François Musy,”
Cahiers du cinema, 355 (January 1984): 12–17, François Musy, the sound engineer for Prénom
Carmen, says that the seagull sounds were recorded two years before the film was made. He
notes that seagulls cry most distinctly when they are near cliffs, and there was no provision for
sea cliffs in Prénom Carmen. Fortunately, he already had a recording of gulls near sea cliffs
which he used in the film. Of the film’s soundtrack in general, he remarks, “It’s a musical
score in which all the sounds intervene on the same level, like instruments: the dialogue, a sea
ambience, the music … The seagulls, moreover, there it’s already a composition of songs: you
have some that cry louder, you have a sort of movement. The sea as well, even if it’s a little
more linear. The seagulls are already more musical, closer to dialogue” (Musy 14).
17 A full analysis of the sonic elements of the film would require an inventory of the
ambient sounds of the various milieus, which are treated in a very self-conscious fashion.
Especially noteworthy are the exaggerated clankings, thunks and echoing conversations of
the asylum, as well as the traffic sounds outside the room at the Intercontinental Hotel. In both
cases, ambient sounds appear, disappear, swell and subside in improbable fashion.

80
Deleuze’s Way
patterning of the sonic continuum. In a similar fashion, a discrete set of recurring
images punctuates the visual continuum – images of the ocean, of the sky, of
the headlight patterns of cars on a freeway, of the lighted windows of two metro
trains as they cross one another over the Pont d’Austerlitz, of chandeliers in the
Intercontinental Hotel. These visual punctuation marks, like their aural counterparts,
have a limited relationship to the plot, and the extended duration of the shots of the
waves, clouds, car headlights and metro window lights emphasizes their status as
abstract geometrical forms. Such extra-narrative, geometrically patterned images,
when interjected at unpredictable intervals into the stream of narrative images,
emphasize the formal nature of the visual continuum as a composition of images, a
composition in the process of divesting itself of conventional coding and narrative
organization while becoming a patterning of images “before names.”
Tragedy
Through a series of allusions, Godard suggests a complex relationship between the
use of images, visual and sonic, and the function of tragedy. Late in the film, Godard
cites (without attribution) a line from Rilke’s first Duino Elegy: “You know, beauty
is the beginning of the terror we are capable of enduring [Vous savez, la beauté, c’est
le commencement de la terreur que nous sommes capables de supporter]” (AS 61). 18
As he delivers this line, a close-up of Carmen’s face fills the screen. This shot is one
of eighteen close-ups of Carmen that appear regularly throughout the film, some
for a few seconds, others for extended periods, ranging from thirty to ninety-six
seconds. (The Carmen close-ups constitute a little over eight of the film’s eighty-four
minutes of running time, or about ten per cent of the film.) Several of these close-
18 In her insightful essay on Prénom Carmen, “A Fraying of Voices,” Verena Conley
observes that Godard’s citation of Rilke should read “La beauté n’est que le commencement
de la terreur que nous sommes encore capables de supporter,” given that Rilke’s original
reads: “Denn das Schöne ist nichts/ als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade
ertragen.” She comments that “the quotation is ‘ill said,’ since through suppression of the
‘encore’ the sentence insists less on a limit, becomes more declarative, but is also stripped of
its possibility of contemplative value by being introduced in a lower mimetic mode. In Rilke,
it refers to the world of absolute beauty or to angels, contrasted with earthen beauty. Terror in
Rilke is of a more absolute kind, that belongs to something celestial … In Godard, the same
values are taken out of context and reversed. The quotation may seem funny, even pompous
in the final, operatic – but also parodic – scene at the Hotel Intercontinental. The terror of
beauty is attributed to the dark, hence diabolical Carmen – who, somewhat comically, is also
said to have been working at a Prisunic – rather than to the angelic Claire (Myriem Roussel)
who rightfully bears her name” (pp. 77–8). I concur that Godard’s citation makes Rilke’s
pronouncement more absolute, but I read the reference differently. Carmen, I argue, is no
longer diabolical when divested of her narrative encoding. I might add that the Carmen–Claire
opposition, while clearly modeled on the Micaëla–Carmen opposition of Bizet, and hence
assimilable within codes of dark/diabolical and light/angelic (reinforced by Godard by the
names of the two women and the association of Carmen with a red rose and Claire with a
white rose), is not reinforced particularly in the visual presentation of the two women, both of
whom have fair skin and dark hair.

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 81
ups mark key meditative moments in the film, some of them accompanied by slow,
lyrical passages from the Quartets. By following the verbal associations that are
aligned with the close-ups, one can see what relation terror has to beauty, and what
relation that terror might have to the terror traditionally associated with tragedy.
During her initial meeting with her Uncle Jean in the asylum, Carmen is shown
in close-up for thirty-seven seconds (shot 28) as Godard speaks off-camera of her
mother:
The shore of the sea [Le bord de la mer], with your mother [avec ta mère], like little
Electra. You’re the one who doesn’t remember. I’ve always said that you had a talent for
misfortune [que tu étais douée pour le malheur]. How did that end, “when there’s,” you
know, “all the guilty [les coupables] in one corner, and then, and then, the innocent [les
innocents] in another”? [AS 24]
The reference to Electra, besides adding a second sexual and mythic dimension to the
figure of Carmen, 19 proves primarily to be an allusion to Giraudoux’s Électre, a fact
that becomes evident in the film’s closing shots when the final lines of Giraudoux’s
play are quoted. The pun on mer and mère might invite psychoanalytic associations
of the mother and primal oceanic forces (the linking of the mother and the feminine
here complicated by the murderous hostility Electra exhibits toward Clytemnestra
in the myth), but the pun’s main purpose is to bring together Carmen, the sea, and
Uncle Jean’s reference to the apocalyptic judgment of the guilty and the innocent.
Uncle Jean’s words also recall Carmen’s opening voiceover, when she speaks of
“terrible waves” within (followed by a shot of the sea), and then adds, “I haven’t
been to college, but I also know that the world doesn’t belong to the innocent … [le
monde n’appartient pas aux innocents]” (AS 21). The world she inhabits is not the
beatific realm of the Sermon on the Mount, she suggests, but as we shall see, she is
not necessarily implying that the guilty, or those with a talent for “le malheur,” in the
sense of “evil,” will inherit the earth.
Midway through the film, Carmen recalls her Uncle Jean’s apocalyptic reference.
For fifty-four seconds her face is shown in close-up (shot 119), while the Molto
adagio strains of the 15th Quartet accompany her question to Joseph: “What is it
called? [Comment ça s’appelle?] … There’s something about innocents there … and
then the guilty, over there …” (AS 33). Later, during a forty second close-up (shot
151), she asks Joseph what comes before the name, “avant qu’on vous appelle” (AS
56). At this point, an association of the motifs of the prénom and the division of
guilty and innocent is suggested through the verb appeler, an association whose full
significance only emerges at the close of the film. There, as Carmen is dying, she
asks a waiter, “What is it called [Comment ça s’appelle] when there are the innocents
in one corner and the guilty ones in the other?” (AS 63). The waiter answers, “Je
ne sais pas, mademoiselle” (AS 63). She then elaborates on her question, citing
19 Powrie sees the Electra allusion as a means whereby Carmen is “remythified twice
over” (“Godard’s Prénom Carmen,” p. 72). He gives a Lacanian reading to the sexual
dimension of this allusion, reading the Giraudoux citation at the film’s close both as a
distancing theatricalization of the action and a confirmation of the identity of the mother with
dawn and the prelinguistic Imaginary.

82
Deleuze’s Way
portions of the penultimate lines of Giraudoux’s Électre: “But if when everyone has
ruined everything, and everything is lost, but the day rises, and the air nonetheless
breathes,” to which the waiter responds with Giraudoux’s final line (and the final line
of Prénom Carmen), “Cela s’appelle l’aurore, Mademoiselle,” “That’s called dawn,
Mademoiselle” (AS 64).
Giraudoux’s play is about a judgmental Électre, an idealist who refuses to
compromise. For her, the world consists of the guilty and the innocent, and she refuses
to taint herself by allowing the crime of Clytemnestre and Égisthe to go unpunished,
even though the circumstances of the murder are uncertain and the future of Thebes
depends on Égisthe’s leadership in the impending battle with the city’s enemies. But
the world is not so neatly divided into guilty and innocent, as La Femme Narsès
implies in the lines Carmen partially cites: “What is it called, when the day rises,
like today, and everything is ruined, everything is pillaged, and nonetheless the air
breathes, and one has lost everything, the city burns, the innocents kill each other [les
innocents s’entre-tuent], but the guilty are in agony [les coupables agonisent], in a
corner of the day that is rising?” 20 When Le Mendiant replies, “That has a very pretty
name [Cela a un très beau nom], Femme Narsès. It’s called dawn,” he suggests that
“dawn” is the name of a world beyond simplistic judgments, a name for possibilities
in the face of universal destruction and ruin. The innocent and guilty alike suffer in
such a world, yet still the day rises, the air breathes, and something new begins.
Unlike Électre, Carmen is no idealist, but she does reinforce the distinct
categories of “innocent” and “guilty” in her discourse. She knows that the world
does not belong to the innocent, and she is obsessed by an apocalyptic separation of
sheep and goats, the innocent in one corner, the guilty in another. Hers is the milieu
of crime, of course, and the cops-and-robbers drama of bank heists and kidnappings
is all about verdicts of innocence and guilt. Indeed, the question of verdicts and
judgments is directly raised in the film’s parodic Tribunal section, in which Joseph
stands trial for his participation in the bank heist. His lawyer indicts capitalism as
the true criminal, stating that his offense is not against “la société” but against “la
Sociéte Générale,” large corporations and “the money of the big banks” (AS 34).
The police, the prosecutor and the judge all support their actions with supposed
aphorisms from Proverbs, and even Joseph counters by citing a reputed passage
from Proverbs.(None of the film’s references to chapter and verse is accurate, and
in fact, the aphorisms are not from Proverbs at all.) The judgments of law and the
judgments of religion coincide, and the question of a Last Judgment raises the
issue of justice and categorization in general. The division of the world into neat
compartments brings with it an ideological classification of reality – in sum, one that
masks the relationship between “la société” and “la Société Générale” and supports
a simplistic differentiation of the innocent from the guilty.
Carmen asks two questions: What does one call the separation of the innocent
and guilty?, and What comes before the name? The two are related, but they are not
the same question. When she is dying, she initially asks the Valet the first question,
which he cannot answer. She then rephrases her query, and in so doing she transforms
20 Jean Giraudoux, Théâtre complet, ed. Jacques Body (Paris, 1982), p. 685
(translation mine).

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 83
the first question into the second. When all is ruined, when categories of innocence
and guilt have been abandoned, when all the judgmental categorizations of the
world have been left behind, then something before categories becomes possible, an
unnamed, unclassified, stark image. The Valet’s answer “cela s’appelle l’aurore” is
a response to the question, “what comes before the name?” The pre-name is called
“dawn,” but its name is merely a designation for the space between, the gap between
night and day, the undecidable moment between dark and light. It is a name for that
which cannot be named. And it is this unnamed, uncategorized world that is the
source of the terrifying beauty Rilke speaks of, beauty that is “the beginning of the
terror we are capable of enduring” (AS 61).
It is important to note that in the film “terror” is not the same as “fear.” In her
opening voiceover, Carmen says “I’m not afraid [Je n’ai pas peur], but that’s because
I have never been able to, known how to, become attached [je n’ai jamais pu, su,
m’attacher]” (AS 21). Throughout the script, there is a play on the words “attacher”
and “détacher,” Joseph’s literal tying and untying of Carmen being related to his
emotional attachment to her and her refusal to be permanently attached to anything.
(A parallel play on the phrases “attirez-moi,” attract me, and “tirez-vous,” go
away, reinforces this motif – see Conley, p. 70.) Carmen has no fear, for she has
no attachments. Joseph, by contrast, does have fear, as Carmen insists. He claims
that the reason he took so long in returning to her after his trial was shame, “j’avais
honte,” “I was ashamed.” But Carmen counters, “Fear, not shame, fear [Peur, pas
honte, peur].” She then asks the Valet, “Are you afraid at times? [Vous avez peur
des fois, vous],” to which he replies, “Never, Mademoiselle” (AS 58). This same
Valet who knows no fear is the one who answers Carmen’s question at the end of the
film. He, like Carmen, it seems, forms no attachments. He can detach himself from
the codes of the world and name the unnamable. He can free himself from fear and
thereby open himself to the terror of beauty.
The unnamable is called “aurore,” but in a sense its name is also “Carmen.” At the
end of her initial voiceover, Carmen adds the phrases, “Got to hurry. Later. The one
who should not be called Carmen [Celle qui ne devrait pas s’appeler Carmen]” (AS
21). When “Uncle Jean” Godard enunciates Rilke’s line that “beauty is the beginning
of the terror we are capable of enduring,” Carmen’s face is in close-up on the screen.
She is the unattached and unattachable, that which cannot be controlled or possessed,
but also that which cannot be categorized. The eighteen close-ups of Carmen spaced
throughout the film are images assimilable within cinematic codes, as well as within
cultural codes of feminine beauty and desirability. The slightly hazy filters and soft
lighting of the close-ups echo faintly the conventions of fashion photography, but
finally Godard’s aim is to detach these images from their conventional moorings,
while at the same time detaching the narrative figure of Carmen from her mythical
coordinates, and to make visible on the screen the pure image of her face. The pure
image in its terrifying beauty “should not be called Carmen” or anything else, but if
it must be given a name, a name before the name, its pre-name would be Carmen.
One way of detaching an image from its codes is to strip it of its name, to divest
it of its associated words, but Godard suggests as well that sounds in general impinge
on images, and hence must be separated from them in order to transform them into
pure images. In Carmen’s initial meeting with Uncle Jean in the asylum, he offers

84
Deleuze’s Way
to lend her his “new camera” (AS 24), which turns out to be a boom box. He holds
the boom box on his shoulder as if it were a camera and plays a tape recording of
“Frère Jacques” and “Au clair de la lune,” accompanied by background sounds of
breaking crockery, and then sounds of an aerial bombardment. The nursery songs
are performed in a primitive fashion, the melody alone pecked out spasmodically in
shifting registers on an out-of-tune piano. The erratic sounds of the piano keyboard
and Godard’s punching of the boom-box play and stop buttons recall Godard’s earlier
strokes on the typewriter keys, which spell out “mal vu, mal dit” at the bottom of a
page of garbled random letters and symbols. When Carmen asks Uncle Jean if he
would like to start making films again, he replies, “Il faut fermer les yeux au lieu
de les ouvrir,” “You must close the eyes rather than open them” (AS 24). As the
sounds of aerial bombardment increasingly dominate the soundtrack, the boom box
on Godard’s shoulder comes to resemble both a camera and a rocket launcher, and
his haggard, scruffy face resembles that of a shellshock victim who has seen too
much and needs to learn to close his eyes. The implication is that the camera can
be a weapon, as can the tape recorder, and that the violence of visual representation
is reinforced by sonic representations. The world is “mal vu, mal dit,” a page of
meaningless babble, but it is also “mal entendu,” ill heard and ill understood, a tape
of disintegrating nursery songs, breaking dishes and dive-bombing planes. To create
“juste une image,” the image must be detached not only from visual clichés and
verbal codes, but also from its sonic counterparts, and sounds themselves need to
be detached from their conventional associations if they are no longer to be “mal
entendus.”
Music and the Spirit of Tragedy
Godard does indeed separate sight and sound in Prénom Carmen, thereby creating
what Deleuze would call a truly audio-visual modern film. But the status of music
in the film is not simply that of a constituent of the sonic continuum. The sounds of
waves, traffic and seagulls, the ambient noises of the hospital, gas station and hotel,
the dialogue on-camera and off – all are treated as elements of a musical composition.
But if noises and sounds attain to the level of music within a single continuum, the
Beethoven Quartets are not thereby rendered mere noises within an undifferentiated
sonic mix. Godard plays with the conventions of film scores, often undercutting
the narrative by providing the action with incongruent accompaniment from the
Quartets. The juxtaposition of the ebullient 10th Quartet’s Allegro and the bank heist,
for instance, heightens the absurdity of the sequence, and the intensely dramatic
cadences of the 15th Quartet’s third movement render melodramatic Carmen and
Joseph’s reunion in the garage (shots 147 and 148). Yet in neither of these nor in any
of the other instances of an ironic pairing of music and action is the music mocked.
Rather, it is always the image that is not adequate to the music. Godard clearly has
deep affection for the Beethoven Quartets, and though he interrupts the ensemble’s
performance at several points, he also allows the music to continue undisturbed for
extended stretches of time.

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 85
There are also a number of sequences in which the music and the images are
not ironically juxtaposed. Throughout the film, when music accompanies shots of
the ocean or close-ups of Carmen, lyrical, slow, highly emotive passages from the
Quartets are used, and at no point does the music undercut the image. Particularly
striking is the use of the third movement of the 15th Quartet during Carmen and
Joseph’s romantic interlude at the beach apartment (shots 92–122). The beginning
of the third movement coincides with the cut to shot 92, a thirty-eight second view
of sea swells shot from above, the calm ebb and flow of the foam-flecked water
gently washing over a small rock as the serene strains of the Molto adagio movement
unfold. Passages from this movement accompany nearly half of the fourteen minutes
of images set at the beach. Three-fourths of the time, the score is matched with shots
of the ocean or close-ups of Carmen. Godard is certainly exploiting conventional
associations of the feminine and the ocean – be it as a figure of the maternal womb
or as a symbol of erotic passion – but the conjunction of Carmen’s face and the sea
to the accompaniment of Beethoven is meant to undo those associations. Godard is
engaged in a pedagogy of images, teaching us to see the images for themselves, and
the score guides us in that lesson. Beethoven titled the opening section of the third
movement “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen
Tonart” (Sacred Song of Thanksgiving to the Godhead on a Convalescence, in the
Lydian Mode), and its mood of quiet, meditative tranquility suffuses the entire
beach sequence. Its modal tonality, as one commentator observes, produces “an
atmosphere of mysterious and other-worldly remoteness,” an “atmosphere of
Olympian contemplation” as well as an “extraordinary feeling of timelessness.” 21
For the thirty-eight seconds of shot 92, we watch the wash of waves and listen to
the Quartet, as if we were being instructed, “learn to see this image itself, learn
to see it with the calm, serenity and harmony of the music that accompanies it.”
When Carmen’s face comes on screen, the same score reinforces a similar lesson:
“learn to see this face as you saw the ocean, not as a maternal or an erotic object
but as a simple image.” The music does not illustrate or represent the images, but it
establishes a mood and imbues the images with an affective intensity. The music’s
slow tempo and the extended duration of the shots of Carmen and the ocean – shots
in which visually nothing happens – together encourage contemplation. Narrative is
suspended, and a timeless time allows images to emerge as forms of a visual music.
To render visible the image itself requires a detachment of the image from its
usual coordinates and an invention of new relationships with other images. The
principle of this practice is indirectly suggested by Godard toward the close of the
film, when Uncle Jean’s Nurse reads to him a phrase from Beethoven’s Tagebuch:
“The perfect union of several voices entirely impedes the progress of one toward
the other” (AS 62, Notebook entry no. 2). In music as in cinema, the strict unison of
elements impedes the movement of elements toward one another. Only by undoing
the unities and uniformities of conventional relations can new relations be forged.
The separation and recombination of voices is a principle governing images, words,
sounds and music in Prénom Carmen, one that makes of the film a stratigraphic
layering of visual and sonic elements. Yet music still has a privileged position within
21 Philip Radcliffe, Beethoven’s String Quartets (London, 1965), pp. 116–17.

86
Deleuze’s Way
these elements. What Schopenhauer finds in music is a strange sensual abstraction,
a direct presentation of an affective geometry of forms immanent within things. A
similar intuition informs Nietzsche’s approach to tragedy as the outgrowth of the
spirit of music. And Deleuze’s sense of music in the classic cinema as the direct
presentation of the open Whole likewise springs from this intuition. For Deleuze, the
modern cinema gives sound a new function as the visual and the sonic are detached
from one another and recombined in new relations, but it seems that music – even
traditional tonal art music – already has within it a force of affective detachment and
rearticulation present in the most conventional of films. Godard subverts codes and
narratives, undermines visual and sonic conventions, but he accepts Beethoven and
allows the Quartets to serve as the milieu within which the film takes shape. If there
is a dominant spirit to Prénom Carmen, it is that of the Beethoven score.
In Nietzsche’s view, tragedy makes bearable our terror at the destruction and
dissolution of all material forms. In music, we are able to embrace the incessant
forces of creation that give rise to forms, break them apart, and then refashion them
in new configurations. Ultimately, the spirit of music for Nietzsche is the spirit of
the artist-god, the “world-child Zeus” at play in his world-making, now building,
now destroying, with an equally serene joy in his activity. 22 It is difficult to decide
whether Godard finally subscribes to Rilke’s view that beauty is the commencement
of the terror we can endure, since little in Godard is offered without ironic distance
and qualification. I have argued that the revelation of the pure image brings with
it the terror of disequilibrium and disorientation, but one might argue as well that
Godard’s Rilkean reference is to the terroristic violence of conventional aesthetic
codes. The creative spirit of the artist-god, however, seems to me to be undeniably
present in Prénom Carmen. The Olympian serenity of the 15th Quartet’s Molto
adagio movement suffuses the film, as does the poised playfulness that surfaces
from time to time in the late Quartets. The coda of Beethoven’s last Quartet, with
its pizzicato chords and light, gay tune, brings Godard’s film to its conclusion, as
a final shot of the sea comes on the screen. The cheerful seriousness of the playful
creator, that expansive spirit of deep feeling and distant reflection so evident in the
late Quartets (as in The Tempest, I would argue), is ultimately the controlling mood
of Godard’s film. Prénom Carmen is no tragedy, but if Nietzsche’s spirit of tragedy
is that of the artist-creator, and if that spirit is also the spirit of music, then this film,
like tragedy, is born of the spirit of music.
22 I take this phrase from Nietzsche’s account of Heraclitus’s cosmos in Philosophy in
the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago, 1962), p. 67. In Heraclitus’s
view of the universe, “only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-tobe
and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal
innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire … Such is the game
that the aeon plays with itself. Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds towers of
sand like a child at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down … The child throws
its toys away from time to time – and starts again, in innocent caprice. But when it does build,
it combines and joins and forms its structures regularly, conforming to inner laws” (p. 62).

Music and Modernity
Deleuze says of Prénom Carmen that it
Tragedy, Sight and Sound 87
… uses musical movements, acts of speech, noises of doors, sounds of the sea or the
metro, cries of gulls, pluckings of strings and revolver shots, slidings of bows and
bursts of machine-gun fire, the “attack” of music and the “attack” in the bank, the
correspondences between these elements, and above all their displacements, their cuts, in
such a way as to form the power [puissance] of a single and self-same sonic continuum.
[IT 305/234–5]
That continuum becomes a fourth dimension of the visual image, in which the sonic
elements “rival one another, cover one another, traverse each other, cut into each
other,” while they simultaneously “trace a path full of obstacles in the visual space,
and they do not make themselves heard without also being seen, for themselves,
independently of their sources, at the same time that they make the image readable,
a little like a musical score” (IT 305/235). Yet Prénom Carmen also makes use of
Western tonal art music in a way that links the film to the classic cinema, its quartet
score functioning as does music in Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy – as Deleuze
phrases it, “like the kernel of fire that surrounds the Apollonian visual images,
and which cannot do without their unfolding parade.” In Godard’s film, as in the
classic cinema, “one may say that music adds the immediate image [of the Whole]
to the mediate images that represent the Whole indirectly” (IT 311/239). What this
suggests, finally, is that music provides common ground for the classic and modern
cinema. Perhaps cinema as a whole, like tragedy, has one of its points of origin in the
spirit of music – the generative ear latent in the eye.
Appendix Prénom Carmen Citations from Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–18
Ceci, je le sens bien. Je le reconnais clairement. La vie n’est pas le bien suprême.
Parmi les maux, le mal suprême c’est la faute. [spoken by Claire]
#118: Dieß Eine fühl’ ich und erkenn’ es klar:
Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht,
Der Uibel größtes aber ist die Schuld.
This one thing I feel and clearly perceive:
Life is not the sovereign good,
But the greatest evil is guilt.
[Schiller, Die Braut von Messina, closing lines]

88
Deleuze’s Way
Agis au lieu de demander. [spoken by Claire]
Fais d’abord des miracles, si tu veux les dévoiler, ainsi seulement tu accompliras
toute ta destinée. [spoken by Claire]
#60: Nicht Fragen, Thaten sollst du spenden, [;] dich selber opfern
[,] ohne Ruhm und Lohn? [!] –Erst übe Wunder, willst du sie enthüllen; und [nur]
so kannst du dein Daseyn nur [ganz] erfüllen.
[Robert] You shall dispense not questions but deeds,
Sacrifice yourself without fame and reward!
If you wish to unveil miracles, first practice them;
Only thus can you fulfill your existence.
[excerpt from Zacharias Werner, Die Söhne des Thals, I. Theil: Die Templer auf
Cypern (Berlin, 1802), Act IV, scene i.]
Prendre la première phrase venue construite sur l’harmonie. [spoken by First
Violinist]
#37: Den ersten besten Satz in Canons erfunden auf Harmonie gebaut. [The
words “in Canons” are crossed out, with dots underneath to signify “stet.”]
The best opening phrases in canons are built around harmonies.
Montre ta puissance, Destin. Nous ne sommes pas nos propres maîtres. Ce qui est
décidé … qu’il en soit ainsi. [spoken by Claire]
#73: Zeige deine Gewalt Schicksal! Wir sind nicht Herrn über uns selbst; was
beschlossen ist, muß seyn, und so sey es dann [?denn]! – –
Show your power, Fate! We are not masters of ourselves; what has been decided
must be, and so be it!
[Possibly a quotation (source unknown)]
Tout vérifier le soir. [spoken by Claire]
#4: alle Abends durchsehn.
Look through them all in the evening.
Et les nuages … les nuages feraient-ils voir des torrents de vie? [spoken by Claire]
#6: Und regneten die Wolken Lebensbäche, nie wird der Weidenbaum dir
Datteln tragen.

Tragedy, Sight and Sound 89
And even if the clouds were to rain rivers of life
Never will the willow tree bear dates.
[Herder, “Verschwendete Mühe,” Zerstreute Blätter. 4th ed. (Gotha, 1792), p. 27]
L’union parfaite de plusieurs voix empêche somme toute le progrès de l’une vers
l’autre. [spoken by Godard’s Nurse]
#2: Die genaue Zusammenhaltung mehrerer Stimmen hindert im Großen das
Fortschreiten einer zur andern.
The precise coinciding of several musical voices generally hinders the progression
from one to the other.
German citations of the Tagebuch from Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven’s Tagebuch
of 1812–1818,” in Beethoven Studies 3, ed. Alan Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 193–293. English translations and commentary by
Solomon.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6
Bergsonian Fabulation
and the People to Come
In a 1990 interview, Deleuze addresses the question of the relationship of politics
to art via a reflection on the modern problem of the “creation of a people.” The
artists Deleuze admires (he names here Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg, Huillet
and Straub) have a deep need of a people, but the collectivity they invoke does
not yet exist – the “people are missing [le peuple manque]” (PP 235/174). Artists
cannot themselves create a people, and the people in their struggles cannot concern
themselves directly with art, but when a people begins to take form, an interactive
process emerges that connects art and the people:
When a people is created [se crée: literally, “creates itself”], it does so through its own
means, but in a way that rejoins something in art … or in such a way that art rejoins that
which it lacks. Utopia is not a good concept: rather, there is a “fabulation” common to the
people and to art. We should take up again the Bergsonian notion of fabulation and give it
a political sense. [PP 235/174]
Deleuze nowhere elaborates at length on the idea of fabulation, but it forms part of
a rich complex of concepts central to his approach to the ethics and politics of art.
It also is a rather elusive concept, which is Bergsonian only in a special sense that
deserves some investigation.
Closed and Open Societies
On initial consideration, Bergson’s fabulation must seem antithetical to Deleuze’s,
for its Bergsonian associations are basically negative, its Deleuzian largely positive.
Bergson first makes use of the concept in his late The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion (1932), fabulation serving a key function in what Bergson labels closed
societies. 1 Ethical theory commonly assumes a continuum of values from love of
family, to love of society, and eventually to a love of mankind, but Bergson argues for
a qualitative difference in nature (not degree) between a love of family and society,
1 The French “fabulation” is a rather uncommon word of recent provenance. Its first
use documented in Robert’s Dictionnaire is from Balzac’s 1839 Curé de village, its sense
being that of an “imaginary representation, fanciful [romanesque, that is, novel-like] version
of a set of facts.” By 1905, psychologists had adopted the word to denote the production of
imaginary or false stories, associating it with mythomania and pathological lying. Robert cites
Bergson’s Two Sources as the first philosophical use of the word, its meaning being “activity
of the imagination.”

92
Deleuze’s Way
manifest in closed societies, and a love of mankind, which only appears upon the
envisioning of an alternative social order, that of an open society. The essence of any
social organization resides in the coordinated functioning of individuals in relation
to a whole, a functioning roughly analogous to that of cells within a single organism.
Social organization is widespread in nature, with two evolutionary tendencies in
social life represented by the extremes of hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants) and
Homo sapiens. The coordinated functioning of individuals within insect societies
is regulated primarily by instinct, whereas intelligence largely guides individuals’
co-functioning within human societies. Instinct and intelligence, however, are
not entirely separate from one another in their social function, a certain degree of
intelligence being present in insect instinct, a degree of instinct permeating human
intelligence. And both instinct and intelligence serve a fundamental social purpose:
“Social life is thus immanent, like a vague ideal, in instinct as well as in intelligence;
this ideal finds its most complete realization in the hive or the anthill on one hand,
and in human societies on the other.” 2
Insect societies are relatively fixed in their structure, the configuration of relations
among individuals being dictated by instinct, whereas human societies vary in their
mode of organization, that variation stemming from the utilization of intelligence
in the development and perpetuation of social structures. Individual insects have
a minimal autonomy in relation to society, the result being that insect societies
are highly stable but extremely limited in their mode of organization. Conversely,
individual humans have a great deal of social autonomy, and as a result humans can
use their intelligence to construct a wide range of divergent social systems. The cost
of such flexibility in social organization, however, is one of instability. The autonomy
of individuals in human societies, made possible by the development of intelligence,
threatens to dissolve social bonds entirely. That which counters the tendency toward
social dissolution in humans is what Bergson calls a “virtual instinct” (p. 998/28),
a basic sense of moral obligation that individuals feel towards others. This virtual
instinct dictates no specific behavior; rather, it serves as an unspecified force guiding
intelligence in its social operation. Hence, the moral “ought” has its source in no
rational or transcendent principle, but in the natural evolution of humans as a social
species.
A general sense of obligation towards others ensures social cohesion, but the
extension of that sense is naturally limited, for one of the basic functions of a
society is that of collective self-defense: “Who does not see that social cohesion is
due, in large part, to the necessity for a society to defend itself against others, and
that it is first against all other men that one loves the men with whom one lives?”
(p. 1002/32–3). Although intelligence allows flexibility in the formation of social
structures, it tends to fashion “closed societies,” whose essential characteristic is
“to include at each moment a certain number of individuals, and to exclude others”
2 Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, Edition du Centenaire, ed. André Robinet (Paris, 1959), p.
997, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton
(Garden City, NY, 1954), p. 27. Translations from Bergson are my own. Page references are
to the French text, followed by the corresponding pages in Audra and Brereton’s English
translation.

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 93
(p. 1000/30). Hence, “the social instinct that we have perceived at the foundation of
social obligation always aims – instinct being relatively unchangeable – at a closed
society, however large it may be” (p. 1001/32). A love of all humanity, therefore,
cannot develop directly out of a love of family and city (or nation), for such a
universal love presumes the existence of an “open society,” one whose constitutive
principle would be qualitatively different from that of closed societies.
Closed societies are basically static. They are regulated by habit and custom, by
those timeworn assumptions, practices and institutions that function like instincts,
rendering social life automatic and somnambulistic. Language is a repository of such
habits, customs, and their attendant social obligations, and religion in closed societies
serves to reinforce static patterns of behavior. A central component of religion
in closed societies is “fabulation” (rendered by Bergson’s English translators as
“myth-making”), which Bergson characterizes as the act whereby the “fantasmatic
representations” (p. 1066/108) of spirits, forces and gods are brought forth. Bergson
insists that fabulation is not related to religion as cause to effect – in other words,
that religion is not simply the product of humankind’s heated imagination. Rather,
he sees religion as the “raison d’être of the fabulative function” (p. 1067/108–109),
and both religion and fabulation as means of reinforcing social cohesion in closed
societies.
Fabulation is an action of the intelligence, yet its basic function is to counteract
tendencies that are inherent in intelligence itself. On its own, intelligence does not
necessarily conclude that the individual’s actions should support the common good;
indeed, intelligence often reasons that self-interest should prevail over collective
interests, and hence intelligence tends to undermine social obligations. Intelligence
also establishes cause-and-effect relations, and thereby gives the individual a limited
vision of the future. As a result, intelligence inevitably leads humans to foresee their
own death, which has the unfortunate consequence of inducing despair. Finally,
intelligence brings awareness of the limitations of human powers, for the same
faculty that guides purposive rational action recognizes as well that means do not
always fulfill their ends, that the hunter’s arrow, though intended to kill the deer,
does not always find its mark. Religion counters intelligence’s anti-social tendency,
as well as its tendency to induce despair through its recognition of the individual’s
mortality and powerlessness. Fabulation is an operation of the intelligence that
supports religion’s function. The role of the fabulative function, “which belongs to
intelligence yet nonetheless is not pure intelligence,” is “to elaborate that religion
… which we call static.” Such a religion is “a defensive reaction of nature against
that which might be depressing for the individual, and dissolvent for society, in the
exercise of intelligence” (p. 1150/205).
Static religion instills social obligation through divinely sanctioned actions and
enforced taboos. It counters the despair created through an awareness of one’s death
by inducing belief in immortal spirits, and it checks the depressing recognition of
one’s impotence by positing supernatural intentions in nature that individuals can
attempt to utilize, placate, defer, overcome, and so on. Fabulation goes hand in
hand with religion in creating the myths of forces, spirits and deities that foster
social cohesion and individual contentment (the social and individual functions of
religion, finally, being inseparable and mutually reinforcing, since stable societies

94
Deleuze’s Way
require stable, relatively content individuals [p. 1144/198–9]). The myths created
through fabulation are products of an “intellectual instinct,” in that such myths are
“representations formed naturally by intelligence, in order to protect itself, through
certain beliefs, from certain dangers of knowledge” (p. 1112/162).
Hallucination and Emotion
At this point, we might wonder what Deleuze could find appealing in the concept of
fabulation, if fabulation’s primary function is to produce closed, static societies in
which habit, custom and common sense enforce somnambulistic rounds of repetitive
behavior. A partial response lies in fabulation’s associations with hallucinations and
vertiginous disruptions in experience. Bergson offers two intriguing anecdotes to
delve into the workings of fabulation. The first concerns a woman who approached
her apartment elevator with the intention of descending to the ground floor. Normally,
the outer gate to the elevator shaft would not open if the car had not stopped at that
floor, but the elevator was not functioning properly, and the gate was open even
though the car was stationed on a flight below. As she walked toward the gate,
she suddenly felt herself thrust backward; she confusedly sensed that the elevator
operator had appeared before her and pushed her away. When she emerged from
her startled state, she found that neither guard nor elevator car were there: “She had
been about to throw herself into the void: a miraculous hallucination had saved her
life” (pp. 1076–77/120). Fabulation, says Bergson, is something like the woman’s
hallucination, a protective illusion that saves us from the void of social dissolution
and individual despair.
The second anecdote comes from William James, who tells of his experience
during the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906. James reports that in the
preceding December, as he left Harvard for Stanford, his friend B. had joked that
he hoped James would “get a touch of earthquake” at Stanford so that he might
“also become acquainted with that Californian institution” (p. 1105/154). 3 When
the earthquake struck, James says, “my first consciousness was one of gleeful
recognition of the nature of the movement. ‘By Jove,’ I said to myself, ‘here’s B.’s
old earthquake, after all!’ And then, as it went crescendo, ‘And a jolly good one it
is, too!’ I said” (p. 1105/154). Throughout the earthquake, James felt no fear, only
“glee and admiration” (p. 1106/154). He experienced the earthquake as an individual
entity, “B.’s old earthquake,” and as one that had come directly to him personally:
“Animus and intent were never more present in any human action, nor did any
human activity ever more definitely point back to a living agent as its source and
origin” (p. 1106/155). Bergson argues that James’s response to the earthquake was
a manifestation of the fabulative function, which, far from being present only in a
“primitive mentality,” persists as a basic component of human thought. The shock
of the event induces awe, elation and a spontaneous, natural attribution of intention
and personhood to the earthquake. Yet, Bergson insists, this intentional entity is not
3 Throughout my discussion of James’s anecdote, I cite the English translation of Two
Sources, which directly quotes James’s original text.

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 95
a fully formed personality; rather, “the living agent is here the earthquake itself”
(p. 1107/156), this particular event, no more and no less. It is an individual event,
to which have been added intention and a basic humanness that provide a bond
between the event and the individual experiencing it. In James’s anecdote, we see
fabulation in its barest, simplest form. Intelligence, “impelled by instinct, transforms
the situation. It brings forth the image that reassures. It gives to the Event a unity
and an individuality which make of the event a being that is malicious or perhaps
mischievous, but a being similar to us, with something of the sociable and human
about it” (p. 1109/158).
Bergson observes that when fiction moves us, it is “like a nascent hallucination:
it can counteract judgment and reasoning, which are the properly intellectual
faculties” (p. 1067/109). A fiction, “if its image is vivid and haunting [obsédante],
may precisely imitate perception, and thereby prevent or modify action” (p.
1067/109). The function of fabulation is to support religion in fashioning a closed
society, and thereby overcome those tendencies inherent in intelligence that dissolve
social bonds. Religion’s proper sphere is action (unlike philosophy, whose primary
domain is thought [p. 1148/203]), and the purpose of fabulation is to impel humans
to act in accordance with religious dictates, which themselves come into existence in
order to ensure socially cohesive action. Fabulation thus fulfills its ends by creating
hallucinatory fictions – vivid, haunting images that imitate perception and induce
action, and thereby counteract the operations of judgment and reason.
Fabulation, then, emerges in the shock of an event, a vertiginous moment of
disorientation in which images bypass reason and work directly on the senses to induce
action. All these aspects of fabulation Deleuze takes up in his own appropriation of
the concept. But in his approach to fabulation he also echoes Bergsonian motifs
associated with fabulation’s opposite: creative emotion. Bergson argues that the
traditional concept of imagination can be misleading, for it encourages the attribution
of fabulation and genuine artistic creation to the same faculty, whereas the two stem
from qualitatively different processes. To delve into the nature of true creativity,
Bergson notes first that writers, for example, most often adopt ready-made concepts
and words, which have been supplied by society, combine them perhaps in new
configurations, but largely add nothing new to the stock of language or its expressive
possibilities. Those rare writers who genuinely create, by contrast, work from a
generative, unique emotion that impels the expression of the ineffable, that pushes
the writer “to forge words, to create ideas,” “to do violence to words, to strain the
elements of language,” and if successful, to fashion “a thought capable of taking on
a new aspect for each new generation” (p. 1191/254).
Emotions are involved in both ordinary composition and genuine creation, but they
are of two qualitatively different types, “infra-intellectual” and “supra-intellectual.”
An infra-intellectual emotion is “a consequence of an idea or a represented image” (p.
1011/43); it is a conventionally coded feeling stirred by an independent intellectual
representation. By contrast, a supra-intellectual emotion “is not determined by a
representation which it follows and from which it is distinct”; rather, it is “pregnant
with representations, no one of which is actually formed, but which it draws or might
draw from its substance by an organic development” (p. 1012/43–44). In short,
“alongside the emotion which is the effect of a representation and which is added to

96
Deleuze’s Way
it, there is the emotion which precedes representation, which contains it virtually and
which to a certain point is its cause” (p. 1014/47). Every great artist invents a new
emotion in producing an artwork, and, indeed, a new emotion is “at the origin of the
great creations of art, science and civilization in general” (p. 1011/43).
Each inventive, supra-intellectual emotion ultimately is a manifestation of
élan vital, the force of natura naturans that creates the new. Creative emotion’s
basic principles are joy, liberation and movement, and the great mystics are those
who most fully engage that élan vital. Mystics, Bergson insists, are not passive
and contemplative, but active proponents of a religion and a society qualitatively
different from those associated with fabulation. The great mystics embrace a religion
of universal love among all humanity and all creation, and that love serves as the
basis of an open society that is dynamic and liberating.
There are thus two sources of morality and religion, as Bergson’s title indicates,
one, the “virtual instinct” associated with fabulation that leads to a morality of
obligation and a closed society, the other, the creative emotion of élan vital that
points toward a morality of love and an open society. The first is a means by which
nature overcomes itself, in that the virtual instinct counteracts intelligence’s natural
tendency to engender individual despair and social dissolution. Yet the second is also
a means by which nature overcomes itself, in that creative emotion is a manifestation
of nature’s own creative impulse, which breaks the hold of the virtual instinct and
makes possible a new social and moral order. The fundamental principle of élan vital
is creation, the dynamic inventive becoming of the new, and through mystics that
principle finds expression in the vision of a creative self-formation of human society.
There is no gradual transformation from a closed to an open society, for they stem
from qualitatively different principles. Rather, the possibility of an open society only
emerges as “a leap forward [un bond en avant]” (p. 1038/74), a break from the
closed circle of what seems possible and a disconcerting jump into the apparently
impossible, which, however, brings forth its own possibility in its very movement.
Deleuze, like Bergson, sees artistic invention as a manifestation of a general
process of cosmic creation, and he also views genuine artistic creativity as an
affective activity, “desire” and “desiring production” functioning in Deleuze’s
treatments of the arts as rough counterparts of Bergson’s “creative emotion.” 4
Echoes of Deleuze’s notion of a minor use of language are especially evident in
Bergson’s account of the writer’s effort to do violence to words and strain them in
order to forge new concepts and new modes of sensibility. For Bergson, genuine
creativity leads toward an open, liberating, dynamically ever-becoming society, and
the future collectivity Deleuze hopes to engender might be characterized in the same
terms. Yet Bergson subordinates art to religion, using artistic invention to explain
the process whereby the mystic creatively envisions an open society; and he regards
mystics as rare individuals who foster the formation of an open society by serving
as models for emulation by others. Deleuze, by contrast, has no particular interest in
religion, though he is deeply concerned with art’s social and political function; and
4 The association of artistic creation and cosmic creation is especially evident in A
Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 11: Of the Refrain. For a discussion of this matter, see Chapters
One and Three of my Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (New York, 2003).

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 97
if he is interested in the individual artist, it is primarily as a vehicle for the formation
of a people – that is, an active collectivity that shapes itself and thereby fashions
new modes of social existence. Bergson also separates fabulation from genuine
creation, whereas Deleuze conjoins the two. When Bergson relates the anecdotes of
the woman approaching the elevator shaft and of James experiencing the earthquake,
his primary aim is to show that such moments of disequilibrium reveal, beneath the
veneer of modern rationality, an automatic, virtually instinctual, fabulative function
that is evident in the belief systems of what are often called “primitive” peoples.
For Bergson, the “leap forward” of genuine creation is unrelated to the shock of the
event which induces fabulation. For Deleuze, however, the leap forward is the shock
of the event, and fabulation is part of the genuinely creative process that makes of
the event the occasion for the invention of a people to come.
The People to Come
Although Deleuze mentions fabulation in his early writings on Bergson, he only
makes the concept part of his own work around 1985. In his seminal 1956 article
“The Concept of Difference in Bergson,” he devotes just one sentence to fabulation
(ID 58/41), and in Bergsonism (1966), though he offers a lucid description of
fabulation, it is only as part of a brief account of creative emotion as the means
whereby intuition comes to full awareness of the workings of élan vital (B 111–
19/106–13). Nonetheless, the broad concerns Deleuze later takes up in the concept
of fabulation are of long standing in his thought, dating at least to the inception of
his collaboration with Guattari. Two motifs from Anti-Oedipus (1972) are especially
germane, both of which are initially articulated by Guattari in the 1960s. The first is
the irreducibly social nature of desire, which manifests itself in the desiring subject’s
hallucination of history: “beyond the Ego,” writes Guattari in 1966, “the subject finds
itself exploded to the four corners of the historical universe; the delirious subject [le
délirant] begins to speak foreign languages, it hallucinates history: class conflict,
wars become its instruments of expression” (PT 155/27–8). The second motif is
that of the group-subject, as opposed to the subjected group, a concern voiced by
Guattari as early as 1962 (PT 42) and prominent throughout his activist engagement
with institutional psychiatry. Unlike the subjected group, which receives its identity
from outside, struggles against “any possible inscription of non-sense” (PT 53), and
imposes hierarchical, fixed roles on its members, the group-subject forms itself from
within, keeps itself open to other groups, and offers fluid and shifting roles for its
members.
In Anti-Oedipus, the desiring subject is said to pass through a series of intensive
states and to identify “the names of history with those states: all the names of history
are me” (AO 28/21). All investment of desire, Deleuze and Guattari insist, “is
social, and in every regard concerns a social historical field” (AO 409/342). When
the desiring subject “hallucinates and raves universal history, and proliferates the
races” (AO 101/85), not only does desire reveal its social nature, but it also shows
itself to be inseparable from the formation of a collectivity. “All delirium is racial”
(AO 101/85), in that all desire concerns social groups, either the cursed races, in

98
Deleuze’s Way
Rimbaud’s phrase, “inferior for all eternity” (AO 102/86), or the superior races of
racist fantasy. The delirium of the cursed races is a manifestation of revolutionary,
“schizo” desire, a desire to “become other” and form a new collectivity, whereas the
delirium of the superior races is an expression of paranoid desire, which seeks to
construct and perpetuate social structures of privilege and oppression. Revolutionary
desire fosters the creation of group-subjects, whose internal relational patterns are
shifting and “transverse,” “forever mortal,” “without hierarchy or group super-ego”
(AO 417–18/348–9) whereas paranoid desire permeates the subjected groups of
control and domination.
When Deleuze and Guattari cite Nietzsche’s delirious remark in his letter to
Burckhardt that “every name in history is I,” 5 or when they refer to Schreber’s mad
ramblings about Germans, Aryans, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, Jesuits and Mongols
(AO 106–107/89), they do so to stress both desire’s sociopolitical dimension and
its irreducible non-rationality. The language of psychosis offers them a vocabulary
of affective engagement with the social, yet one that affords a certain lucidity, in
that it provides diagnostic tools for discerning historical and political investments of
collective desire. The phantasmagoric talk of races, superior or accursed, finally is
a means of discussing the primary task of schizoanalytic politics, that of forming an
active, self-determining collective – in short, that of inventing a people.
In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) Deleuze and Guattari directly take
up the topic of “the people” and relate it specifically to the arts. In a diary entry
dated 25 December 1911, Kafka states that in the literature of a small group, such as
that of the Czechs or Yiddish-speaking Jews, “literature is less a concern of literary
history than of the people.” 6 Deleuze and Guattari argue that such is the case of all
“minor literature,” and that one of Kafka’s chief goals as a minor writer is to foster
the invention of a people. The collective consciousness of a minor people, in Kafka’s
words, is “often unrealized in public life and always tending to disintegrate” (vol.
1, p. 193), yet for that very reason literature has an “enunciative function” that is
“collective, and even revolutionary” (K 31/17). And should the writer be “on the
margins or outside of his fragile community, this situation gives him all the more
opportunity to express another potential community, to forge the means for another
consciousness and another sensibility” (K 31–2/17).
In a minor literature, there is no speaking subject, only “collective assemblages
of enunciation,” and a minor literature expresses these assemblages “as diabolic
powers to come or as revolutionary forces to be constructed” (K 33/18). In the
absence of a fully formed and functional community, the artist can only disclose
the lines of potential collective development that are immanent within the present
social field. In Kafka’s case, especially in The Trial, he presents the power relations
of juridical, economic, political, religious and libidinal existence in the Austro-
Hungarian empire, and then sets them in disequilibrium, warping them and mutating
them in order to reveal the “diabolical powers to come” (those manifest later in
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Christopher
Middleton (Chicago, IL, 1969), p. 347.
6 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New
York, 1948), vol. 1, p. 193.

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 99
the bureaucratic regimes of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and capitalist America),
while at the same time suggesting potential developmental lines for positive, fluid
modes of social interaction. In Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, Kafka, the lone
artist, is not the speaking subject of The Trial, nor is the future community somehow
the speaking subject; rather, “the actual [writer] and the virtual community – both
of them real – are pieces of a collective assemblage” (K 150/84). The Trial is a
machine, whose parts include the actual writer and the virtual community, and K in
the novel is the function that brings these parts together. K is the
… general functioning of a polyvocal assemblage of which the solitary individual is one
part, the approaching collectivity another part, another cog – without our knowing yet
what kind of assemblage it is: fascist? revolutionary? socialist? capitalist? or perhaps all at
the same time, connected in the most repugnant or most diabolical fashion? [K 152/85] 7
In A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Deleuze and Guattari reiterate their analysis of
the problem facing the modern artist, noting that in the modern era “never has the
artist had a greater need of the people, while declaring most firmly that the people
is lacking – the people is what is most lacking [le peuple, c’est ce qui manque le
plus]” (MP 427/346). Fabulation, however, only becomes a part of this analysis in
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), when Deleuze examines the “powers of the false
[puissances du faux]” displayed in Pierre Perrault’s cinéma du vécu and in Jean
Rouch’s cinéma vérité. Perrault and Rouch both produce what might be deemed
documentary films, but they do so, not by providing an “objective” recording of
an external reality, but by entering into a collaborative process of invention with
their subjects. 8 In Pour la suite du monde (1963), for example, Perrault proposes
that a group of Québecois islanders revive a long-abandoned communal practice of
erecting a weir barrier in the St. Lawrence River to snare white dolphins, and then he
films the fishermen in this enterprise. As the islanders plan and carry out their tasks,
they share distant memories and ancestral lore of the hunt for the white dolphin,
but they also begin to form a new community. And as they speak of the collective
past, the camera captures them, in Perrault’s words, “in a state of legending,” “of
legending in flagrante delicto [en flagrant délit de légender],” 9 that is, in the process
of fashioning a new communal lore.
This “legending” Deleuze labels “fabulation,” and he sees it as the practice of
a minor people engaged in a process of self-invention. The Québécois islanders are
marginalized within Anglophone Canadian society, but also within official French
culture, as speakers of a non-standard dialect. Though himself Québécois, Perrault
sees that he, like other well-educated Québécois, has been colonized by the images
and discourse of the once-glorious French empire, for he has absorbed and been
7 I discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of Kafka’s minor literature in greater detail
in Chapters Three and Four of Deleuze on Literature (New York, 2003).
8 For a discussion of Deleuze and Rouch’s films, see pp. 150–54 of my Deleuze on
Cinema (New York, 2003).
9 Pierre Perrault, “Cinéma du reel et cinema du fiction: vraie ou fausse distinction?
Dialogue entre Pierre Perrault et René Allio,” in Ecritures de Pierre Perrault: Actes du
colloque “gens de paroles” (Québec, 1983), p. 54.

100
Deleuze’s Way
shaped by the written forms, standard pronunciation, and orthodox values of “correct
French.” As he observes:
The famous Age of Enlightenment never spoke of the people of the 17th century. That
century produced princely images. A princely imaginary. And a writing and a language
were imposed on people who had a language and did not have writing … Each epoch
produces royal images, images that normalize … My soul was conditioned by centuries
of the French Academy. Through writing I became a stranger to my own surroundings.
Superior. [p. 56]
In Pour la suite du monde, he tries to give voice to the popular oral speech of the
Québécois, and to make that speech an integral part of the project of collective selfinvention
which he initiates through the film. In Deleuze’s analysis, Perrault’s effort
is to counter the orthodoxies of Anglophone and high French culture whose truth
“is always that of the masters or the colonizers” through “the fabulative function of
the poor” (IT 196/150). In Perrault’s film, we see “the becoming of the real person
as he sets himself to ‘fictioning,’ when he begins ‘legending in flagrante delicto,’
and thus contributes to the invention of his people.” The real Québécois fisherman
“himself becomes an other, when he sets himself to fabulating without being fictive”
(IT 196/150).
Fabulation challenges the received truths of the dominant social order, and in
this regard it “falsifies,” but it also produces its own truths through its inventions,
and in this sense it manifests the creative “power of the false.” In Perrault’s cinema,
the falsifying power of fabulation is set in motion through a collaborative process
involving the director and his subjects. Perrault insists that by himself he cannot
escape his literate, classical French mentality. When one of his well-educated
interview interlocutors suggests that in Perrault’s films “the peasant that you are
[le paysan que tu es] could always speak,” Perrault counters, “No, because I have
been colonized by the peasant that you are not [le paysan que vous n’êtes pas], by
Le Nôtre [the seventeenth-century architect of the formal gardens of Versailles].
I have learned to read by reading in the books that obeyed the geometry of Le
Nôtre in order to be elected to the Academy of Richelieu” 10 (Perrault 56). He needs
the Québécois islanders to serve as intercessors, for they still have contact with a
living oral tradition. Yet the islanders also have need of Perrault as the initiator of
a communal task that revives group memory and instigates the invention of a new
collectivity: “I do not want to help give birth yet again to myths, but to allow people
to give birth to themselves, to avoid myths, to escape customs, to elude Writings. I
would like people to write themselves while liberating themselves from Writings”
(p. 56). Perrault and the islanders are mutual intercessors, together engaged in the
falsification of received truths and the “legending” of a people to come: “Thus it is
that I am interceded by Alexis, and Grand-Louis and Léopold and Joachim and all of
the Ile-aux-Coudres [the island community of Pour la suite du monde] and little by
little by all of Québec. So that I might know what I am outside writing” (p. 56).
Perrault’s relationship to his subjects might seem peculiar to his own cinematic
undertakings, but Deleuze sees his films simply as particularly clear manifestations
10 Ibid., p. 56.

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 101
of the artist’s proper relationship to the people in all genuine creation. As in The
Trial, the actual artist and the virtual community are parts of a single machine,
and the work of art is the generative conjunction of those forces in their mutual
intercession. Fabulation is the name for the process whereby the artwork initiates the
invention of a people to come, and in the case of Perrault’s films, the lived speech of
the Québécois engaged in “legending” is central to the fabulative process.
Fabulation and Narration
Fabulation, then, is closely associated with fiction, invention and the “power of the
false.” But at a certain point, one must ask, what has fabulation to do with narration?
Fabulation, after all, comes from the Latin fabula, which may be rendered as “talk,”
“conversation,” or “small talk,” but also as “story,” “tale,” “myth,” or “legend.” In
this regard, fabula resembles its Greek counterpart, mythos, which may be translated
as “word,” “speech,” “story,” or “legend.” And the French fable, besides denoting the
literary form of the fable, has as one of its older meanings that of “story,” “fiction,”
“legend,” while La Fable, according to the Robert dictionary, may refer to “the set
of mythological stories as a whole.” Surely, it would seem, fabulation must have
something to do with the creation of fabulae, just as “legending” must bear some
relation to the enunciation of legends.
Curiously, Deleuze says little about narration per se in his remarks on fabulation,
and in this he is a dutiful follower of Bergson. Bergson regards the mythologies of
the world’s religions as products of fabulation, but he says very little about myths
themselves. His accounts of the fabulative function’s basic operation focus on the
invention of the personae of myths and legends – supernatural forces, local spirits,
and fully-formed gods – but he virtually ignores the actions and interactions of
these eternal beings once their origins have been explained, as if the stories of the
gods were merely secondary and insignificant elaborations of their fundamental
being. Such an emphasis seems odd, when one considers that Bergson is above all
a philosopher of time, and narrative takes as its subject the irreducibly temporal
dimension of experience. Bergson’s central concern, however, is not with myth itself
but with religion as a force that shapes closed societies. The stories of the gods are
merely complex means whereby basic social obligations may be enforced, and hence
they are of little significance in themselves.
Yet there also seems to be an anti-narrative bias in Bergson, one that surfaces in
his occasional references to the arts. The art that Bergson appears to appreciate most is
music, and though he speaks well of writers upon occasion, his highest accolades are
reserved for composers. When he first introduces the notion of “supra-intellectual,”
creative emotion in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he comments:
[W]hat is more systematic, more conceptually elaborate, than a Beethoven symphony? But
throughout his long labor of arrangement, rearrangement and choice of material, which
he was pursuing on the intellectual plane, the composer was ascending back to a point
situated outside the plane, there to seek acceptance or refusal, direction, inspiration: in this
point resided an indivisible emotion that no doubt aided intelligence in unfolding itself in
music, but which was itself more than music and more than intelligence. [p. 1190/252]

102
Deleuze’s Way
Bergson does attribute a similar creative process to the writer, yet he seems to regard
the efforts of genuinely creative writers as in some regards antithetical to their
medium, for narrative has a natural affinity with fabulation and closed societies.
Indeed, language itself bears such an affinity, since “the soul of society is immanent
in the language it speaks” (p. 987/15), and the social obligations of closed societies,
which are everywhere the first forms of human society, permeate the languages of
the world.
As Deleuze astutely remarks in Bergsonism:
[A]rt, according to Bergson, itself has two sources. There is a fabulative art [un art
fabulateur], sometimes collective, sometimes individual … And there is an emotive or
creative art … Perhaps every art presents these two aspects, but in variable proportion.
Bergson does not hide the fact that the fabulation aspect seems to him to be inferior in art;
the novel would above all be fabulation, music, on the contrary, emotion and creation. [B
117/134–5]
If narrative is a temporal art, so too is music, and music has the advantage of being
a directly emotive art, beyond words and all the restrictive habits, conventions,
assumptions and prejudices that haunt natural languages. Perhaps, then, Bergson’s
inattention to narrative simply reflects his low regard for fabulation in general and
his sense of genuine art as an essentially supra-linguistic enterprise.
A similar disregard for narrative can be found in Deleuze as well, despite the
fact that he wrote three books on novelists. True, in Proust and Signs (1964),
Deleuze does make reference to various episodes in the plot of the Recherche, but
the story Deleuze unfolds in Proust is that of Marcel’s apprenticeship in signs, which
eventuates in a philosophical understanding of essences that transcends the sequence
of events leading to that understanding. Marcel’s final discovery of “time regained”
sets him free from chronological time, which is the time of conventional narrative,
and Deleuze’s interest is in the emergence of that redeemed time and the atemporal
vision it afford of the world. In Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967), Deleuze’s
extended preface to Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Deleuze argues that Sacher-
Masoch’s fantasies are essentially static and that his fiction consists of a sequence
of frozen tableaus. Again, as in his analysis of Proust, Deleuze makes reference to
diverse plot details in Sacher-Masoch, but he pays little attention to the narratives
of the novels themselves, regarding them as mere devices for linking timeless
masochistic tableaus (see Chapter 7). In Kafka, finally, he and Guattari discuss a
number of Kafka’s short stories, but primarily as illustrations of concepts, such as the
“schizo-incest” revealed in “The Metamorphosis,” or the “becoming-animal” evident
in “Report to an Academy.” Deleuze and Guattari see Kafka’s unfinished novels as
the fulfillment of his project, the novels’ supposedly defective plots actually being
central aspects of their functioning as open-ended, perpetually moving machines.
Perhaps most telling in this regard is Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that The Trial
does not really have an ending – that the execution of K is actually a dream sequence,
and that the novel has a loose, paratactic structure that allows an endless wandering
from episode to episode. Once again, narrative itself seems a minor consideration.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, an opposition to traditional narrative
recurs as an important theme in Deleuze’s work. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 103
Sensation (1981), Deleuze seizes on Bacon’s disdain for narrative “illustration”
in painting, arguing that Bacon’s fundamental object is to free images from their
conventional associations with their attendant stories and make visible “the brutality
of fact” (see FB 9–10/6–7). In his two-volume study of cinema, Deleuze challenges
narrative-based theories of film, giving priority instead to different conceptions of
time. Film directors in his view are not master story-tellers so much as they are
sculptors of time-space. Narratives are the secondary products of structures of
time, the conventional narratives of classic film emerging from movement-images
regulated by the sensory-motor schema, the fragmented and confusing narratives
of modern film serving as indexes of non-chronological time that has been freed
of the sensory-motor schema’s regulation (see especially IT 38–40/25–7). And in
his 1992 study of Beckett’s television plays, “The Exhausted,” Deleuze shows how
Beckett grows impatient with words and attempts to silence his characters’ voices
and their interminable stories. Beckett’s effort, explains Deleuze, is to bore holes in
words and extract a non-linguistic “something” beneath or between the words, and
his problem “is not that words are liars; rather, they are so laden with calculations
and significations, and also with intentions and personal memories, with old habits
that cement them together, that scarcely has their surface been broached when it
closes over again” (E 103/CC 173). Each of Beckett’s characters reveals a “possible
world,” an “Other,” and “the Others – that is, the possible worlds, with their objects,
with their voices that bestow on them the only reality to which they can lay claim
– constitute ‘stories’” (E 67/CC 157), and it is the incessant babble of such stories
that Beckett tries to bring to an end in his television plays. 11
In Deleuze’s analysis, Beckett’s goal is to produce “pure images,” images stripped
of all of their associations with human intentions, calculations, intentions, memories
and stories, and it is the visual image finally that Deleuze himself privileges in
his approach to the arts and his conceptualization of fabulation. In the late essay
“Literature and Life” (in Critique et clinique, 1993), Deleuze states that literature
always engages “becomings” and “powers [puissances],” metamorphic processes
of becoming-other, and that such becomings and powers have nothing to do with
the authors’ or the characters’ personal emotions, memories, dreams, or fantasies.
Literary characters may be individuated, “but all their individual traits elevate them
to a vision that carries them into an indefinite, like a becoming too powerful for
them: Ahab and the vision of Moby Dick.” There is no literature without fabulation,
Deleuze adds, “but, as Bergson saw, fabulation, the fabulative function, consists
neither in imagining nor projecting a self [un moi]. Rather, it attains to these visions,
it rises to these becomings and powers” (CC 13/3).
In another late essay, devoted to T.E. Lawrence, Deleuze remarks on the reputed
“mythomania” of Lawrence of Arabia in his portrayal of himself and his band of
Arab guerillas, arguing that Lawrence’s effort is not to aggrandize himself and his
comrades but “to project into things, into reality, into the future and even into the
sky, an image of himself and of others intense enough that it lives its own life … It
11 For more on Beckett’s television plays and his attitude toward language, see my
Deleuze on Literature, pp. 176–86, and Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (Albany,
NY, 2004), pp. 127–42.

104
Deleuze’s Way
is a machine for fabricating giants, what Bergson called a fabulative function” (CC
147/118). In a note to this passage, Deleuze refers the reader to Genet’s analysis in
Prisoner of Love (1986) of the Palestinian fighters’ heroic postures and poses, which
Genet regards as efforts to create an image of oneself that is separate from the self
and that one projects into the future. Mythomania, says Genet, is merely the name
for an unsuccessfully projected image, which should “live its own life” and allow
the individual “to become legendary [fabuleux],” “to become an eponymous hero,
projected into the world.” 12
Deleuze here is clearly taking up Bergson’s association of fabulation with
hallucination. Bergson, we recall, says that a fiction, “if its image is vivid and
haunting [obsédante], may precisely imitate perception, and thereby prevent or
modify action” (p. 1067/109). Fabulation for Bergson has the power of forcing
its images on reality and countering the operations of reason and intelligence, but
only in the service of a restrictive morality and a closed society. For Deleuze, the
fabulative function is the function proper to art, which projects into the world images
so intense that they take on a life of their own. For this reason Deleuze describes
great cinema directors as “voyants,” “seers,” “clairvoyants” (DRF 200/217). For the
same reason he says that one of literature’s chief ends is to push language “toward an
outside or a reverse side consisting of Visions and Auditions” (CC 16/5), “Visions”
and “Auditions” here denoting hallucinatory images and sounds that haunt language
and manage somehow to force themselves onto the world.
Fabulation, then, is a hallucinatory power that creates “visions and auditions,”
“becomings,” “powers,” “giants.” If it is a myth-making power, it is one that creates
a mythology not of stories but of images – images of the becoming-other of the
collectivity as it fashions itself by falsifying received truths and fabricating new
ones. And if there is a relationship between Deleuzian fabulation and narration, it
is that of the disruption of conventional narratives and the disclosure of the time of
the event.
In a brief reflection on May 1968, co-written with Guattari in 1984, Deleuze
observes that in every social revolution “there is always something of the event,
irreducible to social determinisms, to causal series.” Historians study causal relations,
“but the event is out of sync or in rupture with causalities: it is a bifurcation, a
deviation in relation to laws, an unstable state that opens a new field of possibilities.”
May 1968 was such an event, and most importantly, “it was a phenomenon of
voyance [‘seeing,’ ‘clairvoyance’], as if a society suddenly saw what was intolerable
and also saw the possibility of something else” (DRF 215–16/234). The time of the
event is, in Nietzsche’s terminology, “untimely – that is to say, acting counter to
our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to
come.” 13 It is a time set free from the narrative causality of history and undetermined
in its relation to the future.
This association of seeing, the intolerable, and the disruptive event is especially
evident in Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. In a 1986 interview, while reflecting on
12 Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux (Paris, 1986), p. 354 (translation mine).
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1997), p. 60.

Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come 105
the thought of his recently deceased friend, Deleuze comments that Foucault “was
an extraordinary seer/clairvoyant [voyant],” with “a power of seeing equal to his
power of writing.” Deleuze explains that when one sees something “and sees it
very profoundly, what one sees is intolerable.” Part of Foucault’s genius was his
ability to see the intolerable, and in his works we discover “thought as vision, as the
seizure of the intolerable” (DRF 256–7/274–5). In a 1988 interview, Deleuze notes
further that Foucault was a writer of histories, but above all a philosopher who “used
history for something else: as Nietzsche said, to act against the times, and hence
on time, in favor, I hope, of a time to come” (DRF 323/346). Foucault’s attempt
was to make possible something new, and to do so by separating us from the causal
determinations of the past. “The new,” says Deleuze, “is the actual [l’actuel bearing
both the meaning of ‘that which is real’ and ‘that which is contemporary, of the
present moment’]. The actual is not what we are, but what we are becoming, what we
are in the process of becoming, that is, the Other, our becoming.” In any situation, it
is essential to distinguish “what we are (what we no longer are), and what we are in
the process of becoming: the part of history, and the part of the actual. History is the
archive, the design of that which we are and are ceasing to be, whereas the actual is
the rough sketch of what we are becoming” (DRF 322–3/345).
To see deeply is to see the intolerable, that is, to engage in a critique of the
received truths and realities of the present. A moment of hallucinatory, clairvoyant
vision is one in which the intolerable becomes suddenly visible, but one also that
makes visible new possibilities unencumbered by the past. The hold of history, of the
forces that have shaped our present, is broken, and the actual of what we are becoming
surges forth. History, story, narrative continuity, yield to the event, a disruption
in causality, a gap in the orderly and regular sequence of world occurrences. The
event is like James’s earthquake, or the woman’s vertiginous moment at the brink
of the elevator shaft, a breach in ordinary experience that instigates unexpected,
hallucinatory images. Fabulation, we might say, is one with the event, fabulation’s
visions emerging within the event, and those visions themselves constituting
events. Fabulation creates visions that falsify received truths by rendering visible
the intolerable, thereby critiquing the present, while those same visions loom like
giant mythic figures of yet to be explored possibilities. The visions of fabulation
break historical continuities and disrupt conventional narratives. They are untimely
visions, becomings and powers that are dynamic but unspecified in their narrative
possibilities, and hence temporal forces that may generate stories, but not themselves
properly narrative elements.
The Two Sources of Fabulation
Bergson’s fabulation has its source in the virtual instinct that creates moral obligation
and enforces the cohesion of a closed society. Intelligence naturally and inevitably
tends to dissolve social bonds, as it pursues self-centered lines of reasoning, while
engendering individual despair, as it deduces the facts of the individual’s mortality
and limited powers. Fabulation is a function of the intelligence that counters these
tendencies by creating images that imitate perception and stimulate action, those

106
Deleuze’s Way
images assuming the form of the various forces, spirits and gods that populate
the mythologies and sacred writings of the world’s religions. The spontaneous
fashioning of such hallucinatory images is revealed in moments of disorientation
or sudden danger, such as James’s earthquake or the woman’s near-mishap with the
elevator shaft. But the jolt that stimulates fabulation differs from the leap forward
that accompanies genuine invention, for the fabulative function is qualitatively
distinct from the creative function that inspires every advance into the new, whether
that advance be in the arts, the sciences, politics, or religion. The creative emotion
from which the new issues forth is a manifestation of nature’s élan vital, which is
simply the name for the natural world’s dynamic, open-ended process of inventive
becoming. The qualitative break evident in human creativity’s leap forward is but
a specialized instance of the general cosmic discontinuity that accompanies any
genuine advance into the new.
Deleuze’s fabulation has its source in the event, which is both a disorienting shock
and a leap toward the future. His fabulation resembles Bergson’s creative emotion
in its internally generative unfolding of new possibilities, but it shares Bergsonian
fabulation’s characteristics of giving rise to hallucinatory images that short-circuit
the operations of common sense. Bergsonian fabulation has the political function
of perpetuating a closed, static society, whereas Deleuzian fabulation promotes the
invention of a people and the formation of new modes of social interaction. Deleuzian
fabulation thus fulfills a function that is part of the general politics articulated in
Anti-Oedipus, a politics in which the desiring subject hallucinates history, and the
subject’s desiring-production in its positive function contributes to the formation
of a group-subject, a self-determining, fluid and open collectivity. Fabulation is
also central to the function of art outlined in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, the
artist’s desiring-production conjoining the actual artist and the virtual community
in a collective assemblage of enunciation that aims at the invention of a people to
come. Fabulation engages the powers of the false, falsifying received truths and
fashioning new truths by “legending.” The artist and the emergent community
serve as mutual intercessors, each aiding the other in a process of metamorphic
departure from received categories and simultaneous approach toward only partially
specified possibilities. Fabulation’s political dimension is explicit in images such as
those Lawrence offers of himself and his guerilla band, but the political aspect of
art is present in every projected image that takes on a life of its own. The goal of
fabulation is to break the continuities of received stories and deterministic histories,
and at the same time to fashion images that are free of the entangling associations of
conventional narratives and open to unspecified elaboration in the construction of a
new mode of collective agency.
“Utopia is not a good concept” (PP 235/174), says Deleuze, for it is too fixed,
too programmatic. Better is the notion of “a ‘fabulation’ common to the people and
to art” (PP 235/174). It is in developing this concept that Deleuze may be said to
“take up again the Bergsonian notion of fabulation and give it a political sense” (PP
235/174).

Chapter 7
Re-Viewing Deleuze’s Sacher-Masoch
In his last book, Critique et clinique, published two years before his death in 1995,
Deleuze seemed at long last to have fulfilled the promise he had made many years
earlier of writing a book on literature, one that would pursue the relationship between
critique in its literary sense and clinique in its medical sense. 1 His object, he had
indicated, would be to examine symptomatology as the area common to the literary
and medical enterprises, the writer serving as a symptomatologist of civilization, the
physician as the artist-analyst disassembling syndromes (or erroneous concatenations
of symptoms) and reassembling them in veridical associations. 2 By 1993, the medical
component of the project seemed to have gone by the wayside, for when he initially
conceived of the project in 1967, Deleuze was intensely interested in the medical
areas of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but after Anti-Oedipus in 1972, he largely
abandoned those areas of investigation. Instead, he concentrated simply on the
notions of the artist as healer and literature as a means of promoting life and health.
It appears that Deleuze conceived of the 1993 Critique et clinique both as a
formulation of his mature theory of literature and as an overview of his previous
literary analyses, for in addition to the studies of Melville, Whitman, D.H. Lawrence
and T.E. Lawrence, authors with whom he had not previously dealt in detail, the
volume includes a brief analysis of Lewis Carroll, whom Deleuze had discussed at
length in The Logic of Sense (1969), and a short essay on Leopold Sacher-Masoch,
the subject of Deleuze’s 1967 book Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Unfortunately,
Deleuze was in poor health during the last decade of his life, and it appears that he
did not have the physical strength to complete the design of the book as he might
have intended. Several of the essays in the collection are revised versions of studies
published earlier, and some of them – the essays on Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche and
Plato, for example – are literary only in a very broad sense, suggesting that the
planned systematic analysis of literature had to give way to a more casually assembled
collection of essays. A number of the selections are quite short – the essay on Carroll
1 In a 1988 interview, when asked about his views on literature, Deleuze responded, “I
have dreamed of a group of studies under the general title ‘Critique et clinique’” (PP 195/142).
The idea for such a book, however, seems to date at least to 1967, when in an interview
Deleuze mentions several writers in the context of critique and clinique and remarks, “What
I would like to study (and that book [Présentation de Sacher-Masoch] would be only a first
example) is an articulable relation between literature and clinical psychiatry” (ID 184/133).
2 “Masoch is a great symptomatologist. In Proust, it is not memory he is exploring,
but all sorts of signs, whose nature must be discovered according to their milieus, mode of
emission, matter, regime. The Recherche is a general semiology, a symptomatology of worlds.
The work of Kafka is the diagnostic of all the diabolical powers that await us. Nietzsche said
it best, the artist and the philosopher are the physicians of civilization” (PP 195/142–3).

108
Deleuze’s Way
is only two pages long, the study of Sacher-Masoch, titled “Re-presentation of
Sacher-Masoch,” runs about three pages – which in my view indicates not so much a
sudden proclivity for aphoristic expression in Deleuze as a limited supply of physical
energy that had to be carefully marshaled and selectively applied. Yet in Critique et
clinique there are hints of the book Deleuze might have wanted to write, and they
show up in an intriguing way in his essay on Sacher-Masoch.
In the collection’s opening essay, “Literature and Life,” Deleuze formulates a
conception of literature that brings together ideas that had occupied him at various
points during his career. Literature is a mode of non-organic life that promotes a
kind of incorporeal health, he argues, and it has four basic components: becomings,
stutterings, the invention of peoples, and the creation of visions and auditions. The
notion of literature as health one finds as early as Deleuze’s 1962 study of Nietzsche;
the concept of stuttering in one’s own language is evident in his 1964 book on Proust;
becomings and the invention of peoples are motifs associated with the concept of
“minor literature,” which Deleuze and Guattari developed in Kafka (1975) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1980); and the idea of visions and auditions seems to have been
one of the last notions Deleuze was working on before his death.
Deleuze’s “Re-presentation of Sacher-Masoch” basically provides a selective
rereading of his earlier book on Sacher-Masoch in terms of the four components
outlined in “Literature and Life.” After cautioning that Sacher-Masoch is not a
neurotic but a symptomatologist of civilization’s ills, and noting that Sacher-
Masoch’s diagnosis is focused on the concept of “waiting or suspense as plenitude”
(CC 71/53–4), Deleuze comments that Sacher-Masoch’s fascination with fur and the
figure of the suffering animal – horse, bull and bear, most often – is part of a general
becoming-animal that permeates his work. This motif, only recognized in passing
in his 1967 book, is now treated as a central feature of Sacher-Masoch’s fiction, part
of a general process of becoming-other, or undoing social codes and practices, that
Deleuze sees as a chief goal of literature as health. Deleuze then emphasizes the
historical dimension of Sacher-Masoch’s novels and tales, especially the portrayal of
the lives of minorities of the Austro-Hungarian empire – Gypsies, Jews and various
Slavic groups – and what was only a virtual footnote in 1967 is now taken to be a
major feature of Sacher-Masoch’s project, an effort to engage the struggles of minor
peoples and thereby invent a future “people to come,” a revolutionary collectivity
capable of opening up new possibilities for life. Sacher-Masoch’s style, only alluded
to in a few very general remarks in 1967, is in 1993 stressed as one of the key elements
of his fiction. Sacher-Masoch invents a means of stuttering in his own language,
says Deleuze, a way of making German stammer and hesitate, “as if language were
becoming animal” (CC 73/55). Finally, Deleuze asserts that in Sacher-Masoch’s
stylistic inventions “it is language as a whole that is carried to its limit: music or
silence” (CC 74/55) – a clear invocation of the notion of “auditions,” which Deleuze
pairs with “visions” as the elements that constitute the limit of language. That limit,
Deleuze says in the introduction to Critique et clinique, “is not outside language, it
is language’s outside: the limit is made of non-linguistic visions and auditions, but
which language alone makes possible” (CC 9/lv).
It is curious that Deleuze alludes only to auditions in “Re-presentation of Sacher-
Masoch,” given the stress Deleuze elsewhere places on visions when developing this

Re-Viewing Deleuze’s Sacher-Masoch 109
obscure concept of “visions and auditions.” There is “a painting and a music proper
to writing,” Deleuze comments, “as effects of colors and sonorities that rise above
the words. It is across the words, between the words, that one sees and that one hears
… Of each writer one must say: here’s a seer, a hearer, ‘ill seen ill said,’ a colorist, a
musician” (CC 9/lv). Yet, though the writer may be both a colorist and a musician at
the moment that language is pushed to its limit, in Critique et clinique when Deleuze
offers specific examples of such effects in words, invariably they are visual rather
than sonic, as in his brilliant essay on T.E. Lawrence (CC 144–57/115–25). In the
case of Sacher-Masoch, it would have been quite simple for Deleuze to have cited
instances of visions at the limit of language, for they abound in the Sacher-Masoch
Deleuze presents in his 1967 book. Indeed, of all of the features of literature stressed
in Critique et clinique, this alone is pervasive in Deleuze’s earlier study, albeit in a
form that is not explicitly articulated as such.
Deleuze’s goal in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch is to dissolve the false
syndrome of sadomasochism and argue that Sade and Sacher-Masoch are each
symptomatologists disclosing a separate “universe” (SM 11/13), a separate “world”
or “Umwelt” (SM 37/37). Sade seeks a rational delirium of pure negation. Following
Kossowski’s analysis, Deleuze distinguishes two natures in Sade: a secondary nature
of destruction and creation, in which birth, metamorphosis and death are confusedly
mixed together; and a primary nature of pure negation, an “original delirium, a
primordial chaos made solely of furious and lacerating molecules” (SM 25/25). 3
That primary nature is never given in reality; it is an Idea, delirious to be sure, but “a
delirium proper to reason” (SM 25/25). Sade’s goal is to create a world of primary
nature, in which a cruel order is imposed with the implacable rationality of a violent
logical demonstration. The mother as procreator is associated with secondary nature,
the father with primary nature – hence the central phantasy of the “father, destroyer
of his own family, impelling the daughter to torture and murder the mother” (SM 52–
3/52). Sacher-Masoch, by contrast, seeks an imaginary disavowal of reality. Deleuze
finds two natures in Sacher-Masoch as well, but incommensurable with those in
Sade. Sacher-Masoch’s secondary nature is a cruel, sensual world of perpetual war
between the sexes, represented by the female figures of the ritual prostitute and the
sadistic torturer. His primary nature is revealed in the figure of the oral mother, who
is “cold, maternal, severe” (SML 45/45). Sacher-Masoch’s dream is of a nature free
of the heat of sensuality, filled with a cool, suprasensual sentimentality and a strict,
cathartic order that purifies and makes possible the miraculous parthenogenesis of a
new man. If the father dominates in Sade, the mother rules in Sacher-Masoch. In the
masochistic phantasy, it is the image of the father that the mother beats, humiliates
and destroys when she disciplines the son, thereby enabling a reconciliation of man
and woman in the triumphant moment when the son is reborn as a transformed being
and united with the mother. Unlike Sadean apathy, which proceeds from a delirious
rational negation, Sacher-Masoch’s coldness reflects the imagination’s disavowal of
reality – a simultaneous denial and acceptance of the real, an imaginary “suspension”
3 Klossowski’s primary text on Sade, and Deleuze’s source for this analysis, is Sade,
mon prochain (Paris, 1947).

110
Deleuze’s Way
of the disorderly violence of secondary nature that neutralizes the real and allows the
unfolding of a new, ideal world of primary nature. 4
The sadist and the masochist stage and perform their own dramas, each “sufficient
and complete drama, with different characters, with nothing that can make them
communicate with one another, neither from the inside nor from the outside” (SM
40/40). What is striking, however, is how little drama there is in these perversions,
how little action in these theaters. Deleuze contrasts Sadean movement and Masochian
stasis, arguing that in Sade sensuality is movement and the staging of sensuality entails
“a quantitative process of accumulation and acceleration,” a “reiteration of scenes,
multiplication in each scene, precipitation, overdetermination (at once, ‘I committed
parricide, I committed incest, I killed, I prostituted, I sodomized’)” (SM 62/62).
By contrast, in Sacher-Masoch sensuality is suspended and phantasy scenes tend to
resemble frozen tableaus, paintings, groupings of statues, photographs. Yet even in
Sade, the scenes of desire incorporate only a minimal development or change. They
consist of simple actions – I killed, I prostituted, I sodomized – each of which might
be represented in a single film clip, or even a paradigmatic photograph, the Sadean
movement consisting of an insistent repetition of these micro-units of perversion.
The erasure of dramatic action, or genuine development and transformation, is even
more evident in Sacher-Masoch. In masochism, the real is disavowed, “suspended”
in every way. Not only are individuals literally hanged, crucified, trussed and tied,
but they are also subjected to a complex time of suspense and waiting, in which two
temporal streams coexist, one promising an awaited pleasure, the other holding forth
an expected punishment, both maintained in a perpetual state of suspension. The
female objects of desire are likened to marble statues, the scenes of punishment to
paintings. Everywhere there is an assimilation of the vibrant human world within the
cold, still world of the plastic arts.
To be sure, a certain amount of action persists in Sacher-Masoch’s world, but like
that of Sade’s, it is minimal. Here is what Deleuze says would be the ideal masochistic
phantasy: “a woman in shorts is on a stationary bicycle, pedaling vigorously; the
subject is lying down under the bicycle, almost brushed by the vertiginous pedals,
his palms pressed to her calves. All the determinations are united here, from the
fetishism of the calf to the double waiting incarnated by the movement of the pedals
and the immobility of the bicycle” (SM 64/63). What we have is a scene of perpetual
movement, but one that goes nowhere, a staging of a situation rather than an unfolding
of actions that result from decisions, consequences, counteractions, external events,
and so on. Deleuze argues that the contract is central to masochism, and in this
element, too, stasis is emphasized. The contract drawn up between the masochist and
his dominatrix specifies a fixed relationship, a set of unchanging roles and rules for
4 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, 1973), define disavowal as “a mode of defence which
consists in the subject’s refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception – most
especially the perception of the absence of the woman’s penis” (p. 118). They also note that
in Freud’s study of fetishism, Freud “shows how the fetishist perpetuates an infantile attitude
by holding two incompatible positions at the same time: he simultaneously disavows and
acknowledges the fact of feminine castration” (p. 119).

Re-Viewing Deleuze’s Sacher-Masoch 111
the execution of action-units that are to be staged repeatedly and without essential
variation. Deleuze points out that Sacher-Masoch has a predilection for ritual as
well as drama, and that in the staging of rites in his fiction there is a passage from
the individual contractual relationship of phantasy to the collective dimension of
myth. And here, too, stasis prevails. In Sacher-Masoch we find various “hunting
rites, agricultural rites, rites of regeneration, of second birth” (SM 82/81), but they
all tend to culminate in tableaus, as at the end of Venus in Furs, when Wanda has
the narrator yoked to a cart and whipped by her black female attendants as she, in
Sacher-Masoch’s words, “contemplates the scene” (cited in SM 83/82).
Deleuze concludes his book on Sacher-Masoch by remarking that “masochism
is a story [une histoire]” (SM 111/112), and that sadism “is itself also a story,”
but “precisely, it’s an entirely different story [c’est une tout autre histoire]” (SM
112/113). Yet in neither case is it much of a story. The sadist’s fundamental phantasy
is that of the father forcing his daughter to murder the mother. The masochist’s is that
of the mother ritually destroying the father by beating the son, with the result that
the son is transformed and made a new, suprasensual man at one with the mother.
In both cases, the action may be reduced to a single scene. Deleuze sees a kind
of dialectic at work in Sacher-Masoch, a mythic process whereby the antithetical
figures of the ritual prostitute and sadistic dominatrix are sublimated within the
figure of the oral mother, yet the stress in this dialectic is not on any developmental
movement from one pole to its antithesis and beyond to a synthesis, but instead on
a single, momentary Aufhebung in which the oral mother transforms the son. The
three female figures constitute “a symbolic order” in which the father is suppressed
“for all time,” says Deleuze, and the masochist needs myth “to express this eternity
of time: everything is already acted out, everything takes place between the images
of the mother” (SM 56/55). The time of myth, in short, is a relatively timeless time,
an already acted out event ever re-enacted anew. And ultimately, the time of myth is
one with the time of phantasy, which Deleuze views as masochism’s central object.
Freudian psychoanalysts define the phantasy as an “imaginary scene in which the
subject is a protagonist,” 5 and Freud’s paradigmatic phantasy scene, “a child is being
beaten,” is like the phantasy scenes of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, a truncated action
that may be reduced to a virtually frozen tableau. Thus, when Deleuze remarks that
the masochist’s mythic rite “represents the element in which reality is rendered
phantasmatic” (SM 82/81), he is pointing out that Sacher-Masoch’s assimilation of
personal contractual scenes of desire within collective mythic rites is a means of
extending the relatively static time of phantasy from an individual or local sphere to
the universal domain of the real.
The logic of Deleuze’s Présentation de Sacher-Masoch is that Sacher-Masoch’s
predilection for visual tableaus and suspended time derives from his particular
libidinal universe and his fondness for the imaginary disavowal of phantasy. Yet the
same tendency toward stasis is evident in Sade – despite Deleuze’s contention that
in sadism movement is primary and rational delirium rather than phantasy produces
such movement – and Sade’s stagings of desire tend to resemble visual tableaus,
even though Deleuze claims that Sade is Sacher-Masoch’s antithesis in his hatred
5 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 314 (emphasis added).

112
Deleuze’s Way
of the plastic arts. What is evident, I believe, is that throughout his work Deleuze
holds an anti-narrative conception of the arts and shows an abiding sensitivity to
visual experience, and what attracts him to Sade and Sacher-Masoch in the first place
is their common strategy of subverting narrative continuities through a virtually
hallucinatory repetition of visual scenes, Sade’s consisting of a rapid succession
of accelerating crimes, Sacher-Masoch’s of a prolonged sequence of suspended
punishments. Deleuze consistently identifies conventional narratives with coercive
practices and codes of power, and he sees in modernist disruptions of narrative
expectations a means of inventing new possibilities for life. Thus, for Deleuze, the
paradigmatic modern painter is Francis Bacon, whose obsession is to escape narrative
“illustration” and render visible “the brutality of fact.” And in his books on cinema,
the modern films Deleuze champions break with the “sensory-motor schema” of
commonsense time and space and create direct “time-ages” that defy subsumption
within the conventions of standard narratives. When, in Critique et clinique, Deleuze
praises the great writers who produce “visions and auditions” at the limit of language,
he does so because they make language and its concomitant codes stammer. They
undo linguistic regularities and the narrative continuities imbedded within language,
thereby creating hallucinatory images and sounds that seem to float above the words,
like a visual and sonic aura emanating from the surface of language. In Présentation
de Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze stresses the affinity between masochistic suspension and
the stasis of the plastic arts, but what counts finally is less the suspension and stasis
of Sacher-Masoch’s phantasies than the sensual intensity and temporal dislocation of
his tableaus. The visions of Sacher-Masoch and Sade are affective emanations at the
limits of language, and their purpose is not to freeze time, but to unhinge it.
When Deleuze re-presents Sacher-Masoch, he emphasizes features in Sacher-
Masoch he had earlier noted only in passing. Sacher-Masoch’s visions he does not
mention at all. Yet perhaps those visions are in no need of being re-presented, for
they are the central, if unstated, objects of Deleuze’s original analysis, and possibly
important sources for the development of the concept of “visions” itself. What is
needed, it may be, is not to re-present but simply to re-view Sacher-Masoch, to see
what was there all along.

Chapter 8
Apology for Nomadology
Over the last twenty years, the notion of the “nomadic,” as developed by Deleuze
and Guattari in their “Treatise on Nomadology” (Plateau 12 of A Thousand Plateaus
[1980]), has been emerging as the concept of choice for theorists of various stripes,
with increasing numbers of books, articles and special issues devoted to the topic. As
early as 1993, Christopher Miller noted this tendency and lamented the spread of this
ill-defined term, and since then, others have echoed his complaints. In his critique of
nomadology, Miller faults Deleuze and Guattari for ignoring the realities of actual
nomadic peoples in developing their concept, arguing that by selectively adopting
elements from scattered anthropological sources they romanticize nomads and
inadvertently repeat the process of colonial subjugation of the native they otherwise
so clearly oppose. Miller bridles especially at the claim that Deleuze and Guattari’s
“nomadic thought” offers a radical alternative to conventional philosophical
approaches, deeming such an assertion unwarranted, arrogant and unhelpful. Miller’s
impatience with the inflated claims of some proponents of “nomadic thought” is
understandable, as is his objection to Deleuze and Guattari’s apparent disregard for
the complexities of nomadic populations. These concerns deserve consideration. 1
Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadism at first glance is what some would call a
“bastard concept,” one that sits astride standard categories and confuses seemingly
distinct classifications. In the broadest sense, Deleuze and Guattari apparently take
the “nomadic” to be that which is unfixed, wandering, peripatetic, set adrift, and
in this regard, their social model appears to be that of all individuals, groups and
societies without fixed abode who are in a relatively constant state of movement.
But several of the descriptive characteristics of the nomadic seem to be derived
from particular cultural instances. The notion of the War Machine as a manifestation
of the nomadic seems to have its origin in the Mongol hordes, whose prowess as
mounted warriors culminated in the formation of the great empire of Genghis Khan
in the thirteenth century. The concept of the “numbering number” (MP 484–6/389–
90) also has its basis in Mongol culture, though Deleuze and Guattari note that this
assignment of warriors into tens, hundreds and thousands, etc. has a biblical parallel
in the Aaronic organization of troops that some researchers tie to the Hyksos nomads
who may have traversed Central Asia to the Middle East in ancient times (MP 148,
154/118, 122). The opposition of the nomadic War Machine and the sedentary State
apparatus appears to have as its clearest exemplification the antagonism of Bedouins
and city inhabitants, so dramatically demarcated by Ibn Khaldun (1332–1408) in
the Muqaddimah (MP 453/366). The association of the warrior and nomadism
obviously is consonant with the bellicose traditions of the Mongols and Bedouins,
1 See Chapter 10 for a detailed response to Miller’s critique.

114
Deleuze’s Way
but Deleuze and Guattari also make reference to warriors and warrior groups in
African and South American sedentary and hunter-gatherer societies, as well as
to the fundamental opposition of warrior and king in Indo-European mythology
exhaustively detailed by Georges Dumézil (MP 434–6/351–3). The notion of a
“nomadic distribution” of elements, which Deleuze first treats in Difference and
Repetition (1968), has as its model the sheep and goat pastoral nomads whose flocks
occupy a territory to the extent of their capability (puissance), flowing over the land
in a free-form, amorphous flux rather than demarcating the land according to fixed
boundaries (DR 53–4/36–7). The “band,” “pack,” or “gang” organization of nomadic
multiplicities, in which individuals are neither discrete units of a mass aggregate nor
regular components of a stratified social structure, but instead “dividual” elements
in an unstable collective distribution of varying group identity, is exemplified by the
streets gangs of Bogotá in A Thousand Plateaus (MP 442/358), but other instances
might include hunter-gatherer groups such as the Mbuti of Central Africa, whose
“only effective political unit is the band,” according to Colin Turnbull, a unit whose
composition “is fluid, to say the least, and does not follow any clear unilineal or
cognatic descent system.” 2 The “smooth space” of nomadic wandering Deleuze and
Guattari derive from Boulez’s contrast of striated, pulsed time and smooth, non-pulsed
time, but the examples they offer are those of desert nomads, such as the Bedouins,
Eskimo hunters who negotiate shifting arctic landscapes, and the “sea nomads” of
Patagonia, who “do not grasp an itinerary as a whole, but in a fragmentary manner,
by juxtaposing in order its various successive stages, from campsite to campsite in
the course of a journey” (José Emperaire, cited in MP 474/557).
In the literature on nomadism, there is considerable disagreement over the range
of societies that should be designated as “nomadic,” but there is some consensus that
at least three categories of mobile peoples should be recognized. The first category,
to which many wish to restrict the term “nomadic,” is that of pastoral nomads, whose
societies may be defined as “societies specializing in animal husbandry requiring
periodic movements.” 3 Thomas Barfield usefully divides pastoral nomads into five
groups, each of which inhabits a particular region and specializes in the raising of a
specific animal: African pastoralists of the Sahel, such as the Masai, for whom cattle
herding is the central and all-consuming cultural activity; the camel pastoralists of
the Saharan and Arabian Deserts, the most notable example being the Bedouins; the
sheep and goat pastoralists of the region running from the Mediterranean littoral
through the Anatolian and Iranian Plateaus into mountainous Central Asia, such as
the Iranian Basseri; the horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe, such as the
Mongols and the Kazaks; and the yak breeders of the Tibetan Plateau. The second
broad category of nomads is that of hunter-gatherers, whose mode of subsistence
sets them apart from both pastoralists and sedentary farmers. There are huntergatherers
who have fixed abodes (just as there are sedentary pastoralists), but several
social groups around the world have (or have had, in most cases) patterns of living
roughly similar to those of the Mbuti of central Africa, who travel most of the year,
2 Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants. The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies (Garden
City, NY, 1965), pp. 26–7.
3 Thomas J. Barfield, The Nomadic Alternative (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993), p. 4.

Apology for Nomadology 115
breaking camp every month or so. Like the African Mbuti, several Amazonian tribes
and Australian Aboriginal groups also are frequently classified as nomadic huntergatherers.
The third basic category is that of Gypsies, itinerant basket-makers,
tinkers, weavers, mimes, magicians, musicians, horse dealers, nostrum traders,
carnival people, circus performers, and so on. Characterized variously as “service
nomads,” “economic nomads,” “commercial nomads,” “craftsman nomads,” “nonfood
producing nomads,” “floating industrial populations,” “peripatetic tribes,”
“peripatetic peoples,” or plain “peripatetics,” these are spatially mobile peoples who
primarily exploit resources in the social environment. 4 They occupy what Berland
and Salo call a distinct peripatetic niche: “the regular demand for specialized goods
and/or services that more sedentary or pastoral communities cannot, or will not
support on a permanent basis.” 5 They are “interim masters of imperfect markets,” 6
their habitat less geographical than structural, consisting of the gaps opened for
itinerant entrepreneurs by unstable and incompletely formed markets for goods and
services. Finally, outside these three broad categories there are vagabonds, traveling
thieves, migrant workers, bi-coastal executives, “academic Gypsies” and other such
groups occasionally classified as nomads, as well as the anomalous instance of the
“sea nomads” of Patagonia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, who perhaps might
be best described as nautical hunter-gatherers.
From a conventional anthropological view, it would seem that Deleuze and
Guattari make a number of serious category errors, ignoring important distinctions
between various ambulatory populations and attributing characteristics to such
populations that are far from universally valid. But Deleuze and Guattari’s object
is not to systematize received anthropological taxonomies; rather, it is to articulate
two tendencies – the nomadic and the sedentary – that have each a certain inner
coherence and that manifest themselves in various mixed forms. Essential here is
the differentiation of observations de facto (of fact) and de jure (of law or right), a
distinction of long standing in Scholastic legal theory and the philosophy of natural
law that Bergson revives at several points in his thought and that Deleuze returns
to frequently in his work. According to natural law theorists, for example, a despot
or usurper may exercise power de facto, but only a legitimate sovereign rules de
jure, that is, by a right inherent in the nature of things. In his Bergsonism, Deleuze
shows how Bergson modifies the de facto/de jure opposition to distinguish between
empirical mixtures of elements (de facto; French, en fait) and differences in nature
(de jure; French, en droit). 7 Bergson’s well-known dualisms – duration/space, quality/
quantity, matter/memory, and so on – are introduced to reinstate differences in nature
that are generally ignored by analysts who consider only the mixed and confused
4 See Matthew T. Salo and Sheila Salo, “Rominchel Economic and Social Organization
in Urban New England, 1850–1930,” Urban Anthropology, 11/3–4 (1982), p. 276.
5 Joseph C. Berland and Matt T. Salo, “Peripatetic Communities: An Introduction,”
Nomadic Peoples (special issue on Peripatetic Peoples), 21/22 (1986), p. 2.
6 David Nemeth, “Service Nomads: Interim Masters of Imperfect Markets,” Nomadic
Peoples, 21/22 (1986), p. 136.
7 The translators of Deleuze’s Bergsonism render “différence en nature” as “difference
in kind,” a choice that is perhaps understandable stylistically, but that tends to mask the
ontological status of Bergson’s distinction as entailing a difference in nature.

116
Deleuze’s Way
forms in which such differences appear in concrete experience. “According to
Bergson,” says Deleuze, “a composite [un mixte] must always be divided according
to its natural articulations, that is, into elements which differ in nature … Bergson
is aware that things are mixed together in reality, in fact; experience itself offers us
nothing but composites” (B 11–12/22). When Bergson speaks of pure duration or
pure memory, he is delineating differences in nature that are manifest only de jure,
not de facto: “If the composite represents the fact, it must be divided into tendencies
or into pure presences that only exist en droit” (B 13/23). Bergson demonstrates, for
example, that time is typically conceived of in a spatialized form, as a succession
of points on a line. As a result, the genuine nature of time as ongoing, indivisible
flow, or duration (durée), is lost. Only by distinguishing a pure durée from a pure
space can one grasp the true nature of time. It happens that in fact we never directly
experience such a pure durée or a pure space, for our space is always a temporal
space and our time always a time in space. Nonetheless, Bergson asserts, durée and
space are qualitatively different from one another; they constitute a difference in
nature that is real, even if we only experience that difference in a mixed form. 8
Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of nomadic and sedentary is one such de
jure distinction of pure differences in nature. The nomadic and sedentary are pure
tendencies that are real, yet that are only experienced in various mixed states. They
are qualitatively different tendencies co-present across diverse social and cultural
formations. This is a fundamental aspect of the concept of “nomadism,” and one
generally ignored by critics of Deleuze and Guattari (and often by those who adopt
Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology as well). Hence, Deleuze and Guattari would
have no problem with the frequent observation that no mobile populations wander
aimlessly and randomly. They would simply argue that the restricted circulation
of Masai herders around a village center, the regular migratory routes of Basseri
sheep herders, the improvisatory seasonal movements of Bedouin camel raisers,
and the ad hoc variable circuits of South East Asian sea nomads represent so many
mixtures of nomadic and sedentary tendencies, each a particular de facto composite
of differences in nature.
One advantage of this approach is that characteristics striking in one mobile
population can be shown to be faintly present in another or perhaps manifested there
in an illuminatingly modified form. Consider, for example, the opposition of nomads
and the State, which plays an important role in many discussions of pastoral nomads,
whose ways of life often involve complex relations of dependence, resistance and
accommodation with contiguous states. Deleuze and Guattari approach the nomad/
State opposition via the work of Pierre Clastres, who in Society Against the State
argues that the marked differences between the cultures of the Andean high plateaus
and the cultures of the Tropical Forest, so evident to early Europeans observers
in South America, represent a basic opposition between State cultures and those
without a State. Clastres insists that Tropical Forest cultures, unlike such Andean
8 For the sake of economy and clarity in delineating the de facto/de jure distinction,
I have simplified Bergson’s views on durée and its relation to space. I discuss Deleuze’s
reading of Bergsonian durée at greater length in the first Chapter of Deleuze on Cinema
(New York, 2003).

Apology for Nomadology 117
cultures as the Incan empire, possess a political organization that is not grounded
in hierarchical class distinctions. The peoples of the Tropical Forest, which include
both sedentary and nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, generally have a chief, but the
chief rules by consensus rather than coercion; far from using his position to extract
inordinate wealth from his followers, the chief gains prestige by giving away most
of his goods. Clastres concludes that Tropical Forest chieftainships are structured
to inhibit the centralization and stratification of political power. Without any direct
contact with State cultures, the Tropical Forest cultures anticipate and ward off the
advent of the State form; in this sense, they are societies against the State.
What Deleuze and Guattari see in Clastres’s analysis of the Tropical Forest
chieftainship is evidence of the existence of a non-State political structure and the
immanence of two tendencies, one patent and one latent, which they identify as
nomadic/anti-State and sedentary/State tendencies. This appropriation of Clastres’s
distinction invites first a reconsideration of non-State Tropical Forest cultures,
which include nomadic hunter-gatherer and sedentary agricultural societies alike.
Clastres notes that among South American peoples, every society’s passage from
a non-State to a State form of political organization has been irreversible, whereas
in some instances non-State sedentarism has given way to nomadism and vice
versa. 9 For Deleuze and Guattari, this would be evidence that sedentary Tropical
Forest cultures possess characteristics that are more nomadic than those of Stateform
sedentary cultures, and that there is a fundamental nomadic tendency across
Tropical Forest cultures. Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of Clastres’s findings
also has suggestive implications for an analysis of the political organization of
pastoral nomads. Barfield, for example, concludes that pastoral nomads manifest
varying degrees of stratification and centralization in social structure, ranging from
acephalous segmentary lineages (the Masai) to centralized tribal states (the Mongol
empires), and that centralization increases in proportion to the power and complexity
of the states with which the nomadic group must interact. 10 In the light of Deleuze
and Guattari’s schema, this proportional correlation of centralization and proximity
to states is evidence not only of a fundamental opposition between nomadism and
the State form but also of a structural relationship between non-State and State
forms of organization that is more than simply contingent and accidental. By this
view, a nomadic population’s contact with a state, rather than directly causing
State tendencies to arise, simply activates a tendency already present within the
nomadic society. According to this logic as well, one would expect to find nomadic
tendencies within centralized states – and indeed, Deleuze and Guattari argue that
non-State and State tendencies can be discerned both within nomadic societies
and within state societies. State societies, far from being the monolithic entities
they purport to be, are fissured by nomadic trajectories of various sorts, including
those of diverse peripatetic groups. In this analysis, the peripatetic populations that
roam state societies and escape their regulation are functional components of those
societies, not extrinsic exceptions to their control. What this suggests finally is that
Deleuze and Guattari’s apparent blunder of confusing primitive hunter-gatherers,
9 See Pierre Clastres, La Société contre l’état (Paris, 1974), pp. 201–203.
10 Barfield, The Nomadic Alternative, pp. 16–17.

118
Deleuze’s Way
pastoral nomads and peripatetics may be of some value. Perhaps the varying degrees
of political centralization among pastoral nomads, when subsumed within a larger
context that includes hunter-gatherer opposition to proto-State structures as well
as the strategies of peripatetic populations such as Gypsies to resist assimilation
within the states they traverse, may be shown to be but concrete responses to a single
problem common to all ambulatory populations.
Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of pure differences in nature also make possible
the isolation of inconstant experiential qualities among social groups as well as
their abstraction from other seemingly heterogeneous contexts. It may well be,
for instance, that no actual nomad travels, as Deleuze and Guattari seem to claim,
by moving along lines without journeying from point to point, but there is an
identifiable, qualitatively distinct operation of negotiating space common to Arctic
hunters, Bedouin herders and Patagonian sea nomads, one that proceeds piece-bypiece,
via changing, multidimensional signs, in an improvisational and experimental
manner. And when one extracts general characteristics from these practices and
relates them to characteristics from other practices in a broad, abstract model,
such as that of Riemannian space, a potentially useful concept emerges – that of
a “smooth space” of pure lines between points, directional vectors without clear
dimensional determination, and distributional spaces without fixed allocation of the
elements’ positions. On the basis of such an abstract configuration of systematically
related qualities, one may then identify smooth spaces in a number of areas – quilt
manufacture, musical compositions, naval tactics, fractals, fluid dynamics, labor
practices, jewelry design, painting, and so on.
The establishment of abstract, de jure oppositions, such as that of the nomadic
and sedentary, is particularly advantageous in the study of aesthetic objects and
social practices, since it affords a means of assessing common tendencies within
various cultural spheres without reducing any of those spheres to the status of an
epiphenomenal projection of another. Consider, for example, the question of Béla
Bartók and Gypsy music. In his 1914 essay “Observations on Rumanian Folk
Music,” Bartók remarks that “Gipsies [sic] pervert melodies, change their rhythm
to ‘gipsy’ rhythm, introduce among the people melodies heard in other regions and
in the country seats of the gentry – in other words, they contaminate the style of
genuine folk music.” 11 Here, one finds a direct link between social movement and
musical practice, with the common stigmatization of the nomadic as impure and
transgressive. Gypsies literally cross borders, and in the process bring the music
of separate regions in contact with one another. They also cross class boundaries,
commingling peasant music and songs heard “in the country seats of the gentry.”
Bartók’s sense of peasant music is that of an art intimately connected to a territory, a
“product of nature,” 12 he says, and Gypsy bands pervert and contaminate that product
of nature through the admixture of foreign elements.
Yet Bartók also attributes the unified styles of diverse Hungarian peasant musical
traditions to “the instinctive faculty of variation in a like manner of large masses
11 Béla Bartók, “Observations on Rumanian Folk Music,” Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff
(New York, 1976), p. 198.
12 Bartók, Essays, p. 221.

Apology for Nomadology 119
living in a spiritual kinship,” this “faculty for variation” being “nothing short of a
natural force” (p. 221). Here one sees the valorization of instinct and a territorial
Volkgeist, but also the recognition of a “faculty for variation,” which resonates with
the notion of nomadic musical practice as the instigation of a state of what Deleuze
and Guattari call “continuous variation” (MP 123/97) – and indeed, an examination
of Bartók’s The Hungarian Folk Song (1924) shows that what he values in this
very territorial music is an aesthetic of rich rhythmic and melodic invention that,
if assimilated directly into tonal Western art music, would unsettle and disturb its
regularities. Further, Bartók recognizes that “there is real gipsy music too, songs on
gipsy texts, but these are known to and sung by the non-musician rural gipsies only,
the regular gipsy bands never play them in public” (p. 222).
The “regular gipsy bands” to which Bartók refers have an ambiguous social role,
transgressive in some regards, but compromising and accommodating in others.
Historically, the professional Gypsy bands served the Hungarian gentry, “who
despised the peasant class and regarded it as good only for the production of labourers,
indeed, for serfs for their landed properties.” 13 The Hungarian gentry embraced a pan-
European aesthetic, and hence one that rejected home-grown, territorial traditions
(peasant traditions being the only ones that had survived hundreds of years of Turkish
occupation), but one that also maintained for the gentry associations with modern
state centralization and class domination. Gypsy bands in some ways reinforced
aristocratic biases through their accommodations of folk motifs to the conventions
of European art music, in the process obscuring the achievements of indigenous
peasant music and encouraging confusion about Hungarian sources through the
introduction of Balkan and Turkish rhythms and scales into their playing – including
the notorious “Gypsy interval” of the augmented second.
By Bartók’s day, the Gypsy bands had taken on an even more complicated role
as purveyors of an urban popular art music, which brought together a trans-regional
amalgam of peasant materials and commercial, “light” classical compositions.
Bartók appreciated the Gypsy bands’ resistance to what he viewed as the base,
commodity music of song hits, operetta airs and jazz, but the popular art music
they promulgated was itself a commodification, regularization and rigidification of
already fixed and ossified material – and hence, one might argue, an anti-nomadic
force that impeded continuous variation. Finally, Bartók sought through Magyar
peasant music to found a truly Hungarian art music, thereby doing for his culture
what Smetana had done for the Czechs and Grieg for the Norwegians, yet even in this
ambiguously territorializing effort at the construction of an ethnic musical identity,
Bartók introduced a decidedly nomadic element, creatively combining, altering,
transmuting and deforming folk motifs in an original personal style (and hence, to a
degree, in a non-collective style) that became a significant force in the development
of modernist innovation and experimentation in the Western art music tradition. One
might say, then, that Bartók’s introduction of faithfully preserved Magyar materials
within his own art music was a form of Gypsy nomadization of the Western classical
tradition.
13 Ibid., p. 361.

120
Deleuze’s Way
If the nomadic and the sedentary are de jure distinctions of pure differences in
nature, which manifest themselves in diverse ways in various social groups and
cultural spheres, one might ask what the status of these categories may be. Are they
mere mental constructions imposed on a random field of heterogeneous phenomena?
Deleuze and Guattari argue that they are not. Rather, they are problems posed by
the real, a given problem characterized as an abstract configuration of differences
that generates multiple concrete actualizations in various spheres. Though such pure
differences in nature are evident in the actual only in mixed forms, they have a
real and separable existence, albeit in a virtual realm, one that is distinct from the
actual yet immanent within the real. The nomadic and the sedentary are abstract
problems that the real continually poses to itself in ever-changing modes, motors
of actualization through which the ongoing unfolding of the world works out its
experimentations and inventions. But those problems also manifest themselves in
thought, and hence do have a mental counterpart. Thought, says Deleuze, is not
voluntary and self-regulating, but involuntary and eccentric, the result of a violence
that dislocates common sense and deregulates the senses, thereby forcing thought
beyond itself to think the unthought and the previously unthinkable. Hence, though
the nomadic and the sedentary have a real existence separate from a consciousness
that conceives them, the categories, to the extent that they represent the products
of genuine thought, are themselves generated from virtual problems that exist
within the real – in this case, within the realm of thought. Yet the thought of the
nomadic is itself nomadic, as is Deleuze and Guattari’s thought of pure differences in
nature. If Deleuze and Guattari follow Bergson in stressing the separation of mixed
elements into pure differences in nature, they do so only to instigate a metamorphic
renegotiation and reconfiguration of those differences. Like Bergson, Deleuze and
Guattari propose numerous binary oppositions, including that of the nomadic and
the sedentary, yet their effort is not to fix categories and demarcate permanent
essences, but to make something pass between the terms of a binary opposition,
and thereby to foster a thought that brings into existence something new. In this
regard, the categories of pure differences in nature are themselves generative forces
of differentiation, which through their mutual opposition function to displace and
transform one another.
I have tried to suggest some of the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s approach
to nomadism is connected to the concrete activities of actual nomadic groups, be
they pastoral nomads, nomadic hunter-gatherers, or peripatetic service nomads, as
well as the means whereby the concept may be extended to issues in the arts and
philosophy. Since the nomadic and the sedentary always present themselves in mixed,
composite forms, their delineation requires a careful discernment of fluctuating,
multi-leveled tendencies that resists simplistic reduction. As I tried to demonstrate
in the Bartók example, a broad contrast of nomadic Gypsy and sedentary art music
is inadequate, since varying degrees of nomadism and sedentarism are evident in
Magyar and Gypsy peasant music, in the music promoted by Hungarian elites, by
the European popular culture industry, and by urban Gypsy bands, as well as in the
ethnic-nationalist and modernist developments of the Western art music tradition.
Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic thought is inherently unstable, in that its use of
binary oppositions is intended to be generative and mutative, but it is not therefore

Apology for Nomadology 121
to be pursued in a haphazard and careless fashion. If the thought of the nomadic
is to be adequate to the actual disclosure of the virtual problem of the nomadic as
real difference in nature, it must engage empirical evidence and historical detail, as
well as the disciplinary considerations of the various established fields of inquiry
across which it moves. Only in that fashion can the concept of the nomadic foster
something that is both useful and new.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 9
Nomadism, Globalism
and Cultural Studies
There is no doubt that we live in an increasingly global era. The specific configuration
and interconnection of elements that might eventually characterize a truly global
order are by no means certain, but that some such order will eventually emerge,
I believe, is inevitable. In such a context of increasing globalization, the field
of cultural studies – if indeed it is a single field – faces several issues that echo
concerns expressed in widespread social, economic and political debates. Is it the
job of cultural studies to counter the forces of global cultural homogenization and
engage in an identity politics that reinforces local specificities? Should the discipline
attempt to isolate common – or even universal – concerns among cultures at the risk
of promoting the asymmetrical power relations of a multinational financial-militarygovernmental
technocracy? Or should cultural studies function primarily as a force
of hybridization, somehow blurring local distinctions without ever allowing the
emergence of a single stable global order?
Over the last decade or two, the work of Deleuze and Guattari has drawn
increasing attention from scholars in cultural studies and analysts interested in
globalization. In cultural studies of a continental European orientation, Deleuze and
Guattari’s influence has been marked, especially in discussions of what they call
“minor literature,” and in the growing literature on globalization several of Deleuze
and Guattari’s concepts have made their appearance, perhaps most fully in Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which may be seen as an extended development
of the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for a postmodern
conception of sovereignty. Of the many concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari,
“nomadism” is one that has had an especial appeal to scholars in cultural studies and
that has increasingly infiltrated discussions of globalization. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari develop a complex of terms around the notion of “nomadism,”
and though the concept has been exploited frequently by others, it has not always
been fully understood, nor has it often been articulated clearly and completely. I
believe that the concept of “nomadism” might help us chart the course of cultural
studies in a global era, but only if the concept is engaged in a detailed and thorough
manner. My purpose, therefore, is to provide an extended exposition of the concept
of “nomadism,” indicate its relevance for understanding the ongoing processes of
globalization with which we must continue to contend, and suggest its potential role
in the formation of a domain of cultural studies that promotes a positive, creative and
non-totalizing “globalism.”

124
Nomadic Distribution
Deleuze’s Way
Deleuze and Guattari apply the concept of “nomadism” to a wide range of topics,
including mathematics, physics, games, cloth manufacture, metallurgy, music and art,
but the core elements of the concept derive from observations about nomadic peoples.
When speaking of “nomads” and “the nomadic” in this socio-anthropological sense,
Deleuze and Guattari seem to play fast and free with traditional anthropological
distinctions and to make sweeping assertions about nomadic populations that ignore
the complexities of actual concrete groups. Anthropologists commonly differentiate
among hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads and peripatetics, reserving the label of
“nomads” for the five main groups of pastoral nomads – the African pastoralists of the
Sahel, such as the Masai; the camel pastoralists of the Saharan and Arabian Deserts;
the sheep and goat pastoralists of the region running from the Mediterranean littoral
through the Anatolian and Iranian Plateaus into mountainous central Asia; the horseriding
nomads of the Eurasian steppe; and the yak breeders of the Tibetan Plateau. 1
Yet Deleuze and Guattari seem indifferent to such distinctions, citing as instances
of nomadism traditional hunter-gatherer tribes of Africa and South America, various
pastoral nomads, such as the Mongols and the Bedouins, the sea nomads of Patagonia,
as well as peripatetics of diverse sorts – itinerant craftsmen, gypsies, street gangs,
and so on. And much of what they say about nomads seems applicable to one group
only, or solely to a single aspect of one group’s behavior. Some critics have seen in
this treatment of nomadism signs of sloppy scholarship and a romantic idealization
of mobile populations, but Deleuze and Guattari are in reality developing a concept
of nomadism that deliberately cuts across traditional anthropological categories and
extracts characteristics from actual social groups that are at times only intermittently
and indirectly evident in those populations. Their object is to identify two broad
tendencies – the nomadic and the sedentary – each of which has an inner coherence
yet is manifest concretely only in various mixed forms.
Crucial here is the distinction between observations de facto (of fact; French: en
fait) and de jure (of law or right; French: de droit), a distinction Deleuze and Guattari
take from natural law theory by way of Henri Bergson (see Chapter 8). As Deleuze
and Guattari indicate at several points in A Thousand Plateaus, their opposition of the
nomadic and the sedentary is a de jure distinction of pure differences in nature. The
nomadic and the sedentary are qualitatively distinct and real categories, but they are
experienced in fact only as tendencies within various mixed states. Hence, Deleuze
and Guattari would have no difficulty explaining sedentary proclivities within
nomadic populations or the patent appearance of certain nomadic characteristics
solely within certain groups and not within others. In each case, a de jure difference
in nature is manifest only in a de facto mixture.
Although Deleuze and Guattari’s most extended treatment of nomadism is to be
found in A Thousand Plateaus, as early as 1969 Deleuze engages certain elements
of the topic in Difference and Repetition. There, he attempts to characterize being in
terms of multiplicities that are irreducible to a dialectic of the One and the Many, and
1 See Thomas J. Barfield, The Nomadic Alternative (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993), pp.
1–19.

Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 125
he does so through the concept of a “nomadic distribution” of elements. In reflecting
on the notion of the nomadic, Deleuze finds particularly illuminating Emmanuel
Laroche’s 1949 study, History of the Root “Nem-” in Ancient Greek, an exhaustive
treatment of the family of ancient Greek words that includes nemo, nemao, Nemesis,
nomos, nomas and other cognates.
In classical Greek of the fifth century B.C.E., nomos generally means “law” or
“custom,” and Nemesis refers to “Fate.” Laroche observes that scholars traditionally
attribute these meanings to an archaic sense of nomos as a partitioning and assigning
of lands to various parties and of Nemesis as an allocation of separate lots, or fates,
to individuals. Laroche counters that the etymological history is much more complex
than this account would indicate. The key to that etymological history he finds in
the eighth century B.C.E. Homeric usage of the verb nemo, which he translates as
“to distribute.” The actions of “dividing into parts” and “distributing” are related
in the Homeric world, as when a warrior carves a roasted lamb into parts and then
distributes pieces to his comrades, but nemo refers solely to the act of distributing.
The Homeric sense of nemesis is not that of fate, but that of an imputation of blame,
which derives from the concept of nemesis as an improper distribution of elements.
The sense of nomos as law or convention Laroche sees as a late development,
with the archaic sense of nomos coming from the usages associated with pasturage
and nomads. In Homer, nomos designates a place where animals graze. “Pasturage
in archaic times,” notes Laroche, “is in general an unlimited space; it can be a
forest, meadows beside rivers, a mountain slope.” 2 Archaic nomos in no way
indicates a partitioning of land. Later, after the reforms of Solon, nomos comes to
mean “assigned plot of land,” but this usage reflects an extension of city sedentary
divisions to the surrounding countryside. In archaic times, by contrast, if the nomos
is related to the city, it is as “an expanse of habitable land around a city before being
an administrative province” (p. 117). Laroche concludes then that “nomos designates
nothing other than pasturage for animals or a habitat without recognized limits for
men” (p. 117). The archaic term nomas, Laroche points out, designates either a
nomadic herdsman or a herd animal, a nomadic herdsman being characterized as a
wandering individual with no fixed domicile, and a herd animal as a creature that
moves freely and randomly across an open territory (p. 122).
What Deleuze takes from Laroche’s study is the notion of nomos as a distribution
of multiple elements in an open, undivided and unlimited space. In Difference
and Repetition, Deleuze describes being in terms of a “nomadic distribution,” a
distribution of an irreducible multiplicity that “is no longer a division of that which
is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open
space – a space that is unlimited, or at least without precise limits” (DR 54/36).
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari do not attempt a description of all
being as a “nomadic distribution,” as Deleuze does in Difference and Repetition, but
they do make use of the archaic Greek notion of nomos in developing the concept
of “nomadism.” They cite Laroche and oppose the nomadic to the sedentary as
the archaic Greek nomos of open pasturage to the partitioned territory of the city
2 Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la racine “nem-” en Grec ancient (Paris, 1949), p.
116 (translation mine).

126
Deleuze’s Way
(MP 472/557). And whenever they speak of the nomadic they conceive of it as a
multiplicity distributed in an open space.
One model of the nomadic, then, is that of a flock of sheep occupying an
undivided landscape. The flock wanders over undulating surfaces, filling the
contours of valleys, plains, hillsides, or slopes, in each case occupying space to the
extent of its capabilities, its puissances, or powers. The configuration of relations
among individual sheep shifts and changes, and the shape of the collective flock
is in constant metamorphosis, adapting itself to the variations in the topography of
the landscape. As the flock roams, it continually exceeds the limits of its external
outlining edges, filling new space as it leaves previously occupied territory. The
flock is a flow, a flux of multiple elements engaged in an ongoing metamorphic,
dynamic process of nomadic distribution across an open and undivided space.
Before proceeding to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of nomadism, we should
note two important characteristics of the multiplicities involved in a nomadic
distribution of elements. First, the multiplicities are qualitative multiplicities. In
Bergsonism, Deleuze credits Bergson with being the first philosopher to differentiate
clearly between quantitative and qualitative multiplicities. Quantitative multiplicities
are collections of elements that do not change their qualities when increased or
decreased through addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. Five bricks plus
five bricks equal ten bricks, but whether a collection of five bricks or a collection of
ten bricks, the multiplicity remains a collection of bricks. Qualitative multiplicities,
by contrast, cannot be increased or decreased mathematically without being
changed qualitatively. A room at a temperature of sixty degrees may be heated to
a temperature of ninety degrees, but the multiplicity of the room at sixty degrees is
qualitatively different from the room at ninety degrees. One cannot add sixty degrees
to thirty degrees without creating a new qualitative multiplicity of ninety degrees,
one that is incommensurable with any quantitative summation of sixty and thirty.
All nomadic multiplicities are such qualitative multiplicities. In this regard, each
nomadic multiplicity has an identity, but an identity that is irreducibly multiple and
open to metamorphosis as its constituent elements increase or decrease. In that its
identity is formed through its qualities, each multiplicity also possesses a certain
affectivity.
Second, nomadic multiplicities constitute what Deleuze and Guattari call
“rhizomes.” In A Thousand Plateaus, they oppose rhizomes to “arborescences,” or
root-tree structures. Unlike arborescences, which have a vertical, hierarchical and
centralized configuration, rhizomes are horizontal, nonhierarchical formations with
no center. Deleuze and Guattari liken rhizomes to crabgrass, which spreads in all
directions and extends roots along every surface it occupies. There is no central root,
no privileged locus of growth. Any patch of crabgrass, if uprooted and transplanted,
may initiate a renewed process of growth and expansion. Not only is the rhizome
nonhierarchical and acentered, but it also manifests what Deleuze and Guattari
call “the principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be
connected to any other point whatever, and must be” (MP 13/7). The rhizome, then,
has no center, no hierarchical organization, and no stable patterns of interconnection
among its elements. The rhizome, we might say, is a network much like the internet
(which only came into being after Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of the

Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 127
rhizome), a proliferating multiplicity of terminals and circuits, in which any terminal
may be connected to any other terminal, and with such rapidity that each terminal
is virtually contiguous to every other terminal, no matter how far apart the various
terminals may be in terms of actual spatial distance.
We may thus make the following preliminary summary of the characteristics
of a nomadic multiplicity: it spreads over an unlimited and undivided space as a
metamorphic flux; it constitutes a qualitative multiplicity with an identity that is
irreducibly plural and affective; and it forms a rhizome, without center or hierarchy,
in which each element is in virtual contiguity and connection with every other
element.
Nomadism, Smooth Space and the War Machine
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari define nomadism through two complex
concepts: the war machine and smooth space. The relationship between nomadism,
the war machine and smooth space is expressed in an especially succinct (albeit
cryptic) manner in the following comment made by Deleuze in a 1980 interview on
A Thousand Plateaus:
We define the “war machine” as a linear assemblage which constructs itself on lines of
flight. In this sense, the war machine does not at all have war as its object; it has as its
object a very special space, smooth space, which it composes, occupies and propagates.
Nomadism is precisely this combination “war machine-smooth space.” We try to show
how and in what case the war machine takes war for its object (when the apparatuses of
the State appropriate the war machine which does not initially belong to them). A war
machine tends to be revolutionary, or artistic, much more so than military. [PP 50–51/33]
First let us examine the notion of “smooth space.” Deleuze and Guattari oppose
smooth space to striated space, identifying smooth space as “nomad space … the
space in which the war machine develops,” and striated space as “sedentary space
… the space instituted by the State apparatus” (MP 592/474). The opposition seems
quite simple: smooth space is space undivided and unmeasured, whereas striated
space is crisscrossed with grids of dividing and measuring lines. But the distinction
is more complicated than it might initially appear. First, it is a de jure distinction, as
Deleuze and Guattari explicitly state:
[T]he two spaces only exist in fact in mixtures of one another: smooth space is ceaselessly
translated, transversed into striated space; striated space is constantly reversed, turned into
a smooth space … and the two can happen at the same time. Yet the de facto mixtures do
not impede the de jure distinction, the abstract distinction between the two spaces. [MP
593/474–5]
Second, the distinction is not strictly spatial. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari take the
opposition of smooth space and striated space from the composer Pierre Boulez, who
uses the terms to describe different forms of time in musical compositions, smooth
space characterizing the nonpulsed time of free, irregular motifs, and striated space
the pulsed time of regular, metrical motifs. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari describe

128
Deleuze’s Way
literal space in terms of the smooth and the striated, but they extend the concepts
as well to such figurative spaces as music, art and mathematics. Third, and most
important, “smooth” and “striated” describe not simply space per se, but also ways
of inhabiting and using space, and in this sense, ways of creating a smooth or a
striated space.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the maritime model of smooth space,
the de facto mixture of smooth and striated spaces is especially evident, as is the
relationship between space and its usage. They note that though “the sea is a smooth
space par excellence” (MP 598/479), the history of seafaring is one of increasing
striation of that paradigmatic smooth element, various inventions allowing ever more
precise measurements of positions, distances, currents and depths. Yet coexistent
with these discoveries are the local practices of fishermen, transporters and travelers,
which constitute “a complex and empirical nomadic navigation by way of winds,
noises, colors and sounds of the sea” (MP 599/479). And though such technological
innovations as sonar, radar, satellites and global positioning devices might seem
to have rendered the seas an absolutely striated space, Deleuze and Guattari point
out that even such a heavily gridded element can function as a smooth space. The
military deployment of ships, aircraft and submarines by modern superpowers aims
at the creation of a virtual force, coextensive with the oceans, that may manifest itself
at any place and at any time. Such a virtual naval force, in Deleuze and Guattari’s
judgment, uses the striation of the seas as a means of converting the seas into a
smooth surface of unlimited, acentered power, in which a submarine, a destroyer, a
missile, or a squadron of aircraft may suddenly become manifest at any point of that
surface. A similar military occupation extends from the sea to the air, such that “the
sea, then the air and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but in order to
control striated space more completely, in the strangest of reversals” (MP 599/480).
Smooth and striated spaces, then, are not simply givens of the natural world,
but they are spaces with different modes of construction or composition. Deleuze
and Guattari offer as a particularly clear example of these contrasting modes of
construction the processes whereby woven fabric and felt are made. In the simplest
instance, woven fabric consists of two sets of parallel threads, one horizontal, and
one vertical. Each set has a prescribed function, the horizontal threads, say, serving
as a fixed element, the vertical threads serving as a mobile element, passing over
and under the horizontal. The fabric may be of an unlimited length, but its width
must be finite (determined by the width of the loom). And the fabric has a top side
and a reverse side, an outer surface and an inner surface. To weave fabric, then, is
to construct a striated space, one that is crisscrossed with lines, the lines assigned
prescribed functions, its production contained within set bounds, and its dimensions
clearly demarcated. To create felt, by contrast, is to construct a smooth space. In felt,
threads are not separated; instead, fibers are entangled by being pressed together,
the microscopic variations in the fibers allowing unpredictable interconnections
and adhesions. In this regard, though felt forms a smooth space, its elements are
heterogeneous. Felt opposes fabric in all respects: “in principle it is infinite, open or
unlimited in all directions; it has no top side, bottom side or center; it assigns no fixed
or mobile functions, but rather distributes a continuous variation” (MP 594/475–6).

Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 129
Smooth and striated spaces also imply different modes of inhabiting space,
and in this respect Deleuze and Guattari see the practices of nomadic peoples as
especially illuminating. The Bedouins may follow broadly determined routes
through the desert and seek out fixed landmarks, and in this sense they traverse
a somewhat striated space, but the shifting sands of the landscape are in constant
variation and their passage must proceed along the unpredictable sites of scattered
shrubs, bushes and patches of grass that serve as pasturage for their animals. In this
respect, they inhabit the desert as a smooth space. They move from oasis to oasis,
but not as migrants traveling from fixed abode to fixed abode. Rather, each oasis
serves as a relay in an open-ended, zigzag trajectory, a way-station in a process
of continuous movement. If each oasis is seen as a point, and every path between
oases as a line, one may thus say that in a smooth space points are subordinate to
lines. In striated space, one moves from point to point, the line serving merely as a
connection between fixed points. In smooth space, by contrast, each point is merely
a pause in the ongoing movement of the line. The line in smooth space, therefore, is
“a vector, a direction and not a dimension or a metric determination” (MP 597/478).
The line of striated space can be measured and assigned a dimensional position,
in that it always passes between fixed and clearly demarcated points. The line of
smooth space, in contrast, moves through unevenly distributed points, each point
functioning as an unpredictable event in the vector’s thrust. What makes possible
the dimensional, metrically determined line of striated space is that “in striated
space, one closes off a surface and ‘allocates’ it according to determinate intervals,
following assigned breaks,” whereas the directional, vectorial line of smooth space
presupposes a domain in which “one ‘distributes’ oneself over an open space,
according to frequencies and along the course of one’s crossings” (MP 600/481).
Thus, if we contrast smooth and striated space in terms of the three basic elements of
Euclidean geometry – the one-dimensional point, the two-dimensional line and the
three-dimensional volume – we may say that the smooth point is subordinate to the
line, whereas the striated point dominates the line; that the smooth line is directional
and vectorial, whereas the striated line is dimensional and metrical; and that the
smooth volume entails a self-distribution across an open space, whereas the striated
volume presumes an allocation of elements in accord with determinate intervals and
assigned discontinuities.
Smooth space, then, is both inhabited and created, and that which inhabits and
creates such a space is the “war machine.” The concept of the “war machine” is one
of the more obscure and unsettling notions of A Thousand Plateaus. Though Deleuze
and Guattari talk about the war machine at length, nowhere do they provide a clear
definition of the term. The name itself seems to arise from common associations of
the nomadic hordes of Central Asia, such as the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan,
with a pure form of terrifying violence, each horde functioning as an amorphous
roaming “war machine” haphazardly encountering and destroying the sedentary
settlements in its path. Deleuze and Guattari use this term in part to introduce
the provocative theses that nomads invent the war machine, that the State merely
appropriates and tames the war machine in the form of conventional armies, and
that war in the common sense of the word is not the object of the war machine per
se, but the object of the war machine as captured by the State apparatus. To grant

130
Deleuze’s Way
these arguments the detailed consideration they deserve is well beyond our scope
here, but what is important to note is that the war machine is opposed to the State
apparatus, and that the war machine constructs and inhabits smooth space, whereas
the State apparatus constructs and inhabits striated space. Through this opposition of
war machine and State apparatus, Deleuze and Guattari mean to suggest that there
is a pervasive political dimension to the distinction between smooth and striated
space – indeed, that every complex mixture of the smooth and the striated, whether
it be social, economic, technological, scientific, mathematical, musical, literary, or
philosophical, is also connected to and inseparable from the domain of the political.
By identifying nomads with the war machine, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that
a nomadic population may be seen as a machine, a collective entity defined by its
function, which is that of creating and inhabiting a smooth space. A war machine is
like a nomadic horde, a collective heterogeneous multiplicity passing through various
sites, tracing vectors along which it distributes itself in open, metamorphic flows.
By designating such a horde a machine, Deleuze and Guattari defamiliarize and
denaturalize this anthropological example, indicating that the horde is an apersonal
collective function, a force of production that does something, and that other
collective entities involving both human and nonhuman components may likewise
function as forces that produce smooth space. Ultimately, what Deleuze and Guattari
designate by the term “war machine” is a force of transformation and metamorphosis
– hence Deleuze’s remark that “A war machine tends to be revolutionary, or artistic,
much more so than military” (PP 51/33). Deleuze also says that the war machine
“constructs itself on lines of flight” (PP 50/33). Deleuze and Guattari frequently
speak of “lines of flight,” taking the term from the French phrase for the vanishing
point, or point de fuite, in a perspectival drawing (with the additional notion that a
“line of flight” is a line of “leakage,” from the French usage of fuite to refer to a leak
in a gas line, for example). A line of flight is a line of escape from any fixed and stable
order. It is a line between things, between clearly demarcated entities and identities, a
zigzag, unpredictable course that disrupts the coordinates of an organized space. The
line of flight, in short, is the nomadic line of a smooth space. And what is essential
is that the line of flight is a line of becoming-other, of metamorphosis and constant
transformation.
The war machine, says Deleuze, “composes, occupies and propagates” (PP 50/33)
smooth space. As we recall, smooth space is not simply inhabited, but it is created
through its usage. Hence, the “war machine,” the name by which we may refer to
any nomadic multiplicity, constructs or composes the smooth space that it occupies,
and as it continues to move it propagates further smooth space. The nomadic
multiplicity is a wandering machine producing its own habitat and extending that
habitat as it wanders. The trajectory of this wandering machine follows a line of
flight, a course of constant metamorphosis, transformation and becoming-other. If
we return to the model of a wandering flock of sheep, we can say that the nomadic
tribe and its wandering flock together constitute a qualitative multiplicity and that
the territory they inhabit is likewise a nomadic qualitative multiplicity. We must
envision the nomadic tribe and flock as a dynamic, ever-changing flux, but we must
also see the land they traverse as a dynamic, ever-changing flux. The nomads and
their flocks constitute a rhizome of interconnected elements, and their movements

Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 131
in turn convert the space they inhabit into a rhizome of interconnected elements.
Smooth space, finally, is less a thing than an active process. The war machine in
this sense is the dynamic force immanent to the productive engendering of smooth
space – or perhaps we should say, it is the force of smooth-spacing, and this ongoing,
metamorphic activity of smooth-spacing is nomadism.
Globalization and Globalism
What has nomadism to do with globalization? In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari frequently refer to phenomena associated with contemporary tendencies
in globalization. In their discussion of the maritime model of smooth and striated
space, for example, they engage the military dimension of globalization, the virtual,
omni-present naval force representing the notion of a comprehensive global military
order that combines the features of a smooth space of immanent, virtual force and a
striated space of control and domination in the service of the states that deploy such
military forces. They also relate the emergence of this military order to the formation
of what Deleuze calls the “society of control” (see PP 240–47/177–82), a kind of
universal social order of constant self-monitoring and self-regulation whereby
individuals construct, organize, discipline and shape one another and themselves.
The goal of a society of control, Deleuze and Guattari imply, is a global social order
that transcends cultural divisions, one in which the very production of people – their
bodies, their ways of living, their modes of subjectivity – undergoes a constant and
thorough monitoring and control. Such a society of control, like the omnipresent
naval force, converts the striated space of traditional social structures into a smooth
space of immanent, dispersed power, but only the more effectively to control and
regulate that space.
But it is perhaps in their discussions of capitalism that Deleuze and Guattari most
fully engage the interrelationship between nomadism and globalization. In their
analysis, the basic tendency of capitalism is to undo complex social codes that limit
relations of production, exchange and consumption and to convert everything into
interchangeable units of capital. In traditional societies, codes determine who can
produce what, which relations of exchange are permissible, which are taboo, who
may consume what goods, who may not. In capitalist societies, the commodity form
tends to replace all restrictive codes. Everything is converted into a quantitative unit
of capital, all relations of production, exchange and consumption are commodified,
and the world tends to resemble a universal machine of schizophrenic interconnecting
flows that mingle commodified bits of people, places, things, processes, fantasies,
ideas, and so on. Yet capitalism depends on the State apparatus for a regulation of
these schizophrenic flows, and hence, though commodification tends to undo all
traditional restrictive social codes, at the same time the State apparatus constantly
recodes flows in newly constructed improvisatory formations. We may say, then, that
capitalism is inherently globalizing in its tendency to proliferate in an unchecked
decoding of flows, that in its schizophrenic interconnecting of flows it functions as a
war machine in a smooth space, and that its recoding of flows via the State apparatus
converts that smooth space into a striated space of control and regulation.

132
Deleuze’s Way
Deleuze and Guattari note that the uneasy relationship between the State and
capitalism is suggested in the emergence of “an enormous, so-called stateless,
monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchanges and across borders,
escaping the control of States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization,
constituting a supranational de facto power, unaffected by governmental decisions”
(MP 566/453). Yet they regard the existence of such a “multinational ecumenical
organization” not as a phenomenon peculiar to capitalism, but as a specific
manifestation of a general feature of every State apparatus. The State, they claim,
does not evolve from non-State social forms. The State apparatus is ubiquitous:
“there has always been a State, and quite perfect, quite well-formed” (MP 445/360).
Likewise, there has always been a non-State, a social organization outside the
State form. The State is the quintessential “form of interiority” (MP 446/360), a
structure of enclosure, organization and regulation – in short, a structure that creates
a sedentary, striated space and an appropriately structured population to inhabit it.
The non-State is manifest as a “form of exteriority” (MP 446/360), a nomadic war
machine that composes, occupies and propagates a smooth space. Just as the de jure
sedentary striated space and nomadic smooth space only appear in de facto mixtures,
so do the State apparatus and non-State forms always appear together. Further, the
State apparatus is always in a relationship with the nomadic as its “outside,” and
conversely non-State forms are always in a relationship with the State apparatus.
Hence, Deleuze and Guattari conclude:
The outside [of the State apparatus] appears simultaneously in two directions: great
worldwide machines, branched out across the ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy
a large degree of autonomy in relation to States (for example, commercial organizations
of the “multinational” type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like
Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but also local
mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of
segmentary societies against the organs of power of the State. The modern world offers us
today particularly well developed images of these two directions, one toward worldwide
ecumenical machines, but also another toward a neoprimitivism, a new tribal society such
as McLuhan describes it. These directions are equally present in every social field, and in
all periods. [MP 445–6/360]
We may say, then, that the State is always haunted by two manifestations of the “form
of exteriority,” one an outside beyond its limits, an ecumenical network extending
towards unlimited horizons; the other an outside within its borders, evident in all
the local pockets of nomadism, underdevelopment and deviation that escape State
control and riddle it with holes. What this suggests, finally, is that the “outside” of
the State is not so much literally outside as that it is an essence of the outside – a pure
“form of exteriority” – that is immanent within the “form of interiority” of the State.
Deleuze and Guattari are often regarded as theorists who approach globalization
primarily from a Marxian economic perspective. In some respects this is true, and
in Hardt and Negri’s Empire one can see the extent to which Deleuze and Guattari’s
analysis of late capitalism may be applied to contemporary manifestations of
globalization. However, Deleuze and Guattari recognize the degree to which noneconomic
elements are inextricably bound with economic relations in modern

Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 133
societies of control (as do Hardt and Negri, we might note), and their approach to
the State form and its outside suggests that they would concur that sociocultural
rather than exclusively economic analyses of globalization have some validity.
Roland Robertson, for example, has argued that globalization has its source in broad
sociocultural changes in Europe in early modernity that go beyond mere economic
developments, to which Deleuze and Guattari might simply respond that indeed,
globalization in early modernity tends to proceed through means more cultural than
economic, but that increasingly economic means have come to dominance in this
process over the last two centuries. Some, like Mihai Spariosu, have pointed out
that Robertson’s account of globalization is myopic in that it ignores instances of
globalization in other parts of the world at other times, such as the development of
various empires – Chinese, Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Incan, Mayan,
and so on – that had as their object an unlimited expansion into all surrounding
territories. 3 Here, too, Deleuze and Guattari would concur, for they assert that the
State apparatus and its outside occur “in every social field, in all periods,” and
such imperial manifestations of globalization throughout history would simply be
evidence of the inherently totalizing nature of the State apparatus.
Ultimately, what Deleuze and Guattari are proposing in the contrasting concepts
of sedentary striated space and nomadic smooth space are two models of totality, or
the Whole, both of which are manifest to varying degrees and in diverse mixtures
throughout history. Striated space is an englobing, containing Whole, a totality
that gains its coordinates and dimensions through its delimitation of a sphere of
total control. The tendency of every striated space is to encompass a Whole that
grids everything within it. Hence, Deleuze and Guattari remark, “That which
is at once limited and limiting is striated space, the relative global: it is limited
in its parts, which are given constant directions, which are oriented in relation to
one another, divisible according to borders, and capable of interconnection” (MP
474/382). Smooth space, by contrast, is an open Whole, an expanse with no limits,
a ceaseless process of acentered proliferation in all directions. It is, say Deleuze and
Guattari, “a local absolute, an absolute that has its manifestation in the local, and its
engendering in a series of local operations with varying orientations” (MP 474/382).
The open Whole appears only as an uncompleted ongoing process, and always from
the vantage of the local. The open Whole is a rhizomatic multiplicity without fixed
center that cannot be apprehended as an enclosed totality. One can encounter the
open Whole only in the local, and at whatever local site one encounters it, that site
functions as the provisional, shifting center of a proliferating process of formation
of the open Whole.
The sedentary and the nomadic, the striated and the smooth, then, represent two
different modes of globalizing, one that is relative global, the other local absolute.
Many of the critics of globalization have objected to the gross injustices and
inequalities that have been fostered in much of the world through the International
Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, Western-dominated multinational
3 See Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London,
1992), and Mihai Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development. Toward an Ecology
of Global Learning (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

134
Deleuze’s Way
corporations, various international financial instruments and market networks, all
supported by political, technological and military means of coercion directed by the
United States and its allies. They have rightly argued that “globalization” all too often
amounts to the “Americanization” and “McDonaldization” of the world and that the
neoliberal model of economic development is not the only course of action open
to the planet’s peoples. This form of globalization, I would argue, is an especially
pernicious manifestation of the relative global, of the sedentary striated space of the
State apparatus. There are alternatives to such globalization, however, ones that might
foster what we could call “globalism,” reserving the term “globalization” to refer
to the processes of neoliberal Western economic-based expansion and domination.
Globalism, in contradistinction to globalization, would entail an ongoing, open-ended
process of worldwide community formation through the interactive proliferation of
multiple sites of cultural invention. Such globalism, in sum, would be a manifestation
of the local absolute of nomadic smooth space, and it is this globalism that should
guide us in conceptualizing the field of cultural studies.
Global Poetics
Deleuze and Guattari are frequently associated with advocates of hybridity and border
crossing in cultural studies – and with good reason, for the motif of “becomingother”
is central to their thought. Yet by no means do they celebrate all processes
of hybridization and blurring of identities as inherently positive. They recognize
that the dissolution of social and cultural traditions may well usher in nefarious
regimes of power, and they would concur with those who criticize the prophets of
unrestrained hybridity for incautiously opening themselves to manipulation by the
forces of globalization (in our restricted use of the term). Yet Deleuze and Guattari
would have little sympathy for cultural studies that advocate an identity politics
whereby local distinctions are reinforced through a return to traditional institutions
and practices. What their work suggests, I believe, is that cultural studies should avoid
the twin pitfalls of unqualified hybridization and reactionary identity politics and
instead cultivate the local absolute as a means of engendering a genuine globalism.
What does this mean in practical terms? As an instance of cultural studies,
consider for a moment the analysis of traditional Navajo poetry and the position it
might occupy within the domain of comparative poetics. Traditional Navajo poetry
lends itself well to study from a broad cultural perspective, for in most instances it
occurs only within the context of complex rituals involving a wide range of cultural
practices and media. Central to Navajo culture are the rituals and ceremonies of
blessing, healing, protection, exorcism, and so on, conducted by the hatáálí, the
ceremonial practitioners usually referred to as “medicine men.” Among the most
important of these rituals are those called Blessingway, Lifeway, Nightway,
Enemyway and Monsterway, each of which consists of several days of chanting,
dancing, ceremonies, prayers and ritual actions, involving various sacred objects,

Nomadism, Globalism and Cultural Studies 135
sand paintings, foods, and so on. 4 The primary instances of traditional Navajo poetry
are to be found in the chants and songs performed by the medicine men during these
rituals.
One of the major obstacles to a global comparative poetics is that the entire
conceptual apparatus of literary analysis – its vocabulary, ideas, procedures, aims,
objects – is specific to the Greco-Roman tradition. The notion of the literary itself,
and even that of the comparative study of an art form, are foreign to many traditions
of the world. Hence, a first stage in the study of traditional Navajo poetry would be to
characterize it in its own terms, avoiding as much as possible the standard language
and categories of literary analysis. One would recognize that the words of the chants
are inseparable from the rhythms, dance movements, vocal inflections and melodic
lines of their performance; that the words are efficacious and sacred, with a direct
power to affect the world; that the power of the word emanates from the gods and
the land; that the elements of the Navajo cosmos are thoroughly interconnected, such
that the four corner-poles of the dwelling-place correspond to the four directions, to
four colors, four stones, four sacred mountains, four gods, four elements, and so on;
that every song participates in a vast, loosely organized body of stories stretching
from creation to the present through generations of gods, humans, animals and other
beings; that the words function as a medicine whereby the singer brings the recipient
of the chant into a proper alignment with the forces of the universe. Within this broad
cultural context, one might then explore the sense the Navajo have of the specific
virtues of language – its powers, pleasures, charms, variations, rhythms, accents
– and on the basis of indigenous categories construct a Navajo poetics.
But this would be only a first step in the promotion of a genuine globalism.
The next would be to use such a Navajo poetics as a local absolute, as a site of
proliferation toward unlimited horizons. For example, one might attempt a Navajo
reading of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Best would be if a Navajo were to conduct
the reading, or if one were to collaborate with a native informant in constructing it,
but let us propose the outlines of a hypothetical (and perhaps somewhat fanciful)
description of the poem from the vantage of Navajo chant. We might say that
Wordsworth’s medicine is slow and quiet, its power fluctuating and inconstant. His
gods are nameless, but they speak together as a diffused, rolling presence. His dance
is unhurried and often still, marked with periods of trance and near-paralysis. The
gods dwell in the sacred landscape, but he is forced to reside in a domain abandoned
by the gods. His chant is condensed and barely sung, its internal rhythms and
cadences replacing the usual waves of repeating phrases, meters and movements that
propel and sustain chant. He has felt the power of his medicine diminish within, but
4 For transcriptions of performances of Navajo ceremonies, see James C. Faris, The
Nightway: A History and a History of Documentation of a Navajo Ceremonial (Albuquerque,
NM, 1990); Karl W. Luckert, Coyoteway: A Navajo Healing Ceremony (Tucson, AZ, 1979);
Washington Matthews, The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony (Salt Lake City, UT, 1997);
Leland Clifton Wyman, Beautyway: A Navajo Ceremonial (New York, 1957); Blessingway
(Tucson, AZ, 1970); and The Mountainway of the Navajo (Tucson, AZ, 1975). On Navajo
chants and religious performance, see Sam D. Gill, Native American Religious Action: A
Performance Approach to Religion (Columbia, SC, 1987).

136
Deleuze’s Way
he senses that it still is efficacious and may bring healing to his sister, the recipient
of his chant.
An analysis such as this, however, in itself is not sufficient to decenter conventional
comparative poetics, for it merely reverses the relation of dominance between the
center and the margin, between Western and non-Western poetics. Hence, one would
need to extend this process of analysis in multiple directions across cultures of
diverse sorts. One might attempt a Navajo reading of Basho’s Narrow Road of the
Interior, for example, and then a Navajo reading of traditional Tamil lyric poetry,
of the Aztec Cantares Mexicanos, the lyrics of Jalaloddin Rumi, and the Shadow
Songs of Léopold Sédar Senghor. The selection of objects of comparison would be
determined by the fruitfulness of the encounters. The goal of each analysis would not
be dominance but mutual transformation of the objects under consideration and the
invention of concepts that belong wholly to no given tradition.
This example may seem somewhat forced and improbable, but I hope it is
sufficient to suggest how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadism might help
us envision the field of cultural studies as a generative force that fosters a genuine
globalism. Cultural studies in this guise, what we might call a nomadic cultural
studies, would first ensure that the configuration of a given site of investigation
emerges from within, through an analysis of indigenous sources and their
interpretative use by local inhabitants. But then it would convert that site into a local
absolute, treating that site as the provisional center of a proliferating open Whole.
Yet a nomadic cultural studies would have to be multiple, with a proliferation as well
of interacting provisional centers. The sites of the local absolute would need to be
plural, and analysts based in various sites would have to be responsive to the diverse
interpretations their own site undergoes in its encounters with analysts situated
in other sites. The goal, finally, would be to allow analysts to see their respective
sites both as provisional centers and as constituents of other proliferating networks
provisionally centered elsewhere, and hence to promote exchanges between sites and
foster efforts to conceive of an open Whole that belongs to none of the sites involved
in the exchanges. In the case of a nomadic comparative poetics, the aim would be to
recognize diverse local poetics, but at the same time to use them to generate a global
poetics that is genuinely acentered and always in the process of formation. In the
case of nomadic cultural studies as a whole, the aim would be to establish multiple
sites of the local absolute, but at the same time to foster the interactive creation of an
open Whole whose unfolding horizons extend beyond those of any one of the sites.

Chapter 10
Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy
There are two basic types of commentators on Deleuze and Guattari: those who seek
to extend the experimental conceptual movement of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought,
adopting the authors’ language and intensifying its tendencies; and those who try
to frame Deleuze and Guattari’s thought in less esoteric terms, utilizing a more
orthodox, academic terminology and testing the practical limits, implications and
consequences of their thought. I am decidedly of the latter group, and for that reason
I am basically sympathetic to the task Christopher L. Miller sets himself in “Beyond
Identity: The Postidentitarian Predicament in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand
Plateaus” (1993; 1998), one of the most detailed critiques of Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of nomadology yet to appear. 1 Miller observes that “the notes to A Thousand
Plateaus are the archive of nomad thought” (Miller 177), and he proposes to assess
the claims of nomad thought by examining A Thousand Plateaus’s voluminous
archive of references, especially the work’s anthropological citations. Again, my
sympathies are with Miller. For the last twenty-five years I have been reading in the
Deleuze-Guattari archive of sources, finding the footnotes in almost every instance
an invaluable guide to understanding their thought. But the conclusions Miller draws
from his investigation are far different from my own.
Miller frames his examination of nomadology within the debates in cultural
studies, gender/sexuality studies and postcolonial studies about identity, “identity
politics” and “identitarian” modes of thought. He argues ultimately that nomadology
is not the answer to the dilemma posed by these debates:
What I think we need to help us in our predicament is a less utopian, less contradictory, less
arrogant, and less messianic theorization of movement, a nomadism that acknowledges
something outside itself. We need a positive cosmopolitanism that remains meticulously
aware of localities and differences: a more convincing ethic of flow than the one proposed
by Deleuze and Guattari. Such a cosmopolitanism of knowledge would have to face up
to the consequences of the representational authority it assumes, not pretending to have
no authority at all. The delusion of “nonauthority” must be abandoned. Then, perhaps,
1 Miller’s essay first appeared in Diacritics, 23/3 (1993): 6–35, under the title “The
Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology,
Anthropology, Authority.” A slightly modified version came out in 1998 as Chapter Six
of his Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture
(Chicago, IL, 1998), pp. 171–209. Miller states in the Acknowledgements to Nationalists
and Nomads that “I wish the present revised versions of all these essays to supersede their
previous incarnations in print” (Miller xi–xii), and in keeping with his wishes, I cite the
1998 version throughout. However, I will have occasion to refer to the Diacritics version
from time to time.

138
Deleuze’s Way
the translation of this cosmopolitanism into knowledge would be less prone to accidents
and contradictions; it would be less at odds with the basic tenets of the project as a whole.
[Miller 209]
Despite the softening effect of “less” and “more” in his formulation, Miller’s
assessment is clear: Deleuze and Guattari are utopian, contradictory, arrogant and
messianic. They are guilty of the delusion of “nonauthority” and irresponsible
in the handling of the authority they do assume. They are prone to accidents and
contradictions, and their work is fundamentally at odds with the basic tenets of their
project as a whole. Those of us who find value in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings
on nomadology, I believe, have an obligation to take seriously Miller’s findings,
examine them closely, and answer some of the challenges he poses.
Miller’s approach to Deleuze and Guattari is generally measured and considerate,
and his rhetoric is largely restrained, although satiric formulations emerge at key
points in the argument. Such benign appearances notwithstanding, the structure
of Miller’s argument follows the familiar pattern of the debunkers of high theory.
We start by framing the object of investigation in stark and often extreme terms,
exposing the theory’s rhetorical excesses of superlatives, absolutes and claims to
novelty. (To the extent that this phase involves distortion and hyperbole, we may
call it the “Straw Man” phase.) We then demonstrate that its supposed innovations
are not really new, and that other, more reasonable and responsible theories already
occupy the field. Next, we show that the theory’s novelties are shams, and that what
seems new is merely careless, self-contradictory, misinformed, poorly researched,
and substandard in its scholarship. Finally, we turn the tables, showing that the
revolutionary is actually a reactionary, that the radical is a closet conservative, that
the rebel is a fascist, or in this case, that the postcolonial advocates of the oppressed
are latent colonialists repeating the patrician European fantasies of primitivism
and exoticism. The end result is that the object of investigation is shown to be
unworthy of serious attention – utopian, contradictory, arrogant, messianic, careless,
irresponsible, unscholarly – and hence an object that need not be read at all, let alone
read with care and sympathy.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Arrogance
One of Miller’s basic tactics is to substitute interpreters of Deleuze and Guattari for
the authors themselves, and then to ground his critique in an analysis of the words
of their surrogates. A particularly sophisticated application of this tactic is evident at
the inception of his analysis. Miller’s focus is on the question of identity, and he first
establishes A Thousand Plateaus as an anti-identitarian text by citing the anonymous
blurb of the English-paperback translation, remarking that the book is “promoted
not as a model of identity but as a way ‘to conceive of individuality free from the
confines of Identity [that is, free from identitarianism (Miller’s editorial comment)],
to think difference in itself, without any reference to the Same’” (Miller 137). Miller
next cites the preface to A Thousand Plateaus, written by “its brilliant American
translator and commentator, Brian Massumi” (Miller 173). Once Massumi is elevated
through this praise to the level of Deleuze and Guattari, Miller can state that “nomad

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 139
thought is presented by Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi as a remedy, a cure for the
ills attendant to capitalism, among which is identity” (Miller 173). Massumi, now a
virtual co-author with Deleuze and Guattari, is then allowed to stand in for Deleuze
and Guattari, and it is Massumi’s words that Miller cites in order to establish A
Thousand Plateaus as an anti-identitarian text. Miller confirms this substitution by
asserting that Massumi’s preface to A Thousand Plateaus “is an important statement
about nomadology” (Miller 174), and that the publication of Massumi’s A User’s
Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia in 1992 makes “Massumi an essential third
collaborator for readers of English” (Miller 174).
Massumi is but one of a series of surrogates for Deleuze and Guattari, others
being André Pierre Colombat, Kenneth White, Eugene Holland, Paul Patton, Stephen
Muecke and R. Rhadakrishnan. This substitution of interpreters for the original is
a curious practice, given Miller’s condemnation of “Deleuze and Guattari and their
followers” for escaping “the ethical burden of representing real, actual nomads, who
might eventually have something to say in response” (Miller 178). Yet the practice
might be deemed acceptable if, indeed, the interpreters faithfully represent the
original. But in fact the interpreters all have their own points of view, and though
their perspectives may at times be illuminating, they may also foster misleading and
distorted interpretations of the original text, especially if they are read incautiously.
Miller’s first job is to characterize “nomad thought.” Through a series of citations
from Massumi, he establishes that nomad thought is anti-identitarian, affirmative
and free from the negative. 2 Via a citation from Holland, Miller establishes that
nomad thought erases “‘the last traces of humanism and even anthropocentrism’
… [Holland 59]” (Miller 175). Next comes Alice Jardine, who, though opposed
to Deleuze and Guattari’s enterprise, “accurately explains” (Miller 177) the nature
of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming: “‘Becoming,’ for Deleuze and
Guattari, means becoming caught up in a process of osmosis (not metaphor) with deanthropologized
and de-identitized entities – women, infants, animals, foreigners,
the insane – in order to resist the dominant mode of representation represented by
any majority [52; emphasis mine (that is, Miller’s)]” (Miller 177). Paul Patton is
then recruited to assure us “that nomad thought ‘lies entirely outside the domain of
the reproducible, of representation [62]’” (Miller 177). And finally Miller establishes
the anti-anthropological nature of nomad thought by quoting Stephen Muecke, who,
says Miller, “claims that Deleuze and Guattari’s presentation of nomadology in A
Thousand Plateaus ‘enables us to take on board the concept “nomad” without having
recourse to anthropological definitions which would only re-integrate the concept of
2 The danger of substituting spokespersons for the authors is especially evident
in Miller’s cautious challenge to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim (as represented only by
Massumi’s claim) that nomad thought is only apparently negative. Miller notes that “in his
own book, Massumi wryly suggests that ‘molar men’ (in other words, fascists) may require
Dr. Kevorkian’s treatment: ‘Their suicide may have to be assisted’ [89]” (Miller 9). Massumi’s
wry suggestion may have some bearing on Deleuze and Guattari’s views, but it is formulated
in terms that are considerably more extreme than one usually meets in Deleuze and Guattari’s
texts, and, indeed, Massumi’s humor and style generally tend to raise the confrontational
dimensions of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhetoric to a new level.

140
Deleuze’s Way
the body of anti-nomadic thinking [24; emphasis mine (that is, Miller’s)]’” (Miller
177–8).
Thus, without quoting Deleuze and Guattari, Miller establishes that nomad thought
is anti-identitarian, free of the negative, non-anthropomorphic, “nonrepresentational
and nonanthropological” (Miller 178). At one point during his opening presentation,
it must be admitted, Miller does cite Deleuze and Guattari themselves – specifically,
their opening statement in A Thousand Plateaus that the two authors each have
plural identities, and “Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd”
(MP 9/3). And on the basis of this remark, he argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s
“nomadology in this case is, appropriately, free-floating, prescriptive, virtual, and
nonreferential, untroubled by the genealogy of its sources and not accountable to
the conditions of ‘tribe[s], nation[s] or race[s] having no permanent home,’ (the
definition of ‘nomad’ in Webster’s New World Dictionary, college edition). It is an
intellectual nomadism and a nomadism for intellectuals. We might call this case the
‘free’ mode of nomadology … antithetical to the representational disciplines that
have dealt with nomads until now, most notably anthropology” (Miller 177). 3
There is some truth to Miller’s description of nomad thought, but that truth
needs to be framed carefully within a complex of texts, primarily by Deleuze, that
extend beyond A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze indeed opposes a traditional ontology
and epistemology anchored in the concept of identity, but he does so by examining
in detail a number of traditional philosophical arguments and proposing complex
responses to them. In The Logic of Sense, he considers at length the paradoxes
associated with becoming and situates identity within a logic of the event and shows
identity to be a secondary product of a process of differentiation. In Difference and
Repetition, he elaborates on that analysis, insisting that the process of individuation
precedes the actual individual and that a generative difference produces identities.
In both books, he challenges anthropocentric and humanist philosophies, but not
in some vague and impressionistic fashion. Rather, he argues that Kant’s supposed
“Copernican revolution” in philosophy is no revolution at all if for God we
merely substitute Man. Only if we abandon the authority of God, Man and World
as grounding concepts can we begin to establish a genuinely non-foundational
philosophy, and Deleuze’s effort in the two books is to do so by developing the
notion of an immanent transcendental field of non-personal virtual forces of
differentiation which unfold themselves in the actual entities of the cosmos. Deleuze
offers a detailed critique of the logic of representation in Difference and Repetition,
showing that the common sense of cognition requires a common functioning of the
3 Miller’s argument seems to be that Deleuze and Guattari, in denying that they have
any fixed, single identity, are freeing themselves from responsibility for their words and
establishing themselves as the only nomads they are talking about. (“So Deleuze and Guattari
are already a horde and a force of nature associated with the earth itself; we need seek no more
nomads than them” [Miller 10].) I find Miller’s logic strained and his conclusions unsupported
by the citation. That Deleuze and Guattari reject traditional notions of self-identity does not
mean that they embrace a nonreferential, solipsistic and narcissistic practice. Miller may deem
the remark on multiple identities an unconscious symptom of such narcissism, but Deleuze
and Guattari’s purpose clearly is not to plead exemption from all referentiality and ethical
responsibility, as I hope to show.

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 141
faculties (sensibility, imagination, understanding, memory, and so on), which itself
presupposes a world subject to representation, whose four elements are “identity in
the form of the undetermined concept, analogy in the relation between ultimately
determinable concepts, opposition in the relation between determinations within the
concept, resemblances in the determined object of the concept itself” (DR 44–5/29).
We need not pursue the details of Deleuze’s argument here, but suffice it to say that
he is not summarily dismissing the concept of representation without subjecting it to
a thorough examination, nor is he simply embracing a free-floating non-referential
semiosis. Rather, he is doing as many modern philosophers of various stripes have
done, and that is to reject the notion of a transparent, unproblematic representation
of the real through the medium of language (what Rorty calls the “mirror of nature”
model) and to seek an alternative account of the relationship between words and
things.
There is truth as well in Massumi’s claim that nomad thought is affirmative,
despite the appearance of negation in its operations, but here again, caution and
precision are in order. The topic of affirmation is central to Deleuze’s reading of
Nietzsche, and in Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze argues that the “affirmation of
affirmation” in Nietzsche’s will to power is a response to the “negation of negation”
central to Hegel’s philosophy. At stake are two different senses of “affirmation” and
“negation.” In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche reveals the two different senses
of negation by contrasting the mentality of sheep and that of eagles (as figures of
slaves and masters). Sheep define themselves by what they hate – the eagles that
prey on them. They develop a reactive, negative sense of self, and then attempt
to impose their values on the eagles, trying to make the eagles feel guilty for not
being sheep. In this way, they impose purely negative, resentful values, defining
good as not-eagle, and evil as not-not-eagle. The eagles, by contrast, affirm what
they are, and from that affirmation they determine their differences from sheep. If
they recognize the baseness of sheep, it is only as a second affirmation of what they
are in contrast to what the sheep are.
The two senses of affirmation derive from this differentiation of mentalities.
Nietzsche argues that affirmation cannot simply be a matter of saying yes to
everything, since that would entail assent to all that is generated by the resentment
of the negative will to power (manifest in the sheep mentality). Genuine affirmation
(as opposed to the sheep’s affirmation, which is a passive acceptance of whatever is)
requires a critique of the negative mentality of resentment and a joyful destruction of
reactive constructions of the negative will to power. It is in this Nietzschean sense of
critique that Deleuze and Guattari see their nomad thought as essentially affirmative,
and only negative in a limited sense of the word.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Superficiality
What precisely Miller sees as Deleuze and Guattari’s position is not easy to determine,
but he seems to believe that they practice some form of deconstruction, at least one
that promotes the free play of the signifier, the subversion of commonsense categories,
and the celebration of an unconstrained and unspecified politics of liberation. At

142
Deleuze’s Way
one point, Miller observes that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of anthropology
is “severely limited,” offering “nothing like the wholesale discrediting of the
discipline that can be discerned, for example, in Derrida’s Grammatology” (Miller
181). Presuming that Deleuze and Guattari’s aim is to engage in such wholesale
discrediting, Miller suggests that they would do better to emulate Stephen Tyler
in his “radical, transformed ethnography,” which, in Tyler’s words, “describes no
knowledge and produces no action,” and which thus, says Miller, “could be described
as ‘free’ (of representation, of correspondence with referents), postidentitarian, and
therefore ostensibly compatible with nomadology” (Miller 181).
Deconstruction, however, has little connection with nomad thought, as Deleuze
makes explicit during his response to a question following his lecture “Nomad
Thought” (his first exposition of the notion, delivered in 1973):
As for the method of the deconstruction of texts, I understand very well what it is, I admire
it greatly, but it has nothing to do with my method. I do not in any way see myself as a
textual commentator. A text for me is only a little cog in an extratextual practice. It’s not
a matter of commenting on the text through a deconstructive method, or by a method of
textual practice, or by other methods; it’s a matter of seeing what function the text serves
in the extratextual practice that extends the text. [ID 363/260]
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari approach language as a mode of
action, situating linguistics within a general pragmatics. Words do not represent
things, but they intervene in them, interact with them, thereby performing
“incorporeal transformations” on things, categorizing them, classifying them,
subjecting them to codes of power, regulation and domination. In no way is
language “nonreferential,” in the sense of “divorced from the world.” It does not
transparently and unproblematically “represent” things, but it certainly affects things
and helps shape them. Language is but one component of interconnected patterns
of action and structures of power relations, those patterns and structures having as
their constituents heterogeneous elements, discursive and nondiscursive, all of them
mutually shaping one another in a dynamic process of inter-formation.
Nor do Deleuze and Guattari espouse an epistemology of infinite self-referential
semiosis, in which all claims to truth and relevance are abandoned. Like Foucault, they
are anti-foundational in their epistemology, but they recognize the practical effects
of truths as power-functions. They know that truths are made, that configurations of
words and things, which are informed by “regimes of signs,” make certain statements
possible and exclude others (those truths being inseparable from the nondiscursive
practices, institutions, physical objects, architectural constructions, geographical
modifications, and so on, that are intermeshed with discursive signs). Deleuze and
Guattari’s nomadic methodology is what Deleuze calls a “constructivism” (PP
199/146), an active effort to disrupt orthodoxies and thereby “falsify” received
truths, but also to construct new, provisional truths that might open unforeseeable
possibilities for life. Once again, nomad thought can be described as “nonreferential”
only in a very specific and limited sense, and certainly not in the sense of “making no
claims to truth” or “denying thought any efficacious relation to reality.”
But most essential is the distance between deconstruction and nomad thought
in the two methods’ approach to the concept of difference. Derrida develops his

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 143
notion of difference from a linguistic model, whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s stems
from an ontological model of Bergsonian origin. In his seminal 1956 essay “The
Conception of Difference in Bergson,” Deleuze outlines a Bergsonian approach to
difference that remains a formative force throughout his thought. In an essay on the
philosopher Ravaisson, Bergson observes that concepts may be developed in two
different ways, and to illustrate this distinction he considers two ways of thinking
about the concept “color.” One is to start with red, efface its redness, then do the
same to blue, to yellow, and so on, until you arrive at the abstract notion of “color,”
that is, a general “colorness” that has been emptied of any specific color content.
The concept is a genus in relation to several species (the individual colors), a single
concept referring to several objects. The concept is generated through a process of
negation (not red, not blue); there is a gap between the object and its concept, a
division between thing and mind; and the relation between the object and the concept
is one of subsumption. The alternative approach is to start with a rainbow continuum
of colors and send them through a convergent lens that concentrates them on the
same point, thereby producing a pure clear light. The concept is that pure clear light.
As Deleuze explains:
[T]he colors are no longer objects under a concept, but the nuances or degrees of the
concept itself. Degrees of difference itself, and not differences of degree. The relation
is no longer one of subsumption, but of participation … Because things have become
nuances or degrees of the concept, the concept itself has become a thing. It is a universal
thing, if you will, since the objects take form within it as so many degrees, but it is a
concrete thing, not a genus or a generality. [ID 60/43]
To speak in strictly physical terms (only a provisional step), we may say that the pure
light is a generative self-differing difference, and that each color is a manifestation of
a process of differentiation (here, imagine a reversal of our original model, the clear
light passing through a lens to form a rainbow spectrum). The clear light is immanent
within each individual color, and we may say that the spectrum of manifest colors
is an unfolding of the clear light as it differentiates itself into the diverse colors. The
manifest rainbow colors have an actual existence, the immanent clear light a virtual
existence, and both the actual and the virtual are real. But the physical unfolding of
the light is inextricable from the unfolding of the concept – the concept is a thing.
Thought and its object together unfold as part of a single process of self-differing
differentiation.
Bergson’s basic method, Deleuze shows, is to replace false distinctions with
genuine differences, which are differences of nature, that is, real differences, but
which exist in their pure state as virtual entities. Time, for example, is generally
misconceived, says Bergson, because it is framed in terms that confuse the temporal
and the spatial, time being construed unconsciously in spatialized terms. Time,
however, differs from space in nature. In the actual world, we always experience
time and space in mixtures, but a pure time and a pure space exist as virtual entities.
We discern those virtual entities as tendencies within the actual, and one of the
primary goals of thought is to discriminate between those tendencies and extract
from them the pure virtual entities that are manifested in those tendencies. Pure
virtual time, what Bergson calls durée (which has as two of its dimensions memory

144
Deleuze’s Way
and élan vital), differs in nature from pure space. What complicates this example,
however, is that even the distinction between pure time and pure space is provisional.
Bergson argues that in a universe of incessant becoming, of ongoing and universal
metamorphosis, there are no real things at all, merely fluxes and flows, perturbations,
movements, vibrations. What we call “space,” even the pure space of the virtual, is
simply a contraction of the vibrational Whole, and time is the infinite dilation of that
Whole. In short, pure virtual space finally is merely a manifestation of durée. The
two separate entities of time and space collapse into one – durée in its dilated form,
durée in its contracted form. But this collapse does not lead us to a monism, for the
“one,” in this case, durée, is itself a self-differing difference, and the real distinction
between pure time and pure space, at which we arrived provisionally, is generated by
durée as it differentiates itself. What we have, then, is a binary opposition in which
one pole generates the other, but not in any temporal priority. The generative pole,
durée, does not in some sense exist prior to the other pole, space. Both coexist. And
the difference between durée and pure space is not some kind of illusion – it is a real
difference of nature, a real manifestation of durée unfolding itself as a self-differing
difference.
Bergson’s analyses of differences of nature are not always as abstruse as that
of the difference between time and space, nor is the final phase of the analysis, in
which one pole is shown to be the differencing of the other, always present. But
throughout his work, Bergson proceeds by discerning tendencies within an actual
mixture, and then isolating the virtual differences of nature that manifest themselves
within the actual. This Bergsonian practice may be seen clearly in Deleuze’s
thought in his early study of the novelist Sacher-Masoch. There, Deleuze argues
that sadomasochism is a false category, a mixture of tendencies, and that sadism and
masochism represent incommensurable worlds, the one explored by Sade, the other
by Sacher-Masoch, both authors being consummate symptomatologists capable of
isolating the complex of elements that make up the pure virtual worlds of sadism
and masochism. Something similar takes place in Anti-Oedipus as Deleuze and
Guattari first challenge the orthodox distinction between psychosis and neurosis and
then differentiate the pure virtual elements of schizophrenia and paranoia from one
another. And in A Thousand Plateaus, this Bergsonian method is used over and over
again, the distinction between the nomadic and the sedentary being one instance of
such an analysis of tendencies in an actual mixture in terms of their qualitatively
different, virtual sources.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Unoriginality
When Miller compares Stephen Tyler’s “truly radical, transformed ethnography”
to A Thousand Plateaus, he finds Deleuze and Guattari “to be quite old-fashioned”
(Miller 181). In their use of the concept of “assemblages,” Miller recognizes a line
of thought “more consonant with the moderate, ‘reformed’ approach to anthropology
(à la James Clifford) that is now becoming commonplace than with the radically
antirepresentational stance of Tyler” (Miller 186). One of Deleuze and Guattari’s
statements, says Miller, “could have come out of Anthropology as Cultural Critique

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 145
[by Marcus and Fischer] or Writing Culture [by Clifford and Marcus]” (Miller
186). 4 The concept of the assemblage, Miller remarks, “is an eminently clear and
reasonable one” (Miller 186), but not one that supports Deleuze and Guattari’s radical
pretensions to having broken with the fundamental presuppositions of mainstream
anthropology.
Miller is correct that Deleuze and Guattari do not engage in the radical transformed
ethnography proposed by Tyler, but they never claim to do so. He is also correct
that Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to certain anthropological concerns is broadly
consonant with the approach of Clifford, Marcus and Fischer, but the conceptual
differences between the two are not simply a matter of rhetoric. Miller states that
the moderate position of Clifford et al. is that “culture results from shared questions
rather than from predetermined beliefs and exists in a state of dynamic tension with
itself and its others” (Miller 186). Miller sees Deleuze and Guattari as supporting
this view when they assert that a given people may exhibit “the predominance of one
semiotic or another” (MP 149/119) but that “configurations change” (Miller 186). In
the passage Miller cites, however, Deleuze and Guattari are saying not simply that
configurations of signs change, but also that cultural practices are shaped by virtual
regimes of signs that become manifest in ordinary experience only as tendencies
within actual mixtures. Regimes of signs involve “assemblages,” and I would
certainly agree that the latter concept is useful, but neither concept is “eminently
clear and reasonable” in the sense of being straightforward and easily assimilable
within standard conceptual frames.
An assemblage is a heterogeneous collection of entities that somehow function
together. In Deleuze’s analysis, the concept of the assemblage is similar to Foucault’s
notion of the dispositif, “apparatus,” “device,” or “contrivance” (see especially
Deleuze’s “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” in DRF 316–25/338–48). An assemblage
in some regards is like a system in systems theory, a circuit of elements engaged in
an interactive process, yet a circuit that lacks the stability, coherence and structural
integrity often implied by the word “system.” In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari
approach assemblages in terms of desiring-machines, various components cofunctioning
like parts of a machine. But if an assemblage is a machine, it is a kind
of Rube Goldberg machine, one made up of incongruous parts in ad hoc, shifting
relations of widely varying degrees of efficiency and probability. 5 Desiring-machines,
say Deleuze and Guattari, break down as they function, and their breakdown is
constantly fed back into their functioning. Assemblages operate in the same fashion.
Nor are assemblages exactly things. They are also processes of perpetual selfconstruction.
The French agencement, translated as “assemblage,” can mean both an
arrangement of things and the act of arranging those things. An agencement thus is
not just an assemblage of things, but also a process of “agencing,” just as a circuit of
4 It is worth noting that Anthropology as Cultural Critique and Writing Culture were
both published in 1986, six years after the appearance of A Thousand Plateaus.
5 In the Appendix to Anti-Oedipe included in a 1980 reprinting of the work, titled
“Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes,” Deleuze and Guattari reproduce two Rube
Goldberg cartoons as examples of desiring machines.

146
Deleuze’s Way
desiring-machines is a “machining” of machines, an active bringing-into-existence
of its own circuitry.
A regime of signs is a configuration of assemblages that guide the formation,
circulation and perpetuation of signs, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. It is
an agencing of heterogeneous elements, among which one may find practices,
institutions, people, plants, animals, machines, artifacts, and so on, those elements
functioning together to produce signs according to a “regime,” in the sense of a
relatively stable pattern of power relations. Deleuze and Guattari delineate four
regimes of signs, each of which is qualitatively different from the others. Each is a
virtual configuration of differences which only become actualized in mixtures. Miller
chides Deleuze and Guattari for what he deems the excessive claim that “there is no
reason to identify a regime or a semiotic system with a people or historical moment”
(MP 148/119), reading this statement as “the assertion of freedom, the denial of
representation” (Miller 186), but Deleuze and Guattari are simply reiterating that
a regime of signs is a virtual entity and that no actual social group manifests that
virtual entity in a pure state. They are also denying that a regime of signs is to be
understood exclusively as a force shaping societies. A regime of signs is at work
in the anorexic’s relationship to food, in the psychoanalyst’s interaction with her
patient, in Kant’s formulation of the self-legislating moral subject, as well as in
Moses’ relationship with the Israelites. Hence, when Deleuze and Guattari talk about
manipulating “maps” of regimes of signs (the term “map,” in its specific Deleuze-
Guattari usage, denoting something like a “schematic diagram of abstract relations”),
they are not trying to “take maps beyond representation and legibility, into a realm
of pure complexity and incoherence” (Miller 186), but to apply the map of a regime
of signs to varying situations (military, philosophical, medical, musical, and so
on) of diverse dimensions (psychic, individual, familial, tribal, regional, national,
planetary).
Deleuze and Guattari delineate four regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus:
the primitive, the despotic, the passional and the nomadic. Miller argues that a trite
and tired evolutionary pattern is evident in this taxonomy, Deleuze and Guattari’s
protestations to the contrary. Specifically, Deleuze and Guattari “reproduce an
extremely familiar evolutionary scheme” between the despotic and the primitive
regimes, in which “the people of the first regime [the despotic] are the harried
tools of capitalism; those of the second regime are primitive, ‘closer’ to nature,
enjoying polyvocality and ‘relative deterritorialization’” (Miller 187). Miller treats
the nomadic regime as a sort of counter-cultural fantasy that Deleuze and Guattari
generate in order to envision an escape from the capitalist/despotic regime. And the
fourth regime, the passional regime, “evoked in one brief sentence,” according to
Miller, “is not explained” (Miller 185).
Miller observes that later in the plateau on regimes of signs Deleuze and
Guattari “offer the tantalizing possibility” (Miller 185) of a plane of consistency
and an abstract machine. “This ‘plane,’” he comments, “sounds a lot like an ethical
utopia” (Miller 185). The plane of consistency and abstract machine, in fact, are not
tantalizing possibilities, but essential components of Deleuze and Guattari’s model.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two planes: a plane of consistency and a plane
of organization. The plane of consistency is the domain of the virtual, whereas the

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 147
plane of organization is the domain in which the virtual becomes actualized. The
virtual, when viewed in itself, is a field of self-differentiating differences, which
may be understood as shifting vectors of forces, vibrating zones of variations, or
oscillating lines of possible development. It is an unfixed plane of potential processes
of differentiation, which is immanent in the plane of organization and in all the actual
becomings of the world. The plane of consistency unfolds itself within the plane of
organization, serving a kind of “pilot” role, guiding but not dictating trajectories of
development and becoming.
The plane of organization is the actual world of concrete, embodied things, but
it is not exactly the world of commonsense entities. The virtual is “territorialized”
in actual things, fixed, stabilized, coded, organized, regulated. But territorialization
is never total; there is always a counter-force of deterritorialization playing through
the plane of organization, undoing its codes, unsettling its regularities, inducing
metamorphosis. Dominant power configurations enforce fixed structures and codes by
limiting variation and stratifying relations, whereas resistance to that dominant power
seeks to undo structures and codes by intensifying the immanent virtual tendencies
toward variation and destratification. But even the dominant power configurations
are patterned via virtual lines of variation and vectors of potential development; they
simply take form in the actual through a different use of the virtual. For this reason,
the plane of consistency is not utopian. It is the virtual domain which may unfold
itself in a better, different world than the one we inhabit at present, but it may well
unfold in a much worse world, despotic, oppressive, barbaric.
The plane of consistency functions like an “abstract machine,” guiding the
combinations of entities and circuits of interaction that unfold in the actual realm
of the plane of organization. In the case of regimes of signs, the abstract machine
puts two basic “assemblages” together, a discursive “collective assemblage of
enunciation,” and a nondiscursive “machinic assemblage of bodies.” Regimes
of signs are regular patterns of power relations interconnected via discursive and
nondiscursive assemblages.
Miller’s characterization of the passional regime as “not explained” is hard
to comprehend, since Deleuze and Guattari devote several pages to this regime.
In fact, one of their chief objects is to demonstrate how the virtual despotic and
passional regimes interact in specific actual mixtures. Miller’s identification of the
despotic regime with capitalism is unwarranted, for capitalist societies exhibit the
strong influence of both the despotic and the passional regimes, as well as certain
tendencies toward a nomadic dispensation of signs. 6 Deleuze and Guattari plainly
indicate at several points that the despotic regime, above all, is connected with the
State apparatus, and wherever there is a state, be it an empire, a kingdom, a city-
6 The relationship between capitalism and the four regimes of signs is quite complex
and not fully addressed as such in A Thousand Plateaus. In Anti-Oedipus, however, Deleuze
and Guattari speak at length about the capitalist social machine and its circulation of signs,
which they contrast with the despotic machine and its handling of signs. The difficult task
facing anyone interested in the function of regimes of signs in capitalism is that of combining,
integrating, and at certain points reconciling, the analyses of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Plateaus with one another.

148
Deleuze’s Way
state, a nation, or a dictatorship, the despotic regime is at work. This fact is crucial
to understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s views on the relation between the primitive
and the despotic regimes, as well as their claim that “we are not suggesting an
evolutionism, we are not even doing history” (MP 149/119), a claim Miller regards
as hyperbolic and hollow.
Deleuze and Guattari find Pierre Clastres’s La Société contre l’état (1974)
especially helpful in determining the relationship between primitive societies and the
state form of governance. Clastres argues that many traditional tribal cultures exhibit
mechanisms that prevent the formation of a permanent class hierarchy among its
members. Leaders are chosen, but they lead only as long as others agree to follow, and
as soon as the leader’s direction begins to prove unfavorable, the followers replace
the leader. As a result, the leader functions more as a consensus builder who senses
where the group wants to go and then leads them in that direction. The leader often has
special privileges, but the leader’s position usually ends up being more burdensome
than that of the followers. Customs regulating the procurement, distribution and
transmission of wealth also mitigate against permanent accumulation of goods by
any one individual or subgroup. Clastres concludes that many traditional societies
are constructed to prevent social stratification, which he regards as fundamental
to the formation of a state. The members of these anti-state societies, in Clastres’s
terms, have a premonition of the imminent danger of the state form, which they
attempt to ward off through their own social structures and practices. 7
7 Miller criticizes Deleuze and Guattari for saying that the presignifying regime “is
animated by a keen presentiment of what is to come” (MP 148/118) and is therefore, in
Miller’s paraphrase, “able to combat the State (through, for example, cannibalism) without
understanding it” (Miller 184). “These characteristics are tremendously loaded,” says Miller.
“They can come only from a reading of texts concerned with colonized peoples in their
interaction with colonial and postcolonial states: the folk of anthropology. Furthermore, these
assertions reproduce one of the most questionable tactics of colonial anthropology – that
of attributing to native preconscious thoughts which the Western interpreter makes explicit”
(Miller 184). The language of “presentiments” and “warding off” the State (Deleuze and
Guattari’s verb is conjurer) comes from Clastres, a professional anthropologist who based
his analyses of anti-State strategies in traditional societies on years of field work with the
Guarani and Guayaki Indians of South America (see especially, Clastres 161–86). Clastres’s
accounts of his field work do not at all indicate that his observations are of “colonized peoples
in their interaction with colonial and postcolonial states.” Deleuze and Guattari’s remark
about people in the presignifying regime not understanding the State they oppose arises in the
course of their rejection of psychoanalytic terms to describe the phenomenon of presignifying
State opposition: “We should avoid thinking that it is through ignorance, via repression or
foreclosure of the signifier that such a semiotic functions. On the contrary, it is motivated by
a heavy presentiment of that which is to come, it has no need of understanding it to combat
it” (MP 148/118). Later, Deleuze and Guattari summarize Clastres’s position, saying “not
only does he doubt that the State is the product of an assignable economic development, but
he asks if primitives societies do not have the potential concern to ward off and prevent this
monster that they supposedly do not understand” (MP 441/357). It would seem that Deleuze
and Guattari’s remark about the extent of native understanding of the State is simply drawn
up in rebuttal to the argument that non-State societies can only oppose the State through a
direct exposure to an existent State apparatus and a consciously articulated knowledge of

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 149
Deleuze and Guattari regard Clastres’s work as evidence that the State does not
suddenly befall innocent traditional societies from without, but that the State form
is immanent as a virtual potential within those societies. They observe as well that
efforts to fix a date for the origin of the State form have been inconclusive, and
that “the more discoveries archaeologists make, the more empires they uncover”
(MP 445/360). The State form, they conclude, has always existed throughout human
history and prehistory. The State does not develop from some pre-State, but instead
exists as an Urstaat. Deleuze and Guattari extend this argument from governmental
forms to that of regimes of signs, asserting that the four regimes of signs have always
existed. They are virtual entities capable of actualization in diverse combinations
at different times. One may write a history of the appearance of those actual
combinations, but the regimes themselves have no history. There is no evolutionary
schema that charts the development of one regime of signs from another. Hence,
when Deleuze and Guattari say “we are not suggesting an evolutionism, we are
not even doing history” (MP 149/119), they are not idly supporting a vague radical
nonreferentiality but stating a specific position concerning virtual regimes of signs
and their relation to the actual appearance of those regimes in world history. 8
The four regimes of signs have always existed (at least, as long as humans have
been in existence – Deleuze and Guattari do not specifically address the question of
the pre-human origins of human culture), but these regimes are not to be conceived
of as absolute categories or as static structures or essences. Deleuze and Guattari
identify four regimes, but “there are many regimes of signs. Our list itself is arbitrarily
limited” (MP 149/119). Miller treats this assertion as a mere gesture toward radical
indeterminacy, but Deleuze and Guattari’s point is that their analysis is provisional
and empirical, and in fact, such hesitance is essential to their Bergsonian enterprise.
They have surveyed various configurations of signs and related practices that have
its functioning. Deleuze, Guattari and Clastres believe that natives have only a supposed
ignorance of the State apparatus, for they recognize full well the mechanisms and forms of
relation implicit in the State apparatus. Clastres did not live long enough to see A Thousand
Plateaus (he died in 1977), but he did read Anti-Oedipus and responded enthusiastically to
the book, especially to its analysis of non-State traditional societies. In a 1972 roundtable
discussion of Anti-Oedipus, Clastres remarked: “Yes, the State exists in primitive societies,
even in the most miniscule tribe of nomadic hunters. It exists, but it is ceaselessly warded off,
it is ceaselessly prevented from being realized. A primitive society is a society that directs
all its effort toward preventing its chief from becoming a chief (and that effort can go as
far as murder). If there is history, it is the history of class struggle (in societies where there
are classes, of course), so one can say that the history of societies without classes is that
history of their struggle against the latent State; it is the history of their effort to code the flux
of power” (ID 316–17/227). Perhaps Deleuze, Guattari and Clastres are incautious in using
psychological terminology to frame their observations, but such language is understandable
given the heavily psychoanalytic atmosphere of French discourse in the 1970s.
8 Admittedly, Deleuze and Guattari invite confusion when they label the primitive,
despotic, nomadic and passional regimes, respectively, “presignifying,” “signifying,”
“countersignifying” and “postsignifying.” But they repeatedly stress that the temporal markers
in these labels are merely heuristic devices to aid in the exposition of their concepts and not
to be taken as supporting an evolutionary or historical approach to regimes of signs.

150
Deleuze’s Way
appeared in the actual mixtures of world history, and they have identified what
they see as four tendencies, each of which points toward a “pure” regime of signs,
distilled of the distracting presence of other, competing regimes. It may well be that
additional regimes exist, but that Deleuze and Guattari did not recognize them in the
actual mixtures they examined.
It should be clear as well that regimes of signs are not mere mental constructs
invented by their analysts. They have a real existence, though they are only manifest
as tendencies within mixtures in the actual world. Yet they are not to be thought
of as fixed structures. The virtual is a dimension of generative self-differentiating
differences, and regimes of signs are configurations of such differences. They
resemble structures in that they are organized, but that organization is not fully
stable, and the components so organized are always guided in their becoming by the
plane of consistency’s immanent vectors, lines of force, zones of variation, which
are capable of multiple and divergent actualization. We can identify regimes of signs
and differentiate them from one another not by elements that are totally fixed, but by
the periodic oscillations of the elements, their statistical probabilities, their fields of
force relations, their loosely cohesive relational patterns.
Nor are regimes of signs essences, though it is easy to mistake them for such,
since in attempting to characterize these elusive entities with their puzzling mode
of existence, Deleuze and Guattari pile up descriptor after descriptor as if they were
completing the final portrait of the nomadic regime or the despotic regime. One
might say that their effort is to extract from the actual a certain kind of essence, but
it is a “fuzzy” essence, neither exact nor abstract. It is, in a term they borrow from
Husserl, “anexact,” something like the category of “roundness,” midway between
the exact figure of a concrete circle and the abstract idea of the circle. 9 In general,
we might observe, Deleuze and Guattari’s apparent tendencies toward essentialism
should be seen as exercises in anexact description. When they speak of the nomad, the
warrior, the migrant, the ambulant, or the itinerant, for example, they are attempting
9 For Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of Husserl’s concept of the “anexact” (which
Husserl associates with “vague essences”), see MP 454/367. Deleuze and Guattari remark
here that Husserl’s vague essences “may be distinguished from sensible things, but equally
from ideal, royal or imperial, essences. The science that treats these vague essences, protogeometry,
is itself vague, in the sense of vagabond: it is neither inexact like sensible things,
nor exact like ideal essences, but anexact and nonetheless rigorous.” Miller cites Deleuze
and Guattari’s statement that “anexact expressions are absolutely necessary; to designate
something exactly” (MP 31/20) as a means of absolving themselves of the responsibility
of accurately representing the world. He seems to regard the term “anexact” as simply a
synonym for “inexact,” or “imprecise,” and in fact, in the 1993 Diacritics version of his
essay, Miller quotes Deleuze and Guattari as saying that “inexact expressions are utterly
unavoidable.” Although he amends his translation in the 1998 version of the essay, he does not
make reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on the concept of the “anexact.” Miller’s
understanding of “anexact” as “imprecise” is of some consequence, since imprecision is one
of the faults he finds in Deleuze and Guattari: “By virtue of being so willfully peripatetic, the
authors risk superficiality and imprecision in their understanding of specific situations. This is
a general problem within A Thousand Plateaus …” (Miller 190–91).

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 151
to assemble the characteristics of a particular set of generative differences, not some
ideal universal. 10
Finally, we should observe that a regime of signs has a complex relationship to
language that can easily be misconstrued. In many ways, Deleuze and Guattari’s effort
to explain the concept of a regime of signs parallels Foucault’s attempt to articulate
his notion of the énoncé, or “statement.” In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault
says that a statement is something that takes place in language, but that is not quite
the same thing as language. Different words may enunciate the same statement, and
the same word or words may enunciate different statements. Even individual letters
may function as a statement, as in the sequence AZERT, which designates a row of
characters on a French typewriter and which functions as a statement in a typing
manual. Statements have a certain iterability, and a certain mode of being, peculiar
to themselves, immanent within language but not reducible to it.
All of these characteristics may be attributed to regimes of signs. Like statements,
regimes of signs are indivisible from actions. They inform the pragmatics of linguistic
use, but they are not reducible to language itself, especially to “language” as construed
by mainstream linguistics, which tends to view all contextual and pragmatic aspects
of language use as “extra-linguistic.” This is the point of Deleuze and Guattari’s
comment that “regimes of signs are assemblages of enunciation, which cannot be
adequately accounted for by any linguistic category … Regimes of signs thus are
defined by variables interior to enunciation itself, but which remain exterior to the
constants of language and irreducible to linguistic categories” (MP 174–5/140). In
a footnote, Miller cites this passage as evidence that Deleuze and Guattari want to
escape responsibility for their own words, for
… this reassertion of multiplicity and insistence on the heterogeneity of their own
writing cannot prevent a reading of what does manage to assert itself within the linguistic
categories that the authors use. Deleuze and Guattari want their regimes to be exempt from
the rule of language, but the only way that these regimes can be created is in language.
[Miller 142]
Far from being an apologia for irresponsibility, however, Deleuze and Guattari’s
remarks are addressed to very specific issues in the conceptualization of linguistics,
which they discuss in some detail in Plateau Four of A Thousand Plateaus. When
10 Miller raises the issue of essentialism and Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization
of cultural “types” when he criticizes Deleuze and Guattari for their use of Edmund Leach’s
comparative study of sorcery in different cultures. Leach’s point is that the sorcerer’s
function varies from culture to culture, whereas Deleuze and Guattari use Leach to construct
an essentialized portrait of the sorcerer. Miller admits that though A Thousand Plateaus is
crowded with “nearly allegorical figures, which we should not forget, have in other contexts
served as the stock characters of essentialism” (Miller 190), Deleuze and Guattari can hardly
be accused of essentialism. But in their utilization of Leach, “by constructing ‘the sorcerer,’
Deleuze and Guattari have by far surpassed the ethnographic authority of their source” (Miller
190). Deleuze and Guattari’s object in referring to Leach, however, is not to seek authority
but to cite empirical instances of sorcery, which Leach has gathered and interpreted, and
which Deleuze and Guattari are now interpreting according to their own very different set of
theoretical assumptions.

152
Deleuze’s Way
they say that regimes of signs are “exterior to the constants of language and
irreducible to linguistic categories,” they are asserting that regimes of signs cannot
be assimilated within the theoretical framework of conventional linguistics, which
privileges constants over variables, and which strictly isolates the linguistic from
the pragmatic and the contextual. Their object is not somehow to escape the burdens
of using language but to make precise the elusive nature of regimes of signs as
configurations of practices immanent within, but not reducible to, language.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Imprecision
One of Miller’s chief objections to Deleuze and Guattari’s work is that it is careless
and given to imprecision. Miller offers as a “particularly egregious” (Miller
191) instance of such imprecision Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to “African
commercial circuits” and their footnote citing Godelier’s essay on the introduction
of money among “the Siane of New Guinea” (MP 171/137). As Miller correctly
observes, Deleuze and Guattari here commit a regrettable error in confusing the
African nation of Guinea with New Guinea. For a full page, Miller expounds on the
significance of this error, which he views as a symptom of a cavalier disregard of
facts inherent in nomadic thought, according to whose rules, “any dualism is merely a
temporary fiction, and any factual mistake should be overlooked” (Miller 191). I find
no evidence, however, that Deleuze and Guattari believe that factual mistakes should
be overlooked, nor have I discovered widespread evidence of imprecision in their
citations or in their references to facts. In my study of the works of Deleuze, Guattari
and Deleuze-Guattari, I have found glaring errors of fact, such as the confusion of
Guinea and New Guinea, to be quite rare. And as I have read through the thousands
of footnotes in their writings, I have been surprised at how reliable and accurate
their citations are. One comes across occasional transpositions of numerals in page
citations, and a few instances in which the publication information is less complete
than one might like, but on the whole their references conform to the standards
of traditional scholarship. Their summaries of the studies they cite, whether in the
body of the text or in the footnotes, have struck me as uniformly judicious and often
extremely insightful. My conclusion is that the confusion of Guinea and New Guinea
is not evidence of a disregard of facts, but a sign of human frailty – unfortunate
certainly, but, I would hope, forgivable.
Miller implies, however, that this kind of sloppiness exists elsewhere in A
Thousand Plateaus, and as an instance of “the authors’ quirky use of anthropological
materials and footnotes,” he cites a passage in which Deleuze and Guattari call upon
the anthropologists Robert Lowie and Claude Lévi-Strauss to testify to a contrast
between Crow and Hopi ways of interpreting signs. The passage in question reads
as follows:
Robert Lowie tells how the Crow and the Hopi react differently when their wives cheat on
them (the Crow are hunter nomads, whereas the Hopi are sedentaries tied to an imperial
tradition): “A Crow Indian, whose wife has been unfaithful, slashes her face, whereas,
without losing his calm, a Hopi, victim of the same misfortune, withdraws and prays that
drought and famine fall upon the village.” [MP 142/113]

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 153
After this citation, Miller parenthetically comments, “there is no footnote in ATP
at this point to identify the text that was quoted. I have not been able to locate this
quotation in any of Lowie’s writings” (Miller 188). Miller then cites the passage
from A Thousand Plateaus immediately following the supposed quotation from
Lowie, in which Deleuze and Guattari refer to Lévi-Strauss’s own comment on
Lowie’s observation:
One can see on which side is the paranoia, the despotic element or the signifying regime,
“the bigotry,” as Lévi-Strauss says: “In effect, for the Hopi everything is connected: a
social disturbance or a domestic incident puts in question the system of the universe,
whose levels are united by multiple correspondences; a disruption on one plane is only
intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of other disruptions, affecting the other
levels.” [MP 143/113]
Miller is correct that Deleuze and Guattari do not provide a footnote immediately
following their citation of Lowie, but they do supply a note after the Lévi-Strauss
citation (as Miller duly observes), referring the reader to Lévi-Strauss’s Preface to the
French translation of Sun Chief, a work Miller describes as “an anthropological ‘astold-to’
autobiography of a Hopi Chief” (Miller 188). If one consults Lévi-Strauss’s
Preface, one finds the following:
To the author of these lines [that is, Lévi-Strauss], the great American ethnologist Robert
H. Lowie confided, in the last years of his life, that, of the Crow and the Hopi, among
whom he had lived and worked, only the first had he found congenial, but that he never
managed to like the second: “Thus,” he continued, “a Crow Indian, whose wife has been
unfaithful, slashes her face, whereas, without losing his calm, a Hopi, victim of the same
misfortune, withdraws and prays that drought and famine fall upon the village.” In effect,
for the Hopi everything is connected: a social disturbance or a domestic incident puts in
question the system of the universe, whose levels are united by multiple correspondences;
a disruption on one plane is only intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of
other disruptions, affecting the other levels. 11
Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari could have come upon a slightly clearer means of
indicating their sources, but their use of the passage hardly seems irresponsible and
misleading, once one consults the reference they do provide. It is not surprising that
Miller was “not able to locate this quotation in any of Lowie’s writings,” since it was
an oral communication reported by Lévi-Strauss, but in his survey of the writings
of Lowie Miller might have come upon a passage enunciating the same contrast of
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Preface to Don C. Talayesva, Soleil Hopi: L’autobiographie d’un
indien hopi, trans. Geneviève Mayou (Paris, 1959), p. vi. In Didier Eribon’s Conversations
with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paul Wissing (Chicago, IL, 1991), Lévi-Strauss observes that
anthropologists do not always get along well with the people they study, and that “One day
every anthropologist finds himself or herself faced with this sort of situation. Robert Lowie
was a great anthropologist who honored me with his friendship. His works on the Crow and
the Hopi are authoritative. However, he confided to me that he got along perfectly with the
first, while he could hardly stand the second” (p. 152).

154
Deleuze’s Way
Crow and Hopi mentalities. In his autobiography, Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist: A
Personal Record, Lowie comments:
The contrast between Pueblo and Plains Indian mentality seems to me further illustrated
by the way in which violent resentment expresses itself. The Plainsman sometimes acted
like a savage, as when a Blackfoot cuckold cut off the tip of an adulteress’s nose, yet
the reaction, repulsive as it was (incidentally to the Crow, too) is humanly intelligible.
Compare with this the reactions of a legendary Zuni who does nothing to either his wife
or to her paramour, but revenges himself upon the community at large. The disgruntled
village chief in a Hopi myth causes a flood or earthquake or even encourages the enemy
to demolish his pueblo. 12
This published passage at least shows that Deleuze and Guattari’s reputedly
unattributed quotation of Lowie roughly reflects Lowie’s actual views, and that
Deleuze and Guattari’s phantom citation is not a pure fabrication, as one might infer
from Miller’s comment.
But Miller’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Lowie and Lévi-Strauss
extends beyond the fine questions of proper citational practice. As Deleuze and
Guattari incorporate the words of Lowie and Lévi-Strauss into their own texts, they
appropriate the authority of these experts and eventually start speaking not simply as
professional anthropologists but as themselves native Americans:
Deleuze and Guattari’s incorporated voice, which begins as that of a reader of texts
(“Robert Lowie describes how … the Crow are nomadic hunters”), and a very confident
one (“It is easy to see …”), finds itself in real harmony with Lévi-Strauss’s treatment
of the Hopi and winds up speaking as if they, Deleuze and Guattari themselves, were
either in total control of Hopi thought or were Hopi themselves. Through the power of
anthropological borrowing, the authors have achieved a mind-meld with an alien people.
[Miller 189]
Miller identifies Deleuze and Guattari’s use of free indirect discourse to bring about
a mind-meld with the Hopi as “one of the most powerful modes of anthropological
discourse” (Miller 189), and hence as evidence that Deleuze and Guattari’s claim
that nomadology is “nonanthropological” (Miller 178) is false. But Miller’s analysis
implies as well that Deleuze and Guattari are here repeating the colonialist/imperialist
practice of dominating and speaking for the Other.
Were Deleuze and Guattari writing an ethnography, perhaps they could be
faulted for their incautious rhetoric, but their main purpose here is to characterize
two mentalities and then extract from those mentalities the tendencies that disclose
the basic features of a regime of signs. By and large, I find their presentation of the
two mentalities relatively clear and not significantly different from the descriptions
offered by Lowie and Lévi-Strauss. Miller’s analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s
rhetoric, however, is designed to show that Deleuze and Guattari are unwittingly
speaking not simply as anthropologists, but as bad anthropologists. Such, I believe,
is the insinuation introduced by Miller via a somewhat oblique footnote concerning
12 Robert H. Lowie, Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist: A Personal Record, (Berkeley, CA,
1959), p. 75.

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 155
Sun Chief, the work for which Lévi-Strauss wrote the French translation’s Preface.
Miller cites the original English 1942 edition of the book, and then adds “The
pseudo-autobiography, in which the anthropologist would write the life story of an
informant, was a popular device. In this case, the anthropologist tells us, Don C.
Talayesva of Arizona ‘definitely feels that this is his book’” (Miller 242). The past
tense “was a popular device” implies that this practice is no longer acceptable, and
the remark of Talayesva makes it clear that the pseudo-autobiography is essentially
an exploitative genre. The footnote’s function, as I see it, is first to associate Deleuze
and Guattari with a dubious source, and then to suggest that their stylistic “mindmeld
with an alien people” is a repetition of Talayesva’s now-discredited practice.
At this juncture, we might digress briefly to observe in this footnote the workings
of what might be called the “contamination footnote” strategy. Miller’s note does
not state directly that Deleuze and Guattari are imitating Talayesva’s exploitative
practice, but the reader is invited to make the connection. Further, the footnote
also serves to discredit Lévi-Strauss, since he was foolish enough to endorse this
pseudo-autobiography by furnishing it with a preface. The contagion then extends
from Lévi-Strauss to Lowie, since Lowie’s analysis is seconded by the suspect Lévi-
Strauss, until all are contaminated with Talayesva’s virus.
A variant of this strategy is the footnote appended to Deleuze and Guattari’s remark
that they are constructing “maps of regimes of signs” which they can manipulate
and reconfigure, retaining now certain coordinates or dimensions and now others,
in order to describe “a social formation, a pathological delirium, a historical event,
etc.” (MP 149–50/119). Miller’s note reads: “In his book How to Lie with Maps …
Mark Monmonier shows how this kind of thing is often done: ‘map authors can
experiment freely with features, measurements, area of coverage, and symbols and
can pick the map that best presents their case or supports their unconscious bias’”
(Miller 242). Deleuze and Guattari’s point is that regimes of signs may be observed
in diverse situations of varying nature and scale, and that their analysis will require
adjustments in the model of the regime that reflect the features that are salient in a
given context but not so in others. Miller’s note, however, suggests that Deleuze and
Guattari’s mapping technique is fundamental to their entire enterprise, and that their
manipulation of maps opens them to unconscious bias. The attack is oblique, but the
contaminating implication is clear: when Monmonier “shows how this kind of thing
is done,” he shows also how Deleuze and Guattari are able to lie with maps.
As a final variant of the contamination strategy, consider Miller’s note concerning
the African secret societies of leopard-men. Deleuze and Guattari briefly discuss
the leopard-men societies and cite as their source Paul Ernest Joset’s Les Sociétés
secretes des hommes-léopards en Afrique noire. After detailing Joset’s role as a
colonial administrator, Miller appends the following: “The ‘leopard-man’ movement
was also made known to an enormous readership through the comic-strip book Tintin
au Congo, by the Belgian author Hergé. Accompanied by racist images and spoken
in petit nègre, the text reports on a secret society …” (Miller 242). The note has
little to do with Joset’s book, and even less with Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis,
but the purpose of this tangential aside, clearly, is to contaminate Joset and Deleuze-
Guattari with the taint of racism.

156
Deleuze and Guattari’s Colonialism
Deleuze’s Way
Miller’s use of the contamination strategy is not limited to footnotes but extends to
significant portions of his main text as well. His treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s
reference to Joset and the leopard-men is a particularly striking instance of this
strategy’s deployment. Joset “is a strange source for anyone writing in the late 1970s,”
says Miller, since Joset’s book, “published in 1955, during the time of colonial power
in Africa … is deeply involved in the exercise of that power” (Miller 194). Miller
concedes that “Deleuze and Guattari cite other books and articles about Africa, of
course, all of which are more respectable than Joset’s” (Miller 196). But his interest
in general, as he states early in his essay, is “in a number of obscure and outdated
sources that [Deleuze and Guattari] read and used,” for which reason he “will not
attempt the most obvious approach to the question [of the use of anthropology in A
Thousand Plateaus], a systematic reading of how Deleuze and Guattari treat their
principal, canonical anthropological sources” (Miller 182). (Such an approach, he
parenthetically jokes, would be “arborescent” [182].)
Miller first establishes Joset’s identity as a former colonial administrator in the
Belgian Congo, who led the suppression of the Kitawala movement in Kivu province
in 1944. Miller then outlines Joset’s colonialist views on indigenous African culture,
which show a degree of respect for native traditions, but ultimately support a
transformation of native societies in accordance with Western Enlightenment norms.
Miller points out that Joset’s sources for information about the leopard-men secret
societies are chiefly “colonial archives, journal articles, and monographs” (Miller
195), not native sources, and that Joset himself worked diligently to eradicate
leopard-men societies. As for Joset’s description of the leopard-men societies itself,
Miller reports that “it is full of sensational and lurid tales” (Miller 194). Joset,
“like Deleuze and Guattari,” says Miller, “places great faith in his sources. By this
cumulative method, Joset spreads before the reader’s eyes a cornucopia of horrors,
with widows buried alive, entrails wrapped around a victim’s neck, grisly mutilations,
and more; no rumor of an atrocity is too tenuous to be reported here as fact” (Miller
195). Joset’s study “is not the work of a professional ethnographer, but, rather, of a
professional administrator” (Miller 194), and though Miller states that “the veracity
of Les Sociétés secretes” is something “which I have not attempted to determine”
(Miller 195), he clearly finds it suspect. His final assessment is that “Joset’s book is
a piece of anthropological kitsch” (Miller 196).
Joset’s book does indeed cite several reports of murders, mutilations and other
atrocities, but one looks in vain there for a lurid or sensational presentation of those
reports. Joset’s effort first is to gather all available information on the leopard-men
societies, and then to assess the import and viability of his sources. He does not
seem especially credulous, and in fact at several points he dismisses various reports
and assertions as false or distorted. (For example, he states categorically that no
Europeans have been the victims of leopard-men murders, rumors to the contrary.) 13
He is forthright in framing his conclusions and recommendations, but these he
13 Paul-Ernest Joset, Les Sociétés secrètes des hommes-léopards en Afrique noire (Paris,
1955), p. 117.

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 157
presents in a section separate from his survey of the data on leopard-men societies.
His final judgment is that the leopard-men murders are real phenomena and not
imagined events, as many colonial administrators believe; that colonial policies are
responsible for the formation of leopard-men societies, which are warped versions
of indigenous institutions created in response to colonial efforts to suppress native
culture; that the leopard-men societies have terrorized the native population and
should be eliminated; and that African culture should be transformed through civic,
secular education, free of superstition, for both sexes. 14
Joset’s study may not meet the standards of contemporary ethnography, but to
dismiss it as a “piece of anthropological kitsch” is excessive. Miller chides Deleuze
and Guattari for using this source, and particularly for stating that it is “one of the
best studies on this subject” (MP 297/539). One might ask, then, what sources
they should have cited. Miller does not say. One might also ask what Deleuze
and Guattari mean by “best” when they cite Joset’s as “one of the best studies.”
Miller insinuates that Deleuze and Guattari have probably not consulted any other
sources, though they imply as much by singling out Joset’s from other studies. To
date, I have found only one other book-length study of the leopard-men societies,
African Leopard Men (1954) by Birger Lindskog, a professor of sociology and
specialist in African studies at Uppsala University – not a colonial administrator.
Much of the information in Joset appears in Lindskog’s study. Lindskog’s survey is
somewhat broader than Joset’s, but not especially so. If Joset’s work is a “cornucopia
of horrors,” Lindskog’s is even more so, though in neither case is the exposition
of the data lurid or sensationalistic. Both books reflect the anthropological views
of their times, but neither seems grossly to misrepresent the facts of the murders
associated with leopard-men societies. If one consults Jeremy Rich’s 2003 essay
in the International Journal of African Historical Studies, “‘Leopard Men,’ Slaves,
and Social Conflict in Libreville (Gabon), c. 1860–1879,” for example, one finds
signs of different methodological assumptions, but the facts presented are consonant
with those in Joset and Lindskog. The same ritual murders, involving beheadings,
mutilations and organ removal, are reported by Rich, as well as the same denials
by colonial officials that the murders are real; and Rich, like Jolet and Lindskog,
finds strong evidence that the pressures of colonial rule led to the formation of the
leopard-men societies. If, then, by “one of the best studies” Deleuze and Guattari
mean one of the most comprehensive single sources of information available on the
subject, it is not unreasonable or outrageous to assert that Joset’s book fulfills that
description. Miller makes little of the fact that the preface to Jolet’s book was written
by Marcel Griaule, one of the doyens of African anthropology in France, but perhaps
Griaule recognized that the book has at least a degree of merit and is somewhat more
than mere anthropological kitsch.
Joset’s study is not central to Deleuze and Guattari’s enterprise. They refer to
Joset only in two footnotes, and the existence of leopard-men societies itself is not
crucial to their argument. Miller prefaces his discussion of Joset by observing that
“Deleuze and Guattari derive their notion of becoming-animal from anthropological
texts” (Miller 193), thereby implying that Joset’s text likewise has special
14 See especially ibid., pp. 195–7.

158
Deleuze’s Way
significance in Deleuze and Guattari’s investigation. It is in Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature (1975) that Deleuze and Guattari first take up the topic of becominganimal,
however, and “The Metamorphosis” is a much more likely source of
inspiration for the concept than any anthropological text. Yet even if anthropological
texts had inspired them in the development of the concept, the relationship between
becoming-animal and folk beliefs in lycanthropy or other lore about human-animal
metamorphosis is complex and oblique. Miller stresses that both Jolet and Deleuze-
Guattari believe “this ‘becoming-animal’ is real” (Miller 196), but such an assertion
only muddles distinctions Deleuze and Guattari go to great lengths to maintain.
Jolet argues that the ritual murders are real, not imagined, but he does not believe
that the murderers actually transform themselves into leopards, as do many of the
indigenous population. Jolet has no beliefs about “becoming-animal,” since it is a
concept unlike any available to him when he writes. Deleuze and Guattari claim that
“becoming-animal” is real, but “becoming-animal” has little to do with dressing up
like animals or imitating them. It is a process of becoming-other that allows people
to undo conventional codes of the human through an interaction with animals. In the
stories of shape-shifters, werewolves, leopard-men and other such human-animal
transformations, which exist in all the world’s cultures, Deleuze and Guattari find
evidence not of literal bodily metamorphoses of humans but of real processes of
becoming-other that have been expressed through these stories. “Becoming-animal,”
however, manifests itself in the actual only as a tendency, and Deleuze and Guattari’s
effort is to extract the virtual process from the actual and establish it as an element
within a network of related concepts of virtual processes. Not surprisingly, Miller’s
analysis does little to clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, for
its main function is to link the concept to anthropological sources in general, then to
Joset in particular, and thereby to establish a circuit of contamination that will infect
A Thousand Plateaus as a whole. In citing the credulous, lurid and unreliable book
by the racist Joset, Deleuze and Guattari have swallowed the virus of the colonial
mentality and allowed it to propagate and thoroughly taint their thought.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Primitivism
Yet another deployment of the contamination strategy may be found in Miller’s
commentary on Pierre Hubac’s Les Nomades and its similarities to A Thousand
Plateaus. Before examining the details of Miller’s commentary, however, we should
pause briefly to reflect on Deleuze and Guattari’s choice of sources in general. Miller
notes that “the archive of nomad thought … is overwhelmingly academic: the vast
majority of sources and citations are either tracts by great thinkers, philosophers,
and literary writers, on the one hand, or, on the other, scholarly studies reflecting
research on specific topics” (Miller 176). Miller concedes that a few references to
popular culture appear, but “for all its eclecticism, A Thousand Plateaus remains
primarily a work of European ‘high’ counterculture” (Miller 176–7). Miller’s
characterization of Deleuze and Guattari’s citations is basically accurate, though for
reasons that may not be immediately apparent. Throughout his writings, Deleuze
remains dedicated to philosophy as a practice, even if the discipline itself has often

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 159
functioned as a repressive and stultifying force. He often makes clear that he is doing
philosophy, by which he means that he is creating concepts. Never does he abandon
rigor or seriousness in that activity, even if it does entail humor and play as well. He
certainly does not champion sloppiness, vagueness, or misleading research practices.
Guattari’s work shows a similar commitment to rigorous and serious thought. Both
Deleuze and Guattari recognize the elitist nature of much scholarship, however, and
they try to be open to influences outside the realm of academic orthodoxy. Popular
culture is one possible source of inspiration for their thought, but a great deal of
popular culture is generated by a mind-numbing industry of consumption, whose
products are tired replicas of worn-out orthodoxies. As a result, their references to
popular culture are somewhat limited. And their respect for rigorous thought and
commitment to philosophy lead them to cite a number of respectable academic
sources.
Nevertheless, there is an important element of the nomadic archive that Miller
does not mention, even though it is central to his critique of Deleuze and Guattari.
If popular culture often does not supply them with adequate tools for challenging
academic orthodoxy, occasionally they find such tools in idiosyncratic works
– memoirs of madmen (such as Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous
Illness), marginally pornographic novels (Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs), eccentric
handbooks (Lipot Szondi’s Experimental Diagnostics of Drives), outmoded treatises
(Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire’s Principles of Zoological History). What they find in such
sources is not ready-made components for their arguments, but hints and suggestions
of possible lines of inquiry, materials with potential for development, modification
or transformation. Deleuze and Guattari’s goal is to think otherwise, and sometimes
a work which, as a whole, is insane, perverse, bizarre, quirky, or simply mistaken
in its governing assumptions, will provide inspiration for the invention of concepts
that are rigorously constructed, cogently interconnected, and viable as elements of a
genuinely creative thought.
One such work is Pierre Hubac’s Les Nomades (1948). Unlike Joset’s study, which
is a tangential source, Hubac’s work is an important one, even though Deleuze and
Guattari cite it only once, and only apropos of Hubac’s assertion of the importance of
climate in nomadism. Miller introduces Hubac via the contamination gambit, saying
that Les Nomades “comes from the same category of dated and dubious anthropology
as Joset’s book on leopard-men” (Miller 198), but Hubac’s method differs greatly
from Joset’s. It is an essayistic, lyrical meditation on nomadism, somewhat in the
vein of a Nietzschean essay in universal history. Miller describes the book as “a
classic example of anthropology that is more about the author’s personal vision
and social ethics than about an actual society” (Miller 198–9), but classifying it as
“anthropology” is strained at best. Hubac sees the opposition of the nomad and the
sedentary as the universal motor of history, and his essay is an attempt to narrate the
history of the world from this perspective, in a style that is deliberately emotive and
evocative, supported by occasional academic references, but without great concern
for the niceties of scholarly objectivity. It is precisely the kind of quirky, at times
monomaniacal, sometimes brilliant, and occasionally provocative work that Deleuze
and Guattari find useful in attempting to think differently.

160
Deleuze’s Way
If the line of contagion in the Joset example is from a footnote about racism in
a comic book, through an ad hominem attack on Joset, to a discrediting of Joset’s
research and finally to Deleuze and Guattari, in the Hubac instance the line is more
direct, from Hubac’s bad anthropology to Deleuze and Guattari’s bad appropriation
of it. The correspondences between Hubac and Deleuze-Guattari are actually quite
fascinating, and they would be worthy of an extended examination (though at
another time). There is some truth to Miller’s remark that Hubac’s “discourse is (to
risk a genealogical metaphor) a cousin once removed, of an older generation, to the
discourse of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Treatise on Nomadology’” (Miller 199). The
question, of course, is how far removed this cousin is. Miller’s answer is, not much.
He capably points out parallels between Hubac and Deleuze-Guattari, duly notes
certain differences in their views, and suggests that what they ultimately share is a
view of nomads as opponents of the state; inventors of the war machine; proponents
of an ethics of flow; and inhabitants of an unlimited space. Most importantly,
“underlying both texts is a fundamental, unshakable sympathy for nomadism, a
desire to rehabilitate nomads, to rewrite or unwrite history” (Miller 204).
All these commonalities are significant, but it is essential to recognize the
incommensurable differences that underlie the conceptual frameworks of the two
texts. Hubac’s history is an evolutionary account of two distinct human types, nomads
and sedentaries, biologically and psychologically different from one another. Human
history is an eternal conflict between the two types. Late in his essay, Hubac sums
up the history he has detailed:
We have seen the nomadic herdsman become warrior, then merchant, caravaneer,
aristocrat, and end up emperor of the universe; we have witnessed the formation of urban
and rural societies, because of the nomad, thanks to the nomad, and we can consider that
this anarchist is the initial factor of every organization, of every city, of every nation, of
every great human collectivity. 15
Obviously, Hubac’s project is at odds with Deleuze and Guattari’s at every point.
Deleuze and Guattari would reject Hubac’s biologism, his naïve evolutionism, his
delineation of the nomad’s changing social roles from herdsman to emperor, his use
of primarily psychological mechanisms to account for historical change, his focus
on the opposition of nomads and sedentaries to the exclusion of all other categories,
his genetic account of the formation of the state, his attribution of all forms of social
organization to the nomad – the list could easily go on.
And if we consider the most salient individual elements common to the two texts,
we must again pay close attention to their conceptual differences. Hubac opposes
nomads to the state, but he says little about the state per se, save that it is formed
in response to nomads. Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, expend great efforts
developing a concept of the State apparatus, its relationship to cities, capitalism,
number, science, subjectivity, thought, and so on. Hubac ties the invention of the war
machine to a specific period in history, when Genghis Khan establishes a new, more
disciplined military order, and he uses the term without offering any elaboration of
its specific meaning. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, do not associate the war
15 Pierre Hubac, Les Nomades (Paris, 1948), p. 229 (translation mine).

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 161
machine with a given phase in the development of nomadic existence, and they
turn the descriptive phrase “war machine” into a properly philosophical concept
within a network of concepts. Hubac speaks metaphorically and poetically of flows,
whereas Deleuze and Guattari use the vocabulary of flows in A Thousand Plateaus
after having devoted virtually the entirety of Anti-Oedipus to the exposition of a
philosophy of flows and fluxes. Finally, though the “empty space” of Hubac’s nomads
resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space,” again, Hubac’s notion is vague
and unspecified, whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s is defined in detail and in ways that
would seem counterintuitive to the basic sense of “smooth” as opposed to “striated”
(the two terms they oppose in Plateau Fourteen: The Smooth and the Striated).
This last point is especially important, given Miller’s criticism of Deleuze and
Guattari for indulging in “the dream of a utopia of undividedness that has so often
characterized Western thought about Africa. The imagery of nomadology often
describes this utopia in terms of ‘empty space,’ what Deleuze and Guattari call
‘smooth space.’ The ‘making-empty’ of that space is a classic gesture of primitivism”
(Miller 198). This characterization of smooth space ignores one of its fundamental
qualities – it is heterogeneous, whereas striated space is homogeneous (MP 593–
4/475–6).
Paradoxically, striated space, through its divisions, creates an undivided,
homogeneous medium, whereas smooth space, while dissolving grids and
coordinates, creates a space of heterogeneous multiplicities. One might think that
smooth space would be infinite and endless, as opposed to a finite and closed striated
space, but such is the case only in a paradoxical sense. Striated space constitutes
a “relative global” space, as opposed to the “local absolute” of smooth space. The
relative global is a whole but one that always manifests its components as relative
elements, whereas the local absolute is an open whole only manifest in the local. It
may well be that Hubac’s “empty space” is an index of his primitivism, but Deleuze
and Guattari’s “smooth space” is conceptually distinct from that notion, as well as
the common notions of “empty space” associated with “the dream of a utopia of
undividedness” (Miller 198).
Deleuze and Guattari’s Pseudoradicalism
In his discussion of Joset and Hubac, Miller does raise a very serious issue – that of
the theme of violence in A Thousand Plateaus. Miller points out that the leopard-men
of Joset’s study actually kill people. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not mention
murder, “it is clear that the African practice of becoming-animal as described by
Joset is intrinsically linked to murder. This is characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s
happy-talk revolution: the benefits are advertised in the text, while the bodies are
hidden, not even in the footnotes, but in the original source material” (Miller 195).
In a similar vein, Miller remarks that Hubac
… confronts the violence and death that “the” nomad war machine causes, in a way that
Deleuze and Guattari fail to do. The ethics of flow described in Hubac’s book is “absorbed”
into the “Treatise on Nomadology,” but in the process of digestion, the source is altered,
as others were. As was the case with their use of Joset’s book, violent death has been left

162
Deleuze’s Way
out … The source material, as it enters A Thousand Plateaus, is at once evacuated of its
representational force, and, in effect, sanitized for the benefits of Deleuze and Guattari’s
“happy” nomadology. [Miller 205]
What Miller suggests is that Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in a form of radical
chic, in which they romanticize non-Western cultural practices, such as ritual murder
or nomadic war, and recommend revolutionary action patterned on those practices,
while simultaneously ignoring the violence necessarily associated with such action.
In this reading, Deleuze and Guattari’s antirepresentational stance is merely a means
of denying the real consequences of revolutionary struggle. Deleuze and Guattari’s
stance, however, is only antirepresentational in a specific, philosophical sense; they
do not deny the reality of leopard-men murders, nomadic war, or the referential
relevance of texts about those phenomena. Deleuze and Guattari do transform
Joset and Hubac when they absorb them within their text, but they do so in order to
develop a set of concepts that are grounded in presuppositions that are unlike those
of their sources. They are not trying to sanitize ritual murder and nomadic war by
denying referentiality, nor are they recommending that people go out and commit
ritual murder and engage in nomadic war. The “happy talk” radicals Miller discerns
in Deleuze and Guattari are revolutionaries who romanticize social struggle and
ignore its violent consequences. They celebrate the actions of leopard-men societies
and nomadic hordes while pretending that the real suffering and death inherent in
those actions do not exist.
In some ways this criticism resembles that leveled at Deleuze and Guattari
following the publication of Anti-Oedipus. Many assumed that Deleuze and
Guattari’s schizoanalysis romanticized schizophrenia, and that Deleuze and Guattari
were summoning everyone to “go schizo.” But they stressed in Anti-Oedipus that
the “schizo” they saw as a promising possibility was not the same as the “schizo”
in the psychiatric hospital. They insisted that the kind of individual they envision,
and more importantly, the mode of social existence within which such an individual
could arise, do not yet exist. Some critics read this position as an appropriation of the
real phenomenon of schizophrenia for some theoretical revolutionary purpose, and
hence as indicative of an insensitivity to the suffering of mental patients and an elitist
isolation from the concrete realm of human pain. At least in Guattari’s case, however,
this charge lacked force. Guattari had spent many years working with schizophrenics
in psychiatric hospitals, and he was all too aware of the practical dimensions of radical
action within that context. He himself was particularly critical of the romanticization
of schizophrenia in some strains of the anti-psychiatry movement, especially as it
was exhibited in the case of R.D. Laing’s patient Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall
(See RM 125–36/51–9). Yet he saw in schizophrenics possibilities for alternative
modes of thought, and in his collaboration with Deleuze he was able to develop a
conceptual framework for articulating those possibilities and integrating them with
possibilities developed out of other sources.
Deleuze and Guattari are not recommending that we imitate leopard-men or
nomads but that we think otherwise, and that we extract from the real phenomena
of leopard-men societies and nomadic hordes the processes of becoming-other
that might facilitate new thought. By no means do Deleuze and Guattari ignore

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 163
the real violence of ritual murders or nomadic warfare. In fact, the “Treatise on
Nomadology” may finally be seen as a treatise on violence, which is the topic
Deleuze and Guattari explicitly address at the end of the plateau. They are very
much aware of the dangers of “becoming-other,” of the precarious nature of any
dissolution of fixed social structures and the potential it holds for violent action.
(This is the point they make when discussing the black hole of the suicidal body
without organs and the microfascisms of the cancerous body without organs [see
Chapter 3].) The nomadology plateau distinguishes the war machine from the
State apparatus, and in so doing problematizes the relationship between violence
and the state. The intuition Deleuze and Guattari are exploring is that the creative,
metamorphic power of becoming-other is linked to violence in the war machine, and
that the state appropriates the war machine for its purposes, directing its violence
and controlling its metamorphic force. Deleuze and Guattari find the war machine
among nomads, warriors, secret societies, and so on, and recognize its close ties to
violence, but finally they ask whether it might be possible that a war machine can exist
without having war as its object – in other words, whether the creative, metamorphic
power of becoming-other might be divorced from violence. The question is a serious
one, posed at the level of basic philosophical presuppositions. As I see it, the issue
finally is whether there is a real difference between puissance and pouvoir, between
good power (potency, capability, empowerment) and bad power (power over others,
domination, violence), or whether the ontological model of power, forces, dynamism
– in short, physics – necessarily brings with it violence and removes any viable
distinction between puissance and pouvoir. It may be that Deleuze and Guattari are
right and we can separate war from the war machine, pouvoir from puissance; it may
be that pouvoir and puissance cannot be separated and we must live with this fact; or
it may be that the entire model of physical forces is wrong, and we need to develop
a different model for thinking about the cosmos. These are the questions addressed
in A Thousand Plateaus, I believe, not those of a happy-talk revolution that ignores
the reality of violence.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Irrelevance
At the end of his essay, Miller asks, “what should be done with nomadology then?,”
and his answer is, “The most promising uses would appear to be those that would
do better than Deleuze and Guattari themselves did at avoiding representation of
foreign cultures: Massumi’s own book, for example” (Miller 208–209). Here Miller
completes the gesture he initiated at the beginning of his discussion. Now Massumi
not only speaks for Deleuze and Guattari, but replaces them. Throughout his critique
Miller adopts the technique of reading Deleuze and Guattari through others, initially
through the words of their interpreters, then through the words of the authors they
cite. In both cases, what Deleuze and Guattari actually say begins to fade, and in
its place appears the discourse of others. Through the discourse of the interpreters,
a phantom deconstructive, radical-chic Deleuze-Guattari takes shape, whereas the
discourse of the sources gives rise to an unwittingly racist, colonialist, primitivist,
orientalist, exoticist, romantic, utopian Deleuze-Guattari monster. Miller examines

164
Deleuze’s Way
Deleuze and Guattari’s use of dubious sources, but rather than focusing on the ways
the sources are transformed within a different conceptual framework, he reads
Deleuze and Guattari as distorted reflections of their sources. The result is that the
sources replace the text – the instance of Hubac being the full realization of this
tendency, in that Hubac’s nomadology emerges as the genuine nomadology, what
Deleuze and Guattari were really saying but were too dishonest to admit. (“But isn’t
[Hubac], also, ultimately, more honest about the ethics of nomadology? He confronts
the violence and death that ‘the’ nomad war machine causes, in a way that Deleuze
and Guattari fail to do” [Miller 205].)
What should be done with nomadology, then? Miller’s answer is, erase it. Dismiss
Deleuze and Guattari and turn to something else. I see other alternatives, however.
One might challenge Deleuze and Guattari in terms of their basic presuppositions,
question their ontology, their Bergsonian methodology, their assumptions about
thought, process, becoming, language, and so on, but do so by confronting their
philosophy as a cohesive whole, not simply treating one concept or another without
paying attention to the host of related concepts that are inextricably tied to it. One
might also reverse the process of Deleuze and Guattari’s Bergsonian method.
Whereas they seek to identify tendencies within the mixture of the actual and extract
the pure differences in nature that inform those tendencies, one might examine the
actual manifestations of those tendencies and attempt to discriminate the specific
combinations of mixed elements that appear there. What aspects of the lives of an
actual nomadic people conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic?
What aspects are sedentary, or itinerant, ambulatory, migrant? In a given speech
situation, what statements bear the stamp of the despotic regime, or the primitive, the
passional, or the nomadic regime? Such an empirical study of these mixtures might
eventually lead one to conclude that Deleuze and Guattari are totally wrong and that
these categories are not helpful, or that they are partially incorrect and that certain
aspects of one concept or another should be dropped, modified, or regrouped.
Miller is a sophisticated critic, with considerable skills as an interpreter, theorist
and cultural commentator. His critique of Deleuze and Guattari brings to light
several problems in their thought and some of the limitations of their knowledge.
Deleuze and Guattari range wide in formulating their nomadology, and sometimes
they traverse territory they should have mapped more thoroughly. In Anti-Oedipus
and A Thousand Plateaus, they try to extend their understanding of culture beyond
the Western world, but Miller is astute in pointing out that Africa is the continent
whose cultures they examine in least detail. And Miller is certainly correct that
Deleuze and Guattari’s project suffers from a lack of African and Asian sources.
He is understandably irritated by what he sees as arrogant, exaggerated claims for
nomadology, and he is deeply concerned at what he deems a resurgence of reactionary
attitudes and dangerous clichés in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari at times
do indulge in hyperbole; they enjoy making categorical, paradoxical and seemingly
illogical statements that run counter to received opinions; they deliberately state their
views with less caution and fewer caveats than would more academic philosophers;
and their mercurial humor sometimes makes it difficult to be certain of their true
intent. This style is not for everyone, but there is more here than mere posture and
rhetoric, for Deleuze and Guattari, in my view, have developed concepts and modes

Nomadology’s Trial by Proxy 165
of analysis that allow us to reframe basic philosophical questions in refreshing and
truly innovative ways. Miller has issued a serious challenge to nomadology, and I
would not have gone on at such length had this not been a serious challenge, but
finally I believe that he is mistaken in his understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s
undertaking.
In his Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze, François Zourabichvili argues that “we do
not yet know the thought of Deleuze. Too often, hostile or adoring, we act as if his
concepts were familiar, as if it were enough that the concepts simply touch us and we
understand them by hints, or as if we had already made a survey of their promises.” 16
The thought of Deleuze, and of Deleuze-Guattari, is difficult – stylistically so,
perhaps, but above all, conceptually difficult. What, then, should be done with
nomadology? If it is not simply to be ignored or plundered for spare parts, it should
first be read, as much as possible, on its own terms. Once we determine, with some
measure of certainty, what Deleuze and Guattari actually are saying, then we may
decide what to do with them.
16 François Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris, 2003), p. 3.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999, pp. 220–39.
Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
Barfield, Thomas J. The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1993.
Bartók, Béla. Essays. Selected and ed. Benjamin Suchoff. New York: St. Martin’s,
1976.
Bartók, Béla. The Hungarian Folk Song. Ed. Benjamin Suchoff, trans. M.D.
Calvocoressi, with annotations by Zoltán Kodály. Albany: State University Press
of New York, 1981.
Beckwith, Karl. “‘Black Metal Music is for White People’: Constructs of Colour
and Identity with the Extreme Metal Scene.” M/C Journal (2002) .
Bene, Carmelo. Opere. Milan: Bompiani, 1995.
Berger, Harris M. “Death Metal Tonality and the Act of Listening.” Popular Music,
18/2 (1999): 161–76.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1911.
Bergson. Henri. Oeuvres. Edition du Centenaire. Ed. André Robinet. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Paris, 1959.
Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra
and Cloudsley Brereton. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1954.
Berland, Joseph C. and Matt T. Salo. “Peripatetic Communities: An Introduction.”
Nomadic Peoples, (special issue on Peripatetic Peoples) 21/22 (December
1986): 1–6.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. New York: Routledge,
2003.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries. Albany: State University
Press of New York, 2004.
Bréhier, Emile. La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme. Paris: Vrin,
1928.
Clastres, Pierre. La Société contre l’état: recherches d’anthropologie politique.
Paris: Minuit, 1974.

168
Deleuze’s Way
Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds). Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Conley, Verena Andermatt. “A Fraying of Voices: Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom
Carmen.” L’Esprit créateur, 30/2 (1990): 68–80.
Eribon, Didier. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Trans. Paul Wissing.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Faris, James C. The Nightway: A History and a History of Documentation of a
Navajo Ceremonial. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith.
New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Genet, Jean. Un captif amoureux. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne. Principes de philosophie zoologique. Paris: Pichon
et Didier, 1830.
Gill, Sam D. Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to
Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Giraudoux, Jean. Théâtre complet. Ed. Jacques Body. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.
Godard, Jean-Luc. “Les signes du mal à vivre: Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard.”
L’Avant scène cinéma, 323/324 (March 1984): 4–11.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard. Ed. Alain Bergala. Paris:
Editions de L’Etoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, 1985.
Godard, Jean-Luc, and Anne-Marie Miéville. Scenario prepared by Marc Cerisuelo.
Prénom Carmen: Découpage intégral et dialogue in extenso du film. L’Avant
scène cinéma, 323/324 (1984): 19–64.
Godard, Jean-Luc, Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Pierre Gorin, directors. Ici et
ailleurs. (Sonimage/IMA, France, 1974).
Goldschmidt, Victor. Le Système stoïcien et l’idée de temps. Paris: Vrin, 1953.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000.
Harrell, Jack. “The Poetics of Destruction: Death Metal Rock,” Popular Music and
Society, 18 (1994): 91–104.
Hubac, Pierre. Les Nomades. Paris: La Reniassance du Livre, 1948.
Joset, Paul-Ernest. Les Sociétés secrètes des hommes-léopards en Afrique noire.
Paris: Payot, 1955.
Kafka, Franz. The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Ed. Max Brod, tr. Joseph Kresh. New
York: Schocken, 1948.
Klossowski, Pierre. Sade, mon prochain. Paris: Seuil, 1947.
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis.
Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
Laroche, Emmanuel. Histoire de la racine “nem-” en Grec ancien. Paris: Klincksieck,
1949.
Leach, Edmund Ronald. Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone Press, 1961.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. New Essays on Human Understanding. Trans. Peter
Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Lindskog, Birger. African Leopard Men. Uppsala: Studia Ethnographica
Upsaliensia 7, 1954.

Bibliography 169
Lowie, Robert H. Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist: A Personal Record. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1959.
Luckert, Karl W. Coyoteway: A Navajo Holyway Healing Ceremony. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1979.
Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique:
An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1986.
Matthews, Washington. The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1997.
Messiaen, Olivier. Music and Color. Conversations with Claude Samuel. Tr. E.
Thomas Glasow. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994.
Miller, Christopher L. “The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A
Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority.” Diacritics, 23/3
(1993): 6–35.
Miller, Christopher L. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African
Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Monmonier, Mark S. How to Lie with Maps. 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1996.
Moynihan, Michael and Didrik Søderlind. Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the
Satanic Metal Underground. Venice, CA: Feral House, 1998.
Musy, François. “Les Mouettes du Pont d’Austerlitz: Entretien avec François Musy.”
Cahiers du cinéma, 355 (January 1984): 12–17.
Nemeth, David. “Service Nomads: Interim Masters of Imperfect Markets.” Nomadic
Peoples, 21/22 (December 1986): 135–51.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne
Cowan. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1962.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter
Kauffman. New York: Vintage, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Christopher
Middleton. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J.
Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Perrault, Pierre. “Cinéma du réel et cinéma de fiction: vraie ou fausse distinction?
Dialogue entre Pierre Perrault et René Allio.” In Ecritures de Pierre Perrault: Actes du
colloque “gens de paroles.” Québec: Cinématheque Québécoise, 1983, pp. 42–59.
Powrie, Phil. “Godard’s Prénom: Carmen (1984), Masochism, and the Male Gaze.”
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 31/1 (1995): 64–73.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. 3 vols. Trans. C.K. Moncrieff and
Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Radcliffe, Philip. Beethoven’s String Quartets. London: Hutchinson University
Library, 1965.
Rich, Jeremy. “‘Leopard Men,’ Slaves, and Social Conflict in Libreville (Gabon),
c. 1860–1879.” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34/3 (2001):
619–39.
Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London:
Sage, 1992.

170
Deleuze’s Way
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Ritter von. Venus in Furs. Trans. Charles Raymond. New
York: Privately Printed for Subscribers Only, 1928.
Salo, Matthew T. and Sheila Salo. “Rominchel Economic and Social Organization
in Urban New England, 1850–1930.” Urban Anthropology, 11/ 3–4 (Fall–Winter
1982): 273–313.
Samuel, Claude. Conversations with Olivier Messiaen. Trans. F Aprahamian.
London: Steiner and Bell, 1976.
Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. and eds Ida Macalpine
and Richard A. Hunter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Shapiro, Marc. “The Birth of Death: A Speed Demonology.” Guitar Presents: Speed
Demons of Metal, (1993): 6–9, 23, 110–12.
Smith, Daniel W. “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two
Directions in Recent French Thought.” In Between Deleuze and Derrida. Eds
Paul Patton and John Protevi. London: Continuum, 2003, pp. 46–66.
Solomon, Maynard. “Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–1818.” In Beethoven Studies 3.
Ed. Alan Tyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp.193–293.
Spariosu, Mihai. Global Intelligence and Human Development. Toward an Ecology
of Global Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Spinoza, Baruch. Complete Works. Ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002.
Szondi, Lipot. Experimental Diagnostics of Drives. New York: Grune and Stratton,
1952.
Talayesva, Don C. Soleil Hopi: l’autobiographie d’un indien hopi. Trans. Geneviève
Mayou. Paris: France Loisirs, 1959.
Turnbull, Colin M. Wayward Servants. The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies.
Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1965.
Wagenbach, Klaus. Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie Seiner Jugend 1883–1912. Bern:
Francke, 1958.
Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy
Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Lexington,
1991.
Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction
and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
Wyman, Leland Clifton. Beautyway: A Navaho Ceremonial. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1957.
Wyman, Leland Clifton. Blessingway. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970.
Wyman, Leland Clifton. The Mountainway of the Navajo. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1975.
Zourabichvili, François. Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003.

Abstract machine, 21–3, 146–7
Aeon/ Chronos, 37, 42–5
Agamben, Giorgio, 7
Amor fati, 8–10
Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen, 38
Assemblages, 20, 145–6
Bacon, Francis 102–3, 112
Barfield, Thomas J., 114–5, 124
Bartók, Béla, 118–120
Beckett, Samuel, 19, 22, 41, 73, 103
Beckwith, Karl, 47
Becoming-animal, 158
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 74–9, 84–9, 101
Bene, Carmelo, 24–7, 31
Berger, Harris M., 41
Bergson, Henri, 28, 55–6, 62, 91–7, 101–6,
115–6, 120, 124, 126, 143–4, 149,
164
Berland, Joseph C., 115
Birdsong, 29–30, 36
Bizet, Georges, 73–7, 80
Black hole, 49
Black metal music, 39–40, 45
Body without organs, 37, 48–52, 163
Boulez, Pierre, 31, 42, 114, 127
Bréhier, Emile, 20
Carroll, Lewis, 107
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 22
Chromaticism, generalized, 32, 40
Clastres, Pierre, 116–117, 148–9
Clifford, James, 144–5
Collective assemblage of enunciation, 18,
20–4, 26, 31, 147
Conley, Verena Andermatt, 73, 80
Count Grishnackh (Varg Vikernes, guitarist
of Burzum), 47–8
Creative emotion (in Bergson), 95–6, 102, 106
Cultural studies, 123, 134–7
Index
De facto/ de jure, 115–6, 118, 120, 124,
127–8, 132
Death metal music, 38–44
Derrida, Jacques, 7, 142
Doom metal music, 39–40, 44–5
Dumézil, Georges, 114
Egg, world as, 8–9, 37–8, 56–7
Fabulation, 14, 93–7, 99–106
Faris, James C., 135
Fischer, Michael M. J., 145
Foucault, Michel, 7, 104–105, 142, 145, 151
Freud, Sigmund, 110–1
Genet, Jean, 104
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne, 159
Gill, Sam D., 135
Giraudoux, Jean, 81–2
Glass, Philip, 43
Globalism, 123, 134, 136
Globalization, 123, 130–4
Godard, Jean-Luc, 64–7, 72–87
Godelier, Maurice, 152
Goldberg, Rube, 145
Goldschmidt, Victor, 20
Griaule, Marcel, 157
Guattari, Félix (as intercessor), 13, 97
Gypsy music, 118–9
Haecceity, 44
Hardt, Michael, 123, 132 –3
Harrell, Jack, 41
Heidegger, Martin, 7
Heraclitus, 86
Hubac, Pierre, 158–62, 164
Hunter-gatherers, 114–5, 124
Husserl, Edmund, 7, 150
Incorporeal transformation, 20, 22, 46, 142

172
James, William, 94–5, 97, 105–6
Joset, Paul-Ernest, 155–7, 159, 161–2
Joyce, James 19, 41
Kafka, Franz, 3, 17–9, 21–2, 26, 98, 102,
107, 158
Kandinsky, Wassily, 14
Kant, Immanuel, 7–8, 28, 107, 140, 146
Klee, Paul, 14, 91
Kleist, Heinrich von, 42–3
Klossowski, Pierre, 109
Laing, R. D., 162
Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis,
110–1
Laroche, Emmanuel, 125
Lawrence, D. H., 107
Lawrence, T. E., 103–4, 106–8
Leach, Edmund Ronald, 151
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 56, 62
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 152–5
Levinas, Emmanuel, 7
Lindskog, Birger, 157
Line of continuous variation, 21–2, 25, 31,
37–8
Lowie, Robert H. , 152–4
Luca, Gherasim, 22
Luckert, Karl W., 135
Machinic assemblages, 20–3, 26, 31, 147
Marcus, George E., 145
Massumi, Brian, 138–9, 141, 163
Matthews, Washington, 135
Mayhem (black metal group), 47–8
Melville, Herman 107
Messiaen, Olivier, 29–32, 36, 38, 42
Miéville, Anne-Marie, 65. 73
Miller, Christopher L., 113, 137–65
Minor literature, 18, 98–9, 108, 123
Minority, the minor, 17–27, 31
Monmonier, Mark S., 155
Moynihan, Michael, and Didrik Søderlind,
47–8
Multiplicities, qualitative and quantitative, 126
Music
in cinema, 71–2
and territoriality, 29–31
and violence, 46–8
Musy, François, 79
Deleuze’s Way
Navajo poetry, 134–6
Negri, Antonio, 123, 132–3
Nemeth, David, 115
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7–9, 11, 70–3, 86–7,
98, 104–5, 107–8, 141, 159
Nomad thought, 139–143, 152, 158
Nomadic distribution, 125–6
Nomadism, 50, 113–21, 123–6, 129–34,
137–8, 159–61
Nomadology, 113, 137–8, 160–2, 164–5
People to come, 14, 97–101, 108
Peripatetics, 115, 124
Perrault, Pierre, 99–101
Plane of consistency, 37–8, 49–50, 146–7,
150
Pound, Ezra, 22
Powers of the false, 14, 99–101, 106
Powrie, Phil, 73, 81
Problems, 59–63, 66, 120
Proust, Marcel 1–3, 53–60, 63, 66, 102,
107–8
Radcliffe, Philip, 85
Refrain, 27–31, 35–6, 48, 51–2
Regime of signs, 145–52, 154–5
Relative global/local absolute, 133–4, 136,
161
Rhizome, 126–7, 130–1, 133
Rhythm, 30, 42
Rich, Jeremy, 157
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 80, 82, 86
Rimbaud, Arthur, 91, 98
Robertson, Roland, 133
Rouch, Jean, 99
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Ritter von, 102,
107–12, 144, 159
Sade, Marquis de, 109–12, 144
Salo, Matthew T., 115
Salo, Sheila, 115
Samuel, Claude, 30, 36
Schoenberg, Arnold, 32
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 70–1, 86
Schreber, Daniel Paul, 98, 159
Shapiro, Marc, 45
Signs, 53–9, 63, 66, 102, 107
Smith, Daniel W., 7

Smooth space/striated space, 37–8, 50, 114,
118, 127–33, 161
Solomon, Maynard, 89
Spariosu, Mihai, 133
Speed, qualitative versus quantitative, 42–3,
45, 52
Spinoza, Baruch, 7, 11–2, 14, 107
Swimming, 62–4
Szondi, Lipot, 159
Talayesva, Don C., 153, 155
Territory, 27–33
Transversality, 2–3, 5, 98
Transversals, 1–3, 5
Turnbull, Colin M., 114
Tyler, Stephen 142, 144
Vice-diction, 8–10
Index 173
Virtual and actual, 8–9, 11, 21, 37, 49,
55–63, 66, 120–1, 140, 142, 146–7,
158
Wagenbach, Klaus, 19
Waits, Tom, 77–8
Walser, Robert, 38
War machine, 37–8, 50–1, 113, 129–30,
132, 160–1, 163
Weinstein, Deena, 38
Whitman, Walt, 107
Williams, James, 13
Wordsworth, William, 135–6
Wyman, Leland Clifton, 135
Zourabichvili, François, 165