Time, always pressing, has kept me from talking about Deleuze and Guattari's book on Kafka. Instead of giving a thorough account, I've reduced my thoughts to a few points, rather pithily.
D&G write toward the end of the book:
A writing machine exists only in an office. The office exists only with its secretaries, its section heads, and its bosses; its social, political, and administrative distribution; and also its erotic distribution without which there would never have been any "technics." this is so because the machine is desire--but not because desire is desire of the machine but because desire never stops making a machine in the machine and creates a new gear alongside the preceding gear, indefinitely, even if the gears seem to be in opposition or seem to be functioning in a discordant fashion. That which makes a machine, to be precise, are connections, all the connections that operate the dissasembly. (82)
"Machine" here stands in for, or characterizes, the idea of an assemblage, which, for them, is always how desire functions. It is, as is Kafka's writing, experimental, generative, not a lack, but only produced within specific constructions that make desire happen. At the same time, and this is crucial for D&G, desire always exceeds the constraints or structures of a given assemblage by creating new assemblages, even taking apart the old.
In this sense, they sound very close to a type of formalism. An assemblage is, after all, a type of form, an arrangement of things (whether they be words, desks, bodies). But where D&G explicitly break from formalism is in claims such as "as long as there is form, there is still reterritorialization, even in music" (6) and that it is stupid to look for structure with formal oppositons if one does not "see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is going to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure" (7). Reterritorialization, in this sense, can be an arresting of desire, an attempt to pin it down into a specific form which can then be interpreted. Take their favorite example, Oedipus complex, with its fully territorialized daddy-mommy-me triad. There is no irruptive, generative desire before the territorialized assemblage in the Oedipal logic; desire comes from the assemblage, it does not create it. Thus, without the assemblage there is no desire. This is what D&G want to reject: no, on the contrary, Oedipus comes about precisely because desire created it.
But, and here is where they aren't formalists, it is clear then that desire is THE agent in D&G's philosophy. They sometimes use the term "intensities," which are outside any ability to understand them as structures of meaning, energy, etc.; intensities make up and create new assemblages. But, my naive (and somewhat late-night) question: what would an intensity outside an assemblage look like? Can we think of such a thing? Badiou has accused, if I understand him correctly, D&G of vitalism, and I think his point is solid. On one reading, intensities and desire seem like blind force, an unthinkable and uncontrolable energy which breaks the boundaries it creates for itself. And, at the end of the day, there may be something to that. But, and this is what I think they'd say, it doesn't make sense to claim there are intensities without assemblages, that intensities, while not reducable to form, are always and only present in forms.
Which amounts to saying that intensities only exist in form, and, indeed, one could go so far to say that intensities are produced by form. This is what the formalist would argue. The literary critics of yesteryear wouldn't use the term intensity; instead, they would say "beauty" or "force." I like the word "affect," (even tho it has become a buzz term, which I don't like). Whichever term one uses, it is pointing to that thing which always punches out from a crafted work of art, which seems to exceed its form but, really, is a consequence of it. And Kafka perhaps provides us with the greatest examples of such work. "In the Penal Colony," for instance, is about as carefully constructed a story as one can find. But, I would argue, that doesn't make it a mere "reterritorialization." All of the parts fit together, true, to create something we would call a whole. But that whole itself is affective, unbelievably compelling, irreducible. It is not desire which produces the assemblage, it is the assemblage which causes the desire to erupt.
Which doesn't, I would say, reduce either the force of that desire nor the nature of that structure. But that is an ongoing problem.
Posted by pjaussen at March 15, 2007 10:35 PM | TrackBack