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                                                    DELEUZENARY STATES

1/22/2014

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It would be an understatement to say philosophy can be difficult, which is perhaps why there are all those books doing the rounds promising to make it easier for idiots such as myself. Gilles Deleuze is no exception. What is one to make of a passage like this? "To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular point of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field." I have quoted this from Difference And Repetition and I must confess that, though I have read it numerous times, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Nevertheless, like the Trojan I am, I soldiered on with the book and found it extremely rewarding in terms of many of its underlying ideas. In this essay, I hope to do justice to some of them.

The 'dark precurser' to Difference And Repetition seems to be Kant, whose achievement Deleuze recognises as both formidable and problematic. Kant of course can be equally recondite and obscure - a 'vice' Schopenhauer said was due to his not understanding his own ideas himself. (Would one dare say that of Deleuze? I wonder.) Kant can also be lucid when he gets into his stride, as indeed can Deleuze. In this essay, I promise to be as lucid as possible, but won't promise to always keep my promise. We are, after all, dealing with difficult ideas.

While reading Deleuze, I was struck by the resemblance between some of his ideas and those of the Sankhya school of Hindu philosophy related to the dual figures of Purusha and Prakrti - a subject I dealt with in a previous essay. According to Deleuze, Kant's thought is oriented towards what it takes to actively synthesise ideas from empirical raw materials. In other words, it is oriented towards  conscious representation of ideas and impressions by actively organising them through the already known concepts of the understanding and creating a sort of hierarchy, which becomes more abstract the higher up the hierarchy you go. Deleuze describes what's involved here as active synthesis, whereby a subject grasps objects of thought or sensation and transforms them into something more complex through synthesising them. He contrasts this with passive synthesis, whereby a subject passively registers sensations or thoughts. This is characterised by contemplation rather than action. As far as I can see, the difference is like that between voluntary looking and involuntary seeing, the first of which is active, the second passive. This has something in common with the parts played by Purusha and Prakrti. In Sankhya thought. Purusha is passive, pure consciousness, consciousness as witness while Prakrti is identified with the active mind-body complex and the phenomenal world. It is interesting that Prakrti is depicted as female and Purusha as male, and the Prakrti seduces Purusha into a web of illusion. The difference between this Hindu concept and Delauze's idea of the passive and active synthesis is that Deleuze tends to pathologise the passive synthesis in a way that the Sankhya school of thought, which I suspect is not free of ascetic Hindu moralism, does not. It is narcissistic  and lacks the realism implicit in the active synthesis. It is the passive synthesis that is at work in dreams and delusions and, of course, it plays a big part in the creation of art and poetry. In Freudian terms, one might perhaps associate it with the Pleasure Principle, while the active synthesis is more associated with the demands of the Reality Principle.

So in a sense it is as if we were trying to escape the gravitational field of the earth through active synthesis, while passive synthesis kept thwarting our efforts and pulling us back down. Active synthesis aims for a more objective view of the 'real' (actual) world, while passive synthesis generates a 'virtual' world more in tune with our unconscious predilections. (As Deleuze says, the virtual is as real in its own terms as the actual, just as dreams are as real in their own terms as waking life is in its own terms, so no hierarchy of values based on the more real and the less real is being suggested here. In fact, the real is not opposed to the virtual, but to the possible.) Consciousness characterises active synthesis, while the unconscious characterises passive synthesis. This may not, of course, be how Deleuze would describe it, but that's the sense I get from his words.

The problem with Kant's active synthesis, according to Deleuze, is that it is disembodied. He fully acknowledges the significance of Kant's Copernican Revolution in thought, but like most bourgeois revolutions, it tended to stop half-way. It replaced the absolute monarchy of reason with a constitutional one. It did not go far enough in decentring the human subject, because of the way it privileged the subject-object relation in thought. Of course, Kant recognised that what grounded the subject - the 'I', like the Eye in The Upanishads, which sees but cannot see itself seeing - was as unknowable in itself as the thing in-itself behind the object of any perception. Nevertheless, he attributed a kind of unity to it which belies its often fragmentary forms. So for Deleuze, the Copernican Revolution in philosophy had to be carried much further and a new 'transcendental ground' of this disembodied subject of cognition had to be developed. Just as the Copernican Revolution was only one stage in the evolution of astronomy, Kant's 'Copernican Revolution' in philosophy was only one stage in the history of philosophy. Deleuze would carry Kant's revolution further by providing it with a perspective influenced strongly by Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and Melanie Klein. In other words, he wanted to shift the focus from the Apollonian to the Dionysian aspects of the Self. Dionysus, of course, was the god who was ritually dismembered by his worshippers; so he seems an appropriate symbol for the fractured subject, which is of such concern to Deleuze.

What this means is that behind Kant's active synthesis of the intellect and cognition lies the passive synthesis of the unconscious which is rooted in the body, which itself, of course, is rooted in the physical constitution of the universe in such a way that the subject  is far from being sovereign in its own realm. In fact, it is precariously floating on top of a sea which underpins it and holds it in being. No wonder the ego, through which we orientate ourselves in the world, is so fragile and prone to disintegration. Also, the mere fact that it exists in time means the self is divided from itself from one moment to the next, as David Hume suggested. Passive synthesis expresses itself through habit and Repetition, although, of course, that is only one half of the equation, since Difference is also involved. Difference is the transcendental ground of all empirical diversity and individuality, but it has to be organised through time, and this is where Repetition and habit enter the picture to make up the passive synthesis which underlies the active synthesis implicit in Kantian cognition.

Yet, just as behind active synthesis lurks passive synthesis, behind passive synthesis lurks active synthesis. Of course, active synthesis doesn't just take place in (Kantian) cognition. It is active throughout nature and the self-organisation which lies at its heart. An example of this can be seen on YouTube. It involves a female cat suckling ducklings. What's strange about this is not the fact that a female cat had abandoned its predatory instincts to kill and eat ducklings, in order to mother them instead. After all, if it had lost its kittens and was still lactating,  there is no reason on earth why it should not have sought a substitute for them. No, what is really strange is that ducks never suckle their young, so there could be no question of a genetic and instinctive form of behaviour kicking in as far as the ducklings were concerned. Quite the opposite in fact. Independently of any 'hard-wired' predispositions, the ducklings merrily took to sucking on the nipples of the cat and imbibing its milk. In short, a new and unprecedented habit was formed which the ducklings themselves inaugurated - active synthesis engendering a new passive synthesis as the ducklings learned to appreciate milk from their surrogate mother and repeat the practice into the future.

So for Deleuze, a passive synthesis is not mechanistic, not something innate, any more than active synthesis. In fact, it must go through the phase of active synthesis before it can become established and then, of course, it must stop itself falling apart. That is active as well, though what you might call passively active. If Difference is "in-itself", repetition is always "for-itself", and not a mere product of mechanical inertia. Perhaps this is why Deleuze has so much time for the philosophy of Bergson, who postulated a creative dimension at the heart of evolution. In his book, Viroid Life, Keith Ansell Pearson writes that Darwinian Natural Selection merely prunes the phylogenetic tree; it does not cause it to grow. At the heart of evolution, in other words, a certain 'for-itself' initiative is being expressed which may or may not serve future generations.

Perhaps what Deleuze means by passive synthesis is a dynamic and mobile structure supporting the activity implicit in active synthesis, a structure which expresses itself through Repetition and habits. However, that seems to be only one side of equation. The other side consists of active synthesis and activity, including the activity of adjusting this structure to new contingencies - as in the case of the ducklings and the lactating cat - and forming new habits. However, Deleuze's language is often so recondite that I am having to hazard my own interpretation of what he might mean based on no more than trains of thought which his words have set in motion in me. Likewise, with his critique of Kant, who seemed to believe that cognition  was something given, something devoid of a structure in which it might be embedded.

Kant also took for granted the unity of the subject - or self - in its subject-object field of perception, which Deleauze does not. According to Deleuze, each 'self' is repeated in time from each of its other selves as it has lived them in its past - or, more appropriately, its present-perfect - so that each present self recedes into the past and is displaced by another. This is what fractures the self in its sojourn through time. The memory of what it has been becomes an integral part of what it is without any longer being what it is. Thus the Self becomes fractured as it passes through time. Kant's 'self' took for granted a unity which it does not possess. In the same spirit, for Deleuze, Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return is not a return of the same or Identical, but a return of the Different. It is a kind of Return which lies at the heart of evolution itself - and not just of species, but of being itself. As in the case of the I which passes through time and becomes many Is, none of which are the same, what returns in the Eternal Return is never the same. This of course makes it a Dionysian rather than Apollonian idea, which one finds implicit in Kant's idea of a unified self.

Repetition involves difference, not identity. The only identity which appears in repetition is the identity implicit in the concept. This dog, which  wags its tail while I pet it, is different from the dog that five minutes ago was chasing a cat. It is only identical in the concept of "this dog". The concept confers on "this dog" an identity which it does not possess in being and is no more than a product of our representing "this dog" to ourselves. Like the I living in time, it is different from one moment to the next. It is a repeated dog, but not the same dog, except in so far as it comes under a concept - which, as Spinoza remarked, cannot bark. Between something existing in being and our representation of it in concepts lies a huge, unbridgeable chasm. Hegel's dialectic, for instance, is a false dialectic because it depends on negation and contradiction, which, in turn, depend on the identity of concepts opposing each other. And identity could be described in terms of something which always equals itself in the concept - e.g., dog = "dog" - which doesn't happen in being. Deleuze want's to replace Hegel's negative dialectic of opposition with an affirmative dialectic of difference, which is excessive rather than restrictive. Of course, in terms of art or poetry, this would involve an art or poetry that over-reached itself and overflowed all its boundaries in the process of completing itself - a Dionysian art.

There are many aspects of Difference And Repetition which completely defeat me. For instance, Deleuze is obviously mathematically highly literate, which is the last thing I am. He is also far more literate regarding the special terminology of structuralist and post-structuralist discourse and indeed philosophy in general.  Philosophy is always difficult, and so it should be if it is to be challenging. There, I think, it  has something in common with poetry, though this would have nothing to do with a shared terminology or method of exposition. One thing they do have in common is that they go beyond taken for granted ideas and make the problematic their central concern. This is certainly the case with Deleuze. What matters for him is the question rather than the answer it might elicit; for he recognises that all original forms of discourse, whether poetic or philosophical, have their roots in ideas which are fundamentally problematic, along with questions which no one else asks.

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                                             NO THINGS BUT IN IDEAS

1/1/2014

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In the last issue of Ol Chanty, I published an essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In that essay I concentrated on the epistemological dimensions of Kant’s thought, particularly in relation to what Kant called the transcendental horizon or ground of empirical thought and also his concept of the Noumenon or unknowable thing-in-itself. In both these areas of thought, Kant tried to go beyond the rather limited horizons of Empiricism in the realm of philosophy. The purpose of the present essay is to explore the relevance of Kant’s ideas to the field of contemporary poetics.

A strong empiricist bias emerged in British poetry after the Second World War. The most typical – and perhaps truest – poet of this tendency was undoubtedly Philip Larkin, who implicitly understood the limitations of empiricism without, however, going beyond them. “And past the poppies’ bluish neutral distance / Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach / Of shapes and shingles. Here is unfenced existence, / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” In this excerpt taken from his poem, Here, it is as if Larkin was paying homage to Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself by saying that there is an area of experience which is beyond our ken, and therefore we shouldn’t talk about it or pretend we can ever have ideas about it. It develops a similar line to that of a lot of the logical positivists of the time, such as Professor A J Ayer, who believed that anything we might say about such a realm of unknowable things would be meaningless, which, of course, meant that metaphysics in philosophy was now out of favour, while facts and sense-data had become the  flavour of the month.  The ‘matter of factness’ about this poem is perfectly expressed in the flatness of the line, “Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach”. This flatness seems to express the choice the poet has made not to go beyond the familiar shoreline and risk exploring the horizon. This absence of risk is typical of so much British poetry, and not just that of the post-war period.

Kant spoke of the transcendental ground or horizon of our empirical ideas, whereby what is absent conditions what is present in thought. An example might be the empirical number 5 presupposing the infinite series of numbers of which it is merely a member. Likewise, Larkin’s “here” is obviously grounded in the “there” of “unfenced existence”.

It seems to me that because Larkin shrank from these transcendental horizons he remained decidedly minor. There was no attempt to go beyond the realm of fact. I don’t pretend to know what lies beyond the realm of fact, but I do know that the transcendental ground of what I know empirically lies in what I don’t or can’t know empirically, that, to take an example, the transcendental ground of the empirically knowable universe lies in what is empirically unknowable, which might stretch from God masturbating this universe into existence to an infinity of universes – both of which are equally plausible, although scientists would probably hold the last to be more plausible than the first. Only one thing is certain about all this and that is that no-one can ever know what lies beyond limits of our perceptions to ascertain what reality is in-itself.  Herbert Zbigniew expressed this dilemma of empirical knowledge perfectly in his prose-poem, Wooden Die. "A wooden die can be described only from without. We are therefore condemned to eternal ignorance of its essence. Even if it is quickly cut in two, immediately its inside becomes a wall and there occurs the lightning swift transformation of a mystery into a skin.” Herbert stops there, but, as a poet I consider it perfectly permissible to imagine any number of possibilities regarding the nature of things-in-themselves and explore them in my work, because I believe that is part of the remit of poetry.

One of the great debates in 20th Century poetry was between the advocates of William Carlos Williams’s “No ideas but in things” and Wallace Stevens’ notion of poetry as “the Supreme Fiction.” I think it was Stevens who coined the expression I have used as the title of this essay, namely “No things but in ideas”. Happily, Williams’s own poetry does not always conform to the “No ideas but in things” poetic he espoused, which, I don’t mind saying, I find highly constricting. More than that, I also see it in terms of the argument between the Empiricists and the Kantians transposed to the realm of poetics. Williams was an advocate of a poetry of things and facts, while Stevens was an advocate of the ‘transcendental’ in Kantian terms - which is not to be confused with the transcendent. Another way of putting this is by saying that one was a poet of the immediate world which lies around us and the other was a poet of the horizon. Take the opening part of Stevens’ The Man With The Blue Guitar. “The man bent over his guitar, / A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. / They said “You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.” / The man replied, “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” / And they said then, “But play you must, / A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, / A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are.” It seems to me that, at least to begin with, “they” are putting forward an empiricist/realist argument about the nature of reality, whereas the “man with the blue guitar” is arguing that ‘things as they are’ get transformed during the creative act – indeed the whole act of perception/cognition. It is impossible to say which of the two versions of reality is really real, that is to say really represents “things as they are”, but the man with the blue guitar’s version is in my opinion the more truthful – if you know how to distinguish truth from fact.

I must confess, I love Wallace Stevens’s work. I love the quirkiness of much of it, “The distance between the dark steeple / And cobble ten thousand and three / Is more than a seven foot inchworm / Could measure by moonlight.” I love also his defence of the ‘abstract’ in poetry. Furthermore, Stevens’ work has a recondite aspect which I find very challenging, even if I can't always tease out his meaning.  I am also all too conscious of the fact that people have taken sides in these questions. I read a poem some years back in a magazine called The Red Wheelbarrow whose subject-matter was precisely a boxing match between William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, which, of course, Williams won by a knockout. It was as if the different claims of David Hume and Immanual Kant were to be decided by an arm-wrestling contest.

Empiricism in poetry, no less than in philosophy, is an approach which eschews the more complex synthetic outcomes of the creative process in order to settle for what’s closer to hand. You have only to read The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry to see the results of this poetic at work. The following poem is by Hugo Williams. It’s called The Butcher. “The butcher carves veal for two. / The cloudy slices fall over his knife. // His face is hurt by the parting sinews. / and he looks up with relief, laying it on the scales. // He is a rosy young man with white eyelashes, / like a bullock. He always serves me now. // I think he knows about my life. How we prefer / to eat when it’s cold. How someone // with a foreign accent can only cook veal. / He writes the price on a grease-proof packet / and hands it to me courteously. His smile /is the official seal on my marriage.” Hugo Williams has expressed admiration for W C Williams and perhaps this fact can be gleaned from the amount of observation in the poem - e.g., the cloudy slices and the rosy young man with white eyelashes / like a bullock.”. However, what also seems to me to be the case - I may be very obtuse – is that the poet has shunned the idea of the synthetic in poetry beyond the immediately present. The poverty of thought in the poem seems to me a consequence of observation taken almost as an end in itself.  The poet has aimed at just what is front of him, rather than at the horizon; as a result there is no winding up of a coiled spring to provide the energy to carry the poem forward from word to word, line to line and stanza to stanza. It is one prose statement after another and in the end you do start to wonder whether the effort was worth it.

We all know what a jackal is, how it scavenges around the carcasses of animals killed by larger predators like lions, leopards or cheetahs. We know that it belongs to some kind of canine order, though, unlike wolves, wild dogs and dingoes, it is not a pack-dog but a much more solitary animal like the fox or coyote.  These are aspects of the jackal which are more or less empirically verifiable according to the methods and procedures of science, which have little poetic about them. In ancient Egypt, jackals were observed hanging around graveyards – for rather obvious reasons, considering they are scavengers. They were thereby believed to have a special relationship with the dead. In time, the jackal was transformed into Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead who led the deceased before Osiris, the god of the Underworld. How the ordinary humble jackal became a god we may never know, but one thing is certain, it took a process of imaginative synthesis for it to eventually come about, a poetic transformation which lifted the jackal out of the everyday element in which the natural historian might view it and turned it into a divine being. It shows how a creature of empirical fact can become one of transcendental meaning through a process of synthesising previously unrelated elements. The ibis underwent a similar transformation. Because it arrived in Egypt before the seasonal floods which fertilized the land, it was seen as a harbinger of the floods and was taken up as the god of wisdom and knowledge, Thoth. Nowadays, it is for us easy to see the connections between one thing and another and dismiss the whole process as one of the pre-scientific mind at work, but a lot more difficult to grasp the transformation that has taken place without seeing a transcendental poetic at work which raises the common or garden empirical jackal or ibis to the status of divine beings.

Paul Valery once wrote ““What matters for poets is the energy of image-formation - the images themselves are of no interest; it is the sensation of a leap, a short-cut, a surprise - of control over the universe of difference.” In my opinion, Valery hit the nail on the head here. The jackal and ibis do not represent themselves. To paraphrase Hamlet, the thing is not the thing and in itself has nothing poetic about it. It is only when it is brought into relation with other elements in a poem that it begins to develop any kind of poetic significance. In other words, it takes on a significance which lifts it out of its humdrum empirical domain into that of the transcendental, which presupposes a complex nucleus of elements of which it is only a part. In short, its life is a life which has been borrowed from the universe of meaning around it, and the whole complex of meanings and ideas which both transcends and subsumes it. It is what makes poetry so different to science. I have nothing against science as such; it’s a very necessary activity. However, I do detest the scientific world-view and see it as a corrupter of all other values. And it is a world-view, moreover, which everyone takes for granted these days as the only one we can possibly have. As a result of the dominance of this world-view, the imagination has been relegated to a very secondary and minor position. This means that the horizons of life itself have diminished, because the horizons of life are entirely determined by the imagination, which constitutes the transcendental ground of all human hopes and aspirations – for better or worse. The Ancient Egyptians understood this in a way that we no longer do. The jackal was no longer merely a jackal, but a guide for the dead, the ibis no longer merely an ibis but a herald of wisdom and knowledge. Like the hippopotamus and crocodile, both dangerous denizens of the Nile transformed into potent gods and goddesses, they underwent a metamorphosis whose poetic truth we still recognize today.   With notable exceptions of course, poets seem to have accepted their diminished role in the world without any demur. That’s why, when I read a book like The Penguin Book Of Contemporary British Poetry, my heart sinks. We are back to the domain of the jackal as jackal, rather than Anubis, and in this a certain world-view which I detest is clearly triumphant.

What’s at stake here is not this or that pantheon, but the principle involved in moving beyond the matter-of-fact common sensical world-view propagated by journalists, scientists and academics in the realm of poetics, a world-view which Peter Russell wittily satirized in his couplet about the death of Pan. “Great Pan is dead; the forest all forsook; / The poets now all have that dead-pan look.” It is a world-view reiterated by Derek McMahon in his poem The Banished Gods - also published in The Penguin Book Of Contemporary British Poetry - which relegates the banished gods to a world of “zero-growth economics”. It is all of a piece with Philip Larkin’s withering dismissal of “the myth-kitty”. With this attitude, the imagination runs slap bang into a wall. Its horizons are entirely determined by journalistic or academic clichés, or formulaic scientific concepts. The ideas embodied in the Hindu Trimurti of Brahma the Creator, Shiva the Destroyer and Vishnu the Preserver, or the dynamic interplay between, say, Apollo and Dionysus have far more resonance in poetry than anything empirical or factual can possibly have because of the way they are grounded in archetypal modes of thought and action which are, in the Kantian sense, genuinely transcendental.

It isn’t just a question of gods and goddesses, of course. It’s a question rather of orientating oneself in one’s poetry through a complex of  ideas that may or may not make use of them, but which nevertheless becomes the transcendental ground or horizon of the poetry itself. And that these ideas should be emergent rather than established should go without saying. I would hazard that the complex of ideas  which turned the jackal and ibis into Anubis and Thoth was an emergent one, not rooted in established conceptions – although, of course, by means of a priesthood serving the state, it later became established. It is no accident perhaps that Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, the editors of The Penguin Book Of Contemporary British Poetry, invoke the ideology of post-modernism to justify their selection. Post-modernism was the creation of an academic priesthood, not artists themselves. And academia deals in the rigid concepts of the understanding, rather than the fluid ideas which chaotically bubble up to the surface of intuition in order to find their final form in a poem. Such fluid ideas are an inalienable part of what poetry’s about, and will be until people stop writing poetry.

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    Richard Livermore is a poet, who also edits Ol' Chanty. 

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