deleuze and spring…
When I ask myself today how I came to Deleuze, I rediscover that initial excitement, awakened through Anti-Oedipus, at the moment of defeat as the neo-liberal counter-reformation was victorious. I was working at Collet’s London Bookshop, and Steve M have bought 50 or 100 copies of remaindered Anti-Oedipus from the USA. I remember his excitement. (All that the US is good for is english language publishing, he would say.) I had read the Proust book and Sacher-Masoch by then, but it was Anti-Oedipus arriving in the late 70s that gave me an additional frame, a new line of thought as I would say now. It also then that the Serres texts began, I think so, with some of the Hermes essays.
How did I feel reading the Anti-Oedipus text in lets say late 1979, was different. The things and thinking that I liked then, disliked then was different. I had been a committed Marxist for six or seven years then. The texts and world I lived in was inherently unstable. Becoming stable. There were things I liked about the Deleuze work, there were things I did not. But when they ask me why Deleuze, it’s as if they were asking me: so, what is space-time? What is water? what is love? I know, but I can’t say… because like my relationship with say Marx or Serres, it’s the element in which I live. Over the last 45 years, lets say 45 years since 1980, thought its really longer, I have been immersed in Deleuzian thought and matter to such an extent that it takes great effort for me to treat it as an object, or the work of a conceptual personae — it is rather a trajectory along which I walked becoming this young-old man. So its like like like the air one breathes, a thing that allows another breath, another morning to happen, that allows collectivities, singularities, sensations and images — everything is political, life as an experimental practice. Perhaps it’s the greatest metaphor, however banal it may seem, that for philosophy, writing, life: a flow of water downstream, atoms falling. One must invent things to avoid suffocating in the dark times that loss and defeat gives you. Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation became an irrelevance instead this gave us something else. Anyway its the 1980s and Deleuze’s concepts are so precise, sharp, powerful — why not talk about them instead of using such fluid terms as streams, space-time, landscape? Because, as space-time passed it became apparent as he formulated it — concepts only exist thanks to a plane that, precedes and enables them, or in which they breathe… a plane of immanence, a plateau… Though a Deleuzian plane of immanence is a little contradictory. And yet, it would be my answer. For the Deleuze texts are clear enough. There is no argument here and no discussion, persuading and so on… Perhaps I thought in the late 80s if this philosophy doesn’t suit you, seek another… But it was always there, just as Marx was. Today forty-five years later I can simply say that to live, have relationships, breathe and free myself, it enabled me to live here and to understand the crises I needed this philosophy, this ground, this plane. This connection with language, words, things, concepts, events, the possible and impossible. So at the beginning it was one things and as I added another layer, plateaus, Bergson, Spinza, dialogues, kafka… what is philosophy and the endless secondary texts — whether good, bad, indifferent or ugly. Perhaps this sounds suspiciously like being but for me it was always structure, pragmatics and systematics, ‘I am a way of being, I am nothing more than that.’ Sure its modes of being, ways of existing, is that so strange? Deleuze even says: ‘What a world!’ Such an exclamation, time passes, Deleuze dies — older now than either Deleuze or Guattari, and the world which is theirs not ours passes by. Lines of flight are not not not another representation of the world, for it’s not the philosopher’s task to represent the world. It’s a metaphilosophy as Henri Lefebrve said before all this began. Deleuze’s philosophy neither judges nor transforms the world, it enacts it differently, it folds it in its own way… I wanted to think differently since I could not live differently, perceive and exist differently. Always though people keep on presently new and ld hierarchies that make no sense. It was also that collision of Deleuze and neoliberalism, that ensured I stopped thinking of becoming academic, who would want to become and academic after the triumph of neoliberalism? followed by the crisis and the development of neomanagerialism into fascism. Not me, I followed the line of flight away from such reaction… Should I mention people, laughter and pleasure in rooms, i think not. And that is enough really.
