An [Un]Likely Alliance:

Thinking Environment[ s] with De1euze\Guattari

Edited by

Bernd Herzogenrath

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with DelenzelGuattari,
Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath
This book first published 2008
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book 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 copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0036-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0036-5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Bernd Herzogenrath
Gilles Deleuze and N~turalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory
and Politics ................................................................................................ 23
Patrick. Hayden
Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art .................................................................. 46
Elizabeth Grosz
'The Instructed Third'; Processing Ecology with Deleuze ........................ 52
Leyla Haferkamp
The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology ............ 66
Michael Mikulak
How to Become a Reader: The Concept of American Literature
and Deleuze ............................................................................................... 84
Antony Larson
A Silent Dance: Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkull's Umwelt
Biology ........ ,............................................................................................. 98
Tom Greaves
Deleuze and Deep Ecology ...................................................................... 116
Alistair Welchman
Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzian Humanism and Ecosophy ................ 139
Edward Butler
Rhythm Ecology; The Topological Stretching of Nature ........................ 159
Eleni Ikoniadou
Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology ................................................ 176
Erick Heroux
vi Table of Contents
'Strange Ecology' in DeleuzelGuattari's A Thousand Plateaus ................ 196
Irving Goh
Political Ecology and Bio Art: "In the Age of Cynicism,
Accompanied by a Strange Piety" ........................................................... 216
James Wiltgen
Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question ........................................... 245
Katherine Young
Becoming Animal: The Animal as a Discursive Figure in and Beyond
A Thousand Plateaus ............................................................................... 266
Vincent J. Guihan
The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century ...... 280
Paul Lewis
The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Felix Guattari .......... 297
Georgina Banita
c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? Contingency, Ecology
and World-History .................................................................................. 314
Jorge Camacho
Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies ........................................ 339
Jussi Parikka
Contributors ............................................................................................. 363
INTRODUCTION
BERND HERZOGENRATH
In her seminal study Bodies that Matter Judith Butler stated that
"some have argued· that a rethinking of 'nature' as a set of dynamic
interrelations suits both feminist and ecological aims (and has for some
produced an otherwise unlikely alliance with the work of Gilles Deleuze"
(4) While the Deleuze-Feminism Connection has already been focused
on, I a likewise response to the second one-the alliance Deleuze and
ecology-is as yet still underdeveloped? As the essays in this collection
will show, the alliance is not unlikely at all- provided that one term in
the equation-the term ecology-will be re-interpreted and taken away
from the hold of both more 'traditional' [essentialist] perspectives, as well
as from the grip of the kind of sociaillinguistic constructivism that Butler
herself is aligned with. A DeleuzianlGuattarian version of ecology does
not see nature as distinct from, but coexistent with nature, and agency
here is not restricted to one side-the humanlcultural side-of the
equation. 'Nature' rather is an open and dynamic ~hole that does n~t
follow-as the term ecology might suggest-one lOgIC (or even: logos); It
might thus be more fitting, as Hanjo Berressem has recently suggested, to
speak of ecollogics instead (57).
Although motivated differently, Butler's statement links with Luc
Ferry's critique in The New Ecological Order (1993), in which he accuses
French philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres of an 'anti-
humanist' stance which, according to Ferry, amounts to nothing less than
a thinly-disguised 'new fascism.' For a neo-liberal humanist like himself,
"it is insane to treat animals, beings of nature and not of freedom, as legal
subjects. We consider it self-evident that only the latter are, so to speak,
'worthy of trial" (xvi). Privileging the question of 'legal status,' Ferry
bypasses the more pressing problematics of what it means to be 'h~man'
and 'free' if these categories cannot anymore be grounded III an
essentialist and clear-cut separation of nature and culture, nature and
'man,' human and non-human, as Deleuze and Guattari-in both their
individual and collective works-suggest:
2 Introduction
we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of
nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the
form of production or industry ... man and nature are not like two opposite
terms confronting each other-not even in the sense of bipolar opposites
within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect,
subject and object, etc.); ratherthey are one and the same essential reality,
the producer-product. (Anti-Oedipus 4-5)
'Thinking Environment[s]' with DeleuzelGuattari is thus far removed
from what might be termed '(intellectual) tree-hugging'-it is basically a
call to think complexity, and to complex thinking, a way to think the
environment as a negotiation of dynamic arrangements of cultural and
natural forces, both of which are informed and 'intelligent.' It refers to a '
pragmatic unlfolding of these infinitely complex arrangements, and as
such cannot rest solely on either a theory of cultural constructivism, nor
on naturallbiological determinism. DeleuzelGuattari provide a useful
toolbox for such a project-Guattari has even called for, in his book
Chaosmosis, an ecosophy, "a science of ecosystems" (91) and a
"generalized ecology-or ecosophy" (91).
The fact that Guattari points out the relevance of ecosystems, of a
generalized ecology, leads to the notion of ecologies, not just 'one world-
one ecology.' It may thus be important to tum an ecologics-a
'generalized' Environmental Studies (by definition both local and
global)-into a 'general project' that traverses philosophy, sociology,
politics, art, history, the hard sciences and urban studies, drawing not on
linear dynamics, but Chaos- and Complexity Theory, propagating logics
of open systems-with a minimum of structmal stability-and
morphogenesis that links various fields of research within a chaotic and
ecosophiclecologics reference. The perspective point of such an ecolog!cs
has nothing of a technophobic luddism and it comes without the regreSSIve
ecological rhetorics found in some of the more 'conservative' strands of
Environmental Studies. Neither does it follow the one-way logic of
sociaillinguistic constructivism encountered m much of today's
Ecocriticism:
The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations
wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be
taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of
all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their
coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis.
(KerridgelSammels 5)
Bernd Herzogenrath 3
A DeleuzianlGuattarian version of ecology does not see 'nature,' as the
majority of 'traditional' ecological or ecocritical approaches does, as a
single and unified totality, it does not at all rhyme with Al Gore's fantasy
of The World Formerly Known as The Harmonious Universe, thrown out
of its proper balance by mankind, the dominator and ex~loiter, and to ~e
restored by man, its steward. Nature, seen as that dynamIc, open whole IS
Posed not in balance , but more
.
in what Ludwig von3 Bertalanffy has termed
"FlieJ3gleichgewicht" (flowmg, turbulent balance). . ..
Guattari, then, at the end of Chaosmosis, comes to cnbClze the
ecological movement in France precisely for its narrow pragmatics: rather
than to close off ecology from the general ecosophic project, the
ecological movement should first of all "concern itself, as a matter of
priority, with its own social and mental ecology" (129). He also scolds the
movement's tendency to compartmentalize ecology into a purely natural
one when one also needs a cultural ecology, whose development has been
inc:easingly at the center of Cultural Studies. 'Nature,' 'landscap~,'
'environment'-in postmodern times, all of these terms and theIr
connotations can no longer be restricted to what one once called 'the
. . such
natura1.' Seemmgly clear-cut categones as' natu'
re and 'man,, 'human'
and 'non-human' are no longer tenable and cannot anymore be grounded in
an essentialist separation, as Deleuze states, "now that any distinction
between nature and artifice is becoming blurred" (Negotiations 155). The
DeleuzianlGuattarian model of ecology, a rather likely alliance, I would
say, affords a single mode of articulating developmental, environmental,
and evolutionary relations within ecological systems and makes room for a
conceptualization of a general, non-anthropomorphic affectivity within
dynamic systems . .
While still focusing mainly on 'natural environments,' the essays m thIS
volume situate these natural environments in the larger context of the
proposed 'generalized ecology,' taking 'nature' as the complex interplay of
nonhuman and human stressors into account: it is not 'the human race' that
either 'stewards' or disturb an otherwise harmonious, well-balanced and
stable nature-the natural environment is in itself turbulent, far from
equilibrium.
Discussions concerned with current ecological crises have attempted to
address and to utilize poststructuralist thought, but only few studies have
delineated the ecological orientation of a specific poststtucturalist. In his
by now classic essay (which I am really grateful to reprint here) "Gilles
Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and
Politics," Patrick Hayden provides a discussion of the naturalistic ontology
 4 Introduction
embraced by the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, one of
the most significant voices in poststructuralism. Hayden interprets Deleuze
as holding an ecologically informed perspective that emphasizes the
human place within nature while encouraging awareness of and respect for
the differences of interconnected life on the planet. Deleuze proves to be a
significant exception to poststmcturalism's generally hostile attitude·
towards naturalism, an attitude grounded on the view that naturalism is
equivalent to essentialism and thus to a dualistic metaphysics. According
to Hayden, Deleuze develops a "geophilosophy" that serves as an antidote
to such hostility, suggesting that naturalism is in fact compatible with the
critiques of essentialism and dualism that define poststmcturalism. Hayden
argues that this view may be joined with Deleuze's innovative ethical-
political approach, which he refers to as micropolitics, to create new ways
of thinking and feeling that support social and political transformation
with respect to the flourishing of ecological diversity. For Deleuze we
must not consider either nature or politics, as if they were mutually
exclusive, but at nature and politics. Finally, Hayden I briefly shows how
Deleuze's ecological orientation compares to several versions of
contemporary ecopolitical theory. He argues here that Deleuze's work can
help us to think how the concern with ecological destruction is a legitimate
post-metaphysical political issue.
In her rereading of Dalwin, Elizabeth Grosz addresses the relations
between sexual selection and the origins of art practices by exploring the
implications of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain. If the various
arts are somehow linked to sexuality, sexual intensification and sexual
selection, this is because art is a mode of intensification of living bodies,
bodies both human and animal, a mode of resonance in which the forces of
the earth, cosmological, climatological, regional directly impact on and
transformed the lived forces of bodies. Our understanding of art is opened
by linking art to natural rather than only culhlral relations.
During the post-Katrina era, ecological issues have gradually become
an integral part of the 'mainstream spectacle.' Although the. political
implications of such a development could not be underestimated, the
specific mode of popularization, revolving around a 'green and clean'
lifestyle and ecological buzzwords, has also brought about a trivializing
trend, rendering insignificant the intricacy of the dynamic multipolar
relations in the ecological realm. To counter this trivializing tendency, it
seems crucial to reconsider the ecological in philosophical terms and
create concepts that match its overall complexity. In fact, from a .
Bernd Herzogenrath 5
conceptual perspective, political ecology "has not yet begun to exist:" it
needs "made-to-order garb" (Latour).
Situated at the interface of nature and culture, ecology figures less as a
detached science than a 'permeable discipline' open to exchanges of the
inter- and transdisciplinary kind; a science in need of the regular revision
of its propositions and the readjustment of its tools according to changing
parameters. Deleuzean philosophy, regarded as a form of process
philosophy, is endowed with the capacity to develop dynamic concepts for
tackling such contrasting polarities as unity and plurality, constancy and
change, specificity and generality. As a conceptualizing machine, it can
provide ecology with concepts that complement its scientific prospects or
'reprocess'· its inherited philosophical notions. Deleuzean concepts are
'ecological' in the sense that they do not address the essences of things, but
the dynamics of events and the becomings that go through them.
From Whitehead to Bateson and further to Deleuze, process philosophy
can provide ecology with a conceptual ground that allows for the
'complexification' of the current ecological debate. Although such a
complexification would already be an important 'further step' towards a
truly ecological culture, beyond these political dynamics, 'processing
ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more
important: the ecologization of the subject.
In her essay "'The Instructed Third:' Processing Ecology with
Deleuze," Leyla Haferkamp approaches the Deleuzian 'conception of
concepts' as a useful philosophical aid for approaching ecological
problems. For this purpose, she focuses on the cluster of Deleuzean
concepts which,· by virtue of their dynamic interrelatedness, provide
appropriate tools for dealing with ecological complexity: the concept, the
plane of immanence and the event. Throughout, Haferkamp regards the
philosophical concept as 'the third party' in the continuous process of
intermediation between philosophical categories themselves as well as
between different disciplines.
In his essay on "The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to
Biotechnology," Michael Mikulak explores the complicated ways in which
kinship imaginaries are (trans)formed by competing discourses. He begins
by interrogating the often ludic tone surrounding the rhizome as an
alternative model for kinship and politics. While many theorists have
taken Deleuze and Guattari's call to strangle "the roots of the infamous
tree," Mikulak examines the bioscientific origin stories and the vectors of
biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative
transversals. More specifically, his paper is about trees, roots and
6 Introduction
rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and
the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured,
shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical
discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence. Drawing on Deleuze and
Guattari, Darwin, Haraway, Heimlreich, and a range of ecocriticism,
Mikulak interrogate how the radically open concept of subjectivity in flux
characteristic of ecological models of rhizomatic kinship, transforms the
political vectors of the various kinship imaginaries that tie us together.
Mikulak rereads Darwin's The Origin of Species in order to show how
an arborescent logic was forced upon Darwin by colonialist and racist state
science. This vulnerability is present in the kinship imaginaries
surrounding rhizomatic theory, and in the same ways that evolution was
used to justify competition, colonialism, and capitalistic accumulation,
despite clear examples refuting these positions within the text, the rhizome
as a model of kinship is being usurped by the age of biotechnology.
Mikulak is thus cautious in celebrating the libratory potential of the
rhizome and ecological thinking, and instead, uses Darwin to produce a
careful and historic contextualization that can reveal the ways in which
regulatory science and corporate interests are usurping the liberated mental
ecologies of rhizomatic theory. He carefully looks at examples where
discourses of nature, culture, ownership and species transform each other
in the discovery of Archaea, a group of marine microbes that live in
thennal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and who transfer genes laterally,
between individuals, as well as vertically, between generations. These
microbes have shattered many conceptions of evolution and origins
because they disrupt Darwin's "natural classifications" and the link
between genealogy and taxonomy. They are truly rhizomatic creatures,
both materially, and discursively, and are providing biotechnology
companies with a justification for genetic engineering and a new means,
through new vectors of gene transfer, to improve the techniques of genetic
modification. By examining the way Archaea are being utilized by
corporate science, Mikulak warns that rhizomatic theory is just as capable
of leading to biopolitical regimentation and imperalist rhizomatics as it is
to healthy, ecological assemblages.
From his first published essay on the constitution of the subject in
empirical philosophy through his polemical critique of psychoanalysis
with Felix Guattari to his final work on immanence and clife, Gilles
Deleuze's philosophy aimed at disrupting the traditional Western
philosophical category of the subject. At every hlrn of this project, from
the subject-as-habitus via Hume to the biopsychic of the Anti-Oedipus to A
Bernd Herzogenrath 7
LIFE of immanence, the goal was to move thought away. from the
centered, human ground of subjectivity to "fields" that extend beyond the
singularly hmnan. What distinguishes Deleuze's work in this exploration
of the trans-human is his method, particularly in what it borrows from a
Spinozist practice of ethology or study of capacities. For Deleuze, the
crucial question in exploring a subject's constitution is not "what is a
subject?" but "what can a subject do?" since the shift away from a
subject's being to its capacities or powers moves one away from questions
of essences and towards those of relations or compositions with other
powers.
While this particular shift in method is not particularly new it is
important to grasp the implications such a method has for the practice of
thought and oflife itself, for such are the stakes of Deleuze's re-thinking of
subjectivity. How can one experience the radical shift in thought that such
thinking requires?
This collection of essays is devoted to the environment and ecology,
but Antony Larson's essay "How to Become a Reader: The Concept of
American Literature and Deleuze" seeks to show that one of the
consequences of this radical shift in thought is an extension or re-working
of terms such as "environment" or "individual" to fields that escape simple
binary definitions of culture/nature. Literature as a concept (in Deleuze's
terms) is an experiment in this shift in thought.
One of the places one might begin to look for answers to these
questions is literature and one of the literatures in which this process is
most visible and most livable is the literature of the Anglo-American
tradition. It is important to understand Deleuze's designation of literature
as Anglo-American in conceptual terms (which, in his philosophy is
defined as a response to a particular set of problems) and see this concept
of literature as responding to these particular questions concerning the
practice of life in terms of capacities and Spinozist ethology.
Larson addresses this crucial question of how to become a reader
through an encounter with perhaps one of the greatest classics of
American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, so that one
might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake. For it is in this
masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of living open before
the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an interpretation in which
the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which it so often appears, so
that a pre-existing judgment may be confirmed, mirroring the critical
reading of the Puritan protagonists. On the other hand, signs are often not
what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious and vital energy that
upon closer examination escapes the pre-determined judgmerit of the
 8 Introduction
reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscemibility that escapes definitive
interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by Hawthome's famous
"bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a textual process has several
consequences. First, moving through the two levels of reading, one
discovers how the text is structured by different zones of intensity which
then feed into a secondary and more important encounter between the
reader and the text, opening one up to a larger textual process that goes
beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger process, in its nature un-
foreseeable and incalculable in advance, tends toward what Deleuze would
call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the intensities of the reader and the
text become something that is neither textual nor "human." That this
should occur in a text that so fundamentally confronts the desire to master
and read in nature the signs of man brings this study back full circle to the
overt and radical attack on the human subject that is Deleuzian thought.
Jakob von Uexkiill's biology strongly influenced Deleuze and
Guattari's account of animal milieus in A Thousand Plateaus. In his essay
"A Silent Dance: Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt
Biology," Tom Greaves explores the way in which the theory of "Nature
as Music" is taken up and developed there, showing that although Uexkiill
lays the groundwork for important insights in compositional ecology, he
remains wedded to an account of harmony which needs to called into
question. This is partially achieved by Deleuze and Guattari's account of
the composition of territories and the movement of deterritorialisation.
Greaves argues that this account can be helpfully supplemented by
attending to ecological phenomenology'S concem with the "ontological
value of species" and rethinking the concept of niche in terms of the
marking of differences which are themselves subject to processes of
"despeciation." The appreciation of these processes leads to a thinking of
the "milieu of all milieus" or chaotic world, a necessity which marksan
important point of conjunction between the very different philosophical
projects of Martin Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, Greaves
suggests that the distinction which Deleuze and Guattari draw between the
intensive line of flight of fascism and the totalitarian State can be applied
to ecological compositions, allowing us to gain more precise insight into
the threat of "eco-fascism."
Deep Ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first
is to the intrinsic value of nature, a kind of axiological antihumanism. This
has always been bound up with a second central commitment, the
metaphysical claim that human beings are nothing other than natural
Bernd Herzogenrath 9
entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical antihumanism. But both of these have
traditionally also been connected to some kind of practice that transforms
our consciousness of nature. In his probing of the alliance "Deleuze and
Deep Ecology," Alistair Welchman ivestigates the relation between the
.first two of these commitments, and tries to show how the third is
subordinate to the first two. The upshot is that metaphysically and
axiologically antihumanist claims can certainly be sustained (and have
been in several historically important philosophical systems) but that they
do not necessarily generate the kind of valuations that deep ecologists
want. Deleuze, as Welchman shos, is a case in point.
The transpersonal' or transformative aspect of Deep Ecology is best
interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have
distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to
undo or reverse those processes. Welchman argues that the most
theoretically sophisticated resources for this kind of critique come from
philosophical phenomenology. But phenomenology is officially neutral
about metaphysical issues and in fact conceptually hostile to any kind of
metaphysical naturalism. Such theoretically sophisticated views offer a
way of reconceptualising nature that is important and significant, but often
in the context of a sustained and even deepened understanding of the
metaphysical distinctness of human beings. Metaphysical naturalism on
the other hand, can make use of ideological critique of the concept of
nature, but does so in the service of a changed understanding not only of
nature, but also of human beings as natural products. In other words, it is
the first two commitments that are really conceptually distinctive of Deep
Ecology; transformation is subordinated to them. What can be leamed
from the encOlmter is the importance of conceptual revision, and this
applies not only to the concepts of the human person and nature, but also
to the concept of valuation.
According to Welchman, there are three possible ways of thinking the
relation between the axiological and metaphysically antihumanist
commitments of Deep Ecology. They may be separate; axiological
commitments may be 'projected' onto nature; or nature may in some sense
be the source of valuations. Welchman rejects the first two as ultimately
incompatible with naturalism and shows that Deleuze champions the third.
But Deleuze's conception of the values posited in and by nature (quite
distinct from the phenomenologically projective account of a weave of fact
and value based on human interests) differs significantly from the
valuation deep ecologists need. Welchman proposes a diagnosis of this
difference: Deep Ecology is still rooted in an understanding the axiological
contribution of metaphysical naturalism based and made explicit in
 10 Introduction
Schopenhauer's morality of sympathy or co-feeling. But Deleuze sees this
as having undergone a successful Nietzschean critique resulting in a
valuative preference not for the interests of natural entities (as in Deep
Ecology) but for the interesting as such (which he-along with Guattari-
gives a quite technical definition for).
Edward Butler's essay "Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzean Humanism
and Ecosophy" applies Deleuzean thought to the project of subverting the
opposition between humanism and ecocentrism. The essay takes its title
from the Hercules presented by Deleuze as the conceptual persona of
Stoicism in The Logic of Sense, who "ascends or descends to the surface in
every conceivable manner," who "brings back the hell-hound and the
celestial hound, the serpent of hell and the serpent of the heavens ... in his
dual battle against both depth and height" (l32). Butler takes Luc Ferry's
humanistic critique of Deep Ecology as his starting point. Even if critics
such as Ferry are correct that the liberating aspects of the Enlightenment
project were only thinkable historically as involving a negation of the
natural order as it was then conceived, nevertheless, it is not necessmy to
reaffirm the conditions of the historical emergence of these ideas in order
for the ideas themselves to continue to operate, unless no other origin can
be thought for them even in principle. It is easy, however, to imagine the
liberatory potential of the Enlightenment having been released without
being accompanied by a conception of the human as essentially
"antinatural"-namely under a different conception of Nature; A
humanism worthy of the name must speak to the genuine conditions under
which humans may develop their potential; and this does not come about
through opposing humanity to a Nature conceived as a static realm of
reified essences, because it cuts off humans from what is liberatory in
human nature and in nature itself relative to reified cultural essences and
imprisoning traditions. Ferry underestimates the liberatory potential of
naturalistic discourses past and present. To be cosmopolitan, to be
nourished by difference, is not "antinatural" at all; it is vitality and
maturity.
At the same time, however, Butler argues, an ecosophy which fails to
locate humanity's best and worst potentials within the natural order fails as
well, because it mystifies the relationship between humans and Nature and
obscures human agency in the constihltion of value. What is needed is not
a lapsarian narrative about humanity's fall from natural· grace, but a
thoroughly naturalistic genealogy of morals. Furthermore, the fundamental
ecosophic thesis of the intrinsic value of living beings and ecosystems
loses its significance if individuals are dissolved in a totalizing conception
Bernd Herzogenrath 11
of Nature such as is sometimes met with in the rhetoric of Deep Ecology.
A De1euzean ecosophy can contribute both to the defense of Deep Ecology
from its critics, and to the internal critique and reform of Deep Ecology
itself.
Butler proceeds to identify some key elements of a Deleuzean
ecosophy. De1euze's basic ethical principle, derived from his reading of
Spitioza, is that "the good or strong individual is the one who exists so
fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his lifetime" (Practical
Philosophy 41). This fullness or intensity can, in turn, be measured by the
criterion of the diversity of wills compossib1e with an essence, because
death expresses the 1itnitations of an essence. The more perfect essence is
that in which the greater diversity of wills is compossible, individuation
according to such an essence generating a plane of immanence with a
greater internal complexity. Developing this calculus involves a distinction
between a mere disintegration into atoms and a genuine monadological
pluralism incorporating respect for the diversity of the orders of reality.
Human nature is neither reified nor negated in this ecosophy, but
represents a zone of contestation, just like the narure or essence of every
living thing or natural system. The ecosophica1 concept of intrinsic value
acquires its ethical force, not by positing a transcendent source for value,
but by recognizing an individuative striving in natural beings that is at
once and as such the striving to constirute a plane of immanence whose
intensive complexity, by expressing the maximal multiplicity of values,
approximates the absolute velocity of thought. According to Deleuze, and
with Spinoza: "No one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of'
(125). Existence is a test, as of chemical composition. If humanity, or a
particular human, turns out not to be what it might have been, nevertheless
something or someone else has that nature, that essence; hence the degree
of imperfection of the world in which we live is expressed by the presence
of ideals. This theory is explicated in relation to a thought-experiment
about humanity and an imaginary alien race posed by Arne Naess in
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989). Butler's essay concludes with a
brief exposition of the sense of this particular image of the deathless
essenc.e.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Le Corbusier poses the question
'Can cities be improved by design?' prompting an era of architechrre that
divided the environment between natural and artificial. Consistent with
traditional Western philosophy and science, modern architecture tended to
equate the improvement of human condition with the harmonisation of the
world's flow. Space, in this spirit of social design, was based on the idea of
 12 Introduction
free movement and a desire to ease the body through it. The inherent
Cartesianism within these disciplines presupposed an ocularcentric
relationship between human body and environment as two different
elements in communication: the perceiver and the perceived. The human
body - as perceiver - assumes a central perspective in relation to the
environment, while the latter - as perceived - is 'simply there before us'.
However, contemporary examples of spatial regeneration in architecture
and relational art are characterized by a shift from stable form to abstract
force. No longer able to distinguish between the fuzzy and continuous
generation of complexity between body, technology and environment, we
need new theories and practices with which to conceive them together.
Eleni Ikoniadou's essay "Rhythm Ecology: The Topological Stretching
of Nature," poses the question: If communication (between perceiver and
perceived) is conceived at the level of sensory perception, then how do we
account for body and environment beyond the limits of our own
experience? Can we rethink them together from the standpoint of
'rhythmic topology' within one system of potentiality? Topology,
according to Massumi and DeLanda, is the branch of mathematics
concerned with spatial properties preserved under bicontinuous
defOlmation (stretching without tearing or gluing). Considered topologically,
a body surpasses the restriction of essences (what it is) and enters the
realm of assemblages (what it can do in its entanglements with other
bodies). Away from the replacement of a visual perspective of space by a
sonic one, this paper explores rhythm as a relational tension between body
and milieu, a mode 'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology
addresses the virtuality of unfinished and unnatural bodies to
conceptualise an ecological becoming that stretches beyond our
knowledge of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for
ecology, Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualisation of an
altogether new nature.
Although Felix Guattari was personally active in Green politics and
published several works about "ecosophy" and the complex transversal
connections between "the three ecologies" of psyche, society, and natural
environment, nevertheless he is neither recognized nor discussed among
ecologists and also literary ecocritics, with very few exceptions to be
noted. Erick Heroux counters the silence that has failed to respond to
Guattari's challenging contributions-his essay on "Guattari's Triplex
Discourses of Ecology" shows how his work bonows from an alternative
tradition of theoretical biology: cybernetic systems and cognitive biology.
Guattari often refened to scientists such as Gregory Bateson, Humberto
Bernd Herzogenrath 13
Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ilya Prigogine-all major figures in the
early development of the contemporary science of complexity. By briefly
introducing the key scientific concepts that Guattari borrows, we will more
readily grasp how he also transformed and extended these concepts. For
example, to comprehend what he means by "machinic assemblages" it is
very helpful to know how Maturana and Varela described the biological
cell as an "autopoetic machine" and how Bateson described "mind" or a
cognition that was always already coextensive with simple living systems.
Guattari further theorized this alternative tradition with and for his
transdisciplinary and social concerns. The bulk of this essay describes the
differences between 'the mainstream science of ecology, the alternative
tradition coming out of theoretical biology, and finally Guattari's unique
and extensive retheorization of these. His ecosophy of "chaosmosis"
would greatly clarify and benefit contemporary political ecology, and also
will most likely be of keen interest for the emerging subfield of
"biosemiotics. "
Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus is first eco-
logy before it is ethology or nomadology. The concepts of becoming-
animal, the refrain, and the nomadic war-machine, are always already born
from a certain engagement with Nature's telluric space, its air, its wind, its
landscape of flora and fauna, and its movement of waters. Any
understanding of these concepts without taking account of the ecological
grounding is an incomplete one. But one should not however expect an
amicable relation between Nature and thought in A Thousand Plateaus. As
Irving Goh, in his essay on "'Strange Ecology' in DeleuzelGuattari's A
Thousand Plateaus" argues, there is a violent economy between Nature
and philosophy there. Philosophy strikes out at Nature. But Nature never
remains as a passive victim. In A Thousand Plateaus, it strikes back.
Nature bears a violent force here. It is a movement of pure
detenitorialization that sweeps up any grounded habitation [this
understanding of Nature is certainly traceable to Bataille's ecology, where
the life of the planet is endowed by the passage of a cosmic or solar line of
luxurious energy expenditure]. And yet this "strange ecology" in A
Thousand Plateaus, to use Deleuze's term in a dialogue with Claire Parnet,
does not end in a nihilistic nothingness for either or both of these entities.
In fact, through the combat between Nature and philosophy, each will
realize that each equally needs the violence of the other not only to sustain
I itself but also to cany it to another level, to engender a creative line within
I itself.
I
I
 14 Introduction
James Wiltgen's "Abstract Composition: The Problem of Thought-Art
in the 4th Machinic Age," begins with a brief look at the Large Hadron
Collidor as it seeks to crash subatomic particles into each other at near the
speed of light, and the current (anti-) cosmological argument that the
universe has increased its rate of expansion dramatically, or the latest
return of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What do these forces tell
us about the current relations between science, culture, and the world?
Tm:ning to I?eleuze and Guattari, the qu.esyion. becomes how to actualize
vanous possIble assemblages, and ways III WhICh strata can be thought in
light of the conceptualization of what exists as the 'infinitely folded up
infinite.' After a brief glance at Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, Wiltgen
focuses on issues of abstract composition: how can composition be
engaged, how to pursue abstract vital lines, and the typology of the shift
from the mode of production to the mode of connection. What lies beyond
the human and how can nonhumans, things, animals, monsters, phantasms,
actants, and other forms of random strata be integrated in different
manners. Will it be possible to, as Nietzsche posed, "let the earth become
lightness"?
In a second part, Wiltgen's essay examines the work of Bruno Latour,
first with We Have Never Been Modern but more importantly The Politics
of Nature. The provocative argument in the latter seeks to jettison the
concept Nature and replace it with a praxis of the 'politics of ecology.' On
what does Latour base his argument, how does this translate into a set of
practices, and what connections does it have with D & G, in particular the
material cited above? In other words, how to understand the call for the
'progressive composition of a common world.' Isuues of materiality, flows
and the regime of computation are examined via the work ofN. Katherine
Hayles; and the importance of sexual bifurcation and the relation between
matter and life in the work of Elizabeth Grosz. The pressing issue here
concerns the ways in which the world, the earth and the cosmos can be
analyzed as most productive for affinnative forms of change.
In the last section, Wiltgen develops a view of current artists'
interventions into these areas: two points of entry-the MOMA exhibit
entitled Design and the Elastic Mind, with its 'bioengineered crossbreeds,
temperamental robots, and spermatozoa imprinted with secret texts'
(Ourousoft); and the work of a series ofbioartists, including Eduardo Kac,
and the 'semi-living art' created by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. How have
boundaries between the biological and the technical become fuzzy, blurred
and eroded? What ways will oocyte fusion, haploidization, and human
cloning alter our thinking, our politics and the means of addressing the
I
1
Bernd Herzogenrath 15
staggering issues of sustainable modes of living? In what ways can the
planet move toward what Bataille called a 'general economy'?
Animals centrally appear in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A
Thousand Plateaus (1980), as the impossible limit and the figurative
possibility of the Body without Organs (BwO), the anti-organism that
resists particular assemblage, significance and subjectification.
Accordingly, animals become living metaphors for the multiplicity of
human desire, or the becoming-animal of humans. In her essay "Deleuze
and Guattari: The Animal Question," Katherine Young explores the
central concern of how we can negotiate the virtual (animal bodies) and
the actual (becoming-animal) in Deleuze and Guattari with a project of
animal advocacy. However, instead of laying the framework for
Deleuzean animal politics, Young's essay critically analyzes Deleuze and
Guattari's underlying anthropocentric implications. In other words, before
we can strike an uneasy alliance between Deleuze and Guattari and
contemporary political projects like animal rights, we must take them to
their (Deleuzean) limits with regard to the animal question.
Vincent 1. Guihan also focuses on 'the Animal Question,' though from
a perspective different from Young's. His essay "Becoming Animal: The
Animal as a Discursive Figure in and Beyond A Thousand Plateaus"
addresses the question of "becoming animal" as a relatively small but very
important part of A Thousand Plateaus. Becoming animal functions in a
number of key ways, but to summarize these, it encourages the adoption
and practice of a more dialogic relationship with both animals and nature
with as an Other rather than merely instruments to be used. First, it draws
Qut, like any kind of anthropomorphism (intentionally or not), the prospect
that species difference is often a culturally mediated and/or socially
constructed phenomena like race, gender or other elements of human
subjectivity. In that sense, becoming animal provides ecocritical thinkers
with a tool to trouble one of the longest standing and least-interrogated
bases for domination in Western thought and one of the major
justifications for environmentally unsustainable living: species ism-the
view that human beings, as human beings, have greater inherent moral
worth than other species and that they in particular and the environment as
a whole exist for human use. Second, it provides us with a basis to at least
trouble if not actually think or work outside of the humanlanimaVnature
dichotomies that a number of ethicists have insisted that we must begin to
trouble. BecoI'ning animal provides us with a way of comprehending
ourselves as human beings within a broader framework if environmental
 / Bernd Herzogenrath
16 Introduction
interdependency - not just in tenns of our political will and rational
reflection or in tenns of how to we might manage and police nature better
as a superspecies - but as a ways of reimagining ourselves as beings
dependent on the ecosystem (a condition that, although obviously tme, has
been denied to the point of becoming debatable, as the debate around
global wanning currently evinces). Finally, becoming animal in particular
and the rhizomatic in general provides us with a way to think outside of
biopower, to use Foucault's tenn, as the primary way of ordering the
relationship between human and non-human animals and the environment.
Plants, animals, and the milieu of life have all been special themes in
art for many thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic.
Recently, however, artists have begun to assume a more assertive and
radical position in this entangled history oflife, nature and art. For the past
ten years, a few artists have been presenting sophisticated genetic and
biological experiments as works of art. Some works are commissioned,
while others are the product of research and production undertaken by the
artists themselves. In any case, as Paul Lewis argues in his essay "The
Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century," the living
organism, plant and animal tissue, the cell, the genome-all these have
entered as raw materials into the practice of art.
Laura Cinti has exhibited genetically altered cactus plants that
allegedly express human hair. Oron Catts and the Tissue Culture & Art
Project have created sculptures of semi-living tissue, including several
pairs of pig wings and a Y4 scale human ear. Eduardo Kac failed to produce
GFP K-9, the green fluorescent dog he envisioned in 1998, but he went on
to exhibit a similarly engineered transgenic rabbit two years later,
borrowing from a marine jellyfish genetic material that had itself been
altered in the laboratory. These gratuitous creatures occupy an uncanny
place in the zoological world. Their extravagance as artworks derives from
the fact that they are not representations of monstrous animals-as one
sees in the works of Bosch, for example-but are in fact living
constituents of the biotic community. They are alive.
Whatever impact these experiments may have within art criticism, their
full cultural significance is much greater still. For the "anomalous"
construction of artificial life forms in art is but a cultural appropriation of
"normal" practices in biomedicine, molecular biology, and agriculture.
Life as an artifact first began to proliferate in the landless ecosystem of
the scientific laboratory. Reflecting the artifice of its life fonns, the
modem biological laboratory is itself a heterogeneous ecology shaped by
venture capitalists, public health initiatives, patent lawyers, government
17
budgets, postcolonial political antagonisms, academic bureaucracies, and
personal obsessions. Now artists have directly asserted some cultural
rights over the play of forces that constitute life, and their works have
therefore extended the already complex political ecology of the laboratory
in an unexpected direction.
The future of these experiments in art will undoubtedly deepen our
ongoing historical confrontation with the most fundamental concepts of
ecology. The important questions, according to Lewis-such as What is an
organism? What is a niche or a habitat? What is natural? What is a
nonhuman environment-appear now, more than ever, to be embedded in
a deterritorialized struggle among social forces over a biological domain
that has itself become deterritorialized. This is a schizoid collision of
sociopolitical and ontological dimensions, a collision in which the natural
and the artificial exist not as a duality but as a multiplicity. In many
important respects, the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari address
this "flow of disjunctive forces" between the natural and the artificial.
Their profound and sometimes outrageous attempt to sharpen the edge of
process philosophy into specific biological speculations and metaphors has
left a rich, but by no means perfect, language for new conceptual problems
in the science and art of ecology. The recent emergence of genetic and
biological experimentation in art, itself an uneasy alliance, provides an
irresistible opportunity to test the uneasy alliance between Deleuze,
Guattari, and the future of ecology.
One of the current development of traditional environmentalist thought
tends toward the inclusion of an "ecology of desire" (Heller) and "mental
ecology" (Guattari) under the concerted influence of the 'ethical tum' and
the 'turn to affect' in the humanities and social sciences. Since it has not
been shown whether such new paradigms have found an echo in parallel
literary trends or can be used as a heuristic for literary criticism, it is the
purpose of this essay to take a first step in that direction.
Annie Dillard's novel The May trees marks a perspective shift from the
life of nature described in Dillard's earlier eco-theological writings-such
as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974-to the life of
the mind best showcased in this untypical narrative about a marriage and
family union. that does not follow the prescribed nonns of moral
convention. Dillard's engagement with the crisis of romantic life and its
'ecological' resolution, Georgiana Banita argues, is in keeping with Felix
Guattari's transition from a natural to a personal ecosophy, as reflected in
the gradual evolution of this concept in his work. While it shares with
traditional ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere,
18 / Introduction
ecosophy also acknowledges that 'incorporeal species' and 'mental ecology'
are equally endangered and in crisis. Banita's reading of The May trees in
her essay "The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Felix
Guattari" seizes opportunities offered by ecocriticism and ecosophy to
make good on literature's ethical investment and reaffirm its social
responsibility. Banita reveals how the novel builds on its explicit
environmental premises to develop an ecology of love relations and their
impact on the characters' awareness of themselves, their natural and
mental environment, as well as their complex rapport with time, both
interior and exterior, subjective and concrete, psychological and
narratological. In doing so, she aligns herself with Felix Guattari's
tripartite ecological approach as it is espoused in his essay The Three
Ecologies, where he proposes a shift from a purely technocratic
perspective in ecological action toward an ethico-political articulation
comprising three ecological registers: the environment, social relations,
and human subjectivity (28). Dillard's novel, as Banita shows, is a hybrid
illustration of Guattari's social ecosophy----whichconsists in "developing
specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live
as couples or in the family" (34)-and his mental ecosophy, leading us "to
reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage
of time, to the 'mysteries' oflife and death" (35).
In his essay "c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
Contingency, Ecology and World-History," Jorge Camacho follows up on
Deleuze and Guattari's marginal but reCUlTent concern with the problem of
finding a historical explanation for the development of capitalism in
Europe vis-a-vis its non-development in China. Its relevance is two-fold.
On the one hand, this problem-and the way it was treated in historical
research between Marx or Dobb and Braudel or Chaunu-serves Deleuze
and Guattari as a concrete example of a first principle that allows them to
revisit and reframe the old topic of Universal History. Such principle,
which they enigmatically relate to Marx's thought, entails that history
ought to be conceived as the work of pure contingency. Implicit here is, of
course, a particular reading and critique of a German tradition (perhaps
Kant or Herder, but certainly Hegel) that stressed the role of necessity,
rationality and teleology. For Deleuze and Guattari, the historical course in
general and, in particular, the sequence leading to the emergence of
capitalism, is a concatenation of contingent events: it could have happened
differently, elsewhere, in another moment in history or not happened at all.
Moreover, their universal history is retrospective from the point of view of
capitalism. For them, capitalism is a potential that has haunted all forms of
Bernd Herzogenrath 19
society and it is from this virtual position that it has shaped-negatively,
as a nightmare to be warded-off-all the social machines that have
emerged in this planet. This being so, what is perplexing for them is
nothing but precisely its singularity, the fact that it fully developed only
once and in 'one place,' thus Camacho asks with them: why in Europe?
Why not in China?
On the other hand, the problem is relevant in the context of this
collection because it prompts Deleuze and Guattari to invoke ecological
determinations for the course of world history. In the rather sweeping and
marginal explanation proposed in the Treatise on Nomadology, they
follow Annales-school historians like Braudel in locating the first 'deep
cause' in the rather different ecological geographies of Europe and China,
and the concomitant agro-technological infrastructures associated with
wheat and rice cultivation. Arguably, beyond any form of determinism,
Deleuze and Guattari's interest for such geohistorical explanation is
precisely the role it grants to concrete contingency in detriment of abstract
rationality.
In this way, the objective of Camacho's essay is to revisit and
disentangle this problem drawing from historical research that has put an
emphasis on its ecological dimension. Most importantly, traveling along
these lines it will be possible to extricate the fundamentally ecological
character of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy; in particular, their
conception of social formations. as heterogeneous assemblages composed
and shaped by much more than just people.
The body of animals, more specifically insects, are media in their own
kind. For Jussi Parikka, this means expanding the familiar notions of
"media" towards a Deleuzian framework where the term resonates with an
ecological understanding of bodies. Bodies are vibrations and foldings
with their environments, a theme that was developed in ethological
research and then adopted to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
Parikka's essay "Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies" shows
how this theme is useful in a reconceptualization of media as an
enviromnent of interactions, translations and foldings between
heterogeneous bodies. In this context, animal bodies mediate and contract
not only the rhythms of nature, but are mediated as part of the construction
of modem media as well, as conceptual figures but also through the
measures ofbiopower inherent for instance in physiological research.
By excavating a certain archaeology of Deleuze's ideas, especially
Bergson's notions regarding "insects technics" as elaborated recently by
Elizabeth Grosz, Parikka attempts to think through some of the
20 Introduction
consequences of what a more enviromnental, ecological and
biophilosophical understanding of "media" could entail. In this context,
media is considered somewhat parallel to a Deleuzian understanding of a
body: it is a force field, a potentiality, an intersection point where forces of
the cosmos contract to form certain potentials for affects and percepts.
Thus, as Rosi Braidotti explains, the "Deleuzian body is in fact an
ecological unit." Bodies/media work only through relatedness where "this
environmentally-bound intensive subject is a collective entity; it is an
embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and
transforms energies and forces."
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari explain how the world
contracts different vibrations and how different natural entities act as
condensations of the cosmos. The way a plant forms and senses itself is
through contracting light, salts, carbon. Through this contracting or folding
"it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its
composition: it is sensation itself" Brains are not found only in the heads
of humans and animals, but microbrains inhabit the inorganic world as
well. The world is media, in a manner of sensation and contracting, even
though Deleuze and Guattari constantly avoided using that specific term as
for them it applies only to mass media of communications. Still, it is
possible to continue from their philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards
directions of a natural philosophy of media where the term starts to
encompass the recording of time in rocks, the capacities of transmission in
plants and animals, the weird sensations for example in insects that
perceive not only through eyes and ears, but through chemicals as well.
In fact, recent years of technological innovation have embraced exactly
insects and like as perfect models for media design. In the 1980s, the
cyborg became a pre-eminent symbol of the late-modem conflation of
biology and technology. This all too familiar figure was, however, always
weighed down by a degree of anthropomorphic baggage, largely due to the
widely distributed idea of Man and his prosthesis being the characteristic
mode of conjoining biology and technology. Yet, since early cybemetics, a
panorama of other biological examples was also discussed in a
technological context, from viruses to flies and rats to insects. Indeed, at
the same time as the man-machine boom was approaching its peak years,
other ideas of non-human models of organization and perception were
emerging both in media design and consequently in media theory as well.
In this context, the epigraph above from A Thousand Plateaus [and
Parikka's reading of it] becomes clear: insects, germs, bacteria and
particles do not just denote biological categories of knowledge, but
simultaneously can be seen as carriers of intensities and potentials. What
Bernd Herzogenrath 21
defmes an insect? Its structure, its evolutionary path, its position in the
ecology of nature? Deleuze rejects in Bergson's vein any spatializing
modes of understanding entities of nature and culture and opts for a more
ethological brand of analysis: natural, cultural and technological bodies are
defmed by their potentials for interaction and enaction, the potentials of
what they can do instead of what they are.
As Dianne Chishohn has rightly to point out, the geo in
DeleuzelGuattari's geopilosophy "evokes no singular (geological,
biological, hydrological, thermodynamical, etc.) activity but, instead,
emits a multiplicity of interconnecting 'geos'-geology, geography,
geophysics, and geopolitics, and emerging composites such as
geophysiology, geomicrobiology, ad infinitum" ... similar to the eco in the
"generalized ecology," which, according to Guattari, consists of the
interplay of at least "three ecological registers (the environment, social
relations and human SUbjectivity" (Three Ecologies 28). Likewise, one
should rather not talk about one ecology, but rather of ecologies-both
naturelmatter and culturelrepresentation are dynamic, open and ultimately
machinic aggregates that operate according to different but interrelated
ecollogics. To show-and do- precisely this is what the present
anthology is aiming at.
Notes
1 Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook,
Edinburgh UP 2000, can be read as a fit answer to the first 'unlikely alliance' in
Butler's claim.
2 See however Chisholm, and Herzogenrath.
3 ••• and what in the English translation curiously goes as "steady state" (41).
Works Cited
Berressem, Banjo. "Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and a
Deleuzian Ecologies." DeleuzelGuattari & Ecology. Ed. Bernd
Berzogenrath (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008): 57-lOI.
Buchanan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook (Eds.) Deleuze and Feminist Theory
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2000).
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
(New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
22 Introduction
Chisho~, Dianne. (Ed.) "Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy."
rhizomes 15 (winter 2007), see www.rhizomes.net/issue15/index.html
(last accessed August 31, 2008).
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. M. Joughin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul
Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995).
-. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Gary Genosko (London: Athlone Press,
2000).
Herzogemath, Bernd. (Ed.) DeleuzelGuattari & Ecology (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2008).
Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammels (Eds.) Writing the Environment.
Ecocriticism and Literature (London and New York: Zed Books,
1998).
von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. General Systems Theory. Foundations,
Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1969).
GILLES DELEUZE AND NATURALISM:
A CONVERGENCE WITH ECOLOGICAL
THEORY AND POLITICS
PATRICK HAYDEN
Introduction
In this paper, I examine the naturalistic and ecological orientation of
Gilles Deleuze, the contemporary French philosopher who is best known
as on of the leading voices of poststructuralism. The term naturalism is
rarely, if ever, encountered in the writings of poststructuralist, and even
then usually appears only as an object of hostile interest. The primary
reason for this distain is that naturalism is taken as a straightforward
equivalent to essentialism, understood as referring to predetermined orders
of 'natures' or invariant essences.! However, Deleuze proves to be a
significant exception to this general attitude toward naturalism. He not
only incorporates discussions of naturalism within the contexts of his
many analyses of historical figures, but he also develops a philosophical
perspective that, at least implicitly, forwards a version of naturalism
compatible with the critiques of essentialism and dualism addressed in his
numerous publications. While Deleuze has no offered a systematic account
of naturalism, one purpose of this paper is to draw together some of the
threads of naturalism woven into Deleuze's texts in order to demonstrate
how he goes about rethinking this topic.
Another purpose of this paper is practical. From his earliest works to
his most recent collaborations with Felix Guattari, Deleuze insists that
philosophy be conceived as a practice whose usefulness derives from the
active creation of new and different ways of thinking and feeling.2 Deleuze
is ultimately concerned with the kinds of effects that philosophy is able to
produce, insofar as these effects encourage the creation of new life-
affirmative values and sensibilities. It is my contention that Deleuze
promotes a type of naturalism that highlights the diverse interconnections
between human and nonhuman modes of life, in such a way as to provide
24 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
some overlooked philosophical resources for integrating ethical and
political considerations with ecological concerns, while resisting the
reductive temptation to tum nature into a static metaphysical foundation.
In the end, Deleuze's view of philosophy as practical implies a
commitment to, among other things, a strong environmentalist stance.
With that in mind, I want to provisionally explore some of the ways
Deleuze's naturalism relates to ecopolitical theOlY. Undoubtedly, Deleuze
has yet to be recognized as a potential contributor to ecological discourse.
One of my aims here, however, is to introduce this possibility for further
discussion.
One of the difficulties with discussing naturalism in the context of
Deleuze's work is that naturalism has been so variously defined and
employed throughout the history of philosophy that it is impossible to
offer a single definition of the term. Some have understood naturalism to
be a view that excludes any reference to supernatural or transcendent
principles, beings, or entities, with possible consequences ranging from the
belief that the world is explicable only in scientifically verifiable terms, to
the assertion of some form of humanism or secularism. Others contend
that naturalism is meant to indicate the continuity or affinity of the human
and nonhuman, and stress that human behaviour and human institutions
have their basis in natural phenomena such that here is no exclusive
opposition between nature and society. Although there are many possible
versions of naturalism with differing points of emphasis ranting from the
ontological to the epistemological and the methodological, I believe that
Deleuze's take on naturalism can be seen as having the most affinity with
contemporary strains of American naturalism, born from the dual
influences of pragmatism and empiricism. 3 While it is impossible to offer
here a discussion of naturalism in twentieth-century American thought,
what is relevant for my purpose is to note that American naturalism,
influenced by such thinkers as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Darwin, argues that
naturalism can be characterized as a perspective that seeks to eliminate the
dualism and transcendentalism of traditional metaphysics, in favour of the
view that humans and the cultures belong within a larger natural reality
that cannot be overridden by any extra-natural essence. 4 In other words,
this position denies that there is an independent supernatural realm having
ontological priority over whatever comes into being.
What I now examine is how this point of view is expressed in
Deleuze's own writings. I do so in several steps. In section two, I explore a
history of philosophical naturalism found in Deleuze's works of Lucretius
and Spinoza. Deleuze lays constant stress on human interaction with the
larger natural world, which allows him to conceive of naturalism as an
Patrick Hayden 25
environmental philosophy. In section three I outline Deleuze's notion of
'geophilosophy,' which he argues is intended to relate philosophical
thinking to the Earth, and demonstrate how this notion leads to an
ecological perspective grounded in symbiotic relationships. Finally, in the
concluding section of the paper I discuss some of the ways that Deleuze's
political concepts and naturalistic ontology compare with contemporary
ecological theory and politics.
Deleuze on Naturalism
Deleuze's support for a natuntlistic ontology can be seen as a strategy to
counteract the anti-naturalistic tendencies of the Platonic tradition
informing much of Western thought. As described in The Logic of Sense,
Deleuze proposes a "reversal" of Platonism, by which he means "the
abolition of the world of essences and the world of appearances" (253).In
other words, Deleuze desires to eliminate the dualism that postulates a
realm of metaphysical essences separate form and more real than the
natural world itself, which is consigned to the status of mere appearance.
Deleuze's work is replete with analyses of the negative consequences that
he sees as resulting from the legacy of Platonic representationalism. One
of the most troublesome results has been the designation of an
unconditioned Absolute, a pure transcendent Being, which circumscribes
and rules the natural world of becoming and diversity. Yet as Deleuze sees
it, one of the basic advantages of naturalism is to conjoin the diversity of
the natural world with its real conditions of material difference and
processes of becoming (see Logic of Sense 26l-3).'Reversing' Platonism
can thus be regarded as a naturalistic strategy aimed at eliminating the
dualism of essence and appearance while affirming the continuous
becoming of a fully natural reality that is in no way indebted to or derived
from any form of hidden, metaphysical transcendence. One of the
resources that Deleuze draws upon in constituting his vision of the
naturalist tradition is the Epicureanism of Lucretius. Deleuze writes that
Lucretius formulated the following basic principles of naturalism as an
anti-Platonic philosophy: "the positivity of Nature; Naturalism as the.
philosophy of affirmation; pluralism linked with multiple affirmation;
sensualism connected with the joy of the diverse; and the practical critique
of all mystifications" (279).
In the essay 'Lucretius and the Simulacrum', Deleuze proposes that a
naturalism based on the changing conditions of real experience, and not a
representationalism which withdraws from the empirical into a realm of
formal structures, is the goal of philosophy. In this case, naturalism is
 26 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
based on the presence of three intertwined aspects of natural diversity: "the
diversity of species; the diversity of individuals which are members of the
same species; and the diversity of the parts which together compose an
\ individual" (266). All the elements of the natural world, the individuals,
species, rivers, plants, and places which constitute, inhabit and traverse it,
are inseparable from such conditions of diversity. For Lucretius, nature is
understood as a distributive rather than collective power. It is that which
produces the diverse; yet it does not totalize the diverse into the
transcendent One, Whole, or Being to which Platonism aspires:
The Epicurean thesis is entirely different: Nature as the production of the
diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize
its own elements. There is no combination capable of encompassing all the
elements of Nature at once. ... Nature is not collective, but rather
distributive, to the extent that the laws of Nature ... distribute parts which
cannot be totalized. Nature is not attributive, but rather conjunctive: it
expresses itself through 'and' and not through 'is' .... Being an addition of
indivisibles, sometimes similar and sometimes different, Nahlre is indeed a
sum, but not a whole. With Epicums and Lucretius the real noble acts of
philosophical pluralism begin. (266-7)
Because nature is differentially interrelated rather than unifying in any
absolute sense, it produces itself through new combinations of its
heterogeneous elements. Yet no single combination can encompass all the
elements of nature at once. Rather, there are particular finite compositions
of elements and relations produces in the continuous movements of
becoming. In this respect naturalism can be equated with pluralism since
Lucretius thinks of nature in terms of Multiplicity, as a non-totalizable
sum of diverse individuals, species, and environments. Lucretius's
naturalism is further expressed by two complementary points of view,
what Deleuze refers to as the "speculative point of view" expressed in the
atomic-physical theory of the clinamen and the "practical" or "ethical"
point of view expressive of pleasure and a joyful existence (272). While it
is true that the former signifies the emergence of a position strongly
opposed to the dualism and transcendentalism of Platonic metaphysics, it
is nonetheless the latter which becomes the primary object of naturalism,
for the responsibility incumbent upon humans is respect for the diversity
produced by the immanent nature within which all things reside and live.
It is the primary object in recognition of the fact that if natural diversity is
harmed or diminished, the potential for a joyful existence is lessened.
Lucretius's naturalism also indicates that our actions are to be guided
not by adherence to supernatural myths and illusions, but rather by
affirmation of the positive power of an immanent and multiple nature and
Patrick Hayden 27
by joy resulting from the diversity of its elementS. Myths and illusions rest
upon the belief in gods and eternal souls, on divine entities and
transcendent forms which mysteriously escape natural existence. Such
myths are thelliselves scornful of the material, sensuous, and temporal
existence accepted by naturalism, and serve to transpose divine will into a
human will (or spirit) set over and against nature. In contrast, Deleuze
asserts, the naturalist "speaks about nature, rather than speaking about the
gods" (278).
The speculative and practical objects of naturalism coincide on this
point: the enterprise of demystification through philosophical, scientific,
and ethical activity intended to free humans from the illusions of onto-
theological transcendence. 5 It is important to notice that this position does
not oppose nature to social convention, custom, and invention tout court.
Instead, it is opposed to those social forces which depend upon myth and
illusion in order to consolidate their poser by negating the multiplicity and
diversity of nature and society, sowing sadness rather than reaping joy.
The negative spirit of transcendence is that which brands the sensible as
nothing more than mere secondary appearance and links the intelligible to
the absolute realm of timeless essence. What appears with Lucretius's
naturalism, according to Deleuze, is a critique of Platonism's anti-
naturalistic repression of the multiplicity of life and the diversity of nature,
along with an affirmation of the flux of natural reality:
One of the most profound constants of Naturalism is to denounce
everything that is sadness, everything that is the cause of sadness, and
everything that needs sadness to exercise its power. From Lucretius to
Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of
thought and sensibility an affinnation. It directs its attack against the
prestige of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its power; it refuses
to the spirit of the negative the right to speak in the name of philosophy...
. The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just as the diverse as
diverse is the object of joy. (279)
A similar naturalistic emphasis in Spinoza's philosophy is embraced by
Deleuze. As with Lucretius, nature is characterized by Spinoza as a
positive and productive power. Whereas Cartesian metaphysics devalued
nature by depriving it of its immanent power, making it the creation of a
transcendent God, and placed the thinking subject outside of nature,
Spinoza's positive naturalism insists that it is within infinite nature that all
finite things exist as a plurality of modes: "This naturalism provides the
true tOOlst of the Anticartesian reaction .... [it] is a matter ofre-establishing
the claims of a Nature endowed with forces or power" (Deleuze,
Expressionism 227-8). For Spinoza, nature is its own dynamic source of

28 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
creation which expresses itself through immanent and actual powers that,
in acting, are parts of nature (see 228). The notion of an expressive nature
thereby "forms the basis of a new naturalism" (232). One of the most
important factors making Spinoza's naturalism 'new' is that while he finds
nature to be dynamic (expressive), he denies that it is teleological. Nature
is a complex process without any predetermined end, and naturalism need
not account for its movement by postulating the existence of some more
fundamental realm which explains this process. There is no ultimate
foundation outside of nature, but powers, relations, and bodily
compositions constitutive of nahlre itself.
This position follows from Spinoza's theory of immanent causality.
Immanent causality "refuses the intervention of a transcendent God" (109)
no less than it does the hierarchy of emanative causality. Instead, the
existence of nature as a productive causality is inseparable from its
immanent essence, which is constituted by the very effects belonging to it,
namely, the attributes and modes. In this way natura naturans (nahlring
nature) and natura naturata (natured nature) are interconnected by a
mutual immanence. What is essential here is the univocity of nature: the
uniquely differentiated modifications of infinite substance are expressions
of formally (qualitatively) distinct but ontologically equal attributes. All
things are in some way different; yet they are generated equally from a
creative nature, thereby, making it possible to speak of the equality of
differences without resorting to an ordering hierarchy or a reduction to
sameness. Instead what are important are the relations between different
modes, insofar as finite modes are dynamic compositions within immanent
nature. Spinoza's naturalism fully emerges from the connection of
immanent causality with univocity; "Naturalism in this case is what
satisfies the three forms of univocity; the univocity of attributes ... the
univocity of the cause ... and the univocity of modality" (Deleuze, Spinoza
92-3). These fonns present us with a conception, akin to that found in
Lucretius, of a nahlre that is the infinite sum of multiple relational
compositions. Nature is multiple, but the multiple forms an open-ended
unity because it is constituted by ever changing combinations.
In Spinoza's nahlralism the 'encounters' between complex bodies are
also evaluated in ethical terms. As Deleuze suggests, those encounters that
agree with the natures of each body are 'good' and help to form other
relations between them, which allow for muhml flourishing and
preservation. Other encounters that disagree with the nahlres of the bodies
concerned are 'bad' and contribute to the destruction and decomposition of
the relations that support their ability to persevere in existence. Spinoza's
notion of ethical goodness lies in striving to maximize mutually
Patrick Hayden 29
compatible relations and in preventing the decomposition, poisoning, and
toxification of what is necessary to maintain these relationships with
diverse natural bodies.
We are faced, then, with the question of how to cany forward
Deleuze's picture of the history of philosophical naturalism into the realm
of ecological theory which addresses environmental destruction as a
contemporary social and political issue. I want to suggest that Deleuze's
philosophical writings contain an important and innovative extension of
the naturalist sympathies exhibited in his historical analyses, and in this
respect can prove useful for contemporary environmental ethics and
political ecology. In 'the next section, I examine some of the ways that
Deleuze carries out this extension.
Deleuze and Geophilosophy
In works written in collaboration with Felix Guattari, Deleuze continues to
articulate a strongly naturalistic basis for philosophical practice. In their
final work together What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari claim that
"thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth" (85).
They indicate that what is unique about the Earth is the it "is not one
element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a
single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize
territory" (85). Even though the Earth embraces all territories, it is also the
force of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, since its continuous
movements of development and variation unfold new relations of
materials and forces. Thus, the Earth both generates difference and
exhibits continuity; yet it is neither inert nor passive. In this sense, the
Earth is again considered distributively, that is, as the open-ended sum of a
plurality of elements in constant interaction, rather than as an absolute
order of Being transcending what is constituted in nature. What Deleuze
and Guattari call "geophilosophy" is the attempt to formulate a mode of
thinking in association with, and as the affirmation of, the diversity and
multiplicity of the continuous becomings of a fluctuating natural reality. In
effect, this attempt amounts to the effort to construct a new way of
thinking that is naturalistic and ecologically oriented because it seeks to
eliminate the traditional dichotomy separating humanity (as subject) and
nature (as object) by "stretching out a plane of immanence," which, they
write, "absorbs" the Earth, that is, bonds together with it without
eliminating the singularity, uniqueness, or difference of each thing that is a
part of this relationship (88).
 30 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
One way that this project is pursued is by emphasizing the interaction
of the human and nonhuman in terms of immanence and relationality. The
notion of 'milieu,' one of the meanings of the Greek oikos from which the
common eco derives, plays an important role here. 6 Throughout their work
Deleuze and Guattari formulate a non-teleological, non-deterministic
evolutionism, according to which the immanent world is characterized by
constant change that grows from within a diversity of milieux connected in
various complex ways. There is, however, no progressive, preordained
developmental tendency exhibited in these changes. Milieu is the word
that Deleuze uses to refer to all that is involved in the interactions between
elements, compounds, energy sources, and organisms from the molecular
to the molar levels. Milieux grow 'from the middle' (au milieu) when
molecular materials and substantial elements are exchanged and organized
around a reversible boundary or membrane, forming a 'unity of
composition' that is qualitatively unique: "Thus the living thing," Deleuze
and Guattari inform us, "has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior
milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary
milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions" (Thousand Plateaus
313).
Taking ecology to refer to the intelTelationships of living things and
their environments, a milieu is the site, habitat, or medium of ecological
interaction and encounter. A complete milieu is made up of the relational
interactions of several submilieux (climate, geography, populations, soils,
microbes, and so forth). Yet it possesses a relative rather than absolute
equilibrium, since the milieu is itself open to transfOlmation on the basis
of its supple boundaries and alterable relationships, with the consequence
that its submilieux can be affected as well. Organisms and milieux
therefore develop, grow, and change together within continuous and
intersecting processes of becoming, a view with significant ecological
importance.
As argued by Deleuze and Guattari, the full diversity of life is
exhibited through natural processes of change and becoming. The effects
of these processes cannot be identified on the basis of their descent from a
common origin, since the creative and transformational "aparallel"
evolutionism proposed by Deleuze and Guattari regards them as the
products of distinct milieux, environmental variations, and transversal
interactions (see 10_1).7 They stress that we cannot account for the CUlTent
forms of organisms and habitat by assuming that their features developed
according to a progressive hierarchy from the primitive to the more
advanced, from the weaker to the stronger, from the less intelligent to the
more intelligent, or that survival is simply a matter of developing more
Patrick Hayden 31
advantageous adaptive mechanisms. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari call for
a rhizomatic conception of evolution based not on a centralized
directionality of species development, but on the active, unfinalized flux of
constantly circulation relations, interactive encounters, and shared
transformations. "More generally," they write,
evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree
and descent. ... Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of
arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but
instead a rhizome operating itmnediately in the heterogeneous and
jumping from one already differentiated line to another. (10)
If so, what is sighificant with respect to the movements of natural
reality is not whether organisms can be represented according to their
progression or regression along a fixed line of descent, but whether the
continuous change and diversification of life and the intelTelationships of
the various organisms that inhabit certain ecological milieux are to be
affirmed and recognized as both necessary and desirable. This recognition
involves what Deleuze and Guattari call symbiotic 'alliances' between and
among the diversity of milieux and organisms: "If evolution includes any
veritable becomings,. it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play
beings of totally different scales and kingdoms" (238). Symbiosis is the
co-functioning of two or more different organisms, often in a mutually
beneficial, cooperative relationship of reciprocity. 8
Deleuze's treatment of relations shows that relationships cannot be
reduced to the supposedly fixed essences from which they are the derived
(see Hayden). Rather, the characteristics and qualities of a specific locus
of interaction are attributable to the types of relations taking hold of the
organisms involved, while the relations are themselves susceptible to
change, transformation, or even elimination. In other words, the
relationship becomes a kind of existential alliance between diverse living
things in symbiosis. This alliance accompanies the becoming that happens
in between whatever is related; it is initiated in the middle of their
interactions within different ecological milieux. Deleuze offers as an
example of symbiosis the interaction of a wasp and an orchid:
The orchid seems to form a wasp-image, but in fact there is a wasp-
becoming of the orchid and an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double
capture .... The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at
the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp.
(Dialogues 2)
Another way that Deleuze develops his naturalism is by arguing for the
inclusion of ethology in his description of philosophical practice. Ethology
32 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
refers both to the study of animal behaviour and to the study of the
formation and evolution of human ethos. While ethology has taken may
divergent forms, from vitalism to behavioralism and sociobiology,
Deleuze uses the term in several of his works in order to emphasize the
nondualistic continuity of human and nonhuman life forms and their
complex symbiotic interrelationships, as well as to propose an overlap
between the physical, biological and chemical, and the social, ethical and
political. For instance, Deleuze draws from Spinoza the conception of a
"common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all
individuals are sihlated" (Spinoza 122).9 This 'one Nature' is common to
all things because it is here that different ways of living are simultaneously
constituted. Life is understood according to its relations of movement and
rest, and each body, whether human or nonhuman, by its capacity for
affecting and being affected by others (see 124). The dynamic capacities
of each living thing to act and be acted upon intersect at various points
with those of others: some affects are shared, some are not. Each thing is
different or singular; yet all are sihmted in the affective realm of nature, a
common environment "which applies equally," Deleuze writes, "to the
inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural"
(DeleuzeIGuattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In other words, nature is that
which is common to all different human and nonhuman entities, implying
as extensive spectrum of encounters between all bodies (taken broadly)
together with the consequences or effects of such encounters:
Ethology is first of all the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of
the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing.
For each thing these relations and capacities have amplitude, thresholds
(maximum and minimum). And variations or transformations that are
peculiar to them. And they select, in the world or in Nature, that which
corresponds to the thing; that is, they select what affects or is affected by
the thing, what moves or is moved by it. For example, given an animal,
what is this animal unaffected by the infinite world? What does it react to
positively or negatively? What are its nutrients and its poisons? What does
it 'take' in its world? Every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the
rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never separable from
its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the
exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms,
perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular
individual in the world.... Further, there is also the way in which these
relations of speed and slowness re realized according to circumstances, and
the way in which these capacities for being affected are filled. For they
always are, but in different ways, depending on whether the present affect
Patrick Hayden 33
threatens the thing ... or strengthen, accelerate, and increase it. (Deleuze,
Spinoza 125-6)
Nature is thus seen by Deleuze as the immanent plane of life within
which all things enter into both their own unique compositions and a
variety of "more or less interconnected relations" with other compositions
(DeleuzeIGuattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In fact, the Earth can be
considered the fundamental yet never fixed plane of immanence on which
the constitution of multiplicities takes place. Yet, it is important to note
that in Deleuze's work the compositions and relations of all living things
are not fixed by an invariable order and that each thing is not directly
connected to every other thing. The idea that nature is that which
distributes affects provides a basis of continuity between each thing in the
world, but also a basis for recognizing the multiplicity of nature since it
makes possible a rich differentiation of all things in terms of the kind of
variations, interactions, requirements, circumstances, and capacities
applicable to each thing and its habitat.
This position stresses not an undivided wholeness or totality
transcending particular things and milieux, but rather the complex of
continuities and differences characterizing all symbiotic interconnections
traversing the Earth, without falling back onto a dualism of the human and
the nonhuman. However, just what relationships obtain cannot be
accounted for on the basis of an indifferent and closed system, but should
instead be explained in terms of the interactions and transformations of
unique bodies and habitats within a dynamic nature. If different types of
relationships, combinations, or symbioses were rendered indistinguishable,
it would be impossible to detennine whether certain beliefs and actions
had either detrimental or beneficial ecological consequences. Deleuze
considers this insight to be one of the most important supplied by the
ethological point of view. Here the concerns ofthe ethologist or naturalist
mak~ . an explicit shift from the assessment of existing ecological
condItIons to the proposal that new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting
be created, informed by the knowledge of what is beneficial to the
flourishing of all life on Earth. Consequently, what must be considered
now are the political aspects of Deleuze's naturalism.
Deleuze, Naturalism, and Ecopolitics
The strength of Deleuze's affirmation of naturalism is that it focuses on
the ethical and political issues associated with the destruction of the
Earth's multiple environments, ranging from the degradation of urban
34 Gilles Deleuze and Nahlralism
centres to the shrinking of arable lands, the clear cutting of old-growth
forests, the mass pollution of air, water, and soil, and the forced extinction
of living beings. In other words, Deleuze provides sound philosophical
underpinnings for articulating ethical and political responses to the
destruction of many of the Earth's combined natural-social habitats. The
fundamental considerations here is that of which concepts, practices, and
values best promote the collective life and interests of the diverse modes
of existence inhabiting the planet. It follows that this basic consideration
entails the practical evaluation of the social institutions through which
humans define, assess, and intersect with nonhuman nature.
Deleuze provides a political perspective to his naturalistic conceptual
framework, articulated in ecological terms. The conjunction of nahlralism
and politics at this point is based on the view that awareness of
ecologically dangerous relationships can be used to formulate active
political interventions aimed at transforming or overcoming those
relationships in order to create new values and interactions that are
beneficial to the diversity of life on Earth. Thus, Deleuze's thought
presents an important contribution to ecological politics. This is not to say
that ecopolitics supplants or assimilates all other political struggles and
forms of intervention, for as Deleuze insists there are "many· politics"
addressing a number of problems at specific points on a complex social
network (see Deleuze, Dialogues 135-47). It does say, however, that
certain institutionalized beliefs and practices based on disregard for the
Earth and contempt for the life needs and health of its inhabitants, while
appearing in different forms and shapes, constitute a serious political issue
shared by many across the planet. Yet, for ecopolitical activism to engage
itself effectively, it must steer clear of universalized abstractions and
carefully study the specific needs and alternative possibilities within
localized situations.
It is for this reason that Deleuze's notion of 'micropolitics' can be
especially useful for a political activism engaged with qualitatively
different ecological milieux. The singularity of diverse ecological milieux
calls. for modes of intervention that are fluidly defined in terms of the
problems and conflicts involved, and the means that are available, with
respect to each local bioregion and its unique needs. This singularity does
not prevent the combining or the fonnation of alliances between different
ecopolitical movements and regions, or between ecopolitical struggles and
those engaged in other fonns of social and political resistance, but in fact
presents the condition for doing so without the need to assimilate them
into a more centralized organizational structure. Neither does the
micropolitical approach rule out 'macropolitical' considerations. As
Patrick Hayden 35
Deleuze acknowledged, "every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics
and a micropolitics" (DeleuzeIGuattari, Thousand Plateaus 213). In other
words, larger systems and fonns of organization are typically generated by
the intersections of multiple smaller, local practices and conditions, which
are in turn themselves affected by the influences and activities of
macropolitical institutions.
Yet it is inaccurate to consider the micropolitical and macropolitical as
corresponding symmetrically, and the one to be reducible to the other.
Deleuze's point is that a more nuanced lmderstanding of the specificity and
reciprocity of the micropolitical and macropolitical, and greater attention
to the diversity of the actual practices and current conditions of local
situations, are required for a useful political philosophy. Thus, while
existing ecological problems undoubtedly present a danger to the entire
planet, a micropolitical focus on the particular needs and interests of
diverse local habitats and inhabitants in light of the available knowledge of
ecological conditions will perhaps better contribute to the creation of
effective ecopolitical interventions than will a focus solely from a unitary,
large-scale framework. Nevertheless, from the Deleuzian perspective,
ecological problems are always considered to be simultaneously local and
global, since local habitats overlap and combine with others at various
points and have a global impact with respect to the planetary ecosystem.
It should be noted that none of these considerations amounts to what
Deleuze calls the "grotesque" gesture of calling for a return to "a state of
nature" (Dialogues 145). Deleuze rejects the view that there is or ever was
an original, non-problematic natural condition that can be reclaimed.
Deleuze clearly holds that all of nature, including its human elements, is in
constant flux and that there is no essential, foundational, or sacred state of
nature to be found. Thus, Deleuze follows Nietzsche in demanding a "de-
deification" of nature that would eliminate interpretations of nature as the
site of divine purposiveness, static essences, and transcendent moral
ideals. JO Deleuze's naturalism is not an essentialist theory nostalgically
seeking a return to some pristine nature that is an object apart from human
existence, conceptualization, and intervention. Rather, it is a critical
perspective that attempts to show that humans Can their cultures are, for
better or worse, an integral part of the existing natural, biophysical reality
which cannot be. transcended, but which can be destroyed by certain
exploitative, ecologically insensitive beliefs, practices, and ways of being.
Human history and natural history are therefore caught up together in the
same movements of change. Political intervention aimed at ecologically
destructive values and practices cannot be based on any reactive appeal to
transcendence, but rather must be grounded in current situations,
36 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
knowledge, and experiences, implying the active creation of, not simple
return to, modes of existence that exemplify appropriate, sustainable, and
beneficial relationships between human and nonhuman beings and their
environments.
A micropolitical approach to such issues has both similarities with and
differences from some contemporary ecological or Green movements.
Social ecology and deep ecology are perhaps the most visible examples
today. Social ecology, pioneered by Murray Bookchin, is oriented
primarily toward the examination of the relationship he sees between
environmental degradation and social structure. More specifically,
Bookchin argues that the human domination of nature follows from the
domination of human by human as found in certain kinds of hierarchical
and oppressive social arrangements. He writes that "ecological degradation
is, in great part, a product of the degradation of human beings by hunger,
material insecurity, class rule, hierarchical domination, patriarchy, ethnic
discrimination, and competition" (Which Way for the Ecology Movement?
17). Social ecology is thus premised of the view that "the basic problems
which pit society against nature emerge from within social development
itself' (Remaking Society 32) and that "human domination of human gave
rise to the very idea of domination nature" (44). According to Bookchin,
this assumption is particularly evident in the technical-economic system of
constant and aggressive expansion characteristic of modern capitalism.
Referring to himself as an avowed naturalist with an aversion to
"spiritualism" and "mystical" approaches to ecological problems,
Bookchin argues that radical culhlral, political, and economic changes in
the current social order, as well as the development of a new "ecological
sensibility," constitute the appropriate responses to a precarious ecological
situation.
Consequently, Bookchin contends that a society oriented by the "grow-
or-die" attitude toward humans and nonhumans alike is destined to
confront insurmountable natural limits. Only fundamental changes in
capitalistic modes of production and consumption can avert ecological
catastrophe. These changes are centred around such notions as the
decentralization of communities, a complex evolutionism rooted in
mutualism or symbiosis, the necessity of cultural and biophysical
diversity, bioregional federalism, and the development of ecologically
appropriate alternative technologies. I I The general outlook of social
ecology presented so far seems to find some strong points of agreement
with the naturalistic and micropolitical aspects of Deleuze's thought.
Deleuze has consistently criticized the destructive effects of a 'universal
capitalism,' the totalizing functions of State apparatuses, the oppression of
Patrick Hayden 37
nationalist, racist, and sexist 'majoritarianisms,' and the dangers presented
by the basic tendency to divorce the creative becomings of life from social
existence. There are, however, important differences that would lead
Deleuze to reject some of the specifics of Bookchin's position.
One of these is Bookchin's excessive reliance on a rationalistic
paradigm for social development. He contends that because humans are
"nature rendered self-conscious" (The Ecology of Freedom 36), the
perfection of human subjectivity wi1llead to a "rational" (The Philosophy
of Social Ecology 182) society that is able to serve as a benign steward for
the rest of nature: On this basis, Bookchin has taken a hostile stand against
recent critiques of the category of reason as evidence of mere
"irrationalism" and "antihumanism.,,12 He argues that any retreat from the
province of reason amounts to "misanthropic" mysticism. Bookchin's
unwillingness to question the generic notion of an inherent, universal
reason, and his basic assessment of oppression as simply the result of
"irrationality," as if rationality and domination were mutually exclusive,
indicates that he retains some problematic, foundationalist assumptions
that have been challenged in various ways by critical theorists, post-
structuralists, and feminists, among others. 13 In addition, Bookchin's
rationalism has also led him to embrace a Hegelian model of progress,
according to which the appearance of a truly rational society is the
dialectical manifestation of a latent "potentiality" contained in nature (see
Bookchin, "Ecologizing the Dialectic"). He frequently offers a picture of
"nature rendered more and more aware of itself' as human societies have
"organically" unfolded "from their own inner logic," proceeding from the
"primitive" to the modern and ultimately to the "rational" (Remaking
Society 41 and 75). For Bookchin, the realization of a rational society
reveals "nature's potentiality to achieve mind and truth" (The Philosophy
of Social Ecology 35). Bookchin's transcendentialist leanings are clearly in
evidence with the preceding remarks, in which he indicates that a
fragmented nature will gradually (re)unite with itself as it increasingly
attains self-reflexivity and eliminates social contradiction. These examples
are intended to dismiss Bookchin's work altogether, for these is much of
value within it, but rather to point to specific positions that Deleuze would.
obviously reject as burdened b deterministic presuppositions of traditional
essentialism, foundationalism, and humanism. The problem with such
presuppositions, Deleuze might point out, is that they fail seriously to
acknowledge the influence of external miliuex on the formation of
individuals, species, and ecosystems in their perpetual interaction.
Ironically, by relying on the notion of an inevitable 'inner logic' to explain
the development of natural and social processes, thus making it difficult to

38 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
explain why we need to invent new ways of existing as well as resistance
to the current social order, Bookchin weakens his critique of ecologically
destructive beliefs and practices.
What of deep ecology, another significant contemporary ecological
theory? Perhaps the most prominent deep ecologist in the Norwegian
philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the tern deep ecology, but others who
have contributed to its development are Bill Devall, George Sessions, and
Warwick Fox. As Naess conceives it, "deep" ecology is so called because
of three basic points: (1) it rejects "shallow" enviromnentalism seeking
minor reform of a few basic socio-economic practices; (2) it asks "deeper"
questions about how and why these practices are in place; (3) it embraces
a "total world view" based on the intrinsic, spiritual identification of self
and nature (Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle 27-8, 163, and l7l~6).
Devall and Sessions claim that deep ecology "attempts to articulate a
comprehensive religious and philosophical worldview" according to which
the "spiritual and material aspects of reality fuse together" into an "organic
whole" (Deep Ecology 65). What is referred to as deep ecological
consciousness is the view that the world exists as an "unbroken wholeness"
(Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep" 96) with no discontinuities or
boundaries between human and nonhuman nature. Deep ecology insists
that everything is a part of and connected to everything else in an
overarching unity founded on internal relations (see Ecology, Community
and Lifestyle, passim).
In terms of ethical and political responses to ecological problems, deep
ecology argues that 'reformist' actions such as recycling and the cleaning
up of highly polluted sites are only short-teilli measures which leave intact
the dominate paradigms legitimizing human exploitation of nature. Naess
contends that self-realization and biocentric equality are two 'norms' that
can aid in a radical transformation of these paradigms. As presented by
Naess, self-realization is a process in which the self is identified with as
much of the world as possible, since difference is taken to be a hindrance
to the awareness of the "sameness" uniting all things into a "greater Self"
A full realization of the individual self can only be accomplished with its
integration into the larger Self of the entirety of nature:
By identifying with greater wholes, we partake in the creation and
maintenance of this whole .... The ecophilosophical outlook is developed
through an identification so deep that one's own self is not longer
adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism. One experiences
oneself to be a genuine part of all life. (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle
173-4)
.. ~
Patrick Hayden 39 I
I
!
I
Naess goes on to argue that the wider identification characteristic of 1.1
the "deep, comprehensive and ecological self' contributes to an "
understanding of biocentric equality, that all things in nature are equal
with respect to their ability to achieve self-realization, implying that
harming other entities is equal to hanning one's own self through the
elimination of potentials for self/Self-realization.
It appears that there are more differences than similarities between
Deleuze's naturalism and deep ecology. While Naess uses language similar
to Deleuze when he claims that "diversity, complexity, and symbiosis" are
fundamental "potentials," and that realizations of these potentials should
be plural and qualitatively different, he assigns them this importance only
insofar as they are integrated into the totality of comprehensive Self-
identification (200-2). This difference may be a consequence of Naess'
assumption that difference can only inhibit the awareness of biocentric
equality and is to be equated with "indifference" (174) in the sense that if a
strong identification of sameness is absent only negative indifference will
remain. Naess grounds this belief in the idea of "microcosm mirroring
macrocosm," of each natural entity mirroring "the supreme whole" (202).
This approach, again, seems to indicate a denial of difference, for the
individual self and the supreme Self simply reflect one another in a mirror
of sameness. I believe, however, that a position grounding concern for
others in resemblance or identification presents a greater opportunity for
ethical-political indifference that does an account based on respect for the
coexistence of interrelated differences. Furthermore, such an attitude may
fail to pay sufficient attention to the unique needs, interests, and capacities
of different modes of existence; seeing them as identical (or seeing them
only if the are identical) could lead to greater ecological harm than if their
differences are acknowledged and understood as such. In addition, Naess
openly adheres to a "back to nature" attitude and a "Nature mysticism"
(183) that Deleuze also clearly rejects as dangerously reactionary, with the
possibility for limiting the creation of alternative discourses and practices
and for falling back into a kind of moralistic longing for the "Golden Age"
(176). Finally, it is doubtful whether Deleuze would have any sympathy
for the constant appeal to an essentialistic and psycho logistic 'depth' in
deep ecological theory. For Deleuze, it is not some vague essence that is
the key to ecological understanding, but rather the various kinds of
relations or interactions that each living thing is capable of entering into
with others. Hence, the micropolitical appeal to analyses that are specific
to particular modes and regions of existence, that is, to differences as they
exist and function.
 40 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
Not surprisingly, the position most compatible with Deleuze's thinking
on these matters is Guattari's 'three ecologies' argument. As outlined in his
book, Les trois ecologies, Guattari makes the case for a series of critical
and creative "ecological praxes" situated with the context of three distinct,
yet interconnected ecologies: social ecology, environmental ecology, and
mental ecology (all translations are my own). These three ecologies
correspond to the "ecological registers" of social relations, the nahlral
enviromnent, and human subjectivity. When taken together, the three
registers require an "ethical-political articulation" capable of addressing
the dangers presented to life on Earth by the combined effects of
environmental disequilibrium, progressive deterioration of social
existence, and the ossification and standardization of thought and
behaviour (11-2). Critical of the belief that the dominant economic-
political systems of what Guattari calls 'integrated world capitalism' will
be either willing or able to cultivate significant transformation in the
planetary situation, Guattari calls for a simultaneously micropolitical-
macropolitical ecological revolution:
There will not be a tme response to the ecological crisis except on a
planetary scale and on the condition that it brings about an authentic
political, social, and cultural revolution, reorienting the objectives of the
production of material and immaterial goods. This revolution must not be
concerned solely with the visible relations of forces on a grand scale but
equally with the molecular domains of sensibility, of intelligence, and
desire. (13-5)
Guattari regards the three ecological registers to be 'existential territories'
characterized by unique problems and conditions requiring the
construction of new fields of possibility for both human and nonhuman
nahlre. This construction is to be undertakes in terms of the individual and
collective "resingularization" (21) of the world, inspired by aesthetic as
well as ethical creation. Working from the perspective that culture and
nature are inseparable, Guattari argues that there are three complementary
points of transversal interaction relevant to ecopolitical praxis: the socius,
the psyche, and the environment. Responding ethically and politically to
the "simultaneous degradation of these three areas" must be done in terms
of the "contemporary conditions of the objectives and methods of each and
every form of movement of the social" (32-3). Hence, the need for three
ecologies.
Of these ecologies, social ecology is the theory and practice concerned
with the degradation of social conditions, and with the reconstruction of
human relations and liberty at all levels of the socius, or social field. Such
Patrick Hayden 41
phenomena as urban decay; capitalistic expansion, and exploitation of
territory and labour; subjugation of women, the unemployed, immigrants,
the homeless, and children; the rise of religious fundamentalisms and
cultural intolerance are to be considered as effects of the decline and
pollution of the social environment. These phenomena are indicators of the
disappearance of "the words, expressions, and gestures of the human
solidarity" (35). In comparison, environmental ecology is the theory and
practice concerned with the degradation of the diverse natural conditions
upon which all life inhabiting the planet depends, as will as the protection
and enrichment of these conditions. The widespread ravages of the Earth's
complex ecosystems and in the increasingly rapid loss of natural species
and habitat enacted by the various exploitative technologies of an
international market economy, or integrated world capitalism, have led to
a steady deterioration of world-wide living conditions.
Finally, mental ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the
degradation of the conditions for creative subjectification and
singularization. In Guattari's analysis, the spread of integrated world
capitalism has been accompanied by the infiltration of homogenizing
nOlms into the production of subjectivity at all levels of daily life, whether
"individual, domestic, conjugal, neighbourly, creative, or personal-ethical"
(44). Such norms de-singularize different modes of subjectivity and
experience, and propagate images of thought as somehow 'outside nature,'
centred on concepts, discourses, and regimes of control, instrumentalization,
and representationalist identity. Each ecology, then, confronts a specific
problem area; yet these areas are separate form one another because they
are interconnected and degrading simultaneously. This position allows
Guattari to propose a generalized ecology viewed through the lenses of
each of the three ecologies, united by their common principle:
The principle common to the three ecologies consists of the following;
each of the existential territories with which they confront us, not in and of
itself, closed upon itself, but as ... opening up, as a process, into praxes that
enable it to be rendered 'habitable' by human projects. It is this praxic-
openness that constitutes the essence of the art of the 'eco,' subsuming all
the ways of domestication existential territories, concerning intimate
modes of being, the body, the environment, the great contextual ensembles
relative to ethnic groups, the nation, or even the general rights of humanity.
(49)
While the struggles and aims of each ecology are different, their
COlnmon aim is to "organize new micropolitical and micro-social
practices. New solidarities, a new gentleness or kindness, conjoined with

42 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism
new aesthetic practices and new analytic practices of formations of the
unconscious" (45-6). In this way, Guattari articulates an ecological vision
aimed at developing different forms of social action "which cannot be
achieved by top-down reforms" (57) on the part of professional politicians,
but by the creative proliferation of new value- systems, alternative modes
of subjectivity, innovative human and nonhuman relationships and forms
of alliance, across the social network of local practices intersecting with
the natural movements of global becomings.
What has been elucidates here makes it clear that Deleuze would agree
with most, but perhaps not all, of the elements of Guattari's account. What
is most important is their agreement that in order to resist ecologically
destructive beliefs and practices, it is necessary to engage in the creation
of specific alternatives at the level of local, yet overlapping habitats, which
allows for the formation of mutually beneficial alliances and relationships
of ecological solidarity. On this basis, it may be possible to formulate a
more extensive dialogue between Deleuze, Guattari, and other current
theorists and activists concerning ecology, and to begin to develop
micropolitical analyses of various ecological conditions, problems, and
modes of intervention. One of the most important suggestions that I make
in this paper, I hope, is that we must actively work to create a habitable
world, while recognizing our place in a natural, living reality that is
complex, interrelational, symbiotic, and ultimately, whose changing limits
or dimensions are inseparable from our own continued existence. If that is
the case, Deleuze's ecological naturalism amounts to the practical
affirmation of the common destiny shared by all modes of life on Earth,
not in spite of, but because of their multiple yet always intersecting and
fragile lines of difference.
Notes
1 Published discussions of the poststmcturalist critique of essentialism and
determinism are too numerous to list here. However, an accessible survey of these
topics may be found in (Best and Kellner).
2 For a concise presentation of Deleuze's views here, see (Deleuze and Pamet). For
Deleuze, philosophy should not ask after the 'essence' of a thing, but rather ought
to look into how something functions or lives, how it relates to other things, and
into what kinds of effects it has or inspires. This theme is discussed by Deleuze in
his (Nietzsche and Philosophy).
3 Deleuze has characterized his philosophy as a type of pluralistic empiricism
inspired by Anglo-American thought. See (Deleuze and Pamet, Dialogues vii-viii).
4 General accounts of philosophical naturalism can be found in (Danto),
(Kirkorian), and especially (Ryder).
I
,
Patrick Hayden 43
5 For more on the 'illusions of transcendence,' see (DeleuzelGuattari What is
Philosophy? 49 and 73).
6 Oikos can mean house, household, family, milieu, vicinity, habitat, or
environment.
7 For more on the notion of nonparallel or aparallel evolution, see (Deleuze and
Pamet, Dialogues 2-10).
8 Michel Serres has made symbioses a central aspect of his call for a "natural
contract" that is dedicated to the renewal of our relationship to the Earth. He argues
that humans have maintained a "parasitical" rather than "symbiotic" relationship ~
,I,
with the natural world, and that a global ecological revolution requires an
awareness of the Earth as our "symbiont" (see Serres 35-44).
9 I refer here to the final chapter which is also published separately as "Ethology,
Spinoza and Us," in Incoiporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New
York: Zone Publications, 1992). There are quite a few references to ethology "
scattered throughout De1euze's writings and it is unnecessary to refer to them all in
i
i
this context. However, the reader is urged to consult especially plateaus 10 and 11
of A Thousand Plateaus, entitled respectively "1730: Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ... " and "1837: Of the Refrain."
10 Nietzsche asks: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our
minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin
to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed
nature?" (The Gay Science 168-9). Significant discussions of Nietzsche's
naturalism can be found in (Schatzki) and (Lampert).
11 These ideas can be found throughout the works cited above, and especially in
(Toward an Ecological Society).
12 See, for example, the introductory chapter to (Remaking Society).
13 Michel Foucault clarifies that critically examining the notion of an inviolate,
inherently non-oppressive rationality is not by itself evidence of irrationalism: "I
think that the blackmail that has very often been at work in every critique of reason
or every critical inquiry into the histOlY of rationality (either you accept rationality
or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality
were impossible" (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 27). The point made by Foucault
is that there are different possible forms of rationality that mayor may not be
useful or beneficial. .
Works Cited
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner Postmodern Theory: Criticai
Interrogations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991).
Bookchin, Murray. Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal and Buffalo:
Black Rose Books, 1980).
-. The Ecology ofFreedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982).
-. Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End
Press, 1990).
44 Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism Patrick Hayden 45

-. The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism Schatzki, Theodore R. "Ancient and Naturalistic Themes in Nietzsche's
(Montreal and Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1990). Ethics." Nietzsche-Studien 23 (1994): 146-67.
- . "Ecologizing the Dialectic." Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and
Social Ecology. Ed. John Clark (London: Green Print, 1990). William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
-. Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (Edinburgh and San
Francisco: AK Press, 1994).
Danto, Arthur C. "Naturalism." Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 5 (New
York, Macmillan, 1967).
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
-. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1988).
-. The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester
and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
-. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
-. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Pamet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Devall, Bill, and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature
Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985).
Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D.
Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1988).
Guattari, Felix. Les trois ecologies (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1990).
Hayden, Patrick. "From Relations to Practice in the Empiricism of Gilles
Deleuze." Man and World 28:3 (July 1995): 283-302.
Kirkorian, Yervant H. (Ed.) Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1944).
LampeIi, Lawrence. Nietzsche and Modern Times (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1993).
Naess, Arne. "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology
Movement." Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100.
-. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Trans.
David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1974).
Ryder, John. (Ed.) American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth
Century (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994).

EIGHT DELEUZIAN THESES ON ART
ELIZABETH GROSZ
Deleuze and Guattari have enabled us to profoundly reconsider how
the human is understood and how the prevailing conceptions of
subjectivity, agency, reason and language, since at least the seventeenth
century if not long before, have served to divide the human from the
animal in ways that must now be interrogated. From ahnost the beginning
of Deleuze's writings, and at the heart of his various collaborations with
Guattari, the place of the animal-in the human, before the human and
beyond the human-has figured as central theme, as a way of perhaps
displacing consciousness (and the unconscious) as the defining feature of
the human. From Deleuze's, and Deleuze and Guattari's, work on Spinoza,
Nietzsche and Bergson, the animal cannot be considered that over which
the human has dominion, for the animal is the internal condition, context
and destination of life itself. Man, that all-too-human creature, is what the
animal has created and continues to inform; and the animal is the source
and force that enables the most human of all productions~art, science,
philosophy-to be seen, not as the culmination of logos, but as the animal
gift, the animal impetus, that the human has inherited and must makes,
however provisionally, his own.
Deleuze and Guattari enable us to ask: How are our conceptions of
human accomplishments-whether in art, architecture, science,
philosophy or in governance and in social and political relations-
transfOlmed when we place the human within the animal? What kind of
crisis exists in the concept of man orthe human that impels us now to seek
that which man had cast aside and rendered as his to possess and govern?
How and why does the animal imperil human uniqueness and dignity?
What do we gain in restoring the human to the animal from which it has
come and the natural in which it is, however ambiguously and
complicatedly, structured. How is art to be understood when its
preconditions are not cultural but natural?!
I want to proceed in a purely speculative way discussing the animal
and sexual preconditions of art with some broad hypotheses which I
cannot prove or even argue but which I hope will generate some new
I ,
Elizabeth Grosz 47
thinking regarding Deleuze and Guattari's relevance for thinking the place
of the animal in art. It is Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion, above all in
'Of the Refrain' in A Thousand Plateaus that art is entirely involved in and
dependent on the anima1. 2 ';
Eight Theses about Art and the Animal
l. All of the arts, from architecture to music, poetry, painting, sculpture,
dance are the indirect products or effects of what Darwin calls 'sexual
selection' the attraction to potential sexual partners, sometimes but not
always or tmiversally for the purposes of procreation, for the purposes
of some kind of sexual encounter. Sexual selection, Darwin makes
clear (in ways that many of the Neo-Darwinists have forgotten), is not
reducible to natural selection, the capacity to survive in given and
changing enviromnents, but is a fundamentally separate and potentially
antagonistic principle which may at times imperil life for the sake of
pleasure or desire. The separation of natural from sexual selection-so
crucial to Darwin that he devotes two separate books to these
principles (natural selection is elaborated in The Origin of Species
([1859]1996) and sexual selection is explained in The Descent of Man,
and Selection in Relation to Sex ([1872]1981)-is regularly reduced in
contemporary Darwinism, when, for example, sociobiologists suggest
that sexual attraction and procreation are 'really' underneath it all,
forms of maximizing the survival potential of one's genes. In such
accounts, which are,nearly tmiversal at present, sexual selection is in
fact an unconscious attraction to those beings who can maximize one's
genes' capacity to surVive. Instead, I will claim that sexual and natural
selection are two quite irreducibly and potentially antagonistic
principles. If natural selection can help explain the remarkable variety
and adaptations of life to its specific enviromnents then only sexual
selection can explain the extravagant, often useless, sometimes
imperiling qualities that have no survival value (Darwin, for example,
mentions in the case of the human, hairiness or other visible
differences in secondary sexual characteristics);
2. Sexual selection can be more explicitly linked to the arts than is natural
selection, to the extent that it functions to highlight, to focus on to
intensify, the bodies of both the living beings exciting and the li;ing
beings excited by various forms of bodily display-such as in the
courtship songs and dancing of competing birds, the dazzling displays
of colors in sticklebacks and other erotically attuned fish, the loud and
colorful encounters of various mammals in competition with members

Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art
48
of the same sex over sexual partners. Sexual selection unhinges,
deranges and imperils survival for the sake of intensification, for the
sake of pleasure, providing a principle separate from that of mere
survival, which for Nietzsche is the most contemptible and ignoble of
aims (This notion of the separation of sexual from natural selection is
the condition under which art can fully understand and appreciate its
own animal genealogy);
3. Art is a form of intensification of the body (both the body of the
subject of sexual display and the bodies of the observers of such
display) that links the energies and intensities of the lived body to the
rhythms and forces of the earth itself. Art is the result of the living
creature's ability to extract something-a property, a quality, a sound-
tone, a color-source, a rhythm or force-from the earth, from the
usually uncontained territory in which it lives and enacts its activities.
Art is the extraction of territorially linked qualities and their use in
intensifying the energies and forces of living bodies. So art, like
technology or like science, links living bodies to the earth, not
wholesale but through the connections it makes between specific
qualities-those leaves that attract the attention of various showy birds,
the shiny objects that appeal to bower birds-and specific bodies. But
unlike technology or science which aim to extract useful principles,
principles which can be used to attain specific aims or goals-
regularity, predictability, order and organization-the arts redirect
these forces of practical regularity through intensification to produce
something no longer regular, ordered or manipulable but something, an
intensity, which actively alters the very forces of the body itself,
something appealing, irregular, unpredictable;
4. This emphasis on sexual selection rather than on Dmwin's more
privileged concept of natural selection, which is so beloved by the
sociobiological tradition, not only provides us with the possibility of a
non-reductive understanding of the arts that refuses to understand them
in terms of their capacity to prepare us, by way of playful rehearsal, for
the tasks of survival; this emphasis also makes clear that wherever art
is in play, that is, wherever qualities, properties, features, forms have
the capacity to brace and intensify the body, we must recognize, along
with all feminisms of difference (especially that developed by Luce
Irigaray), that sexual selection is the underside of sexual difference.
Sexual selection, the sexual appeal and attraction of members of the
same species, is always at least two-fold, resulting both in the
development of at least two different kinds of morphology or bodily
type, male and female, and at least two different kinds of criteria for
I'.
~
Elizabeth Grosz 49
attractiveness. Ironically, Darwin is more a feminist of difference than
the anti-feminist he has been commonly accused of being;
5. Art and especially the first and primordial of all of the arts,
architecture, is thus a particular linkage between living bodies and the
forces of the earth. Art is the direct connection between the forces of
the living body and the forces of the earth, formed above all through
rhythm. Architecture is the first art, the art that is the condition for the
emergence of all the other arts, for without some cordoning off of
territory from a more generically conceived earth, no qualities or
properties can be extracted, no properties can resonate, intensify, effect
and transform bodies. Without territory, they simple are, they are
without effect. It is only to the extent that both the body and the earth
are partially tamed through the creation of a provisional territory that
protects the living creature, and creates a temporary 'home' that art as
such can emerge. It is through the staking out of a territory in the bird's
eloquent song that a space is marked between trees in which amorous
encounters can take place between the songbird and those it entices,
between the songbird and the rivals it repels, between a songbird and
the fuhlre generations it anticipates through a nest to be built. Art is,
for Deleuze, the extension of the architectural imperative to organize
the space of the earth. This roots art, not in the creativity or sensibility
of mankind but rather in excessiveness or abundance of nature, in
nature's production of extractable qualities that have intensifying
effects on living beings;
6. Art is the sexualjzation of survival; or equally sexuality is the
rendering artistic of nature, the making of nature into more than it is,
the making of a leaf into a sexual adornment rather than just a residual
shedding, photosynthesizing property of a tree. Art is that ability to
take a property or quality and make it resonate bodies to the extent that
this quality takes bodies away from their real immersion in a particular
habitat and orients them to a virhlal world of attraction and seduction,
a world promised or possible but never given in the real. This is why
the first art is architecture-for qualities to be extractable, a territory,
that is a framed and delimited space, must first exist, a space of safety,
competition, courtship and flight; only within such a provisional space,
a space always threatened with deterritorialization, can there be the
pure joy of qualities, the immersion of the living in intensities.
Architecture is the bridge between life and art, the condition under
which life complicates itself and fmds transportable, transformable
qualities for this complication.
50 Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art
7. If art is rooted in the ways in which sexual selection deviates from
nahlfal selection, making properties, qualities, organs and muscles
function, not usefully but intensively, mt is the capacity of materiality
to function otherwise that what is given: art is the exploration of
qualities and properties not for their own sake, not for their use value
or exchange value, but only insofar as these qualities and properties do
something, have some effect, on living beings. Art is the means by
which nature deviates itself from givenness, comes to function in other
terms than the useful or the manageable: art is thus the space in which
the natural and the material is the most attenuated, rendered the most
visible and tangible for living beings; and
8. These qualities and properties, attractive to various forms of life,
become art only to the extent that they can be moved, transferred
outside of where they are found, sent on a deterritorializing trajectory,
able to function elsewhere than where they originate or are found:
while the conditions and raw materials for art are located within
territory, as part of the earth, they become art, architecture, dance only
to the extent they become transportable elsewhere, only to the extent
that they intensify bodies that circulate, move, change, only to the
extent that they too become subject to evolutionary transformation and
spatial movement.
These eight theses outline, in as brief a way as possible, how Deleuze and
Guattari, inflected through Darwin's own texts on sexual selection and its
productive extravagances, may provide us wit h a way of linking nature to
art, not through imitation or mimesis but directly; Art is nature attenuated
to attract and allure; or equally, nature is art undeveloped and requiring
intensification and framing. Art is the elaboration and foregrounding of
properties, the qualities-sonorous, visual, tactile, and so on-that nature
provides through their deterritorialization, their framing and movement
elsewhere. The animal is that world in which everything human about the
human is born, accommodates and intensifies itself, and dies. Animal
origin and animal destination. A human trajectory enabled and limited
through the animal. Darwin opens up this trajectory, Nietzsche ironizes it,
and Deleuze and Guattari celebrate it.
Elizabeth Grosz 51
Notes
I Since this anthology is focused on Deleuze and Guattari's relations to ecological
thinking, I am reluctant to place my own work within a 'traditional' ecological or
eco-feminist position. I have already specified my differences from eco-feminism
in chapter one of Time Travels. To briefly recap here: I have carefully avoided any
understanding of nature, the world, or the cosmos as a single unified entity in all of
my work. Generally ecological perspectives are holistic, and they imply a concept
of the world as a unified totality, a cohesive and potentially unified entity that has
been primarily subjected to division through human intervention. In my
understanding of the D!!rwinian tradition, on which I rely so strongly in this text,
Darwin's understanding of nature is bifurcated, linked to divergence and the
elaboration of difference, rather than being directed to the attainment of unity or
cohesiveness. My concem, if it is to be in any way defined by the eco-Iogical, is to
separate the logos from bios, to understand them as two extemally linked relations:
the eco has no logos, or its logos is that of the proliferation of destruction. My
concem here, as elsewhere, is to complicate and elaborate differences, to insist on
the impossibility of a larger term that could encompass differences, to affirm
incommensurability. And equally, it is to problematize the place of human agency
in either the destruction or the reconstitution of a unified and cohesive world.
Ecological accounts have positioned the human as the agent of the destruction of
this unity; and as the agent who, armed with a new politics, or new insights, may
be the one who can repair or overcome mankind's previous acts of destruction.
This is to accord man, once more, the privilege of dominion, or its more modest
companion, stewardship, over all living things and over the earth as a whole.
2 This more or less recaps some of the work I have undertaken on mt and the
animal in Chaos, Territory, Art.
Works Cited
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
-. The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos,. Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the
Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
-. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 2005).
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans G. Gill and C. Burke
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994).

'THE INSTRUCTED THIRD':
PROCESSING ECOLOGY WITH DELEUZE
LEYLA HAFERKAMP
In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze reads Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of mona do logy in terms of the model of the fold,
according to which the world is considered an infinite continuum of folds
and foldings, an origami world of utmost pliability; a "plastic habitat" in
perpehlal process, constantly "folding, unfolding, refolding" (137).
"[W]hat has changed now," Deleuze writes, "is the organization of the
home and its nature" (137). The two-floored edifice of the Baroque house
is transformed into the 'new habitat,' situated as the new oikos beyond the
dualistic distinctions of inside/outside, subject/object, public/private.
Within this context, Deleuze ends his reading of The Monadology with a
plea for nomadology, calling for a mode of subjectivity that is always 'in
process.'
Deleuze's reading of Leibniz provides, as Tom Conley has noted,
powerful insights for rethinking the positio humana within the 'ecological
fold:'
That humans stand as triumphant subjects among inert objects no longer
holds. They no longer own things as they had in the world of possessive
individualism. Now it must be asked how humans select and designate
what they caU'living' or 'inert.' If organic life cannot be easily demarcated
from inorganic matter, it behooves subjects to look at matter from a
different angle. Leibniz points towards an ethics that appends the science
of ecology. In his turn, Deleuze suggests that an at once abstract and
tactile sense of matter must figure at the ClUX of any social practice. (xiv,
emphasis added)
The Fold and What Is Philosophy?, published shortly afterwards and co-
authored with Felix Guattari,
would be hypothetical approaches to problems - population, habitat,
displacement, genocide - that require urgent and practical commitment
Leyla Haferkamp 53
[... ] And since they beg reaction of this kind, these works can also be said
to orient philosophy into the future of the planet in ways that pragmatic
means have yet to conceptuaIize.{xiv) I
The ecological insights implicit in the 'hypothetical approaches'
formulated in Deleuze's later work attain more relevance if we take into
consideration a crucial metaphilosophical aspect: the Deleuzian method of
'processing' concepts; as in 'process philosophy.' In the following, I will
d~al with the Deleuzian 'conception of concepts' as a useful philosophical
aid for tackling ecological problems. 2 For this purpose, my focus will be
on the cluster of Ueleuzian concepts which, by virtue of their dynamic
interrelatedness, provide the appropriate tools for dealing with ecological
complexity: the concept, the plane of immanence and the event.
If, in socio-historical terms, "the transition from ecosystem ecology to
evolutionary ecology seem[ed] to reflect the generational transition from
the politically conscious generation of the 1960s to the 'yuppie' generation
of the 1980s" (Soderqvist in Worster 414), ecology today seems to be
shifting grounds once again as the 'ecological threat' tends to become an
integral part of the MTV generation's 'mainstream spectacle.' While
~nvironmental consciousness rapidly gains high-street visibility and eco-
lIfestyle fi~al1y finds its niche in the heart of consumer culture, the popular
understandmg of ecology runs the risk of being confined to relations of
linear causality between neatly defined phenomena, thus reducing the
fundamental. complexity intrinsic to the ecological to a set of analyzable
complicatioris.
. In scientific terms, the tenn Oecologie, coined by Darwinian biologist
Ernst. Haeckel . in 1866, originally addressed the "relations of living
orgamsms to the external world, their habitat, customs, energies, parasites,
etc." (qtd. in Worster 192). Although Haeckel's definition underlines the
significance of the relationship between the biological organism and its
physical environment, it fails, fl:om a contemporary point of view, to
capture the complexity of the network of parameters operative in the
ecological process. It was only during the 1970s, when the science of
ecology took a 'systemic turn,' that one recognized the importance of the
multidirectional interconnectedness between the heterogeneous
cons!ituents that make up the ecological.3 This connectivity is not only a
cruCial f~ctor operative on the intrarelational level of the ecosystem, but
also an llnportant aspect on the metalevel of ecology's interrelations to
other disciplines. Situated at the interface of nature and culture, ecology
figures less as a detached science than a 'permeable discipline' open to
exchanges of the inter- and trans disciplinary kind; a science in need of a
54 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
regular reVISIOn of its propositions and the readjustment of its tools
according to changing parameters.
Recent definitions of ecology point to a revival of the systemic
approach and highlight the dynamic aspects of connectivity and diversity
within a systemic framework that includes both organic and inorganic
elements. The systems perspective - that the ecological constitutes a
complex system with emergent properties - has become, with some
modifications, increasingly more important for the ecological debate. As a
new defmition of ecology provided by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem
Shldies demonstrates, ecology is
[t]he scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and
abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the
interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy
and matter. 4
Importantly, the new definition replaces the 'relations' in Haeckel's
seminal definition with bidirectional 'processes,' 'interactions' and
'transformation and flux:' It blends biological with physical aspects, thus
blurring the boundary between the organic and the inorganic due to the
existence of the continuous loops between the domains of interiority and
exteriority so neatly separated by Haeckel.
Despite this systemic complexity, within the current discourse of
popular 'lifestyle ecology,' the whole range of environmental problems
seems to have been downsized to the 'inconvenient truth' of global
warming. While climate change does indeed pose an immense challenge to
the biosphere as 'we' know it, S the frequent use and haphazard
contextualization of the phrase in the mass media contributes less to a
fruitful debate in political ecology than to the psychodramatic process of
soothing our 'bourgeois conscience.' To counter this extremely
anthropocentric and immensely trivializing tendency that prevails in the
post-Katrina era, it seems crucial to reconsider the ecological in
philosophical telms that match its overall complexity and expand the
ecological discourse beyond the bounds of an oscillation between
technocratic faith in effective planning and outright pathetic fallacy. As
Gregory Bateson has noted,
the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans
themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of
pragmatism. It wiII not in the long nm pat to 'seII' the plans by superficial
ad hominem arguments which wiII conceal or contradict the deeper insight.
(513)
Leyla Haferkamp 55
In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres stresses, in a similar vein, the
urgency to abandon the 'parasitic' position of anthropocentricism and
rethink our relationship to nahlre in terms of a new contract: "[W]e must
add to the exclusively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and .
reciprocity in which our relationship to things would set aside mastery and
possession [ ... ]" (38). This new pact, he argues, should extend beyond the
scope of mere discursivity and take into account the fact that "the earth
speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions [... J" (39). Serres'
contract implies an ichnographic set of horizontal relations, i.e., a flattened
hierarchy that is held together by the systemic 'intercordedness' of its
constituents within which the venerable distinction between humans and
nonhumans 'is dissolved. However, this heterarchic web of relations is
defined not only by the diversity of its interconnected elements, but it also
implies a systemic totality within which the seemingly opposite poles of
the global and the local communicate: "The bond runs from place to place
but also, at every point, expresses the totality of sites. It goes, to be sure,
from the local to the local, but above all from the local to the global and
from the global to the local" (107).
The narural contract that follows "the recent passage from the local to
the global" and sets the parameters for "our renewed relationship to the
world" (38) calls for a new mode of thought that Serres sees embodied in
what he caIls the "the Instructed Third," who dweIls in the interzone as the
"traveler in [both] nature and society," while ceaselessly navigating the
waters of "the Northwest Passage, those waters where scientific
knowledge communicates, in rare and delicate ways, with the humanities
[ ... ]" (94). In a more recent inquiry, Bruno Latour argues in a similar vein
when he draws attention to the necessity of inserting "a learned
community that acts as a third party" between nature and society, which
"the ecological movements havesought to short-circuit [... ], precisely in
order to accelerate their militant progress" (4). According to Latour, the
shortcomings of political ecology result from the conceptual deficiency
residing at its core, from its having skipped the crucial step of
redefming/reorganizing concephml parameters. This conceptual
inconsistency can be traced back to the fact that political ecology has
merely juxtaposed such inherited notions as oi/cos, physis, anthropos, etc.,
without further investigating their interrelatedness and interdependency
within their mutual, ecophilosophical context. For the sake of a weak
version of pragmatism, it has too readily
'gotten beyond' the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of
law and objects of science - without observing that these entities had been
56 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
shaped, profiled, and sculpted in such a way that they had gradually
become incompatible. (3, emphasis added)
Roughly speaking, the contemporary ecological debate can be said to
be taking place in a realm marked out by two idealized extremes: a fully
'organized' technocratic culture with its valid solutions and a pristine and
'organless' nature characterized by perennial flow. The latter is an
Arcadian myth in that it implies the purely intrinsic, ecocentric value of
the natural, whereas the former sways into the homocentric Utopia of
perfect planning. These two extremes, though fully incompatible and in
themselves useless for the development of viable ecological policies and
strategies,6 serve nonetheless as necessary parameters that demarcate the
outermost periphery of the theoretical framework that allows for the
description of ecological processes. It is within this framework that
Deleuzian philosophy, regarded as a form of process philosophy with the
"capacity to fuse into one unifying conception such contrasting polarities
as unity and plurality, stability and change, specificity and generality [ ... ]"
(Rescher 4), is well-equipped to play the role of 'the instructed third.'
The planomenon of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is the plane of
immanence, which provides the space on which the links between the
seemingly incompatible realms of discursive abstraction and fluent
materiality are established. "The plane of immanence," as they note
programmatically, "has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and
as Physis" (What Is Philosophy? 38). This topology of the plane implies a
thoroughly monistic process philosophy, in which the notion of process,
although it is not restricted to the Heraclitean notion of perennial flow,
encompasses the whole range of transmutations related to the dynamics at
work in the very interzone marked out by the idealized extremes of
pennanent fonn [being] and amorphous flux [becoming]. Accordingly,
Deleuzian philosophy puts the emphasis on the simultaneity and
interdependency of opposing forces as well as on the translational
processes taking place in between them; a move that reflects the principle
of dynamic reciprocity Alfred North Whitehead had developed in Process
and Reality:
In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the
overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux.
Pennanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can
find its adequate intensity only by submission to permanence. Those who
would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts.
(338)
Leyla Haferkamp 57
In the Deleuzian version of process philosophy, the ontological
oneness of epistemologically incompatible categories, e.g., the horizontal
[planar] interconnectedness of nous and physis, constitutes the basic
paradox philosophy has to deal with. 7 Although Deleuze abandons the
primacy of the mental in favor of a psychophysical monism, his
perspective is by no means that of an eliminative materialism that fully
rejects the mental component. What Deleuze does reject is any idea of
transcendence that surpasses materiality, an orientation that also prevails
in Bateson's writings. "In addition to the physical detenninism which
characterizes our universe," Bateson writes, "there is a mental
detenninism." This mental detenninism is, however "in no sense
supernatural [ ... ] [It] is not transcendent but immanent and especially
complex and evident in those sections of the universe which are alive or
which include living things" (472). Deleuze goes even one step further
when he asserts that "[a]lthough it is always possible to invoke a
transcendent that falls outside the plane of immanence, or that attributes
immanence to itself, all transcendence is constituted solely in the flow of
immanent consciousness [ ... ] Transcendence is always a product of
immanence" ("ltmnanence" 31, emphasis added).
As the "[i]mmanent mind has," as Bateson argues, "no separate or
unearthly channels" (473), what we take to be transcendent can only
emerge from within the realm of immanence, which, according to
Deleuze, "is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or
to a subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things"
("Immanence" 27, emphasis added). Along these lines, the Deleuzian
perspective comes close to that of an emergentist materialism, which
regards the mental as an emergent property of the bio-physical. 8 This
specific mode of materialism suggests the reversal of Platonism, in which
the ideas as immaculate concepts enjoy absolute primacy over all other
categories of being. Such a reversal applies even more readily to P10tinus'
Neo-Platonic theory of hypostases and emanation. The top-down
movement of emanation, the eidetic illumination of the lower strata of
being, is substituted in Deleuze by the productive force of immanation
ensuing from "the new postconscious and postsubjective, impersonal and
non-individual transcendental field" (Agamben 225). It is within the
context of such an emergentist materialism that Deleuze understands
philosophy as the discipline engaging in the continuous 'conception of
concepts:' "Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting
for some philosopher to come grab them. Concepts have to be produced"
(Two Regimes of Madness 313).
58 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
Why, then, processing ecology through Deleuze? Though lacking an
explicitly ecological orientation, Deleuzian philosophy offers extremely
useful conceptual tools for dealing with the translational processes that
take place between the diametrically opposed 'ecological' terms such as
constancy vs. change, form vs. flux, order vs. chaos. In his early work,
Deleuze himself stressed the significance of the conceptual as follows:
"The genius of a philosophy must first be measured by the new
distribution which it imposes on beings and concepts" (Logic of Sense 8-
9). Later, for Deleuze (and Guattari), the special vocation of the
philosopher consisted primarily in the conception of concepts:
"[P]hilosophy is a discipline that is just as inventive, just as creative as any
other discipline, and it consists in creating or inventing concepts" (Two
Regimes of Madness 313). As Deleuze and Guattari write, just as the
scientist is the inventor of prospects and the artist the creator of affects and
percepts, the philosopher is the inventor of concepts (What Is Philosophy?
24).
What makes Deleuzian philosophy especially relevant for the
ecological debate today is also its deliberately trans disciplinary positioning
as a system of thought open to both the sciences and the arts. Though they
produce different tools, the philosopher, the artist and the scientist interact
in their effort to depict and analyze 'reality.' However, whenever there is
need for conceptual clarity, it becomes the philosopher's task and the
philosopher's task only to explore the domain in between the disciplines
and come up with the adequate concepts. "A scientist as a scientist,"
Deleuze writes, "has nothing to do with concepts. That is even why -
thankfully - there is philosophy" (Two Regimes of Madness 314).
As a conceptualizing machine, philosophy provides ecology with
concepts that complement 'its' scientific prospects, although they differ
drastically from these prospects. For instance, science and philosophy
differ drastically in their attitudes towards chaos, which is "defined not so
much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking
shape in it vanishes" (What Is Philosophy? 118). While science decelerates
the infinite speed to the point of an analyzable standstill, "in order to gain
a reference able to actualize the virtual," philosophy retains the infinite,
"giv[ing] consistency to the virtual through concepts." It can do so because
the plane of immanence serves as the "philosophical sieve" filled with
concepts whereas science attempts at laying out its own "plane of
reference" (118). Unlike scientific propositions that are based on fixed
points of reference and aim at quantitative measurements, concepts are
complex products of metaphysical thinking: "[T]he concept is not a simple
logical being, but a metaphysical being; it is not a generality or a
Leyla Haferkamp 59
universality, but an individual; it is not defined by an attribute, but by
predicates-as-events" (Fold 42, emphasis added).
Deleuze's 'concept of concept' can best be elaborated by virtue of its
connectivity to the plane of immanence on the one hand and to the concept
of the event on the other. The concept is correlative of the plane of
immanence, without which it could not exist. The plane displays the
constitution of the assemblages forming and filling space; it is
characterized by "only speeds and slownesses between unformed
elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers.,,9 The components
constituting its surface abide by the geometrics of "pure longitude and
latitude" (Thousand Plateaus 261) and know of no dimensionality, i.e.,
they are located within the cartography of heterarchic directionality.
Though in itself not directly a philosophical concept or "an act of thought"
(What Is Philosophy? 21), the plane constitutes "the image of thought"
(37) indispensable for philosophical activity; it serves as the
prephilosophical basis and "the absolute ground of philosophy, [ ... ], the
foundation on which it creates its concepts" (41).
The notion of concept is also closely related to that of the event,
probably the most important concept relating thought to process. One of
the things that make Deleuzian concepts so 'ecological' is that they do not
address the essences of things, but the dynamics of events and the
becomings that go through them. In most general terms, "[t]he concept is
the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come" (32-
33). Although concepts as metaphysical entities belong to the realm of
relational abstractions and have "the reality of a virtual, of an incorporeal,
of an impassible, in contrast with [scientific] functions of an actual state,
body functions, and lived functions" (159), the events they signal
constitute the hinge between the virtual and the actual; in fact,
[the event] is itself inseparable from the state of affairs, bodies, and lived
reality in which it is actualized or brought about. But we can also say the
converse: the state of affairs is no more separable from the event that
nonetheless goes beyond its actualization in every respect. (159)
Thus, the event connotes the simultaneity of incompatibles: it involves
both the virtual and the actual, both the virtual concept of philosophy and
the actualized function of science as its independent yet synchronous
categories: "The event is actualized or effectuated whenever it is inserted,
willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it
is abstracted from state of affairs so as to isolate its concept" (159). The
event is the intennediary, the 'meanwhile,' the interzone of thought:
60 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
In every event there are heterogeneous, always simultaneous components,
since each of them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that makes
them communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidability:
they are mediations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite
order. (158)
The meanwhile designates neither the eternity of immanence nor the
temporality of scientific actualization: In laying out the contours of events
to come, the concepts address the level of pure becoming.
As the elements "moving about on a plane of immanence" (143), as
mere intensifications upon its fractal surface, Deleuzian concepts display
indefinite contours; unlike scientific propositions with their detenninate
coordinates of the actualized 'freeze-frame,' concepts, in their vagueness
and fuzziness, retain something of the nebulous virtuality of immanence.
In fact, they cannot be thought apart from the planomenon, which
constitutes the conditions of their creation. Nonetheless, Deleuze argues
that" [p]hilosophical concepts are also modes of life and modes of activity
for the one who invents them, or knows· how to tease them out, giving
them consistency" (Two Regimes of Madness 263). This claim does not
only establish a quasi-phenomenological link between concepts and 'lived
reality,' but also points towards a specific understanding of subjectivity
prevailing in Deleuzian thinking.
It does not come as a surprise, then, that Deleuze abandons the
traditional image of the subject as fixity in favor of a process of
subjectivation designated by "difference, variation and metamorphosis"
(Foucault 106). Deleuze focuses, like Michel Foucault, the "processes of
subjectivation, governed by the foldings operating in the ontological as
much as the social field" (116). These processes of subjectivation are set
against the two hitherto dominant modes of subjectivity, "the one
consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of
power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized
identity, fixed one and for all" (105-06). The new subjectivity is always
one 'under construction' and 'in progress.'
It is in Deleuze's reading of Leibniz that the ecological mode of
protean subjectivity is integrated into a web of relations that· include the
concept and the event. A new theory that was based on the principle of
variation and involved the concept, the event and the individual within one
and the same framework was introduced during the Baroque as "[t]he
concept [became] the 'concetto,' or an apex, because it [was] folded in the
individual subject" (Fold 126). Deleuze traces the Leibnizian folding of
the object into the subject by way of the latter's adopting a multi-
perspectival, hence variable 'point of view:'
Leyla Haferkamp 61
The principal examples of [Leibnizian] philosophy are shown in the
transformation of the object into a series of figures or aspects submitted to
a law of continuity; the assignation of events that correspond to these
fignred aspects, and that are inscribed in propositions; the predication of
~hese propositions to an individual subject that contains their concept, and
IS defined as an apex or point of view, a principle ofindiscernibles assuring
the interiority of the concept and the individual. (126)
This reconciliation of the external world with the individual via the
concept, often corresponding to the triad "scenographies-definitions-points
of view," makes possible what Serres has called Leibniz's "ichnographic
chart of the Universe"~(16lnll), made up of the network of bidirectional
relations between multiplicity and tIDity. For Deleuze, this new and, as I
have tried to show, ecological relation is the most important consequence
of the fold-in: "Always a unity of the multiple, in the objective sense, the
one must also have a multiplicity 'of one and a unity 'of' the multiple, but
now in a SUbjective sense" (126).
Apart from referring to the complex interrelations between organisms
and the multiplicity of environmental components surrounding them (and
even those living within them as integral 'parts'), the tenn 'ecology' has
also come to denote any 'intricate system or complex.' All ecological crises
require prompt action and a decisive attitude, but they also necessitate the
insight, know-how and flexibility to deal with them as complex systems.
"Organism plus environment" is, as Bateson remarked, no longer ecology's
sole unit of survival;· it now has a double: "the unit of evolutionary survival
turns out to be identical with the unit of mind' (491). Ecology, then, is not
only the science concerned with the overall bio-physical system and its
constitutive parts, but also "the study of the interaction and survival of
ideas and programs [ ... ] in circuits" (491). On the level of the mental, the
"many catastrophic dangers which have grown out of the Occidental errors
of epistemology" (495), which Bateson had warned against nearly four
decades ago, not only still present a major challenge today, they do so ori
an amplified scale. The epistemological fallacies that posit the primacy of
transcendence over immanence and/or regard immanence as immanent to
'Some Thing' other than itself, the belief in "an overall mind separate from
the body, separate from the society, and separate from nature" (493) and
the more banal modes of superstition and 'psycho centrism' that prevail in
contemporary culture contribute itmnensely to the 'ecological threat.'
The propagation of transcendence refutes the fact that the human agent
is fully included in the decentered network of the dispersed and the
interconnected, without the privilege of the hierarchical superposition of
an impartial observer [n+ 1]; that "[w]e are not outside the ecology for
62 Processing Ecology with Deleuze
which we plan" (512). In the flattened network, the human position is
always that of the partial observer while some of our concepts/ideas can
become "nuclear or nodal with constellations of other ideas" (510). "We
are," as Foucault has observed
in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the
epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a
moment, [ ... ] when our experience of the world is less that of a long life
developing through time than that of a network that connects points and
intersects with its own skein. ("Of Other Spaces" 22)
Concepts, as metaphysical tools, belong to the order of understanding
and they playa crucial role in facilitating our comprehension of the world.
Deleuzian philosophy holds the potential to provide efficient and flexible
concepts for the ecological debate precisely because it operates from
within the interstices of thought and nature. The Deleuzian concept is
always 'in process;' first as a product of the flow of immanence, an
intensification upon its surface of chaotic directionality and, secondly, as
the act of thought that signals the event, which is, in its turn, the
'meanwhile' of the interstices between the virtual and the actual. But most
importantly, the philosophical concept always serves as 'the third party' in
the continuous process of intermediation between philosophical categories
as well as between different disciplines.
It is precisely this precarious position that allows for the specific
functionality of philosophy within the ecological realm. As Whitehead
noted,
[t]he useful function of philosophy is to promote the most general
systematization of civilized thought. There is a constant reaction between
specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to
modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and
common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also an enlargement of
their imaginations. By providing the generic notions philosophy should
make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances which
rest unrealized in the womb of nature. (17)
From Whitehead's Process and Reality to Bateson and further to Deleuze,
process philosophy can provide ecology with a conceptual ground that
allows for the 'complexification' [or, in Deleuzian tenlls, the complication]
of the current ecological debate beyond the bounds of the strict distinction
between homo centrism and ecocentrism. Although such a
complexification would already be an important 'further step' towards a
truly ecological cui hIre, beyond these political dynamics, 'processing
Leyla Haferkamp 63
ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more
important: the ecologization of the subject. The true point-of-perspective
of 'processing ecology with Deleuze' lies in the processualizing and
singularization of the subject, in its immersion within the horizontal
planomenon of flattened hierarchies and within the overall 'mentality' -
and mental ecology - of the haecceities that make up the plane of
immanence. Ultimately, 'processing ecology with Deleuze' means never to
forget that, in our origami world, "the eco-mental system called Lake Erie
is part of your wider eco-mental system - and that if Lake Erie is driven
insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and
experience" (Bateson 492).
Notes
I The explicitly environmental perspective is presented in Felix Guattari's
programmatically ecological writings that directly combine ecological categories
with political activism. See esp. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul
Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). Guattari draws on Bateson's ecological
views for developing a politically relevant ecosophy. See Verena Andermatt
Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London:
Routledge, 1997),91-107.
2 Deleuze sees Leibniz's genius in his metaconceptual innovation: "It is also widely
held that Leibniz brings a new conception of the concept that transforms
philosophy" (Fold 42).
3 See, for example, Eugene P. Odum, "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development,"
Science 164 (April 1969): 262-70.
4 http://www.ecostudies.org/definition ecology.html
5 -
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (lPCC) was rewarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2007 for the final proof of global warming and the assessment of its
drastic consequences for the biosphere. This achievement emerged from a new
form of science organization and related policies. To observe the climate system,
the cooperation of hundreds of scientists all over the world is necessary.
http://www.ipcc.ch (Apr 29.2008).
6 "What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two
systems ofreality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses [ ... ].
Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream"
(Whitehead, The Concept o.fNature 30).
7 At first sight, 'immanence and transcendence,' 'the virtual and the actual,' 'the
smooth and the striated,' 'deterritorialization and reterritorilization,' etc. are all
conceptual pairs of seeming binary polatity. An Anti-Hegelian, Deleuze never
posits them within a dialectic of sublation that blends conflicting poles into a
unifying fusion. Instead, Deleuzian philosophy treats such pairs as the limits
demarcating a zone of indiscernibility, i.e., the very zone of their continuous
intermediation.
 Leyla Haferkamp 65
64 Processing Ecology with Deleuze

8 "[A]ccording to emergentist materialism the appearance and refinement of Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
cognitive abilities, be it in the individual or in the species, far from being Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
mysterious, is an aspect of the development or the evolution of the brain Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process
interacting with the rest of the body as well as with its natural and social Philosophy (Albany: State University of New Yark Press, 1996).
environment" (Bunge 105). Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and
9 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between two planes William Paulson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
concephJalized as "the plane of immanence" and "the plane of transcendence." The
2001).
function of the latter is restricted to the 'organized' development of forms and the
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
formation of subjects (267-68); it accommodates the dimensionality of hierarchic
developments and organizations. The plane of transcendence/organization (New York: The Free Press, 1985).
corresponds to the planomenon's noetic facet (see What Is Philosophy? 38). -. The Concept ofNature (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004).
Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New
Yark: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. "Absolute Immanence." Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999),220-39.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2000).
Bunge, Mario. Scientific Materialism (London: D. Reidel Publishing
Company, 1981).
Caty Institute of Ecosystem Shldies
http://www.ecostudies.org/definition_ecology.html (Apr. 27 2008)
Conley, Tom. "Translator's Foreword." Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1993), ix-xix.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2000).
- . "Immanence: A Life." Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Trans. Anne
Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25~33.
-. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
-. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004).
-. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Trans.
Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2006).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003).
-. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson
(London: Verso, 1994).
Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22-
27.

THE RHIZOMATICS OF DOMINATION:
FROM DARWIN TO BIOTECHNOLOGY
MICHAEL MIKULAK
In a time where global wanning, pantoxicity, pesticide pollution,
resource scarcity, and a whole host of environmental problems regularly
appear in news headlines, the perennial question about what the
relationship between humans and nature is and should be, is more pressing
than ever. While it may seem trite to focus on questions of narrative,
representation, agency, and subjectivity in the face of more "pressing"
material concerns, the environmental crisis is more than a problem for
scientists; it is a problem of narrative, ontology, and epistemology. It is as
much a failure of imagination as it is a technological problem, arising from
maladapted social and political ecologies that fail to establish healthy and
sustainable network of kinship imaginaries 2 that are capable of addressing
the competing needs and desires of multiple actors within the biocultural
networks humanity is always within. Kinship imaginaries are the
foundation of how we relate to others, and thus are the ground upon which
(bio )politics are based. They are the basis of how we imagine ourselves to
be connected to the world around us, and the myriad organisms that
populate this increasingly shrinking and sullied world. How we imagine
ourselves in relation to nature determines, to a large extent, the power
dynamics of that relationship, whether it is colonial, ownership based, or
convivial and respectful. Whether the Christian narrative of Genesis that
encourages Man to "increase, multiply and subdue the earth" (cf Lynn
White Jr, Merchant), or Gary Snyder's blend of Eastern mysticism and
Aboriginal myth which sees the world in terms of an etiquette of freedom,
kinship imaginaries are the foundation of our relationship with each other
and the world around us, and thus must be interrogated carefully if we are
to address the source of the enviromnental crisis., They are the discourses,
emotional ties, art and beliefs we have about our place in the world and
provide the substrata and intellectual justification for our actions in the
world. Although not an exhaustive sampling, this paper is about two
competing kinship systems, the arboreal and the rhizomatic, and the ways
Michael Mikulak 67
in which they structure and are structured by political economy, scientific
knowledge, and power. The environmental crisis is a complicated
interaction of all these things, and my choice to focus on kinship
imaginaries derives from the belief that any solutions to the environmental
crisis must also occur on the level of narrative if they are to be more than a
passing fad. Neil Evernden suggests that "we are not in an environmental
crisis, but are the environmental crisis," in the sense that our way of
knowing and being in the world is the problem (134). As such, to address
kinship imaginaries, is to approach the problem from the understanding
that we must first change the way we think about nature and culture if we
are to solve the problem. There are many different kinship imaginaries
circulating, but I choose to focus on rhizomatics and arboreal systems for
the sake of brevity, but also because of the potency of certain discourse
emerging out of the biotechnological debate, and their implications for
transforming the way we understand nature and culture to be related.
And so this is a paper about bioscientific origin stories and the vectors
of biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative
transversals. More specifically, this is a paper about trees, roots and
rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and
the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured,
shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical
discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence. Drawing on Deleuze and
Guattari, Darwin, Haraway, HeimIreich, and a range of ecocriticism, I will
interrogate how the radically open concept of subjectivity in flux
characteristic of ecological models of rhizomatic kinship, transforms the
political vectors of the various kinship imaginaries that tie us together.
Because the biopolitical nexus of life and politics always draws on
discourses of naturecultures in order to find more efficient modes of
domination, we must carefully attend to kinship imaginaries that on the
surface may seem to promise connection, but which open the door to
perhaps more insidious modes of domination. This is especially the case
with environmentalist discourses of ecology, which often valorize an open
concept of complete rhizomatic interpenetration and connectivity, without
considering how vectors of category transformation may infect the body
politic with yet undreamt of viruses of biopowei. What I call the
rhizomatics of domination are the shifting configurations of (bio)power
that capitalize on ecological understandings of relationality and kinship.
This is not to say that Deleuze and Guattari, and other rhizomatic theorists
blindly celebrate the rhizome, but rather, that rhizomatics is being shaped
by other rather arborescent discourses, namely the bioscientific narratives
of biotechnology, capitalism, and solving world hunger and curing disease

68 The Rhizomatics of Domination
through genetic engineering. It is thus important to understand how the
rhizome is being deployed, much in the same way that Darwin's notions of
evolution were transformed into racist justifications for eugenics. In terms
of ecology, Donald Worster declares Darwin as the "single most important
figure in the histOlY of ecology over the past two or three centuries" (114),
and as such, it is important to interrogate Darwin's contributions to
rhizomatics, and the way he has been taken up. Darwin(ism) has
profoundly shaped contemporary kinship imaginaries, both positively and
negatively, and by examining the profound struggles and tensions Darwin
faced in articulating a non-anthropocentric web of life, I hope to cast some
light on current problems we face today as biotechnology, and the
intensely capitalist discourses around it, rewrite both life itself, and the
way we imagine our connections to the world.
Roots and Rhizomes
Rhizomatic theorists like Deleuze and Guattari and Stephan Helmreich
tend to dichotomize the rhizome in relation to a (Darwinian) genealogical
tree. For example, Helmreich argues that "at least since Charles Darwin,
the family tree has been an algorithm for thinking about evolutionary
genealogy, origins, and identity" (340). Such genealogical classification,
he claims, are "derived from Victorian social practices of family record
keeping. Reading such kinship customs onto the organic world, Darwin
effectively naturalized and universalized them, suggesting through a now
commonplace epistemological reversal that such practices were
themselves emanations of natural logic organizing all relatedness" (340).
In rejecting these practices, Deleuze and Guattari declare that they are sick
of trees because in the West, "arborescent systems are hierarchical systems
with centers of significance and subjectification" (16). They declare that
we must "make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow
offshoots" (24)! The arboreal is associated with linearity, hierarchy,
origins, racism, rigidity, and carnophallogocentrism, while the rhizome
embodies flexibility, openness, movement, and potentiality. On the one
hand we have a kinship system that is vertical, appealing to origins, stages,
the scala naturae (in which humans rule over dumb beasts), and on the
other hand, a system that seems to be open, thrives on diversity and
change, and celebrates plurality.
While I agree that the rhizome as a model is potentially very libratory
and politically flexible, the ludic tone of valorization that often surrounds
the rhizome tends to replicate the very binaries and dualistic thinking it
attempts to escape by privileging an equally abstracted notion of
!
/"'
Michael Mikulak 69
multiplicity, lines of flight, rupture, and schizoanalysis that are potentially
even more amenable to shifting configurations ofbiopower within the age
of b~otechnology. Rhizomatics seems to be the theoretical soup de jour,
and III the same way that arborescence has been rigorously overcoded and
dominated by certain bioscientific discourses of purity, miscegenation, and
progress, the rhizome is equally vulnerable to such manipulations. As
such, my paper argues that the celebration of rhizomes must be amended
with careful attention to what I call the rhizomatics of domination.
Echoing Haraway's notion of the "informatics of domination" (Manifesto
161)/ the point of this paper will be to reach back into Darwin in order to
show how even what we'consider pure models of arborescent descent are
in fact much more rhizomatic and complicated in their configuratio~ of
origins. By looking at the ways in which Darwinism was transformed by
the arboreal logic of the time (social Darwinism, eugenics, degeneracy,
anti-immigration), and tracing the lines of flight from his theories to the
bioscientific origin stories assembled by political opportunists, we can
extrapolate and begin to see how the rhizomatics of domination is
effecting the landscape of late capital. With discourse of climate change,
eco-apocalypse, and the recent celebration of global warming as a boon for
capitalism, the struggle over kinship imaginaries will shape the terrain of
the future by fundamentally setting the tone for how we deal with the
environmental crisis. The way we perceive environmental damage dictates
how we will react to it, who we blame, and the actions we take. Discourse
shapes the way we tmderstand our relationship to global pollution and the
actions we can take to address it, and kinship imaginaries are the most
basic ideas we have about how we relate to the world. It is thus my
contention that the reception and use of Darwinism must stand as an
example for us when we are theorizing the political potential of rhizomatic
or ecological thinking, especially in the context of powerful new
technologies of genetic engineering that are rewriting the social and
biological fabric of the tree of life along increasingly privatized lines of
rhizomatic flight. In the same way that Darwinism was (mis)construed as a
bioscientific discourse of legitimation for political philosophies that fly in
the face of its author's intentions, rhizomatics must attend to the fascistic
potential of re-coding bios within the current biopolitical terrain.
N aturecultures
The purpose of most environmentalist discourse is to account for the
material, epistemological, spiritual, political, and economic conditions that
have resulted in the current environmental crisis. The discourse is thus
70 The Rhizomatics of Domination
inherently elegiac, mourning for a lost nature, state of union, innocence, or
perhaps simply a connection to a world we are increasingly alienated from.
Many ecocritics and environmentalists locate environmental degradation
in the separation of nature and culture-in other words, a failure of kinship
imaginaries to knit together human goals and desires with those of the
biosphere. For example, many critics have pointed the finger at Western
rationalism and scientific objectivism for its role in objectifying Nature in
a manner that denies it agency and voice and transforms it into a mere
resource for human exploitation (cf Manes, Evemden). The ostensible
purpose of environmental discourse is thus deconstructive in the first
instance, but ultimately constructive, with hope coming from the desire to
reconstitute society within a healthy and sustainable relationship to nature.
The environmental crisis is thus a crisis of narrative as much as it is a
crisis of technology, economy, and politics.
But what is it that we are saving? What do we· mourn? If Nature is
dead, as Bill McKibben has stated, then what does it mean to be post-
natural? How do we weave a multiplicity or assemblage withOn) Nature
without engaging in the same kind of fall and recovery narrative that
Carolyn Merchant identifies as essentially colonialist in "Reinventing
Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative"? Is Nature, thus, a useless
category for creating an ecological, biocentric ethic, because the tenn
already frames humans and nature along a binary of self and other. Is it an
arboreal narrative of false origins and hierarchies? What purpose does the
categOlY serve? Have we ever been in Nature in the purest sense of the
word? If we accept what Donna Haraway says about our
biotechnologically sahlrated world of technoscience, that we live "in a
world where the artificatual and the nahlral have imploded, Nature itself,
both ideologically and materially, has been patently reconstructed"
(Vampire 350), then is the source of environmentally destructive ideology
the arboreal separation of nature and culture, or a rhizomatic lack of
separation? In other words, do we perhaps need to insist on a more
stringent separation that would thus isolate the goals of non-human nature
from our own and allow us to account for it in our enumerations?
Darwin's Rhizomatic Tree of Life
Heisenberg Principle: "What we observe is not Nature itself, but Nature
exposed to our method of questioning"
-Systems Theory 336.
Like anyone trying to theorize the link between nature and culture,
Darwin was faced with the problem of producing "objective knowledge"
Michael Mikulak 71
while being embedded within the very system he was observing. Gillian
Boer addresses precisely this problem when she analyzes the disjuncture
between language and content within Darwin's project, which she
identifies as the dec entering of humanity in the kinship chain of Nature, an
effort that resonates well with ecocriticism's attempt to challenge the logic
of anthropocentrism and move towards a sustainable, biocentric
worldview. Donald Worster agrees, stating that "the figure of Dmwin must
remain the most imposing and persuasive force behind the biocentric
movement" (187).
However, if language is inherently anthropocentric, and we are
linguistic creatures, how'can we ever hope to understand a world outside
of ourselves and respect the goals of non-human nature? Is biocentrism
even a tenable position? Should we perhaps be seeking a stronger
distinction between humans and the world, rather than collapsing the two?
Or is this perceived separation simply a linguistic artifact? How can we
speak of/within Nature if language predisposes us towards all sorts of
humanistic biases? Does this even matter? Gillian Beer asks: "If the
material world is not anthropocentric but language is so, the mind cannot
be held to truly encompass and analyze the properties of the world that lie
about it" (Darwin's Plots 45). Darwin seems very aware of this, frequently
bringing attention to the linguistic limitation of his own theories. In The
Origin of Species, he states that "I use the term Struggle for Existence in a
large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on
another" (62). Donna Haraway argues that "biology is also not a culture-
free universal discourse, for all that it has considerable cultural, economic,
and technical power to establish what will count as nature throughout the
planet Earth" (Vampires 323). Darwin seems painfully aware of this, and
perhaps for this reason, avoids mentioning humanity in the Origin of
Species. However, precisely because Darwin is hying to explain
something that exceeds the anthropocentric focus of language, the
discourse of evolution can easily be manipulated to serve various political
ends.
Moreover, because the act of description and observation necessarily
results in the transfonnation of the thing being observed, any theory of
nature that does not take into account its production as a hmnan discourse
is dangerous and hugely problematic. Thus, even if one is seeking a non-
anthropocentric theory, to avoid the human is to obfuscate the ideological,
economic, and political conditions of emergence that necessarily shape
any theory of nature or culture. It is irresponsible and naive at best, and
incredibly dangerous and fascistic at worse. For example, Earth First!ers
tend to look at human beings ecologically, or as one more "natural
CAUFORNIA INSTITUTE
OF THE ARTS
72 The Rhizomatics of Domination
population" that has exceeded the carrying capacity of its range; hence,
like rabbits, algae, deer, or locusts in similar circumstances, there must be
a catastrophic crash or mass die-off to re-equilibrate networks of
ecological exchange. The most famous and problematic incarnation of this
position was an article in the Earth First! journal that argued that AIDS
was a good thing because it would reduce the pressures of human
population on the earth, and consequently, governments should do nothing
to help African countries with the epidemic. Although this statement was
later retracted, the Earth First! tendency to take a virulently anti-humanist
stance has problematic ramifications for the ethico-political communities
of kinship they imagine. Although they embrace a profoundly ecological
view that equates all life, they tend to exclude humans from many of their
accounts, and thus cannot address issues of environmental justice and the
role of hierarchical and exploitative social and political ecologies that
produce the conditions of environmental degradation. Chim Blea, a
pseudonym for a member of Earth First!, argues that: "We as Deep
Ecologists recognize the transcendence of the community over any
individual, we should deal with all individuals-animal, plant, mineral,
etc. - with whom we come into contact with compassion and bonhomie"
(Ecocritique 23). The (eco )fascistic tendencies emerge in the complete
subsumption of the individual to an imagined· community, without a
framework being established for adjudicating how, what, and where one
organism should live, and another die. If everyone is truly equal, then what
does it matter if nahu·e dies in order for humanity to survive? In a strange
way, any biocentric theOlY must take a detour through anthropocentrism.
And in this sense, Darwin is a key figure. He was instrumental in
shattering the Arcadian view of nature based on a Romantic concept of
pastoral hannony. His focus on struggle and violence unsettled people's
notion of a benevolent creator and creation in place for humankind.
Popular kinship imaginaries now had to contend with a natural world that
was decidedly inhumane and violent, denuded of a benevolent original
mover that provided all life with the means to survive, and the divine right
for human domination. What emerged, according to Donald Worster, was
a "dismal science" of nature red in tooth and claw, even though Darwin
himself placed a high degree of emphasis on mutual aide and cooperation.
This had the effect of decentring humanity and thus providing the
necessary first steps towards a biocentric environmental ethic of
rhizomatic interconnectivity. However, it also tended to provide the
ideological naturalization of violence, competition, and hiearchalized
human superiority. The same act of decentring had profoundly antithetical
consequences in terms of humbling and aggrandizing humanity' within the
Michael Mikulak 73
networks of worldly kinship, making humans on the one hand, just one
member of the great chain of being, and on the other, the rightful
conquerors and creators of an earthly garden of Eden (cf Merchant). Thus,
"to dwell on the violence and suffering in Nature was, from the mid-
nineteenth centmy on, to be 'realistic'" (Nature's Economy 128).
While Worster is correct in identifYing Darwin's role in the scientific
disenchantment of the Arcadian view of nature, and the shift from an
economic model based on harmony, divine providence, and abundance, to
an economy of competition, violence, and suffering, a careful attention to
Darwin's language reveals a much more complex interaction between
competition and cooperation, one that is more in line with a rhizomatic
conception of nature, than an arboreal one. For example, In Descent of
Man, Darwin is very biocentric, arguing that "nature appears as a world
essentially held together by lines of 'mutual love and sympathy'" (182).
This was very typical of Darwin's work, and he would often seek to
simultaneously affirm and deny the struggle for existence as violent and
competitive, attempting the delicate balance of holding mutualism and
competition in a dynamic flux. For example, he argues that "a plant on the
edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though
more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture" (Origin
62). The notion of arboreal hierarchy often ascribed to Darwin ignores
these frequent appeals to rhizomatic solidarity, and his careful attention to
the way language frames our understanding of kinship networks. In one
form or another, Darwin often stated: "all survival is socially detennined,"
and nature is a "web of complex relations," in which "no individual
organism or species can live independently of that web" (Nature's
Economy 156). Especially if we consider Darwin's debt to Lyell, post-
Darwinian concepts of nature were rooted/routed through a continual flux
and migration of all life. Unlike the Linnaean notion of a divine order
where every organism was given a place in nature that did not change,
Darwin introduced a rhizomatic motion to nature that understood it as an
infinitely dynamic economy in a constant state of flux. No organism was
divinely appointed to a specific niche, and no environment was immune to
change. By shattering the notion of a divine mover and static creation,
Darwin's so-called tree of life begins to resemble a rhizome. There is no
such thing as balance and harmony: Nature is no longer static, it is a
rhizomatic structure of proliferating lines of flight that multiply endlessly
in perpetual de and reterritorialization between beings.
So how do we read the Origin of Species? Is its appeal to an
arborescent origin, or is it a prototype for rhizomatic thought? The notion
of origins and order is arborescent, but the principles of evolution are
74 The Rhizomatics of Domination
rhizomatic. Politically, Darwinism has become associated with an
arborescent system, but from the point of view of kinship imaginaries, it is
rhizomatic. Arborescence organizes, segments, and orders according to
first principles. This is the Darwinism of order and origins, and the
consequence of the racist reductionism by the likes of Herbert Spencer that
naturalizes the fierce competition of an economic order by appealing to
evolution. The rhizomatic is about flow, deterritorialization, space without
boundmy, edge or linearity. It is escape, flight, flux, flow, and never
ceasing movement. This describes Darwin's notion of evolution quite
accurately: the dynamic flux and flow of genetic information in a process
of de and reterritorialization that transfonlls species and individuals in
relation to the flux of all the forces around them. The totality is but an
assemblage, an incomprehensible multiplicity that transforms itself in the
act of becoming. There is no beginning or end, just ceaseless change and
rhizomatic flux.
Arborescent Darwinism
Rockefeller: "The Growth of a large business is merely the survival of the
fittest"
-Dmwin 487.
All biological discourses are necessarily shaped by political economy,
a perfect example of the co-constitution of naiure and culture, and thus the
necessity of close deconstruction. Although the phrase "survival of the
fittest" is synonymous with most popular conceptions of Darwinism, the
tetm was Herbert Spencer's and not Darwin's. So while Darwin was trying
to situate humanity back in the natural order, careful to use the struggle for
existence and natural selection as metaphors, many people rallied around
his ideas for their own dubious ideological causes. They transformed the
complicated notion of evolution as co-constitutive and dynamic, with no
goal or departure point, but rather a series of endless adaptations, into a
teleological narrative of perfection and progress that served. various
nationalistic and racist agendas. Perhaps the most influential of these
interpretive appropriations was Herbert Spencer's, who began what we
now know as social Darwinism, and which in effect collapsed survival and
struggle into one another in a blatantly ideological tautology that applied
the "implications of science to social thought and action" (The Vogue of
Spencer 490). Spencer believed that "evolution can end only in the
establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness"
(491), and for him, this was embodied by a specific class of European
gentry. Even before Darwin, he applied the Malthusian theory of
Michael Mikulak 75
population to a theOlY of social selection that was incredibly callus to
social conditions. In 1852 he stated that "the pressures of subsistence upon
population must have a beneficent effect upon the human race," or in other
words, starvation is good for the species as a whole because it weeds out
the poor and weak (492). There are frightening similarities to Earth First!'s
argument about aids, suggesting once again that we need to attend to the
rhizomatics of domination before we whole-heartedly embrace the
rhizome as a kinship model. Spencer vehemently attacked Benthamism
and social reform on the basis that they interfered with the natural
machinations of a laissez faire market place that followed the laws of
evolution. He was against helping the poor because this would interfere
with the "the ultimate development of the ideal man" (The Vogue of
Spencer 492). The state should not interfere with the market because "the
whole effort of Nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them [the
poor], and make room for better" (493).
We can see obvious resonances here with current discourses
surrounding neoliberalism, in which the market seeks to replace the
environment by mediating all social, political, and environmental
interactions within a supposedly fair social Darwinism. The struggle for
existence, or competition, is seen as a positive force of inevitable
perfection, which, if left to its own, will act like nature and weed out the
weak and unworthy, and reward the strong. The market functions as an
evolutionmy sieve that separates the strong from the degenerate, and thus
collapses society into the choices of isolated bourgeois monads. Structural
violence is ameliorated into the amoral rhetoric of survival strategies, and
the rich become the legitimate bearers of evolutionary capital. Thus, it is
easy for Carnegie to state: "All is well since all grows better" (The Vogue
of Spencer 497), and avoid the difficult questions of privilege and artificial
selection within an unjust political economy, which would throw the
whole equation into question. I could see Darwin responding by stating
that the arena of artificial selection pales to that of Nature, and any
economic evolution would therefore be necessarily flawed and imperfect.
The focus on antagonism, unsocial sociability (Kant), and competition is
not only violent and callus to the inequities faced by those on the bottom
of the "evolutionary rung," it also favors those who already have power by
creating a reverse-teleology that naturalizes their own ascent to power.
The kinship chain that emerges is one of isolated egos violently competing
for limited resources. Michel Zimmerman proposes that
so long as people conceive of themselves as isolated egos, only externally
related to other people and nature, they inevitably tend to see life in tenns
of scarcity and competition. When people conceive of themselves as
 The Rhizomatics of Domination
76
internally related to others and to nature, however, they tend to see life in
terms of bounty, not scarcity, and in terms of cooperation, not aggressive
competition. (242)
And thus in order to get to the heart of the environmental crisis, We
must address the implications of various kinship imaginaries as they align
humanity and nature along a continuum of struggle, competition, and
harmony.
For example, Elizabeth Belmke argues that we must resist a frontal
knowledge of Nature that knows it from above and confronts "Nature as a
totality of sheer things ... in such a way that being known (or being-object)
becomes the measure of being" (95). As an altemative to the Cartesian
ontology she resists frontal knowing in favor of speaking within nature,
and thus being a part of it: "We must leam to speak from within this
Nature that surrounds and includes us" (95). She takes this framework and
tries to apply it in order to create a practical, "embodied ethics" for
interspecies peace (96). She shifts language into the body, leaming to
decode and recode somatic semantics, or somantics, in a way that enables
and fosters interspecies peace and a kinship of life by leaming to
hannonize "kinetic melodies" (109) and becoming a co-participant in fluid
situations. This does not mean that all encounters will be peaceful or
possible; however, openness is an essential first step. She embraces the
notion of an "improvisational" or "wild body" that enables us to push at
the boundaries of our semiotic, cultural, and historical contexts and engage
in communication with significant others (108). By taking the poshlre of
"primordial motility" (107), we can hope to adapt and listen by
abandoning the "pervasive style of seperative seeing that makes Being,
Nature, Others, etc., into objects over-against a subject" (108).
But how do you resist this frontal knowing and enable modes of
interbeing that embrace what Haraway calls the "counter-intuitive
geometries and incongruent translations necessary to getting on together"
(Companion Species 25)? The implication of rhizomatic thought, with its
emphasis on becoming and flow is one such way. Behnke echoes Deleuze
and Guattari in many ways, speaking of a subjectivity that is unfixed and
in constant flux and thus resistant to overcoding. The notion of an
improvisational body seems to, on some fundamental level, abandon a
desire to be one with nature in favor of a mixing or, like the wasp and the
orchid, a kind of semiotic translation through a process of de and
reterritorialization. In this context, we can see echoes of Delueze and
Guattari rejecting unity: "The notion of unity (unite) appears only when
there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a
corresponding subjectification proceeding" (8). This artificial unity is
Michael Mikulak 77
similar to viewing the world from a strictly anthropocentric standpoint: a
semiotic overcoding of the human that renders the multiplicity of nature
unintelligible by naturalizing the human and humanizing nature. The way
in which Darwinism has been deployed politically, emphasizing the
arborescent logic of purity, origins, and struggle, is a perfect example of
this kind of overcoding. From a critical standpoint, rhizomatics can help us
resist this overcoding by providing a language for becoming-nature that
does not separate or blindly ameliorate, but rather, celebrates the
messiness of becoming. The kinship imaginary that emerges is one that, on
a fundamental level, is profoundly multiple and resonates with the
ecological precept that· everything is connected to everything else, without
seeking a knee-jerk and uncritical union or unity.
Narratives of origin are struggles over the future as much as the past, in
that they set the initial vectors of biopower. The focus on struggle within
the various appropriations of Darwinism is nothing but the use of biology
to justify the Hobbesian State of Nature, the war of all against all, and as
such, must be countered with more politically just narratives of origins,
even if those are equally politically inflected. While many of Darwin's
contemporaries transfonned his theOlY into a justification for their political
and economic climate, and therefore de-moralized questions of poverty
and justice, Darwinism was also picked up by thinkers like Peter
Kropotkin (1902), who emphasized the "Law of Mutual Aid" as the
motive force of nature. Based on observation of animals and plants in
Siberia, he concluded that when there is a large scarcity of food, "no
progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of
keen competition" (Mutual Aid 520). Instead, he draws on a movement out
of the University of S1. Petersburg that focused on Darwin's observations
of morality, sociability, and intellectual development within social
animals. Kropotkin believed it was dangerous to "reduce animal
sociability to love and sympathy" (522), and instead, proposed a theory of
solidarity and sociability that did justice to the evolutionary befits of
mutual aid. In essence, he rejected the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra
omnes, arguing that "the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the
notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to
conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-
starved individuals thirsting for one another's blood" (524). Ultimately,
Kropotkin argues that it was equally dangerous to view nature as pure
struggle, or pure hannony, as "sociability is as much a law of nature as
mutual struggle" (525), both of which represent different evolutionary
forces at work. He believed that social animals were the fittest, using the
example of ants, which are among the most numerous and successful
78 The Rhizomatics of Domination
insects in the world, as a case where "mutual aid has entirely taken the
place of mutual struggle" (526).
The emphasis on struggle, even in Darwin, was likely the result of the
fact that Darwin relied on Malthus almost religiously, and thus failed to
theorize fertility itself as a product of natural selection, and as such, the
ratio between sexual productivity and food production remained dismal
and thus favored a view of nature based on competition. However, the
Malthusian ratio only applies under conditions of ecological disturbance
(Nature's Economy 155), and does not adequately account for species
differentiation as a force counter to competition. Thus, instead of
competing for the same food source, a species can differentiate and find a
new source. It can proceed rhizomatically rather than arboreally,
proliferating new shoots and lines of flight. Divergence allows organisms
to create new places in nature's economy without resorting to competition:
"Diversity was nature's way of getting round the fiercely competitive
struggle for limited resources" (Nature's Economy 161).
Rhizomes, Microbes, and Trees: Towards a More Critical
Rhizomatic Thinking
Although a truly rhizomatic paper would resist conclusions, I am
moving towards an assemblage of points, that I hope, ties things together,
while also leaving them open. Thus to end is only to begin, and I propose
that Darwin is both an end and a beginning to thinking about current
debates within biotechnology, and the different kinship imaginaries
enabled and disabled by the recent discovery of a Archaea, a group of
marine microbes that live in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and
who transfer genes laterally, between individuals, as well as vertically,
between generations (Trees and Seas). These microbes have shattered
many conceptions of evolution and origins because they disrupt Darwin's
"natural classifications" and the link between genealogy and taxonomy.
They are truly rhizomatic creahlres, both materially, and discursively, and
are providing biotechnology companies with a justification for genetic
engineering and a new means, through new vectors of gene transfer, to
improve the techniques of genetic modification. This strange new bacteria
is very appealing to biotech firms because it allows them to work as both
engineer (man the tinkerer) and as botanist (man the gatherer). The claim
to the former allows for the patenting of genes based on novelty (cf Shiva),
while the latter, allows these companies to avoid regulatory scrutiny by
claiming substantial equivalence between the genetically modified
organism and its natural counterpart. It is based on this substantial
Michael Mikulak 79
equivalence that GMO foods are not labeled in Canada and the US. By
shifting our understanding of the origins of the tree of life towards a
rhizomatic model, a new set of kinship imaginaries emerges, with
competing vectors ofbiopower emerging from the very same argument.
Once again, Darwin's own struggles are illustrative. For example, a
biocentric worldview was fostered by Darwin's removal of God from the
cosmic equation, since the Genesis invocation towards domination, and
the special place of man in the scala naturae was challenged (cfMerchant,
Lynn White 1r). However, as God was replaced as Nature's original
mover, and creation was seen as "replete with errors, weaknesses,
imperfections, and misfits" (Nature's Economy 175), the human place
within the order became much more amenable to a Baconian concept of
absolute domination. As such, '''Man must proclaim himself Nature's
engineer and must then see about creating his own paradise on earth"
(Nature's Economy 176). This is very much the kind of discourse within
biotechnological circles, which refer to lateral gene transfer as nature's
genetic engineering, and thus justify their own socially, politically, and
economically mediated practice as somehow entirely natural (Trees and
Seas 348). Although the idea is not new, the rhizomatic flow of Archaea
provides a new mode of justification and framework for Man the
(bio)engineer, one that draws on rhizomatic and ostensibly ecological
kinship .networks to justify unscrupulous economic, political, and
biological practices.
Thus,. while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that rhizomes never allow
themselves to be overcoded (9), we can read biotechnological uses of
rhizomatic horizontal gene transfer (as a technique and as a discourse), as
precisely this kind of overcoding, whereby the organism is taken over by a
practice of signification and subjectification, in this case by the expansion
of capital into· the interior space of cells and genes through patents. The
celebration of rhizomatic lines of flight fails to account for the rhizomatics
of domination present in the biopolitical over and re-coding of genetic
information through the patenting of life forms (IPRs) , biopiracy, and
biotechnological research that seeks to colonize the very interior of life
itself (cf Shiva, Haraway). In a sense, the rhizome provides new imoads
for corporations to claim ownership on life by setting a precedent for
bioengineering in the very heart of evolution, and thereby naturalizing a
deeply colonial and parasitic relationship in a manner that echoes what
happened to Dalwin's theories.
Stephen Helmreich explores this further by examining the potential
restructuring of kinship imaginaries in new scientific research on Archaea.
He argues that "the taxonomic untidiness such microbes have introduced
80 The Rhizomatics of Domination
through their lateral gene transfer reaches beyond issues in phylogeny and
molecular systematics into arenas adjacent to kinship concerns and
biopolitics" (341). By potentially shifting the meaning of bios in the
biopolitical equation, these microbes may usher in a revolution of
biotechnological discourse akin to Darwin's, realigning the vectors of
biopower within new constellations of violence in the name of social good.
The common argument launched by companies like Monsanto who claim
that GMO crops, like Golden Rice, are the only way to feed the worlds
hunglY masses, exploit rhizomatic concepts of evolution in order to
incorporate genetic codes into the informational economy. Thus, while
discourses of kinship, race and origins have moved away from talk of
miscegenation, this new rhizomatic openness is being greeted with a
conCUlTent closure of the genetic commons as corporations manipUlate
new kinship imaginaries in order to patent life itself. This is especially the
case with the thermophyllic microbe Archaea, whose main commercial use
promises to increase the speed and efficiency of genetic engineering by
providing new viral vectors capable of h·ansfelTing genetic information at
higher temperatures. Moreover, the "natural genetic engineering" (Trees
and Seas 348) of these microbes is being used as a justification for human
engineering, which is interpreted as natural and safe. However, as
Vandana Shiva points out, this reductionist view of nature, with
conveniently shifting discourses of artifice and nature used to
simultaneously justify the safety of "naturally" engineered organisms, and
the appeal to scientific creation and novelty for the purposes of patenting,
ends with Nature being declared as "dead, inert, and valueless" (24).
Corporations are thus able to recode biodiversity as a genetic investment
strategy (Vampires 351), and use the flexibility of rhizomatic kinship in
the same opportlmistic and selective way that Darwin's contemporaries
took up the struggle for existence as a justification for fierce capitalistic
competition. Thus, while on the surface the conceptual untidiness of
rhizomatic, lateral gene transfer has the potential to strangle "the roots of
the infamous tree" (A Thousand Plateaus xiii) and provide new kinship
imaginaries capable of dealing with a messy and interdependent world, it
is fundamentally important that we ask "how a genetically shuffled bios
might be inscribed into new biopolitics" (Trees and Seas 342).
In the rhizomatics of domination characteristic of corporate funded
genetic engineering and biopiracy, the benefits of rhizomatic kinship are
subsumed by the hierarchical accumulation of capital, while the dangers of
biological contamination, the· development of super-viruses and weeds,
and the devaluing of traditional forms of knowledge are felt horizontally
by the entire biocultural network of organisms. Taxonomy is shifting from
Michael Mikulak 81
kind to Brand, from Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer to Man™
and Woman™ (Vampires 350). So while these marine organisms
challenge the genealogical origins of species and open up the possibility
for the kinds of kinship connections Haraway valorizes in Cyborgs and
Vampires, a radically open concept of kinship also leaves us prone to a
rhizomatics of domination. We can take a lesson from the ways in which
Darwinism became a justification for fOlms of biopower he no doubt
would have found egregious. There is much in rhizomatic theory that
makes it invaluable for theorizing new forms of kinship necessary for
addressing the unhealthy relationships humans have with the planet in the
age of ecological crisis. However, in the same way that Darwinism
became used to justify fascistic and nationalistic fonus of power,
rhizomatic theory is very amenable to reconfigurations of bios within
biotechnological discourses of life. By using Darwin as a kind of test case,
we can resist the rhizomatics of domination from choking the roots of a
very different kind of plant, one which, if we are careful, has the potential
to knit a network of kinship capable of addressing the messy and
complicated environmental crisis we now face.
Notes
I This essay was first published in Rhizomes 15 (Winter 2007)
2 Kinship imaginaries are discourses about the relationship between nature and
culture that focus on the ways in which humans relate to the world and ultimately
each other.
3 I am specifically thinking about the way that systems of networks and
information, while liberating us from certain older .forms of oppression and
domination, open up whole new systems of power that may be more difficult to
locate and resist.
Works Cited
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Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd Edition (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000).
Behnke, Elizabeth. "From Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Nature to an Inter-
Species Practice of Peace." Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and
Animal Life. Ed. Peter Steves (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Capra, Fritjof. "Systems Theory and the New Paradigm." Key Concepts in
Critical Theory: Ecology. Ed Carolyn Merchant (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1994).
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Datwin, Charles. Descent ofMan (1871) Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge
http://pages.britishlibrary .net/charles. darwin/texts/descent/descent fro (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1997).
nt.html, last accessed April 07, 2008. - Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild: Essays (San Francisco: North
- . The Origin of Species (1859) Point Press, 1990).
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Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2
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Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
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(York: Routledge, 1991).
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Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century US."
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed.
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Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology."
American Ethnologist 30:3 (2003): 340-58.
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Appleman (New York: Norton & Company, 1970).
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(New York: Norton & Company, 1970).
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How TO BECOME A READER:
THE CONCEPT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
ANDDELEUZE
ANTHONY LARSON
From his first published essay on the constitution of the subject in
empirical philosophy through his polemical critique of psychoanalysis
with Felix Guattari to his final work on immanence and life, Gilles
Deleuze's philosophy aimed at disrupting the traditional Western
philosophical category of the subject. At every turn of this project, from
the subject-as-habitus via Hume to the biopsychic of the Anti-Oedipus to
A LIFE of immanence, the goal was to move thought away from the
centered, human ground of subjectivity to "fields" that extend beyond the
singularly human, leading to declarations such as the following from
Difference and Repetition: "Biopsychical life implies a field of
individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and
there in the form of excitations" (96). While such a statement might
remain curiously impenetrable, the position it implies was nothing new for
certain strands of French thought at the end of the twentieth century.
Jacques Derrida, notably, pushed the trans-human implications of
deconstruction to questions of the animal in his later work. What
distinguishes Deleuze's work in this exploration of the trans~human is his
method, particularly in what it borrows from a Spinozist practice of
ethology or study of capacities. For Deleuze, the crucial question in
exploring a subject's constitution is not "what is a subject?" but "what can
a subject do?" since the shift away from a subject's being to its capacities
or powers moves one away from questions of essences and towards those
of relations or compositions with other powers, notably powers of the
trans-human.
While this particular modification in method is not particularly novel
to specialists of Deleuze and Guattari, it is important to grasp the
implications such a move has for the practice of thought and of life itself,
for such are the stakes of Deleuze's re-thinking of subjectivity. How can
we experience the radical shift in thought that such thinking requires?
Anthony Larson 85
According to Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, a shift in thought concerning
our constitution in the "fields"surrounding us implies a shift in living
practices, particularly where one's relationship to the environment (another
way of describing "fields" of life) around oneself is concerned. How can
this happen? What would such a shift feel like?
One of the places one might begin to look for answers to these
questions is literature, for, as Deleuze was constantly reminding his
readers, "Writing is question of becoming, always incomplete, always in
the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or
lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses
both the livable and th-e lived" (Critical and Clinicall). In other words, it
is, paradoxically, through the cultural construction of literary textuality
that one is able to beyond the limits of our daily anthropomorphic
structures and touch on the larger "text" or "field" of Life itself. For
Deleuze, literature offers a privileged point onto this process of life. One
of the literatures in which this process is most visible and most livable is
the literature of the Anglo-American tradition (which Deleuze treats
memorably as being "superior" to other traditions in Dialogues). Why,
after affirming literature's potential out of limiting structures such as
anthropomorphic culture, would Deleuze go on to make such an
outrageous affinnation concerning literature? For there are many splendid
literary traditions and limiting them to their socio-historical borders seems
above-all counterintuitive. However, this would be to forget Deleuze's
designation ofliterature as Anglo-American in conceptual tenns (which, in
his philosophy is defined as a response to a particular set of problems) and
to forget how this concept of literature responds to these particular
questions concerning the practice of life in terms of capacities and
Spinozist ethology. In other words, it is through this original Deleuzian
concept of literature that we can begin to understand this highly practical
project for changing our manner of perceiving ourselves and our
surrounding environment.
Before proceeding further, it will be necessary to address a concern
that examining literature in a collection devoted to ecology, the
environment, and Deleuze might appear frivolous. One of the stakes of
Deleuze's fundamental tum away from questions of ontological status
(What is a body?) to those of capacity (What can a body do?) is a re-
framing of the way that one separates understanding and action. As Arne
Naess has noted, one of the most fundamental advances offered by
Spinoza's thought is that understanding is not simply a proposition but an
act (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translator's introduction ii).
Reading literature with Deleuze (and Spinoza) is exactly this: inadequate
86 How to Become a Reader
ideas that one initially has concerning the text are corrected and appended
in such a manner that new ideas are formed that allow one to read and act
in entirely novel ways. Naess says that to approach thought in such a
manner "implies acts of understanding perfonned with the maximum
perspective possible" (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
translator's introduction iii). One might once again object that such talk of
thought, understanding and action has little to do with ecology or the
environment. This would again be a mis-reading for what occurs with this
particular Deleuzian approach to thought and to that most everyday of
actions which is reading and the interpretation of signs around us is a
transfonnation ofrteutral terms such as "enviromnent" or "individual." The
text transmits affects but the affects are nothing without the "plane of
consistency," "enviromnent," or "individual" in which those affects act.
The environment or the individual are not simple categories that require
mapping and understanding in a passive manner (asking what the
environment is, for example) but fields of forces, the actions of which we
strive to experience. What can we experience when we read? What
happens to us when we walk in the forest or on the ocean shore? What
happens to the shore or the forest when we walk in it? In each of these
questions, the framework of the environment changes in perhaps a
superficial manner but the more profound question of understanding how
such an environment acts does not. To say that "everything is the
environment" would be rather reckless, but this extension of the way one
thinks the enviromnent to places such as the text and reading is important.
It allows one to go beyond sophisticated repetitions of an already ancient
cleavage in which the "enviromnent" comes into existence as an
epistemological object of the philosophical subject. Indeed, extending the
enviromnent outward in this manner is extremely Deleuzian in the same
manner that his thought is an attempt to excavate the plane of immanence
in all instances of transcendence. Perhaps the most radical "Deleuzian
enviromnentalism" would be one in which the term "environment"
disappeared and left its place to "thinking." This move is far from
convincing and it is thus necessary to put this theory to the test.
Practically speaking it is through an encounter with perhaps one of the
greatest classics of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet
Letter, that one might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake.
For it is in this masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of
living open before the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an
interpretation in which the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which
it so often appears, so that a pre-existing judgment may be confinned,
mirroring the critical reading of the Pmitan protagonists. On the other
Anthony Larson 87
hand, signs are often not what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious
and vital energy that upon closer examination escapes the pre-detennined
judgment of the reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscernibility that
escapes definitive interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by
Hawthorne's famous "bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a
textual process has several consequences. First, moving through the two
levels of reading, one discovers how the text is structured by different
zones of intensity which then feed into a second and more important
encounter between the reader and the text, opening one up to a larger
textual process that goes beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger
process, in its nature un-foreseeable and incalculable in advance, tends
toward what Deleuze would call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the
intensities of the reader and the text become something that is neither
textual nor "human." That this should occur in a text that so
fundamentally confronts the desire to master and read in nature the "signs
of man" brings this study back full circle to the overt and radical attack on
the human subject that is Deleuzian thought.
As many critics have noted one of the reasons Hawthorne's novel
remains so powerful and attractive today is because it dares the reader to
undertake a strategy of reading based on judgment in which one overlays
one's own prejudices or worldviews in order to better "see through" the
text and decipher its lessons. That is, the plot is propelled forward by the
thinly hidden but nonetheless extra-textual affair between the Reverend
Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne for which Hester suffers and pays
her debt of the scarlet letter while Dimmesdale apparently escapes his
judgment but suffers· another more debilitating and fateful punishment in
the end. In such a plot, the reader often very willingly goes along with
Hester's Puritan judges and ministers and is also only too happy to follow
the investigations of Roger Chillingworth, Hester's "lost" husband who has
returned to the Puritan colony to exact his revenge on Dimmesdale.
Indeed, it is in this judicial equation of a debt of pain for a sin committed
that Henry James finds the novel at its most interesting:
The story goes on, for the most part, between the lover and the husband-
the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own
lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends
itself to the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his
guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to the
misery of atonement-between this more wretched and pitiable CUlprit, to
whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, the
older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has
suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with
88 How to Become a Reader
his wronger, living with him, living upon him; and while he pretends to
minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his
unsuspected knowledge of these things, and stimulates them by malignant
arts. (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed. 232)
From this critical position, it is only a small step to the next one in
which the abundance of tropes in Hawthol11e's novel invites the
investigative and judgmental reader to fill in the textual gap and draw the
pastor's secret out in the daylight, in a manner that milTors Chillingworth's
own investigation. It is just this danger that James famously finds to be the
text's weakness taking as an example the remarkable scene from the
twelfth chapter when Dimmesdale is drawn to the pillory in the middle of
the night and calls a passing Hester and Pearl to join him:
But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and
wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those
meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to
waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its
radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt
the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense
lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects
by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories
and quaint gable-peaks; the door-steps and thresholds, with the early grass
springing up about them; the garden~plots, black with freshly turned eaIih;
the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with
green on either side; -- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that
seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than
they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with this hand
over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering
on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link
between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendor, as ifit were the light that is to reveal all secrets and the daybreak
that shall unite all who belong to one another. (101-102)
For James, all the subtlety and poetry of this passage is lost when
Hawthol11e says, " ... the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld
there the appearance of an immense letter-the letter A-marked out in
lines of dull red light" (102) since the appearance of the central symbol in
the novelis "mechanical" and "grazes triviality" (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed.
233). In other words, James is wary of the way the text invites the reader
to close the tropic and allegorical gap a little too quickly and to see in the
night's "unaccustomed light" a "moral interpretation" that simply draws
out the secret at the heati of the novel's plot. There is a certain amount of
Anthony Larson 89
pleasure in this type of approach to the text in that it permits the reader to
close in on the extra-textual mystely of the text, to determine who has
done what and perhaps even to participate vicariously in Dimmesdale's
punishment.
"Seeing through" the text in this manner is also another way of
mastering signs, and in this particular example, signs of nature. In a
manner similar to that of the vicarious judgment that one feels when
reading Hawthol11e's text, the reader closes the textual gap offered her/him
in the dichotomy set up between the Puritan civilization and the sinful
wildel11ess into which Hester is cast. Thus, on a walk through the woods
shared by Hester, Dimnfesdale, and Pearl, Hawthol11e offers a textual trap
similar to the one mentioned above in that he dares the reader to read in
nature's signs the mirror-image of sins, secrets and sufferings of his
protagonists:
Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the
reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but
soon lost all traces of it amide the bewilderment of tree-trunks and
underbrush, and here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens.
All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a
mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its
never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tale out of the heart of the old
forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a
pool. (120)
Once again, the reader is dared into decoding the reasons that Hester
and Pearl find themselves banished to the "wildel11ess" of the young
colony and it is the process of this decoding itself, in that it requires the
reader to set up a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and
meaning, that sets up the structuring dichotomy between Puritan
civilization and "sinful" wildel11ess. As Hawthol11e reminds his reader,
"Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that OCCUlTed with less
regularity than the rise and set of the sun and moon, as so many
revelations from a supel11atural source" (102). Seeing through Hawthol11e's
symbols is to reveal things based on this supel11atural and transcendent
position where positions of judgment and dichotomies between Puritan
civilization and wildel11ess are founded.
Of course reading in this manner is inappropriate and the objection that
James raises to Hawthol11e's text is really about how it allows itself to be
read by hasty and careless readers and not about the text itself. As any
reader looking to get to the literal heart of Dimmesdale's suffering knows,

90 How to Become a Reader
Hawthorne's text is not as satisfying as it appears for secrets are never
truly exposed and when they are, they only appear so, as with the novel's
conclusion where the scarlet letter seems to 100m again visible behind a
textual cloud of hallmark Hawthornian style made up of contradictory
hypotheses, plays on points of view, tortured revision, and the
undecidibility of signs:
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy
minister, a SCARLET LETTER-the very semblance of that worn by
Hester Prynne-imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there were
various explanations, alI of which must necessarily have been conjectural.
Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when
Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of
penance, -- which afterwards, in so many futile methods, folIowed O~lt, --
by inflicting a hideous torhlre on himself. Others contended that the stigma
had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger
Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear,
through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again-and
those best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the
wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body,-whispered their belief,
that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse,
gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's
dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. (162-3)
Instead of closing the critical gap, the scarlet letter (both the symbol
and the text itself) holds off any final and deciding interpretation,
reminding us that "The reader may choose among these theories" (163).
The scarlet letter is evelything but the unadulterated symbol that the hasty
reader hopes to find in order to fix his/her judgment once and for all. This
play of words on the scarlet letter's "A" (which is anything but original
and, one suspects, almost desired by Hawthorne) is the linchpin of a poor
reading of the text and the desire to see through its tropes, for judgment
always depends on a transcendent (or one might say, unadulterated)
position outside of the text in order to make a final decision. What James
sees as "mechanical" or "trivial" is the transcendent tribunal that
Hawthorne's symbols (the scarlet letter itself, Hester's illegitimate
daughter, Pearl, the rose that opens the first chapter of the novel, the
engraved shield on the tombstone that closes the novel, Hester's exile in
the wilderness, the babbling and secretive brook, etc.) tend to set in motion
in the careless or poor reader. That is, where James detects what he calls a
slipping from moral tragedy to physical comedy, there is the erection of a
tribunal of judgment in the reader's mind in which the symbol's fluidity is
reduced and nanowed to a logic of one-to-one conespondence. The logic
,I
Anthony Larson 91
of this one-dimensional reading of Hawthorne's symbol does indeed rob
the text of its power in favor of a simplistic exchange of a symbol for what
is considered to be its just value. To return to what was announced at the
beginning of this text, such a reading is an example of a very basic and
relatively un-intense "field" of intensity in which the reading subject finds
his/her values justified and reinforced. Such a reading subjugates the
plurality of Hawthorne's text to the "sameness" or "oneness" of the
transcendent and judging subject. It is a reading that attempts to get to
what the text "is" and had very little to say concerning what the text can
"do."
The greatness of Hawthorne's text is to undo this tribunal of judgment
in a text that turns around that very theme and it is most certainly this
slippery movement of judgment turning upon itself and being undone that
is at the heart of so many mis-readings and dangers. If we have worked
through the dangers of mis-reading this text, I have yet to respond to the
questions I announced above of how literature can help us go beyond o~r
basic and "un-intense" fields of constitution. Perhaps the best way to begm
is to realize that if anything, mis-reading texts such as Hawthorne's makes
us weaker and separate us from our ability to act. In order to understand
how this is possible (and also to more explicitly respond to what I consider
to the more important and pressing question of how we can become better
readers and thus go beyond our poor and un-intense subjectivity), we need
to pass more explicitly through the work of Deleuze. ..
What does it mean to say that judgment separates us from our abIlIty to
act? For Deleuze reading Spinoza, there are two ways to consider the
world: through the prism of transcendence (in which a certain instance or
value is placed outside of all others) or in and through immanence (in
which no transcendent point rises above any other). To take an example
close to our reading of Hawthorne, the difference between these two ways
of considering the world around us can be explained by morality
(transcendence) or Spinozist ethics (immanence). In a system based on
morality, one is judged according to one's essence and more precisely
according to one's ability to achieve one's essence. For man, it is well-
known that his/her essence is reason since man is a reasonable creature. Of
course man often falls short of this essence and morality's role is to
consta~tly remind man of his/her essence, of the need to achieve hislher
essence to its fullest degree. This system of reminders or exhortations is
what we call values, upon which one is then able to judge whether one has
achieved or failed to live up to his/her essence. In other words, morality
bases itself on a belief that life is defined by essences which morality then
raises to a higher power by defining as the end of life itself. This

92 How to Become a Reader
externalization of our essence is the system of values to which we are
condemned to eternally answer.
In a system based on Spinozist ethics, this hierarchical tribune of
judgment disappears. For Spinoza, man is not defined by what he/she is
(essence) but by what he/she can do. Bodies no longer have essences but
rather possess powers and life is no longer an affair of realizing one's
essence (and thus judging whether one has correctly or incorrectly realized
this essence) but of discovering one's powers. The question is no longer
one of judgment, of whether one has lived up to one's abilities (reasonable
or unreasonable) but rather practical, of how can one live in such a way in
order to act in such a way (reasonable or unreasonable).
In order to understand such a strange way of seeing the world one has
to take the further step of seeing the world through Spinozist lenses: each
body, each idea, is made up of a certain number of relations that form its
substance. When one body or set of relations encounters another the result
is either positive and the two bodies or set of relations combine in a
harmonious manner to fmm a higher and more complicated relation (the
result of which is joy), or it is negative and both bodies are diminished in
the encounter (the result of which is sadness). Food for example nourishes
our body procuring joy, but poison kills it procuring sadness. For Deleuze
and Spinoza, the stakes. of life are to come to an adequate idea of this
system of relations and encounters structuring our existence. One falls into
morality and a system of judgment when one fails to adequately
understand the proper structure of these relations and encounters,
beginning with the effects of joy and sadness they procure. Deleuze
explains this best in summarizing Spinoza's theory of the triple illusion of
consciousness:
Since it only takes in effects, consciousness will satisfy its ignorance by
reversing the order of things, by taking effects for causes (the illusion of
final causes): it will construe the effect of a body on our body as the final
cause of its own actions. In this way it will take itself for the first cause,
and will invoke its power over the body (the illusion offree decrees). And
where consciousness can no longer imagine itself to be the first cause, nor
the organizer of ends, it invokes a God endowed with understanding and
volition, operating by means of final causes or free decrees in order to
prepare for man a world commensurate with His glory and His
punishments (the theological illusion). Nor does it suffice to say that
consciousness deludes itself: consciousness is inseparable from the triple
illusion that constitutes it, the illusion of finality, the illusion of freedom,
and the theological illusion. Consciousness is only a dream with one's eyes
open. (Spinoza 20)
/
Anthony Larson 93
As mentioned above, the stakes of an ethics it la Spinoza is to escape
this triple illusion by seeking out encounters which allow us progressively
to have an adequate vision of the relations and encounters which structure
our existence. We noted above that a poor reading of Hawthorne's text,
based on judgment, separates us from our ability to act and in this it is
highly dangerous. If we adopt a Spinozist vision of the world, new and
surprising paths for discovering abilities emerge. Bodies can enter into
relations with each other and this "disposition" is their power to either
affect or be affected. That is, their power or ability is always a
combination of the active (actions) and the passive (the passions of joy or
sorrow that accompany encounters with other bodies). In order to escape
the triple illusion of consciousness and the passions that accompany it, we
must try to seek out encounters in which our power to affect is increased.
This might sound like a simple idea but just as Deleuze's declaration that
consciousness is the seat of all illusion might be shocking or surprising,
this vision of our capabilities or powers is also surprising and shocking. A ,
concrete example to understand this more clearly would be helpful: !~
everyone has seen young children learning to swim at a swimming pool. l
The instructor describes the movements of a certain stroke to the children
but their mind has a difficult time grasping the relatively theoretical
movements. The encOlmter between the mind and the idea of swimming a
particular stroke simply does not pass and everyone has seen (or
experienced) the confusion of the children as they try to master the stroke
outside of the water. What is needed is the encounter of their bodies with
the water. Suddenly, when in the water (and sometimes when thrown in
the water by the instructor) the children discover a capability in their body
that they did not know they had or were not able to adequately understand.
The encounter of the body of water with their actual bodies awakens a
capability in their bodies that they did not know they possessed. The
sensation of the encounter between these two bodies (that is, their
swimming) provokes a greater understanding in their mind of their
abilities and what they can do with them. In other words, it is through the
encounter of two bodies that a greater and more adequate idea of one's
abilities emerges.] As a consequence, bodies are judged "good" or "bad"
in such a situation only in relation with the other bodies they might
encounter. In this instance, one can declare the water of the swimming
pool good for the children who encounter it with a rudimentary but
inadequate idea of what they are capable of doing. The water of the
swimming pool is bad for those who have no idea of what they are capable
of doing in water because of the risk of drowning. In this manner, a
Spinozist vision of the world judges ourselves and others by what these
94 How to Become a Reader
bodies can and cannot do and not by morality (which is, of course, the way
a swimming pool is most often presented: "Forbidden and off limits!").
Once again, Deleuze explains this vision of a world beyond good and evil
in exemplary terms:
Hence good and bad have thus a primary, objective meaning, but one that
is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature does not agree
with it; And consequently, good and bad have a secondary meaning, which
is subjective and modal, qualifying two types, two modes of man's
existence. That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or
strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to
join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with
relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power.
For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power and the composition of
powers. That individual will be called bad or servile, or weak, or foolish
who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his
encounters, but wails and accuses evelY time effect undergone does not
agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in
this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that
with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself,
how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one
keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment,
spreading one's own powerlessness and enslavement evelywhere, one's
own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to
encounter oneself. (Spinoza 22-3)
After this long detour through Deleuze's Spinoza, morality and ethics,
we are at last capable of returning to our central questions concerning
literature. It should be clear by now that correct or empowering readings
of literature and the encounter with the text should be seen in Spinozist
terms. Literahlre is an empowering experience and the best texts awaken
abilities in us that we did not know existed. The unprepared or careless
reader is quick to try to fill the critical gap between Hawthorne's symbols
(especially that most central one, the scarlet letter itself) and a judging and
measuring eye but if he/she is open enough and capable enough, the
frustration he/she experiences in attempting to make that velY judgment, to
limit the scarlet letter to a simple and unadulterated truth, opens him/her
up to something else. This something else is what Deleuze, unsurprisingly,
calls literature's affair of health:
Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would
necessarily be in good health [... ] but he possesses an inesistible and
delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard things too big
for him, too strong for him, suffocating things, whose passage exhausts
Anthony Larson 95
him, while nonetheless gIVIng him becomings that a dominant and
substantial health would render impossible. (Critical and Clinical 3)
Following up on an observation made by Proust, Deleuze notes how
literature hlrns language upon itself, creating a sort of foreign tongue in
language itself which is the text's style. Taken to this deforming limit, the
text allows the reader to see and hear the sights and sounds of an Outside
of language which is what Deleuze calls the passage of Life itself (Critical
and Clinical 5). Another way of putting it is that the confusion and power
that we feel when confronted with a text such as Hawthorne's forces us to
let go of our desire to judge, to personalize the stakes of the text. In place
of a personal reading based our position as judge there is the impersonal of
the text:
As a general rule, fantasies simply treat the indefinite as a mask for a
personal or a possessive: "a child is being beaten" is quickly transformed
into "my father beat me." But literature takes the opposite path, and exists
only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an
impersonal-which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point:
a man, a woman, [... ] a child r... ] [L]iterature begins only when a third
person is born in us that strips us ofthe power to say "I" [... ]. (Critical and
Clinical 4-5)
When the minister gazes at the sky from the scaffold during his night
vigil, he does not see the scarlet letter but an immense letter and it is this
impersonal but highly singular and powerful letter/text that speaks to the
empowered reader of Hawthorne's novel. As one moves from the desire to
judge, to personalize the stakes of the text to this larger, stuttering (the
many options that the reader is left to choose at the end of Hawthorne's
text) and impersonal reading, one moves through two different "fields" or
deployments in life-one weaker and servile and another stronger and
freer in life. Furthermore, moving through these readings, through this
passage of Life, is also something from which one never "recovers." One
of the authors Deleuze is fond of citing is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in
particular, his autobiographical text, The Crack-Up in which the author
chronicles his fall into alcoholism. It is easy to see why such a text
attracted Deleuze, especially in Fitzgerald's description of "molecular"
changes that break down one's "molar" structure (another way of putting
this passage of Life in literature):
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the
dramatic side of the work-the big sudden blows that come, or seem to
come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in
 Anthony Larson 97
96 How to Become a Reader

moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at
once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't
feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality
that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of
breakage seems to happen quick-the second kind happens almost without
your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (69)
To deploy oneself through such an apprenticeship in literature is to
never go back to what one was before such an encounter and it is in this
that we become more powerful and freer.
This encounter or apprenticeship in literature is something that must be
sought out, as De1euze reminded us above when speaking of Spinoza. One
must search out empowering encounters in life that allow the passage of
Life to appear. This is important, for it implies two things: first, that the
field or plane of intensities that are "deployed" in Life are never given in
themselves (that is, they are not "out" there to be discovered through the
text but must be constructed with the text) and must then, secondly, be
assembled in relation to each other. To put it differently, Deleuze's concept
of literature teaches us that our constitution within Life is always "at
work" and becoming, bifurcating like Hawthorne's text in which we must
always choose our endings and encounters. Much is at stake in such a
concept of literature. The lesson that Deleuze gives through literature is
valid for life: one may blindly judge, master and possess the signs of the
text and close oneself up in the black hole of a debilitating (or, as Deleuze
might say, clinical) subjectivity; or one may choose to open oneself up, to
pass through the intensities of the literary and critical text and search out
ever greater and ever-more liberating encounters. To read in such a
manner is to read with and through Deleuze and Life.
devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the
unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the
body" (Spinoza.' Practical Philosophy 18-19).
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition Trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
-. Essays Critical and Clinical Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
-. Spinoza.' Practical Philosophy trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Light Books, 1988).
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Crack-Up ed. Edmund Wilson (New York:
New Directions, 1993).
James, Henry. "Critical Essay." The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E.
Hudson Long (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962).
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland
Person (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).
·'r
;

Notes
1 This is an illustration of the Spinozist theory of parallelism: there is no hierarchy
between mind and body and (much like Nietzsche and Freud) Spinoza believes that
it is often through the body that the mind can discover unedited powers. Deleuze
explains, "There are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness
than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So it is by one and the
same movement that we shall manage, ifpossible, to capture the power of the body
beyond the given conditions of our knowledge and seize the power of the ~ind
beyond the given conditions of our consciousness. One seeks to acqUIre a
knowledge of the power of the body in order to discover, in a parallel fashion, the
powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to compare these
powers. In short, the model of the body according to Spinoza does not imply any
devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important, a

A SILENT DANCE:
ECO-POLITICAL COMPOSITIONS
AFTER UEXKULL'S UMWELT BIOLOGY
TOM GREAVES
The German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexkiill exerted a quiet but
powerful influence on 20 th Century philosophy,. which has on~y recently
been fully recognised. Like the worlds of meamng that he claIms escape
both the casual glance of the naturalist and the precise measurements of
the physiologist, Uexkiill's thought has escaped the notice of much
ecological philosophy. This is perhaps not surprising for a thinker who
explicitly challenged contemporary Darwinism and. advocat~d a return. to
the apparently discredited idea of a "plan" underlymg the hIstory of lIfe.
Nevertheless, Uexkiill's biology made a decisive contribut~on to two
streams of philosophical thought, the phenomenology of Heldegger and
Merleau-Ponty and the assemblage-ontology of De leuze and Guattari, both
of which have been influential on those who see the necessity of widening
the scope of enviromnental philosophy. In this chapter I will trace some of
the remarkable points of conjunction between these two fundamentally
distinct philosophical programmes as they each take up Uexklill's concept
of Umwelt. After outlining some of the significant and contentious features
ofUexkiill's theory of "Nature as Music," I consider whether Deleuze and
Guattari's focus on the telTitorialisation of Umwelten might not be
helpfully supplemented by phenomenological concerns about the
ontological significance of specific difference and speciation. I then tum to
the problematic notion of a chaotic world or "milieu of all milieus" and try
to show why this notion remains of central importance to both accounts,
although they differ markedly as to its precise significance. Finally, I
discuss claims about the totalitarian and fascist tendencies to be found in
musical and ecological composition, which have been associated with the
notion of a milieu of all milieus. I suggest that we can use the distinction
that Deleuze and Guattari make between totalitarianism and fascism to
gain a more precise understanding of the threat of what is sometimes
Tom Greaves 99
called "eco-fascism." Compositional ecological philosophy must become
attuned to different modulations of silence, both destructive and creative.
Umwelt: A Compositional Theory of Environment
An Umwelt is distinguished from an environment or habitat in that it is
composed of only those elements which have significance for the living
being. Uexkiill often expresses this by refelTing to the Umwelt as the
subjective world of the animal. That is because he wants to point out that
what physiologists miss when they analyse a reflex arc, for example, is
that the relation between-an animal and an object is not one of linear
reception and reaction. Rather, the relation is one of an integrated
"functional circle" in which meaning is calTied from the object through a
perceptual world and the subject in tum utilizes that meaning in an
operational world (Uexkiill, Stroll 322-324). Thus, there are no neutral
objects in an Umwelt, but all carry significance and a certain "tone" with
them. In fact, describing the Umwelt as a subjective world becomes
problematic when we consider that meaning is not projected from a
subject onto a neutral object. The object is itself caught up in this circle of
meaning just as much as the subject. The meaningful "cue" or "tone" of an
object is there by virtue of the animal listening out for it, but it
nevertheless has that tone, othelwise the animal would not hear it. The
idea that the living subject is a "centre of meaning" will become even
more problematic when the "object" which it encounters is another living
being, as is so often the case. Here two or more worlds of meaning
intersect and it is surely impossible to locate the origin of meaning on one
side or the other. Neither is the Umwelt subjective in the sense of being 'I
unavailable to others. The whole basis ofUexkiill's research is the thought
that these worlds can be systematically described, if we are able to
overcome certain prejudices as to the proper objects of scientific inquiry.
The famous example of a simple Umwelt that Uexkiill sets out at the
beginning of his short book "A stroll through the worlds of animals and
men" is the Umwelt of a tick. The tick's Umwelt is made up of three
receptor cues and three effector cues. The tick smells the butyric acid
emanating from a passing mammal, then it drops from its watch post. If it
lands on something warm, then it moves about. When it feels a hairless
spot it begins to burrow and pump itself full of blood. The question is not
whether each of these affective-effective cycles can be understood in terms
of physiological impulses or in terms of the organic structures which are
influenced by the smell of the acid or the body heat and then transmit
"physical waves of excitation" through the body. They certainly can be
 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt Biology
100
understood in this way. The question for a biologist, however, is how it is
that out of all the possible stimuli that surround the tick these three affects
produce a precisely articulated world: "The isolated impulses are
coordinated into units, and these self-contained motor impulses or
rhythmical impulse melodies act upon the muscles subordinated to them"
(Uexkiill, Stroll 323). The biological question is therefore a question of the
coordination, composition or consistency that is produced by blocks of
affect. Those blocks are articulated into affective and effective cues so
that, "Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms
of a forceps, receptor, and effector" (Uexkiill, Stroll 323).
The influence of this theory can be seen at various points in A
Thousand Plateaus. In plateau 3 "The Geology of Morals," the figure of a
pincer is reworked as a "double articulation" during the discussion of
coding consistency. Deleuze and Guattari insist that we can begin to
articulate various figures of the milieu, not in a line of development
leading up to the fiJlly fledged Umwelt of the tick, but as distinct moments
of its articulation. There is the exterior milieu in which an exterior of
amorphous material is interiorised as in the process of crystallization (55).
There is also the organic interior milieu in which organisation involves
membranes and limits in the interior (56). Finally, there is the figure of the
annexed or associated milieu, whereby sources of energy that are different
to the material that will make up the interior are annexed to the organism.
Life begins to "breath," to respire in the most general sense of annexing
specific energy sources (57). It is here that Deleuze and Guattari first refer
to Uexki.ill's tick, as it displays its associated milieus in its ability to
recognise only very specific chemical elements in its surroundings. Once
again, this is not an evolutionary account of the Umwelten nor is it
suggested that Uexkiill was wrong to simply start in the midst of already
constituted animal worlds. The various figures of milieu are folded into
one another; they do not form an explanatory chain. That life forms
articulated functional circuits and begins to "breath" is not explained by
any of the preceding figures. Thus it is perfectly legitimate to proceed as
Uexklill does, beginning in the midst of animal (that is, animate or
breathing) worlds. The task is not one of tracing a line back to the first
intake of breath, but of following the way in which these worlds play
themselves out, as they involve other figures of milieu, erupting onto and
folding into the animal stratum.
As life takes breath, it can begin to sing. If we want to follow the
composition of animal or breathing life then we must investigate the
temporal articulations that constitute that life. This is where Uexkiill's
musical illustrations of ecological composition come into play. It will not
Tom Greaves 101
only be a question of the where and how of the composition, but of the
type of composition and of what transpires in the performance. In "A stroll
through the worlds of animals and men" Uexkiill describes a sequence that
rolls forward in such a way that, "The effector cue or meaning
extinguishes the receptor cue or meaning" (324). Now if each meaningful
cue or "tone" were utterly extinguished as it is followed by the next then
the musical composition would never hold together. Is it not the case that a
meaningful cue in nature "hangs" like a musical note, whilst being
transformed by the following tone? The theory of "Nature as Music"
which Deleuze and Guattari refer to when they cite this text in plateau 11
of A Thousand Plateaus, is perhaps better exemplified in Uexklill's
somewhat later text "Theory of Meaning.'" There each of the "meaning
receptors" of the tick is set out in a table over and against the "meaning
carriers" of the mammal. The first are said to be points and the latter
counterpoints (Uexkiill, Bedeutungslehre 146). Just as the wasp and the
orchid that Deleuze and Guattari describe form an assemblage, the tick and
mammal are also in concert. Weare thus presented with a theory of
composition in nature, which Uexkiill thinks can be utilised in
understanding both what he calls the "mechanics of nature," which
includes ontogeny and ethology, and the "technics of nature," or
phylogeny.
Later in "TheOlY of Meaning" Uexkiill describes two experiences
which led him to develop the idea of parallels between biology and music.
The first was at a Mahler concert in Amsterdam. During the concert he
was sitting next to a young man who was studiously reading the score
throughout. Uexkiill, "inusically uneducated" as he puts it, asked what can
be gained from reading the score which cannot be immediately gained
from hearing the piece played. The young man passionately replied that
only those who can follow the score can see how each particular
instrument and voice form a point and counterpoint, so that they then melt
together into a higher fonn. This led Uexkiill to ask himself whether it is
not the task of biology to "write the score of nature" (154). Of course, this
does not mean that a score is to be written for nature to follow. Uexkiill is
clear that the idea of a "compositional theory of nature" should not lead us
to the mistaken belief that there are general rules of composition that
nature itself can teach. The score that is to be written is a score composed
from nature, like the musical poems of Messiaen, taken from the song of
birds. Neither straightforward reproduction nor a set of general principles
of composition, such a biology would allow us to [md coherence in a
multitude of voices, without liquidising their multiplicity.
102 Eco-Politica1 Compositions after UexkUll's Umwelt Biology
The second musical event which inspired Uexkiill to think about the
idea of biological composition was a performance of the Matthew Passion
played in Hamburg. The song moved forwards with a real destiny, but one
which was totally unlike the progress that the "fantasies of researchers"
see in the processes of nature:
Why should the violent drama of nature, that has rolled on since the
appearance of life on earth, in its highs and lows, not be, like the Passion,
one single composition?
Was the highly prized progress, that is supposed to lead living beings from
incomplete beginnings to an ever greater completeness, at ground simply a
petty bourgeois speculation concerning the increasing profit of business?
(164)
It is easy to see the power that such a fantasy still exercises. Despite
the ever increasing clamor of resistance to any thought which displays the
slightest hint of finalism, there is still a strong tendency to view the history
of life more or less as a progression. Even if it is no longer thought as a
progression from incompleteness to completeness, the complexity of
living systems is still imagined to increase in a more or less linear
trajectory, interrupted by the occasional catastrophe. What is thereby
misunderstood is that the complexity of a composition is not to be
measured by the actual diversity of is elements at anyone time. It may be
that we need to rethink not only the history of life but our attitude towards
the conservation or cultivation of biological diversity with an ear for the
overall coherence of the composition.
It is that coherence, rather than any latent finalism, that Uexkiill is
thinking of when he continually refers to the plan of nature. He is careful
not only to distinguish the idea of a plan from that of a goal, but to insist
that the "will-O'-the-wisp" of a goal must be extinguished from our
contemplation of Umwelten. This can only be effectively done by drawing
attention towards the over-all plan, into which it is possible that certain
teleological actions may be dovetailed (Uexkiill, Stroll 352-3). The plan is
therefore not a plan of action, nor even a fixed ground plan, but the plane
of consistency where Umwelten are composed. The history of life is seen
as a single composition, but this does not imply the presence of a
composer other than the biologist who composes from nature and not for
it. Uexkiill already goes a long way towards the destratification of this
plane by insisting that every Umwelt is as "complete" as another and also
that, as Deleuze and Guattari put it: "Above all, there is no lesser, no
higher or lower, organization" (Deleuze and Guattari, 77).
Tom Greaves 103
Nevertheless, Uexkiill retains a certain kind of expectation in his mode
of listening. There is no higher or lower, in the sense of more or less
complete, because every phrase is complete in itself. The "contrapuntal"
structure of Umwelten that he insists upon ends in agreement and is bound
to harmonic space. Any tension is quickly resolved. Uexkiill even
describes the "counterpoint" which is maintained between diverse
Umwelten as the two feet of a bridge which is connected in music by
harmony and in nature by meaning (Uexkiill, Bedeutungslehre 157).
Furthermore, the comparison between music and biology should not be
con~ned to the notes played by the various instruments in asymphony, but
the lllstruments are constructed with a view to one another, so that the
orchestra forms a technical as well as a musical unity.
Uexkiill's compositional theory of environment thus leaves ecological
thought with a number of pressing questions which are taken up in not
altogether disparate ways by Deleuze and Guattari and thinkers in the
phenomenological tradition. Firstly, is it the case that the "musical" and
the "technical" can be separated even to the extent that Uexkiill suggests
they can? Clearly in nature the construction of the instruments takes place
as part of the composition, so that we need to learn to think not in tenns of
an orchestra which plays a composition, but of an orchestra which
composes itself as it plays. In that case, to learn to listen to that
composition without demanding that it fit any musical cliches would be of
the greatest importance to ecological thought. It is well known that
ecology has been dogged by an image of balance and harmony which has
ancient roots. Of course, that does not mean that harmony is to be
abolished, although it may be freed. The diversity of contrapuntal voices
need not be the answer of one instrument to another, but the piece itself
can be heard to create and sustain a multiplicity of voices. Secondly, we
must consider what is to be made of the plan(e) when it comes to
eco~ogical thought. Should we not confine ourselves to the diversity of
enVIronments that are played out for us and avoid apparently vapid and
perhaps dangerous speculations about a "milieu of all milieus," a chaotic
world or chaosmos? Are we able to think such a world, even one for which
contrapuntal integrity remains paramount, without liquidising ecological
multiplicity even as we do our best to recognise and respect it?
Territory and Niche: Marking a Distance/Difference
When we stumble into an unfamiliar habitat territories are not simply
open to view. Even the closest knowledge of the features of an
environment will not reveal territories unless we are able to see how
104 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexldi11's Umwelt Biology
environmental and behavioural patterns mark out a territory. That is why
Uexkiill says that, "Territory is a pure Umwelt problem" (Uexklill, Stroll
365). It is also the ethological problem par excellence. On the other hand,
the concept of niche is also an Umwelt problem, but one which belongs
above all to ecology. Of course, the two problems cannot be strictly
separated, but rather they belong to two different tendencies in the
thinking of life. Since it is above all an ethology that Deleuze and Guattari
are interested in developing, one might be tempted to think that the
ecological problem of niche is set to one side or surpassed in this ethology.
After all, in A Thousand Plateaus we move from milieu to territory,
tracing the territorialisation of milieu in the "becoming-expressive of
rhythms." When the functional milieu is territorialised, have we not left
ecology behind? Or can the problem of niche be posed again, in such a
way that Uexkiill's distinction between the technical and the musical in
nature does not apply?
At first sight the problem of territory and the problem of niche seem to
be distinguished by the fact that the fonner is intraspecific whilst the latter
is interspecific. Both involve marking a critical distance, but territory
marks out a distance between those who occupy precisely the same niche.
Apparently niche is prior to territory and of a different order. It is crucial
for ecological thought to show that this is not the case, that there is a
problem of niche as well as a problem of territory. However, they are not
problems that can be tackled in isolation. The problem of niche can
fruitfully take its lead from Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of
territorialisation and deterritorialisation.
For Deleuze and Guattari the marking of a territory becomes far more
complex than in many previous accounts. In particular, marking is no
longer understood as a warning sign which points beyond itself, towards
the potential consequences of transgression. They do not allow the
expression of territory to become a system of signs that all tend to signifY
aggression. That is their challenge to Lorenz's "ambiguous thesis," with
its, "dangerous political overtones" (Deleuze and Guattari, 348).2
Intraspecific aggression is not the transcendental signified of territorial
markers. Rather, aggression itself is taken up into the territorial expression
which marks critical distance. Aggression expresses territory rather than
territory signifying aggression. Aggression is only one of the functions
which is reorganised in territorialisation and we can presumably imagine a
territorialisation which does not express itself in terms of aggression at all.
In fact, Uexkiill himself, from whom Lorenz derived many of the
principles of his research, already came quite close to this view of things.
He considers the case of dogs marking their territory through urination.
Tom Greaves 105
Rather than necessarily signaling that aggression will be faced if a meeting
occurs, UexkiHl recounts the case two dogs that marked the same territory.
If taken out together, they engaged in a "urinating competition" (Uexkiill,
Stroll 367). It is the becoming expressive of the function that counts in
marking a territory, rather than the specific function of aggression.
If we turn to the problem of niche, then the situation is somewhat
different. Rather than following the tendency to turn the marking of
distance in expression into a signification of a privileged function, niche
has been understood as the function of all functions. Niche has come to be
defined as an "n-dimensional hypervolume," which is to say, the volume
created by plotting the species' survival range within the entire range of
environmental conditions (such as moisture, temperature, light and so
forth) against one another. Certainly, the volume will not have fixed
dimensions, since the "realisation" of a living function within anyone
dimension might affect the range of any number of other dimensions. If
there is more food available an animal might need less water.
Nevertheless, G.E.Huchinson's fonnal distinction between "potential" and
"realised" niche remains purely Aristotelian (see Hutchinson). The
"potential" niche, that is, the full range of potentialities of a species within
which the real niche of the species is realised when restrictions such as
predation and competition are taken into account, becomes as unthinkable
as pure matter. A potential niche has neither form nor volume unless it is
already partially realised. So the distinction becomes one of the greater
and lesser degrees of formation or realization. In contrast to this
functionalist accolillt, we need to begin to think niche too in tenns of
expression and the marking of a distance. It would be a mistake to entirely
identify a niche with a milieu ftmction, such as the annexation of an
energy source. We need to begin to see and hear expressions which not
only mark out territorial distances but also specific differences. Niche is
not a volume carved out of unfonned matter, but an expression which
reorganises a multiplicity of forms.
Deleuze and Guattari are already aware of a link between their
discussion of the becoming-expressive of a function and something
approaching what Merleau-Ponty called the problem of the "ontological
value of the notion of species." (189).3 They draw our attention to the
"decoded" sections of genetic material, the "junk DNA" which has no
function and does not code for any protein. This material and the 'genetic
drift' which it induces remain important but highly problematic
phenomena. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is precisely because it is
decoded and without function that territorialisation can produce a kind of
indirect differentiation or speciation:
 106 Eco-Political Compositions after UexkiiII's Umwelt Biology
But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species
independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of
another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with
its milieus. Territorialisation is precisely such a factor that lodges on the
margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate
representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is
because there is a disjunction between the ten'itOlY and the code that the
territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever territoriality appears,
it establishes an intraspecific critical distance between members of the
same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction in relation to specific
differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means of differentiation.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 355)
Precisely how telTitorialisation "lodges on the margins of the code"
remains somewhat unclear here. What is clear is that the problems of
telTitory and niche are not concerned with the intraspecific and
interspecific respectively. Nor are speciation and the "potentialities of a
species" which mark out its niche to be confined to the order of the coded.
Rather, once the ecological niche has been freed from the strictures of
functionalism, then it becomes an expression of distance which
accompanies telTitorialisation. The task then becomes one of listening to
the different rhythms whereby distances and differences are marked out.
An example of this complex interplay between telTitorialisation and
speciation is the case of the ruddy duck, a North American species which
has "colonised" Britain. There is to be an attempt to exterminate the
British population because of the" genetic threat" which it poses to the rare
and closely related white-headed duck in Spain. The ruddy duck is known
for its aggressive behaviour, marking out a telTitory but also a niche which
it both shares with the white-headed duck and excludes it from. 4 This
sitlJation is neither a pure telTitory nor a pure niche problem. Colonisation
and hybidisation involve a complex of expressive rhythms. The real
danger is the fetishisation of telTitorial boundary and specific difference
which closes our ears to those rhythms. That is not a call for "non-
intervention" or anything of the kind. It is simply a reminder that neither
telTitories nor niches are pre-established boundaries but are rhythmically
created, so that the creation, conservation or transgression of any such
.boundaries is best undertaken by the establishment, support or elaboration
of those rhythms.
Whilst not strictly separable, the varying rhythms of territorialisation
and differentiation introduce dissonance into Uexkull's theory of
ecological composition. On the one hand, there is the disjunction that
Deleuze and Guattari find played out in romanticism, between the telTitory
Tom Greaves 107
and the earth. The Ur-refrain of the earth beats out a rhythm which strikes
against all telTitorial and milieu refrains:
The little tune, the bird refl"ain, has changed: it is no longer the beginning
of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the earth. It is no longer
made of two consonant parts that seek and answer one another; it addresses
itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also strikes against it and
sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is indissolubly
constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth that arises to
drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the
Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the
assemblages of the biM, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal
breathing of the eatih. (Deleuze and Guattari, 374)
The rhythm of the earth takes in all of the telTitorial expressions but
also harnesses and overwhehns them. The earth calTies each telTitorial
refrain before· it and they in turn can be detelTitorialised by it, although
they remain under its sway. The earth founds telTitories, but it does not
leave them behind, it forces them into continuous variation.
The dissonance to be heard in the creation of specific difference, on the
other hand, is not that of a pulsing earth that calTies all along with it, butof
the lag of those who cannot keep pace. It was Bergson who identified this
rhythm of speciation. He complained that radical finalism conceives
evolution on the model of, "a musical concert, wherein the seeming
discords are really meant to bring out a fundamental harmony" (128).
Nothing of the kind is to be found in the evolution of life. However, the
mistake lies not in the musical metaphor but in the failure to hear a basic
rhythmic difference:
The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference
of rhythm. Life in general is mobility itself; particular manifestations of
life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always
going ahead, they want to mark time. (128)
Life is always lagging behind itself. That is not because of some failure
to keep time, but because the very mobility which creates a path for itself
must of necessity lay down a road which it is reluctant to leave behind.
Rather than the deep pulse of the earth sounding behind each refrain we
hear the plodding lag of living beings whose very way of life has forced
them into a niche. None of this is to say that telTitory and niche are to be
absolutely distinguished in terms of this rhythmic difference. Once more,
territory and niche are each marked out rhythmically, but there is nothing
to say that the marking of a distance might not also create a difference.
108 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt Biology Tom Greaves 109

The rhythms of the earth and of life must both be attended to in a is of interest because, somewhat unexpectedly, by insisting on the mutual
behavioural ecology which is able to hear the composition as a whole. envelopment of Umwelten it avoids the implicit anthropocentrism of the
Is th~re anythin~ to be said about the whole complex of these rhythms, view that all we can speak of comes from within an exclusively human
the. consIst.ency WhIC~ they are able to achieve and the lines of flight by Umwelt. Nevertheless, both of these solutions move away from the true
WhICh tern tory and mche are detelTitorialised and destructured? Can we novelty of the notion of Umwelt. Neither the sum of exterior events, nor an
think the whole without turning it into a totality? In such a project Deleuze interior relation, the compositional event of an Umwelt, "opens on a
and Guattari might find an unlikely ally in ecological phenomenology. temporal and spatial field." The constitution of the world in which these
environing events "surge-forth" is not secured before the event. It is
neither the suprasensible nor a nature-subject, but the theme of a melody
The Chaotic World: What becomes of the "Milieu that haunts all its realisations. The plane of ecological consistency consists
of all Milieus?" in this melodic thematism, it is not a set of pre-constituted niches waiting
to be filled. The problem that we are left with is how to traverse the
At first sight Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of animality and
ecological world, the Umwelt of Umwelten, without reducing it to a pre-
environment might seem to contrast sharply with that of phenomenology. constituted field which itself could be grasped in the pincer of a particular
However, both make extensive use ofUexkiill's Umwelt-theory, in such a
functional-milieu.
w~y th.at the cent~al ontological concerns introduced by the thinking of
It is this problem that deeply infonns both the ecological-
ammalIty and enVIronment coincide at certain points. In particular, as we
phenomenology that Martin Heidegger elaborated in this lecture course
have begun to see already, the concept of Umwelt demands that we
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude and
consider the consistency of the whole ecological interweaving of animal
the account given by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
environments. What is the character of this consistency? How and where is
Despite deep rifts between these thinkers, there are a number of points in
it constituted? These questions led both Deleuze and Guattari and the
their respective traversals of the ecological plane at which they come so
phenomenologists to reconsider the problem of world in the light of
close as to almost touch.
ecological composition.
First of all, there is the question of becoming-animal. What is the kind
In his 1957-58 lectures on "Animality, the Human Body, and the
of event that brings us into the midst of an ecological composition? It is
Passage to Culture" at the College de France, which formed part of a series
not sympathy or empathy if that means an attempt to feel the affects of
of lectures on the concept of Nature, Merleau-Ponty devoted some time to
another, which belong exclusively and personally to that other. That is
an examination of Uexkiill's notion of Umwelt. During his interpretation
why it is also not a question of imitating an animal, since that is also an
Merleau-Ponty is led to the question of the world where Umwelten are
attempt to get ourselves into the position of the animal, implying that an
composed. If animal worlds can be "englobed" in a human Umwelt and it
animal occupies a position which will itself not be affected by this
is precisely the task of biology to achieve this, nevertheless an Umwelt is
b~coming .. Heidegger therefore asks not whether we are able to empathise
never total, so we are all englobed in an Umgebung-the totality of natural
WIth an ammal, or get into the consciousness of an animal, but whether we
surroundings-which we often mistakenly assume our own scientific
can be transposed into the life of an animal. This transposition in tum is
Umwelten can grasp in its totality. Uexkiill's theory then steers us towards
not the taking up of a position, but a movement of becoming which we
the question: "What is the Umwelt of Umwelten?" (177). In Uexkiill's
follow through along with the animal: "Nothing other than this: whether or
work~ Merleau-Ponty finds two responses to this question, both of them
not we can succeed in going along with the animal in the way in which it
unsatIsfactory. In the earlier work, adhering more strictly to the Kantian
sees and hears, the way in which it seizes its prey or evades its predators,
principles which he professes allegiance to, Uexkiill gives no positive
the way in which it builds its nest and so forth" (Heidegger, 203-4). The
determination of this environing world-in-itself and suggests that none can
possibility of going along with the animal is nevertheless subject to affect
be given. By the time of the 1934 "A stroll through the worlds of animals
of a certain kind, but an impersonal affect to which the Dasein is attuned
and men," following what Merleau-Ponty sees as inhlitions already
in its going along with the animal. This tune is not the exclusive property
de~eloped .by Schelling, Nature itself is detennined as a unique subject
of one who becomes athmed. Such an attunement turns out to be the core
WhICh carnes all Umwelten but is itself closed to them. This second view

--------------- - -- -- - - - --- ------- --

110 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt Biology Tom Greaves 111

of Heidegger's infamous thesis, a thesis which he himself stmggles with a by an enonnous wealth of contents and relations which we can hardly
great deal, that the animal is "poor-in-world." The "poverty" is a ''po~erty imagine, but in all this it is still fundamentally different from the
in mood [Ar-mut]" in which the Dasein comes to be athmed to annnal manifestness of beings as encountered in the world-forming Dasein of
man. (277)
becomings (195). Dasein can become attuned to the animal's life only
because animal becomings are played out to a hme.
The gulf that Heidegger insists upon here is often taken as evidence
Thus it is not in the least bit clear that there is anything more
that he carmot adequately think the proximity of Dasein to animality or
"anthropocentric" about such ecological phenomenology.than the conc~pt anything like becoming-animal. But upon closer inspection it becomes
of becoming-animal offered by Deleuze and Guattan. Indeed, KeIth
clear that although our imagination can often fail us, ecological thought is
Ansell-Pearson has suggested that Heidegger's thinking of "animal-
not fundamentally an exercise of any special imaginative capacity. The
becomings" might be used to counterbalance a lacuna in Deleuze .and
very movement through~ the worlds of woodworm and woodpecker and
Guattari's reading of Uexkiill, namely that the thought of "becommg-
squirrel is that of Dasein that finds itself in the midst of these encircling
animal" has a tendency to suggest that the animal is already given in its
rings. It is not that Dasein stands somewhere outside of this ecological
animality and to neglect the way the idea of Umwelten demands the
interplay or tries to imagine itself in the midst of these intersecting circles.
thorough re-thinking of how that animality comes about. Ansell-Pearson
The manifestation takes place in the "going-along-with" the worm which
even suggests that one might argue that Deleuze and Guattari's, "attempt to
at the same time is the traversal of the whole composition of encircling
disclose nonhuman becomings of the human results in a 'violent' rings. "World-forming" has nothing to do with the moulding of unformed
humanization of animal worlds as well as producing an idealized account
matter. It is the traversal and translation of the chaos of forms that intersect
of nahIre and the cosmos" (Ansell-Pearson, 188). Whether or not
in this ecological dimension. There is an echo of the Chaosmos here. Each
Heidegger's account could entirely remedy such a situation is unclear,
encircling ring persisting in what is its own, threatened by the surrounding
since he himself admits that his "going-along-with" the animal falters
chaos, but also in itself engulfed by the others, shot through by lines of
when it comes to giving a full account of what he calls animal motility and
flight from which its very own milieu is composed.
its specific kind of "historicality." (Heidegger, 265-267) Ul!imately it. may
In the final analysis, we may find that the boundaries that Heidegger is
not just be a question of thinking animal~becomings alongSIde becommgs-
constantly marking and remarking are themselves composed from
animal but becoming athIned to the tension that arises in both of these
movements and traversals that constitute an ecological dimension without
accou~ts, between being swept up by an affective becoming-along-with underlying unity. There is a despeciation on the ecological plane which
the animal and thinking the kind of world which is inhabited or plane that
mns alongside and intersects with deterritorialization. It is only in the
is traversed in these becomings.
intersections, the movements of traversal, that the "its own" of each
For Heidegger, when there is a "going-along-with" an animal, just as
specific ring is composed. That is why Heidegger too, like Deleuze and
Deleuze and Guattari insist is the case with "becoming-animal," it is not a
Guattari, questions the idea of a linear evolution, a straightforward
question of imitation or imagination. Dasein do~s not imagin~ wha~ it is
unfolding of differentiation from an undifferentiated primordial slime,
like to be an animal, nor does it play at being annnal. It finds Itself m the
which does not take account of the way that differentiation is repeatedly
midst of an ecological dimension, so that there is never a going-along-with
marked out and as such open to despeciation. The contexhIal ring in which
one animal, without at the same time going along with all those with
an animal lives out its life is not marked out for it before it begins to live.
which it is in communication and with which its Umwelt intersects:
The genetic code itself, together with the all important margin of decoded
code, is one of the materials taken up in the composition of what ~s
The woodworm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is
encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means specific to that life. Its specific meaning is produced in the movement It
together with this encircling ring. of its own, finds itself in tum within t~e composes along with others. As such the specific tones which each living
ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And .thls being can produce and become athmed to only gain their specificity as part
woodpecker finds itself in all this within the encircling ring of the .sq~Irrel of the whole composition. "-i

which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness wlthm the j
rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized

1-1
112 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt Biology
Modulations of Silence and Ecological Annihilation
The danger that threatens this retum to the whole, to the world in
which Umwelten compose themselves and mark out for themselves what is
their own, is the dissolution of specific difference. However much Deleuze
and Guattari insist that, "there is in all this no hint of a chaotic white night
or an undifferentiated black night," (78) the Earth does still threaten to
engulf the singing of birds and the colour of flowers in one huge Ur-
refrain (378). Species are threatened with being swept up in the huge
traversal of "life in general." This threat is not easily overcome and we
have seen that Uexkull himself was constantly in danger of succumbing to
it, especially when he introduces a great Nature-subject to describe the
compositional plan, rather than allowing the plan itself to be composed
between the Umwelten themselves.
This danger asserts itself in strictly compositional terms. That can be
illustrated by some remarks of Theodor Adomo conceming the use of
counterpoint in new music. Even in the most thoroughly contrapuntal
composition, in which harmony has been "freed" to the greatest degree
possible whilst maintaining the consistency of the piece, there is the
danger of dissolving specificity, precisely through its insistence on
differentiation:
It is true enough that even though the different voices are heard
simultaneously, their tones and rhythms never coincide, and hence they are
absolutely to be distinguished from one another. But this very absoluteness
makes the differences between them problematic. Not only does everything
go back to a unified, identical basic material, so that distinctions collapse
into sameness; but also the all-inclusive nature of the distinguishing
principle hlms everything into one single thing. Differences are eroded into
complimentaries; the antithetical nature of counterpoint, the representative
of freedom, is submerged in synthesis without retaining its identity. (139-
40)
Adomo is concemed with the potential totalitarianism of counterpoint.
That is to say, absolute differentiation may revert to simplicity. An
economy with the highest degree of division of labour is not as a
consequence an economy which allows for a high degree of specificity or
differentiation. This has its ecological equivalent in the thought of a living
world which absolutely separates each living voice, locating each in its
own "niche" within a total economy of nature. A silencing of the whole
may be the effect, even as polyphony is emphasised at every tum.
Tom Greaves 113
Nevertheless, the totalitarian lock-down of despeciation and the
resulting dissolution of specificity itself, may not be the only or even
greatest danger facing ecological composition. Along with, but thoroughly
distinct from its potential totalitarianism there is the potential fascism of
music. Fascism is not the blocking of lines of flight, but their tum towards
destruction. Since music is composed precisely of such lines it is never
immune to this potential: "Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of
destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential
'fascism'?" (Deleuze and Guattari, 330). We must recall here that Deleuze
and Guattari draw a strict distinction between fascism and the totalitarian
State. They concur with Virilio's observation that fascism is less
totalitarian than it is suicidal. "Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its
utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an
intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction
and abolition" (Deleuze and Guattari, 258). The dissolution of species and
territories by means of the locking down of all lines of deterrorialisation or
despeciation would therefore not be the only danger to face ecological
composition. There is also the danger that its own creative movements will
be swept up into a suicidal flight of destruction. The silence from out of
which and within which the whole composition emerges might become
overwhehningly attractive.
With this we are able to define far more precisely than has usually been
possible the much discussed danger of "eco-fascism." This would now
have to be distinguished from the first danger, the danger of a totalitarian
locking down of all creative lines in the name of conservation or
preservation. As we have seen, such a totalitarian ecology will ultimately
dissolve rather than conserve what has been composed from creative lines
of deterritorialisation and despeciation. The danger of eco-fascism,
however, is not this conservationist lock-down, whatever the conservationist
laws introduced by the Nazis might suggest, but an intense line of traversal
at a global level. The perception of a global crisis brings with it the
declaration of a total war. It is a line of destruction which surges through
the entire Mechanosphere, bringing with it the implicit desire for death as
the only way to really achieve a "zero carbon footprint." It sweeps across ~
land creating vast tracts of bio-fuel and damming rivers, displacing
millions and annihilating species such as river dolphin. It may even reach
the cosmos, in the form mirrors to deflect the sun's rays away from us.
This is not to say that anything like the full force of eco-fascism has as
yet been unleashed. We see the potential for it in conjunction with a State
apparatus that blocks creative lines whilst painting itself green and joining
the enviromnental refrain. What we need most of all in this situation is to
,
114 Eco-Political Compositions after Uexldill's Umwelt Biology
learn to listen. Not just to the great silence from which every mus-
ecological composition is born, the silence which penetrates the whole but
which can also induce a thirst for annihilation. We need to learn to listen
to the smaller but equally powerful silences which sustain the
composition. "The animal is," Merleau-Ponty writes, "like a quiet force"
(177). It emerges from the physiochemical conditions, but not as their
effect. The whole interpenetration of strata on the plane of consistency
makes up, according to Deleuze and Guattari, "a silent dance" (77).
Furthermore, the very creations which can be locked-down or tum bad in
annihilation arrive in silence:
Is it not the nature of creations to operate in silence, locally, to seek
consolidation everywhere, to go from the molecular to an uncertain
cosmos, whereas the processes of destmction and conservation work in
bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire cosmos in order to enslave the
molecular and stick it into a conservatory or a bomb? (382-3)
Within the two movements which threaten dissolution and
annihilation, the totalitarian conservatory and the fascist's bomb, we can
perhaps still just discern the small silences of creative ecological
becoming.
Notes
1 Ronald Bogue also points to the significance of this later text for gaining a full
understanding ofUexldill's theory. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and
the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003) 58-62. It has been published both in
German and in French translation in a single volume together with "A stroll
through worlds of animals and men."
2 Gary Genosko has explored Deleuze and Guatiari's confrontation with Lorenz in
some detail in his, iliA Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression: Poster fish, bower
birds, and spiny lobsters," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24no.3
(1997): 529-42.
3 The significance of this "ontological value of species" and the central importance
ofUexldill's "melodic" theory of animality for Merleau-Ponty's understanding of it
has been carefully explored by Mauro Carbone in his The Thinking of the Sensible:
Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004),
Chapter 2 "Nahlre: Variation on a Theme." For our purposes the question would be
whether Merleau-Ponty does not remain too "painterly" in his understanding of the
problem. Does he not lock the ontological value of species into the reciprocity of
vision? Does he not need to distinguish "two movements of creation" as Deleuze
and Guattari do, the painterly moving from the soma to the germen and the musical
moving form the germ en to the soma? cf. (Deleuze and Guattari ,383-4).
'"----------------~---~~.- .. _ - - - - - - -
Tom Greaves 115
4 Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and Windus,
2005) 108-11.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. "The Function of Counterpoint in the New Music."
Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Standford
University Press, 1999).
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of
Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999).
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York:
Dover, 1998).
Bogue, Ronald Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York:
Routledge, 2003).
Carbone, Mauro The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-
Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004).
Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey. Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and
Windus, 2005).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian
Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004).
Genosko, Gaty. 'itA Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression:' Poster fish,
bower birds, and spiny lobsters. It Canadian Review of Comparative
Literature 24:3 (1997): 529-42.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
Hutchinson, G.B.. "Concluding Remarks." Cold Spring Harbour Symposia
on Quantitative Biology 22:2 (1957): 415-27.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the College de
France. Trans. Robert Vallier (Evaston: Northwestern University
Press, 2003).
von Uexkiill, Jakob. "A stroll through the worlds of animals and man: A
picture book of invisible worlds." Semiotica 89:4 (1992): 319-91.
- StreifZiige .durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschenl
Bedeutungslehre (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1970).

DELEUZE AND DEEP ECOLOGY
ALISTAIR WELCHMAN
I seems, on the face of it, quite consistent to believe that humans are natural
Deep ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first is to
the intr·insic value of nature. l Surface ecology, by contrast, legitimates
various broadly ecological concerns with non-human nature on the basis of
their value as means for some human end. Deep ecology might for
instance argue in favor of restricting or forbidding pollution on the ground
that the pollution causes harm in nature; a surface ecologist might be able
to support exactly the same conclusion, but only because the same
pollution will cause harm to human beings. In this sense deep ecology is
an ethics of nature, the denial of the axiological version of humanism, i.e.
the denial of the view, exemplified by Kant, that human beings either
themselves constitute the only values or else are the only source for
values. 2 Deep ecology can therefore be conectly described as a kind of
(axiological) anti-humanism, provided it is clear that the "anti" does not
negate human beings as such, but merely negates the view that human
beings are the sole sources of value.
From its initial formulations, deep ecology has always been bound up
with a second central commitment, the metaphysical claim that human
beings are nothing other than natural entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical
naturalism. 3 In this sense, deep ecology is the denial of the metaphysical
version of humanism, i.e. a denial of the view, exemplified by Descartes,
that human beings are metaphysically distinct from natural beings.
Accordingly, deep ecology can also be understood as a kind of
(metaphysical) anti-humanism, with a suitably modified version of the
above proviso.
Deep ecologists manifest an obvious affinity for naturalistic
philosophical systems that assert the continuity of human beings with non-
human nature and therefore give naturalistic accounts of human beings
themselves. Naess alludes with some frequency to the work of Spinoza
(e.g. "Spinoza and Ecology"). And more recently connections have been
made with Nietzsche and Deleuze,4 who, not coincidentally, himself
"--------------~---------~-
Alistair Welchman 117
devoted two monographs each to Spinoza and Nietzsche. In addition, some
deep ecologists have made use of a specifically naturalistic account of
ethics (CaIlicot).
Now there is a clear (though not inferential) connection between
metaphysical and axiological humanism: the metaphysical distinctness of
hmnan beings is often mobilized in support of their axiological
distinctness. 5 What is not so clear is the question as to whether there is a
relation between the denial of metaphysical humanism and the denial of
axiological humanism. It is not obvious, to say the least, how one can
move from any kind of metaphysical naturalism to an axiological claim. It
beings and at the same time to think that the rest of nature has only
instrumental and not intrinsic value in relation to human beings.
In other words, deep ecology wants to be an ethics of nature, but it
only supports this with a kind of naturalistic ethics. The gap between the
two is not necessarily simply the result of Moore's naturalistic fallacy (see
Moore 9ft). Indeed I will argue that metaphysically naturalistic systems
can all be understood as presupposing or expressing values in the sense of
evaluation or selection. The question that needs answering however is:
what principle of valuation or selection? And the answers to this question
vary with the type of metaphysical naturalism, that is, with the conception
of nature. Minimally, the relations between the metaphysical and
axiological anti-humanisms at play in deep ecology need to be clarified.
The third central commitment of deep ecology is to some kind of
practice that transforms our consciousness of nature. 6 Although it
sometimes takes on a meditative or even a frankly mystical tone, this
transformative aspect of deep ecology can, I think, be given a quite
rigorous philosophical reconstruction. The motive for this third
commitrnent seems clearly to be an avoidance of axiological issues, at
least of a certain type: "moralizing" ones (see Fox 215ft). As a practical
matter, it is probably true that adopting a moralizing tone may be counter-
productive. But a transfonnative identification with nature hardly evades
all issues of valuation. Presumably the reason for identifying with nature is
that people are in fact identical (in some sense) with nature, i.e. not
metaphysically distinct from it: this is certainly Fox's view.? And so the
issue would devolve back into a consideration of the relation between
valuation and metaphysical naturalism.
-- --- ~
118 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
II
I think the transpersonal or transformative aspect of deep ecology is best
interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have
distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to
undo or reverse those processes. Thought of in this way, transpersonal
ecology has also called upon some philosophical heavyweights, just as the
metaphysical naturalism aspect did. Indeed, what have become the
standard axes of ideological distortion can be deployed in this new field.
Thus, Marxists may argue that our understanding of nature has been
distorted by commodification, in which the non-human world comes to be
understood primarily as an economic resource; similarly feminists (eco-
feminists) may argue that our understanding of nature has been distorted
by a patriarchal system that sustains itself by aligning women with nature
as a way of legitimating male domination. 8
On a more clearly philosophical plane, thinkers as diverse as
Heidegger9 and Adorno,lo whose sophistication makes the term
ldeologiekritiker seem rather a bad fit, nevertheless have analyses
predicated on the presence of a deep distortion of nature in our experience
of the world. These thinkers are doubtless difficult to interpret. But what
makes them so difficult is, I think, their analysis of just how deep
ideological distortion goes. In the case of Heidegger the distortion
("technology") is the only way in which Being has, historically, ever in
fact been revealed to us. II In the case of Adorno the distortion is bound up
with reason itself (in the fonn of instrumental rationality).12 As a result,
there is a certain pathos of the negative about both these writers that
centers around the sheer intellectual (and even more than intellechtal)
difficulty of thinking beyond Western Metaphysics or Western
Rationality. But at the same time their projects would make no (or at least
less) sense if it were absolutely impossible to free oneself from the
"ideological" distortions. However provisional it may ultimately be, there
is a clear contrast in for instance Heidegger's "Question Concerning
Technology" between the understanding of the Rhine made manifest in a
hydroelectric plant and that manifest in Holderlin's visionary poetry. 13
Despite the variety of thinkers who can be positioned in place of a
psychological sense of· personal transformation, there is nevertheless
considerable agreement on the centrality of Descartes in the construction
of the false conception of nature. Descartes breaks with the medieval idea
of the continuity of beings (and, a fortiori, of the continuity of human
beings with nahlre) that had dominated Western thought since Aristotle by
introducing a radical separation between human beings and what he now
Alistair Welchman 119
calls "nature." The defming characteristic of human beings is their
possession of consciousness, what he calls "thought", although it includes
everything of which we are conscious and not just what today would be
described as thoughts (as opposed to e.g. feelings or mere sensations).14
We have bodies, but only contingently. And our bodies, like animals and
everything else in the universe, i.e. nahlre, have only the property of being
extended in space. 15 This conception of nature excludes not only thought
and feeling, but also secondary qualities (like color), which have no real
existence, according to Descartes, since they are merely subjective
projections. 16
Now Descartes' overall metaphysical position (metaphysical
humanism, as above) involves two components: it claims that human
beings are specifically distinct from nature in that we are defined by our
possession of a non-natural property (thought); it also has a quite
distinctive conception of what nahlre is - a machine. It is going to turn out,
I believe, that the denial of metaphysical humanism must entail, along
with its reconceptualization of human nature, a reconceptualization of both
the rest of nature and of valuation. This is what can, I think, be learned
from viewing the transformative aspect of (deep) ecology as a form of
ldeologiekritik: at the end of the critique we will have transformed both
the nature of human beings and (non-human) nature so as to see their
underlying metaphysical unity in nature as such. It is from this point of
view that the deep ecological reference to metaphysically naturalist
philosophical systems cah be brought critically into play with the question
of valuation.
The often phenomenological orientation of the ldeologiekritiker lends
itself to the epistemic pessimism ofHeidegger and Adorno: it is extremely
difficult, ifnot impossible, to escape the clutches ofthe false "ideology" of
nature, and so most of the theoretical energy of such positions is spend in a
kind of conceptual deprogramming that is the speculative analogue of
Fox's appeal to psychology. Where it differs is that in Fox's case, although
theoretically unsophisticated, it is clear that the culmination of the process
is a consciousness of metaphysical naturalism, i.e. that "we and all other
. entities are aspects of a single unfolding reality" (Fox 252). ldeologiekritik
however is by no means committed to any kind of metaphysical naturalism
(although it may contingently accept some form of materialism, e.g.
dialectical materialism). Indeed, in its most philosophically sophisticated
guise, as phenomenology, it is intrinsically hostile to any form of
metaphysical naturalism.
Heidegger clearly wants to revolutionize our (Cartesian) conception of
nature; and, at the same time, he wants to revolutionize our conception of
120 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
the subject (hence his new vocabulary of Dasein); but he by no means
wants to sink Dasein into the world ontologically: Being-in-the-world is
the way of Being of Dasein that precisely distinguishes it from the ways of
Being ofnon-Dasein, what he calls, after Kant the "categories", presence-
at-hand and readiness-to-hand. l ? Heidegger can be best understood as
radicalizing Kant's critique of Descartes, which objected to Descartes'
conception of the subject as a thinking thing precisely because the subject
is even more different from nature than the objectlike designation "thing"
can accommodate. 18 This is why Kant figures so prominently in
reactionary resistance to (deep) ecology.19 Heidegger transforms our
conception of nature from a mere resource; but is radically committed to
the ontological distinctiveness ofDasein. 20
Thus Ideologiekritik is doubtless important, but it is at best a way of
getting to an underlying metaphysics (and here I am only interested in
naturalistic metaphysics). So an emphasis on the transformative aspect of
(deep). ecology distracts attention away from its metaphysical
commitments; and those metaphysical commitments entertain as yet
unexplained relations with its fundamental evaluative ones, i.e. the
existence and importance of non-human values. Here I will want to argue
that it is not just our conceptions of human beings and nature that must be
changed, but also the conception of value itself.
As already mentioned, the problem of the relation of valuative
commitments to metaphysical naturalism inevitably brings up the question
of the application of Moore's naturalistic fallacy. In brief, Moore argued
that it is impossible to infer the intrinsic goodness of something from its
natural properties; from which of course he concluded that the good is an
objective but non-nahlral property. The specter of this fallacy is raised by
the very term "deep ecology." The "ecology" part of this designation refers
to an apparently neutrally descriptive scientific endeavor; whereas the
"deep" part brings in a range of nonnative principles. In Naess'
fonnulation, this is supposed to be unproblematic because he distinguishes
carefhlly between the scientific claims of ecology and his own system
(more properly ecosophy), which, he says, like the great metaphysical
systems of Spinoza and Aristotle, freely mixes normative and descriptive
components (Naess 1973: 99). How this is possible still requires some
clarification.
Nevertheless, while Naess may have been admirably explicit about
separating the normative and factual principles of this view (see "The
Shallow and the Deep" 33f), there are clear dangers in an appeal to
ecology. On the one hand, there is the danger that social values will be
projected onto the science in the process of its constitution. Ecology has
Alistair Welchman 121
hardly achieved the kind of cognitive maturity that gives it a physics-like
autonomy from the nexus of human practices out of which it emerged?1
Indeed some of its most fundamental concepts were politicized at their
origin and are still among the most contested of any science?2 On the
other hand, there is also the inverse danger that exploits the relative
authority of the scientific discipline's epistemic position for prescriptive
ends. For instance, for a long time, technical (perhaps among other)
limitations made it difficult to model any but homeostatic, i.e. self-
sustaining, systems. But from this it is easy to move to a view that systems
should be self-sustained, a view that has conservative implications
analogous to those of structuralist-functionalist sociology.
Three different positions can be used to mark out the range of
possibilities for thinking about the relation of valuation to metaphysical
naturalism. There is, first, what appears to be Naess' position: that
evaluative commitments are separate from descriptive (metaphysical
ones). This position suffers from an obvious drawback: in the absence of
further elaboration, our abilities to perform evaluation or identification are
not explicable on the basis of the nature that we attribute intrinsic value to
or on the basis of that nature with which we identify. But then, we are to
that extent precisely not identical with that nature, and the only result must
be a kind of humanism.
Second, there is the view that valuations are "projected" into nature.
This can be given an (increasingly popular) transcendental idealist gloss,
so that it no longer seems as if it is just getting things wrong, i.e. the
projection can be understood as in some sense constitutive of (our
conception of) nature. Conceived in this way, the valuative commitments
of (deep) ecology would be analogous to those of virtue theory: human
experience of nature is (at least under the right conditions) always and
constitutively the experience of a natural world that presents itself as
inextricably shot through with valuative significance (affordances for the
prosecution of human interests) in the same way that human experience of
the social is (at least under the right conditions) always and constitutively
the experience of a social world that presents itself as inextricably shot
through with valuative significance (opportunities for kindness etc.). Thus,
for both Heidegger (in thinking. at least in part about nahrre), as for
Alasdair MacIntyre (thinking about the social), the idea of the separation
of fact from value (that underlies Moore's conception of the nahrralistic
fallacy) represents a kind of cognitive catastrophe: once valuation has been
separated from description, then the two can never be put together again?3
In this sense, even to ask the question of the relation between valuation
and nature is already to have deprived oneself of the resources to answer
122 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
it. It should be noted however that the upshot of this position is a kind of
idealism about nature. The very fact that we are able to break through the
seamless interweaving .of fact and value already demonstrates the
contingency of this conception of nature and suggests that the seamless
weave is not the real nature as it is in itself.
The last option is that nature itself is, in some sense, valuative, and that
this is what supports both the existence and importance of non-human
values and the valuation of human beings, understood as a part of nature.
This is a delicate matter, for how can it be distinguished from a selective
appeal to the authority of nature adopted as legitimation for a social
project? One way is to appropriate the Kantian insight offered by the
above analysis comparing Heidegger and Macintyre, but to prolong it in
precisely the opposite direction. Rather than retreating to nature as
phenomenon, the thought of nature can be expanded beyond the
phenomenal scope where it is restricted by properly scientific
considerations, transforming nature this time not in relation to a synthesis
of human interests, but by going beneath the phenomena, retrieving but
renewing a classical sense of the metaphysical. This, I take it, is the
attraction of thinkers like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze for (deep)
ecology.
III
Deleuze's conception of nature goes to unusual lengths to establish
continuity between the cultural, biological and even inorganic domains.
Deleuze's early assertion of a primary monism is articulated in his later
(collaborative) works in terms of an analytical vocabulary that is deployed
freely across all domains. 24 Thus, in a Plateau on ethology, territorial
animal behavior (especially birdsong) is explained in terms derived from
human cultural production (of musical styles) and vice versa with such
suppleness that the twin objections of naturalizing the cultural and
aestheticizing nature are simultaneously undermined. It is humanistic
chauvinism not to attribute aesthetic ability to birds just as it is to deny
that high art is not also nature (see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, Plateau 11).
In collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze defends this view by
developing a thought of abstraction that is understood not as conceptual
generality but as interconnection across heterogeneous domains. This
difference can itself be understood using the crucial distinction between a
tree and a rhizome. Tree-like or arborescent structures are organized
according to a strict hierarchical principle, the most visible of which today
Alistair Welchman 123
is probably the organization chart. These charts (in which the arborescent
structure is upside down) start with a single trunk (the boss) who is the
superior of everybody. Everyone else in the organization either reports to
the boss, or reports to someone else who reports (ultimately) to the boss.
The significant feature of such structures for Deleuze is that
communication on one level is always mediated by someone on a higher
level. Until recently, the biosphere was itself understood as a tree (the tree
of life) in which present-day life forms were related by filiation through a
common ancestor somewhere higher up the tree. Deleuze and Guattari
were among the first philosophers to take note of the general import of the
revision to this model that has now become the standard for redrawing the
diagram of life, that is, the fact that genetic relatedness can also be
established by direct lateral connection between life forms. When Deleuze
and Guattari were writing, the only significant examples of this were
viruses. But now it is widely recognized that most life forms can be
assigned only a statistically approximate filiation because of the
dominance of inter-"specific" genetic exchange in bacteria. This idea of
lateral connectivity or networking is what Deleuze and Guattari call a
rhizome. 25
There are even rhizomatic and arborescent conceptions of abstraction
itself. Conceptual classifications have, since Aristotle, followed the tree of
life quite directly: higher order concepts contain or encompass lower order
ones, traveling up to the most abstract concept (God, Being) and down to
ever more minutely distinguished aspects of reality.26 Abstraction here
carries its standard but arborescent connotation of lacking (specific)
content. But Deleuze and Guattari treat abstraction rhizomatically as the
possession of a greater ability to connect laterally or transversally. The
more connections to the more heterogeneous elements, the more abstract. 27
Abstraction therefore knits together disparate domains at the same time
as it radicalizes the notion of multiple realizability by isolating "machinic"
fragments that can be effectuated in disparate domains. This is what
enables Deleuze and Guattari to avoid reductionism in either direction: it
is not that Deleuze and Guattari are projecting or anthropomorphizing
when they say that in the development of courtship and other rituals in
birds, "expressive matters" or "motifs" become "autonomous" and form a
"style" - even when this autonomy of the motif is immediately explicated
using the example of the Wagnerian musical motif wandering away, in the
score, from its assigned dramatic character on the stage (1980: 319). Nor
are they (the converse) giving a reductive account of human aesthetic
capacities, as if the latter were "just the same as" birdsong. Rather, the
same "abstract machine" is differentially effectuated in both cases.
124 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
Here Deleuze and Guattari insistently reject the idea that such inter-
domain assemblages result from a comparison or an analogy, a procedure
that would result in the privilege of one domain over another (see Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition 129ft). An affinity group is not rhizomatic
because it "compares itself' with couch grass or bacteria, but because all
three effectuate the same abstract machine.
The relative under-theorization of ecology in comparison with
evolutionary biology is exactly the victory of tree over rhizome since
ecology is the Shldy of the systemic properties of the lateral connectivity
(alliance) between leaf nodes in the evolutionary tree of descent (filiation).
Nevertheless, despite Deleuze and Guattari's deep-seated metaphysical
naturalism, implacable hostility to the humanist perspective of
transcendence and detailed methodological commitment to the use of a
conceptual apparahls that resists anthropocentrism, there is still an only
uneasy juxtaposition between their work and (deep) ecology.
It should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari would fiercely resist
Warwick Fox's peon to the tree (Fox 253-4) even while acknowledging the
pernicious force of arborescent formations in biohistory. But the problem
is surely more general than this. Organicist interpretations of ecosystemic
relations have been rife in (deep) ecology, culminating in Lovelock's Gaia
hypothesis. They are probably on the wane now, but their replacement by
more vague terms like "interconnectedness" (e.g. Fox 245t) looks less than
half-hearted in comparison with Deleuze and Guattari's onslaught against
the (notion of the) organism as such in Anti-Oedipus, one of whose central
theoretical terms is the body without organs. Similarly, Deleuze and
Guattari strenuously resist any concept of holism: the whole, far from
having any priority over the parts (either valuative or ontological) is
simply a part produced alongside other parts. And, despite some
similarities of their work to a kind of general systems theory, they distance
themselves from this through a refusal of even the idea of effective
functioning?8
Perhaps most basic of all, is the singular importance in Deleuze and
Guattari's work from 1972 onwards of the term "machine." Of course, as
Halsey carefully notes, Deleuze and Guattari's machines, especially their
desiring-machines, are not "purely mechanical" (40).29
Is this disjunction between Deleuze and (deep) ecology a merely
superficial or terminological one, or is there a substantive disagreement?
To answer this question will require something of a detour, starting out
from the observation that it was already true for Descartes that machines
were not purely mechanical.
Alistair Welchman 125
Descartes arrived at his historically dominant conception of nature
through a peculiar reversal of the intuitively obvious relation between
science and technology. This relation would normally be understood
analytically, in other words: the theoretical business of science will tell us
something about the way nature works, and technology, implemented by
engineers not scientists, will apply the theoretical understanding of science
to the fabrication of useful instruments, machines. For Descartes, this
relation is exactly reversed. His conception of science is parasitic upon his
understanding of technology. In particular, he formulated his mechanical
philosophy of nature as the object of scientific inquiry on the basis of his
observation of technical -machines, most especially the hydraulic statuary
in the royal gardens at Saint-Germain, which were themselves the products
not of a scientific but of an autonomously artisanal milieu. 3o
This leaves Descartes with a problem because the notion of a machine
is irreducibly· nonnative: its effectuation of a causal chain is to be
evaluated in terms of its performance of a function. As he admits in
Meditation 6: "A clock made of wheels and counter-weights follows all
the laws of nature no less closely when it has been badly constructed" (AT
VII: 84). As a machine, a clock is defined not just by the chain of causes it
embodies, but also by its functional consistency with something outside of
nature, i.e. a form of purposiveness. In the case of human or animal
bodies, this purposiveness must lie in God. So, even for Descartes,
machines, and hence nature, are not purely mechanical, but contain an
essential reference to a purposive or teleological realm. 31
Descartes' conceptual innovations are generally regarded as in part
responsible for the break between facts and values that underlies both
Moore's naturalistic fallacy and the difficulty of any more supple an
understanding of the relation between metaphysical naturalism and general
questions of axiology. His failure to effect this break cleanly however has
historically opened up the possibility of giving a naturalistic account of the
emergence of values in nature through the functioning of biological
organisms.
The phenomenological account weaves fact and value together on the
presupposition that nature is constituted as phenomenon out of
fundamentally human interests. In Heidegger, for instance, beings reveal
themselves most primordially as ready-to-hand, i.e. as already taken up in
a sphere of specifically human significances. By contrast the naturalist
critique of Descartes takes the realm of divine purposes that underlie the
mechanistic construal of nature, and gives a naturalistic account of just
those purposes. In Kant, for instance, machines are precisely distinguished
from organisms on the grounds that while the former have (as Descartes
126 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
argued) extrinsic purposiveness, the latter are intrinsically purposive, i.e.
they carry their purposes with them. Kant, famously, could give no
account of how this possible.32 But after Darwin it becomes easy to think
of organisms as positing value. Canguilhem, for instance, sees the calisal
pathways of organisms as incomprehensible in the absence of their
homeostatic regulatory functions (see The Normal and the Pathological
126, 131, 136). Thus it becomes possible to say that e.g. methane is of
value for methane-metabolizing bacteria because of the functional role it
plays in maintaining the existence of such entities.
It is important to note the difference between these two positions,
which can at times become subtle. In the phenomenological account we
(as phenomenological subjects or Dasein or whatever) construct "nature"
in accordance with our interests. It may still be true that this happens in the
naturalized account. If there is anything that it's like to be a methane-
metabolizing bacterium, then doubtless methane will appear valuable
within its phenomenology. While this example may seem fanciful, the
origin of the modern science of ethology was dominated by the work of
von Uexkiill who made exactly this move. Uexkiill emphasizes that
interest-relative life-worlds are constructed phenomenologically by all
organisms and have strikingly different saliencies so that the "same"
ensemble of objects will appear very differently to a human, a dog and a
tick. 33
Nevertheless, the naturalized account does not appeal to any projective,
world-constituting or phenomenological origin - not even to one of
Uexkiill's non-human phenomenologies -- for a valuative component in
nature. Rather, the crucial element is the sheer fact that there are systems,
usually understood as biological ones, whose conditions of existence
involve the effectuation of a differential valuation of segments of the
environment, in other words: living systems that posit values. It is not, in
other words, the values constructed phenomenologically from within such
systems that form the basis of a metaphysically naturalized conception of
valuation, but the existence of systems that do in fact posit values.
Still this does not seem to be enough to generate the valuative results
that deep ecology wants to infer from its metaphysical basis. It might be
possible to generate a naturalized conception of the interests of naturally
occurring systems on this metaphysical basis. But the interests concerned
are both inherently conservative (reminiscent of the first wave of
cybernetics) and appear to have only an oblique relation to our valuations
as human beings. Systems at various scales doubtless do have conditions
of existence interpretable as interest-relative valuations. But on what basis
ought I to respect these? It is not obvious. Indeed the phenomenology of
Alistair Welchman 127
such valuations in e.g. the case of predator-prey relations suggests that the
values one system posits may precisely be the abjection of another system.
There are possible answers to such questions, in for instance the -
sometimes now quite intricate - naturalistic ethics of evolutionary biology.
Such naturalistic approaches are no longer socially Darwinist: since the
1930s, work on inclusive fitness has shown how it is possible to develop
biologically based valuations that extend beyond the individual organism
to those that (may) share its genes. Still these fall short of even the
inclusion of all human beings, and so also fall short even of axiological
humanism (see Callicot).
Those deep ecologists like Callicot, who use this approach therefore
still need to appeal for a transformation of consciousness that will get us to
identify with not only non-kin but also non-human nature. Perhaps this can
be done. But the question remains: why should we engage in such a
process of identification? It cannot be just on the basis of the values
posited by life (the interest of a functional system is continuing to
function) since those values opened up the original gap that now needs to
be closed by identification. In other words: some extra valuation is also
required to motivate identification.
My hypothesis is that this further move can indeed be explained on the
basis of metaphysical naturalism, but only of a very specific kind.
Naturalizing the extrinsic Cartesian finality of machines through the
intrinsic finality of a living system yields a possible calculus of valuative
interests, but nothing more. What could motivate a transfonnative
identification with nahlre is not the mere fact that humans are a part of
nature, but the further claim that humans are, in some way, genuinely
metaphysically identical with (the rest of) nature.
An example of such a metaphysical naturalism is Schopenhauer's view
that individuated things (including organisms, and hence human beings)
possess, in addition to their material properties, a second, phenomenally
inaccessible, aspect: they are also wilL For Schopenhauer individuation
itself is inapplicable to the will (this is his famous and highly original
interpretation of the familiar doctrine of the freedom of the will: the will is
free not because it is capable of free choice, but because it is free of the
form of individuation, the principium individuationis). It follows from this
that the will in itself is neither singular nor plural. For Schopenhauer
therefore it is false to say that each of us has a will. Rather each of us (and
evelY separate entity in non-human nature too) is at the same time the
same non-singular, non-plural, non-individuated wilL
Schopenhauer characterizes the will as endless striving: striving
because it is willing; endless because if it had an end or aim or purpose,

128 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
there would be something separate from it. Here Schopenhauer introduces
the idea of a transformed nature that acts, but neither in accordance with a
chain of causes nor on the basis of a purposiveness alien to it. This is the
idea of a nature whose activity is properly immanent to it. From these
resources it would be possible to construct a rigorous critique of the
naturalization of purposes on the basis that this naturalization uncritically
accepts the non-natural purposes posited e.g. by Descartes and merely
asserts that just those kinds of purposes can be given a naturalistic account
without going further and interrogating the structure of purposiveness
itself.
Of course endless striving without aim or purpose is a fonn of
suffering, and Schopenhauer does not shrink from the implication that
existence is, at a basic level, pain. Only at the level of individuated entities
(what Schopenhauer calls the level of aspect of representation) does the
will will anything in particular: each entity wills to sustain itself in what
Schopenhauer calls the will to life. Each thing then posits the continuation
of life as a value and perfonns an appropriate selection on its environment
as a result. 34 But each of us is at the same time will, and hence
metaphysically identical with the other. As a result, the direct values of
self-maintenance posited by life are metaphysically superficial: when I
pursue my interests at your expense, when I assert my (personal) will
against yours, I forget that I am really (at the deeper metaphysical level
underneath the nature of mere representation) the velY same will that you
are and hence I really attack myself - or more accurately: I act as an
instrument by means of which the will attacks itself.
Je suis la plaie et Ie couteau!
Je suis Ie soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les members et la roue,
Et la victime et Ie bourreau!
[I am the wound and the lmife!
1 am the blow and the cheek!
1 am the members and the wheel,
The victim and the executionerl]35
This metaphysical identity provides the missing link between a
naturalistic account of non-human interests on the basis of organic
functioning and the need for a transfonned consciousness. The affinities
with deep ecological thought here are clear, and indeed the metaphysically
naturalist and anti-humanist ethics of Mit/eid (sympathy) that
Schopenhauer develops from this shades into a mysticism of self-denial
-Ai~
Alistair Welchman 129
II
.!j.
'.
explicitly influenced by the philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads.
It seems to me that only something like this can meditate between the
location of valuation in the self-sustenance or Self-realization36 of the
individual natural system and an analogue of Kant's "universalization"
requirement, that we (as humans) recognize and value these valuations. It
is because "I is another" that it makes sense to identifY with the interests of
self-unfolding natural systems taken as a whole. 37
Now Deleuze's relation to deep ecology can be made clear, for Deleuze
is the inheritor of the Schopenhauerian intellectual tradition, but only in a
significantly modified fmm, that is, modified by Nietzsche's critique of
Schopenhauer. Deleuze follows Schopenhauer in having a metaphysically
enriched conception of nature, distinct from the interest-relative
phenomena of phenomenology as well as from tlte interest-neutral terms of
scientific discourse. But he follows Nietzsche in rejecting the
presuppositions of the morality of sympathy that underlie Schopenhauer's
rationale for our identification with nature as a whole, and hence also, the ;
ground for recognition of the interests of functioning systems in
maintaining their own functioning. This presupposition is that existence is
fundamentally pain, and hence of little value. Schopenhauer's thought
makes a clear bridge between a. fmm of anti-humanist metaphysical
naturalism and an anti-humanist axiology. But, for Nietzsche, it is the
value of this axiology that must be brought into question on the basis of
the value of life. 38
What does this mean? Deleuze's interpretation is in tenns of difference,
both as ultimate value and metaphysically basic constituent. The idea is
that conservative (i.e. homeostatic or purely self-conserving and merely
self-regulatory) systems have a tendency to dissipate. They may for
instance be subject to the ratchet effect, where eventual minor
dysfunctions accumulate to the point of breakdown because a conservative
system has no way to reverse such changes. The cuhnination of tltis
tendency is the second law of thermodynamics and the eventual
achievement of irreversible thermal equilibrium. Life, in so far as it resists
this tendency, requires and produces differences (e.g. the pool of variation
of Darwinian evolution). This is the sense that Deleuze gives to
Nietzsche's eternal return, understood as a principle of selection.
Conservative systems (based on identity) cannot return because, without
difference, they will eventually corrode down to nothing; only difference
can return because it is what enables even the identical to resist
dissipation. But for difference to return is for "it" to return not as the same,
but precisely as different. 39
130 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
By his later and collaborative work, the rather dIy-sounding
philosophical distinction between the different and the identical had
morphed into the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent types of
system discussed above. But the Nietzschean principle of evaluation and
selection is still operative. It is rhizomatic systems that capture difference
so as to act in a maximally exploratory way. Integrity (identity, self-
maintenance etc.) has a completely secondaIY relation: it is affinned to the
extent that it is necessary for the promotion of rhizomatic exploration. This
is the reason for Deleuze's hostility to functional coherence (organisms,
functioning, finality, holism etc.). In the polemical first volume of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, he and Guattari prosecute Nietzsche's
revaluation of values with a maximum of rigor, attacking all residual
derivatives of identity; and, while the second volume is apparently more
conciliatory, this is in fact a purely pragmatic response to the contention
that some level of integrity may be required for the production of more
difference. 4o
This is where Deleuze's conception of the machine finds its place. An
assemblage (a "system" constituted out of intrinsically different or
heterogeneous parts) is machinic at its most extremely deterritorialized
edge, namely the point at which it is most in contact with a maximum
number of other assemblages, at which it is maximally. abstract in the
sense previously elaborated. 41 This is the point at which its exploratory
behavior produces a new source of differences, e.g. the metabolic
creativity of bacteria or the chemical creativity of protein synthesis or the
expressive creativity of language.
Machinic selection or valuation for Deleuze is therefore distinct from
the implicit valuation of the machine in which Descartes found himself
embroiled. Descartes makes all valuative judgments (including those of
purpose or function) into essentially secondary qualities, projections of
human mental capacities. It is possible to naturalize such capacities into
the notion of the organism as intrinsically rather than extrinsically
purposive; but in so doing, one retains both the ideas of extended (nature)
and thinking things (human mental capacities) in substantially the same
forms. The valuative commitments of this strategy are correspondingly
conservative, favoring self-interested (i.e. self-maintaining) systems and
the values they necessarily posit.
Deleuze's conception of machinic valuation is both metaphysically and
axiologically anti-humanist, but quite different from the deep ecological
view that natural systems have an interest in Self-realization. Machinic
valuation does not represent selection based on anything remotely
approximating interests; but rather the selection of systems that are
Alistair Welchman 131
interesting, in the quite specific sense of optimally productive of
exploratory novelty.
Notes
1 In Arne Naess and George Sessions' canonical "Platform Principles of the Deep
Ecology Movement," the first principle reads: "The well-being and flourishing of
human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic
value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the
nonhuman world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Naess in ,
.,
particular has tried to distance himself from any theory of intrinsic values in the
style of analytic philosophy, and has instead emphasized a kind of "ordinary
language" use of the term. See (Naess "Intrinsic Value" and Fox's discussion
(22 It). In some ways the distinction seems misplaced because many analytic
philosophers use the terms "value" and "right" precisely to express the distinction
between value in general (axiology) and specifically moral rightness.
2 Kant's position is that only rational beings possess intrinsic value, because they
have (possibly) good wills. Strictly speaking this includes rational aliens and
rational supernatural beings like angels or god. I shall iguore these possibilities in
what follows. See Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals).
3 Naess claims that "The ecosophies will, I suppose, be absorbed in the general
traditions of philosophy of nature (NatUiphilosophie)" (Ecology, Community and
Lifestyle 210).
4 See the pieces by Acampora, Hallman and Halsey as well as Patrick
Hayden's essay in this present volume. Bennett also makes use of Deleuze in her
attempt to establish a kind of "active" theory of matter. Her references to ecology
though are largely limited to its systems theoretic aspect rather than its "deep"
aspect.
5 In The New Ecological Order, Ferry locates Descartes' metaphysical
discontinuity between human beings and nature at the origin of the axiological
discontinuity constitutive of humanism that he rightly associates with Kant and
Sartre (see e.g. 3ft).
6 Naess' analysis of such a transformation in his conception of "identification"
("Spinoza and Ecology" 36ft). Fox's Towards and Transpersonal Ecology is a
book-length attempt to orient deep ecology in terms derived from the then-
fashionable transpersonal psychological analysis of Abraham Maslow. See
especially pages 225ff for a wealth of evidence that this transformative approach is
widespread among deep ecologists. .,
7 Fox claims that there are three grounds for identification with wider nature:
personal contact, ontological and cosmological (249ft). The last of these involves
an acknowledgement of the claim that we are all "aspects of a single unfolding
reality" (252). .
8 It is of course also standard for Ideologiekritiker to argue that the concept of
"nature" is often deployed itself for ideological reasons, i.e. to present social
choices as inevitable. Indeed this may be the basic formula for all ideology. I will
132 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
address this issue below, but here the point is that such distorted conceptions of
nature presuppose the at least possible accessibility of an undistorted conception of
nature.
9 Heidegger has been repeatedly appropriated as an ecological thinker. See, for
instance, Zimmerman ("Toward a Heideggerian Ethos"). Zimmerman regards
Heidegger as a robust realist ("What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to
Environmentalism?" 217), citing Glazebrook. While not personally endorsing this
interpretation of Heidegger, it does have the merit of making it clear that
Heidegger wants to correct a distortion in our understanding of nature. Other, more
canonical, interpreters of Heidegger have also given him an environmental gloss,
see Wood (2001) who coins the term "ecopheneomenology."
10 Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is already a proto-
ecological tract in that their critique of the Enlightenment and its self-destructive
obsession with the "mastery of nature" (xvi) creates a "disenchantment" (3) of
nature, i.e. a false (ideological) conception of nature (and our relation to it) that can
be, in principle, subject to Ideologiekritik and corrected.
II In his "Letter on Humanism" from 1947, Heidegger writes "As a form of truth
technology [Technics] is grounded in the history of metaphysics, ... which is itself
a distinctive and up to now the only perceptible phase of the history of Being"
(220).
12 One can see how far this goes for Horkheimer and Adorno in the theme of the
second essay of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Odysseus, or Myth and
Enlightenment" (43-80). Although their constant allusions to the Weberian notion
of disenchantment suggest that they agree with Weber that it was Descartes who
radically instrumentalized modern culture, they nevertheless argue that the
deployment of myth in Homer's Odysseus is already instrumental in conception.
Thus to find a model for a non-instrumental relation to nature, one would already
have to go back beyond the muthos / logos distinction.
13 Heidegger writes: "In order that we may even remotely consider the
monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is
spoken by the two titles: 'The Rhine,' as dammed up into the power works, and
'The Rhine,' as uttered by the art work, in HOlder lin's hymn by that name' (297).
14 Descartes' theory of perception involves both a mental component and a physical
component: stimulation of nerve sites causes infonnation to be transfen'ed to the
brain where (at some point) it is converted into something of which we are
conscious, a "sensing," of which he writes "But this [sensing] precisely so taken, is
nothing other than thinking" (Meditations 29). In Meditation 6 he describes
sensations e.g. of hunger or thirst as "nothing but confhsed modes of thinking"
(81).
15 This is the upshot of the famous 2
nd
Meditation (Meditations 23-34) in which
Descartes shows that there are two substances in the universe, and that human
beings are (essentially) one substance (thinking substance) and evetything else
(including the human body) is extended substance or matter.
16 In Meditation 6 Descartes claims that there are indeed "differences
corresponding to the different perceptions" of secondary qualities like colour, but
that these differences "do not resemble" our perceptions of them (Meditations 81).
Alistair Welchman 133
17 Heidegger writes that "Dasein's characters of Being are defined in terms of
existeniality, we call them 'existentialia'. These are to be sharply distinguished
from what we call 'categories'-characteristics of Being for entities whose
character is not that of Dasein" (Being and Time §9, 44).
18 Kant's critique of Descartes' conception of the self as a thinking thing takes place
in the "Paralogisms" section of the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason
(A348ffIB413ft). In §10 of Being and Time, Heidegger also mentions the
"reification" (46) of the subject in Descartes and goes on to give an analysis of
Max Scheler's (Kantian) attempt to distinguish persons from things (47-8) in which
he is clearly approving, while at the same time maintaining that the various
positive characterizations of the Being of persons (Dasein, in his terminology), e.g.
"soul" or "spirit" or even "subject," have all been flawed. Later he makes it clear
why: "Even if one rejects the 'soul substance'· and the thinghood of consciousness,
or denies that a person is an object [i.e. one takes Kant's critique on board],
onto logically one is still positing something whose Being retains the meaning of
present-at-hand, whether it does so explicitly or not" (§25, 114). In other words:
Kant's critique does not go far enough in undoing the reification of Dasein, even
terms like 'subject' are thought on the basis ofthe categories, that is, on the basis of
the kind of being that entities unlike Dasein have.
19 Ferry is quite clear about this, defining the humanist era in Kantian terms, as
involving a conception of human beings able to set aside their whole natural being:
as he terms it "Antinatural Man" (3ft).
20 The term "metaphysical" is highly freighted in Heideggerian thought: it is the
nexus of philosophical concepts characteristic of the West, which Heidegger wants
to overturu or reinvigorate, but increasingly finds this task impossible, perhaps
necessarily so. My use of the term is simply to distinguish prima facie non-
axiological from axiological claims and I do not want to enter this complex
Heideggerian debate on either side.
21 In the interview "Truth and Power," Foucault distinguishes between sciences
with a "low" and a "high epistemological profile" and confines his project to the
former (109).
22 Sarkar describes, for instance, the classification of stochastic models of
population growth as "a striking exemplar of the social determination of science."
23 See MacInttyre's "disquieting suggestion" at the beginning (It) of his After
Virtue that the social conditions required for even the perception of virtues have
been eradicated and compare with Heidegger's claim that after Descartes scission
of the world into extended and thinking things, we try to bridge the gap using
"value-predicates" - but "Adding on value-predicates cannot tell us anything at all
new about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods have
pure presence-af-hand as their kind ofBeing" (Being and Time §20, 99).
24 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues, following Duns Scotus, that Being
j
i
i
is "univocal" (35). In A Thousand Plateaus he infers a pluralism from this monism
according to the equation "PLURALISM = MONISM" (20).
25 For all this see A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 1. Deleuze and Guattari use the
biological model of arborescence (10, complicated by viruses) and contrast
134 Deleuze and Deep Ecology
(arbors cent) models based on filiation with (rhizomatic) ones based on "alliance,
uniquely alliance" (25).
26 Schopenhauer compares such conceptual classifications to a mosaic, which can
approximate reality to any given degree of accuracy, but can never quite match up
to it because the mosaic pieces must always have edges, where reality does not
(see Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. 1, §12, 93-4).
27 See their critique of Chomsky's linguistic models, which are "not too abstract
but, on the contrary, ... not abstract enough, ... they do not reach the abstract
machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of
statements" (A Thousand Plateaus 7).
28 A Thollsand Plateaus borrows the term "plateau" from Bateson (21-2). In Anti-
Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that "in desiring-machines everything
functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and
failures, stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that
never succeeds in bringing its various parts together" (42).
29 It must be noted however that Halsey's assimilation of Deleuze and Guattari to
"conceptual-scheme"-type linguistics (where reality is a flux essentially
ungraspable by any linguistic terms, which therefore do intrinsic violence to
reality) does not really do justice to their break with structuralism.
30 Descartes mentions the fountain at the royal gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Leyes
in the "Treatise on Man" (AT X: 131-2).
31 It is this that prompts Canguilhem to remark that "The mechanistic conception of
the body is no less anthropomorphic, despite appearances, than the teleological
conception ofthe world" ("Machine and Organism" 64).
32 Kant distinguishes between "relative" and "inner" purposes in §61 of the
Critique of Judgement (212f) and shows his skepticism about the possibility of a
properly scientific biology when he declares that "it is absurd ... to hope that
another Newton will arise in the fhture who shall make comprehensible ... the
froduction of a blade of grass" (§75, 248).
3 See von UexkUll's "Stroll through the Worlds of Men and Animals." Von
Uexkiill founded the Institut fiir Umweltforschung at the University of Hamburg,
one of the first. Interestingly enough, his term for the biologically constructed
worlds of animals was Umwelten or environments.
34 Von UexkUll's debt to Kant is well-known (see his Theoretical Biology) but it
would be interesting to speculate to what his notion of interest-specific and action-
relative perception owes to Schopenhauer's conception of knowledge subordinated
to the will.
35 Charles Baudelaire "L'Heautontimoroumenos" (poem LXXXIII in Les Fleurs du
Mal).
36This is Naess' preferred term (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 196f).
37 Rimbaud declared that "I is another" (345). Thus transformative identification
with nature has practical consequences only on the supposition of a kind of
egoism: the more people identifY with wider nature, the less they will be likely to
harm it, presumably for the same reasons people don't generally harm themselves:
self-interest.
Alistair Welchman 135
38 An analysis of Nietzsche's relation to Schopenhauer (independent of Deleuze's
appropriation of it) is beyond the scope of this paper. It is worth noting however
that even by 1872 in The Birth of Tragedy's analysis of epic (§§3-4) Nietzsche is,
in the notion of a Greek optimism based on a profound sensitivity to pain,
contesting Schopenhauer's valuations even while still accepting its metaphysical
outlook.
39 This interpretation is laid out in detail in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition,
Chapter 5.
40 Deleuze and Guattari's implicit critique of Anti-Oedipus is given primarily in A
Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 6, where they claim that "you don't reach the BwO
[body without organs] ... by wildly destratifYing ... the worst that can happen is if
you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse" (160-1).
41 "Whenever a terntona . . I assembl age IS . taken up by a movement that
deterritorializes it ... we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the
distinction we would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine
is like the set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage
undergoing deterritorialization and draw variations and mutations of it" (A
Thousand Plateaus 333).
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138 Deleuze and Deep Ecology

- . "What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?"

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HERCULES OF THE SURFACE:
2004): 207-30. DELEUZIAN HUMANISM AND DEEP ECOLOGY

EDWARD P. BUTLER

Alcmaeon says that humans die for this reason, that they cannot join the
beginning [arc he] to the end [telas].
-pseudo-Aristotle, Prablemata 17. 3. 916a33

Proponents of deep ecology, in attempting to articulate a metaphysics

in support of their core intuitions, have seemingly managed instead to
provide openings for critics whose attacks, though often facile, have begun
for lack of an effective philosophical response to pass for conventional
wisdom. Particularly damaging, although least accurate, has been the
claim that deep ecology, because it opposes anthropocentrism, is thereby
incompatible with humanism. In its cruder forms, this argument is simply
a straw man, confiating non-anthropocentrism with misanthropy, whereas
the first principle in the deep ecology platform states, "The well-being and
flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have a value in
themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-
human world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Ecosophists
are far from failing to honor the human qua human; Arne Naess, the
founder of deep ecology, affirms that "[t]he richness of reality is becoming
even richer through our specific human endowments; we are the first kind
of living beings we know of which have the potentialities of living in
community with all other living beings" (Sessions 239). The charge that
deep ecology seeks to undennine the structures of nonnativity is itself
undermined by Naess, when he plainly states that "the significant tenets of
the Deep Ecology movement are clearly and forcefully normative"
(Sessions 154). The charge that the principles of deep ecology are
somehow irreconcilable with nonnativity is a different one altogether, and
goes rather to the question of mistakes ecosophists have made in
attempting to articulate those principles in a metaphysical structure.
More salient is the criticism from friendly quarters (see, e.g., the
critique of deep ecology in Hayden 126-8) that the metaphysics of deep
ecology would dissolve individual living beings into an unmediated unity

1
140 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
with Nature conceived as a totalizing super individual. At its worst, this
has amounted to a regrettable marriage of bad Spinoza and bad Vedanta,
and would undermine the basic deep ecology thesis of the intrinsic value
of living beings as species and as individuals. It is instructive in this
respect to contrast the view of nature Deleuze traces to Spinoza and
ultimately to the ancient atomists. According to Deleuze, what matters in
Spinoza's thought "is no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but
rather the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all
bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated" (Spinoza 122). For the
atomists, nature is not a totalizing super-organism but "an infinite sum,
that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements ... a sum, but not a
whole" (Logic of Sense 267). Nature exists purely as "the principle of the
diverse and its production," and "a principle of the production of the
diverse makes sense only if it does not assemble its own elements into a
whole" (266). Since the thesis of intrinsic value makes no sense without
intrinsic difference, it is clear that this concept of miture is better suited to
the purposes of deep ecology than one in which difference is denied.
Accordingly, this essay offers suggestions toward a Deleuzian
metaphysics of deep ecology incorporating basic elements of the deep
ecology program, in patticular the thesis of intrinsic value, into a post-
anthropocentric humanism.
I. Ethics and the Plane of Immanence
The notion of a preconceptual plane of immanence which is the
principle of individuation for concepts, subjects and facts alike could be
considered Deleuze's philosophical first principle. 1 A plane of immanence,
Deleuze explains, is "the image thought gives itself of what it means to
think," which "retains only what thought can claim by right," i.e.
"movement that can be carried to infinity" (What is Philosophy? 37).
Deleuze characterizes such an "infinite movement" as expressing the
"reversibility" of thinking and being: "movement is not the image of
thought without also being the substance of being ... The plane of
immanence has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as
Physis" (38). A plane of immanence is not itself immanent to something,
to any subject or object, but rather is a selection of "diagrammatic" or
"infinite" movements yielding a field of concepts (pertaining to thinking
and to being), on the one hand, and facts (whether subjective "lived
contents" or objective "states of affairs"), on the other. The plane of
immanence as such, which is proper to philosophy taken in the widest
possible sense, has complex relationships with other planes of formation,
..,
.
Edward P. Butler 141
such as the artistic "plane of composition" and the scientific "plane of
reference," with which the present essay will not be concemed. The plane
of immanence is germane to the present discussion because it is the site of
normativity and provides the possibility of a Deleuzian ethics. Deleuze's
ethics depends upon the idea of a comparability of planes of immanence
based upon theirintensive complexity, that is, the diversity of individuals
and modes of individuation they are able to encompass, not in empty
universality, but in concrete and mutually sustaining relationships.
In the moral framework Deleuze develops from his reading of
Spinoza,2 all acts are in themselves equally natural, equally perfect, and in
that respect morally neutral, but this equality does not apply to the agents
of these acts, the modal essences to which they are ascribable. In this
model of action, the good act is one which brings the relations constitutive
of the agent into "composition,,3 with the relations constitutive of another
being, and such an act augments the agent's power of acting, while the evil
act, insofar as it decomposes the relations characteristic bf some other
being, diminishes the actor's very agency. The equality of acts from the
standpoint of nature expresses the fact that there are only really relations
of composition, insofar as it is only of these that there are adequate ideas,
i.e., ideas that express their causes rather than indicating affections. Nature
is thus, metaphysically speaking, intrinsically good, although it is by no
means good for all things at all times: thus, there is an "agreement"
between a poison and the new disposition it produces in the body, but not
between that disposition and the organism's preservation.
From this perspective, beings do not decompose one another qua
beings, and so insofar as there is an adequate idea of the evil act it must
belong to a different being, a more universal one, as Deleuze explains:
[C]onsider bodies agreeing less and less, or bodies opposed to one another:
their constitutive relations can no longer be directly combined, but present
such differences that any resemblance between the bodies appears to be
excluded. There is still however a similarity or community of composition,
but this from a more and more general viewpoint which, in the limit,
brings Nature as a whole into play ... As all relations are combined in
Nature as a whole, Nature presents a similarity of composition that may be
seen in all bodies from the most general viewpoint. (Expressionism 275)
The "agreement" between the poison and the consequent disposition of
the body is a chemical composition but a biological decomposition, just
like the reduction of a living thing to its raw materials, either by a physical
or an intellectual process. The latter may in tum enter into relations of
cultural composition, just as the fonner may enter into the composition of
142 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
a spider. We can come to grasp the reality underlying the processes of
generalization constihltive of the "biological" or the "cultural" as such
through the detours of the understanding necessitated by these complex
relationships of decomposition and composition:
[E]ven in the case of a body that does not agree with our own, and affects
us with sadness, we can form an idea of what is common to that body and
our own; the common notion will simply be very universal, implying a
much more general viewpoint than that of the two bodies confronting each
other. It has nonetheless a practical function: it makes us understand why
these two bodies in particular do not agree from their own viewpoint.
(285f)
The language of "viewpoints" here can make it seem as though there is
no more at stake than a matter of perspective, but in fact it is a matter of
individuation itself. In Deleuze's reading of Spinozist ontology, the
individuation of modal essences depends wholly upon their realization in
existence-this is clearly a primary reason for Deleuze's preference of
Spinoza over Leibniz. Deleuze sees the two philosophers as "radically
opposed" on this issue:
In Leibniz an essence or individual notion is a logical possibility,
inseparable from a certain metaphysical reality, that is, from a "claim to
existence," a tendency to exist. In Spinoza this is not the case: an essence is
not a possibility, but possesses a real existence that belongs to it itself ...
Neither a metaphysical reality nor a logical possibility, the essence of a
mode is a pure physical reality. Modal essences therefore, no less than
existing modes, have efficient causes. (193)
Deleuze argues that Spinoza's modal essences are intrinsically distinct
while denying that they are possibilities subsisting a priori in a divine
intellect. Their intrinsic distinction, their individuation, is instead
irreducibly existential-and hence assimilated by Deleuze to the atomic
"swerve", or clinamen, which he refers to as "a kind of conatus" (Logic of
Sense 269). This intrinsic and yet existential individuation expresses for
Deleuze the peculiarly Spinozist sense of eternity: "The eternity of
essence," Deleuze explains, "does not come afterwards; it is strictly
contemporaneous, coexistent with existence in duration" (Spinoza 40)--
neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous: "You do not know
beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know
beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given
arrangement, a given combination" (Spinoza 125).
Edward P. Butler 143
The value of this ontological perspective for Deleuze is that it renders
existence "a physical or chemical test, an experimentation" (40) in which
the essence of a mode expresses itself through the unique composition of
extensive parts belonging to it in duration and the combinations it enters
into, which are eternal although they happen in duration. There is a real
genesis in time of the essence which is nevertheless truly eternal.
Individuation-which is inseparable from essentialization-is thus
fundamentally ethical:
If during our existence we have been able to compose these parts so as to
increase our power of "acting, we have at the same time experienced a
proportionally greater number of affections that depend only on ourselves,
that is, on the intense part of ourselves. If, on the contrary, we have always
been engaged in destroying or decomposing our own parts and those of
others, our intense or eternal part, our essential part, has and cannot help
but have only 11 small number of affections that come from itself, and no
happiness that depends on it. This is the ultimate difference, therefore,
between the good man and the bad man: the good or strong individual is
the one who exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his
lifetime. (41)
"Death is all the more necessary," Deleuze explains, "because it always
comes from without" (42). But this exterior is defined wholly according to
the limits of the plane of immanence constirnted by an essence. "That a
man, from the necessity of his own narnre, should endeavour to become
non-existent, is as impossible as that something should be made out of
nothing" (Ethics IV, Prop. XX), Spinoza states. The individual in this
respect is absolutely atomic, but there are individuals-or "bodies"--of
many different orders and thus, as Deleuze memorably remarks, "the
interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior a projected interior"
(Spinoza 125) -cf. the description of the plane of immanence as "the not-
external outside and the not-internal inside" (What is Philosophy? 59f).
Death is defined for an essence, not by its interior limitations, but by the
interior it projects.
In the plane of immanence constirnted by Narnre itself there is no
nonbeing (Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 38f); but for individual essences
the sirnation is very complicated. Since all particular essences are
comprised in the production of each (Expressionism 198), the
individuation of each involves, by definition, a normative disposition to all
the individuals in every order of being, and produces itself in and through
this nonnative or ethical disposition, indeed as this ethical disposition. The
fullness or intensity of such an individual essence can, in tum, be
measured by the criterion of the diversity of wills compossible with it,
144 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology Edward P. Butler 145

with death expressing the essence's limits of compossibility, a limitation embodied in Pico della Mirandola's description of humanity as the
which is not passive but in effect an active negation or exclusion by which indefinite essence (on which see below, sec. III).
it defines itself. The more perfect essence, the more living essence, is that The recognition of intrinsic value thus does not mean that one does not
in which the greater diversity of wills is compossible, individuation make relative value judgments, but rather that the judgment is explicit and
according to such an essence generating a plane of immanence with a the costs of the choices not hidden. Valuing other individuals in and
greater intensive complexity. Individuation involves the recognition and through the concrete relationships I establish with them, I individuate
articulation of the diverse orders of being. myself. But this valuation has itself no assignable value if it does not begin
from the recognition of intrinsic value, for it is only against this
background, with these stakes, that thought and action can themselves be
II. Intrinsic Value and Valuation ethically measured or valued. Similarly, in questions of culture to
We now possess the tools for an appraisal of deep ecology as a plane recognize that cultural fOlmations have an intrinsic value is not to c~ase
of immanence. The most fundamental principle of deep ecology is the making value judgments concerning them and their effects· it is rather to
thesis of intrinsic value. As Arne Naess remarks in his essay, "Equality, begin making value judgments about them explicitly rather' than' obscuring
Sameness, and Rights," them. The way in which to make these choices coherent is to understand
t~at our own essenc~ and individuation depend upon the harmony or
I have injured thousands of individuals of the tiny arctic plant, Salix dIssonance we establIsh between the different orders of being at whose
herbacea, during a ten-year period of living in the high mountains of nexus we exist and act; and on this point the Deleuzian ethic of
Norway, and I shall feel forced to continue stepping on them as long as I individuation and the deep ecology ethic of intrinsic value are functionally
live there. But I have never felt the need to justify such behavior by indistinguishable.
thinking that they have less of a right to live and blossom (or that they have While affirming the intrinsic value of species and individuals Naess
less intrinsic value as living beings) than other living beings, including cites the "rich variety of acceptable motives for being more relu~tant to
myself. (Sessions 223) injure or kill a l~ving being of kind A rather than a being of kind B," as
well as the paUCIty of general nonns for this sort of decision: "The more
Notice that Naess's recognition of the intrinsic value of the plant does
narrow and specific the questions posed, the less vagueness there will be"
not force him to stop treading on them. As he states elsewhere, "We might
~Se~s~ons 224). General norms individuate whole orders of being, while
agree upon rules such as will imply different behaviour towards different
~ndlVlduals must ?e ~ealt with to the greatest degree of specificity possible
kinds of living beings without negating that there is a value inherent in
If we are to do Justice to them, and the orders of being which must be
living beings which is the same value for all" (Naess 168). The recognition
taken into account in such ethical judgments are diverse. Here is where a
that beings having the same value will not be valued the same is thus the
kind of phenomenological practice makes sense. As Naess remarks in a
threshold of an ethical maturity. The anthropocentric hypothesis that the
paper on the philosophy of wolf management, discerning the possibilities
plant only has value insofar as it serves some human purpose, whether
for "mixed communities" of humans and other animals is more important
material or aesthetic, obscures the moment of valuation by presenting it,
than the abstract concept of "a general 'life community' embracing all
not as an existential choice, but as something given by virtue of a reified
kinds of life" (Naess and Mysterud 24). Fundamental nonns such as
human essence. Thus Luc Ferry, in attempting to articulate his own
"severe suffering endured by a living being x is of no less negative value
anthropocentric environmental ethic in opposition to deep ecology, calls
than severe suffering endured by a living being y, whatever the species or
upon us to create "a phenomenology of human signs in nahlre ... to obtain
population of:c and y" (26) have an operative value particularly when they
a clear awareness of that which can and must be valued in it" (l43).The
can help to ShIft the terms in which a dispute is conducted. For example, as
achml moment of valuing nature has here been reduced to finding signs in
Naess points out, "wolf enthusiasts" may not always take seriously enough
nature of a reified human essence. The role of thought itself is thus
the suffering of sheep attacked by wolves and the effects of such attacks
devalued inasmuch as it is reduced to the anthropomorphic representation
on entire herds. Taking up the issue in these terms does not resolve the
of humanity instead of its production, the labor of the spirit which was
dispute, but it individuates the sheep as objects of ethical regard
146 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
irrespective of the outcome, emiching a debate which might otherwise
only value them economically and aligning argumentation with ontology.
Another general' norm articulated by Naess in relation to wolf
management is that "Humans have an obligation not to place their
domestic animals in a situation where there is a significant risk of severe
suffering." Here the general norm makes the specific relationship of
domesticity an object of ethical regard. The degree to which there can be
an adequate idea, in the Spinozist sense, of the relationship of
"domesticated animal" must be assessed in such an ethical inquiry; that is,
the degree to which there is something in the machine of domestication
which transcends mere domination. Insofar as there are species which
exist in no other fashion than in the relationship of domestic animal, there
is some degree of "composition", in the Spinozist term, in this relation.
The powers and limitations of such a machine become apparent when it is
put to the ethical test. The responsibility incumbent upon humans in this
relationship may require, in the specific situation, hiring shepherds to
protect the sheep, in which the machine of domestication meets a threat
from its exterior-the wild predator-by intensifYing: the shepherd brings
domesticated dogs to guard the domesticated sheep. But the limitations of
the domestication machine are explicit in its projected exterior, the wild
predator, for whom-just as for the human consumer-the domesticated
animal is decomposed into a mere captive food source. The wild predator,
at the same time, is a pestilential, chaotic outsider from the viewpoint
interior to the relationship of domestication, due to the impossibility of
constituting the ethical relationship characteristic of humans and their
domesticated animals with respect to the wild animal-and which may
suggest the limitations of the attempt to constitute an ecological ethic
based on the concept of "stewardship."
Rather than an abstract concept, or, worse, a mystical construct,
intrinsic value can thus be seen as a kind of regulative ideal. Furthermore,
it can be applied beyond the confines of ecology in the narrow sense. Felix
Guattari posited three ecologies, pertaining to the environment, social
relations and human subjectivity respectively. The constihltion of planes
of immanence permitting the richest intensive complexity corresponds to
what Guattari calls "singularization" or, in many cases, "re-
singularization." Guattari's notion of singularization has been perversely
conflated by certain critics (e.g., Ferry) with nationalistic chauvinism or
even with racism and fascism, or simply with a relativism incapable of
critique, but these criticisms fail to understand that the ethic of
singularization is applied at every level, not just on the level of
nationalities. The ethic of singularization in fact represents the apex of
Edward P. Butler 147
individual rights, insofar as it demands that we secure to the degree
possible all of the' existential territories which empower individuals in
pursuing their life projects. This necessarily involves both the preservation
of tradition as well as the liberation from it. Moreover, the ceaseless effort
to strengthen diversity in every cultural field as well as in every order of
being guarantees the relentless subversion of hegemonies. Hegemonic
ideologies will always continue to exist; but where their natural
antagonists flourish, hegemonic ideologies are forced back upon their own
existential territories, their opportunities for expansion curtailed. The truly
effective critique of hegemonic ideologies comes not from countervailing
universalizing discourses~ but from their own projected exteriors, which
undermine them existentially and locally rather than attempting to co-opt
them through overcoding. The projected exterior is both exterior and
interior; thus, for example, a projected exterior of religious fundamentalism
is esoterism or occultism, interior to fundamentalism inasmuch as they
share the latter's intensive cultivation of the text, but repressed for their
recourse to transfonnation. 4
As a broad ethical perspective, recognizing the diversity of the orders
of being means recognizing that the way we make value judgments differs
in different orders according to the different ways in which we participate
in them. In a society that is our own, we speak and are understood and
seek change from within. With the power we possess in social institutions
comes an ethical demand to act on a scale commensurate with our personal
influence. The more central we are in such a social group the more action
is demanded of us and the less restraint, insofar as we playa larger share
in constituting the group itself. Where we are peripheral, or an outsider,
we have nevertheless a role to play, but there is much we cannot do or
which it would be unwise to attempt. At the limits one could say we act on
the basis of a common humanity; but this universal is really just a place-
holder for whatever degree of understanding has already been established
between myself and the other prior to the exchange-if there were a more
specific basis for the intervention, one would not appeal to such a
universal. The universal thus expresses the sphere of interest in which we
engage the other-recall that in Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, recourse to
the universal implies the relationship of antagonism or decomposition
between individuals.
In the relation to the other animal, there is also a universal, a common
animality presupposed in the encounter and embodying relations
established in many cases prior to our thematic awareness-the perception
of, e.g., living motility being phenomenologically very primitive. The type
of universal to be deployed here is not that which is formed by subtracting
148 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
differentiae, but that which is integral in each individual, and is
transcendent in just this fashion-e.g., the Platonic autozoion, "Animal
Itself', which is "one and visible, containing within itself all animals
which are by nature cognate with it" (Timaeus 30 D).5 The wider sphere of
interest expressed by this animality means that the most basic elements of
value must hold proportionally more weight. Issues of physical integrity,
habitat preservation, and so forth, thus necessarily dominate our ethical
engagement with the non-human animal. When dealing with our fellow
humans, by contrast, we feel free to override these matters for the sake of
cultural concerns. Humans choose to make war with one another over such
matters and it does not surprise us much when they sacrifice their physical
integrity to an ideal. We cannot expect someone else to sacrifice herself
for our ideal, however; and a fortiori we cannot ask this of another
species. For we could ask the other's sacrifice as the price of being a
member of our community, and upon acceptance a certain agreement
would have been reached. However, no agreement is ever made solely
among its immediate participants, and thus no social contract or compact
achieves real, but only ideal or hypothetical closure. This failure of closure
means that everyone has something to say about everyone· else's culture.
But to a member of another species we can only offer very limited
participation, the "mixed community" of humans and other animals
usually being defined more by the capacity to tolerate diverse uses of a
common space than a community of purpose. Culture's role in according
value to the non-human cannot therefore be absolute, and is in fact more
curtailed than in the case of according value to a custom or tradition.
In certain cultures the sacrificial act, inherently an act of
decomposition and hence of evil, is made good upon precisely such an
according of membership in the society to the non-human victim, in which
the same limitations and lack of closure are to be observed as in the case
of the compact according to which humans become members of society.
No such compact succeeds in determining all of the "bodies" ascribable to
an individual, and hence human rights form an irreducible remainder in
relation to any cultural organization; and the gap in determination is of
course far greater in the case of a non-human participant. It would be a
mistake to fail to recognize that non-humans do participate in human
culture, even above and beyond phenomena such as domestication or the
"mixed community" of coexistence. The mere production of symbols
pertaining to non-humans already constitutes their participation in the
social, albeit to a minimal degree--but not so minimal as that it does not
already compound the ethical responsibilities toward "the animal" as such
with responsibilities toward a participant in a social order. The symbolic
Edward P. Butler 149
order, like every other order of being, is not composed of static essences
but of multiple planes of immanence proving themselves; hence there is an
ethics of symbolic production which encompasses not only religious and
artistic symbols but also, e.g., mathematics.
III. Deep Ecology as Humanism
The emergence of human ecological consciousness is a philosophically
important idea: a life form has developed on Earth which is capable of
understanding and appreciating its relations with all other life forms and to
the Earth as a whole. (Naess 166)
Far from being a challenge to humanism, deep ecology ought to be
seen as its fulfillment, for the te/os of humanism cannot lie in an
anthropocentrism embodying a reified notion of the human essence. This
truth is recognized by a "humanistic" critic of ecology such as Ferry (see
Chap. 1, "Antinatural Man"), who however proceeds to use it to
exacerbate the ideological opposition of humanity and nature which he
regards as indispensible to preserving the democratic values of the
Enlightenment. But the true value of indeterminacy in the human essence
is that the latter acquires determinacy through the ethical judgments made
by human beings, with the regulative ideal of a maximal coexistence and
flourishing of species and individuals on the earth expressing the maximal
value of the human essence itself and the individuals constituted as
humans according to it. The ecosophical concept of intrinsic value derives
its ethical force from affirming an individuative striving in natural beings
that is at once and as such the striving to recognize others, to constitute a
plane of immanence whose intensive complexity expresses the maximal
multiplicity of values.
The .indefinite essence of humanity is the symbol of this striving, and
has no mherent bond to the taxonomic designation "human." In just this
fashion Kant distinguishes between the predisposition to humanity and the
predisposition to personality (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason, AK 6:27-28). Although Kant did not extend personhood to non-
human animals, he did extend it beyond humans to any other rational
beings, as well as criticizing anthropomorphism in morality (AK 6:65n).
"Rationality" indeed is not an empirical, but an intelligible characteristic,
and to that degree a rational being is the same as a being rationally
conceived, conceived, that is, in its autonomy, as an autopoietic individual,
rather than in its heteronomy, as either an instrument or as a mere moment
or aspect of a totalizing whole. Where we recognize autonomy we
recognize an end, a telos, but in the case of a living being that telos is not,
150 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
as in the case of abstract beings, expressible as a separate end of which the
individual is a means, but as something unique and inseparable, that is,
"existential", expressing intrinsic distinction. In autonomy of the "merely"
biological kind, therefore, we also inescapably find an intrinsic value
which puts us to the test, the test of the compossibility of our telos with
that telos, the experiment which determines our exterior, our mortality, our
own degree of "autonomy."
Moreover, in the absolute positivity of nature there is a plenitude, as
well as an anonymity, of "natures." Any possible nature is actual; and if
humanity, or any particular human, turns out not to be what it might have
been, it is necessarily the case that something or someone else, of
whatever order of being, has that nature, that essence. Arne Naess
expresses this intuition in a provocative thought-experiment about
humanity and an imaginary alien species:
Homo sapiens may be capable, in suitable circumstances, and upon the
basis of a wide perspective, of recommending its own withdrawal as the
dominant living being on earth. By such an act humans would confirm
Gust as we do in many other actions) that mankind is not bound to the
values "useful for human beings" or 'suitable to human self-preservation"
when "utility" and "self' are taken in a narrow sense ... Would we as
human beings subject ourselves freely to the political will of an alien
species which had more or less the same characteristics as us, but which
lacked our tendency to torhlre, torment and exploit one another? The
decision would perhaps take a few centuries, but I believe it would be
positive. We would abdicate, if we were sure of them ... Human beings
would lose something of their own essential nature if they refrained from
abdication. (169)
It is not a question here of some determinate other species, nor of an
elite within ours, but rather of whether "humanity" is to be identified with
whatever humans do or have done, however sordid, or must stand for an
ideal irreducible to the all-too-human, and one which thereby cannot help
but be open to the non-human other from the moment that the latter
becomes distinct. What the thought-experiment affirms is that if we are
not human, someone or something else nevertheless is; but what the
human is, in which order(s) of being it exists, is indeterminate in order that
its value might range across these orders.
By contrast, Ferry, in his defense of "humanism" against the threat to it
he imagines coming from deep ecology,finds it adequate to find our duties
toward all other animals in the degree to which they present to us an
"analogue" of humanity (54), but fails to appreciate what is radical in the
Kantian notion he appropriates inasmuch as for Kant we, too, for our own
Edward P. Butler 151
palt possess only analogous humanity, since we are animals as well. Ferry
makes humanity in the ethical sense merely a property of our species
rather than a problem posed to the individual. To be human is a mere
status for Feny. But hmnanity is an indefinite essence, not because we are
exempt from nature, but because the essence of the human is inseparable
from the project of humanity, which transcends any particular species,
including our own, but is nevertheless a project at once natural,
metaphysical and historical. Heidegger says, with Ferry's approval, "The
stone is without world, the animal is poor in world, man is creator of
world" (55), but a "world" is a trivial thing indeed if only humans have
one. The stone has created our world, as has the animal, in a different
sense. Nothing is without world. 6 The geological world, the biological
world, the mathematical world-nothing has given philosophers license to
hold themselves aloof from acknowledging them, nor would there be
anything "humanistic" in doing so.
Again, Ferry quotes with approval Philip Elder's ironic remark that it is
anthropocentric to presume that objects such as mountains are opposed to
the development from which ecologists would seek to preserve them, and
argues that since "[a]ll valorization, including that of nature, is the deed of
man ... consequently, all nonnative ethic is in some sense humanist and
anthropocentrist" (13I)-but in what sense? Is it merely a question of
attempting to find any sense at all in which ecology, in aspiring to
transcend anthropocentrism, could be said to be anthropocentric in spite of
itself? Beyond this rhetorical tactic, is it Ferry's claim that the humans who
oppose the development of the mountain-or even simply those who do
not stand to benefit fmancially from it and thus passively fail to support
it-no longer human? Are their values a performative contradiction?
It is reasonable to say that a mountain, taken purely as stone-that is,
as the very raw materials on account of which it is being targeted for
development-is not "opposed" to development, but it is irrational to
suppose that the animals who would lose their habitat would favor it, or
that the continued existence of the mountain as a cultural asset is
compatible with such development; and so it is unclear where the
contradiction is supposed to lie. Rather, it is Ferry who seems caught in a
fundamental contradiction when he attempts to determine the "subjective
moment" in valuation as an objectively human moment, a moment, that is,
in the natural history of the hmnan species, and to deduce from the fact
that ethical discourse is a human activity that the outcome of all ethical
decisions must benefit, above all, any hmnan asselting even the most
trivial claim, lest the deliberation undermine its own conditions of
possibility. Just as the deep ecology thesis of intrinsic value sets a
152 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
regulative ideal of the widest possible scope for ethical-ontological
individuation, so too the refusal of anthropocentrism in deep ecology
ought to be seen, not as anti-humanist, but as the fulfillment of the most
profound ethical potential within humanism itself, because it rejects the
thanatophoric moment in which a humanism all-too-human would seek to
determine with finality the limits of ethical concern according to abstract
taxonomical designations. From a Deleuzian perspective, a post-
anthropocentric humanism is particularly desirable inasmuch as it
accomodates both the becoming-animal of the human7 as well as its
reciprocal movement, the becoming-human of the animal, which is a
matter neither of anthropomorphism nor of domestication, but of the
animal's deterritorialization of humanity via, e.g., the abstract machine of
Kantian morality.8
Deleuzian humanism, as a frankly metaphysical humanism, can also be
seen as expressing the conditions ofthe possibility of a project such as that
of Halliwell and Mousley's Critical Humanisms,9 viz., their remarks
concerning the "amorphous" nature of the human, which is to be
conceived not as "a given entity" but as "an open-ended and mutable
process"; the concept of the human is to retain its "critical edge" while
resisting "becoming a reified and prescriptive category." Similarly,
Deleuzian humanism as I have sought to articulate it in this essay holds
open a critical space for multiple humanisms, critical because it speaks to
what is at stake in any conception of the human, open and multiple
because the human essence is viewed as a product of ethical individuation,
as an appropriation in the Stoic sense (oikeiosis). Although Deleuzian
humanism as I have described it does not fit any of the diverse humanisms
Halliwell and Mousley describe, they do discuss A Thousand
Plateaus briefly under the rubric of the "transhuman"-the "transhuman"
being, in effect, nothing other than the metaphysics of the human properly
understood.
Coda: Philosophy at the Surface
In the Eighteenth "series" of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze offers a
sketch of three paradigmatic "images of philosophers" rooted in antiquity.
Following Nietzsche, Deleuze typifies the Platonist as a philosopher of the
ascent to the intelligible and the Presocratic as a philosopher of the descent
into the maelstrom of the forces animating life. Deleuze sublates the
Nietzschean opposition, however, by adding a third image, typifying the
Hellenistic philosophical schools of Stoicism and Cynicism as
philosophies of the surface. Deleuze offers here-as he does in other
Edward P. Butler 153
places and in diverse ways-a genealogical account of the emergence of
his own philosophical position. This particular account is an appropriate
conclusion to the present essay because it offers an image of the activity of
philosophy as rooted in a relationship to nature, rather than solely as the
working out of the implications of a certain set of concepts.
Deleuze here uses Empedocles and the Orphic theologians as
exemplars of Presocratic thought. He singles out in Empedocles the
complementary images of, on the one hand, the isolated limbs and organs
offering themselves up for exotic combinations in a prior and also (due to
the cyclical nature of becoming) future phase of cosmogenesis
(Empedocles frags. 50-52 Wright); and on the other, the phren hiere
. (frags. 22, 97), the "body" of divine thought into which the cosmos is
formed by the waxing strength of Love, dubbing the phren hiere the "body
without organs," in the first use of this familiar Deleuzian concept (Logic
of Sense 129).10 Paralleling these two Empedoclean perspectives on the
"body", the one dismembering and recombining, the other an indivisible
and ideal totality, Deleuze cites "two faces" of Dionysus: "his open and
lacerated body, and his impassible organless head ... Dionysus
dismembered, but also Dionysus the impenetrable" (129).11
In the reciprocity of these two "bodies", the one disintegrated into its
molecular relations while the other expresses nothing other than the mind
capable of thinking all these syntheses and decompositions, Delelize sees
something requisite to Presocratic thought but which remained unthought
in it, namely the torsional surface of thought which connects them, and
which he sees as having been made explicit by the Hellenistic schools. 12
With this shift to the surface, there comes at first a crisis of relativism as
Platonic intellectual ascesis and Presocratic practices are both subsumed in
the Stoic science of mixtures:
This thesis ... establishes that in the depth of bodies everything is mixture.
There are no rules, however, according to which one mixture rather than
another might be considered bad. Contrary to what Plato believed, there is
no measure high above for these mixtures and combinations ofIdeas which
would allow us to define good and bad mixtures. Or again, contrary to
what the Presocratics thought, there is no immanent measure either,
capable of fixing the order and the progression of a mixture in the depths
. of Nature (Physis); every mixture is as good as the bodies which pervade
one another and the parts which coexist. How could the world of mixtures
not be that of a black depth wherein everything is permitted? (130-1)
This "black depth" is a consequence of the interpenetration of
everything; since all elements are contained in all things and pervade one
154 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
another, everything is impure, everything is "cannibalism" and "incest."
Thus the supposed Platonic essentialism is undermined, as well as the
Presocratic cosmological organization of forces. What is left appears to be
solely the pure positivity and relativity of Nature.
What presents itself to the Stoic as more fundamental than either
abstract essentialism or "natural law" is the modes of mixture or synthesis:
"imperfect mixtures which alter bodies" and "perfect mixtures which leave
bodies intact and make them coexist in all their parts" (131). The ultimate
"perfect" mixture is, Deleuze explains, "the unity of corporeal causes ...
wherein everything is exact in the cosmic present" (131). The perfect
mixture, Nature, is in effect the hiere phren of Empedocles
retenitorialized. Nature is the perfect mixture because it is guided by no
transcendent hidden hand but by the strivings interior to individuation, and
divine thought is that which attempts to approximate this absolute
polycentricity. The intelligibility of causality on the ultimate scale was, in
Empedocles, the absolute transparency of the cosmos to itself at the acme
of Love's power, but is now individual and contemporaneous, just as
Eleatic Being and Nonbeing are retenitorialized as Atom and Void. This is
the moment, in effect, when the plane of individuation transcends that of
speciation-hence the significance Deleuze accords to the Epicurean
doctrine of an infinity of atoms, but not of atomic shapes or sizes (270),
for the metaphysical individual must be free from final detetmination
either by the universal (shape) or by the phenomenal (size, because if the
atom could be of any size, there would be sensible atoms). From a
different perspective, the Empedoclean body-without-organs, the unique
individual, presents itself as the precondition for the ideality of the
universe in Platonic thought through a movement of eros producing the
Idea in temporality.
But on any level less comprehensive than the totality-a paradoxical
totality, moreover, that does not assemble its elements into a whole-there
are no perfect mixtures, nor absolute states of bodies which would render
transformation intelligible (as, e.g., in Heraclitus frag. 36 DK: "For souls it
is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth; from earth
water comes-to-be, and from water, soul"):
Bodies caught in the particularity of their limited presents do not meet
directly in line with the order of their causality, which is good only for the
whole, taking into consideration all combinations at once. This is why any
mixture can be called good or bad: good in the order of the whole, but
imperfect, bad, or even execrable, in the order of partial encounters. (131)
Edward P. Butler 155
At first, all of the moves seem to exacerbate this opposition between
the universal, an apocalyptic body-without-organs, and the order of
particular relations, a realm that would seem to be ungovernable by any
science or morality. If everything is coherent and justifiable on the
ultimate scale, then our plane lacks justice and coherence altogether. Can
the Stoic science of mixtures supply a science, much less an ethics? A
little later, Deleuze remarks that
We moved too quickly as we presented the Stoics challenging depth and
finding there only infernal mixtures corresponding to passions-bodies and
to evil intentions. The Stoic system contains an entire physics, along with
an ethics of this physics. If it is true that passions and evil intentions are
bodies, it is true that good will, virtuous actions, true representations, and
just consents are also bodies. If it is true that certain bodies form
abominable, cannibalistic, and incestuous mixtures, the aggregate of bodies
taken as a whole necessarily forms a perfect mixture, which is nothing
other than the unity of causes among themselves or the cosmic present ...
Ifthere are bodies-passions, there are also bodies-actions, unified bodies of
the great Cosmos. (143)
. With this in mind, Deleuze formulates a fundamental Stoic problem, an
mdex for reason and morality alike. He asks with respect to Chronos, that
is, discrete time, the time of particulars,
Do the bodies which fill it possess enough unity, do their mixtures possess
enough justice and perfection, in order for the present to avail a principle
of an immanent measure? Perhaps it does, at the level of the cosmic Zeus.
But is this the case for bodies at random and for each partial mixture?
(163)
Stoicism, Deleuze explains, reinterprets the Presocratic cosmos
"through a physics of mixtures in depth" (132). These "mixtures" are
essentially ways of analyzing larger aggregates into smaller ones and
composing smaller aggregates into larger ones. The heir to the Stoic
science of mixtures, at once ethics and physics, is thus ecosophy and the
science of testing the value of the human essence and of one's own essence
as a human in the crucible of Nature.
For Deleuze, therefore, the essence of the Hellenistic moment in
philosophy relative to its historical predecessors is to have brought
Presocratic physics and Platonic idealism alike to the "surface" of an
ethical and individuating plane of immanence on which hybrid discourses
concerning the ontology of ethics and the ethics of ontology come to life.

156 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
De1euze chooses Hercules, an important symbolic figure for the Stoics, to
personify this moment in the history of thought. Hercules, he explains,
is always situated relative to the three realms of the infernal abyss, the
celestial height and the surface of the earth ... He always ascends or
descends to the surface in every conceivable manner ... It is no longer a
question of Dionysus down below, or of Apollo up above, but of Hercules
of the surface, in his dual battIe against both depth and height:
reorientation of the entire thought and a new geography. (l31t)
The "Herculean" individual--the subject of deep ecology-carries on
her back at all times her own individuation in eternity, at the nexus of
intrinsic value and unfathomable Nature, with nothing whatsoever to
predetermine the outcome of her struggle.
Notes
I On the plane of immanence, see especially Deleuze and Guattari (What is
Philosophy? 35-60).
2 Deleuze's ethics are to be discerned chiefly through his readings of Spinoza,
Nietzsche, and the Epicureans. In the following account, I accord a certain primacy
to Deleuze's Spinozist ethical thought, because there he speaks in a more
conventionally nonnative language of good and evil, rather than in hedonic tenns
of joy and sadness. Another reason to accord primacy to the Spinozist side of
Deleuze's ethics is that it shall be seen from the following that it is possible from
within this ethical framework to motivate Deleuze's adoption of an ontology
synthesized from the Epicureans and from Hume-i.e., from two different varieties
of atomism.
3 Note that the sense of "composition" in Deleuze's readings of Spinoza is
completely distinct from the sense of "composition" as it applies to art (the "plane
of composition").
4 Cf. "Prohibitions on Transfonnation," 379-83 in Canetti.
5 Compare the Deleuzian "body without organs" as discussed in the Coda of the
present essay. The universal in question expresses the complementarity of the first
two kinds of universal in Simplicius's commentary on the Categories, 82. 35-83.
20, in contrast to the third; see the discussion in Lloyd, 67; see also MoyIe'S
remarks on the problem of conceiving the commonality between humans and other
animals as a generic "first nature" to which the specific difference of "second
nature", or reason, is added in humans.
6 It should be noted that theorists of deep ecology have their own readings of
Heidegger; see in particular Zimmerman 1983, though there is more
incompatibility to be found between Heidegger and deep ecology in Zimmennan
1993.
7 See Chap. 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-
Imperceptible ... ," in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (232-309).
I,
Edward P. Butler 157
; For the charact~ristics of abstr~ct ~ach~n~s, see A Thousand Plateaus (141 ft).
lO~y thanks to Tim Matts for brmgmg thiS Issue to my attention.
For two branches. do not s~ring from his back, he has no feet, no swift knees, no
org~ns. of re?roductlOn, but IS equal to. ~i~sel~ in e~e~ direction, without any
I begmnmg 01 end, a rounded sphere, rejolcmg m enclrcImg stillness" (frag 22
I trans. Wrigh9; "For he is not equipped with a human head on a bod;, he h;s n~
j ~eet, no .SWlft kl~ees, no shaggy genitals, but he is mind alone, holy and
:rexpre~slble, dartmg through the whole cosmos with swift thoughts," (frag. 97).
In pomt of fact, D.eleuze confuses here the fate of Dionysus, dismembered and
consumed by the Titans but for his heart, preserved by Athena with that of
Orpheus, the "prophet" of Dionysus, dismembered by the Mae~ads while his
oracular head was preserved.~
12 That is, the S~oics and the Cynics. Deleuze does not discuss the Epicureans here,
but w~u~d obvlOus!y regar~ them as capable of being assimilated to the other
HelIe11lstic schools 111 the salient respects upon his own reading ofthem.
Works Cited
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart (New York
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). .
Deleuze, .Gilles ..Spin,0za: Practical Philosopy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San
FrancIsco: City LIghts, 1988).
-. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
-. The LOfjic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester w/Charles Stivale, ed.
Consta~tm V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press 1990).
Deleuz~, GIlles ~nd Guattari, ~elix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Sc~lzophrema. Trans. Bnan Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
MInnesota Press, 1987).
Deleuze,. Gilles and Guattari, Felix. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh
TomlInson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).
Devall, Bill and Session~, George .. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature
Mattered (Salt Lake CIty: Peregrme Smith, 1985).
Ferry, . Luc: The N~w Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago:
l!mversity ofChlCago Press, 1995).
HallIwell, Martin and Mousley, Andy. Critical Humanisms'
Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Universi~
Press, 2003).
Hayden, Patrick. Multiplicity and Becoming. (New York: Peter Lang,
1998).
Lloyd, A. C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (Oxford: Clarendon Press
1990). '
158 Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology
Moyle, Tristan. "Re-Enchanting Nature: Human and Animal Life in Later
Merleau-Ponty." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
38:2 (May 2007): 164-80.
Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy.
Trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989).
N aess, Arne and Mysterud, Ivar. "Philosophy of Wolf Policies I: General
Principles and Preliminary Exploration of Selected Nonns."
Conservation Biology 1: 1 (May 1987): 22-34.
Sessions, George (Ed.) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century:
Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New
Environmentalism (London: Shambhala, 1995).
Zimmennan, Michael. "Toward a Heideggerean Ethos for Radical
Environmentalism." Environmental Ethics 5 (1983): 99-131.
"Rethinking the Heidegger-Deep Ecology Relationship."
Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 195-224.
Wright, M. R. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1995).
RHYTHMIC TOPOLOGY:
THE AFFECTIVE STRETCHING OF NATURE
ELENIIKONIADOU
Introduction
Score for a Hole in the Ground is a sonic sculpture by Jem Finer,
positioned in a forest at Kent's countryside. Part music score part art
installation, it consists of a deep shaft next to a lake in which resonant
metallic objects, of different sizes and tunings, are buried. Drips of water
from the lake strike the objects ringing them like bells, while a giant brass
hom pipes the sounds seven metres above ground. This project was
inspired by the Japanese suikinkutsu, a type of music device and garden
ornament in the country's tradition, originating from the middle of the Edo
period (1603-1867). The suikinkutsu is an acoustic water chamber of
subtle and minimal music, composed by the sounds of the environment.
As such, it is "a literal manifestation" of the fact that "in Japan rhythm was
traditionally conceived of as obeying the unpredictable qualities of nature"
(Finer 41). Contra Western music's metric fixity and definiteness, Finer's
installation wants to evoke an indeterminate environmental soundscape. In
other words, to present an "eco dub system" that relies on environmental
harmonics as its sources of energy: climatic forces, gravity, water and
wind (41). According to Finer, this is a post-digital return to a prehistoric
music, in which the reverberation of nature becomes the space of
composition. As such· this sonic sculpture needs no human intervention
(other than set up) and is independent from any energy source or
technology. The idea is that it becomes part of the environment that it
penetrates, providing an alternative model to the computational paradigm
of sound design. Its compositional value rests on the fonnation of potential
connections between landscape, metal, and weather, as they continuously
contaminate and affect each other.
Score for a Hole in the Ground, for this essay, poses a conceptual
aesthetic challenge to the common dichotomies between nature and
culture, the biological and the artificial. These oppositions are nothing
160 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching ofNatnre
new. Fundamental assumptions about the given natural world, at the heart
of mainstream Western thought, reflect an inherent Cartesianism that
philosophy and science have often been unable to shake. Within this
tradition the attempt to understand a body's experience of space has relied
primarily on the latter's ocularcentric conception, linking its experience to
human subjectivity. Yet the rearrangement of hierarchies in sensory
perception, in order to substitute visual predominance by aural experience
(as in the work of Walter Ong and McLuhan) presents us with further
limitations. First, that it remains confined in the dualism between perceiver
and perceived as two distinct elements in communication, and, second,
that it relies on the first in order to determine the latter. At the same time, a
predetermined world implies that we can only ever represent it, by
acquiring insight into fully formed identities and essences.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, identity, analogy, resemblance, and
opposition become problematic categories in constructing assemblages of
the real rather than merely representing it. In the theory of assemblages a
body is produced by process: its differences and relations with other
bodies, within a system whose potential is never exhausted in actuality (4).
A body is not defined by symmetrical parts that form a whole but by
tensions, forces and speeds that melt the boundaries between internal and
external worlds topologically. Topology, according to Massumi, is "the
science of self-varying deformation" (Parables for the Virtual 134).
Considered topologically bodies surpass the restriction of essences (what
they are) and enter the realm of assemblages (what they can do in their
entanglements). Following Deleuze and Guattari this essay asks, how can
we account for the relationship between body and environment beyond the
limits of subjective experience? Current architectural theory,
neurophysiological case studies and bio-technological experimentation,
provide promising fields in which to rethink a body away from
essentialism. Drawing on particular instances we will argue that real and
virtual, living and nonliving, natural and artificial, are vibratory milieus
tied together by the concept of 'rhythmic topology.' Away from the
replacement of a visual perspective of space by a sonic one, this essay
explores rhythm as a relational tension between nature and culture, a mode
'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology, then, addresses the
virtuality of unfinished bodies (human, animal, technological) to
conceptualise a becoming of nature that stretches beyond our knowledge
of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for ecology,
Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualization of an altogether
'new' nature. In particular, this essay analyses the rhythmic topology of a
body in three different levels: the aesthetic level of digital architecture as
Eleni Ikoniadou 161
the spatiotemporal modification of bodies; the neurophysical level of
rhythmic hallucinations as auto generated bodily activity; and the
biotechnological level of cellular vibration as the intensive transformation
of turbulent matter.
A note on rhythmic topology
The idea of nature as physis, the development of living organisms
outside extemal influences, has not only shaped our understanding of
ecology as the scientific study of the environment. Rather, it has
necessarily interpreted nature contra culture throughout various aspects of
Westem thought. This notable split between natural and artificial
environmental models is part and parcel of an understanding of rhythm as
split between a) physical, that is, a psycho-physiological notion of
circadian body rhythms whose speed and slowness depend on external
cues, expressed in breathing, walking, heart beat and so on; and b)
artificial, such as the mechanical motion of the metronome, or any
machine that establishes a steady tempo or pulse. In both cases, rhythm
implies synchronization, balance and the metric organization of spacetime
and body.
However, for Deleuze and Guattari the concept of rhythm excludes any
linear or metric relation in favor of 'packets of relations' and the
'superposition of disparate rhythms.' Here the relation between body and
milieu is not one of identification, categorization or organization but one
of rhythmic passing and transduction. Living bodies continually pass from
one milieu to another, but also milieus pass into one another, tied together
by a rhythmic creativity ("interrhythmicity"). Rhythm, in other words, is
the critical moment that allows heterogeneous connections and the
manifestation of change:
Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which
grows natnrally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from
plant to animal, from animal to humankind, yet without this series
constitnting a progression. (Deleuze and Guattari 313)
As such rhythm is not the beat of coordination but the difference that
creates linkages in-between different milieus, during which one becomes
the basis for the other. Following Deleuze and Guattari's concept of
rhythm, we can rethink the relation between nature and culture away from
hitherto dualities. This move to collapse the distance between either/or and
between subject and object, involves plugging them into the abstract
machine of topology.l A topological body is not unitary but collective: a
162 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
dynamic alliance of different bodies, across species, between biology and
technology.
Topology, also called rubber-sheet or differential geometry; is a branch
of mathematics concerned with spatial properties preserved under
bicontinuous deformation. In Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi
defines a topological figure "as the continuous transformation of one
geometrical figure into another" (134). Topological spaces cannot be
studied by the metric concepts of Euclidean geometry, such as length,
shape and volume, since their distances do not remain fixed on the basis of
their exact shape (DeLanda 22). Thus their analysis requires an altogether
different understanding of form, under which a thing passes from one
formation to another, irrespective of fundamental distinctions in shape.
Studied first by Leibniz, subsequently by mathematicians such as Euler
and Gauss, and established through Poincare's differential equations,
topology points to systems that are utterly different with similar long-term
behavior. Deleuze extracts the topological feahlre of multiplicities
(defined by singularities) from Poincare, to argue for a rhizomatic model
of thought, which knows no subject, object, points or positions.
Considered topologically, a thing can no longer be considered as one, a
unity, but as a multiplicity, always increasing its lines of connection with
other things. Topology follows the continuous transformation between and
within 'things' at a scale smaller than we can perceive. Rhythm is the link
between things, bridging or allowing them to pass from one another,
inciting the speed at which their relations unfold. Echoing Deleuze and
Guattari, rhythmic topology conceptualizes an affective space that cuts
across the distinction between biological and artificial, unraveling micro-
synthetic bodies beneath their macro-organic appearances.
In the specific case of Finer's project, Score for a Hole in the Ground,
we see. an attempt to surpass the determinism of Western models· of
thought, by moving away from a primarily technological and visual
organization of music (composition in scores). As such the sculpture
suggests an alternative understanding of rhythm as immanent to nature,
expressing the latter's artificiality beyond technological interventions. The
sculpture exposes the dub forces of an ecological system and in so doing
reorganizes the relationship between naturality and artificiality. It is a
system that continuously regenerates the micro-rhythms of sonic matter,
extracting them from the guts of the earth and amplifying them
noncomputationally. Sound molecules travel from water to metal and from
soil to air, at different speed variations, in unpredictable and undecided
ways. The anti-teleology of the system means that it will keep on playing
endlessly, constituting and reconfiguring new rhythmic planes out of the
Eleni Ikoniadou 163
different combinations and alterations of the molecular landscape. In
Deleuze and Guattari's words, "nahlre appears as a rhythmic character with
infinite transformations" (319).
Although Finer's sonic sculphlre is used here to provide an entryway to
the map of rhythmic topology, as are all the different instances used in this
essay, rhythm for us is not directly associated with sound nor does it
strictly imply time. At the molecular level, before vibration is extracted in
sound and sound becomes organized music, we may speak of
spatiotemporal rhythms that populate all bodies. If we detach the notion of
rhythm from the limits of beat, meter and cadence, referring to the concept
as used by Deleuze and Guattari, rhythmic topology invokes a space that is
affective rather than specific to the sonic or the visual. Affect, according to
Massumi, is "the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and
the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other" (35).
Affect is a body's capacity (power) to enter into relations with other
bodies, a potential to affect and be affected (Massumi 15). For Spinoza,
affects are modifications of a body (affeetiones), by which the power of a
body to act increases together with the ideas of these modifications. Affect
thus surpasses action; it is felt by a body "toward a thing future, present,
past" and draws it in different directions (Spinoza 128, 195, 190). Affect is
change superimposed by a body's potential; it does not inform us of the
nature or externality of a body but it is an indication - or inclination - of
what it might become. Rhythmic topology is thus not a matter of sonic or.
visual perceptions and cognitions of a body, but of affective, nonsensorial
tendencies that extend to all bodies living or not. As we have seen in the
case of Score for a Hole, inorganic and organic matter share symbiotic
connections that point to nature as an ongoing process away from
teleology. The spatiotemporal eco architecture of this sculpture turns our
understanding of nature towards an open-ended becoming of indeterminate
mutations.
Blob Bodies
The coming together of heterogeneous realities beyond the limits of
possibility and the concreteness of actuality is better expressed by the
concept of potential relationality. A philosophy of potential relationality
crucially argues that an opposition between nature and culture reduces the
world to· a function of human understanding. Soil, air, metal object and
sound molecule feed into each other in a variety of ways, as their abstract
formations reveal a multiple nature that we problematically reduce to the
domain of the living. In architechlre, contemporary practices are also
164 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
beginning to investigate the relational potential of digital de~ign, using
topology as an alternative method to building and understandmg spaces.
The building of space now shifts from stable form to abstract force,
steering new ideas and challenges to the relationship between space, body
and technology. Architects of topological surface organizati~ns "inv~te us
to consider a new morphological analog of the body more akm to a smgle-
cell blob than a symmetrically articulated upright man" (Greg Lynn 176).
In so doing they incite the amorphous, unfmished and underlying
topological structures that bodies and spaces endure. .. . but rather integrates it, by topologizing their surfaces. Body and milieu
Architectural theorist Greg Lynn's method of desIgnmg, mvolves
programming a set of modifications before he has an object to modify. His
work engages with "an alternative mathematics of fOlm" (176), to
integrate an abstract plan that cannot contain all the detail~ of the final
product. In other words, the design has to be abstract enough m or~er to be
compatible with myriad combinations. Lynn's "soft geometry" mcludes
curves, folds and blobs as morphological issues that emerge in the process
of converting a surface into a continuous traversing line. Blobs are
intensive bodies that traverse the internal/external divide (between body
and world, organic and inorganic) expanding by constantly i~corporating
external forces. Their importance in architectural theory IS that they
suggest peculiar and alternative methods of stru~tura~ organizati.on and a
strategy of building that connects exterior and mtenor topologI~ally. In
particular, Lynn uses' a topological tactic th~t he calls 'smo~thmg,' the
blending of heterogeneous mixtures that contmuously reorgamze fonn to
expose new possibilities that were not there before. Drawing on Deleuze
and Guattari's description of smoothness as the "continuous variation (and
development) of fonn" (478), Lynn puts a philosophy of hetero~eneous
ecology to practice. He is building process not form, followmg the
potential movement of self-variation before it settles into an exact figure.
Although Lynn uses CNC (computer numerical control), digital
technology in his work is not used as an architectural tool of construction
but as an integral component of the environment. Hence, Lynn does ~ot
strive for a simulation of reality in artificiality or towards a perfectIon
already present in nature. Referring to Lynn's description of computer-
assisted design (CAD), differential parameters that combine to govern
continuities of self-varying movement and end only when the program
stops running, Massumi asks:
Doesn't [Lynn's] topological design method digitally repeat what our
bodies do noncomputationally as we make our way to and from our
workstations? Then, when we watch the program lUn, aren't we doing it
again, slumped before the screen? Are we not immobily repeating our
Eleni Ikoniadou 165
body's ability to extract form from movement? When we stare, barely
seeing, into the screen, haven't we entered a 'lost' body-dimension of
abstract orientation not so terribly different from the one we go to when we
roll up our eyes and find ourselves in the fold? (Massumi 183-4)
Lynn's abstract topological geometries of fluidity reveal an architecture
of folding that engages with seemingly unrelated elements, as they become
intricately connected by the external force of smoothing (or smooth
mixtures). Smoothing does not eliminate difference between the elements
enter into a new allian<{e without losing anything of their nature, by
experiencing an architecture that melts their form and diffuses their
structure rather than stabilize and align them according to a general model.
In a sense, blobs depart from an architecture of territories where space is
designed horizontally, directing the experience of a vertical body within it.
Blob models do not separate between space and object, as in Euclidean
geometry, but are defined on the basis of a differential topological and
gravitational relationship of equalization between body and environment.
In other words, a blob is a relational sticky "thing which is neither singular
nor multiple but an intelligence that. . .in its form can become virtually
infinitely multiplied and distributed" (Lynn 172). Blob bodies are fluid (or
"aqueous") hypersurfaces that internalize their surroundings by liquefying
them.
According to Steve Goodman, treating space as if it was a gel or liquid
"opens a privileged portal into the amodal transensory" (Goodman 64).
Lynn's blob tectonics, according to Goodman, become "not so much an
intervention into the visual field of the built environment, but rather into
its invisible, affective modulation" (63). Designing by topological relation,
with a blob constantly (re)acquiring its non-stable shape by environment
and movement rather than fonn and function, allows for the emergence of
a new dynamic relation between body and space. Blobs are not grounded
in any given enviromnent but point to the latter's fluidity, mobilizing an
affective relationality between floating body and liquid space. Rethought
from the standpoint of weightlessness, body and space absorb each others
gravity and are no longer separated by absolute tenns. This aquatic
experience of feeling space as it unfolds, beyond the level of perceivable
structures, bares the potential of "masses to float within mass" (Lynn 107),
in a sea of rhythmic matter.
Away from the deconstruction of space and time, blobs point to an
architecture of spatiotemporal affectivity - the realm of the virtual as it
comes into being. The virtual experience of rhythmic matter does not refer
to an immaterial space of analogies between the application of design and
"
·1'
166 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
aquatic life. Lynn develops an architectural concept of differential
gravities that re-conceptualize the relationship between earth and
architechlre, to provide an altogether different method of building. In his
own words, "buildings do not, after all, have to be structured as standing
up ... and have been structured on principles of bridging, hanging,
stretching, squatting, leaning, lying and floating among others" (98).
Looked at this way, digital architechlre taps into the potential of an
"actively indeterminate" nature (Massumi 237); a virtual reserve of
potential open to modulation. "This is Spinoza's 'naturing nature': nature as
an inexhaustible, impersonal reserve of giving self-activity" (238). Blobs
are forces of viscosity, an axis of rhythmic contamination across the
nahlre-culture continuum. They point to an ecology of "liquefaction" that
topologizes exterior and interior "onto a single plane of differential
vibration" (Goodman 65).
Rhythmic hallucinations
Neurological shldies in progressive nerve deafness, argue for a direct
relation between sensorial deafness and autogenerated auditory
hallucinations. Neurologist Oliver Sacks argues that audio hallucinations
are often not psychotic, as in schizophrenic patients, but neurological (52).
Deprived of any sensory input, a body auto generates spontaneous activity
in the form of 'release' hallucinations, ranging from loud tinnitus to entire
musical symphonies. This seemingly abnormal brain activity has been
described by patients as 'a circuit in the head' and the hallucinating part of
their body an alien autogenerating mechanism (Sacks 55 & 62). Such
analogies between the hallucinations and technology refer to the fact that
in every sufferer the sound initially appears to arrive from an external
source (coming from a radio, television, record-player or a noisy
machine). It is only when such external sources are excluded that the
patient becomes aware of the noise being generated autonomously, by
their own bodies. However, the relationship between biology and
technology in a hallucinatory body is not exhausted in analogy. Rather, the
complexity of the relationship is expressed in the fact that these
hallucinations are not an organic disease of the brain, nor a subjective
phenomenon, but the non-living backflow of a virtual activity. The
phenomenon thus points to the actualization of a· dynamic generator of
rhythmic forces as it emerges from a body in the form of a seizure.
These hallucinations are not restricted to nerve deafness and the
deprivation of sensorial input, but can be caused during seizures or
strokes. However, in every case, they appear as 'strange yet familiar'
Eleni Ikoniadou 167
experiences of a body as it enters a strange superimposed state of multiple
experiences known as the 'doubling of consciousness' (Sacks 20-21). The
latter is compared to the feeling of a 'deja vu,' or dreamy state, but it is
actually a body feeling many different states simultaneously, amplifying
its own consciousness. In other words, the seemingly abnormal defective
body is a body too aware, its capacities expanding beyond temporal and
sensorial perception. A hallucination does not trigger seizures it is the
seizure, stretching a body towards a hyperstate or virtual state of
consciousness. The superimposed, resonating hallucinatory body can no
longer be approached as a unity but as a multiplicity of forces and energies
that vibrate in the same topological figure. The resonances they produce
are unexpected, inconsistent and have unspecified scopes, from an instant
to a day or a lifetime. They are largely, but not entirely, beyond the
conscious control of a body and may disappear as suddenly as they
emerge. They thus point to the capacity of a body to operate as a
transducer of rhythmic forces that do not belong to it as essences or
impact on it from outside; rather they are self-referential rhyt~ic
~haracters i? passing. These rhythms are liberated from the body-Figure,
I.e. from bemg dependent or owned by the Figure to become the Figure: a
resonating blob of rhythmic forces and self-varying matter of no specific
form. In his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze explains that sensation is
essentially rhythm, but the kind that is still dependent on the Figure. Yet
when sensations are superimposed and form couplings, rhythm-sensations
cease to be attached to specific level of the body "in order to make
something appear that was irreducible to either of them" (Deleuze 67).
This coupling of rhythm-sensations between the different levels of the
resonant blob is a scrambler of form consistent with the concept of
topology. The topologic tension between perception and hallucination is
exposed in certain types of experience (as in the case of audio
hallucinations) to allow for an acute conception of one's own body as "an
experiment in nature through an auditOlY prism" (Sacks 86). Rhythmic
hallucinations constihlte a mode of feeling that baffles ordinary
experience. They reveal a body on the edge between lived and non-lived
modes of experience that is closer to affect than sensory perception. The
affective potential of a body (its power to affect or be affected) leaks into
actuality through the emergence of auditory defect. In hallucinating new
unheard-of rhythms, a body coincides with its own potential and
intensifies it. Consciousness is doubled in the process and amplified, as a
body's different modes are simultaneously superimposed. The shock of
auditory seizures and hallucinations is the moment of affect passing into
actuality. These shocks are indicators of forces beyond organic wholeness
168 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
"that lie outside or below the level of conscious experience" and have a
life of their own (Sacks 232). Defect pointing to affect.
Before matter is organized in metric time and space, it lives and feels
within its own potential energy. The auto generative rhythms of a body
emerge when this turbulent energy coincides with a body's capacity (or
power) in the doubling of its consciousness. The topological nature of this
doubling, or coupling, means that levels which hitherto seemed distant and
unrelated become superimposed. "It is only in that superpositiollthat the
unity of the figure can be grasped as such, in one stroke. That one stroke is
the virtual image center of the figure" (Massumi 134). For Massumi, the
differentiated vagueness of the virtual is best approached topologically,
through the infoldings and unfoldings of self-referential transfonnation,
more suitable to imagination or intuition. Intuition is a thinking feeling that
does not refer to anything outside it, "the muhml envelopment of thought
and sensation as they arrive together" (134). For Michel Serres, intuition is
also influenced by topology, the science of nearness and rifts, enabling us
to concephmlise a crumpling, multiple and foldable spatiotemporal
diversity (Serres 59-60). Far from a mere theory of numbers, topological
thinking, according to Serres, is consistent with our crumpled experience
of spacetime before we simplify and reduce it to measurement.
In certain contemporary psychoanalytic studies, the concept of
intuition is shifting from hitherto associations with narcissistic meanings,
to . a mode of felt thought integrated in coenesthetic experience.
Coensesthetic experience (particularly dominant during the first six
months of life) is largely visceral, strangely vague and marked by tensions,
temperatures, vibrations, rhythms, durations and pitches. During this time,
somatic and psychic perceptions are not yet differentiated and perception
takes place on the level of sensibility. Inhlition is an archaic mode of
thought that is nonverbal, nondirected, and in which impressions of fonn
become undifferentiated. It is in this sense an 'amodal mode of experience'
during which a body cannot separate between the senses, the intellect, the
conscious and the unconscious, express them in language or follow a
single line of thought (Piha 37). An inhlitive body is a polyrhythmic
structure of superimposed strands that occur without a point of reference
and "with the suddenness of a revelation" (24). Intuition exposes a body's
qualitative transfonnations in experiencing space, comprised of an
immeasurable number of heterogeneous but overlapping and
interpenetrating subspaces. Behind the learned schemata, intuition is a rare
sensitivity in bodies that can grasp the rhythmic movement of spaces "as
sound streams that cannot be described in static fonn" (Piha 37). In
Eleni Ikoniadou 169
intuition a body is thrown to uncertainty; in a non-lexical world of archaic
experience that is felt in the interrhythmicity of topologized spacetime.
Cellular Vibrations
'Sonocytology' is the study of cellular vibrations that, in the future,
could arguably offer a closer understanding of the body and its tendency
for disease. Discovered by nanoscientist James Gimzewski, sonocytology
reveals that cells produce numerous miniscule vibrations per second. The
breakthrough was further enabled by Gimzewski's invention of the Atomic
Force Microscope (AFM), an ultra-sensitive high-resolution motion
detector that uses tactile sensing to detect motion at the molecular scale.
When these vibrations were amplified, the state of the cells (presence or
lack of movement) was found to be directly linked to their rhythmic
properties. Whether living or dead a cell continues to pulsate, although its
pitch changes accordingly, due to the tiny molecular motors inside it,
moving things around. Using computer software, Gimzewski and his team
amplified the cellular rhythms collected by the AFM to create audible
sound. The interrhythmicity of the cell is affected by changes in
temperature and perhaps also by contact with the needle of the AFM that
acts as en extra-sensitive micro record player. Unlike optical microscopes,
the AFM touches and scans the surfaces of cells recording their
topography; it thus feels the rhythms of cellular vibration as an electrical
signal in a liquid environment. As scientists are 'blind' at the nanoscale, the
AFM's tiny 'finger' senses oscillations that occur at the membrane of a cell.
"On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and
probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and
approximate interpretations" (Gimzewski & Vesna The Nanomeme
syndrome). According to the authors, molecular techno-science is
ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality, from a culture based
on vision to one of sensing and connectivity.
At the molecular level matter conveys incredible complexity,
concealed by the apparent simplicity of ecological equilibrium. Ilya
Prigogihe and Isabelle Stengers argue that in the case of cellular
functioning we encounter a remarkable convergence of biology and
physics, through the investigation of 'complex' system at the microscopic
level (Prigogine and Stengers 154). Molecular biology, in particular, has
the capacity to provide the microscopic basis for the instabilities that occur
in dynamic, non-linear physical systems. A living system is a complex
machine of chemical transformations, space-time organizations and
nonuniformity in the distribution of its biochemical material. In other
170 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching ofNahlre
words, "not everything in a living system is alive" (156). This postulation
is articulated, at the very least, out of the notion that the energy flow
crossing a living system is sometimes at equilibrium and others not.
Complexity reveals that both the definition of entities and the interactions
between them are in continuous modification. The minute fluctuations and
changes at the local levels of a system, are not only responsible for its
instability and complexity but, importantly, also guarantee its order and
regularity at the macrolevel (206). The bifurcations of matter then point to
a continuum between the unstable and stable phases of a system, across
the micro and macro levels of order. "Thus we are led to conclude that the
same nonlinearities may produce an order out of the chaos of elementary
processes and still, under different circumstances, be responsible for the
destruction of this same order, eventually producing a new coherence
beyond another bifurcation." (206)
In his techno-scientific experiments, Gimzewski 'touches' the rhythmic
fluctuations of cells revealing that beneath its apparent stability and
organization a body is turbulent matter, undergoing intense transformation.
The cell goes through a constant infolding, a rhythmic contraction that
reveals its inner complexity below, as well as its potential to make
multiple connections above. Cellular infolding, according to Deleuze and
Guattari, always involves a double articulation between molecular and
molar organizations, out of which content (formed matter) and expression
(functional structure of matter) emerge, to surpass the form/substance
duality (42 - 44). The relation between content and expression (rather than
form and substance), exposes the dynamic microscopic instabilities that
compose all macroscopic structures, enabling a departure from the model
of a whole that predetermines its parts. Content and expression are two
variables of stratification, a regenerative and continuous creation of the
world from chaos. According to Deleuze and Guattari "chaos is the milieu
of all milieus. There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage
from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination
between heterogeneous space-times" (313). The vibratory cell reveals that
there is no given state in a body, only the potential to undergo a passage
from one state to another, through the infoldings of rhythm. Probing its
rhythmic topography, the scientist is faced with "the unexpected intrinsic
structure of reality" at the heart of micro-nature (Prigogine and Stengers
216).
Following the discovery of cellular vibration, nanoscientist Pelling and
media artist Niemetz created an audio-visual event for the NAND
exhibition at LACMA? Entitled The Dark Side of the Cell, this is an
immersive environment that combines architecture, sculpture, sound and
Eleni Ikoniadou 171
video art to compose an unusual concert. Its primary intention is to invite
participants to move through the space and experience the spatial
variances of indeterminate cellular rhythms, recorded by the AFM.3 For
its creators, the discoveries and inventions of bio-technological
experimentation open up new questions into the functioning of matter and
uncover more mystery rather than provide answers. Conceptual media art,
in this instance, may intervene to incite a space of communication between
the scientific and the aesthetic in order to push these questions further.
Molecular biology, nano-biotechnology, far-from-equilibrium theory and
quantum research reveal the impossibility of predicting a system's exact
future and the incomplete and uncertain description of nature. For
Massumi, such sciences "tread on territory dangerously close to the virtual
and the anomalously relational" (229). Yet this is also a limit that sciences
refuse to cross in order to remain scientific, in other words, objective.
Newness, virtuality and anomaly are conditions that must be kept
indeterminate, vague and formless in order to invoke the potential
relationality of nature. While the methodological context of scientific
experimentation alone may result to predetermined outcomes, a dynamic
alliance between the scientific and the aesthetic, as a symbiotic system,
could construct a field of contingencies that is closer to a non-given
nature.
Conclusion
According to Deleuze and Guattari, there is no vital matter specific to
the organic stratum as matter is the same across the machinic assemblage
(45). Thus a body is not defined by its fonn, function or substance, but
rather by its potential to enter in relations with other bodies. At the molar
level, a body is organized to acquire a specificity, that is, to be considered
as organic, or technological, as a nahlral or artificial whole. For Massumi
the molar level is an effect: the apparent settling of movement at the
macroscale and a relative concreteness that does not reveal anything about
the 'swarming micromovements of matter" (203). Beneath this molar
stability, we have attempted to tmfold the rhythmic spreading of matter
across the different layers of a body and between heterogeneous bodies.
Thinking matter topologically pushes the concept of nature beyond unity
and totality, away from similarity and identity, in favor of degrees of
development, speeds and differential relations.
Following a continuum of rhythmic intensities between nature and
culture, we engaged with rhythmic topology at the aesthetic level of blob
tectonics, on the edge between architecture and art, between theory and
/
t
172 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature
practice. At this instance, external environment and internal body are
liquefied topologically, incorporating one another in their digital
engineering. The blob modifies sensory perception to a trans-sensory
experience of space; a sea of vibrating matter out of which shapes are
reorganized continuously and in which bodies float, instead of walking.
The architecture of space, in this paper, moves beyond the notion of an
exceptional cultural moment of design imposed on nature, to become a
topological archive in which no part is ever finitely completed or
stabilized. The blob challenges the idea of rigid spaces in order to suggest
new connectivities between body, space, technology and environment,
from the standpoint of rhythmic topology. In architecture, topological
formations allow for inventions and interventions that, for us, point to a
redefinition of architecture itself: as spatiotemporal affectivity, a mode of
feeling the rhythms of space rather than perceiving the built environment.
On a neurophysical level, auto generated body rhythms point to a
human body's tendency toward a dehumanized agency. Rhythmic
hallucinations stretch a body's perception onto-topologically, towards
those layers that assemble and infold below the senses, allowing us to
rethink how a body 'hears' without ears. Auditory hallucinations unravel a
body as the machinic assemblage of technological, social, sonic, visual,
conscious, defective, unconscious components, as these are reconfigured
in the dynamism of their potential relations. Felix Guattari explains that
the assemblage does not imply any notion of bond between the
components, but rather involves possible fields of both virtual and
constituted elements (35). The modulatory interaction of the somatosenses
and their dynamic relationship with brain, nervous system, auditory
perception and non-conscious audibility, generate assemblages beyond the
hierarchies of organism. In such assemblages a body discovers novel
modes of feeling that are not necessarily tied to a specific mode of
perception. This is not a perfectly balanced compost of elements but a
heterogeneous assemblage of components "too big to fit the contours of an
individual human body" (Massumi A Shock to Thought xxix). Massumi,
following Deleuze and Guattari's notion of impersonal expressive agency,
explains that expression is a self-movement of potential that requires
allying with forces of systematic defonnation. The continuing of
expression across experiences always involves non-human fonnations, not
only of components outside the human body but also within it. Viscerality,
intuition, proprioception, kinesthesia, coenesthesia, synaesthesia are few
of the many ways in which a body feels immediately before it acts and
before it perceives itselffeeling. 4
Eleni Ikoniadou 173
As matter is re-engineered by techno-science, reality changes to allow
for the emergence of new molecular intensities that were not there before.
Yet this is not the result, or effect, of nature's domination and construction
by new technoscientific discourse, but rather an event that unravels an
already artificial nature. The AFM's silicon finger fonns a rhizomatic
connection with the vibrational membrane of a cell and a line of flight
crosses over to the inilieu of the musical concert. The rhythmic
fluctuations located between milieus (technological, biological, aesthetic)
fonn a map that fosters these heterogeneous connections. The connections
between the different layers of the assemblage are contingent, not
seamless or logical, traversed by a cellular energy that is not simply one of
vitality or exclusive to the living. As its movement pushes from below and
its speed increases, this energy assembles a multilayered body that is not
the sum of its parts, but a swarm of 'singing' cells, atomic forces, chemical
elements, catalytic actions, synthetic mutations, the continual variations of
matter.
According to Luciana Parisi, "a body is composed and decomposed by
the activity of molecules and particles, forces and energies. It is not simply
biological or cultural. A body is defined by metastable relations between
microcellular and multicellular bodies, the bodies of animals and humans,
the bodies of society and technological bodies merging and unleashing
new mutating compositions" (27).
Rather than rely on an understanding of nature versus culture and on the
idea that artificial environments are at best supplements of the real,
rhythmic topology proposes a middle way of conceiving their
connectivities. Beyond the phenomenology of lived experience, bodies are
rhythmically composed by a constant oscillation and exchange between
actual and virtual elements. The in-between space of rhythm registers the
ceaseless potential of a body to become: a vibrational circuit without
organs, with no origin or end.
Notes
I "An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is
semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the
artificial and the natural either)" (Deleuze and Guattari 141, emphasis in the
original).
2 The NANO exhibit was a collaboration between LACMALab and a UCLA team
of nanoscience, media arts, and humanities experts, lead by Jim Gimzewski and
Victoria Vesna in 2004. Nanoculture, Implications of the New Technoscience.
(UK: Intellect Books, 2004) is a collection of essays, edited by Katherine Hayles,
that complements the exhibit as well as explore the relationship between
174 Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature Eleni Ikoniadou 175

nanotechnology and science fiction, cultural production and technoscience. For
more information see http://nano.arts.ucla.edu/
3 For more details on the project see http://www.darksideofcell.info/about.html
4 Brian Massumi understands a body's capacity to affect and be affected through
interoception (viscerality, proprioception, kinesthesia), a mode of perceptions and
exchanges between interoseptive and the five 'exteroceptive' senses, before the
brain processes their excitations (see Parables for the Virtual 35 and 60). Michel
Serres has also attempted to conceptualise internal senses in relation to 'body
image', the processes below consciousness, and a topological understanding of
spacetime. Serres refers to coenesthetic experience in his Conversations on
Science, Culture, and Time with Bnmo Latour, in his discussion of poetry, art and
literature in relation to noise theOlY (98). Additionally, Serres discusses the
folding-over of consciousness, the contact of the self with itself, in relation to
kinesthesia in Five Senses. (London, New York: Continuum, 2006), 20.
Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the
Mutations ofDesire (London & New York, Continuum, 2004).
Piha, Heikki. "Intuition: A Bridge to the Coenesthetic World of
Experience." Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 53: 1
(March 2005): 23-49.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order out of Chaos (London:
Flamingo, 1985).
Sacks. Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (London:
Picador, 2007).
Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and
Time (Ann Arbor: The'University ofMichigan, 1995).
Spinoza, Benedictus. Ethics (New York: Hafner, 1949).

Works Cited
DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London &
New York: Continuum, 2002).
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London & New
York: Continuum, 2004).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London & New York: Continuum, 2002).
Finer, Jem. "Score for a Hole in the Ground." Autumn Leaves: Sound and
the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double
Entendre, 2007).
Gimzewski, Jim, and Victoria Vesna. "The Nanomeme Syndrome:
Blurring of Fact & Fiction in the Construction of a New Science."
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/publications/publications/0203/JV_ nanolN_nan
0_artF5VG.htm, last accessed April 08, 2008.
Goodman, Steve. "Sonic Anarchitecture." Autumn Leaves: Sound and the
Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double
Entendre, 2007).
Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (USA: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
Lynn, Greg. Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays (Belgium: La Lettre
Volee, 1998).
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (USA: Duke University PreSs,
2002).
- . "Introduction: Like a thought." A Shock to Though: Expression after
Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002),
Xlll-XXXIX;

GUATTARI'S TRIPLEX DISCOURSES
OF ECOLOGY
ERICK HEROUX
Let us begin at the end, to see where we will have been going, and then
retrace our steps to see how we got there, or rather here, with the last
words of Felix Guattari in his final essay:
Ecological disasters, famine, unemployment, the escalation of racism and
xenophobia, haunt like so many threats . . . . [But humanity] passively
contributes to the pollution of water and the air, to the destruction of
forests, to the disturbance of climates, to the disappearance of a multitude
of living species, to the impoverishment of the genetic capital of the
biosphere . . . to the suffocation of its cities, and to the progressive
abandonment of cultural values and moral references in the areas of human
solidarity and fraternity ....
Most older methods of communication, reflection and dialogue have
dissolved in favor of an individualism and a solitude that are often
synonymous with anxiety and neurosis. It is for this reason that I
advocate-under the aegis of a new conjunction of environmental ecology,
social ecology, and mental ecology-the invention of new collective
assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the school,
the neighborhood, etc. ("Remaking Social Practices" in The Guattari
Reader 262-63)
In sum, these are the three ecologies: nature, society, and psyche. Their
interactive interdependence forms a triplex discourse and material effects,
in sickness and in health. Also, here Guattari firmly turns to face toward
the future, toward creative change, and toward new forms of solidarity. By
now this is a common attitude, if still wistfully emerging and vaguely
articl,llated about what needs to be done. So why Guattari now? What does
he ~ffer ;s prospective tools for the unprecedented challenges of the
twenty-first century?
A few weeks after submitting this testament for publication, Guattari
suddenly died in 1992 about three years before the death of his more
famous colleague, Deleuze, in 1995. Then and now, he is widely assumed
Erick Heroux 177
to be a sort of junior partner in their collaboration on several books. A side
effect of this essay will subvert that assumption by showing that Guattari
was not only a fOlmidably productive theorist in his own work, and also
by noticing that much of the supposedly Deleuzian lexicon appeared
earlier in Guattari's publications. Most commentary today erroneously
attributes to someone named "Deleuze" these terms, "words that Guattari
invents" as Deleuze himself said (On the Line 88) and even more
generously that there "is not one of these ideas that which did not come
from Felix (black hole, micro-politics, deterritorialization, abstract
machines, etc.)" (Dialogues II 19). Yes, Guattari's earlier solo articles 2
were replete with terms such as: deterritorialization, overcoding, machinic
assemblages, concrete and abstract desiring machines, molecular versus
molar, transversality, diagrammatic, non-signifying semiosis, material
fluxes, assemblages of enunciation, plane of consistency, the refrain, and
schizoanalysis. In sum, this amounts to most of what generally gets
repeated as "Deleuzian" concepts by commentators. It is telling, also, that
during interviews with the two theorists, Deleuze often defers to Guattari,
who then lets forth a volley of speech that is rapid, critical, fertile,
uncompromising, sprinkled with neologisms and flights of theory that
insist on multiplying the social potentials of desire. 1 This is a unique voice
that we recognize from somewhere, deja vu. Where? Yes, in those
notorious two volumes of L 'Anti-CEdipe and Mille plateaux. Moreover, the
main evidence of Guattari's major contribution in collaborating with
Deleuze is in his recently published notebooks and working drafts in The
Anti-Oedipus Papers, which is described by an editorial blurb as revealing
Guattari "as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded
'conceptor,' arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in
philosophy and sociopolitical theory today" (Guattari 2006). Likewise,
Gary Genosko's booklength study gives significant evidence of Guattari's
authorship.3 While Deleuze was indeed philosophically more erudite and
stylistically more "poetic". than Guattari, nevertheless, the books that most
of us speak of as Deleuzian theory would not be possible without
Guattari's conceptual and radical contributions. Antonio Negri is a
prominent exemplar of a theorist said to have been influenced by Deleuze,
yet it was with Guattari that he cowrote Les nouveaux espaces de liberte
(in the English edition, Communists Like Us). Therefore, while I have been
slow to appreciate Guattari myself, resisting his posthumanist machinic
terminology and impatient abstractions as too bristly, I have gradually
come to appreciate his work as offering us extensive potentials; and for
other reasons, not the least of which is that any person must be
extraordinary who survived a training analysis with Lacan, collaborated
178 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
with Negri and with Deleuze, and then defined our era of late capitalist
globalization in terms of its ecological degradation a full decade before the
fall of the Berlin Wall. He was not a junior partner, but rather an
inspirational cowriter and a veritable fountain of new ways to do both
theory and praxis. His fairly successful transformation of a IOO-bed
psychiatric hospital over several decades is an under appreciated example
of that praxis. 4
Meanwhile, here my primary aim is to provide a critique of Guattari's
explicit turn toward ecology vis-a-vis the theoretical biology of Bateson,
Maturana, Varela and of "complexity science" in general, and thence his
enlargement of ecology, an ecology of the postindustrial mass-mediated
globe by way of a political economy and psychology, resulting in
something quite different for theory. We have already suggested where he
winds up. The main texts in my discussion will be Guattari's booklet, The
Three Ecologies, but also his passages on this topic in a later book,
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm and scattered elsewhere in his
occasional writings. Hence, now that we have reviewed "why Guattari?",
the next question about the terms in my title should be: "What was
ecology?"
Ecology sans Guattari
Ecology, as every school child knows, is an empirical study of the
relationships between organisms and also between organisms and their
physical environment. What fewer people know is that today these
relationships are usually measured (often statistically) in terms of energy
exchanges, flows, transfonnations throughout a given set of organisms and
nonorganic environs. An original view within ecology defined these
relationships in terms of their systemic effects much like the use of
feedback and homeostasis in cybernetics and general systems theory.
Ecologists then thought that ecosystems seek stability, and that
biodiversity itself is a key support of this stability. While the notion of an
open system and/or interlocking ecosystems remains one of the current
models, it has been challenged from within the field by a younger group of
ecologists who point out some of the limitations of this view and the
empirical exceptions that the systems view ignores. 5 Today, ecologists
place more emphasis on dynamic (in)stability that is not essentially locked
to biodiversity in a direct way.
Whatever the future fate of the systems view, the field of ecology is
like every science-if not riven by then constituted by internal debates and
multiple positions which are only within the field because they address
Erick Heroux 179
issues made possible by the even deeper underlying assumptions and
selected sets of data that allow these assertions to make sense a kind of
"positive unconscious" as Foucault called it, the unspoken ~les which
form a particular scientific discursivity (xi). In other words, the field of
ecology nevertheless continues to focus on an interactive overview
showing the interdependence of manifold life-forms where one's wast~
becomes another's food across complex networks often called food webs,
and where a change in the population of one species will have secondary
~nd tertiary effects on the population of other interconnected species, often
m a nonlinear way.
The earth's biosphere itself continues to reproduce the physical
~onditions of possibility for living organisms, a planet open to the vast
mput of extemal energy, with life driven ultimately by the cyclical dose of
solar energy which then gets converted and passed along and recycled
throughout the uncounted inorganic and organic subsystems at scales that
are both microscopic and macroscopic. These levels are so vast and
complex that ecology itself is now carved up into numerous subspecialties,
each of which may take one's entire career to master, with some
specializations requiring, i.e., more expertise with chemistry but others
with population genetics while others with animal behavior but others with
oceanography and so forth. Ecology is charged with the responsibility to
explain how this all works, and then perhaps to predict when the
components that sustain the conditions of life might no longer work. This
focus on relationships and interdependent flows rather than on isolated
?rganisms is a kind of (neo)holistic approach, though without committing
Itself to any mystical holism, and as such ecology moved slightly away
from the older tendency of biology to analyze into smaller components
a~d ex~lai~ by reduction, the tradition that led .toward impressive
dlscovenes III genetics and molecular biology. A subtle tension within the
biological sciences persists today between ecologists and the biologists of
the latter sort, however this should not be exaggerated or taken to mean
that they commonly disagree about the means and ends of science. Both
~emain committed to a wide range of shared traditions and, again, merely
mternal debates. A powerful example of this is the theory of evolution by
natural selection, which while given over to different combinations of
emphasis on relatively specific aspects, continues to be a shared
knowledge that structures the whole field, so that the explanation provided
by "adaptation" gets applied nearly everywhere, only now with many
added qualifications and supplements by all sides.
Much more could be said, but this is the best short description of
contemporary ecology-as-a-science that I can muster here. In sum, I will
180 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
emphasize that the discipline is as empirical as the other branches of
science, with the attendant use of quantification, especially statistics; that
it also commonly employs computer simulations to model predictable
future outcomes, and that it continues to develop competing models and to
gather new data for analysis. Guattari did not discuss this field in detail, so
therefore he has never been cited by ecologists.
Bateson & Theoretical Ecology
Now would seem to be the moment, therefore, to say that this is too bad
for the field of ecology today. They may likely find themselves alTiving at
some version of a Deleuzoguattarian philosophy later this century if they
continue to study the interconnections and. flows outward and inward.
Already a new subfield is slowly emerging circa 2008 called
"biosemiotics" which has begun to add a semiology of information,
meaning, and signification to the interdisciplinary study of ecology.6 The
biosemioticians, alas, have not yet discovered Guattari, which discovery
might save them a few years of puzzling through the reinvention of non-
or a-signifying semiosis and/or diagrammaticism, and assemblages of
enunciation from Guattari's toolbox that would seem useful at this stage.
Yet surely, Guattari's aim was not to contribute to the study of natural
relationships per se, but rather to the Shldy of the human organism using a
specific subset of bio-systems theories that were in themselves already
more philosophically inclined than the discipline of ecology described
above would seem to apprehend within its unspoken rules. He often cites
and alludes to two sources: Gregory Bateson and the more recent cognitive
biology of Maturana and Varela (Autopoiesis and Cognition 1980), which
extends and complicates the seminal work of Bateson with their theory of
"autopoesis" or the self-organizing, self-producing capacity of living
systems such as a simple cell when it obtains "operational closure" but
struchlral openness.
From the innovative and transdisciplinary works of Bateson, Guattari
adopted the cybernetic view that living systems enact a necessary unity of
life-fonns and mind, beyond or beneath any dualist division of reality, and
that mind is manifested at even the simplest levels of life and all the way
up to the interactivity of complex ecosystems. Mind here is not
consciousness, but a fonn of embodied cognition-in-acting by life fonns
doing things with "infOlmation" or differences. That is, elementary
mentality does not alTive suddenly after the brain, but rather whenever an
organized pattern emerges that begins to make distinctions, e.g., between
food and waste, light and dark, wann and cold, me and not-me, and so
Erick Heroux 181
forth and· begins to use such distinctions as maintenance or systemic
~eedbac~, developing increasingly complex levels of logical types of
mfonnatlOn, such as information-about-infonnation is of a logically higher
category. When this becomes an organic process rather than static logical
types, the process depends upon and produces "orders of recursiveness"
(Mind and Nature 222). I might go so far as to compress Bateson's much
more colorful and elegant observations as to state that once an organic
system obtains orders of recursiveness, then it has the capacity to "learn,"
a behavior generally attributed to mind rather than matter. Mind co-
evolves into brain, and does not suddenly appear after that organ magically
appears on the scene. Mind is a kind of body without organs in
Deleuzoguattarian terms, yet it is produced interactively by organs without
a body at the same time.
Furthermore, looking at the larger interactive network between
o~ganisms, once two or more of these recursive systems begin to process
dIfferences (a.k.a, information) interactively in strategic patterns of
cooperation/competition, then we are at the learning process of co-
adaption, which Bateson also called co-evolution (51). Bateson is
sometimes hastily misread as suggesting that biology shows us a Mind
guiding Na~ure, but this is a very poor reading since Bateson explicitly
warns agamst such transcendence repeatedly. The mind/nature or
nature/m~nd th~t he did try to describe is entirely immanent, and it is only
coextenslVe WIth the material systemic process that has, Guattari would
say, produced it, and Bateson would add, while simultaneously being
produced by it. Already of interest here is that Bateson does not write of a
Subject or intentionality, but rather of complex systems that treat as
informa~ion only a "difference that makes a difference" for that system, a
pragmatic process (250). One of his most philosophically passionate
summings up is in an essay titled "Fonn, Substance, and Difference"
where a further step is made from the way mind is dependent upon the
larger contexts, the interconnecting patterns, and that this complex unit (or
assemblage) of the "organism-and-its environment" is actually what
survives in natural selection. Ultimately, Bateson argues that mind is not
something located inside an isolated entity, but rather "immanent in the
la:ge biological system-the ecosystem" ("Form, Substance, and
DIfference" 454). But because this interdependent system has co-evolved
because mind in this sense has been selected, this implies an obligation o~
our part to attend to the survival of the whole context, not the isolated
individual or species. A vital consequence of this is summed up in
Bateson's paramount conclusion that has not yet been fully taken on board:
182 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
The identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival
is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical. (460)
The traditional vulgar-darwinist view of competing individuals and the
survival of the most successfully adapted species in an indifferent
environment is an enormous error, according to Bateson, a view that
actually assists in the ongoing suicidal destruction of our environment.
Bateson's solution is to think more comprehensively about the nature of
nature, beyond identity and reification, so as to reconnect to the sources of
one's own mind in the larger material contexts of interlocking systems in
nature. Mind is on the outside, so to speak, if also the inside/outside binary
is already placed under erasure to the degree that the inside (i.e., your
mind) is inseparable from the outside, while the outside always already is
comprised of multiple layers of insides. I might rephrase this after Guattari
as the becoming-mind of the complex networks of bodies-and-their-
environment, of systems inside of systems inside of systems all the way
down as far as we can go to the molecular and even the subatomic, and all
the way back up to the planetary and the cosmos. While each system is
distinct, producing its own properties, there is no possible cut along the
continuum of interactive mutuality, or as the theoretical biologist Varela
puts it in his Buddhist terms: "codependent arising" (Embodied Mind 110).
Guattari assimilated and adapted much of Bateson into his already
developing theory of "desiring machines" and "machinic assemblages"
(agencement), which can most readily be defined as a kind of Batesonian
system. From Bateson, he will recognize the themes of immanence,
process, the co-dependence of mind/nature as enacted in the connecting
pattems of systems, the irrelevant lateness of a conscious subject or an
isolated cogito, the way that meaning is only a pragmatic activity for a
particular system of differences, and finally Bateson's urgent ethical
conclusion of a what was so far an objective description. At this point, we
can also more easily find the connections between those "three ecologies"
of mind, society, and natural environment already insisted upon in many
of Bateson's essays.
Ecologies avec Guattari
Now that we have the gist of this altemative theoretical biology, it
should be both more obvious and more resonant that the lead epigraph for
Guattari's booklet The Three Ecologies is from Bateson: "There is an
ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds." The bridge
(though not the identity) between a science and a politics, between
Erick Heroux 183
epistemology and ethics, between the established ecology and the
Guattarian ecology begins with Bateson's insight. While science
continually delimits its statements for value-neutrality in the traditional
project to preserve its objectivity from subjective distortions, this approach
proves to be too simplistic and inadequate as a human ecology-both for
epistemology and for ethics. Guattari will thus take ecological theory
through Bateson and Varela and beyond into a social praxis that he also
called an "ethico-aesthetic paradigm" (the subtitle of his book,
Chaosmosis). Social practices, personal practices, and environmental
practices are indeed mutually influencing, but more to the urgent task at
hand, Guattari repeatedly insists in several books that scientific knowledge
is not the end point, but only the beginning to assist in the creative activity
of making new ways of life, a social cultivation of new singularities linked
to new solidarities with open, multiple, transversal connectors. Ecological
practice needs empirical sources of knowledge about the natural world, but
then this factual knowledge is not the fundamental ground of all human
values, and must enter the complex social production of new values,
becoming part of the larger ecology of ideas and the emerging autopoetic
"assemblies of enunciation" as they move across the social formation.
This is Guattari's gambit as the way around our current impasse, a
world where we already have far more ecological knowledge than we do
ecological practices, which are often blocked at the level of national
politics and suppressed whenever they conflict with the profitable interests
of corporations. But piecemeal reforms go nowhere near far enough to
solve the planet's problems; and as soon as we begin to tamper with one
specific problem, sooner or later we find that it is connected to other
problems in other realms, other ecologies, which are then connected to
other problems in tum, endlessly and we find that everything is connected
to everything. A viable altemative to this false dilemma between the
unsustainable status quo and ineffective technical reforms carried out by
authorities would seem to be quite Guattarian: to set loose a "molecular
revolution" of micropolitical practices that make new transversal
subjectivities, assemblages, autovalorizing machines of enunciation, de-
and re- territorializations that are flexible, process· oriented, and open to
the multiple agencies involved, whether prepersonal, personal, or
metapersonal. In Chaosmosis, he occasionally takes to the soapbox to
deliver a rousing manifesto:
With the fading antagonisms of the Cold War, we enter a period when
serious threats, posed by our productivist society to the human species,
appear more distinctly. Our survival on this planet is not only threatened
by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social
184 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
solidarity and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be
reinvented. The refoundation of politics will have to pass through the
aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three ecologies-the
environment, the socius and the psyche. We cannot conceive of solutions
to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the
greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a
mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art ofliving in society. We
cannot conceive of international discipline in this domain without solving
the problem of hunger and hyperinflation in the Third World. We cannot
conceive of a collective recomposition of the socius, correlative to a
resingularisation of subjectivity, without a new way of conceiving political
and economic democracies that respect cultural differences-without
multiple molecular revolutions. We cannot hope for an amelioration in the
living conditions of the human species without a considerable effort to
improve the feminine condition. The entire division of labor, its modes of
valorization and finalities need to be rethought. Production for the sake of
production-the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist
market or in planned economies-leads to monstrous absurdities. The only
acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that
is auto-emiching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion. (20-21)
I have quoted this passage at length because it is a rare moment in
Guattari's texts when he is willing to concretely list the particular
problems, suggest both their diversity and pervasiveness, and also show
the holistic entanglement we are caught up in, while simultaneously point
to the way forward, the "new art of living in society." Forming scientific
commissions of ecologists to study the problem is very far from adequate,
though of course a small step toward progress. He goes on to explain the
radical break since his ecology "must stop being associated with the image
of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in
my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power
formations, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue ... "
(Three Ecologies 52). A ringing echo can be heard of Marx's famous
"Theses on Feuerbach," the point is change, not interpretation; creation not
reiteration; experimentation not repetition.
But change how and according to whom? Guattari's theory and praxis
never stopped answering this: At every level, high and low, inside and out,
from each according to their desire to each according to their needs.
Rather than Marx's gambit for centralization and economic development,
Guattari aims for a decentered, heterogenic, polyphonic transversality at
all levels across the three ecologies. We now know that most people desire
to create a healthier psyche, society, and environment. But they feel
trapped. Yet we also know that certain conditions have led to rapid and
Erick Heroux 185
dramatic change from below, just like chaotic flows in thermodynamics
will unpredictably bifurcate and generate a new organized pattern, as for
instance happened around the world in 1989 when masses of people
poured into the streets to suddenly end the Soviet Union. Change is a
process of flow from below, from each pre-individual subconscious
fragment, each person, each family, locale, group, classroom, tribe,
audience, and so forth all the way through international levels, with
"transversal" lines crisscrossing each in multiple networks. In the fifteen
or so years since this long quotation was published, we have indeed
witnessed the massive spread of awareness about the global warming it
mentioned, something that took about thirty years but only hundreds of
individuals to communicate to the world. Today as a consequence, we
witness an exploding emergence of multiple responses, groups, solutions,
technologies, dreams, critiques, soul-searching, city planning, international
accords, actions moving in all directions, coming from above and below in
various transversal combinations. If this process could be encouraged
rather than constrained (which is also happening at the same time), then
another molecular revolution vis-a-vis global climate change will have
happened, resulting also in new subjectivities, new agencies, new
solidarities.
Other current examples of how these three ecologies can be
reconnected in new "machinic assemblages" are emerging in many zones.
The important work of Vandana Shiva converges with Guattari's
recommendations, though starting from a very different education and
location. Shiva is a particle physicist, ecologist, and feminist active in
India, and she has successfully helped to create new forms of solidarity
among village women and farmers to avoid the devastation of their
communities wrought by transnational agribusiness, genetically modified
seed, the biopiracy of privatizing genetic heritage, and neoliberal
economics. While speaking, writing, and organizing for environmental
justice, Shiva continues to compose uncounted book after book about the
interconnections between biodiversity and "bio-democracy" versus "bio-
imperialism" and monoculture--of both the agricultural and cultural sort. 6
Her theory and practice connects ideas and materials, economics and
ecology, global and local, individuals and communities, scientific
knowledge and ethics, forming new assemblages of emmciation that link
up democratic desires and produce new social practices. Guattari imagined
a world of a billion Vandana Shivas, each a unique singularity linking up
new solidarities.
How to cultivate the conditions for such a renewing society is the main
theme throughout Guattari's theoretical work. He does not merely remind
186 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
us that we have a serious problem and that the world is going to hell in a
handbasket, like all too many writers have done. Instead he delves into the
micro level sources of change and the institutional, psychic, and
ideological blockages that prevent change. Readers of this essay collection
know that he moved through and beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis and in
postmarxist circles for much of his career. During the last phase of his
career, these too were enfolded and extrapolated into an increasingly
layered theory coming out of the theoretical biology previously
introduced. The complexity of Guattari's theoretical work is a consequence
of his dialogue with complexity science, and at times this dialogue was
literal, as in the case of a fonnal discussion with leading scientists, Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. 8 Just as he had already been doing with
Lacanism, Marxism, and semiotics, Guattari critically worked through and
against complexity science, theorizing what he variously called ecosophy
and chaosmosis. Prigogine is one of several founders of the new science of
complexity, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on
thermodynamic flows, showing the emergence of order in physical states
far from equilibrium. Guattari often alludes to Prigogine and his cowriter,
Isabelle Stengel's. An essential book by them, one of the most important
for both its philosophy of science and its contribution to a new science, is
Order Out of Chaos (1984). This explains the "new science of complexity"
in detail for a general reader, or at least in its thennodynamics aspect. The
book makes a surprising number of enormous claims for the historical
shift to a different science as it argues for the irreversibility of time, the
uncertainty of prediction, a new perspective on entropy, the emergence of
order from chaotic fluctuations, the priority of becoming over being, active
matter, etc. Guattari reappropriated this for his psycho-socio theories,
especially the emphasis on how non-equilibrium dynamic systems in
chaotic flux fonn new self-organizing processes. He used this to correct
the older cybernetic systems view he had learned from Bateson, a view
which tended to emphasize a more static equilibrium or homeostasis. One
can immediately guess that his dislike of Freud's deep reliance on
biological homeostasis, for instance in the theory of a death drive, is
paralleled in all such conservative tropes that then get reapplied as
ideological containment at the social level. Now the tables were turned,
and the new science of complexity was showing that while stasis is
ultimately entropy, that chaos leads to the emergence of self-organization,
that process and becoming are more fimdamental in nahlre than being.
Does all this borrowing from natural science make Guattari a neo-
materialist who would return psychology and sociology to their
evolutionary and physical ground? Is he a kind of crypto-sociobiologist in
Erick Heroux 187
the E. O. Wilson camp, providing deeper foundations for social theory? A
closer reading will show that the answer is no. Just as Lacan pried
psychoanalysis away from biology by bringing in linguistics, the gaze, the
imaginary, the symbolic structure, etc., So too did Guattari for ecology in
his own way.9 The hybrid complexity of his theory also owes to his
frequent citations of Bakhtin's literary theory and Hjehnslev's linguistics,
which would have to be the topic of another essay. The upshot for now is
to see three ontological modifications that preclude any easy reduction of
one domain to another. First, his three ecologies are not simply the same,
nor in a direct causal chain. Each ecology has its own distinct emergent
properties, while other features do traverse the three. I will come back to
this in a bit more detail below. There is left then no reduction of one to the
other, as was the error of Social Darwinism for instance. Second, which
"nature" are we talking about? For Guattari, the nature of nature is
endlessly innovative, productive, dynamic, chaosmic, heterogenic, auto-
poetic, becoming. This does not preclude a neo-materialist psychology
(Nietzsche is a case in point here), but it certainly complicates the
traditional attempt to nail down human normality on its physical substrate,
since in this case it would be hard to locate the norm. Third, the
environment is selectively shaped by each organism differently; such that
different species interact with a different "world" in a very materialist way,
a rather elaborate point explained by Maturana and Varela (1980). This too
should be clarified once we look next at Guattari's three ecologies a bit
more closely.
The three domains are interactive yet each operates on its own unique
principles. They also parallel the three horizons found in a quite common
philosophical tradition (in phenomenology, existentialism and gestalt
psychology) that situated our experience of phenomena within three
distinct contexts, moving outward in concentric circles: self (eigenwelt),
society (mitwelt), and environment (umwelt) also translated commonly as
"world". These are not objective lmiversals, but rather situations that
structure conscious experience of an inner world, a social world of being
with others, and the natural world as it appears from one's position. Let us
see how those three phenomenological horizons are remodeled in
Guattari's version of a tripartite ecology, since he rejects phenomenology
as a method (37). Still, he did retain some elements of that phenomenology
or at least existentialism, when he notes a few pages later that the three
ecologies do have in common that they are experienced as a "for-itself
[pour-soil" and not as a closed "in-itself [en-soiJ" (53). Despite this
common feature, each ecological domain also has a separate principle of
188 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
its own, and there may even be "antinomies between the ecosophical
levels" (54).
First, for the psyche, the principle is that it faces the world and selects
the significant environmental factors through "a pre-objectal and pre-
personal logic that Freud has described as being a 'primary process'" (54).
I believe that Guattari had in mind his previous work on "partial objects"
and "partial enunciators" that are closely related to transitional objects
(between self and other, neither/nor but both/and) in psychoanalysis and
the objet petit a in Lacan. But Guattari is now re-articulating this already
subtle psychological point with the cognitive biology of Varela and
Maturana, who argue that every organism "brings forth a world" with its
own unique set of senses and interactions with particular environmental
signals, energies, meanings, while it ignores or cannot perceive some other
environmental signals that are the "world" for a different type of organism.
One way to see the simultaneous links and separations between the psyche
and its environment is through this version of a partial object somewhere
in the middle between subject and object, both/and yet neither/nor. The
organism brings forth its own objects, selected from the buzzing chaos as a
difference that makes a difference. Thus these objects are partly
subjective, and specific only to that particular umwelt.
Second, the ecological principle specific to the social domain has to do
of course not just with objects but rather other subjects, always already in
relationships, from parents and family to larger and larger social groups
out to the mysterious entity called society that seems to demand things
from us and to both meet and frustrate desire. The ecology of society is
informed by these entangled emotional and libidinal investments, yet also
including "pragmatic cathexis" (60), or the practical internalization of
social norms and habits. As this psychoanalytic description suggests, an
interlocking overlap with the previous psychic ecology is everywhere
apparent in Guattari's description of the social domain. He further divides
the socius into two basic types of relational identification. To simplify, I
might serviceably rephrase these as bad (unconsciously) versus good
(autopoetically), if only we understand that Guattari does not take
seriously any such binary oppositions, and that throughout his work there
are no guarantees that any political ontology is inherently always "good".
Readers of Deleuze and Guattari together inevitably find this caveat, that
is, if they make it to the end of each chapter: deterritorialization is not
always the right thing at the right time, and neither is reterritorialization
always wrong; "smooth spaces" are not necessarily liberatory; lines of
flight can be a danger to self and others; the "rhizome" is both "good and
bad"; the "body without organs" can be an "overdose" or also "fascist"
Erick Heroux 189
depending on the situation (Deleuze, On the Line 108). The same
deconstructive seeing through logocentrism pertains to Guattari's struggle
to articulate useful tactics that nevertheless provide no eternal guarantee
for every situation. The section on social ecology then offers a longer
discussion about global social problems: the imposition of a postindustrial
selfhood onto undeveloped countries in monstrously awkward social
~ormations; the failure of mass media to assist in positive social change,
lllstead feeding the degradation of mind, society, and environment; the
alternative potential for a "post-media age" that would allow everyone to
produce communications, fostering "a multitude of subject-groups capable
of directing [the media'S] resingularization" (61); and the complex
recomposition of the working classes as if they were middle-class
["embourgeoiser'1 given the advent of a new mode of production in
information economies (63); coupled with the off-shoring of factory line
Fordist production, intersecting with an international division of labor; the
a
dangerous probability of a bifurcation and emergence of "fascism of the
Ayatollahs" and similar reactionary capturing of social groups through
fantasies of the Law, the Father, the Leader. These topics are more
familiar to readers of Hardt and Negri today, but I am reminded that the
date of this booklet was 1989. In winding down his global ecology,
Guattari warns again that his theoretical models are not guarantees: "It
must be stressed that [my] promotion of existential values and the values
of desire will not present itself as a fully-fledged global alternative" (66).
Something else will be at least as crucial, the "long-tenn shifts" in value
systems that undergird sociocultural systems. Yet these too are long wave
results of thousands of smaller value-systems "percolating" up over the
years. The bifurcation and emergence, formerly known as the revolution,
always occurred when such microrevolutions could coalesce into "new
poles of valorization" (66).
Now that we have seen the more distinct principles of both the mental
and social domains, finally we arrive at the third, but the specific principle
of environmental ecology tellingly gets the least space in his text, and it
gets short shrift. In a book dedicated to ecologies, this is oddly
inexplicable and the principle here does not seem to follow from his
reading of Bateson and Varela, with the vital exception that he does take
up that point about preserving the unit of "organism-and-its-environment"
discussed above. This section does, however, seem to resemble more so
his engagement with Prigogine's chaos science of unpredictability,
irreversibility, and the process of dynamic disequilibrium. The natural
principle is that anything can happen and probably will-"the worst
disasters or the most flexible evolutions" (66). Again there are no
190 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
guarantees. The upshot for human ecology in this passage could be
summed up as restoration ecology and creative environmental engineering
both. Since our technologies have now seriously interfered with and
endangered so many ecosystems, we fmd ourselves thrown into a race to
then use technology to manage, repair, improve our environment in order
to preserve the human habitat. This is asserted briefly as a matter of fact
over which it is by now too late to argue, as we are in the midst of one of
the greatest mass species extinctions ever recorded in addition to global
climate chaos, something the media has been shy to discuss. Scientists
announced in January 2008 that we have indeed passed into a new
geological era that they named the "Anthropocene Epoch."l0 The new
man-made epoch will be measurably visible to future geologists, a
segmentation layer has already been laid down between this new epoch
and the old, departing from the recent 1O,000-year-old Holocene Epoch, or
in other words all of written history and then some. Now we begin to
move into the interesting times where natural history and human history
have become so interwoven that geological analysis cannot ultimately
separate them. This is what I mean by being thrown into an inextricably
technological ecology. Since complex systems under bifurcation are
irreversible, as shown by the work of Prigogine, there is no going back.
Guattari pushes us ahead, urgently.
Guattari attempts to articulate the three in relationship to each other
inseparably and yet also as autonomous realms given over to their unique
modes, never allowing one to dominate and endanger the others. Thinking
through this sort of both/and approach, Guattari advises us to "learn to
think 'transversally'" (Three Ecologies 43) and to emphasize an "eco-logic"
of creative process, relational systems, and experimental praxis rather than
reductionist analysis. Nevertheless, the three domains are equally
distressed today, and not by coincidence. Especially after 1989, what he
had long before been calling "Integrated World Capitalism" increasingly
dominates and endangers all three domains of psyche, society, and natural
environment. To that extent, his ecosophy defends these "three ecologies"
against an unsustainable system of exploitation. Articulating their needs
and interests together will not be a return to Marxist totalization with its
fundamental categories of the infrastructure-ideology model. Instead, for
Guattari, as with virtually all of the poststructuralist postmarxists, we are
beginning to create new "ecosophical assemblages of enunciation" that
will redirect us away from the unhealthy "dead-end" of capitalism (53).
The only escape is to encourage a praxis that embraces the three domains
yet frees them to mutate and evolve simultaneously and heterogeneously
(68):
Erick Heroux 191
• A nascent subjectivity
• A constantly mutating socius
• A natural environment in the process of being reinvented
Guattari concludes that the "reconquest of a degree of creative
autonomy in one particular domain encourages conquests in other
domains--the catalyst for a gradual reforging and renewal of humanity's
c.onfidence in itself starting at the most miniscule level" (69). For a long
hme we were taught to see humanity at war with nature; and individuals
competing against each other for scarce socio-economic rewards; and the
psyche as eternally caught in discontented tension between the opposing
pressures of the superego and the instincts. This new ecology breaks with
all three traditional lessons of inexorable conflict by highlighting the
forgotten lessons: the ways in which the stimulation of creative production
in one domain often enough does support the increased vitality of the other
domains. A diseased psyche destroys its own environment and thus itself
but ~ healthy psyche cultivates and renews its own environment, obtainin~
as gIfts the further productivity of the natural world. Societies of open
cooperation multiply the benefits for individuals in tertiary effects beyond
calc?lation. Guattari's ecosophy argues for. a theory and praxis that
cultIvates both mutual interdependence and heterogeneous creativity at
each level simultaneously: "Individuals must become both more united
and increasingly different. The same is true for the resingularization of
schools, town councils, urban planning, etc." (69).
Perhaps it does not go without saying that I have had to condense and
simplify Guattari's more extended and complex points. His texts are
interesting in their sudden shifts from abstract neologisms to the more
homely examples. While he did not consider himself to be a writer, and in
fact confessed that he had no patience for writing, still his books and
essays are deliberately constructed to offer a new vision sincerely held and
seriously thought through. His style has been dismissed frequently by the
usual impatient reader. Likewise, his ecosophy has yet to be discussed in
any of the major anthologies of Ecocriticism, Green Studies readers, and
such that I have come across--and I collect them. Carolyn Merchant
omitted him from her 1994 anthology Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical
Theory even though it contains decent sections on critical theory (Adorno,
Marcuse et al) and also from "postmodern science" including Prigogine.
Greg Garrard omitted him in the first book length overview of the field of
ecocriticism (2004). On the other hand, Guattari was discussed
appreciatively by the poststructuralist ecofeminist Verena Andermatt
Conle~ in a chapter devoted to him in Ecopolitics (91-107), even though
she WIshes that he had read more Donna Haraway on the cyborg-as-

192 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
feminist, and thereby misses too much that could be read in Guattari's
machinic assemblages; and she refers not at all to his Chaosmosis. I will
mention one other appreciative reading of his ecosophy in passing, that in
an essay for the Research on Anarchism website titled, "The Possibility of
an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism" in which the author reliably if rapidly
summarizes Deleuze and Guattari on the rhizome and also Guattari's Three
Ecologies and largely defends the implications of these against the
opposing view of the more humanist social ecology of Murray Bookchin.
The essay is sketchy but makes a number of sharp distinctions along the
way and in general argues that Guattari is useful.
Very little has been said about his ecosophy to date, and even less has
been done with it. So, does the study of Guattari repay the effort? Or are
other ecologies of theory better formed and more effective? After all, it
has become a commonplace among the mainstream intelligentsia that this
style of theory fails to pay sufficient returns for the efforts invested. But
the same class of readers said the same thing about a novel titled Ulysses
when it was ftrst published. Guattari will never become a Joyce, but I hope
to have shown how his ecosophy comes out of a study of the most
philosophical biology and complexity science available to date, and how
Guattari adumbrated the next step ahead for human ecology from there,
the ftrst and last step with which this essay began: the remaking of social
practices by increasing the disequilibrium of the current deadly
organization that is frozen in a repetition-compulsion of destructive
behavior, a new fostering of bifurcations toward new singularities, new
subjective formations of "agencement" and new transversal interactive
networks simultaneously, the very process of autopoetic self-organization
out of dynamic flux.
Notes
I See the interviews with the two in Chaosophy (Guattari 1995) for instances of
Guattari's input and Deleuze's reticence.
2 Many of his earlier solo articles are translated in Molecular Revolution:
Psychiatry and Politics, trans., Rosemary Sheed (Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1984). This selects from two previous books: Psychoanalyse et transversalite
(1972) and La Revolution moleculaire (1977). But even the dates of those books
misrepresent the dates of composition or deliverance of many of the conference
papers and articles collected here. An introduction by David Cooper notes that
items taken from the first book date back to 1955 through 1970, long before and
during the start of his collaboration with Deleuze. Much of the terminology here
shows up later in his collaboration with Deleuze on the two volumes of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia.
Erick Heroux 193
3 The leading Guattarist in the anglophorte world is Gary Genosko. His booklength
monograph, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, is the first major study of
Guattari in English, and one done so thoroughly, including archival research, that it
is a benchmark for any later effort. If any single book could begin to correct what
Genosko calls "the problem of the reception of Deleuze's work as a way of erasing
Guattari", then this is it. Here, I do not intend to turn the tables and claim that
Deleuze was the junior partner, and in fact that would miss the point of their
creative co-operation; instead, I intend to counter the odd erasure of Guattari
coupled with the general apotheosis of Deleuze. In order to be for Deleuze, one
need not suppress Guattari; and vice-versa of course.
4 See the almost autobiographical essay in Chaosophy about his psychoanalytic
theory/praxis: "La Borde: A~Clinic Like No Other" (Guattari 187-208) and also
Genosko's description of the La Borde experiences ("The Life and Work of Felix
Guattari" 133-139 in Guattari, Three Ecologies, 2000). This shows clearly how
Guattari was more engaged in a praxis as a theoretical psychoanalyst who wanted
to make the closed and disciplinary institutions in which he worked more open to
participation and creativity by the staff and patients at every level. He worked in
and on and through this clinic from 1955 until his death. "Empowerment" was the
cliche during that era, but instead Guattari always spoke of "desiring", "molecular
revolutions", "transversal" connections, and "machinic assemblages" and
"singularization". What impresses me now is how successful Guattari was in
transforming that clinic, which was the same size and of the same sort as a
psychiatric hospital that I worked in as an aide for three years in California during
the 1980s. Where I was left with a fmstrating sense of hopelessness, Guattari
energetically and brilliantly intervened in his institution, deftly avoiding the dead
end traps of Lacani an ism, romantic anti-psychiatry, Maoism, etc., while deploying
his keen analytic skills on the practical transformation of the institution toward a
space of participation, openness, flexibility, community, and the production of
singularities by channeling desire.
5 I was first alerted to this debate about the systems view among contemporary
ecologists by the ecocritic Dana Phillips' chapter on the historical shifts within the
discipline, "Ecology Then and Now" in his scathing (and too often erroneous)
critique of the emerging field of ecocriticism in the humanities: The Truth of
Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford University Press,
2003),42-82.
6 Like every emergent specialization, biosemiotics is both very new yet
paradoxically has a minor prehistory dating back decades. Key figures include
Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Guenther Witzany, Marcello Barbieri, and Thomas
Sebeok. The field now has an international organization, a journal, and conference
proceedings. See website at http://www.biosemiotics.org/ The field is
interdisciplinary yet would appear for now to be the biologist's version of a
Deleuzoguattarian resurrection of Gregory Bateson, but minus the micro-
revolution.
7 See especially Vandana Shiva's Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on
Biodiversity and Biotechnology (1993) and her recent Earth Democracy: Justice,
Sustainability, and Peace (2005).
 194 Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology
8 This round-table dialogue with the scientists is reprinted with the title "Openness"
in the valuable coIlection of materials about Guattari in Deleuze and Guattari:
Critical Assessments a/Leading Philosophers. Vol 2. ed. Gary Genosko (London:
Routledge, 2001), 774-794.
9 To give credit, I believe that Genosko also made this observation about Lacan's
anti-biology effect and connected this to Guattari, but for now I cannot locate the
exact source.
10 On our recent passage into the new geological epoch, see Robert Roy Britt,
"Humans Force Earth Into New Geologic Epoch" LiveScience 27 Jan 2008, n.p.
www.1ivescience.com/environment/080127-new-epoch.html. Three separate
sources for this proposal are cited, and several other scientists are quoted. Relevant
excerpts include: "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphicaIly significant
change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene-
currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change-as a new
geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion,'
Zalasiewicz's team writes. The paper caIls on the International Commission on
Stratigraphy to officiaIly mark the shift .... In a separate paper last month in the
journal Soil Science, researchers focused on soil infeliility alone as a reason to dub
this the Anthropocene Age. 'In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human
. impact is clear, large, and growing,' AIley told ScienceNow, an online publication
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'A geologist from
the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new
name, where and when our impacts show up.'" We have deterritorialized and
reterritorialized a new segmentation at the geological level.
Works Cited
Bateson, Gregory. "Form, Substance, and Difference." Steps to An
Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 448-68.
-. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam Books,
1979).
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in
Poststructrualist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1987).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Pamet. "On the Line." On the Line. Trans.
John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983),69-114.
-. Dialogues II (London: Continuum, 2002).
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
GalTard, Greg. Ecocriticism (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004).
Genosko, Gary. Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London:
Continuum, 2002).
Erick Heroux 195
(Ed.) Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers. Vol 2 (London: Routledge, 2001).
Guattari, Felix. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans.,
Rosemary Sheed (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984).
-. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London:
Athlone Press, 2000).
-. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and
Julian Prefanis (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).
-. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995).
-. The Guattari Reader. Ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
-. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Trans., David Sweet and Chet
Wiener (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996).
-. The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Ed. Stephane Nadaud (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2006).
Guattari, Felix, and Antonio Negri. Les nouveaux espaces de liberte
(Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985).
Joff. "The Possibility of an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism". Research on
Anarchism website, n.d.,
http://rafolUm.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article=1761, last accessed
April 02, 2008.
Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and
Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordecht: D. Reidel
Publishing, 1980).
Merchant, Carolyn (Ed.) Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (New
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994).
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in
America (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New
Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984).
Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity
and Biotechnology (Debra Dun: Natraj Publishers, 1993).
-. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (South End
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Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991).

"STRANGE ECOLOGY" IN DELEUZE-
GUATTARl'S A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
IRVINGGOH
Introduction
What this paper is interested in is the image of Nature, and the relation
between Nature and thought in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand
Plateaus. It could be said at the outset here that Nature in A Thousand
Plateaus does not take on an image that is of an exploited, victimized, or
powerless passivity. Instead, Nature takes on a violent image. It is an
image of a violent force, an image of mutation, furor, and even of violence
turned against itself and everything that dwells within it. Consequently, the
relation between Nature and thought cannot be a benign one either. In A
Thousand Plateaus, it will be shown that thought seeks a violent economy
with Nature-and vice versa. Thought feeds and builds on the violence of
Nature. But Nature likewise feeds on the violence of thought. This rather
anomalous image of Nature and the peculiar relation between Nature and
thought in A Thousand Plateaus are what this paper would like to
explicate. It will also argue that the radical philosophical edge of A
Thousand Plateaus is possible not only by recognizing the violence of
Nature but also by striking out against Nature, by being almost anti-
Nature, contre nature. In return, Nature, in order to sustain itself, likewise
calls for a thought as radical as Deleuze and Guattari's, a call that is no less
forceful, as it will be shown, that involves a violent abstraction of
philosophy. Once again therefore, one must not expect in Deleuze and
Guattari the passive, benign Nature that one is so inclined to safeguard and
embrace, an image that most ecocriticisms or environmental movements
are quick to conjure. With Deleuze and Guattari, one is in the realm of a
whole other Nature, "an entirely different nature" (Thousand Plateaus 11)
if not a "strange ecology" as Deleuze would say (Deleuze and Parnet,
Dialogues 75).
In a sense, this project shares the premise of Verena Conley's
Ecopolitics, where she argues that "1968 thinkers," of which Deleuze and
Irving Goh 197
Guattari are certainly part of, develop radical philosophies that "produce
cOminanding changes in the way we think the world" by having an
"ecological consciousness" (Conley 1). That point, for me, is especially
undeniable in Deleuze and Guattari, whose concepts are ineluctable from
the natural environment. I will just list a few of those concepts here in
brisk fashion: becoming-animal (I will discuss this concept further on in
this paper), which brings the human outside of its anthropocentric and
anthro~omorphic confines via a correspondence not only with animals, but
also WIth plants, and which leads towards a cosmic line that traces the
earth's surface; the refrain, which is ineluctable from the ground of the
earth since it constructs a territory around itself; and nomadology, which
traverses spaces or rather makes deserts of spaces, and therefore is always
already engaged with a movement across environmental spaces. In other
words, any thinking of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts without a
sensitivity to the natural environment can only be an incomplete grasp of
~heir philosophy. One could say that philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari,
IS perhaps first eco-Iogy-in the sense of a thinking that is never detached
from the earth, the sea, the sky, the climate, the cosmos that surrounds our
planetary space, and all the natural elements and entities that dwell in all
these spaces, including bacteria and viruses-before it is ethology or
nomadology. One could say that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is
always already eco-etho-philosophy.!
Where I will depart, however, from Conley'S book, is the perspective
on "ecological consciousness." As suggested in the opening paragraph
here, if there is an "ecological consciousness" in Deleuze and Guattari it
will also take into account a consciousness of the violence of ~he
ecological environment itself, a consciousness of the violence unleashed
by Nature itself. This paper, as such, therefore also departs from
conventional ecocriticisms, which generally tend to call for interventions
that seek to preserve, conserve, sustain, and protect Nature as if there is an
original state of Nature with definable horizons or co~stant limits. In
Ecocritique, Timothy W Luke has sharply pointed out that most of the
times such ecocriticisms amount to 'Justifying anthropocentric
guardianship over terrestrial processes." (Luke 198). In other words,
making Nature a subject of discourse becomes just another opportunity for
human subjectivity to assert its control and mastery. More recently, in
Deleuze and Environmental Damage, Mark Halsey argues that the
problem of ecocriticsm is that it is touching on (to) Nature too much.
Ta~ng issue with deep ecology, which seeks to re-link people back to tlte
enVIronment, he notes that it shares its methodology with capitalism-that
force that has always been charged (rightly so) with direct and indirect
198 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
destruction of the environment-since capitalism has always predicated
itself, or has been motivated by the benefits of diachronic. and trans-
geographical relations. In other words, capitalism has always been acutely
aware of shifts in environmental occupation and development brought
about by movements of people across terrestrial spaces. So capitalism has
as much attraction to the environment as much as radical ecology. Wary of
this methodological problematic if not contradiction, Halsey will say,
"lack of interconnectivity [ ... ] is not the rallying point for ecological
problems" but that "ecological dilemmas result from· too much contact
with the Other (rivers, forests, soils, 'exotic' cultures)" (Halsey 29).
Following Deleuze and Guattari, Halsey argues that any thought of
ecology must free itself from any temptation, even though it is well-
intended, to close in on Nature, to seek to preserve it in other words, to set
it within limits even though these limits are to safeguard it. As Halsey
says, "What else is environmental conflict if not the visible and audible
result of attempts to constitute various portions of earth as a unity in spite
of it being a multiplicity?" (Halsey 80). To this critique of ecocriticisms,
Ingolfur Bliihdorn in Post-ecologist Politics will add, there is a false
"ecological correctness" to be aware of (Bliihdorn 185). One must avoid
being like "ecologists [ ... ] obsessed with-and tied by-the ideas of
stability, security and rational controllability." One must "avoid being
ecologically normative" (Bliihdorn 171 and 15).
Given these contemporary critiques expressing caution against the
uncritical perception of Nature as a weak and passive realm, which then
seems to justify an overexposed anthropocentric management over Nature
or which therefore underestimates or refuses to acknowledge the veritable
and active force of Nature, should the point for thought then, for a thought
like eco-etho-philosophy, be to uproot from such safe/ saving relations
with Nature? Should one instead open a field of thought where Nature
(re)asserts an active force which might contest the human condition, and
witness what emerges positively not only from this strife itself but also
from each side of the strife? I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's A
Thousand Plateaus inclines towards such a relation with Nature. In other
words, it risks a mini-combat with Nature, albeit a combat without
nihilistic ends, wills, or ambitions. If there is an "ecological
consciousness" in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus, then perhaps it would be more critical to discern a consciousness
that uproots (from) Nature and see what new ensemble Nature and thought
can form through this peculiar relation. This, to reiterate, is what this paper
will take as its task to elucidate.
Irving Goh 199
And just as there is no benign relation between Nature and thought,
there is also no attempt at enviromnental conservation in Deleuze and
Guattari-if by conservation one means to keep nature in check in terms
of preservation. For Deleuze and Guattari, Nature is a moving force. It is
even movement par excellence, always expending its energy, its
outgrowth, engendering a plurality of results in Nature (and whether these
are seen as positive or negative outcomes, it is always only from the point
of view of an anthropocentric axis and not that of Nature itself and
therefore somewhat critically inconsequential to an "ecological
consciousness" that is keenly perceptive of all sorts of energies and
mutations that the movement of Nature is capable of). The question of
how we can save the enviromnent will not be posed. The invocation of
Nature in Deleuze and Guattari is less about solving environmental
problems than how the environment and thought negotiate each other,
contest each other, and despite such contest, may support each other in the
end. There is, indeed, a strange alliance between thought and nature in
Deleuze and Guattari.
Philosophie contre Nature
In Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, philosophers are like sorcerers or
witches who hover at the edges of woods or fields. 2 In other words, Nature
is always in proximity. Nature fonns not only the backdrop of philosophy,
but as it will be seen, it even foregrounds philosophy, it drives philosophy
forward. At Nature's edge, philosophers are attendant upon an intuitive or
instinctive (muhml) attraction to a particular animal of the woods. After
all, they have an affinity with such an element of nature: "The important
thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact" (Thousand Plateaus
246). Once that is sensed, the philosophers strike, in pursuit of the animal,
not for the ends of consuming it but to experiment with a tearing away of
anthropomorphic structurations by entering into a molecular relation with
the animal, by becoming-animal in Deleuze and Guattari's term.
Becoming-animal, in short, is the correspondence. by mutual desire of
human and animal molecules at the frays of their respective material
forms, and therefore immediately situates itself within "ecological
consciousness." But in becoming-animal, the philosopher-sorcerers strike
not only against the animal but also the forest, the field. In a horizontal or
rather diagonal movement, the philosophers cut across the vertical lines of
trees, as if cutting them down. Their zigzag movements, in contrast to the
static root systems that support and found the arborescent landscape of the
woods, but corresponding to the transversal dissemination of rhizomes,
200 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
seem to as if uproot trees. In the chase for the animal, in other words in the
midst of the trajectory of becoming-animal philosophy, Nature is cut
down. And there is no pity: "not pity, but participation against nature. ,,3
In this tale of the philosopher-sorcerer traversing through Nature, what
is immediately striking is the apparent betrayal of Nature by the thought of
Deleuze and Guattari, since it has been noted previously that their
philosophy bears an "ecological consciousness." If one is at this point
rudely shocked by the apparent ecological insensitivity at the end of
deleuzoguattarian philosophy, let one be assured that Nature will take its
revenge, and so let it be said here that the philosopher-sorcerer will not be
the ultimate vanquisher in his or her interactivity with Nature. There will
in fact be no clear-cut winner in the contest between philosophy and
Nature. I will come back in a while to the end of this equivocal
philosophy-Nature negotiation. But at this moment, I would like to
explicate further the engagements with Nature during the flight of
Deleuze-Guattari's philosopher-sorcerer and the undeniable sense of
betraying Nature as philosophy proceeds, across a forest or field, in pursuit
of an animal.
In a way, something of a betrayal ought to be expected in Deleuze and
Guattari, since it is always an inherent mechanism in their philosophy.4 In
fact, this is especially the case for any thinking of an alliance. Alliance in
Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is linked to becoming-animal.
"Becoming [ ... ] concerns alliance" (Thousand Plateaus 238), as they say.
Now, alliance in becoming-animal also proceeds by a following of what
Deleuze and Guattari calls the "Anomal" or "the anomalous," an animal
that strays at the edge of the animal pack, ambiguous in its role in relation
to the pack as to whether it still belongs to it or is already a foot
somewhere outside it. This "Anomal" will also be for Deleuze and
Guattari the border that any becoming-animal must cross. In other words,
any body desiring a becoming-animal will follow this "Anomal," fOlming
an alliance with it. But forming this alliance is still not yet becoming-
animal per se. It is but a step towards becoming-animal. To complete the
process of becoming-animal, one would ultimately need to strike at this
"Anomal" according to Deleuze and Guattari. This is the stroke of betrayal
in becoming-animal, in alliance. To become-animal, one must form a
friendship with a particular animal, and then undo this friendship. As
Deleuze and Guattari will write, "becomings-animal are there from the
start, on the treason side" (Thousand Plateaus 241). So if one is to think
about the alliance between Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy and the
environment, as one is called to do so here, then a betrayal of the latter
Irving Goh 201
must somehow show up, and hence the violent image of philosopher-
sorcerers striking out at Nature in its flight of philosophy.
But one must also ask to what ends the instances of philosophical
violence against nature serve. In the elaboration of a philosophy of
becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari borrow images that depict
violence against Nature. The best example perhaps would be the reference
to Melville's Moby Dick, where Ahab's quest to hunt down the white whale
is expressed in a most fascinating or alluring and yet at the same time
violent style. In Deleuze and Guattari's reading, this hunt for the whale is
first not a quest for subjective revenge by Ahab, who had lost a leg to the
whale during a previous expedition: there is "no revenge to take"
(Thousand Plateaus 245). What is desired instead is a reaching towards
more nature, towards more than a singular Moby Dick, towards a pack of
whales. In this perspective, Moby Dick is but a boundary, the "Anomal" as
mentioned above, a frontier to be crossed in order to reach towards a more
multitudinous animal space. In other words, if there is a violence or
betrayal against an element of Nature, it is only but to reach towards more
of those elements. It is to go further in the experiment or experience of
becoming-animal by engaging with a multiplicity of animals in the pack
this time round, or to intensify further the immersion or engagement with
Nature. To attain the latter then, a certain violence against Nature becomes
necessary. As Deleuze and Guattari read Ahab reading the whale, "he is
the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to
reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it" (Thousand Plateaus 245).
It should be noted here in fact that the violence implicated in a
becoming-animal produces more nature not only at the end of its
trajectory. As Deleuze and Guattari will argue, Nature is served in the
middle of becoming. Becoming is not just only the interactivity of two
entities. In the midst of becoming, something else of nature can be
replicated, remembered, if not created. As the rhetoric of Deleuze and
Guattari goes, even a stream fOlms in the midst of this becoming,
emerging from or in-between the bi-directional flow of molecules between
the two entities. In becoming, there is "a transversal movement that
sweeps one and the other away, a stream [my italics] without beginning or
end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle"
(Thousand Plateaus 25).
 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
202
Nature contre Philosophie
So far, the image of the philosopher-sorcerer charging through the
forest or field on his or her broom-stick appears to be at first sight an
ecologically care-less will or desire on the part of the philosopher-sorcerer.
However, one cannot really say that a purely subjective force drives the
philosopher-sorcerer forward in this path through Nature right from the
beginning. According to Deleuze and Guattari, one must also recognize
that the philosopher-sorcerer himself or herself is in fact caught up in a
movement of Nature itself. There is a violent force of Nature that pushes
the philosopher-sorcerer towards an interactivity with nature's elements,
and situates him or her within Nature. As much as it is the philosopher-
sorcerer who consciously seeks out the animal and consequently charges
through Nature, this entire movement is actually also motivated by an
invisible force of Nature that sweeps the philosopher-sorcerer up in a
desire to become-animal and to traverse through the forest or field. There
is at work too the Furor of Nature, and it is through such a recognition that
one sees that the engagement between philosopher-sorcerer and Nature is
not one-sided affair. As Deleuze and Guattari say, "There is a complex
aggregate: the becoming-animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and
rats, winds and tempests, bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor"
(Thousand Plateaus 243). The interactivity here is therefore more complex
than one involving an aggressively active philosopher-sorcerer on the one
side and a passive helpless Nature on the other. Nature intervenes as
actively, if not as violently, in the interactivity between thought and
Nature. Once the Furor of Nature is recognized, there will no longer be the
illusion of the human in absolute control over Nature.
One must hence rethink the flight-path of the philosopher-sorcerer. Is
the flight of the philosopher-sorcerer smooth throughout? Is it with
arrogant confidence that the philosopher-sorcerer traverse the forest or the
field? What happens to the philosopher-sorcerer in the course of its
Nature-cutting flight? One notes that this line of flight is never a straight,
linear, horizontal path. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari will argue, it
follows the zigzag or diagonal dispersion of rhizomes. In other words, the
flight-path of this philosopher-sorcerer is not a well-charted one in the
sense of a systematic and meticulously coordinated precision-flying. It
already puts itself at risk of being cut down by a tree, by its stem, trunk, or
branches. Just as Nature drives the philosopher-sorcerer forward, it also
interrupts or ruptures this flight by placing its other elements before it. Cut
down, the flows of tributaries on the ground, or the water-flows that exist
between plants as Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus (11),
Irving Goh 203
will take over and wash the grounded philosopher-sorcerer further
elsewhere. By this time, the force of Nature has already taken over. Or
rather, it has always been the guiding techne of the philosopher-sorcerer,
since it is the haphazard dissemination of rhizomatic outgrowth that his or
her flight-path is implicitly (or unconsciously) predicated on. But here, the
violence of Nature is more than evident, as it will not only cut down the
philosopher-sorcerer in flight, but also sweep him or her away in the rush
of water. At this point, those. who were shocked initially by the violent
thrust of the philosopher-sorcerer's flight-path would perhaps find in this
scene of the philosopher-sorcerer's crash-landing some sort of poetic
ecological justice. ~
Recognizing this image and force of Nature now, recognizing not only
its Furor of becomings but also how it places the philosopher-sorcerer
before potentially disastrous ends, one would perhaps reconsider any
continued interactivity between philosophy and Nature or any further
investment in an eco-etho-philosophy. The question arises then, in relation
to the exchange of forces between philosophy and Nature: "Toward what
void does the witch's broom lead?" (Thousand Plateaus 248).5 There is a
risk of an ultimate destructive nothingness in an eco-etho-philosophy
therefore. For Deleuze and Guattari however, this is the risk that any act of
living thought must take or must dare to take as it pursues the trajectories
of Nature's forces. But must it necessarily end in tragedy or nothingness
for the philosopher-sorcerer, as if like a denouement of poetic justice for
his or her violent course through Nature? Deleuze and Guattari do not
think that the flight of the philosopher-sorcerer ought to necessarily crash-
land as such. Let me paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari here. The risk is
known from the outset, to reiterate. And it will be taken. And one would
proceed with an experimentation in interactivity with all forces and
elements of Nature. In other words, all that come before his or her flight-
path, which either cut him or her down, or lead the flight-path towards
another trajectory, will not be seen as terminal obstacles. They will not be
seen as impenetrable walls that violently bring everything to a crashing
and fatal halt. Instead, they will be seen as borders, each one a new
frontier of Nature's multiplicity and heterogeneous alterity, through which
other molecular engagement, or becoming as Deleuze and Guattari would
say it, with other elements and forces of Nature can take place. For
example, cut down from his or flight, and now at the mercy of the rush of
the stream on the ground, the philosopher-sorcerer must make a leap onto
what this new accidental ecological terrain can offer to thought. From the
broom-stick, the philosopher-sorcerer must now take up a surfboard with
this rush of water. (Deleuze has spoken of the act of philosophy as the
204 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
athletic energy or force or elan of a surfer riding a wave. Here, it is a
question of turning that elan into an elan vital.) He or she is now the
philosopher-surfer. And the task from then on would be to negotiate this
violent rush of water, and to think how this largely overwhelming violence
gives him or her to think anew or rethink his or her negotiation with a new
ecological terrain, to think how to survive this force of Nature.
Seen in this way, the violence of Nature is not necessarily an image
with a nihilistic horizon. It can also be a giving source, not only of
survivability but also of the invention of a new thought as thought
negotiates with new elements and forces of Nature. Put in another way,
taking risk with Nature's trajectory sustains a continued and renewed
experimentation with a philosophy and nature interactivity. In this case,
there is no fatal crash-landing. The philosopher-sorcerer can survive by
precisely taking the risk of going along with the stream-rush through the
forest. And this trajectory would only be a consistent passage of a series of
life-affirming becomings not only for the philosopher-sorcerer, but also for
the ensemble between philosophy and Nature:
it is always possible to have the good fortune to avoid them. Case by case,
we can tell whether the line is consistent, in other words, whether the
heterogeneities effectively function in a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether
the multiplicities are effectively transformed through the becomings of
passage. [ ... ] So experiment. (Thousand Plateaus 250-1)
It should be noted too that the violent force of nature acts not only
against humans. It acts against itself too. There is even a sacrificial logic to
the ecological thought of Deleuze and Guattari. In the interactivity
between philosophy and Nature, that is to say the flight-path of the
philosopher-sorcerer through the forest or field, it had been noted that this
trajectory is largely predicated on the moving cartography of rhizomes.
Not only do the rhizomes underlie the zigzag or haphazard flight-path, but
they also motivate the series of becomings that the philosopher-sorcerer
experiences in his or her encounter or engagement with Nature. But given
this predication on rhizomes, such that rhizomes can disseminate and
engage in a multiplicity of heterogeneous becomings with other plants,
animals, rocks, the wind, rivers, and humans, structures of vertical trees
have to be cut down, as Deleuze and Guattari doubtlessly suggest. To put
it in ecologically terrifying terms, they have to be deforested. One notes
that this takes place at the level of rhetoric, and yet the force of violence,
this time nature against nature, is still notable nonetheless. Rhizomes are
favored in place of trees in A Thousand Plateaus. Rhizomes look towards
"abandon[ning] the old model of the tree" (Thousand Plateaus lO). And a
Irving Goh 205
little later, the image of uprooting trees is again invoked to underscore the
free movement of rhizomes in contrast to the structured organization of the
tree-roots-branches system: "a line of flight [enables] one to blow apart
strata, cut roots [my italics], and make new connections" (Thousand
Plateaus 15). In all, there is therefore also a war between rhizomes and
trees in A Thousand Plateaus, "the rhizome as opposed to arborescence"
(Thousand Plateaus 296), and the trees have to be defeated. Beyond the
strife between rhizomes and trees, there is another recognizable scene of
violence involving elements of Nature. At the beginning, we have looked
at the violent mechanism of betrayal in the event of becoming-animal. For
Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is not restricted to a human-and-animal
. interactivity. Instead, animal and animal, or animal and plant, or plant and
plant may fold one another in a series of becomings. And as long as there
is becoming, there is the "Anomal", and there is the alliance, and therefore
within Nature (even in the absence of anthropomorphic Man), there will be
instances of treacherous violence of Nature against itself too. Given the
events of becoming in Nature, "combinations are neither genetic nor
structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations" (Thousand
Plateaus 242), and therefore "Nature operates-against itself" (Thousand
Plateaus 242).
Eco-etho-philosophy without Subject
and Natural Deterritorialization
For a philosophy that engages itself with the ecological realm, that is, a
philosophy that follows the dissemination of Nature's elements and forces
and which negotiates its own force with the latter, this philosophy canno~
ground a Subject. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Subject is what
in fact creates an obstacle to the movement of Nature, drying up a water
source or arresting the flow ofrivers. As they will write, the Subject is that
"which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow"
(Thousand Plateaus 276). If there is a potentiality of something new in
eco-etho-philosophy, if there is to be a new dimension to be opened up
through eco-etho-philosophy, a new world where thought and nature each
continue to flourish through an active engagement between them, this
cannot take place when there is a Subject that establishes his or her
existence in the world as primary presence, a Subject that establishes itself
as ~he spectacle to which everything else must gravitate towards, and
WhICh projects its subjectivity towards its field of interested perception and
habitation so as to rein everything else in and to control them, to make
them his or her property. In eco-etho-philosophy, one abandons any notion
206 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
of the Subject or subjectivity and disappears instead into the molecular
lines of the rock, the sand, and plants. That is where the creation of a new
world that involves thought and nature folding and unfolding each other
also becomes possible: "thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with
the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible" (Thousand
Plateaus 280). It is in this sense that Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy may
be said to take on a veritable ecological consciousness. For in this
situation, the figure of thought and elements of nature are almost
indistinct. One has become the other. Nature and thought cross each other.
"One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/ everything,
into a becoming" (Thousand Plateaus 280). Eco-etho-philosophy would
therefore strike against this Subject which resists such crossings. In the .
face of the Subject and its subjectivity, eco-etho-philosophy grapples or
wrestles with it only to tear it down. Deleuze and Guattari will even
deploy the image of violent nature, here the image of violent tectonic
movements, to break such systems of thought: "One elaborates a punctual
system or a didactic representation, but with the aim of making it snap, of
sending a tremor through it" (Thousand Plateaus 295). Or else Nature
itself, in its furor or force, will strike: "nature opposes its power [ ... ] to the
machines of human beings" (Thousand Plateaus 309).
Philosophy and Nature in eco-etho-philosophy will dis-organize any
attempt to found a notion of subjectivity. Any vision of a figure of thought
that seeks to absolutely or resolutely telTitorialize the ground around it and
the things within that ground can only be a delusion. As Deleuze and
Guattari's sense of the ecological would insist, the force of Nature will win
out at the end. Any gesture of telTitorialization, and any space that has
been telTitorialized, will be swept up and reclaimed by the
detelTitorializing movement of Nature. DetelTitorialization is the force
proper to the universe. And this force traverses all· things on this earth,
connecting them all with it, rendering them of this world and not another.
A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to
molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible.
Every fiber is a Universe fiber [my italics]. A fiber strung across
borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. (Thousand
Plateaus 249)
Deleuze and Guattari take up this point again later in What is
Philosophy? There, they will reiterate how telluric space, through which
the cosmic force of the universe passes, can never be controlled or
delimited by subjective wills to telTitorialization. Instead, the
detelTitorializing trajectory of the earth uproots and surpasses the latter. As
Irving Goh 207
they write in What is Philosophy?, "the earth constantly calTies out a
movement of detelTitorialization on the spot, by which it goes beyond any
territory: it is deterritorializing and deterritorialized" (What is
Philosophy? 85). But the sweeping up of occupied territories does not
signal a catastrophic end. Instead, this sweeping movement looks towards
the creation of new places, of elsewheres. In other words, it gives to new
territories at other places. "Movements of deterritorialization are
inseparable from telTitories that open onto an elsewhere; and the process
of reterritorialization is inseparable from the earth, which restores
territories" (What is Philosophy? 85-6). Deleuze and Guattari will note
that this creative trajectory of Nature cannot be realized without it being an
absolute movement of deterritorialization, i.e. a movement of unhindered
flow. But Deleuze and Guattari will also argue that Nature cannot do this
alone in fact. Philosophy however, that is to say a philosophy that thinks
via immersing itself within the immanent heterogeneity and plurality of
molecular trajectories in the world, a philosophy like ethology or
nomadology in other words, can help carry through this movement of
absolute detelTitorialization. It is with this interactivity with philosophy
that "Nature [can pass into] infmite diagrammatic movements," and that
the force of nature as such can posit itself as "the creation of a future new
earth" (What is Philosophy? 88).
But what could be the motivation for thinking this deterritorializing
force of Nature? In a way, one could argue that this is the trace of
Bataille's ecological understanding in Deleuze and Guattari. In Bataille's
ecology, the earth is traversed by a cosmic energy that is dissipated from
the SUll. The earth and forces of nature bear this energy in its dissemination
across the surface of the world. And this energy-flow does not rest nor
gather itself up into an accumulative reserve. In other words, this energy is
a luxurious superabundance which gives itself to the world, and demands
nothing in return. As Bataille writes in The Accursed Share, "Solar
radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the
globe," and that "the sun gives without ever receiving" (29 and 28). For
Bataille then, human activity (be it economic or cultural) and human
interactivity with Nature must bear this expenditure without reserve in
mind. What they have accumulated for themselves from natural resources,
they must learn to eventually undo these accumulations without productive
ends in return. An accumulation to the point of excess in contrast to what
the passage of cosmic or terrestrial energy gives is impossible. In this case,
the latter will call for the expenditure of the former. As Bataille writes,
"energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly
(without return)." And a little later: "a surplus must be dissipated through
208 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
definite operations: the final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the
movement that animates tenestrial energy" (22).
Catastrophe is only imminent if one refuses these operations of
expenditure. Nature just would not allow it. And human accumulation will
not constrain the movement of Nature. Elements of Nature that have been
delimited would only gather themselves into some sort of pressure system,
which builds itself up to the day when it can no longer contain itself and
would overflow or break all limits imposed by human and technological
agencies. With regard to the human indifference of accumulation of
natural resources, in other words with regard to the human denial of the
non-accumulative flow oftenestrial energy, Bataille will write,
his denial does not alter the global movement of energy in the least: the
latter cannot accumulate limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually,
like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us. (23)
Bataille therefore insists on a certain violent force of Nature too, a line of
thought that Deleuze and Guattari will follow later. 6 Nature always has a
way not only to escape human restrictions but also to destroy them. In this
case, it delivers us even to catastrophic ends:
[Nature] consigns men and their works to catastrophic destmctions. For if
we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot
be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this
energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable
explosion. (24)
There is always the possibility of Nature to overflow or to flood an
occupied tenitory therefore, and Bataille gives the example of the onset of
Nature swarming back to a place that had been cleared for a garden but is
now abandoned:
one can speak of pressure in this sense only if, by some means, the
available space is increased; this space will be immediately occupied in
the same way as the adjoining space. Moreover, the same is tme every time
life is destroyed at some point on the globe, by a forest fire, by a volcanic
phenomenon or by the hand of man. The most familiar example is that of a
path that a gardener clears and maintains. Once abandoned, the pressure of
the surrounding life soon covers it over again with weeds and bushes
swarming with animal life. (30)
Irving Goh 209
The force of Nature always rehrrns even in spite of human intervention.
And this is because it always already begins with an excess or a luxurious
force to be dispensed: "On the surface of the globe, for living matter in
general, energy is always in excess" (23).
I believe that this understanding of a primal or cosmic force of
universal energy running through earth, which is uncontainable in any
absolute terms or closed limits, and which only unleashes a destructive
force in return if it is delimited, is what motivates Deleuze and Guattari's
inscription of Nature as absolute detenitorialization. In other words, what
Deleuze and Guattari has learned from Bataille, or what Deleuze and
Guattari sustains from Bataille in the understanding of the force of Nature,
is the resistance against stasis, against grounding oneself absolutely within
a tenitory, which only entails an accumulation of resources around that
territory. One must instead follow the flow of tenestrial energy, follow its
detenitorialization. Surely, this force gives to new spaces, as we have
noted already. But as the climate and the geophysical sunoundings change
in that tenitory, which is often Nahlre's explicit signs for seeking an
elsewhere, one must not resist this movement. One must not insist on
further grounding oneself in that particular tenitory. One must not resist
abandoning it, dispensing with it. One must follow where Nature's
trajectory of detenitorialization leads to, and then there will be the
possibility of witnessing a new world or tenitory emerging or in the midst
of creation. It is as such that Deleuze and Guattari will also write that one
is not in the world. One becomes with the world instead, through the
interactivity of Nature and nomadic philosophy. "We are not in the world,
we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. [... J We
become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero"
(What IS Philosophy? 169).
In Deleuze and Guattari's ecological trajectory then, one never remains
within a certain tenitOlY permanently. Swept along by the wind, tempests,
flows of rivers, tectonic movements, pollens in the air, bacteria mutation,
etc., one must create other tenitories elsewhere. Tenitories are always to
be unframed or de-framed. And this is where Deleuze and Guattari in
What is Philosophy? go beyond the project of Bernard Cache's Earth
Moves. For Cache, the critical art of the earth is not one where one reduces
the image of Nature into the appropriating frame of our human minds,
guided by our ocular perspectives. Instead, he calls for an art of the frame
which not only reflects the landscape of the outside, but also reflects
vision back to the actual grandeur of the outside, where once again we re-
cognize that objects of and in Nature have in themselves an ungraspable,
non-limitable, umepresentable immensity. Such a frame, according to
 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
210
Cache, gives to the experience of the singularity of the space, which is not
only constituted by the ground of the space itself but also by the
multiplicity of perspectival forces or trajectories (for example, the
mountains nearby, the sea at the horizon, etc.) that this space is related to.
Deleuze and Guattari will indeed celebrate such an art of framing that
keeps the notion of singularity open. But they will also supplement
Cache's project by suggesting that framing is not enough. Rather, one must
constantly de-frame and create another frame elsewhere. Instead of just
calling for cadre (or framing), Deleuze and Guattari will go for a more
radical de-framing or decadrage, which traces an absolute movement of
deterritorialization in relation to a cosmic line:
it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of
deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in
order to open it onto the universe, that go from house-territory to town-
cosmos, and that now dissolve the identity of the place through variation of
the earth, a town having not so much a place as vectors folding the abstract
line of relief. (What is Philosophy? 187)
Conclusion: Rethinking Sustainability and Aftershocks
De-framing or deterritorialization after Nature's trajectories is perhaps
how one should rethink the question of ecological sustainability today. Not
only must sustainability be a question of how elements of Nature be
preserved through human agencies in order that resources for continued
survival and growth for both the environment and humans be constantly
regenerated, but one must perhaps also give thought to how continued
transformation and development of Nature itself could be given place by
following the trajectories of Nature, i.e. allowing us to be borne along the
unfolding of Nature rather than determining it or acting on it. There is a
wisdom of plants, of rhizomes especially, that ecological thought has not
critically and creatively engaged with or experimented with. And it is here
that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, which is really a pedagogy in
thinking with ecology as this paper has been suggesting throughout, can
become instructive. The regret of not following the wisdom of Nature is
only the falling behind of thought in relation to nature. The situation which
Deleuze and Guattari describe as "thought lags behind nature" (Thousand
Plateaus 5) is certainly something one should avoid falling into. Thought
has to keep up with the trajectories of Nature, no matter how violent or
seemingly chaotic they are. There is ultimately, as Deleuze and Guattari
will say, a "wisdom of plants: even when they have roots, there is always
an outside where they form a rhizome with something else-with the
Irving Goh 211
wind, an animal, human beings" (Thousand Plateaus 11). In other words,
for Deleuze and Guattari, what is to be learnt is that forces of Nature are
always mobile. Being mobile enables them to seek other free spaces. They
somehow are always able to find an exit route when they find themselves
restricted by certain limits. And they do this by forming rhizomes. In the
wisdom of plants; rhizomes are everywhere, or rhizomes can be fonned
anywhere with anything, be it other natural fauna or flora or even human
forms.
H is a question of following, if not creating, these rhizomes. It is
precisely through rhizomatic gestures or outgrowths that therein rest the
potentiality of rupturing imposed limits or encroaching destruction by
exterior forces: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it
will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines" (Thousand
Plateaus 9). In fact, there is even the possibility of expanding one's ground
in this way. As Deleuze arid Guattari will say, "form a rhizome" and then
one (e.g. Nature) can "increase [one's] territory by deterritorialization"
(Thousand Plateaus 11). What emerges then, in the rhetoric of A
Thousand Plateaus, is the event where an ecological line traverses both a
figure of thought without subject and without possessive territorialization,
and the multiplicity of Nature: "You have the individuality of a day, a
season, a year, a life [ ... ]-a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack"
(Thousand Plateaus 262). And it is not only humans that partake in a
becoming-Nature. Nature likewise folds into humans and other elements
of Nature. "Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the
things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and
awaken within them" (Thousand Plateaus 263). However, Deleuze and
Guattari will think that Man in general, that is humans who have left their
childhood behind, who have entered the political economy of work and of
constructions of profitable habitations, have not yet learned how to access
this realm of interactivity with Nature. For Deleuze and Guattari, only
animals like the wolf or the horse, and children, know how to create events
like these. "It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to
be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an
hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life" (Thousand Plateaus 262).
But at the end of it all, critique may tum on Deleuze and Guattari's
eco-etho-philosophy too. It certainly could be said that the violence of
Nature's movements in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is
ultimately and admittedly not as destructive, not as extreme as experienced
or witnessed in the real natural enviromnent. It may even be on the mild
side, in Deleuze and Guattari. Keeping at that relatively mild level, it
could be said that it is too easy for Deleuze to proclaim, as noted already,
212 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
that thought could be like the movement, the athleticism, l'elan of a surfer
riding a wave. But what if the surf becomes an uncontrollable, destructive
tsunami, which would certainly threaten to hurl the surfer towards an
almost assured painful end, and which would also strike or destructively
clear away other natural entities (trees, plants, bushes, animals, etc.)
beyond the shorelines? What contour or dimension would thought take
from such a wave? What would have transformed in thought when it
changes from being a surfer's wave to a tsunami? What kind of thought
would it be now?
The violence of Nature has often generated exceptional modes of
thought, gestures, actions, policies, etc. They are often in excess of their
manifestations in everyday life. In response to natural catastrophe at a
particular place, for example Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Asian tsunami
disaster, the world has witnessed people there and around the world
responding with a force equally if not more overwhelming than the force
of Nature, a human force that overflows the limits, norms, and conditions
of quotidian ethics, politics, and economy. It is indeed usually in the wake,
in the aftermath of a natural disaster that a sense of an "international
community" beyond race, nation, culture, political ideology, market
frontiers, can be glimpsed at or can be thought of as a possibility. Genial,
generous, giving, and hospitable as they are, there nonetheless remain
many challenges to these after-thoughts, these after-actions that can be
regarded as aftershocks in their own ways. The first is that what may seem
to be unconditional at that time may have been predicated on an
expectation of a prospective return when everyday life returns to normal.
This is especially the case when a State enters the scene to aid another in
crisis, one which normally does not have amicable relations with the
former in ordinary times. The question here would be how to sustain these
thoughts and actions as unconditional, in other words, how to maintain if
not guarantee them as veritable ethics, opening oneself to another without
calculating, without expecting any future returns, without counting on
these present thoughts and acts and to use them for future bargaining chips
in political or economic negotiations or even in interpersonal relations?
Certainly, there is the potentiality for the transformation of thought, or
the emergence of a new thought of the unconditional derived from the
violent force ofNature.7 But there is yet another aspect to this. There is the
question, and this is of greatest imperative perhaps, of how to sustain and
develop these after-thoughts or after-actions without waiting for another
natmal shock to hit humanity. In other words, how to finally learn what
thoughts or actions can be derived from the violent force of Nature. To be
sure, such a thought is not that which predicates itself on a future natural
Irving Goh 213
disaster or catastrophe. It is not about having an apocalyptic mindset to
determine thoughts and actions. It is not driven by the demands of
exceeding ethics, exceptional politics, and aneconomical economics in a
time of natural disasters. This thought cannot be framed by such a priori
or cal~ulate~ conditions or preconceived expectations. That would only
estabhsh a dIstance between thought and the violent force of Nature. What
is to be risked instead is to insert thought in the midst of the violent force
of Nature, at the time of Nature unleashing such a force-thought as
immanent violent Nature. It is perhaps a question of a future eco-etho-
philosophy riding not just a surf but a tsunami.
Notes
lOne notices that nomadology seems to have disappeared in the formulation of
Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy as eco-etho-philosophy. But nomadology is not
really absent in this term. If ethology is to be understood (in Mille Plateaux and in
Deleuze's Spinoza: philosophie pratique) as the philosophical science and ethics
which. involves a going-outside of oneself in order to engage with a plural
gathenng of heterogeneous entities through mutual desires, and which also
therefore undoes structured, hierarchized organizations of relations (through
mostly homogeneous genetic filiations), then this would also already included the
~ense of nomado logy, which always resists structurations and stasis.
See especially the "Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-
imperceptible" section in A Thousand Plateaus, especially pp. 239-52 for this
image ofthe philosopher-sorcerer.
3 This is my translation. Massumi's goes as such: "not pity, but unnatural
participation" (Thousand Plateaus 240). The French original reads « non pas pitie
mais participation contre nature» (Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980, 293). Th~
French construction "contre nature" certainly can be read as "unnatural." But
"contre" is also "against," and I would like to keep this notion of an "against" here
since I am eliciting the sense of an undeniable violence against nature in Deleuze~
Guattari here.
4 ~s mentioned earlier under the nomenclature of noma do logy, deleuzoguattarian
phIlosophy involves an active experiment with absolute movement with a certain
~ine o~ t1igh~ as D~leuze and Guattari would say. But as Deleuze w'ould say in the
mtervlew WIth Clatre Pamet, "There is always betrayal in a line of flight," and that
"the experimenter is a traitor" (Dialogues 40/41).
5 In the original French text, it reads "Vers quel neant Ie balai des sorcieres les
entraj'ne-t-il?" (304). Evidently, I would prefer to read the French "neant" directly
as "nothingness" rather than "void" as Massumi suggests.
6 And just as Bataille's Nature is indifferent to effects of human disruptions, that of
Deleuze and Guattari's takes a similar approach to the latter. Even if the air or
water. is ~olluted, deleuzoguattarian becoming somehow will adapt to these
~utattons 111 Na~re and use them to its benefits, i.e. Nature will improvise on its
Imposed destructIon so as to transform the defect into an element that supports the
214 "Strange Ecology" in Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus Irving Goh 215

crossing of molecular trajectories in becoming. In other words, becoming always -. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
takes into account not only uncontaminated forces of Nature but also those which (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
are supplemented by pollution. It takes into account, as A Thousand Plateaus Guattari, Felix. Les trois ecologies (Paris: Galilee. 1989).
goes, "the importance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious -. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and
particles, favorable conditions for these transports" (261). New Brunswick: Althone, 2000).
7 In Ecocritique, Timothy W Luke proposes an "ecological popularism" that calls
Halsey, Mark. Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text
for awareness of ecological knowledge and intervention at the levels of the
personal and the comrnunitarian more than at the State level, both of which would
(Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006).
mn on a global scale thanks to technological interconnectivity. He writes, "Making Luke, Timothy Woo Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature,
effects of environmental destruction [my italics] and preservation more personal Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
and communal could lessen many ecological disasters happening right now" (205). 1997).
As this paper has tried to suggest, perhaps all it needs are the "effects of
environmental destmction," not so much in the controversial sense of human
overexploitation of Nature, but rather in the sense of the violent relation between
nomadological philosophy and Nature, and "environmental destmction" in the
sense of re-cognizing an inherent violent force of Nature that strikes out at both
thought and humans. The endeavor of "preservation" would only threaten to
delimit any flow ofNahlre. Nonetheless, what remains laudable of Luke's proposal
is the experimental perspective to it. In other words, it has the "freedom to fail"
(206), though he hopes that the global communitarian aspect of it could intervene
to help. Likewise, there is no guarantee that the concepts of Deleuze-Guattari,
which take on aspects of violent Nature, could reduce the "ecological disasters"
that are produced by human exploitation for economic ends. One can only always
experiment, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.

Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. La part maudite. [1949] (Paris: Minuit, 1967).
-. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1:
Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991).
Bltihdom, Ingolfur. Post-ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the
Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000).
Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Trans. Anne
Boyman. Ed. Michael Speaks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in
Poststntcturalist Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Deleuze, Gilles, et Claire Pamet. Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977).
-. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles, et Felix Guattari. Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980).
-. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
- . Qu 'est-ce que la philosophie ? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND BIO ART:
"IN THE AGE OF CYNICISM, ACCOMPANIED
BY A STRANGE PIETy,,1
JAMES WILTGEN
"It's not about you or me .. .its all about us"
-Brazilian Girls (Talk to La Bomb)
This essay will put the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour in a
certain proximity in order to assess commonalities as well as possible
divergences, most especially regarding a thinking of the earth as ",-,ell as
the idea of political ecology. Both might be argued to have theonzed. a
sophisticated type of politics: while Latour seems to profess a .certalll
"progressive" stance, Deleuze often veers more tow~rd what mIght be
called a "subversive" politics, one more difficult to decIpher. Among those
themes both thinkers address can be counted the following: the "death" of
God man and perhaps nature, and the dangers embedded in these deaths;
how' to think time, most particularly via its constitutive split and
"unending" dynamic; the power of the subject/object binary and. its
hierarchies and ordering power; the energy and force of becomlllg;
composition and connectivity as fundamental modes of action; the impetus
as well as the demands of questioning; the materiality of humans and
nonhumans and the parameters of their interactions; and the "people(s) to
come" or the contours of the collectives. Clearly, there will be only time to
briefly outline the issues involved, but they raise questio~s and problems
that have the possibility of becoming more and more pressmg as the planet
moves farther into the 21 st century. The continued staggering growth of the
human population, the speeds of technology, and the consumption of the
planet's resources have intensified many .dang~~s, and t~e. thI:eat,~ to ~he
world seem to have mutated from the penIs of total annIhIlatIOn dunng
the Cold War; yet for vast populations these threats seem, at certain levels,
as pemicious as ever. .. . immanence, and a notion of abundance; how those who decide can
The argument here will be that while both theonsts combme certalll
elements of dualism and monism, Deleuze will press more forcefully the
James Wiltgen 217
implications of this layering in a way that relentlessly abjures any type of
closure, and any form of totalizing control. This combination of dualism
and monism provides arguable the most forceful example of the
intransigence and power of paradox: critical thinking, ultimately, will have
"no ally but paradox" (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 132). As
example, he will combine a certain reading of Spinoza on substance and
Nietzsche on the etemal recurrence/will to power in a daunting manner of
simultaneity, which privileges the speeds and rhythms of
deterritorialization. His own thinking will constantly be affected by its
internal limits, such that difference functions as a caesura questioning its
own premises as well as tire construction of all other forms of knowledge.
Deleuze will also critique the formation of the subject such that the current
individual will, in many ways, be in constant flux; however, in part
through his reading of Simondon, the processes of individuation remains
absolutely crucial, and a fundamental task of thinking becomes how to
both de-individualize and re-individualize. Finally, the force of the
chaotic, which undergrids his reading of difference, looms as the most
difficult and unsettling of concepts, and must be grappled with alongside
any political efforts. Some critics have willfully misread Deleuze, in
particular Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, trying to force him into a rather
simplistic monism, while his thinking exhibits a complex layering of
elements, of both monism and dualism: in a word, not either/or but
both/and.
On the other hand, Latour embarks on a relentless critique of
modemity, only in some ways to re-inscribe its basic tenets via the
creation of a new Constitution, under the aegis of due process and enabled
by a certain transparency of language. His approach will shift the
subject/object divide to that of the human/nonhuman, but in key elements
this involves but a tactical shift: there will be no fundamental questioning
of the position of the new questioner, other than to welcome the nonhuman
into the growing collective. This focus on epistemology, the triumph of a
certain rethinking of language and concepts through the prism of a type of
"technocratic" and scientific aura seems predicated on a number of crucial
ambiguities. Modemity seems to have been given a new boss, but in some
ways it will be the same as the old boss. The position of this essay will be
to acknowledge certain powerful elements of Latour's political and
epistemological thought, while pointing to significant problems and
limitations. Among the major problems, and the very important
differences between Latour and Deleuze, will be: the perils of a shift to
constantly be put into question; the imperative of a critique of ressentiment
218 Political Ecology and Bio Art
and morality in all their guises; the necessity of a densely articulated series
of positions for those who produce knowledge, not just for science but as
an amalgamation of artists, philosophers, and scientists, at the very least;
finally, the tension between the constmction of a cosmos and that of a
chaosmos. How these questions are posed, who asks them, and how they
are answered will be essential in addressing themes of political decision
and ecology change.
Crystalline Vibrations
To begin an assessment of the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as his
writings with Felix Guattari, for an analysis of ecology and the political,
one of the most important points of entry would be the "primacy" of the
concept of difference. This formative concept of difference subtends
elements of a certain strand of poststructuralist theory, and produces a
constitutive split as the fundamental movement of thought. 2 In a very
succinct formulation of this approach Deleuze will argue that "(i)n the
beginning, at the origin, there is the difference between active and reactive
forces"; more expansively, "if there were an undifferentiated qualitative
state of the world or a position of equilibrium for the stars, then this would
be reason never to leave it. ,,3 The universe maintains itself in perpetual
tension, in an ongoing and insistent dis-equilibrium, always riven. In an
elaborate chart in his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze presents a typology of
these forces at work, where he meticulously lays out the tension in a type
of tetragon, with active and reactive forces in continual tension with the
power of affirmation and negation. 4 This chart of forces produces a
schema for, among other things, the "triumph of reactive forces;"
published in 1964, this book still offers a provocative way in which to read
a vast panoply of issues, including, for example, the foreign and
envirorunental policy of the United States at this moment in history.
Difference perpetually splits, marking two asymmetries, not in any sense a
pair of binaries but as speeds, rhythms and the interruptions of energy:
various figures of this split will emerge, most tellingly as the eternal
recurrence and the will to power per Nietzsche, and as the virhml and the
achml in the work of Henri Bergson. 5
Difference, thought in this manner, produces a radical sense of time,
and Deleuze will address this crucial force via a number art forms, but for
purposes of this essay the focus will be on cinema: in the "Preface to the
English edition" of Cinema 2: The Time-Image he will argue that a
revolution occurred in philosophy from the Greeks to Kant as "the
subordination of time to movement was reversed, time .. .increasingly
James Wiltgen 219
appears for itself and creates paradoxical movements" (Cinema 2 xi-xii).
This revolution will be repeated, in a certain fashion, by cinema in a more
compressed span; this emergence of the power of time· will mark the
perpetual and enduring split between what Deleuze calls, in another
context, the pure past and that of the present; or in Cinema 2, between
"sheets of past" with that of "peaks of present" (98). As example, the films
of Ors?n Welles, profoundly influenced by Herman Melville, produce
"two dIfferent states of time, time as perpetual crisis, and, at a deeper
level, time as primary matter, immense and terrifying, like universal
becoming" (115). The world has become untimely, time does not move in
the world, the world moves in time; this time will be constituted by and
t~ough a constitutive rift. Or, in The Logic of Sense, time as a concept
WIll engender a type of straight-line labyrinth, that of Aion, infinitely
splitting in two directions simultaneously, with the present as fulcrum. As
with the work of Borges, especially "The Babylonian Lottery" time
continually forks, producing an "empty form" of "event-effects," one that
"endlessly subdivides," producing a "subdivision ad infinitum;" this
produces "two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards
the future while the other falls into the past.,,6 This splitting can also be
conceived as a type of folding, another way in which to think the primary
processes of time and difference.
Perceived from other plateaus time will be "demented time or time
outside the curve which gave it a god," with Hamlet as a key symptom of
this shift (Difference and Repetition 88). A second marker in this transition
will be H6lderiin, who held that time was now distributed unequally, riven
by an caesura, and that "(h)aving abjured its empirical content, having
overturned its own ground time is defined not only by a formal and empty
o~·der but also by a totality and a series" (89). This totality will be very
dIfferent from what has been traditionally thought-"the idea of totality
must be understood as follows: the caesura, of whatever kind, must be
determined in the image of a unique and tremendous event, an act which is
adequate to time as a whole" (89). This caesura will mark the "event of
difference" and make any "closed" notion of totality entirely inoperative
and untenable. Further, the untimely dramatically alters the constitution of
the subject: "(t)he finality of the living being exists only insofar as it is
essentially open onto a totality that is itself open" (Deleuze, Bergsonism
105). For Deleuze, totality must be thought simultaneously with a split, as
they reciprocally presuppose each other; and, totality is never the One, nor
the Whole-it will always be open, and "(w)e must.. .be delighted that the
Whole is not given" (104). These elements contribute to the "primacy" of
difference, the split that will produce the theoretical basis for an incessant
220 Political Ecology and Bio Art
questioning, a perpetual attempt to grasp the contours of "that from which
we come" (Difference and Repetition 74).
The Insistence of Questioning, As "?-being" (64)
Again, what has changed? Namely, in the move to first Kant and then
Nietzsche "(m)an did not survive God"; categories which had formerly
functioned now would be thrown into disarray, into· a maelstrom of
uncertainty, of the play of forces devoid of a "transcendental signifier"
(xix). In Difference and Repetition, in the section "Note on Heidegger's
Philosophy of Difference," the key factor in Deleuze's reading of
Heidegger will be difference and not negation (as opposed to a certain
reading of Hegel); more, there will be a fundamental relation "between
difference and questioning," as the fonner generates the latter in
perpehlity? In an extended examination and critique of, among other
things, Heidegger's Seinsfrage, Deleuze posits a shift in the movement of
the questioning process, from "the hypothetical to the apodictic" to one
that feahlres the movement "from the problematical to the question" (197).
Here, the process of the question and questioning mutates, as "questions
express the relation between problems and the imperative from which they
proceed;" this can translate itself into both aesthetic and political spheres,
where "problems are inseparable from the power of decision," and a
defining task of politics as well as art involves a type of thinking which
could "determine problems and creative decisions" (197 & 268). In other
words, "modem ontology is inadequate" to pose the questions required of
thought; because "every sensation is a question" everything will be under
scrutiny in perpetuum, without certainty, fixity, or the consolations of a
stable Being (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 196). As with the
dynamics of time, this questioning in many ways will be an empty form,
and the issue for critical analysis will be to "fill in" these empty and
indiscernible structures.
After this incisive critique of Heidegger Deleuze will then employ a
certain reading of Nietzsche, arguing that the basis of interpretation and
evaluation concerns a question of forces, of "which one?," which force
will be capable of composition and creation, and the key will be to
construct well-posed questions (50 & 70). For example, "what forces make
up the human?;" and "how to make a world?"g What has been created here,
succinctly, involves a question-problem complex. It will be Alice's time,
per Lewis Carroll, and she will also pose the question "which one?;"
which direction, and by extension does it entail active or reactive force? In
this situation Alice will realize that "everything happens at the border,"
James Wiltgen 221
and that boundaries form the key to an operative and creative approach to
thinking. 9 This border-thought, then, produces an incessant "discordant
harmony," a tension of forces, the continual incommensurability between
terms, such that any fundamental reconciliation becomes the continuing
attempt to think the unthought-in a word, to think difference without the
concept of identity.1O Difference, qua splitting, subtends time, and
produces unending questioning.
Threat Level: Thanatopolitics, or What?
The dangers of contemporaty existence pose serious dilemmas, both in
terms of the malevolent effects they have on the planet as well as their
resistance to creative change. Deleuze will argue that the lethal threats to
life radiate from the "two great reactive concepts of ressentiment and bad
conscience" that have established the conditions for what might be called
extreme nihilism. 11 In an ominous sense of the stakes involved he
wonders at the "disquieting depths from which reactive forces emerge."
One can speculate on these disquieting depths but certainly they bode ill
for the composition of the earth and the relation between humans and the
world. This dominance of ressentiment and reactive forces will manifest
itself in the concept of utility, both as a mode of positivism and as the
linchpin for the politic-economic system of capitalism (Nietzsche and
Philosophy, 54, & 73-75). Even more to the point "(t)he misrecognition of
action, of all that is active, is obvious in the sciences of man: for example,
action is judged in terms of its utility" (73). Deleuze exhibits a strong
sense of the dimensions of these malign forces at loose in the world,
coupled with an intense concern for the vast apparatus of aggression and
destruction that has been and is being constructed. For example, both Anti-
Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus chronicle the grave problems facing the
planet and basically all species, and perhaps all materiality. There exist
three, or four dangers: "first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the
great Disgust." (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 227). What
the authors call the "fourth danger" has, abstractly, unleashed "the line of
flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of
connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning
to destruction, abolition pure and simple" (229, italics in the original).
Even more focused, they examine the contours of the State appropriation
of what they call the war machine, asserting that Clausewitz's formula has
been inverted, and "it is politics that becomes the continuation of war,"
arguing that "it is peace that technologically frees the unlimited material
process of total war" (467). More prescient, perhaps given the current
222 Political Ecology and Bio Art
moment, "(w)ars had become patt of peace" and "States no longer
appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of which
they themselves were only the parts" (467).
In Anti-Oedipus the stress will fall on the vast repressive assemblage
built by a certain form of modernity, and a telling symptom of passive
nihilism would be this formation driven by powerful elements of a will to
nothingness as it has been utilized by the forces of capital. In one of the
most trenchant and chilling analysis of the way the system functions, they
link capitalism to the production of lack, or antiproduction driven by the
most pernicious elements of a type of aggressive instrumentalization of the
planet, seeking ever "tighter and tighter control" over all facets of life
(Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus). Capitalism's true police, "money and
the market," have been normalized, with the goal that "the world market
extends to the galaxy"; the only mode of thinking permitted might soon be,
or already is, the "thought for the market" (223-235). Besides unleashing
these forces, capitalism also undertakes a vast privatization of the body's
organs, and "desire" in the widest sense of the term, as a set for the crucial
micro-matrix of power and control. This complex assemblage bases itself,
then, on the subject-object divide--it does not need to be rehearsed here
the extent to which this structuration has affected the planet, both in terms
of the destructive utilization of resources as well as the densely-configured
hierarchies it has established.
Fully implicated in the assemblage of capital will be the sciences, at
least very powerful elements, which Deleuze will assess as forces that are
''passive, reactive and negative. ,,12 In other words, there exists an internal
struggle within science, most especially as it deals with the forces of
chaos. One perspective, which in many ways has held sway over the past
centuries, has been dominated by a "religious taste for unity or
unification;" in other words, this "passionate relationship with religion" on
the part of science will manifest itself in "all the attempts at scientific
unifonnization and universalization in the search for a single law, a single
force, or a single interaction" (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
125 & 206). One can see this played out in a number of spheres, from the
Big Bang, to linear evolution, to the attempt at a Grand Unified Theory.
For Deleuze, the emphasis in science needs to shift from "equilibrium
attractors" which abet this undue process of unification, to "strange
attractors" which undermine any attempt at closure, or any appeal to a
single determinate ideal. Most importantly, the sciences, like philosophy
and art, must "include an I do not know that has become positive and
creative, the condition of creation itself, and that consists in determining
by what one does not know" (128). So, how does one address the question
James Wiltgen 223
"(w)hat would a truly active science be like?;" per Deleuze it would
involve "discovering active forces and also recognizing reactive forces for
what they are-forces.,,13 Science, in conjunction with critical thought and
art, must, in their pursuit of functions, concepts, and sensations, maintain
an internal stance of openness, of the inability to know conclusively, or
control totally, or unify completely the forces of the earth, of the cosmos,
and of the chaotic.
Becoming: In the Realm of Fluxes & Flows
"In tmth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of
inhumanities"
-A Thousand Plateaus 190
Wh~le t~ere will not be sufficient time to deal with all the myriad
rmmficatIOns of the concept of becoming, it has been unleashed as a force,
at least for a powerful tradition of thought, by the aforementioned "death"
of God and of man. One of Deleuze's principle critiques of Kant concerns
the fact that the latter, in attempting· to be done with theology, sought to
replace it with a type of anthropology: in other words, "by putting man in
God's place" Kant utterly failed at breaking the grip of reactive forces and
the attendant will to nothingness. With Nietzsche, an entirely different
sen~e. of energy h~s been set into motion, one capable of ungrounding
tradItIonal categones and concepts, and challenging, among other
precept~, the S.econd Law of Thermodynamics. Further, "(b)ecoming is
mvolutIonary, mvolution is creative:" with involution "form is constantly
bei~~ ~issolved~ fr~eing times and speeds," providing a critique of any
POSItIVIst evolutIon m favor of "(a) strange machine that is simultaneously
a machine of war, music, and contagion-proliferation-involution" (A
Thousand Plateaus, 267-269; as an example, see Blek Ie raton). This
machinic formation operates on the borders, boundaries, interstices, and
gaps of existence. In another register, The Logic of Sense begins with the
"First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming," where regarding the past
and the future the definition of becoming will be "to move and pull in both
directions at once"-in other words, both descent and ascent
simultaneously (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 1). As has been already
addressed, the crucial facet for a genealogical analysis will be to determine
which forces dominate and in what ways they function. In a well-know
sec~ion of A T~ousand Plateaus, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-
AnImal, Becommg-Imperceptible ... " the authors, utilizing a "worldwide
!ntens~ty map," point toward the various strata of "becoming-other"
mcludmg that of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and finally
224 Political Ecology and Bio Art
becoming-imperceptible. These forces of the "anorganic," the "asignifying,"
and the "asubjective" induce perplexity, and the option of affirmation will
be the act of questioning. 14
Looking at the epigraph of this section, the question arises as to what
might these "inhumanities" be? For Deleuze, they exist as part of "the
links between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality," in
zones and strata, in speeds and slownesses, as part of the processes of the
continual composition of existence in the "post-man" epoch (A Thousand
Plateaus, 280). He will juxtapose the idea of the "too-human" with that of
"the inhuman and the superhuman - a thing, an animal or a god," as other
poles of existence, other modes in which the human interacts at a
fundamental level, traversing in a heterogeneous series from the molecular
to the cosmic (Nietzsche and Philosophy 79). In The Logic of Sense
Deleuze will cite Nietzsche, who having freed himself from the power of
Schopenhauer and Wagner "explored a world of impersonal and pre-
individual singularities ... a free and unbound energy." Further, "(t)hese are
nomadic singularities which are no longer imprisoned within the fixed
individuality of the infinite Being (the notorious immutability of God), nor
inside the sedentary boundaries of the finite subject (the notorious limits of
knowledge)" (The Logic of Sense 107). We have become, and are in the
process of becoming, monsters, new forms of existence, strange mixtures
of human and nonhuman elements: "(t)he forces within man enter into a
relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes
carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or
agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier" (Deleuze Foucault 131-
132). Aesthetics, and by extension politics, moves from any sense of
"truth" to an overarching frisson with the dynamics of mixing, mixtures
and the impure: "(o)ne speaks always of bodies and their mixtures."
Brut Art
"Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other"
-Elizabeth Grosz Chaos, TerritOlY, Art 23
How, then, might these analyses impact aesthetics and artistic production,
crucial elements in conceptualizing the issues involved in the construction
of the world? In What is Philosophy? Deleuze will argue that in creating
affects via their metier artists, responding to the ungrounding power of
becoming, create zones where "living beings whirl about," where "we no
longer know which is animal and which is human" (What is Philosophy?
73). Art confronts the forces outside the domain of the "human," where
James Wiltgen 225
everything will be a question of "sensory becoming," energies of chaos
and the cosmos that cannot be readily assimilated into current conceptual
structures. This requires an openness to "inhumanities," to the unthought
in all aspects of existence; it challenges the imagination at the most
fundamental and elemental levels. Indeed, "(p)erhaps art begins with the
animal," and before that, in "the primitive swamps of life;" difference and
becoming-other must be thought simultaneously with the human, with art
(173 & 177). Most forcefully, this creates "a vast plane of composition
that is not abstractly preconceived but constructed as the work progresses,
opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited
compounds in accordance with the penetration of cosmic forces"; what the
authors call a "planomenon." Succinctly, "(c)omposition, composition is
the sole definition of art" and "(c)omposition is aesthetic;" the task of this
composition for art will be to "create the finite that restores the infmite "
and Paul Klee's painting "Equals Infinity" forms a cogent example of this
for Deleuze's analysis (188-197). The infmite here provides the force of
becoming as it taps into the energy of the planet and beyond, stretching
outward and inward to encompass forces that have as yet to be conceived,
sensed, or analyzed.
"(A)rt, science, and philosophy ... cast planes over the chaos;" they tear
open, slit the umbrella (of transcendence), and plunge us into the
maelstrom, into pure chance, to "let in a bit of free and windy chaos" (202-
203). Chaos, like the infinite, will be the force of the unthought, the
outside wherein reside energies, actants, monsters, all of which pose both
risks and promises to the continuing and perpetual construction of the
human. In response to this current moment aesthetics and epistemology
have two areas of tension: the first will be the "struggle against chaos," as
the unlimited energy of the multiverse; and the second as "the struggle
against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself."ls The key
for artists and thinkers will be "the leap that leads them from chaos to
composition" in the first place; the second challenge, in some ways as
daunting as the first, will be to cut through the vast layering of cliches,
opinion and doxa that encrust all language, objects, and concepts. This
confrontation with chaos and cliches has, finally, a political valence,
based on the idea that the "the people no longer exist, or not yet. . .the
people are missing;" that given the power of capitalism and its methods of
capture humanity has "disappeared.,,16 Forces of chaos can compel art,
philosophy and science, if affirmatively engaged, to dispel cliches, doxa,
and opinion, with the project of "people to come" and "the creation of a
future new earth." One must be very careful here not to rush to any
"utopian" thinking, or to fold to soon-the triumph of active forces would
226 Political Ecology and Bio Art
be better suited to create the conditions for an earth linked to the forces of
chaos and the emergence of an abstract and recombinant humanity-not a
former people, nor the masses, and certainly not the Yolk, but a new
mixture of different elements of the human, the inhuman, the subhuman,
and perhaps even the superhuman. New groups and groupings who will
enjoy more freedom and autonomy from the vast repressive apparatus now
in place, and who have challenged the received wisdom, tradition, and
contemporary structures; not simply as total rejection but in the powerful
crucible of composition. Call it quasi-topian thinking.
From the Mode of Production to the Mode of Connection
"The modern world is that in which information has replaced nature"
-De1euze, Cinema 2, 269
How does Deleuze think the concept of nature as it has been constructed
by a certain reading of modernity? Beginning with at least Anti-Oedipus,
one could raise doubts about the integrity of the concept, as the focus in
this book will be on germinal flows, a molecular unconscious, and forces
from the outside. Nature, then, will be understood "as a process of
production," that "everything is production;" further, the authors argue "we
make no distinction between man and nature."i7 Then, in one of the most
sustained examinations of the concept, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
analyzes "Lucretius And The Simulacrum," where "(n)ature will be
thought of as the principle of the diverse and its production," as both
plenitude and void, "not collective, but rather distributive"; it is, most
particularly, "power." It will resist any attempt at being conceptualized as
"Being, the One, the Whole" (The Logic of Sense 266-267). In both these
works fOlmer boundaries and borders have been subjected to a serious
process of questioning as a means of displacing cliches and methods of
power and control. In other words, at the veIY least the analysis will seek
to undermine a pervasive sense of the tenn nature, generated in part by the
forces of capitalism qua utility, one that defined it as passive and inert, and
as the ultimate receptacle/object/repository for the colonization of the life-
world by the forces of discipline and control. In response to the epigraph
above, the task for critical thought, for art, and for science will be to "go
beyond information"; how, certainly, becomes of primary importance
(Cinema-2269).
For Deleuze a crucial respond to the threat posed above will be via
issues of connection, of the ways in which links can be constructed using
new protocols of creativity and affirmation-in many ways from the mode
James Wiltgen 227
of production to connectivity. This centrality of the "mode of connection,"
then, "provides the means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies
that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the homogeneous surfaces
that overlay smooth space, and neutralizing the lines of death and
d~structio.n" (A Thousand Plateaus 208). Connectivity and heterogeneity
wIll prOVIde the primmy location of artistic and political processes, and
fonn the focus of critical thinking. How can decision and action be
addressed in this hyper-complex configuration? Deleuze will use what
might be termed a Spinozian ethics to argue for "that which increases the
number of connections at each level of division or composition, thus in
descending as well as ascel1ding order." Indeed, we do not yet know what
a "body can do," and what connections can be created (508 & 257). In
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza he argues that nature has become
expressive, it is now "the object that expresses itself, the thing itself that
explicates itself." Further, nature has no telos, there exists no fmality; and
the question of ethics resides in the ability to affect, via the joyful
passions, and in tum be affected by those same passions (Deleuze,
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza 269 & 316-320). At the end of A
Thousand Plateaus the analysis will focus on the ways in which "bodies
without organs connect" and how "the continuum of intensity is
extended"; succinctly, "(t)he question is, therefore, the mode of connection
be~ween the different parts of the plane" (507). Art, philosophy, and
SCIence generate the conditions for connectivity: "(t)he productive
synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature"
(Anti-Oedipus 5). The concept of nature has shifted to one of forces and
energy, and the aesthetic and political imperative will be to analyze those
elements, connect the active, affirmative forces and disconnect those that
are negative and reactive.
Techno-crats
"The sublime or higher man subdues monsters, poses riddles, but knows
nothing of the riddle and monster that he himself is"
-Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 100
At least two major crises drive the recent work of Bruno Latour, and not
surprisingly they intertwine in what might be termed a type of spiral. The
first involves the dramatic increase in the number of hybrids, monsters,
and new actants about in the world; the specific problem concerns the fact
that "if we can no longer separate the work of proliferation from the work
of purification" how do we control this continuing explosion of new forms
(Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 67)? In other words,
228 Political Ecology and Bio Art
purification has been the mode of "judging" for many centuries, judging
with a hard and remarkably consistent type of exclusion; perhaps,
however, the reign of this conceptual apparatus nears its end. Science,
charged as one of the key arbiters in these matters of judging and
exclusion, now faces severe problems in evaluating and controlling new
petitioners, .as the appeal to the former modes of true and false has been
put into serious question. Indeed, the very formation of what Latour terms
Science functions as a crucial element of the expanding problems:
"Science ... make(s) public life impotent by bringing to bear on it the threat
of salvation by an already unified nature" (Bruno Latour, The Politics of
Nature, 245). More tellingly in tenns of a celiain approach to politics,
especially regarding previous categories of thought as well as notions of
"radical democratic" processes "(t)he new hybrid remains a nonhuman, but
not only has it lost its material and objective character, it has acquired
properties of citizenship" (249). New petitioners have emerged
demanding different approaches and challenging the political and aesthetic
structures that have ruled for a very long time.
The other crisis, which forms arguably the central issue of Latour's
book Politics ofNature, would be the crisis of objectivity, or the increasing
difficulties, or perhaps the irrelevance, of that very endemic and seemingly
pervasive subject-object divide (20). Succinctly, the subject-object divide
proscribes exchange and prevents the processes of intensified mixing; it
also controls the borders and boundaries, producing a certain type of
proliferation, but only as a means of increasing power and saturation.
Latour rehearses here crucial elements of a type of poststructuralist
analysis: the necessity of humanity to exit the Cave and dissolve a certain
Platonic approach that founds everything on the basis of a fundamental,
and at this point ossified binary logic; by a critique of representation based
on the premise that it has been organized by this mode of binary thought;
and a detailed interrogation of the basic principles underpinning this type
of thinking (We Have Never Been Modern 67). The subject-object divide,
generating the overarching struchlres of subjectivity & objectivity, rests
upon the most polemic and rigid of positions, utilizing a conceptualization
of nahlre as that of an "unjustified process of unification of public life,"
propelled by a system of control with velY aggressive categories, based on
two distinct and separated realms, and designed to compel "the human
assemblage to submit to a permanent threat of salvation by Science" (The
Politics of Nature 245, 45, & 57). This "nature," fOlmed in the Cave and
property of what Latour calls the Old Regime, rests upon a singular
dimension manifest in a powerful ordering, which produces not a
collective but a "bicarmelism," a duality comprised of the "Heaven of
James Wiltgen 229
Ideas" on one hand and "the prison of the social sphere on the other"
(238). However, this insistence on a type of immanence can be very
dangerous, as it creates a variety of paths that could lead toward totalizing
formations. For example, in championing political ecology as the solution
to the problems of the world, and as a powerful critique of any attempt to
"totalize the hierarchy of beings" Latour will argue for the necessity of
convoking "a single collective whose role is precisely to debate the said
hierarchy"; and again, "(p)olitical ecology proposes to move the role of
unifier of the respective ranks of all beings out of the dual arena of nature
and politics and into the single arena of the collective" (29-30). For
whatever salutary reasons the dissolving of this dualism might be
proposed, the necessity of "a single collective," a type of totalizing
gesture, would seem premature at best; as a question of emphasis this
appears like an unjustified unification, an undue simplification. Too much
work needs to be done, and thought, before a single anything should be
proclaimed.
Latour argues that the concept of nature, at least how it has been
thought and enforced for a very long time, particularly in the West, should
be jettisoned from political and pragmatic thinking. In other words:
Thank God nature is going to die. Yes, the great Pan is dead. After the
death of God and the death of man, nature, too, had to give up the ghost. It
was time: we were about to be unable to engage in politics any more at all.
(25-26)
This does not mean some type of "disappearance" of the world outside and
within humans into a kind of absolute relativism: like so much of the more
sophisticated critical work at this time, a careful attention to context and
nuance will provide the sense in which this rather dramatic assertion
~n~tions .. In a word, the "'nature" Latour seeks to question, and to
dISSIpate, Illvolves the stark imposition of "the hierarchy of beings in a
sinEfle ordered series;" the assemblage driven by a subjec1l0bject logic
whIch create the conditions for a rampant intrumentalization (25). Here,
modernism and the moderns will be equated with this conceptual lattice,
and as "discovering an indisputable and atemporal nahlre;" a central
problem, then, concerns what it means, in modern terms, "to naturalize"
(25). What engenders such a destructive stance toward the world from this
cultural and political complex, which seems capable of "unduly extending
the reign of Science to other domains," as well as "paralyzing politics"
(192 & 245). At some level the stakes of this debate involve the
organization of the world, as well as the possibility of politics as Latour
would define it. This "end of nahlre," then, would also be the "end of a
230 Political Ecology and Bio Art
certain type of scientific certainty about nahlre," and it should open up an
era of uncertainty, of a radical questioning of the world and the prevailing
modes of cognition (245 & 63). Yet, who will do this questioning, and will
only "scientific certainty" be at an end? Again, who will control this
process? What do artists, or critical thinkers have to say? Will the
collective bring about ce11ainty as a foundational moment?
Latour has a term for the discipline and control exercised by the
concept nature as it has been developed over a number of cenhlries:
"mononaturalism," a type of Market/Statist thought seeking both to
saturate and to bind, abetted by an insidious method of homogenization
and passiveness (33 & 48). The key problem will be a type of closure, or a
closing off, which attempts to subsume everything into the One, or the
Same, or a highly struchlred realm of Ideas. By way of a critique of this
type of timely folding into oblivion Latour will offer a number of
modalities: "premahlfely unified nature," as "simplifying the sihlation too
quickly," and as "an unjustified process of unification" (245 & 219). In a
word, this sense of transcendence, of which nature serves as symptom,
mandates a line of abolition which will destroy everything that does not
serve directly the imperative of a unified method of (a) single thought.
Here, difference and a certain approach to the outside have not been
foreclosed as much as hijacked by a densely articulated power coefficient,
covered over by a canopy that has a very belligerent and dominant praxis.
Mononaturalism as an assemblage, as a component of modernity, will then
both bring forth and permit the idea of multiculturalism, with a privileging
of "difference" contoured so as to be recuperable by the forces of
capitalism and capture in a nearly seamless and instantaneous manner
(249). What Latour proposes to replace, or better displace the hierarchic
schema of nature will be the concept of "political ecology." Once again,
the analysis of profound contemporary issues seems cogent enough, but as
has been stated earlier, he risks dissolving one type of transcendence only
to replace it with another fOl1TI of totalizing. Is it time to declare a new
common dwelling, an oikos, and to restore the idea of Plato's cosmos, as a
well-formed collective? 19 He might be folding too soon.
From "Nature" to Political Ecology
On the first page of The Politics of Nature Latour speaks of political
ecology by echoing Lenin's oft-remarked line "what is to be done?" What
is to be done after politics has been "uncoupled" from nahlre and all it
implies, freed from a series of parameters and paradigms? After a critique
of the ways in which the current sense of political ecology has been
James Wiltgen 231
misshapen, Latour's position will be that the "political chessboard" must
be seriously reconfigured. His purpose here involves a move from the
realm of a rigid transcendence to another formation, one whose
"foundational" moment involves the collective composition of the world.
This collective composition might mean a process with no stable or
ultimate end, a perpetual questioning of the borders and boundaries of life,
a-life, semi-life, quasi-life, almost-life, etc. The collective per se does not
refer to something pre-established, as with the dominant fOl1TI of
transcendence, but with "a procedure for collecting associations of humans
and nonhumans" (238). Political ecology ftmctions, then, as a conceptual
and political assemblage 'whose approach will be "to welcome non-
humans" into the collective via "due process;" further, that "humans no
longer engage in their politics without nonhumans" (226). A type of
exteriority would exist, perhaps not as determinate transcendence but as
the temporal and spatial zones of all those elements included under a
variety of different-than-human classifications, including subhuman, non-
human, inhuman, superhuman, a-human, etc. Once again, Latour skates
very close to a notion of immanence, of the single collective, which would
naturalize all political thought and action. Further, this collective will be
gathered as well as collected via a notion of justice embedded in the
phrase "due process;" the basic premise that pulls together this formation
functions "by offering the production of the common world the equivalent
of a state of law" (240). In other words, per the creation of a new
constitution for governance, the goal will be to "achieve a common world
through due process." Achieving a common world via a state of law and
due process: what would that be? Perhaps it might be time to consult
Kafka.
Latour seeks to effect a substantive shift in the concept of
transcendence, basically tmdel1llining and putting under erasure the old
approach to metaphysics, where a unifying force held sway; and of
critiquing multiple modes, from purification to translation, which
functioned in the service of a foundational sense of Sameness. Rather than
a formation of first principles, the emphasis here will be the manner in
which boundaries are drawn, policed and enforced, perhaps not a
complicity with foundations but a fidelity to composition. There would
appear to be a concerted effort not to replace this transcendence by a sense
of immanence, as there exists "no prison of immanence either;" and even
more emphatically, there is "no immanence, only networks. ,,20 Latour
seeks to dislodge what he terms the "incontestable transcendence" by "a
new type of externality;" yet, this "new exteriority" would seem to involve
a type of outside, or at least a new definition of the outside" (38 & 121-
232 Political Ecology and Bio Art
127). However, precisely on this point the issues of ambiguity and
confusion resurface: while transcendence, moral law and the Sovereign
have been swept aside by the new Constitution, in the end "(w)hen we
look outside we see a whole still to be composed." And, "no moral
principle is superior to the procedure of progressive composition" (126 &
124). Then, further complicating the notion of what type of outside this
might be, Latour presents a chart that argues for a "Collective without
outside resource;" an "objective external reality" does exist, but there
seems no reason for a "big fuss" about it (37-38). Basically, transcendence
has been transformed into an outside, what might be a laudable movement,
one Deleuze would applaud, but then the outside, in a second movement,
will become the "externalization" of the collective. By a convoluted route
immanence returns, a single collective reigns. While Latour argues that
Heraclitus should be more important that Heidegger, it would seem that in
crucial ways he remains closer to Heidegger, and that the composition of
the collective could be taken as an answer to the question of Being.
In another interesting maneuver, Latour will take the notion of the
pluriverse, developed by William James, as the basis for a questioning of
the collective:
We can start from nature, not in order to move toward the human element,
but-by making a ninety-degree turn-to move toward the multiplicity of
nature, redistributed by the sciences-something that might be called the
pluriverse .. .to mark the distinction between the notion of external reality
and the properly political work of unification .. .instead of going back and
forth between nature and the human, between realism and constmctivism,
we can now go from the multiplicity that no collective yet collects, the
pluriverse, to the collective which up to now was gathering that
multiplicity under the combined names of politics and nature. (40)
The pluriverse will be in contradistinction to the "'uni-verse'" which will
be criticized because "unification has come about without due process."
This begs a ftmdamental question: could unification take place with due
process? It will be precisely this type of confusion in Latour's analysis that
opens his entire project to serious questions.
An Age of Aquarius?
In seeking these seemingly vast changes how can those potential dangers
be addressed? Once again, a high degree of ambiguity obtains, mortal
threats might exist yet they seem to be dissipated as the dangerous
appellants gain admission to the collective. Certainly, in this emerging
James Wiltgen 233
world there would be "no peace nor the absence of war" (226). At the
VeIY least the set of dangers involve the shift away from an assemblage
controlled by a quasi-incontestable transcendence, a singularized nature, a
powerfully articulated separation between the subject and the object, the
drive to purification, lethal border patrols, and the intensification of
current societal and genetic patterns. Added to these dangers would be the
difficulty in the articulation of a new position capable of focusing on the
problems generated by the Old Regime, which has produced the current,
very de-formed societal configuration. In one of his strongest political
analyses, Latour links modernity and imperialism, arguing that those who
followed these practices "declared they depended on no one; indebted to
the entire universe, they thought they were free of any liaison" (192). This
(anti)assemblage, then, has short-circuited politics, neutralized radical
democracy and prevented, most importantly, efforts at composing a
collective which welcomes the nonhuman into the process of creating a
common world, indeed a cosmos. As again, Latour calls for the
abandomnent of a certain type of dualism based on this thinking, of
discarding the two house structure created therein via a dramatic shift in
the use oflanguage and classification: "the name of the game is .. .to avoid
using the subject-object distinction at all in order to talk about the folding
of humans and nonhmnans. ,,21 Yet, as has been argued, this devolves far
too easily into a type of immanence that may well not have the sustaining
power to resist forces of totalization, and of an unjust, unjustified
unification. Here a competent schizoanalysis seems warranted.
Ambiguities, not paradoxes, multiply: on the one hand, when the
concept of mononaturalism is jettisoned "political ecology .. .is only
beginning to tmderstand what wars it has to fight and what enemies it has
to learn to designate" (The Politics a/Nature 219). In another of his more
trenchant political critiques Latour laments the rise of a globalization
which he equates with the "disappearance of everything external to the
human world;" and, linked to a certain type of totalitarianism which
exhibits a similar methodology, they both have ruthlessly "reduced the
number of concerned parties" by eliminating species, land, and other
elements of the planet in the name of an unjustified simplification, of a
seemingly unchecked rapaciousness. 22 These constitute the effective
dangers existent as "a threat of pacification worse than the evil it was
fighting;" we have never left the Hobbesian state of war?3 Yet, he
maintains an interestingly confident stance with regards to the possible
contours of these dangers: there will be no "brutal rupture" nor big
conversion, no violent shift. At another point he seems clear on the
dangers of the war of the worlds, but also, in the next paragraph, fairly
234 Political Ecology and Bio Art
sanguine about the possibilities of change, where "humans and nonhumans
finally assembled according to due process," as "nothing proves that these
extemalized entities will always remain outside the collective" (218-219 &
124). He will then criticize the current regime of globalization-a
laudatory endeavor-but because "nothing is less univeralizable" than this
process; so, why this thinking of something which could be universalized?
If the subject/object should be undennined, if the current definition of
nature should be expunged, why would a notion of the "universal" not be
another term that critical thinking should be extremely wary of using? As
always, he will provide the requisite ambiguity, because "(t)he universal is
neither behind nor above nor below, but ahead;" the question again will be
at this moment does this "promise" of the universal need to be made, does
it not have a whiff of the ontotheological, of religious transcendence to it?
The real danger for Latour will be the danger those extemal to the
collective pose in their clamor to be admitted-this might signal a mortal
threat, yet ultimately it will be a matter for due process. Once political
ecology has repositioned the chessboard the principle danger will be from
those demanding entrance to the collective, not fire from the skies, and "no
Apocalypse to fear" (192). If these entities want in, how much danger will
they pose? Here, one might wonder what happened to ressentiment and
bad conscience? Did they disappear, along with the old Constitution?
Abundance, and Difference
In what ways might Latour's ideas contribute to a new social formation, a
new democracy if you will, a democracy extended to nonhumans, to
"things"? The political theorist Jane Bennett thinks his work very
important for a different approach to the political, with its
acknowledgment of a "self-organizing power" on the part of the collective,
capable of altering the demos in an originary manner (Jane Bennett "In the
Parliament of Things" 143). Latour, in this analysis, partakes of a
conceptual approach to the world Bennett sees as signifying a sense of
"abundance," as opposed to another political thinker, Jacques Ranciere,
who she argues analyzes the world more in tenns of a constitutive "lack."
Briefly, for Bennett, the notion of an "ontological imaginary of lack"
posits a "non-symbolisable lack" at the heart of difference, and has been
most closely associated with the work of Jacques Lacan; an "ontological of
abundance" would be that theoretical stance which "emphasizes networks
of materiality, flows of energy, processes of becoming and experimenting
modes of affilmation," and the most important thinker in this vein would
be Deleuze (2-4). However, a strong argument can be made that Deleuze's
James Wiltgen 235
notion of abundance must be thought simultaneously with his concept of
difference, otherwise a number dalmting of problems emerge, not the least
of which would be a tendency toward monism and the myriad dangers of
unification, whether premature or not. Continuing, Bennett argues that in
posing the question of the 'we?' the key element of change will be the
realization of "humans as materialities inextricably mixed with nonhuman
entities and forces," and "the relationship between human and nonhuman
members of the demos is close" (137 & 143). Radical democracy in this
approach consists in acknowledging the enmeshed materiality and
carefully, using a sense of due process, adding more and more to the
collective, all the while working the borders and boundaries with the most
sophisticated processes of questioning and evaluation possible. In formal
terms, "from mixed to still more mixed. ,,24 Very salutary at some level, yet
again one must be extremely careful in the ways that limits are drawn: for
Deleuze this happens via the perpetual fonn of difference, which cannot,
by definition, be flilly sutured.
In furthering this sense of the political and of a type of democracy per
Bennett, Latour's work might be termed a form of neg entrophy, seeking to
combat a certain sense of inevitable decline into decadence with the idea
of increasing complexity based on an enlarged collective. In his attempt to
both "disinvent" and "pardon" the modem experiment this analysis seeks
to fundamentally alter the notion of time: after a brisk critique of the
"arrow of the modems" which depended upon "the end of history," Latour
adds to Mark Twain's certainty of only two things-death and taxes-a
third element, as "tomorrow, the collective will be more intricate than it
was yesterday. ,,25 After being banished earlier, certainty retums.
Continuing, there exist at least "two arrows of time": political ecology
must "attack in full awareness" the "atemporal" machinery of the modems,
which bases itself on "the classic relations between subject and object,"
and their certainty of being able to "pry the established facts more
decisively away from their matrix of desires and human fantasies" by
means of the judgment of Science (Politics of Nature 192 & 188-189).
Yet, Latour seems precariously close to a type of positivism, or
functionalism, as those desires and fantasies might be circumvented by the
arbiters of due process as they establish the institutions of the collective.
Further, by "experimentation, by making morality a path of trials,"
political ecology evades the problems of theoretical ecology; again, why
morality? Shouldn't morality be put to a severe questioning? Time, for
Latour then, points in the direction of more complexity, more interaction,
and an increased density in the vast networks of collective life. However,
the key debate, still unresolved, would be whether this had an end point,
236 Political Ecology and Bio Alt
and if the goal would be the full integration of all those entities demanding
admission to the collective. One might hope that the process would be,
indeed, unendlichkeit, unending.
Cosmos v. Chaosmos
One last shift, and it might well be back to a certain reading of the Greeks,
their sense of a "cosmos," and the argument that "all collectives, like
Frankenstein's creature, are bom deformed," and "only the trajectory of the
experiment gives them a civil form" (198). In seeking to uncouple the
connection between nature and politics, Latour will argue that "(n)ever,
since the Greeks' earliest discussions on the excellence of public life, have
people spoken about politics without speaking of nature" (28). He will use
the definition of Isabelle Stengers, as well as the Greeks, for cosmos: as a
"'harmony,'" a certain equilibrium that heralds the possibility of a "good
common world" (237-238). The forces propelling the composition of the
life-world would not be elements of chaos, which would have vast
· . 26 The "progressIVe
elements that defy control, or even conceptua1Izabon. .
composition of the cosmos," would be based on an aesthetic ofproport~on
and form, on an intemalization of the extemal appellants, of a studIed
equilibrium--and once more the analysis offers a perplexing ambiguity:
these institutions would not be constructed "once and for all," yet the
principles for the construction of these institutions will be found, "at the
end of the process" (Politics ofNature 90). Foundations do exist, we must
be patient and they will ultimately materialize in the composition of the
cosmos.
Deleuze would seem to understand the Greeks in a different manner:
rather than the construction of the cosmos as the operative idea, a
confrontation with the forces of chaos will demand of art, philosophy and
science their primary efforts. In other words, "what would thinking be if it
did not constantly confront chaos?;" and decision "slices the chaos" (What
is Philosophy? 208 & 160). This chaos will not be seen as a threat but as
"most positive," as "infinite speeds of birth and disappearance" from
which our plane of consistency will be composed. By cutting, folding, and
slicing, the various activities of art, philosophy, and science compose
chaos, producing what Deleuze will call the "Chaosmos.,,27 For hi~
thought continually vibrates, from chaos to cosmos and back; for Latour, It
seems that the cosmos will be created by the move from the pluriverse to
the collective, or better the collective slowing, and gradually intemalizing,
the new exteriority. These approaches obviously have important
James Wiltgen 237
implications for thinking and for creativity, and will be explored briefly
below in the form of an intriguing set of artistic practices.
Transgenic Aesthetic
"The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic"
-A Thousand Plateaus 280
"Why hasn't the breeding of animals, still principally an economic concern,
moved into the field of aesthetics?,,28
~
So, two positions, two types of political composition. In both Deleuze and
Latour these elements are present, but the question will be that of
emphasis. The position of this essay has been that far too much work
needs to be done before a new constihltion can be proposed, before a type
of due process can be put into place. Too many cliches, too much bad
opinion, too many micro-complicities. For artists, and philosophers, and
scientists no retum to the Greeks can happen: they can certainly infuse and
provoke debate, but we are on our own in a profound sense. The theme of
radical democracy, especially as it applies to the current relationship
between humans and the earth remains crucial, but the stress should be on
the "radical." For artists, as for thinkers, one might argue for an
uncompromising approach in their work, for the primacy of an encounter
with the forces of chaos and difference. The following artists have been
probing some of the issues raised by both Deleuze and Latour; the key will
be to glean the most forceful and subversive elements from both theorists,
and to put them into a complex loop between artistic practice and the
thinking of aesthetics.
The world abounds with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), as
global corporations and the US military, predominately, conduct
increasingly complex experiments on reordering and augmenting the
materiality of the planet. Biodata from every comer of the globe has been
subjected to processes of privatization and patenting; borders seem to
proliferate and become more porous, while a powerful counter-tendency
seeks to police those borders and boundaries with more invasive and
controlling procedures. Commodification and relentless instrumentalization,
driven by competition and profit, control many of these forces. The very
molecular substratum of life and matter has been subjected to continual
probing, surveillance, and manipulation, in what seems to be a very
destructive, and even monomaniacal manner. These groups, abetted by
powerful Nation-States which have been rapidly morphing into Market-
States, fund the labs, set the rules, and determine the composition,
238 Political Ecology and Bio Art
however misshapen, of society. In response, activists such as Vandana
Shiva and Eric Chivian demand a different relation to the material world,
calling for an end to such practices as biopiracy, and advocating the
protection and enhancement of the world's biodiversity. In a striking
measure of the stakes involved, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT)
has recently inaugurated the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in partnership
with a series of private donors and the Norwegian government, storing
millions of seeds from around the world in a vault deep in the Artic, as a
means of protecting the genetic richness and biodiversity of the planet
from all manner of threat. It has also been called "The Doomsday Seed
Vault."
At another level, a group of artists and thinkers has been raising a series
of questions-aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical-regarding the
proliferation of genetic manipulation and the explosion of GMOs around
the world. Manipulation of crops can be traced to at least the beginnings of
agriculhlre, yet the pace and scope of the changes occurring at this
moment seem to have increased dramatically. An exhibit at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, mounted in 2008, entitled
"Design and the Elastic Mind," feahlred what one pundit noted were
"bioengineered crossbreeds, temperamental robots, and spermatozoa
imprinted with secret texts" (www.moma.org). In one of the most astute
books dealing. with these issues, Eduardo Kac has assembled a striking
amalgamation of writings on various aspects of bio art, called Signs of
Life. Kac, himself an attist noted for his work with transgenesis, speaks of
the new technologies that "will bring humans into the world through novel
methods" including oocyte fusion, haploidization and human cloning
(Signs of Life 86). Laying out a history of some of these processes, he
argues for a careful thinking of the "life continuum" and the links and
connections between humans and nonhumans. 30 Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
of the Tissue Culture & Art Project explicitly seek to challenge the
primacy of corporate agribusiness and the various military machines
around the world that seek to dominate the sphere of bio-processes, what
Louis Bec calls "bio-Iogic." Introducing what they term "semi-living"
entities into the continuum of life, these artists have been taking
experiments in genetic manipulation out of the laboratory, where they
have been developed under the aegis of profit and conflict, and inserting
them into aesthetic and political debates. Bernard Andrieu asks the
question "what tolerance do we have today for transplants?" as he
chronicles the history of the chimera in its trajectory toward today's
incarnation as the "transgenic chimera" (Andrieu "Embodying the
Chimera" 64). Further, he argues "(g)iven that the body is no more
James Wiltgen 239
natural, or at least that the individual and social representation of the body
defines it as entirely culhlral and technical, we can deconstruct and
reconstruct the body endlessly" (67). There exist a number of problems
with his approach, which cannot be addressed here: however, his use of
Francisco Varela's work and his questioning of the issues involved in
humanity's experiments on "shaping our bodies according to our wishes"
raise some of the most complex and probing trends now unfolding, as does
his sense that there will be no end to these processes. As another sign of
the sweeping changes on the horizon, in May of 2008 the British
Parliament "voted to allow the creation of hybrid embryos, which have a
combination of human and animal DNA" (www.guardian.co.uk).
Louis Bee, in Signs of Life, discusses the shift to "life art," and to the
"fashioning" of "new forms, new species and new behaviors" ("Life Art"
84). An expert on his self-titled specialty "Technozoosemiotics," a
discipline at the crossroads of "semiotics, ethology, cognitive science,
technology, computer science, and artistic practice," his question will be
"(w)hat conditions are necessary for technological objects of the almost-
living to become part of our reality," a stark yet elegant formulation of
many of the themes being discussed in this essay (87 & 91). A "basic
hypothesis" of this hybrid practice will be that "all living beings are social
beings and that they have to solve a characteristic set of communication
problems that fit into a panoply of stimuli and common or approximate
response" (87). Bee will put forward a "biocryptographic aesthetics,"
based upon a sense of the "transgenic" and transgenic art which provides
"a dimension of endogenous abnormality, a hidden dimension that
divulges the tillderling pressure of degrading and impure procedures that
engendered it" (86). The operative words here-abnormality, degrading
and impure-signal a range of questions/problems, all of which probe the
"cultural foundations" of the world, the human, and the other-than-
31
human. As example of this, Bec points to a project headed by the
scientist Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi, entitled "Half Fish/Half Robot," a
"strange hybrid creature with a mechanical body controlled by the brain of
a fish;" what does one make of this, a type of "technofacturing," fusing
"living matter and machine" and compressing over 350 million years of
"evolution" into a contemporary transgenic hybrid ("Life Art" 87 & 91)?
Via the "art of manipulating processes" defined as "transgression,
exploration, and auto-transformation" Bee means to provoke and
produce discussion and argumentation, "a truly democratic debate about
technological culture and biotechnology" (84).
Artists have joined the debates about the fundamental relations between
the human and the nonhuman, as well as the materiality of the planet, in
240 Political Ecology and Bio Art
terms of provocative interventions as will as probative questions. They
have brought crucial experimentation from the laboratories to the galleries
and to the street, and are forcing critical thought about these complex
issues. The correlations with the work of Deleuze and Latour should be
evident, both in terms of form and in terms of content; the implications for
thinking in a different way humanity's relations with the earth are clearly
at stake. Succinctly, what will be the emphasis: the encounter with chaos
and "infinite movement," or due process and a new Consitiution? Will
these works produce creative change, or will they become curios for the
very wealthy? Time, or better the untimely, will perhaps tell.
Notes
1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 225. After Watergate, the chief analysis produced by the
government was the Church Committee; after five years of investigation, the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of the US Congress released, on 6.05.08,
its report on the ways the US administration repeatedly overstated the threats to the
US from Iraq: it was chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. For lack
of time, this essay will conjoin the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari at pivotal
moments-the separation of their thought would require a different study.
2 Splitting has a number of current uses: the Chinese continue to refer to the Dalai
Lama as a "splittist" for his supposed desire to remove Tibet from Chinese rule;
Newsweek magazine recently had a cover story about divorce, entitled
"Splitsville;" and the Large Hadron Collider, situated on the French-Swiss border,
will soon begin operations, attempting to split subatomic particles at nearly the
speed of light (a type of "time-machine" close to where Nietzsche first had the
flash of the "eternal recurrence" at Sils-Maria). Political, sociological, and
technological splitting in other words: this essay concerns what might be called a
"post-ontotheological" splitting. Finally, see Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art, where
she combined the work of Deleuze and Guattari with that of Luce Irigaray.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 55. Also, ibid. 46-47 for Nietzsche's fidelity to Heraclitus, but with a
twist.
4 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 146. Another possible tetragon would be a
crystal (anorganic)/seed (organic) dyad folded into a series of "differences" and
"repetitions."
5 Other workings of this asymmetry will be chaos and cosmos, and nonsense and
sense. See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994),64. Here might be offered, in the face of
the ungrouding power of difference, a paraphrase of the authors take on Bergson:
"difference (instead of duration) needs a nmner" (quotation altered). In other
words, following the work of Gilbert Simondon, difference, chaos, etc., all
James Wiltgen 241
reciprocally presuppose "individuation," an actor/agency, as composer of the
chaos.
6 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990), 61-65. See also Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81, where he addresses this different
type of time "non-chronological time, Cronos not Chronos ... the powerful, non-
organic Life which grips the world."
7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 64-67. Heidegger's Not refers ... "not to
negation but to questioning;" however, Deleuze will trenchantly critique
Heidegger's dismissal of Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence.
S Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), 88.
Also, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 280, to faire un monde. Deleuze and
Guattari induce ambiguity at ce1iain points, especially regarding the future
contours of existence: the argument here is that any stable notion of a people to
come, or the new earth, or to make a world will be perpetually undermined by the
force of chaos, and the paradox of irreducible multiplicities. Finally, Bergson's
concept of the "pure past" wll be abstract and chaotic, complicating any simple
notion of immanence or monism.
9 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 9. For example, Moby Dick and Mrs. Dalloway
signal important forces at the border. Also, see the provocatively titled film La
Frontera lrifinita, The Infinite Border (2007), about Central Americans crossing
Mexico headed to the United States; certainly powerfully exclusionary borders
exist within the human amalgamation as well as between humans and non-humans.
One of the most pressing problems of the world is how to treat the billion to two
billion poor, and how to alter the global developmental model so the resource base
does not receive lethal damage, if it hasn't already been so affected.
10 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 146 & 193-194. See also xx-xxi, 13, & 23
for "difference without negation." For the unthought, see of course the work of
Foucault in The Order of Things, 322-338.
11 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, x. See also the work of Sande Cohen,
especially Passive Nihilism, as well as his essay "Reading Science Studies
Writing," in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader, (London and New
York: Routledge, 1999).
12 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 73. This section is a very powerful reading,
by Deleuze, of Nietzsche's critique of "Sciences of Man."
13 Ibid. 75. Active science would use three modalities-a symptomatology, a
typology, and a genealogy.
14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 279. It will be important to note
that becoming-other here is Ve1Y different from the conceptualization of otherness.
15 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 203, italics in the original. Also, see
Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, 68, where he argues Nietzsche thought that
chaos and the eternal recurrence "are not two different things." In the film Youth
Without Youth, as Dominic is hit by lightning, his umbrella bursts into flames.
16 Deleuze, Cinema 2,216, italics in the original. Also, see What is Philosophy?,
88,99, 108, & 218.
242 Political Ecology and Bio Art
17 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 4. See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother
Was a Computer, where she problematizes the notion of nature by "alluding to the
displacement of Mother Nahlre by the Universal Computer" (3).
19 Bnmo Latour, The Politics of Nature, 180-183. The title of this section is "The
Common Dwelling, the Oikos"-even though Latour says that Heraclitus is a surer
guide than Heidegger, this section has a number of echoes ofHeidegger.
20 Ibid. 219 & Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 128. The implications here
are for the crucial importance of connectivity.
21 Bnmo Latour, Pandora's Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
1999), 193-194 It is worth noting that this book is dedicated to, among others,
Donna Haraway.
22 Latour, The Politics of Nature, 58 & 220; "this stark reduction of accepted
categories"-this relentless elimination of species around the planet, which seems
to be accelerating: how far will the human species go with this?
23 Ibid. 224. Latour will single out Carl Schmitt as someone who "makes the error
of completely forgetting nonhumans" (282). Latour also says that the exterior is
not a nahlre, but an otherness-as has already been argued, this is not a
conceptualization Deleuze uses.
24 Latour, The Politics of Nature, 191; and "we don't know what an environment
can do," an interesting reference to Spinoza's notion that we don't know what a
body can do, 197.
25 Ibid. 193-194 & 192. See also Deleuze, Cinema 1, where he cites Bufiuel's work
as privileging repetition over entropy (133).
26 www.nytimes.com. 6.04.08, the section of "Science Times" with the headline
"Dark, Perhaps Forever," about the possibility that certain elements of the universe
will never be known.
27 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (299). Chaosmos will be the composition of
chaos, the basis of philosophy, art, and science. All this takes place via the "will to
power"-this term, for Deleuze, does not mean to master or control, but signifies
creativity, and folding. The dyad will to power and the eternal recurrence, per
Deleuze's reading ofHeidegger, does not signal the culmination of metaphysics,
but a profound subversion of it.
28 Vilem F1usser, "On Science," in Eduardo Kac, ed., Signs of Life (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 371. Flusser does seem to spend too much time on a
type of Disney mentality: "who will be the Disney of the fhture ... maybe a
molecular biologist."
30 Kac, Signs of Life, 3-4. Kac will cite the importance of Lynn Margulis and her
notion of the dynamics of "symbiosis and cooperation" in evolution, as much as
"mutation and selection."
31 There are a number of films that deal with elements of these issues: see The
Intruder and Trouble Every Day, by Claire Denis; The Planet of the Apes, where
there was a whiff of interspecies coupling in the kiss between Taylor and Zira; and
in The Island of Dr. Moreau, where the interspecies relations would seem
definitely possible, especially between Montgomery and Fox Lady, although not
without problems of power.
James Wiltgen 243
Works Cited
Bennett, Jane. "In Parliament With Things" in Radical Democracy:
Between Abundance and Lack, Ed. Lasse Thomassen (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005).
Cohen, Sande. Passive Nihilism: Historiography and the Rhetorics of
Scholarship (New York: St.Martin's, 1998).
- . "Reading Science Shldies Writing," The Science Studies Reader, Ed.
Mario Biagioli (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
-. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
-. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990).
-. Cinema 2, The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
-. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael
Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
-. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
-. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988).
- . "Review of Simondon (1966)." Pli, The Warwick Journal of
Philosophy, Volume 12, "What is Materialism?" 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
-. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian
Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
-. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008).
Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and
Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays. Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993).
244 Political Ecology and Bio Art
-. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard
University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999).
-. Politics ofNature: How to Bring The Sciences Into Democracy. Trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Harvard
Press, 2004).
Lyotard, Jean-Franyois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. George
Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
Websites:
Seed Magazine. http://seedmagazine.coml
Tissue Culture & Art Project. http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/
Stelarc._http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
GlobalCropDiversity.http://www.croptrust.org/mainiarctic.php?itemid=il
Louise Bec. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/prolegomena/ (Bec)
CR!, Xinhua News Agency. 10.04.
http://www.china.org.cn/archive12004-10/20/content_ll09829.htm
Blek. %20the%20Raton. %20blekmyvibe.free.frl
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI:
THE ANIMAL QUESTION
KATHERINE E. YOUNG
Environmental struggles have emerged as key contemporary political
issues, driving the development of a vibrant sub-genre of political thought,
environmental political theory. Notably, animal rights have materialized as
a valuable subset of this genre. How do animal rights scholars and activists
frame their arguments? Generally, they take two routes, which mirror the
theoretical underpinning of Western juridical systems: (1) we have an a
priori obligation to uphold the natural rights of animals not to be harmed
(deontology), or (2) animal rights are created by the law to maximize
social happiness for all sentient beings (utilitarianism). Both force animals
into the ethical-political space traditionally set aside for humans, pushing
rights talk to its limits by forcing us to question why we value the interests
of humans over those of animals. However, by relying on the very
structures-law, morality, science-from which they wish to liberate
animals, in order to free them, animal rights scholars find themselves in
the uncomfortable space of working on juridical forms that are ultimately
exploitative (or speciesist, to borrow a term from the animal rights
movement). I For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus (1980), animals (or animality) are disruptive signs, which may
potentially dislocate our commonsense understandings of the world. And
this theoretical line of flight opens the possibility for an intriguing alliance
with contemporary animal rights projects--one that may destabilize the
underlying values that,. at last, damage animal life. Importantly, Deleuze
and Guattari offer a post-structural, non-hierarchical appreciation of
humans and nature, rendering such an alliance even more convincing. 2
Given this potentiality, my task is to take Deleuze and Guattari to their
limit, to craft a politics of becoming for animals.
246 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
Bodies and Desire
On any given weekday in New York City's meatpacking district, the
streets are bustling with a variety bodies: models, celebrities, jetsetters,
designers, butchers, factory workers, and the dead carcasses of animals in
the meatpacking facilities that operate in the district. At night, the
landscape of the neighborhood transfonns as the butchers go home and the
glamoratti arrive in full force. And, again, in the early morning hours, the
different bodies that inhabit the district intersect again as the delivery vans
arrive, the factory workers begin their day, and the partygoers depm1 for
the night. This area, which runs from west 14th street to Gansevoort, was
once one of the largest dressed-meat producing areas in the United States,
housing hundreds of meat slaughtering and meatpacking facilities during
its mid_20 th century heyday. Today roughly 20 meatpacking facilities
operate in the district, dotting the streets along with high-end boutiques,
restaurants, and trendy clubs. In a recent article on cruelty-fi'ee fashion, the
New York Times reported with little irony that a new vegan boutique had
set up shop in the district (La Ferla). In this sense, the meatpacking district
is a never-ending flow of bodies that intersect and interrupt one another in
an amorphous flow with a seeming apathy, if not desire, for their
differences. So much so, that as rents sky-rocketed at the onset of the 21 st
century, and the meat factories moved out and the meat markets moved in,
boutique merchants pushed for historical district stahlS in an effort to hold
onto the 'grittiness' of the neighborhood. Yet, despite the nebulous mass
of bodies that inhabit the district, one group remains largely hidden in
plain view-the (dead) animals. Even as the meatpacking facilities leave
the district, it derives its energy from the meat that once drove its
economy-operating in plain view during the day and, arguably, re-
circulating in the size-zero leather and fur-clad bodies that lithely walk the
streets at night.
What makes the flow of the NYC meatpacking district such an
interesting vignette for introducing the animal question in Deleuze and
Guattari is its strangeness: animal and human bodies collide in Deleuzian
fashion to create a virrual reality of becoming-animal. (Perhaps most
strange and Deleuzian of all is the fact that the district, once known as
Gansevoort Market, was the workplace of Hennan Melville for 20 years.)
3If we consider a street scene on a typical day in the meatpacking district,
the flows of bodies assemble and disassemble depending on the day or
hour. Yet the animal body is strangely missing from the configuration,
only (absently) materializing in the fonn of meat or its image. For Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the animal figures as the impossible limit and
Katherine E. Young 247
the figu:ative P?ssibility of the Body without Organs: the anti-organism
that reSIsts partIcular assemblage, significance and subjectification. For
the~, animals and humans exist as flows of molecules on a plane of
conSIstency. And along that plane what Deleuze and Guattari seek to
inspire is "A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate
it" (Thousand Plateaus 255). In other words, to become-animal is to
ne~ther co~y nor reproduce the animal. It does not involve wearing an
all1m~l .smt. or assuming an animal fonn. Rather, becoming-animal
matenahzes m the locus of the event, the relation of forces that constitute a
body at a particular moment. Returning to the NYC street scene described
above, we can compare it to a rendering of becoming-animal from A
Thousand Plateaus:
It is the wolf its~lf, and the horse, and the child that cease to be subjects to
become events, 111 assemblages that are inseparable from an hour a season
an atmosphere, an air, a life. The street enters into compositio~ with th~
horse, just as the dying rat enters into composition with the air, ad the beast
and the full moon enter into composition with each other ... Climate, wind,
season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people
that ?opulate th~m, f?llow them and awaken with them ... The becoming-
evelllng, becommg-llIght of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o'clock is this
animal! The animal is this place! (263)
It is important to note is that in the scene that Deleuze and Guattari
describe, there is a breakdown of the animal body that attracts the (human)
assemblage of becoming-animal: the wolf body concealed by the night, the
pa~k; .the ho~se beaten on the street to the point of near death; the dying rat.
ThIS IS an Important distinction, because it is in the destruction of the
animal body that becoming-animal transpires. A similar scene unfolds in
the meatpacking district. Desire circulates and produces anomalous bodies
that scramble the lines and codes of species. "The meatpacking district" is
cut with blood, sweat, skin, and meat, simulated leather, and fur-a
t?pographical animal body, all the while its center content remains empty
lIke the meat for which it is named. 4 And, this is the point: the animal is
frag~ented throughout the district but "present" nowhere except in its
partIal assemb.lag~s. In short, the "meatpacking district" is a living, volatile
metaphor, WhICh IS shaped and transmuted by the multiplicity of desires
that assemble within the area.
In this sense, lack is positively refigured and displaced onto animals via
the figurative emptiness of becoming-animal, which certainly presents the
c~an~e for an intriguing alliance with animal advocacy projects (although
thIS IS by no means Deleuze and Guattari's intent). Emptiness is a central
line of flight in their work, not as the negative-dialectical construction of
 248 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
lack but as the condition of possibility for human life. More specifically,
Del~uze and Guattari envision all life on a plane of consistency, in a
continuous and temporal state of becoming, so that there is no distinction
between hmnans and animals. Certainly this superficial re-figuration allows
animals to take form in the most unexpected ways, potentially disrupting
our molar understandings of animal nature (for example, as food,
companions, scientific experiments). Yet, as the meatpacking district
exemplifies, becoming-animal may have unforeseen consequences. for
animals, begging the question: how we can negotiate the actual (ammal
body) and the virtual (becoming-animal) within the context of Deleuze and
Guattari. In other words, when they write, "anyone who likes cats or dogs is
a fool" (Thousand Plateaus 240, their emphasis) do we take this as a
symbolic rejection of Oedipal desire or something else-perhaps a nalTOW
reading of the animal body that reduces it to a manifestation of repressed
desire? Moreover, if unbridled desire is an ontological truth in their work,
does this imply that animals embodying "repressed will" must be
"destroyed" in the wake of this totalizing desire? Any potential alliance of
Deleuze and Guattari with animal advocacy or a larger project of
enviromnentalism demands consideration of not only their intended use of
the animal (as the figurative possibility for life) but also their underlying
image of the animal body as juridical limit to be consumed in the path of
5
self-generating subjects of desire.
Becoming-Animal
How does one become-animal? To create this line of flight, this
movement of becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari create a loose
hierarchy of animals in A Thousand Plateaus-Oedipal, State and
demonic, in which the first two types point to the (egoist) regression and
(heroic) mystification of the subject, respectively, and the third incites the
assemblage of the Body without Organs. All center on ideas of animality,
which either reify the deprivation of desire (lack) or provoke its plentitude
and excess. In terms of the sorts of animals represented by each type, the
categories are not reserved for any particular kind of animal-any animal
considered "my little beast" becomes Oedipal and "even the dog" becomes
demonic when constituting a continuously transforming population (241).
Overall, the authors privilege demonic-becomings; in particular, although
all becomings-animal run the risk of becoming mystifications, it is the
demonic or diabolical idea of animality-wild, multiplying and
transforming-that is the figurative possibility for escaping humanist
classifications:
Katherine E. Young 249
In short, between substantial forms and determined objects, between the
two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a
natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that
compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed
subjects that receive them. (Thousand Plateaus 253, their emphasis)
What does this mean for the animal body? Deleuze and Guattari take
care to explain the difference between molar (well-defined) and molecular
(dynamic) conceptions of the body and their affects on becoming-animal.
The former refers to what we clearly recognize as the body, or the "real"
animal trapped in its molrtr fonn and endowed with certain organs and
functions (and in the case of the human molar fonn, assigned as a subject)
(Thousand Plateaus 275). The latter are the particles or molecules emitted
by an organism that come into proximity with other particles within the
context of an event. Becoming-animal, as with any becoming, flows
between these molar and molecular poles. For example, the disintegration
of fonns, the tillS table haecceities of one and the pack that occurs with
becoming-wolf is a line of flight toward a molecular assemblage, whereas
the becoming-dog associated with Oedipal and state animals (for example,
the companion or breed) moves toward a molar form: "No one can say
where the line of flight will pass: Will it let itself get bogged down and fall
back to the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to
another danger, for example, turning into a line of abolition, annihilation,
self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab ... ?" (Thousand Plateaus 250).
The relations of movement and speed that transpire in the vacillation to
and from molar and molecular are the process of desire: "becoming is the
process of desire" (Thousand Plateaus 272). It is a pack or swarm of
molecules that spreads and multiplies via contagion. As Claire Colebrook
explains in her book Gilles Deleuze , becoming-animal describes the
positive multiplicity of this movement of desire. Citing a child's encounter
with a wolf, she notes: "the child's fascination for the wolf is not for what
the wolf represents but for the wolfs entirely different mode of becoming:
wolves travel in packs, at night, wandering" (134, her emphasis). In other
words, the child desires not the single form of the wolf or what it
represents, but the multiplicity of its potential actions (134). And within
that moment, the child too trades ipseity for singularity. It is important to
note that within this fluid composition of one and many, Deleuze and
Guattari do not distinguish between humans and animals. Instead, we are
all molecular bodies, more or less, passively or actively, inhabiting molar
forms on a plane of consistency-the surface on which all events
(becomings) happen (Thousand Plateaus 267).
250 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
But there is not simply one plane. Deleuze and Guattari use the image
of the plane as the space of becoming, both in its molar and molecular
capacities. In this sense, the plane of organization is the molar counterpart
to the plane of consistency, in that it organizes molecules into a subjective
form: "the plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of
consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the
movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them,
reconstitute forms and subjects in dimension of depth" (270). We can
think of the planes of consistency and organization much like the tables of
the earth and sky on which the Nietzschean dice-throw takes place: "But
these two tables are not worlds. They are two hours of a single world, the
two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the hour when the
dice are thrown and the hour when the dice fall back" (Deleuze, Nietzsche
and Philosophy 25). As Deleuze explains in Nietzsche & Philosophy, the
dice throw is the eternal return of life. The two moments, in which the dice
are thrown (earth) and the dice fall back (sky), symbolize the accident of
life and the becoming of life, respectively. In other words, life enters the
world on the plane of organization marked by its molar form. As bodies,
we have been selected and organized by those in power: we are the dice.
And collectively we (humans) are bad players because we want to repeat
the combination of the first throw and reaffirm our subjectivity; that is,
bring order to chaos through dialectical resolution. It is embracing the
second throw, however, that allows us to overreach the dialectic and
transvalue inherited values. In this sense, to be free is to embrace the
contingency of history and becoming (Colebrook 129).
If we overlay the Nietzschean dice throw with becoming-animal, it is
apparent that animals are open to assembling themselves with the world
around them, to chance encounters. For example, dogs love to follow a
scent, wherever it may lead (trash, a dead animal, another dog, etc.)
creating assemblages that rupture their categorization as polite "pets." At
the crass event when it sniffs a rotting bird carcass, the dog enters into an
assemblage (dog-carcass-maggot) that ruptures our Oedipal configuration
of "the dog." However, in order to perceive this difference, the dog must
necessarily break (Oedipal) or reinforce (evolutionary) identities as "a
dog." In other words, the pack delimits the condition of possibility for the
animal, since animals are rendered in groups, which then defines their
being (Lippit, Electric Animal 131). As Deleuze and Guattari explain in A
Thousand Plateaus, individuals or species are only symbolic entities of the
pack. 6 More specifically, what is important for Deleuze and Guattari is the
anomalous borderline of the pack. In this sense, an animal may demarcate
difference as the leader of the pack, or redouble into the pack so that each
Katherine E. Young 251
and e~ery animal occupies this position (Thousand Plateaus 245). This
rereadmg of the group or pack in terms of the borderline allows the
authors to transvalue humanist conceptions of animals. "It is now even
P?ssible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding the
pItfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective
stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they
bring into play)" (Thousand Plateaus 245).
. This is not to say that the pack cannot be cut by planes of organization
m a way that they fall back into state or Oedipal forms (Thousand
Plateaus 246, 260). Indeed, this is how animals are inscribed and read by
humans; for example, a'toy dog dressed up to be the object of one's
affection. As Steve Baker discerns in Picturing the Beast, culture allows
us access to received rather than unmediated understandings of animals.
For this reason, he argues, we must realize that symbolic and rhetorical
uses of the animal carry as much conceptual weight as the "real" animal
(10). For Baker, the challenge to re-picturing animals is rendering animal
bodies "abstract, conceptual, arbitrary, unstable, and not as the site of the
fi~ed '~ea1'" by amalgamating them with images of the human body (223).
LIkewIse, Deleuze and GuaUari suggest that we reread and transvalue the
animal form inherited from evolutionary classifications with a multiple
and amorphous animality. From this transvaluation we can infer
becom~ng-animal as the common denominator of life, or the will to power,
that anllnates the eternal return of the Nietzschean dice throw.
Colebrook explains this rereading of the animal in terms of the
transversal quality of becoming-animal; that is, the mutation or variance
that occurs with each molecular event or encounter. "For Deleuze,
transversal becomings are key to the openness of life. Life is not
composed of pre-given forms that simply evolve to becoming what they
ar~, as thoug~ becoming could be attributed to the coming of some
bemg,,: What It is depends on the life it encounters" (133, her emphasis).
The ammal, reread as the borderline, becomes the figure for embracing
tragic gaiety. As humans we do not know what a body can do and
"lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk" (Deleuze, Spinoza 17-8).
More specifically, our bodies are stolen from us in order to "fabricate
opposable organisms" (Thousand Plateaus 276). In this sense the
becoming-animal of the human is recognition of the body as inscribed by a
relation of multiple discursive forces that separate the body from what it
can do. In terms of the cache of this animal metaphoricity, however, we
must concede that there remains the ever-present danger of destroying
"real" animal bodies for the (human) body without organs (a point to
which we will return shortly).
252 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible
For Deleuze, the actual world is the combination of virtual
tendencies: what we perceive as achml or real is, in fact, one among many
possible actualizations. In this sense, pure difference or becoming
precedes our ontological understandings of the world. If we return to the
anomalous border, it is the perception of the border that delineates an
event and that contracts the flow of becoming (Colebrook 126-7). The
plane of consistency is the flow of molecules that stretches from human to
animal to molecular to particles, all the way to the imperceptible so that
"Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines
constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization" (Thousand Plateaus
249). What this means is that becoming-animal necessarily depends on the
breakdown of our timely conceptions of animality; that is, it takes the
categories of the present and makes them suspect. Freedom, in the sense of
becoming-animal, is not aligned with a particular line of flight or end:
there is no original or stable moral vantage point from which to judge
actions. Rather, freedom is possibility itself: "the viltual opens up new and
possible worlds for actualization, but such openings will not automatically
lead in the direction of freedom. This is nonetheless what the virtual does:
it opens possibilities for new experiences, for new encounters, for new
steps to be taken" (Rushton 227).
More specifically, ethics replaces morality for Deleuze (Spinoza 41).
Morality takes the active range of possibilities and presents it reactively,
"as already detennined through a system of immutable values-this is
evil" (Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze 130, her emphasis). Ethics, on the other
hand, recognizes: "In reality, we are never judged except by ourselves and
according to our states" (Spinoza 40). Working from Spinoza and
Nietzsche, Deleuze conceives of the body as constituted out of a relation
of active and reactive forces; the fonner combining and overreaching
humanist categorizations and the latter separating active forces from this
creative potential (Nietzsche & Philosophy 57). Ethics is the active reading
of the body with regard to these forces. Accordingly, judgment is centered
on a body's affective power, so that "badness" signals the decomposition
or destruction of the capacity to be affected or the domination of the body
by reactive forces (Spinoza 41, Nietzsche & Philosophy 57). According to
Deleuze and Guattari, we can judge what a body can do only when it
enters into relations with affects of another body: "We know nothing about
a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are,
how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the
affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it,
Katherine E. Young 253
either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in
composing a more powerful body" (Thousand Plateaus 257).
Returning to becoming-animal, this eliminates any potential for
empathy with animal-others, since compassion assumes a static moral
vantage point. Instead, an animal is judged on its affective capacity, and
becoming-animal is constituted out of difference or anomaly. Deleuze and
Guattari's loose hierarchy of animals corresponds to this view of ethics:
the image of the Oedipal pet or the mythic state animal must be
overreached because it separates the body from what it can do. For
humans, the Oedipal animal configuration invites regression into
narcissistic contemplation, while the state configuration reinforces
symbolic associations that limit becomings (Thousand Plateaus 240, 248).
Conversely, it is the demonic animal that delineates the anomalous border
and draws human perception. Animal bodies are similarly rendered
reactive, servile and submissive by means of Oedipal and state
configurations. Only at the moment of death, when the limit of their
affective capacity shines through, do these types of animals attract human
desire. A passage from A Thousand Plateaus is instructive on this point:
Little Hans's horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of
a species but an element or individual in. a machinicassemblage: draft
horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in
the context of the individuated assemblage it is a part of. .. These affects
circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse 'can do.'
The~ indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse power, but also a
pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't get back on its
feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping· a horse
is going to die!-this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche,
Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). (257)
What this passage suggests is that the situation or event that brings to
bear the threshold of the horse does so by revealing the forces that produce
and animate its actions. As a beast of burden, the horse's body is the
product of forces that load its back, similar to Nietzsche's camel or the
self-~oading ass discussed by Deleuze in Nietzsche & Philosophy (1962).
In thIS sense, the horse is a passive body: it is a figure of passive nihilism,
a body that affinns nothing but the reactive forces which dominate it. Of
course, when Nietzsche and Deleuze talk of beasts of burden, they intend
to symbolize human action: the horse or camel or ass is the enlightened
modern man who loads his own moral baggage via the displacement of
religious or state values as his own power (Nietzsche 26-7, Nietzsche &
Philsophy 181). We are unaware of our own passive nihilism as humans.
Yet in witnessing the event of the horse being whipped, its consequences
254 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
are no longer separated from its productive forces. More specifically, there
is recognition (which the psychoanalyst misses) of the affects or forces
themselves-the animal is the production and limit in the relation of these
forces (Thousand Plateaus 257-259).
Animals always already occupy this (passive) position in relation to
humans. Animals lack .language: they have no origin story and are not
aware of the values that mark them. Cruelty, as defined by Deleuze and
Guattari in Anti-Oedipus "is the movement of culture that is realized in
bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them" (145). And language is
what allows for this inscription of signs into the "naked flesh" that codes
flows and invests organs as part of the social machine (Anti-Oedipus 145).
For this reason, humans are the sole purveyors of cruelty because it is only
human values that inscribe and mark the body. Becoming-animal, for this
reason, is a human-centered event that attempts to recoup the Body
without Organs-the body before it is organized and dissected into
Oedipal and scientific codes. Deleuze discusses this cruel transmutation in
terms of animal nature in Coldness and Cruelty:
It has been said that the senses become "theoreticians" and that the eye, for
example, becomes a human eye when its object itself has been transformed
into a human or culhlral object, fashioned by and intended solely for man.
Animal nahlre is profoundly hurt when this transmutation of its organs
from the animal to the human takes place, and it is the experience of this
painful process that the art ofMasoch aims to represent. (69)
In this passage, Deleuze describes the distinctly human touch of
cruelty; that is, our painful passage into passivity. And for the masochist,
animality is recovered, if only momentarily, in the fetishistic fantasy of the
feminine ideal: Masoch's Venus in Furs is becoming-animal, with its open-
ended play of "flesh, fur and mirrors" (69). As Deleuze describes, this
fantastic suspension of desire allows Masoch to disavow and invert its
negative element in his work (71). More specifically, the masochist
recodes cruelty onto his naked flesh in order to suspend, rupture and
transform Oedipal desire. And it is in the event of this sensual encounter
that the masochist transforms desire and transmutes cruelty, so that it
becomes productive rather than repressive (54).
It is important to note that in Coldness and Cruelty, preliminary
sketches of the Oedipal, state and demonic classifications emerge in
Deleuze's account of the uterine (Aphroditic), Oedipal (Apollonian) and
oral (Dionysian) mothers present in Masoch's novel. The becoming-animal
of the masochist operates between the poles of the uterine and Oedipal
mothers; that is, between the cold chaos of "mother nature" and the
Katherine E. Young 255
sentimentality of the degraded maternal form. Simply put, the masochist
breaks down himself, via a recoded cruelty, so the oral mother may be
born of his own (paternal) lack. Deleuze describes this flight of becoming
that occurs within the masochistic fantasy in Coldness and Cruelty:
Most of Masoch's novels contain a hunting scene, which is described in
minute detail: the ideal woman hunts a bear or a wolf and despoils it of its
fur. We could interpret this symbolically as the struggle of woman against
man, from which won:an emerges triumphant. But this would be a mistake,
since woman has already triumphed when masochism begins, the bear and
the fur have already been invested with an exclusively feminine
significance. The animaI"stands for the primitive hetaeric mother, the pre-
birth mother, it is hunted and despoiled for the benefit of the oral mother,
with the aim of achieving a rebirth, a parthenogenetic second birth in
which, as we shall see, the father has no part. (61)
Here we can view that oral mother as a demonic manifestation who
necessarily depends on the symbolic organization of nature (the pa;k, the
Aphroditic mother) in order to recode Oedipal desires. What is intriguing
about this passage, however, is the destructive impulse directed at animal
bodies (the wolf and bear) and later displaced onto the masochist himself:
the remnants of wild animals take on this powerful feminine significance
in the masochistic heroine, or the "becoming-woman" (as Deleuze and
Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus) of the desiring machine
suspended within the masochist's fantasy.7 In this sense, and as Deleuze
concedes in Coldness and Cruelty, we can view Masoch's three feminine
types in terms of their suspension of the dialectical resolution of desire
(52-3).8 Indeed, cruelty is recoded, and flesh becomes fantasy during the
masochistic event. Yet this is heralded by the symbolic destruction of the
uterine mother, literally as animal bodies, and then re-grafted onto the oral
mother in the partial assemblage of "flesh, fur, and mirrors" that Deleuze
describes.
Organs without Bodies
What is suspect, in terms of becoming, is the "beautiful soul" at the
displaced heart of Deleuze's work (setting the stage for becomings in his
later projects with Guattari).9 Of course, this appears a strange symptom,
given Deleuze's stance that the Hegelian dialectic crushes difference under
the fayade of identity. And whereas Deleuze is more than willing to take
what he wants from other philosophers in order to produce strange
theoretical hybrids, Hegel is strangely missing in his work. As Brian
 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
256
Massumi observes in his foreword to A Thousand Plateaus: "Hegel is
absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring" (x). But
what if Deleuze is becoming-Hegel, as Slavoj Zizek argues in Organs
without Bodies? And what if becoming-animal is yet another
materialization of the logic of opposition or "the gap dividing the One
from within, the inherent doublure, as the most elementary ontological
fact" (Organs without Bodies 68)? Although certainly more complicated
than the space of this essay will allow, what Zizek locates at work in
Deleuze is a fundamental Hegelian logic of division and repetition. If we
return to the virhlal and achlal in Deleuze, according to Zizek they
represent two sides of the same Moebius strip (92). What this means is that
the virtual is the caesura that separates us from the unconscious (Other),
while the actual is the (empty) body that is constituted within the
topography of this gap: "In this sense, One is the name of the Void. With
the emergence of subjectivity, this void is posited as such-it becomes
For-Itself-and the empty signifier, the mark of this void, 'represents the
subject for other signifiers lll (68). Everything, in sense, is a surface effect
of desire concealed by the mask of subjectivity. And, far from reconciling
this gap, language exacerbates it: "Language is the supreme example here,
that is to say, it is only through the enjoyment provided by the vary act of
speaking, through the speaker getting caught in the closed loop of
pleasurable self-affection, that humans can detach themselves from their
immersion in their environs and thus acquire a proper symbolic distance
toward it" (144).
Applied to Deleuze, the "surface membrane" of subjectivity that
delimits the achlal and the virtual becomes active,or self-positing in the
flow of becoming (118). Or, in Lacanian terms, it is the reflection of the
subject via language that constantly dismpts the preverbal totality of
being. In other words, the virhlal represents the will to mastery and the
actual represents the traumatic realization that we can never overcome
fragmentation (lack). With regard to the symbolic castration from this
trauma, Zizek explains that a fundamental paradox of symbolization
emerges, in which the subject is radically de-centered via its self-identity
so that "it can find itself only in a medium outside itself" (The Indivisible
Remainder 47). And it is with this endless division and repetition of
linguistic trauma, wherein we have the minimal freedom to act, that the
subject emerges (Organs without Bodies 68). As such, becoming
(becoming-subject) is clandestinely Hegelian for Zizek: "In other words,
the subject is a pure virtual entity in the strict Deleuzian sense of the term:
the moment it is achlalized it is changed into substance. To put it yet
another way, subjectivity is the sight of 'true infinity.' No wonder, then,
Katherine E. Young 257
that when Deleuze asserts the infinity of pure becoming as the virtuality
that encompasses every actualization, he is again secretly Hegelian" (69).
With this secreted raison d'etre comes a concomitant renunciation of
animal bodies, sustained via language. Deleuzian freedom, in this Zizekian
sense, is the minimal power to accept or reject being affected in a certain
way: ."'Freedom' is thus inherently retroactive. At its most elementary, it is
not SImply a free act that, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but
rather a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities
will determine me" (112). Accordingly, when he argues that language
feeds difference by allowing humans to move beyond acts of mere animal
survival to perceive autonomous "partial moments" of desire, Zizek
imagines language as both the limit and condition of possibility for
(human) freedom (143). Non-human organisms, too, have an innate power
to produce mles, map relationships and limit their actions to a series of
affects, but they are driven solely by their primal desires. Humans, of
course, attach values to these desires via language, which allows them to
take hold of the world around them. Indeed, Zizek reads this
"humanization" as paradoxical, since subsequent symbolic castration
works to limit human freedom (as opposed to sustaining it). Although
Zizek is not explicit on this point, if we accept his reading of Deleuze, this
means that becoming-animal is an attempt to break free of the fetishization
of pleasure by embracing the (animal) open. 10
Here it useful to discuss, if only briefly, Heidegger's implication of
an~mals, which parallels this arrest of animal abandon. For Heidegger,
ammals are defined by their affects: they are poor-in-the-world. In short,
animals are open to other beings, but only in an instinctive way. More
specifically, animals are held captive by the world because they only relate
to it as an extension of themselves-no space or gap exists between the
other and the animal. And because they have no conception of others as
beings-as-such, this also means that they cannot take any position over and
against that to which they are instinctually drawn (Calarco 23-5). Within
Heidegger's framework, animals exist in the world only in a space of
exclusion (Lippit, "Afterthoughts on the Animal World" 792). Lacking
language, they do not divide the world or their bodies via concepts.
Humans, on the other hand, lend order and meaning to their world via their
choices; that is, only humans are world forming. And because the
linguistic "subject" believes it is affected by encounters with autonomous
"objects" (animals, or others generally), it lives in isolation to the world.
What this means is that this objective liaison is simply a veiled
relationship to us, one that works to ban our worldly (and distinctly
human) experience as well as close down human freedom. Granting this
258 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
schema, animals become amalgams of the forces to which they are drawn
because they only sense affects as extensions of themselves; that is, they
are bodies without organs. Here we can see the parallel of Heidegger and
Deleuze. II As Zizek senses, language grants us a paradoxical sense of
freedom. Becoming-animal is recognition of this paradox, the embrace of
animal openness, which is sensed through the recoded assemblages of
human bodies and their worlds. Yet as Zizek discerns, this is a distinctly
human endeavor, since animals simply live in the open, but cannot take
hold of it. In fact, careful reading of Deleuze and Guattari reveals they too
concede becoming-animal as an anthropocentric event:
Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as ifhe changed molar species; the
vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities
between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed
and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are werewolves
and vampires, we say this with all our heart; but do not look for a
resemblance or analogy. to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in
action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the 'real' animal is
trapped in its molar form and subjectivity). (Thousand Plateaus 275)
And this is precisely Giorgio Agamben's point in his book The Open,
wherein he uses Heidegger's principle to cast animality and humanity as
one and the same, "two sides of a single fracture" (36)-similar to the way
that Zizek portrays the actual and virtual as two sides of same Moebius
strip.12 For Agamben, to "let the animal be" would mean realizing this
relationship for what it is-the creative force of human life. In this sense,
Deleuze's becoming-animal falls back on the dialectical and paradoxical
logic of politics that Agamben delineates, and Zizek gathers in terms of
psychoanalytic theory: to exceed the limits imposed upon us by
language-to live in the Deleuzian sense-is contingent upon our
possession of language. As such, animals serve as the constitutive outside
of the human world, excluded via their lack of language but included as
figures that affect our human existence; that is, the animal is the
borderline, receding or emitting from the pack, breaking or reifying
molarity. Becoming-animal is contingent upon the over-reaching
(exclusion) of molar animal forms, by destroying and taking them to their
bodily limits. For the masochist, as we have seen, cruelty is recoded via
the physical re-inscription of human flesh. Yet, as described above, the
masochistic fantasy is a self-reflective and anthropocentric event preceded
by the literal breakdown of animal bodies. Here we can return to Deleuze
and Guattari's description of Little Hans's (as well as the masochist's)
fascination with the various horse-producing assemblages (draft-horse-
Katherine E. Young 259
omnibus-street) representing the threshold of what a horse "can do"
(Thousand Plateaus 257).13 Except that in the case of the masochistic
fantasy, the bit, bridle and sheath re-circulate what the masochist's body
can do by annulling some organs "so that their liberated elements can enter
into new relations from which the becoming-animal, and the circulation of
affects within the machinic assemblage, will result" (260). Of course, this
destabilizes and re-territorializes human (and animal) bodies, by calling
into question the trajectory of "natural" history, similar to the way that
Alphonso Lingis describes Nietzsche's evolutionary transvaluation (13).14
As Judith Butler explains in Subjects ofDesire, the liberation of desire
from its negative and repressive (Hegelian) elements insists not only that
the law can be broken, but also that it must be broken in order to transform
our human genealogy (205-7). And as we have seen, given the paradoxical
"nature" of "humanization" this too entails breaking down, literally and
figuratively, molar animal fOlms. And taken to its limits, this spells death
for animal bodies. Given their implicit anthropocentrism, Deleuze and
Guattari must become accountable to the contemporary political project of
animal advocacy if we are to re-circulate desire for animals. In other
words, without negotiating Deleuze's inscriptive line of flight with a lived
animal politics, wherein animal bodies are always already at stake, we run
the risk of once again becoming human, all too human. 15
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Extinct
A provocative example of the danger of becoming-animal for animals
is illustrated in Akira Lippit's book Electric Animal. Here Lippit takes
becoming-animal to its farthest limit-extinction. For Lippit, animals
serve as the imaginaIY position in human speech, as metaphors that exist
outside the realm of ontology (26). More specifically, animals are pure
medium, pure text, pure ideas, and "fleshy photographs" that are able to
disrupt the flow of figurative human speech. How do they do this,
according to Lippit? Lacking language, animals are incapable of
determining or regulating the discourse that they transmit (21).
Consequently, animals serve as living metaphors. To arrive at this
position, Lippit expands Derrida's claim that animals function as absolute
limits of language, since within language they can only appear as another
expression-metaphor (166). More specifically, sacrificing molar animal
imagery via becoming-animal allows us access to the space proscribed by
reason and language, while concurrently releasing us from the realm of
morality (181). In this sense, becoming-animal entails the destruction of
 260 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
bodies that encapsulate or transmit categorizations that separate us
(humans) from what we can do.
All of this parallels the Deleuzian configuration of freedom. As Lippit
explains, the multiplicity of the pack, which ultimately defines an animal,
is also what lends an animal its immortal property. Using the death of a
dog as an example of this eternal return, Lippit explains in Electric
Animal: "Thus the dog is immortalized, preserved (taxidennically) in the
slaughterhouse of being, language" (48). In other words, it is animals' lack
of language that allows them the power to molecularly transpire back into
the pack: "Undying, animals simply expire, transpire, shift their animus to
other animal bodies" (187). Animals become pure image, literally
photographs (film images) in Lippit's analysis. And it is the animetaphoric
ingestion of animals via the media that allows the sacrificial moment-the
imaginative flash-to live beyond the extinction of animal bodies in the
modern world. As pure text, the absence of the actual animal body
becomes trivial, since this re-circulated animal medium survives in a new
habitat of technological media (25).
More specifically, as nature recedes and animals become increasingly
extinct, changes in language via media provide another realm for animals
to inhabit: "It is a space made possible by the extinction of a certain form
of language. The technological media can be seen as the afterlife of that
language-animals survive language in the cryogenic topographies of
technological reproduction" (161). Surely, Lippit wishes to acknowledge
and refigure traces of animality (and animals) that destabilize human
subjectivity (25-6). However, taken to its extreme, what we find in this
Deleuzian call of the wild is an affinnation of (human) life founded in
(animal) death. Arguably, Lippit seems to celebrate the annihilation of
actual animal bodies and the emergence of the "electric animal" as a
Deluezian assemblage that pennits another economy of the gaze,
identification, and becoming (179). Once unearthed, however, this morbid
fascination exposes the narcissistic gaze of a refigured (human) subject,
which writes and destroys animal bodies only to reinvent and multiply its
own power. Simply put, animal bodies become newly and familiarly
inscribed, freshly packaged and sold in the slaughterhouse of the rhetorical
(political) economy: dead meat.
Lippit stands out in his representation of the electric animal. Yet he is
not alone in testing the (impossible) limits of the postmodern animal. Steve
Baker, for example, similarly explores the becoming-animal of postmodern
art, although with a quiet acknowledgement of the discord between its
somatic and figurative implications: "the politics and philosophy of animal
rights have little in common with postmodern art's representation of the
Katherine E. Young 261
animal, with its apparent refusal to draw the line even at bestiality or
butchery" (Postmodern Animal 174). For Baker, becoming-animal is
imaginative thought that challenges the complacency and consensus
thinking of contemporaty politics (18-9). It is postmodern art's serious
engagement with animals-its willingness to represent animals in new and
dangerous ways-that marks its promise in tenns of becoming-animal.
Whether or not this leads to a better future for animals or more or less
humane priorities in our relationships with animals is onl; secondary to the
type of freedom that it promises (25).
. A quick read of Deleuze and Guattari can certainly point to this line of
flIght. But to work on tlle surface in this way is to slip back into a
complacency that is, at its roots, anti-Deleuzian. Deleuze and Guattari are
clear on this point: rhizomes emerge within the plateaus of our inherited
molar concepts, and freedom is contingent on rupturing or cutting across
molarity: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will
start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid
of ants because they fonn an animal rhizome that can rebound time and
again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of
s~g~entarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized,
sIgmfied, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which
it ~onstantly flees" (Thousand Plateaus 9). As this passage demonstrates,
amI?als awkwardly populate these plateaus. Contemporary animal rights
projects surely push the limits of traditional political discourse. Yet, if we
assemble animal rights within a politics of becoming, it is clear that in
accepting our juridical system as given, they do not go far enough. In other
words, Deleuze and Guattari may lend a much-needed sense of openness
and possibility to these projects by forcing them to take on the value of their
political values. And at the same time, scratching beneath the surface of
becoming-anima~ reveals its destructive impulses with regard to animals, as
w~ have seen. WIthout these kinds of negotiations, it is easy, all too easy, to
thmk that we can fully escape our complicity with a larger structure of
do~ination. Becoming-animal opens a multitude of virtual possibilities for
an~mal-hu~an relationships, an entire (minoritarian) politics of becoming-
anll~al, WhICh challenges our rote knowledge of animals-not to escape it,
but III the words of Deleuze and Guattari, to put it to "strange new uses"
(15).
262 Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question
Notes
1 See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. . ..
2 Note that Guattari directly engages the link between human subJectlVlty and
environmental issues. See Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies.
3 Here we are reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's discussion inA Thousand
Plateaus of Ahab's pursuit of the whale, as a manifestation of becoming-animal, in
Melville's novel, Moby Dick.
4 See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat.
5 Here I am playing off Judith Butler's argument in Subjects of Desire that Deleuze,
following the Hegelian tradition, figures desire as the cen:ral feature. o~ .human
ontology, one that is liberated when it is free of the constramts of prohibitive law
(206). . .. ., . I
6 Here we can observe a certam affi11lty with Dernda s work on the a11lma
question. In a similar way, D~rr~d~ observes .in. "T,~~ Animal That Therefore I ~m"
that the "heterogeneous multlpltclty of the ItV111g IS reduced to a concept of ~he
animal" that allows for an "original" human subjectivity (124-5). When Dernda
comments "I would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular. There
is no ani~al in the general singular, separated from man by a single i~ldivisible
limit. We have to envisage the existence of 'living creatures' whose plurahty cannot
be assembled within the single figure of animality that is simply opposed to
humanity" his retort may be comparable to Deleuze and Guattari's. notion of
becoming-animal in A Thousand Plateaus (125). Although he POl11.t~ to the
reduction of "the animal" in language, Derrida reserves a strong cnttque for
Heidegger (and Lacan's) use of "the animal" arguably lending his work a diff~rent
trajectory than that of Deleuze and Guattari (~ee also "And .Sa~, the A11lmal
Responded" and "Eating Well, or the CalculatIOn of the Subject for a more
comprehensive discussion of "the animal" in Derrida's work).
7 Here we can think of Deleuze and Guattari's reference in Anti-Oedipus to the
continual material flow, or relations of production, that drive the pure and empty
space of desire or becoming (as they later describe in A Thousand Plateaus).
8 In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze notes that Masoch's dream of Venus at t~e
beginning of Venus in Furs was inspired by "Ba~h?fen, ~s ~uch as Hegel,". ~n
terms of the progressive disintegration of the fem111l11e prtnclple (the. ~phr?dltlc
era) to the degenerate Dionysian form with respect to th~ three fem111l11~ Ideals
(52). In this sense, Hegel's "beautiful soul," or the suspensIOn of the ne~attve that
digresses into madness, is represented in the oral mother of the masochist fantasy
[for a more complete treatment of the beautifhl soul, see Hegel's Phenomenology
ofSpirit (383-409)]. . .
9 Note that Deleuze does critically examine the Hegehan conceptIOn of the
"beautiful soul" in Difference and Repetition. . .
10 Specifically, this is a reference to Giorgio Agamben's text, The. O~en, which Will
be discussed in greater detail shortly. For now, we can turn to Zlzeks comment on
the human fetishization of desire in Organs without Bodies: "In short, the zero-
degree of 'humanization' is not a further 'm~diation' o~ animal activity, its
reinscription of a subordinated moment of higher totaltty (say, we eat and
Katherine E. Young 263
procreate to develop higher spiritual potentials) but the radical narrowing of focus,
the elevation of a minor activity into an end-in-itself' (141-2).
11 Matthew Calarco, in a subsection (aptly titled "Body without Organs") of his
essay "Heidegger's Zoontology," reveals this link between Deleuze and Heidegger.
Note that Calarco does not reference Deleuze in the text. Although 'body without
organs' certainly and literally refers to Heidegger's consideration of the bee whose
stomach has literally been removed, the reference to Deleuze seems obvious.
Specifically, he cites Heidegger's appraisal of an experiment, in which the
abdomen of a bee was removed to test whether the animal would continue to feed
on honey unimpeded. Not only did the bee fail to recognize the presence of too
much honey, it failed to notice the loss of its abdomen, leading Heidegger to
conclude that the bee was held captive by its food (25). The bee was literally the
body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari describe.
12 Note that Zizek does comment on biopolitics and the homo sacer, briefly
referencing Agamben, in his article "From Politics to Biopolitics ... and Back."
13 Also see page 8 of this essay for the full quotation from A Thousand Plateaus.
14 In "Nietzsche and Animals" Alphonso Lingis describes the Nietzschean account
of evolution as an eternal return of "ancient instincts and pleasures that produces
new excellences" (13). More specifically, the atavaristic survival of animal
instincts (whose evolutionary goals have diminished to the point of being
imperceptible in human bodies) manifests as "gratuitous expenditures of energy"
or re-bridled desire in Deleuzian terms (13).
15 More specifically, I am working from the two broad theoretical approaches
outlined in Elizabeth Grosz's book Space, Time and Perversion: the inscriptive
approach (the likes of Foucault, Deleuze, Nietzsche) which views the body as a
surface on which values are inscribed; and, the lived body approach, which refers
to the lived experience Of bodies, always already in terms of their social coding
(33-7).
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Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 2000).
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(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
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CentUlY France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
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and Identity. Ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London:
Continuum, 2004), 18-30.
Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002).
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BECOMING ANIMAL:
THE ANIMAL AS A DISCURSIVE FIGURE
IN AND BEYOND A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
VINCENT J. GUIHAN
As a number of the other papers in this volume have argued, there is
nothing incipiently about Deleuze and Guattari's thought that is
environmentally unfriendly. It is nevertheless worth pointing out that the
kind of nomadism that they envision in A Thousand Plateaus has been
mostly compatible with a sustainable human relationship with the
environment for several millennia. What has become environmentally
unsustainable about the idea of nomadism are the technologies that are
used to achieve this nomadism Get flight, for example), the regimes of
power which require and encourage it (notably Capital). However, as
Marx suggests, Capital as a world-historical phenomena has only been an
influential part of human history for several hundred years. Whether or not
Capital, in its schizophrenia, will be able to produce an environmentally
version of nomadism or even how long Capital will remain an effective
regime of power remains a question. This is only to suggest that rote
assumptions about the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's work
and ecocriticism as mutually exclusive are problematic.
It is from this starting point that my work addresses the question of
"becoming animal" as a relatively small but very important part of A
Thousand Plateaus. Becoming animal functions in a number of key ways,
but to summarize these, it encourages the adoption and practice of a more
dialogic relationship with both animals and nature with as an Other rather
than merely instruments to be used. First, it draws out, like any kind of
anthropomorphism (intentionally or not), the prospect that species
difference is often a culturally mediated and/or socially constmcted
phenomena like race, gender or other elements of human subjectivity. In
that sense, becoming animal provides ecocritical thinkers with a tool to
trouble one of the longest standing and least-interrogated bases for
domination in Western thought and one of the major justifications for
environmentally unsustainable living: speciesism-the view that human
Vincent 1. Guihan 267
beings, as human beings, have greater inherent moral worth than other
species and that they in particular and the environment as a whole exist for
human use. Second, it provides us with a basis to at least trouble if not
actually think or work outside of the humanianimaVnature dichotomies
that a number of ethicists have insisted that we must begin to trouble.
Becoming animal provides us with a way of comprehending ourselves as
human beings within a broader framework if enviromnental
interdependency-not just in telms of our political will and rational
reflection or in terms of how to we might manage and police nature better
as a superspecies-but as a ways of reimagining ourselves as beings
dependent on the ecosystem (a condition that, although obviously we, has
been denied to the point of becoming debatable, as the debate around
global warming currently evinces). Finally, becoming animal in particular
and the rhizomatic in general provides us with a way to think outside of
biopower, to use Foucault's term, as the primary way of ordering the
relationship between human and non-human animals and the enviromnent.
But, first, what does '!becoming animal" mean in terms of Deleuze and
Guattari's thought and what is at stake in it?
Deleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of becoming animal with a
reading of the film Willard, a film that depicts the protagonist's life with
his mother and the rats with whom they share their home. Deleuze and
Guattari describe the film as a typical bildungsroman, a story of coming to
age for Willard as he transitions from a friendship with the rats,
particularly Ben, to a friendship with a young woman. "Willard tried to
drive [Ben] away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he
then is lured into the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is
waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing"
(Thousand Plateaus 233). The film juxtaposes the bourgeois comedy,
which typically ends in marriage, with a more gothic tale, in which nature
returns to devour the Subject. From the film, Deleuze and Guattari draw
out the Animal as a figure that affirms or denies the Oedipal. "(Are there
Oedipal animals with which one can 'play Oedipus," play family, my little
dog, my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an
irresistible becoming?'" (233). The rats, in their multiplicity and ferocity
represent animals that are clearly not Oedipal, which leaves us with a
question as to how we should understand them in semiotic terms; how do
we read them and what do they mean?
Moving from the film, De1euze and Guattari put forward a theoretical
outline of as to who animals as representations function in imaginative
work. They argue that:
We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuate animals,
 Becoming Animal
268
family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own pretty history,
'my' cat, 'my' dog. These animals invite us to regress into a narcissistic
contemplation. [... ] And then there is a second kind: animals with
characteristics or attributes: genus, classification or State animals; animals
as they are treated in the great divine myths in such a way as to extract
from them series or structures, archetypes or models [...] Finally, there are
more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a
becoming, a population, a tale ... Or once again, cannot any animal be
treated in all three ways? (241)
That animals function as representations in these particular ways is not
a revelation. What is of particular interest, however, is the question of
multiplicity and the understanding that animals as signs may work in
multiple ways.
Having described how becoming animal works in basic semiotic terms,
Deleuze and Guattari attempt to draw out the contours of becoming
animal. What is important to note about their theorization is that they
reject the importance of mimesis out right, which is very distinct from
other ecocritical theorizations of animals in cultural representation.
Instead, they argue that
Becomings-animal are neither dreams not phantasies. They are perfectly
real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not
consist in playing animal or in imitating an animal, it is clear that. the
human being does not 'really' become an animal any more than the ammal
'really' becomes something else [... ] Finally, becoming is not an evolution,
at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. (238)
That is, becoming-animal applies to even those beings that would not
normally have a signified in nature, and even to those beings we may not
normally consider animals. The result is that becoming-animal is entirely a
discursive construct. Furthermore, "becoming can and should be qualified
as becoming-animal even in the absence of a tenn that would be the
animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if
the denial the human being becomes is not" (238). That is, even in the
absence of a stable signifier that we would understand as an animal, the
process of becoming-animal may still describe it. In general, however, for
Deleuze and Guattari, the idea of species difference is not a matter of the
real relationship between human beings and animals, but primarily
discursively constructed understandings of our relationship to one another
as human beings, with the Animal as a figure propping up that
understanding. Discussing totemism, they argue that "when analyzing the
institution of the totem, we do not say that this group of people identifies
Vincent J. Guihan 269
with that animal species. We say that what group A is to group B, species
A is to species B" (236). Furthermore, in their view, this is always a more
complicated analogy than what simple metaphor allows. They argue that
"a man can never say: 'I am a bull, a wolf.. .' But he can say: I am to a
woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to
the sheep" (237). The relationship between human beings and animals is
invariably a discursive one that more frequently reflects a relationship
between human beings. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this is a
rationalizing process tied to structuralism and modernism (237).
In that sense, becoming animal in cultural representation bears a
certain resemblance to traditional kinds of anthropomorphism, but it is a
resemblance only; becoming undoes stable categories of being; becoming
animal undoes the human-animal boundary in a way that cannot be
stabilized easily by traditional metaphoric and metonymic
understandings of animals in semiotic terms. Taken too literally, Deleuze
and Guattari's understanding of becoming animal functions as a kind of
anthropomorphism, butit is not just any kind of anthropomorphic gesture.
What difference does this make? Whether or not literature functions as a
counter-hegemonic practice in Gramsci's sense or a reverse discourse in
Foucault's sense, is, of course, a matter determined at the location of the
production of meaning: that is, with the nominal reader. But some cultural
representations obviously require greater work then others to understand
and account for the meaning. Some resist stabilized and stabilizing
readings more than others. Becoming animal, as a representational tactic, I
would suggest, troubles the boundary between human beings and animals
more substantially than just indexical representations of animals as mute
sufferers or the humans in animal drag in more anthropomorphic texts and
gem-es. Becomings"animal as a representational tactic summons the reader
to engage in a dialogic relationship with the animal as an Other that cannot
be easily rendered internally homologous. This provides ecocritical
readers with a new way of thinking outside the traditional mimetic vs.
anthropomorphic representational dichotomy on which traditional thematic
cultural criticism relies.
Working from Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of becoming
animal, it becomes clear that some that while all anthropomorphic
(mis)representations of animals may be problematic, some are more
problematic than others. Why is anthropomorphism problematic in
general? There is, of course, a wealth of criticism on how particular
Animals function as metaphor and symbols in particular texts, but there is
no extensive theoretical literature on how the Animal functions as a sign
within purely imaginative narratives. Most ecocritics have frowned on
270 Becoming Animal
anthropomorphism, largely because anthropomorphic representation
typically affirms an anthropocentric view. The most prominent, and
universal, objection to anthropomorphism is that it represents animals
inaccurately. However, what makes the misrepresentation implied by
anthropomorphism problematic varies from theorist to theorist. This is
only to say that Deleuze and Guattari are right, and in step with other
ecocritical thinkers, to argue that "the politics of becomings-animal
remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive
societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break
them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence"
(243);
Similarly, in cultural representations, the Animal as a sign often comes
to signify someone/something else, which effectively pushes animal body
to a discursive periphery. In the case, metonymy, this peripheIY is almost
total. With metaphor, the animal body is always present, allowing a
deconstruction of whatever substitution is at play: metaphor always
suggests that animals are capable of suffering in a way that is roughly
equivalent to human beings, but that human suffering is a far more
important question. With synecdoche, however, the animal body remains
as a part of the whole that is signified. Synecdoche embodies the animal as
multiplicity. However, although preferable to metonymy and metaphor,
the use of synecdoche, is still problematic. Even in the use of synecdoche,
the particular animal signifier ceases to represent its specific animal
signified that should be understood and valued on its own terms. At best,
the Animal as a synecdoche conjures empathy for human and animal
suffering that includes the particular animal. As a consequence, the
Animal as a signifier invariably points somewhere else, but as synecdoche,
it may also point back to its animal body. This tactical deployment of the
Animal in cultural representation is the most likely to affect any material
changes (if this is even possible) in how we perceive the Animal as a sign
within social narratives.
Of course, no discussion of the Animal as a sign could be complete
without some discussion of its social uses and effects in the modern West
as an ontological categOlY, and popular discourses (connnercials,
advertising, television, etc.) provide the most visible place for the
intersection of imaginative and other kinds of narratives. The Animal is
often mobilized in propaganda to regulate human behavior or to (re)form
the Subject. However, what is of primary interest to me here is how the
Animal is deployed as the sign of an ontological category of Being that is
outside the modern Western notion of 'culture'. As object, the Animal is a
homologous Other: a pet, a beast of burden, etc - the State animal. As
Vincent 1. Guihan 271
abject, the Animal is what is excluded from the sphere of the human
Subject: ferocious wild animals, meat - the Animal represented as
multiplicity. In contrast to objectification, abjection attempts to naturalize
an ontological position on the boundary of discourse, as merely the body,
or perhaps more appropriately, as merely the carcass. Understandably,
then, the Animal serves as a perfect synecdoche for the abject, whether
human, animal or ecological. Becoming animal as a theory helps us to
understand this mythologization as a process, and in particular, how some
representations of animals and nature may resist it.
The most extensive theorization of the Animal in imaginative work
comes from the work of-ecofeminist and literary theorist Carol Adams.
Her Sexual Politics of Meat is the only extant and extensive theoretical
treatment of the politics of animal representation in literature. Drawing on
Lacan's work, Carol Adams argues that anthropomorphism renders the
Animal as a sign more open to metaphorical interpretation and
appropriation. In particular, she suggests that the Animal as a sign
functions frequently as a metaphor and as an absent referent, through
which animals "become metaphors for describing people's experiences"
(42). At the same time,however, as a metaphor, the animal body as absent
referent "is there through inference but its meaningfulness reflects only
upon what it refers to because the originating, literal experience that
contributes the meaning is not there" (42). For Adams, this rendering into
metaphor effectively erases animals from literary texts in the same way
that 'meat' erases the Animal body from the dinner plate. For Adams, the
Animal as a sign, within both literary and social narratives, functions as a
primarily as a metaphor. Moreover, the erasure through metaphor of the
animal body within social narratives into 'meat' recapitulates and is
recapitulated by the metaphorical erasure of the animal body within
literary criticism. In place of this criticism, she calls upon her readers to
reinstantiate the animal body where possible within Western narrative.
While certainly an insightful critique of the bulk of literary criticism,
Adams' argument as a whole is not without its problems.
In spite (and because) of how useful Adams' argument is, there are
some obvious objections and complications. First, her argument
occasionally lapses into over-generalizations-for example: "People with
power have always eaten meat" (26), a clear accident fallacy with its
oversimplication. Second, her notion of a text assumes the
"unchangeability of the text's meaning so that through repetition the same
meaning recurs" (14). Following the work of Kristeva, I Butler,2 Bhabha,3
Foucault, 4 and so on, it is hard to imagine what text (other than a
phonebook) that this definition of textuality would describe. Second, her
272 Becoming Animal
somewhat misleading dichotomy between metaphoric or indexical
representations elides the possibilities of the Animal as a sign to function
as metonymy or synecdoche, just as it fails to acknowledge that even
mimetic representations of the Animal can still be appropriated
metaphorically. Third, even working solely with the question of metaphor,
Adams herself contends, quite correctly, that "the absent referent is both
there and not there" (42). She dismisses this remainder, but with its
mention, she complicates the absoluteness of her own argument and fails
to acknowledge that what allows her to deconstruct strategic
(mis)representations of animals-careful reading-would allow other
readers to do so as well. As whole, none of these represent outright failure
onthe author's part, but they do present problems and they point to the
necessity of a more careful theory.
On the other hand, however, there is one large problem to Adams'
argument (which ties together several smaller complications). Namely,
Adams posits a linear, causal relationship between anthropomorphic
representation, metaphorical appropriation, erasure of the animal body,
and the abjection of real animals, a formula from which neither the Reader
nor the Animal can escape. This is problematic for several reasons. First,
the sign is always a "deferred presence" (284) that requires an act of
reading. That is to say, there is no originary 'natural' connection between
the animal signifier and the animal body that it conventionally signifies-
it requires a reader to inake this connection, and there may be variations in
how the reader does so. Second, not only does this reasoning collapse
together several highly debatable assumptions (risking an ignoratio
elenchi fallacy: it is unclear what has actually been show by her
argument), it also poses anthropomorphism as the intrinsic cause (drawing
her argument into a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, in which an
historical effect in mistaken for a historical cause). Third, in what seems
like a stroke of cultUral idealism, this causal chain suggests that meat
eating is the product of social and literary narratives, not of
materials/ecological causes, which mayor may not be the case. Taken
literally, the close causal relationship between literary appropriation and
material practice suggests that the anthropomorphic representation of cats
and dogs in literature would effect an increase in the consumption of
felines and canines. Without suggesting that textuality produces no
material effect, the linearity and inevitability of this chain is undoubtedly
an oversimplification. As I will suggest later, the Animal as a social and a
literary sign do work together: but not in any absolute, predictable or
causal way as Adams tends to suggest here. In spite of these
considerations, however, Adams' way of theorizing the Animal as a sign
Vincent J. Guihan 273
provides .paramount insight into how most strategic cases of
anthropomorphism under modern Western social conditions probably
function.
Along similar lines, Maty Midgley objects to anthropomorphism
because it naturalizes human ideology through a metaphorical use of the
Animal as a sign (99-102). While her work is somewhat open to the some
of the same critiques as Adams', she draws out two important aspect of the
Animal as a sign that will be very important to my own argument. First,
that the Animal as a sign does not flllction merely as a metaphor but as a
myth, and second, that the discourse of the Animal, whether social or
literary, are also, and perhaps primarily, a discourse about the Subject. In
contrast, Konrad Lorenz suggests that writers may "let the animal speak
like a human being, the may even ascribe human motives to its actions",
but he or she "must regard it as their most sacred duty to be properly
instructed regatding those particulars in which they deviate from actual
facts" (xx).
But what if the conditions of possibility are changing? How then can
the Animal function as a sign within cultural work? The Animal can
function as an indexical sign in Peirce's sense (signifying the animal body
itself), or tropologically (signifying something else, whether it is deployed
as a metaphor, ·metonymy or synecdoche). As well, whether the Animal
functions indexically or tropologically, it can also function to naturalize or
denaturalize mythic structures around the Animal or the human Subject as
an ontological category. In that sense, to every representation of the
Animal in cultural work, anthropomorphic or not, there are at least two
axes to consider. First, how much the particular representation draws the
reader away from the literal animal body it conventionally signifies.
Second, does the representation work naturalize or denaturalize a
particular ideology (i.e., does it construct or deconstruct a myth). As well,
how one perceives the sign as functioning along both axes is a matter of·
context-a realist novel will contextualize an anthropomorphic Animal
differently from a beast fable. Of course, the sign may function in other
ways. What I wish to suggest here is only that how the Animal functions
as a sign in cultural work is extraordinarily complex, and not given to
fonnulaic assumptions.
The criticism of anthropomorphism proposed by Carol Adams is useful
but inadequate when compared with Deleuze and Guattari. Her argument
suggests a one-size-fits view of animal representation that cannot
articulate the wide differences between works like Upton Sinclair's The
Jungle and Disney's Bambi. Instead, it follows from Adam's argument that
the only acceptable representations of animals are 'accurate' representations,
274 Becoming Animal
without problematizing the notion of the 'accurate' when the "self-identity
of the signified conceals itself unceasingly as is always on the move"
(Derrida 250). Nor do they consider alternatives that may more effectively
challenge the process of erasure that Midgley, Adams', and Lorenz take
pains to critique. Sinclair's The Jungle is in many ways an 'accurate'
representation of the animal body, but it fails to present an active
challenge to the abjection of the animal body. In fact, that the animal body
is represented accurately as a speechless carcass renders them up all the
more easily to appropriation as metaphors. "That is why" as Deleuze and
Guattari argue, "the distinction we must make is less between kinds of
animals than between the difference states according to which they are
integrated into family institutions, State apparatuses, war machines, etc."
(243).
Nevertheless, when the representation of animals in imaginative work
is not accurately mindful of the differences between human and non-
human animals (and between other species), then the 'Animal' as a
representation comes to signify something other than what is, usually, but
not exclusively, a metaphor for something human. In that circumstance,
the 'Animal' as a sign ceases to function like any other sign and instead
takes up an alternative signification, and this alternative meaning is often
problematic. Where metaphorical, this transformation of the Animal is
often mythological as Midgley suggests, though not always or inevitably
so. Moreover, I would suggest that this 'something else' is tied discursively
to both material and ecological conditions and to the ideological structures
and force relations that mediate and reimagine those conditions. Further,
as Midgley and Lorenz have both hinted, the misrepresentation of animals
not only poses problems for the Animal but may pose problems for homo
sapiens as well. In Mythologies, Barthes suggests that myth is
predominantly the domain of the Right (135-7), and certainly, myths
constructed around the Animal are frequently myths mobilized as part of a
strategy to gain or maintain hegemony. Just as Patriarchy mobilizes
discourses of sexism to constrain and regulate authorized and unauthorized
genders, the discourse of species constrains and regulates human behavior
with respect to other human beings and non-human animals. For now,
however, I will attempt to draw out a more comprehensive theory of the
Animal as a sign, positing that a tactical anthropomorphism that i·esists the
mythologization of the Animal is possible and desirable.
In Mythologies, Barthes argues that the "voluntary acceptance of myth
can in fact define the whole of our traditional Literature" (134), and it
would be no exaggeration at all to suggest that the mythical deployment of
the 'Animal' constitutes one of the cornerstones of Western narrative.
Vincent J. Guihan 275
Barthes proposes that myths involve "two semiological systems, one of
which is staggered in relation to the other" (115). The first is system the
standard relationship between signifier and signified (e.g., the 'Animal' and
the animal body), and the second system is the myth itself (115). For
Barthes, "the flmdamental character of the mythical concept is to be
appropriated" (119). "As a type of depoliticized speech", the myth
redeploys its signs in order to give "an historical intention a natural
justificatio~l": to make "contingency appear eternal" (142). Generally, but
not monolIthICally, for many of the central stories of Western culture the
Animal as a sign functions metaphorically within a mythological struchrre
and these stories rely upon the (mis)representations of the Animal in orde;
to naturalize specific ideological positions.
In a general sense, each of these terms involves a substitution of the
animal body for another signified within the Animal as a sign. As a trope,
~et~p~o: substi~ut~s for signified for another, in a way that suggests
sImIlanttes, but IS mcapable of erasing all differences. 'To suggest that I
was a bear this morning' connects the grouchiness of the I with the
mythological grouchiness of the Bear. In this case, the metaphor trades an
accurate representations of animals in favour of a mythological one but
with this process, it inevitably points to the difference between the I ~nd a
literal bear. In cases like this, metaphor is always a double movement, and
as I will argue later, it is a double movement that unavoidably opens itself
to detournement. A metonymy is a trope in which one term is substituted
for another, in which the terms are already closely associated: the
American bald eagle is one example. Tropologically speaking, metonymic
representations of animals are the most mythological, the most naturalized,
and the. least susceptible to deconstruction. Most literary deployments of
the Ammal are read as metaphors, but that reflects the conditions of
possibility with respect to reading more than anything else.
In contrast, .synecdoche is a trope in which a part is used to represent a
whole, usually m the case of a body, but it can also refer to the substitution
of a more inclusive term for a less inclusive one. The all-seeing eye of
God, as representing the wholeness of an omniscient Being, would be one
example. However, the particular Animal posed as a representative of an
entire species, or for multiple, similar species (e.g., 'Great Apes', 'Big
Cats', etc), or for all animals everywhere as a whole would constitute
several others. The Animal as synecdoche functions negatively in the
sense that it represents all animals of the species with the same
monolithically anthropomorphic, representation. On the other hand:
~o.we~er, synecdoche is the trope that least yields itself to mythology since
It IS sImultaneously the most inclusive and mercurial. As a type of speech
276 Becoming Animal
the synecdoche remains political in the sense that the 'hand' that represents
the 'body' must represent itself in doing so. Deployed anthropomorphically
as a synecdoche, the Animal can articulate and challenge the suffering of
the Abject, and as a part of that whole, its own suffering as well, without,
of necessity, erasing the difference between specific animals or between
species.
The problem of anthropomorphism lies in the strategic erasure of both
the similarities and the differences between human and non-human
animals. In a sense, this is as problematic in Deleuze and Guattari's
thought as it is in any other kind of anthropomorphism. In fact, this strange
double movement is requisite to render a human being abject as though he
or she were an animal. On one hand, the Animal must function as an
ontological category that bears as little similarity as possible to the human
Subject in order to permit the utter abjection of the Animal. On the other,
the ontological difference between the human Subject and the Animal
must be erased in order for human Subjects to be constructed as 'animals'.
The threat posed by the erasure of the ontological differences between
human beings and animals through strategically anthropomorphic
representations of the latter is what makes anthropomorphism so
dangerous to both. The problem posed by erasure of their ontological
similarities, however, is what allows to Adomo to lament that "Auschwitz
begins whenever someone looks at the slaughterhouse and says: they're
only animals" (qtd in Patterson 53). Together, instrumental reason and
binary opposition provide what is necessary to prodllce a clear cut 'us' and
'them' as the basis for an abjection of 'them'. It is this structure and process
that infonns both the production and reception of anthropomorphism, not
anthropomorphism as such, that maintains the nature/culture divide. If a
tactically anthropomorphic representation of animals maintains the
difference between the animals represented while calling into question the
gulf between human and non-human animals, then it is not only full
justified ethically, it takes on the character of a literary ethics. In its own,
equally strange double movement, tactical anthropomorphisms can effect a
defense of both the human Subject and the Animal. This is the important
understanding to which becoming animal leads us.
Finally, as an ecocritical tool, becoming as a whole stands in
contrast to the modem epistemic processes of knowledge that Foucault
describes in Society Must be Defended. He argues that "one of the basic
phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power's
hold over life" (241). For Foucault, this reflects a shift from disciplinary
power to biopower. Over the nineteenth century,
unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinalY
Vincent J. Guihan 277
power is applied not to man-as-body, but to the living man, to man as
living being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species [... ] So far a first
seizure of. power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a
second seIzure of power that is not individualizing but, .if you like,
massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body, but at man-as-species.
After the anatomo-politics of the human body established in the course of
the eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence
of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but
what I would call a 'biopolitics' of the human race. (242-3)
Certainly, the organizing of man-as-a-species has its consequences on
the organization of other species-as-species. This organization of
knowledge about animal bodies is what drive eugenics, genetics, ethology,
ecology, behaviorism and other bodies of knowledge separable from one
another and from zoology and psychology. The attempts to make human
animals more productive also find their corollaries in attempts to make
other animals species more productive, both through advances in farming,
~ontr?lled breeding and with the process by which individual species were
IdentIfied and cataloged. Although the shift from cataloging animals to a
focus on the regulation of their birth, death and productivity are not
entirely historically contiguous, it is this shift that takes us from the
naturalism of early zoologists and explorers to the factory farms of the
post-Second World War period. Animals (including human beings) were
certainly commodities (in the sense that they could be exchange based on a
monetary value, not just bartered for another good) from the sixteenth
century onward.
The drive of biopower to make human beings more productive reflects
a broader process of making animals and nature more productive. In that
s~nse, biopower represents a culmination of those Enlightenment
dIscourses that saw the actualization of human Being in the domination of
na~re. It is in difference to this process of organization man as a species
bemg, as well as the ordering of things required by it, that the rhizomatic
stands in opposition. The rhizomatic is the trace passenger that refuses its
point of origin and its destination and in so doing undoes stable categories
of knowledge and meaning with multiplicity and syncretism. As Deleuze
and Guattari put it:
~ecomi~g is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming
IScert~ll1ly not imitating or identifying with something, neither is it
regresslI1g-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing
corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or
production through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its
own; it does not reduce to or lead back to 'appearing,' 'being,' 'equaling' or
278 Becoming Animal
'producing.' (239)
Becoming, then, is the incipiently counter to what Foucault most
closely associates with the modem episteme: the product of stable and
stabilizing bodies of knowledge based on series and stmcture that require a
chain of beings or an evolution, which is, after all, a stage-managed
teleology. Within that purview, becoming animal is incipiently counter to
an ordering of the relationship between animals and especially between the
relationship human and non-human animals in a way that already assumes
anthropocentric supremacy. If abjection and objectification (the animal in
multiplicity and the State and bourgeois animals respectively) represents a
strategic metaphorical appropriation of the Animal, then a tactical
redeployment of that sign combined with critical deconstmction of that
metaphorical process unconceals the processes of objectification and
abjection as a management strategy that involves the domination of all
human and non-human animals as well as nature.
In the end, what do we learn from Willard's story? It is Willard's tum
from a dialogic relationship with Ben as an Other that is his tmdoing.
Similarly, it is a refusal to see animals as beings to whom one owes
something that drives a great deal of ecological harm. All sentient species
depend on nature for survival, even human beings, although we have been
able to mitigate that somewhat. The idea that we can separate ourselves
and other animal species out from nahlre is a false dichotomy in practice;
it may help us to clarify why we think things are right and wrong when we
pose hypotheticals or it may serve some other function when we create
cultural work. But if we take animals seriously, if we take the view that
animals have rights seriously, then harming the environment on which
those animals depend for their lives is a velY serious moral wrong.
Protecting ecosystems for non-human animals is not just compatible with
the view that animals have rights; it is of the clearest and most rational
ways to defend environmental protection is to argue that sentient beings
(including human beings) have a right to live their lives in relatively
natural habitats tmdisturbed. Becoming animal always draws us towards
the prospect of that dialogic relationship.
Notes
1 Following and expanding upon Bakhtin's work, Kristeva suggests "any text is
constmcted as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absoption and transformation
of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and
poetic language is read as at least double" (Kristeva 37).
2 Butler argues that "constmction [of sex/gender/sexuality as a set of signs] is
Vincent J. Guihan 279
neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a
set of fixed effects. Rather, constmction not only takes place in time, but is itself a
temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both
rroduced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration" (Butler 10).
In a paraphrase of Marx, Bhabha suggests that "if colonialism takes power in the
name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce"
(Bhabha 85). This repetition with its inevitable differences produces mimicry, "one
of the most and elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge"
(85), "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference
that is almost the same, but not quite" (86).
4 For Foucault, discourse, including literary texts, is what "transmits and produces
power; it reinforces it, bur also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile"
(Sexuality 101).
Works Cited
Adams, Carol 1. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist- Vegetarian
Critical Theory (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1990), 1-42.
Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today. "Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers
(London: Paladin, 1973), 109-59.
Bhabha, Homi K. "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial
discourse." The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),85-
93.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: an Introduction (New York:
Vintage Books, 1978).
-. Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 1997).
Kristeva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue and Language". The Kristeva Reader.
Ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986,34-61.
Lorenz, Konrad. King Solomon:S Ring (London and New York: Routledge,
1952).
Midgley, Mary. "The Concept of Beastliness." Animal Rights and Human
Obligations. Ed. Peter Singer and Tom Regan (New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, 1976),94-123.
Oliver, Kelly. "Animal Body Mother." Family Values: Subjects Between
Nature and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). .
Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 53-80.

THE EDGE EFFECT:
ART, SCIENCE, AND ECOLOGY
IN A DELEUZIAN CENTURY
PAUL LEWIS
Prelude: The Toad and the Bacterium
In 1973 Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published their now
famous hypothesis that natural history might not be best explained as a
process of slow genetic drift and evolutionary gradualism, that instead it
might be a history of punctuated equilibria. In the very same year Stanley
Cohen and Herbe11 Boyer reported their successful efforts to cut,
recombine, and splice specific segments of DNA plasmids between
populations of differentially drug-resistant E. coli bacteria, an experiment
which marked the advent of genetic engineering. Just months after
accomplishing these first recombinant DNA trials within bacterial
populations, Cohen and Boyer worked with Paul Berg to move segments
of DNA from an African clawed toad across the phylogenetic gap and into
the bacterial DNA. The success of these more radical transgenic
experiments showed that it was possible to separate at least some
hereditary elements from their historical dependency upon genealogical
descent. From this point forward, the genotype of an organism would not
be constrained in any absolute sense by lines of historical filiation, nor
would it be constrained by the boundaries of species, genera, phyla, or
kingdom. The hypothesis of Eldredge and Gould-the one about natural
history as a record of intermittent but irreversible phyletic punctuations-
could not have come along at a better time.
There are without a doubt some profound rhetorical possibilities in the
contrived association of these two scientific revolutions, one theoretical
and the other experimental, which emerged almost simultaneously from
the very disparate fields of molecular genetics and paleontology. The two
seem to belong together. Could there be a clearer instance of punctuated
equilibrium than what was actually happening in the laboratories of
Paul Lewis 281
Cohen, Boyer, and Berg? In "Principles and Applications of Recombinant
DNA Methodology," microbiologist David Jackson put it this way:
The fundamental point to understand about recombinant DNA
methodology is that it allows one to construct in the laboratory new
combinations of genes. Among these combinations are many that at
present have no known mechanism for formation in nature. (41)
Granted, this deliberate and premeditated alteration of the bacterial
genetic plan in the laboratory was not the kind of punctuation Eldredge
and Gould had intended~ to describe in their hypothesis. Nevertheless
bacterial history, humming along in white noise, had indeed been
punctuated-suddenly, dramatically, and with lasting consequence. I
Moreover,the natural history of the amphibian (Xenopus laevis) and the
natural history of the bacterium no longer proceeded in parallel. Their
historical paths collided by design; and these particular organisms fell into
a deeply indeterminate position between the natural and the artificial
giving life to combinations that "have no known mechanism for formatio~
in nature." Within a decade, in fact, the genetic future of the bacteria
would be revised even more extensively, as E. coli were converted into
factories used cOlmnercially and on a very large scale to synthesize human
proteins such as interferon, somatostatin, growth honnone, insulin, and
many others.
It may appear vacuous or even insincere to ask, at this stage of the
game, whether or not bacteria imbued with segments of amphibian or
human genetic material are natural or artificial. The seemingly unlimited
historical plasticity of these ostensibly contrasting terms has weakened our
capacity to discern or to impose any robust differences between them. In
its parts and taken as a whole, the world we inhabit may be freely
characterized as natural, artificial, organic, mechanical, animate,
holographic or whatever else, and we appear to be stuck with certain
antinomies inherent in the very concept of nature. To put it another way,
nature does not specifY its own metaphysical significance, neither through
empirical. evidence nor through a priori reasoning. "That there is such a
thing as nature," wrote Aristotle in Physics, "it would be ridiculous to try
to show" (94). By this he simply meant that the existence of nature was
self-evident, it was given, and could only be questioned out of confusion
between those kinds of fact that require proof and those that do not. Nature
cannot be proven-I think Aristotle was right about that-but this
observation is not entirely trivial, as we shall see, nor is it merely a
statement about the logic of evidence and proof.
282 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
Precisely because the existence of nature is self-evident, its mode of
existence is not. The given is a historical variable~not a constant~in the
development of our knowledge and experience of nature, because in what
is given we can neither preserve nor recover any trace of origin. Not only
do the constituent forms of life change, but more importantly the very
processes of emergence, transformation, preservation, and extinction
change too. The body of nature is therefore left to creep through history
along the shifting seams of language and technology, representation and
intervention, appearing intuitively now as one thing and later, also
intuitively, as something else altogether. For this reason nature in itself
appears always in the background but never in the foreground of modem
scientific inquiry. What is nature?~this is simply an unscientific question.
Moreover, notwithstanding the ancient adage that nahlre abhors a vacuum,
we do not know what nature abhors. No one can say. In a manner of
speaking, nature is counting on us to provide the abhorrence, approbation,
or cold indifference to its ways.
The case of genetic engineering is an instructive example of the
historical, technological, and semiotic contingency of nature. In it we can
readily observe the fragility of principles at one time or another identified
as natural or biological laws. Consider Wallace's Sarawak Law, for
example. While working in Borneo, in the state of Sarawak, the English
naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace formulated a principle that has exerted
considerable influence on the study of natural history ever since. Wallace
published the idea in an essay of 1855 entitled "On the Law Which Has
Regulated the Introduction of Species." The principle~which became
known as the Sarawak Law~maintains that "every species has come into
existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely
allied species." Immediately following the basic statement of this
principle, Wallace offered the following exposition:
If the law above enunciated be true, it follows that the natural series of
affinities will also represent the order in which the several species came
into existence, each one having had for its immediate antitype a closely
allied species existing at the time of its origin. It is evidently possible that
two or three distinct species may have had a common anti type, and that
each of these may again have become the anti types from which other
closely allied species were created. The effect of this would be, that so
long aseach species has had but one new species formed on its model, the
line of affinities will be simple, and may be represented by placing the
several species in direct succession in a straight line. But if two or more
species have been independently formed on the plan of a common anti type,
then the series of affinities will be compound, and can only be represented
by a forked or many-branched line.
Paul Lewis 283
But already in the first transgenic experiments of Cohen and Boyer,
and even more so in later extrapolations, we see that the Sarawak Law has
come to an end in some sense. The lattice of zoological relations needs no
longer to be constituted by lines and forks, as Wallace imagined.
Arguably, it will not be constituted thus, so we must ask: What does it
become?
In the case of the toad and the bacterium, the "natural series of
affinities" between them-'----after genetic recombination~cannot possibly
"represent the order in which the several species came into existence." The
fact that the prokaryotic bacterial cells could be made to function, in some
crucial respect, as the eukaryotic cells of an amphibian or a human, the
fact that some bacteria now share an unprecedented structural affinity with
the other species, tells nothing about their correlative position in phyletic
history. The paleontological and retrospective relation has been severed
and replaced by a relation that is technological and prospective. Whereas
Wallace envisioned a branching tree of speciation as the moving process
of natural histOlY, the future histOlY of nature promises to be something
else altogether. It is as though a certain dimension or continuum of natural
history has been broken.
Not only is there a synchronic discontinuity of novel species
constructed by recombination in the laboratory, but there is also the
diachronic discontinuity of species revivified after a period of extinction.
Consider the Case of the woolly mammoth or the Neanderthal, from which
paleontologists have excavated substantial genetic information and for
which some are planning a kind of biological resurrection.
Understandably, there is intense fascination and even some real scientific
engagement with the prospects of reconstituting the mammoth and the
Neanderthal. These prospects, negligible or even ludicrous at present,
should be considered in light of the fact that the Banteng, for example, an
en~angered species of south Asian ox, and the Influenza A (HIN1) virus,
whIch was responsible for the catastrophic pandemic of 1918, have
already been reconstituted from long dead specimens containing still
viable DNA signatures. These were not the first achievements in
biological reconstitution from preserved remnants, nor will they be the
last. How exactly shall we represent the genealogical descent of these
evolutionary Lazaruses? Following Wallace's terms, neither the straight
line nor the forked line attaches these resurrected organisms to natural
history. They are dots or thread fragments, harbingers of a pointillistic
taxonomy, first scrawlings and erasures of a biological palimpsest.
Together, the many synchronic and diachronic genealogical disruptions

284 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
made possible by genetic engineering would seem to prefigure a
rhizomatic fiIture of zoological affiliations. . .
The texture of natural history is indeed punctuated by sCientIfic and
technological breaks, just as it has been for thousands of years. A~ to ~he
frequency and character of these breaks over time, one can IdentIfy
differences of degree and differences of a more fundame~ta~ sort: We
continue to look toward the animals, however, even those artIficial annn.als
conjured in the laboratory, as we stumble toward both an u~derstandmg
and an engineering of nature. This seems to b~ a tr~ce o~ mstrumental
continuity amidst so many biological and ecological disruptIOns. B~tween
nature and embodied human experience there always stands an ammal-
many animals-and plants as well. Re~resentations of lif~, partic~larly
animals therefore function as more than Just another theme m art, SCience,
and refl~ction. One can read them as the signs, often cryptic or distorte?,
of a changing historical relation to nature. Thi~ is no less tr~e m
technologically saturated societies, where an expansIO~ o~the ecologies of
artificial life has given rise to an artificial ecology of hfe m general, where
environmental conditions and cycles are quasi-stable at best, and where
the punctuations promise to outnumber the equilibria by a long margin.
In ecology, the proliferation of atypical life fo~s within areas. of
persistent ecological disequilibrium, or at the envlromnent~l mar~ms
called ecotones is known as the edge effect. I want to explore thiS claSSical
concept in ecoio gy as both the metaphor and the historical condit~on. of
new life forms emerging on an edge between the natural and th~ artIfiCI~l.
Until recently this edge has been associated almost exclUSively ~Ith
scientific research, which has long been in the business of p:oducmg
biological hybrids, mutations, and augmentations; but :ecently artIsts have
staked a claim on this edge effect as well. My exploratIOn follows some of
the more dramatic instances of experimentation with biology as an art
form. I also draw together the beginnings of a Deleuzian interpretatio~ of
the future of ecology, an interpretation that cuts, splices and reco.mbl~es
elements of an idiosyncratic ontology into the tissue of a strange a~lmahty.
Deleuze and Guattari developed their own species of process phIlosophy
in an intellectual environment of speculations and critical discoveries in
anthropology, genetics and molecular biology. As a result of this effort,
they have left a rich-but by no means perfect-language for new
conceptual problems in the science and a~t of ~colo.gy. Th~ recent
emergence of genetic and biological expef1ment~tIOn m art, Itself an
uneasy alliance, provides an irresistible opportumty to test the uneasy
alliance between Deleuze, Guattari, and the future of ecology. ~~ese
experiments in art constitute a kind of schizoid collision of sociopobtIcal
Paul Lewis 285
and ontological dimensions, a collision in which the natural and the
artificial operate not merely as the pincers of some dialectical opposition
but as the rhizomatic threads· of a more complex multiplicity, as a flow of
disjunctive forces between the natural and the artificial.
Terror Cells: The Art of Biology
Once out of Nature, I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake
--Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats
Plants, animals, and the milieux of life have all been special themes in
art for thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic. As to the
real "function" of early cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and
elsewhere, which are dominated by depictions of animals, we are not
entitled to assert much beyond wonder and speculation. In many of these
speculations, however, great significance is attached to hunting, and the
paintings are thought to have recorded a gesture of primitive sympathetic
magic intended to secure some advantage over the hunter's quarry. But
scenes of animal mating and parturition are also widespread in the cave
paintings, which suggests a more general sense of awe toward animal life
itself. It is as if the Paleolithic artists were expressing a relation to nature
that centered on beauty, vitality, birth and predation in the animal world.
In recent years, however, artists have asserted a more direct and radical
responsibility-beyond representation-for this ensemble of life and
nature. Over the past decade, a few artists have been exhibiting their own
quite sophisticated genetic and biological experiments as works of art.
Some are completed by outside laboratories cormnissioned to do the wet
biological work, while others are the product of research and production
undertaken by the artists themselves, who have one way or another
acquired the requisite scientific skills and equipment. In any case, we can
say that the living organism, plant and animal tissues, the cell, the
genome--these have now entered into the practice of art as raw materials.
Laura Cinti has exhibited genetically altered cactus plants that express
human hair. Oron Catts and the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A)
have created sculptures of disembodied tissue grown in vitro, including
several pairs of pig wings and a Y4 scale human ear. Catts and TC&A even
gilded some of the pig's wings with gold, knowingly or unknowingly
putting flesh and blood into Yeats' oracular promise to "wake a drowsy
286 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
Emperor" by stepping outside nature to assume a bodily form "of
hammered gold and gold enameling." Eduardo Kac failed to produce GFP
K-9, the green fluorescent dog he envisioned in 1998, but went on to
exhibit a similarly engineered transgenic rabbit two years later, borrowing
from a marine jellyfish genetic material that had itself been altered in the
laboratory. Within the narrative of art history, these works attest to a
contemporary cultural condition in which art emerges from a wide open
field of practices and possibilities.
In these recent works of biological art, it has become increasingly
difficult to express the nature of the relationship between the artist, the
medium, and the artwork, perhaps because nonhuman biological agencies
and forces themselves are responsible for so much of the process and the
product. Jens Hauser, curator of a recent exhibition of biological art
entitled "Still, Living" offered the following survey ofthe field:
Let's step back a moment, this welcome moment of stillness in the eye of the
breaking storm above an increasingly media-hyped art field. As biology's
ascent to the status of hottest physical science has been accompanied by the
massive use of biological metaphors in the Humanities, this has also generated
a wide range of biotech procedures that are providing artists simultaneously
with the topics and new expressive media: transgenics, cell and tissue culture,
plant and animal selection and breeding, homo grafts, synthesis of artificial
DNA sequences, neurophysiology, synthetic biology, visualization techniques
borrowed from molecular biology and biomedical research. Artists are in the
labs.
The very last sentence, because of its simple declarative force, is the most
potent moment in Hauser's restrained celebration. Artists are in the labs-
how shall we punctuate that? And what impact will these artists have upon
the various networks of life at the edge of the natural and the artificial?
Now more than ever the movement "from here to there" in biological
history would seem to follow a nonlinear path, where the initial conditions
include artists in the labs working with cells, tissues, recombinant DNA,
and other living materials.
Still more emblematic of this post-medium condition, to use Rosalind
Krauss' clever phrase, is the recent work of Jennifer Willet and Shawn
Bailey entitled "Teratological Prototypes." Adopting the corporate identity
BIOTEKNICA, Willet and Bailey collaborated with Oron Catts and lonat
Zurr of TC&A to produce and exhibit tissue cultures "seeded with the P19
mouse teratoma cell line. " Teratomas are cancerous growths of chaotically
differentiated tissue: lumps of muscle riddled with hair, teeth, gut, bone,
and so on. These extraordinary tumors, which can appear naturally and
Paul Lewis 287
catastrophically in organisms outside the laboratory, develop from
concurrently operating ectodermal, mesodermal, and endodermal
embryonic genn cell lines. They are morphological outlaws, rejecting any
somatic plan that would distinguish inside from outside. Here we can
speak without exaggeration of bodies without organs-or organs without
bodies-growing slowly but deliberately in the thin membranous ecology
between art and science.
It is difficult to imagine a more graphic instance of biological
abomination than these teratological prototypes, and yet something much
more than an art of abjection is being undertaken here, something more,
even, than the political pressure Willet and Bailey are trying to exert as
"activists and cultural workers towards the democratization of the
biotechnological sphere." This populist political intention is fairly typical
of views expressed by other wetware hackers, as they are sometimes
called, and just as often it includes a moral admonition against the
uncritical surrender of our biological futurity to science and to the market.
There is a feeling and perhaps a hope that in displays of biological
aberration artists might communicate an effective warning against the
inadequate or incoherent ethical responsibilities of biotechnology. If
nothing else, they make plain the fact that experimental organisms will
almost certainly come to life before they are understood-and what
exactly does it mean to understand an organism in this context? But again,
more than political inclusiveness is at stake in these biological
interventions or soft experiments, as Willet and Bailey call them, more
than just an artistic plea for the precautionary principle in science. Such
works also challenge our assumptions about the present and future
conditions for life and nature in an increasingly artificial world. They are
ontological question marks, whose interrogative force pushes into the
unfamiliar encounter with life and animality: What is this? What's really
going on here? What comes next-not for art but for life?
Reactions to these kinds of works within art history and art criticism
have varied widely, of course. Some celebrate the new biological media on
the grounds that art might now be pulled from its ineffectual games of
irony and self-reflexivity. And there is a related sense that art might be
freed from its often gratuitous relationship to popular culture-the sense,
in other words, that it might develop as something more than mere
commentary. One could still say that these works belong to a long
tradition of artistic commentary on science, but saying so would conceal
the historical, cultural, and aesthetic discontinuities-not necessarily
discordances-between physical science in general and biological science
in particular.
288 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
The public reaction to new biological artworks has also included a
moral reflex that asks the question: Is this right? Outright moral hostility,
though, is faint almost by necessity since the basic vocabulary for
expressing moral objections to this kind of artwork is lacking. Again, the
question "What is this?" eclipses the exclamation "This is wrong!" In some
cases the work is seen to be a symptomatic reaction against ongoing
degradations of the larger natural environment-in other words, art as an
aesthetic flight from the ecological nightmare into a biological
dreamworld. Seen in this light, artists producing anomalous plants and
animals are among the first wave of cultural refugees from a planetary
ecological crisis. A more cynical observer might understand their cellular
and genetic mischief as a specific realization of Freud's diagnosis: the
neurotic repeats instead of remembering. 2 Separated both mentally and
physically from so many corrupted environments, they are taking up their
own neurotic positions at the edge of this biological diaspora.
Despite the diversity of their aims and techniques, the new biological
artists are stringing together a chain of disjunctions and contradictions-x
is either this or that, x is neither this nor that. But they are doing so in a
way that amplifies the simultaneous presence and operation of contrasting
tenns: natural and artificial, living and dead, human and inhuman, normal
and pathological. The disjunctions, in other words, are inclusive
disjunctions and belong to the eccentric ontologies of Deleuze and
Guattari. It is the mutual action of their opposition and difference that
engenders these works of art in an age of biological production. In a
memorable passage from Repetition and Difference it is written that:
"Difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing"
(57). In the realm of the semi-living-a neologism favored by Catts-the
nothingness behind biological difference confronts us directly-viscerally,
one could say-and expresses a radically contingent future of
discretionary organisms and artificial ecologies.
An interesting example of this is Laura Cinti's Cactus Project, which I
mentioned briefly earlier. These are the alleged transgenic cactus plants
that have been designed to express human hair. In scattered online
discussions about the project, some incredulous contributors identifying
themselves as biologists have aimed skeptical arguments against the
scientific authenticity of Cinti's work. There are imputations of fraud, in
other words, maintaining that the ectopic hair of the cactus plant is not
really human hair and could not have been achieved genetically,
presumably because of some still unsurpassed technical limits in
biological engineering. The authenticity of the hairy cactus is not
exclusively a scientific question, however, and the criteria for fraudulence
Paul Lewis 289
in art have until recently had very little to do with criteria for fraudulence
in science. So even if the hairy cactus is genuine-that is, even if the
human hair expressed is indeed the result of genetic engineering-why
should we still call this hair human? Doesn't it belong now to the cactus
and not in a trivial sense either? Or better still, doesn't it become just a
standard biological part, to use a revealing phrase from the biological
engineering laboratory at MIT? In this case, as in so many others, what
makes it standard is not its elemental composition but its technical
transmissibility: the apotheosis of Fordism put into service as an
organizing principle for life?3
Human hair or cactus'hair-the taut disjunctions asserted, especially in
transgenic organisms, "do not involve any exclusions," as Deleuze and
Guattari explained in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia," since
exclusions can arise only as a function of inhibiters and repressers that
eventually determine the support and finnly define a specific, personal
subject" (38-39). It is precisely these inhibitors and repressors that are
giving way, just as species-properties will gradually lose their dependent
relationship to the species, a relationship that the long course of natural
history proves to be spurious in any case. This decoupling and general
circulation of biological parts and traits from their once specific owners is
unfolding even as the very concepts of the species, the taxon, and the
phenotype are becoming more unstable. Theodosius Dobzhansky
summarized this development in a well known essay of 1973, "Nothing in
Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." Molecular
biology, he explained, had "made possible an approach to exact
measurements of degrees of biochemical similarities and differences
among organisms." Reviewing the variance of amino acid sequences in
proteins shared by different species, for example, Dobzhansky made the
following observation:
It is important to note that amino acid sequences in a given kind of protein
vary within a species as well as from species to species. It is evident that
the differences among proteins at the level of species, genus, family, order,
class, and phylum are compounded of elements that vary also among
individuals within a species. Individual and group differences are only
quantitatively, not qualitatively, different. Evidence supporting the above
propositions is ample and is growing rapidly.
The evidence-"ample and growing rapidlY"-encompasses a matrix
of biological differences in degree only. For instance, human and
chimpanzee hemoglobin have identical amino acid sequence profiles, the
gorilla hemoglobin chain differs from these by one amino acid, the same
 r
I
290 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
functional metalloprotein in cattle differs at seventeen loci, etc. To say,
however, that these are differences only in degree is misleading, however,
since these differences are omnipresent within as well as between
taxonomic groups, according to Dobzhansky. For the individual, as for the
class, difference is constitutive of life itself.
The same constihltive ontological difference is written into the
desiring-machines of Deleuze and Guattari, who drew upon a wide range
of sources in the development of their ideas on this subject. In Anti-
Oedipus they recognize the work of Melanie Klein, for example,
particularly her concept of partial objects, as one basis for the desiring-
machine:
Partial objects are what make up the parts of the desiring machines; partial
objects define the working machine or the working parts, but in a state of
dispersion such that one part is continually referring to a part from an
entirely different machine, like the red clover and the bumble bee, the wasp
and the orchid, the bicycle hom and the dead rat's ass. (323)
The Deleuzian fascination with flora and pollinating insects is here, as
elsewhere, a mark of commitment to the idea that forces of biological
production and reproduction are not confined within the selfsame
individual; they are instead dispersed across fields of difference, always
referring, like Klein's partial objects, to other forces. Aristotle once
ventured a distinction between the natural and the artificial by contending
that the former has its principle of movement within itself, while the latter
does not. This distinction collapses if one concedes, as Deleuze and
Guattari have, that the principles of movement are everywhere, which is to
say neither inside nor outside the organism. "There is only desire and
environments, fields, forms of herd instinct" (287).
For Deleuze and Guattari another important line of influence came
through the sciences of molecular biology, genetics, and embryolog~.
Their engagement with the work of Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod IS
clear enough, and there is also an important connection to the philosopher
Gilbert Simondon, who wrote in The Genesis of the Individual:
The individual is to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying
only a certain phase of the whole being in question-a phase that therefore
carries the implication of a preceding preindividual state, and that, even
after individuation does not exhaust in the single act of its appearance all
the potentials embedded in the preindividual state (87).
Paul Lewis 291
Simondon's principal contention is that the individual in the living world
"can be grasped as more than a unity and more than an identity" and is
therefore other than "that which is identical to itself." One common way of
characterizing this proliferation of constihltive differences takes human
technologies as a special driving force, a force which expands the
boundaries of the human phenotype. Biotechnologies are at the outermost
edge of instability in what has come to be known as the extended human
phenotype, where the extension here is presumed to be an extension of
technological reach into the nahlral world. But the phenotypes of
nonhuman organisms that develop within this human technological
extension are also extended. This is the edge effect operating against both
sides ofthe edge.
In the biological art that flourishes there we have uncovered instances
of a schizoid voice speaking prophetically of a strange biological fuhlre
not in language but in flesh: biotic first, semiotic later and perhaps not at
all. These works are not primarily the outcome of symbolic expression, as
they were, for example, in the paranoiac or absurdist productions of
Surrealism and Dada long ago. This particular advance of biotechnology is
an intensification of differences that multiply edges inward and outward. It
is an expansion of the ecology of life in general along newly forming
seams between nature and artifice, between art and science.
In a strategy of involution SymbioticA, a group established at the
University of Western Australia and also directed by Oron Catts, has
produced "MEART: The Semi-Living Artist." Developed and shown over
the past six years, MEART is an electronic network of receptions and
transmissions cybernetically connected to populations of culhrred
mammalian neural cells in Atlanta. Electrical impulses to and from the
glass-bodied "brain" move mechanical drawing arms in remote exhibition
spaces. Cameras are included in the feedback loops so that the
disembodied nerve cells can "see" the work in progress. Under the
scientific direction of Steve Potter at Georgia Tech University, these
neural colonies grow, adapt, and allegedly "learn to make art."
I call this an inversion because in this case it is not the artwork but the
artist who exists as a soft experiment: artist, medium, engineer and product
have fused in a triple synthesis of hardware, software, and wetware. This
would not be the first time artists employed forms of animal life as
intermediate agents in the production of their artwork, nor would it be the
first time artists have attempted to submerge their personal and human
intentions into mechanical or aleatoric machinery. In this sense, MEART
is a synthesis of once radical but now familiar artistic experiments. On the
other hand, because it is continuously connected to an advancing front of
 292 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
techniques in biological engineering and, more importantly, because it is
connected to a real and evolving life form-neither human nor nonhuman,
neither plant nor animal-MEART goes beyond its closest precedents in
art history. It is the manifestation of yet anotherkind of edge.
Potter Laboratories is not the only workshop developing organic-
synthetic neural interfaces. Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi has constructed a similar
apparatus, but instead of using disembodied nerve cells cultured in glass,
as Potter and Catts have done, Mussa-Ivaldi managed to connect the live
but disembodied brain stem of a lamprey to a photosensitive robot. The
strictly mechanical and optical components of this hybrid are controlled by
the organic component-the brain stem-and the whole apparatus exhibits
behaviors appropriate for a lamprey in the presence of variable light
stimuli. In yet another research program, Miguel Nicolelis trained owl
monkeys to manually control a joystick in response to images presented on
a screen, as in a video game. At the same time Nicolelis opened a second
channel of screen control, whereby the specific brain wave patterns
accompanying the monkey'S manual movements could themselves be used
to control the onscreen action. In time the monkey learned to act upon the
screen imagery without using its hands at all, allowing the direct
expression of its will or intention to act through the brain monitors. Lastly,
Sanjiv Talwar has expanded the prospects for a Skinnerian future by
setting up a system of signals and stimuli that can be used to control the
locomotion of rats. Rewards triggered through the pleasure center of the
medial forebrain bundle prompted rats to turn right or left with timed
stimulations sent to the somatosensory cortical regions for right and left
whisker sensitivity. These "ratbots" can be guided from a distance, by
remote control, even as they navigate completely unfamiliar terrain.
On the one hand, neuro-electronic-animal-robotic networks such as
these can be construed as but another instance of the extended human
phenotype, like highways, wrist watches, air conditioners, and radar-just
more technology, in other words. One could put MEART into this same
memory hole of technical banality. On the other hand, it could be
construed as something of an organism on its own terms, embedded and
adaptive within an artificial ecology of scientific and artistic selective
pressures. In their sympathetic reading of Samuel Butler's Erewhon,
Deleuze and Guattari endorse this second interpretation: the desiring-
machine stands for the environment in which technologies and networks
like MEART might flourish and even reproduce. The Deleuzian moment
in Butler's text centers on the contrast of two arguments. The first holds
that an organism is but a complicated machine; the second holds that
machines are but extensions of the organism. These two arguments
I l
Paul Lewis 293
recapitulate one of the very oldest conceptual dichotomies in metaphysics.
"But there is a Butlerian manner for carrying each of the arguments to an
extreme point," Deleuze and Guattari explain in Anti-Oedipus, "where it
can no longer be opposed to the other, a point of nondifference or
dispersion." At this point, they continue, "it becomes immaterial whether
one says that machines are organs, or organs, machines. The two
definitions are exact equivalents: man as a "vertebro-machinate animal,"
or as an "aphidian parasite of machines" (284-5).
The green-glowing rabbit, the cactus growing human hair, the pigs'
wings, and the monstrous but still living teratoma have not yet found any
clear placement in the aft world. They are the early perturbations of an
unforeseeable aesthetic development. But these bizarre creatures occupy
an equally uncertain place in the zoological world. Their extravagance as
artworks derives from the fact that they are not representations of
monstrous animals-as one sees in the works of Bosch, for example-but
are in fact living constituents· of the biotic community. They are alive.
They belong as much to the histOlY of life as to the history of art. How
should we begin to understand or even speak of their natural habitat? Can
we speak of a habitat at all? Whatever impact these experiments may have
on the discourse of art, their full significance will exceed this limited
sphere. It already has.
We know that the artists have arrived quite late to the practice of
zoological tinkering: their "unprecedented" and occasionally "scandalous"
use of anomalous life forms as art is an appropriation of routine practices
in the biological sciences. Life as a pure artifact first began to proliferate
in the landless network of the scientific laboratory, where its exploratory
and instrumental value for knowledge was unproblematic, or so it was
assumed. Reflecting the artifice of its life forms, the modern biological
laboratory is itself a heterogeneous ecology shaped by venture capitalists,
public health initiatives, patent lawyers, government budgets, ideological
antagonisms, academic bureaucracies, religious exclamations, and
personal obsessions. 4 The biological laboratory is itself an ecology of
many edges. Now artists have directly asserted some cultural rights over
the play of forces that constitute life, and their works have therefore
carried the already complex political ecology of the laboratory in an
unexpected direction. This kind of serious work has until now been the
prerogative of scientists, and doubtless it still is, but the ground of
authority and interpretation has shifted somewhat to accommodate art.
The science of biotechnology has already been likened to an art, not
always favorably, by some of its own practitioners. Reflecting critically on
the unsystematic and ad hoc techniques of biological engineering, Drew
294 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
Endy has undertaken the work of elevating this practice, which has been
little more than an art so far, into a real science. Endy's discontent is
quoted in "Synthetic Life," an article for Scientific American by W. Wayt
Gibbs:
Say I want to modify a plant so that it changes color in the presence of
TNT, I can start tweaking genetic pathways in the plant to do that, and if I
am lucky, then after a year or two I may get a "device"-one system. But
doing that once doesn't help me build a cell that swims around and eats
plaque from artery walls. It doesn't help me grow a little micro lens.
Basically the current practice produces pieces of art. (74-5)
The recent emergence of genetic and biological art is both a widening and
a deepening of the extensive system of artificial habitat for semi-
biological, pseudo-biological, and trans-biological organisms. This cannot
easily be discounted as fashionable nonsense, I believe, nor is it even a
metaphor. No longer restricted to the field of meaning and affect, art has
become an ecological niche, literally. It is rather, the surplus of an older
and more extensive field of biological productions operating under the
auspices of science, medicine, and agriculture. As Deleuze and Guattari
proclaim at the very beginning of Anti-Oedipus: "Hence we are all
handymen: each with his little machines" (1).
The future of these experiments in art will undoubtedly deepen our
ongoing historical confrontation with the most fundamental questions of
ecology. What is an organism? What is a niche or a habitat? What is
natural? What is a nonhuman environment? Such questions appear now,
more than ever, to be embroiled in a deterritorialized struggle among
social forces over a biological domain that has itself become
deterritorialized. In art, specifically, the raw ontological struggle over
discontinuities in nature will not be mitigated by the pragmatism and
culhlral authority that accompany science in the public imagination. This
will widen the range of ontological habitat between life and non-life, a
range populated by the pseudo-animate, the semi-living, the ontic, and the
ontoid, tracing an edge between art, science, and ecology in what may (or
may not) carry us toward a Deleuzian century after all.
Paul Lewis 295
Notes
1 There is a great deal of natural biological hacking and genetic recombination
through bacterial conjugation in the wild-outside the laboratory, that is. In "The
Invisible Enemy," Steve Silbennan reported the emergence of a highly drug-
resistant and occasionally lethal bacterium in American emergency medical
facilities established along an Iraq evacuation chain: "When a team of geneticists
unlocked the secret of the bug's rapid evolution in 2005, they found that one strain
of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii carries the largest collection of
genetic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism. Out of its 52 genes
dedicated to defeating antibiotics, radiation, and other weapons of mass bacterial
destruction, nearly all have been bootlegged from other bad bugs like Salmonella,
Pseudomonas, and Escherichia coli."
2 The genome itself, by translation and transcription, is neurotic and repeats
without remembering. Contra Dawkins it is not a selfish but a selfless replicator!
3 The Computational and Systems Biology Initiative at MIT maintains a Registry
of Standard Biological Paris in order to supply a universal platfonn or catalog to
the emerging field of synthetic biology.
4 See Paul Rabinow's Making peR: A Story of Biotechnology. This ethnographic
study of the invention and ascent of the polymerase chain reaction "shows how a
contingently assembled practice emerged composed of distinctive subjects, the site
in which they worked, and the object they invented" (2).
Works Cited
Aristotle. "Physics." A New Aristotle Reader. Ed. J. L. Ackrill (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Dobzhansky, Theodosius. "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the
Light of Evolution."
http://people.delphiforums.comllordonnanllight.htm, last accessed
April 08, 2008.
Gibbs, W. W. "Synthetic Life." Scientific American 290:5 (May 2004).
Hauser, Jens. "Curator's Statement: Still, Living."
www.beap.org/v8/docs/bp_symb.pdf, last accessed April 08, 2008.
Jackson, David A. "Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA
Methodology." The Recombinant DNA Debate. Ed. David A. Jackson
and Stephen P. Stich (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1979).
Rabinow, Paul. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
 296 The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century
Silberman, Steve. "The Invisible Enemy."
www.wired.comlwired/archiveI15.02/enemy.html. last accessed April
08,2008.
Simondon, Gilbert. The Genesis of the Individual. Quoted in Todd May.
Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
Wallace, Alfred Russel. "On the Law Which Has Regulated the
Introduction of Species." www.wku.edu/~smithch/indexl.htm. last
accessed April 08, 2008.
Willet, Jennifer and Shawn Bailey. "Interview with Jennifer Willet and
Shawn Bailey ofBioteknica." Simultaneita
http://simultaneita.netlzeroonebioteknic.html, last accessed April 08,
2008.
.~
Ii
THE ECOLOGY OF LOVE:
READING ANNIE DILLARD
WITH FELIX GUATTARI
. GEORGIANA BANITA
The title of this essay raises the issue of the interconnectedness between
modern conceptualizations of deep ecology on the one hand and
definitions of love as shaped by but quite separate from current theories of
pleasure, desire, and need in the context of environmentalist ethics on the
other hand. In her ecofeminist study Ecology ofEveryday Life: Rethinking
the Desire for Nature (1999), Chaia Heller distinguishes between an
ecology of need, related to production, consumption and reproduction, and
an ecology of desire-subjective and qualitative-which foregrounds the
sensual aspects of interpersonal and ecological relations. The sum of these
desires, also referred to as the eco-erotic, is continuous with Deleuze and
Guattari's discourse on desire in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1972), but also with the trispherical ecosophy principle
fonnulated in Guattari's The Three Ecologies (1989). Part of Guattari's
thesis, inspired by Gregory Bateson's proto-ecosophic study Steps
Towards the Ecology of Mind (1972), is that mental ecology and the
structures of hmnan subjectivity to which it refers is under threat of
extinction through the propagation of epistemological fallacies that
reinforce ecological hierarchies. Guattari's transversalist, polyphonic
conception of ecological subjectivity, informed by the author's
psychoanalytical training and his continuing interest in works of art and
literature, will be tested here asa heuristic for the interpretation of a
literary text that shares its engagement with eco-ethical and eco-erotic
paradigms.
Annie Dillard's novel The May trees (2007), the author's merely second
novel over an otherwise long and prolific literary career, gives a subdued
account of acts of love that are both sacred and mundane. 1 Taken in the
context of Dillard's literary work, the novel clearly marks a perspective
shift from the life of nature described in Dillard's earlier eco-theological
writings-such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
l
298 The Ecology of Love
(1974)-to the life of the mind best showcased in this untypical narrative
about a marriage and family union that does not follow the prescribed
norms of moral convention (fidelity, possessiveness, self-righteousness)
but takes the path of ethical values that are as starkly individual as they are
selfless. Dillard's engagement with the crisis of romantic life and its
'ecological' resolution, I argue, is in keeping with Felix Guattari's
transition from a natural to a personal ecosophy, as reflected in the gradual
evolution of this concept in his work. While it shares with traditional
ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere, ecosophy also
acknowledges that 'incorporeal species' and 'mental ecology' are equally
endangered and in crisis: "how do we change mentalities," Guattari asks in
Chaosmosis, "how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to
humanity-if it ever had it-a sense of responsibility not only for its own
survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and
vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts,
cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling
of fusion at the heart of the Cosmos?" (119-20).
My purpose in this chapter is to encourage an ecologically oriented
reading of the erotic themes in Dillard's The May trees. This reading,
escaping from the esoteric abstractness and mystic focus (see e.g. Dunn
1978; Keller 1983) that afflicts much criticism of Dillard's work, seizes
opportunities offered by ecocriticism and ecosophy-which instigate
discussion of the linkages between natural and cultural processes-to
make good on literature's ethical investment and reaffirm its social
responsibility. I will outline the essential features of such a reading by first
assessing the connections between eroticism and ecological thinking in
The May trees. My aim is to reveal how the novel builds on its explicit
environmental premises to develop an ecology of love relations and their
impact on the characters' awareness of themselves, their natural and
mental environment, as well as their complex rapport with time, both
interior and exterior, subjective and concrete, psychological and
narratological. Not only, then, is an explication of the love-ecology
relation long overdue, but such an explication needs to be placed in the
context of its artistic realizations, where extended deployment of the two
concepts becomes less and less stable and acquires a formal malleability
very much in the spirit of postmodern and poststructuralist thought.
In doing this, I align myself with Felix Guattari's tripartite ecological
approach as it is espoused in his essay The Three Ecologies, whert{ he
famously proclaims that "it is quite wrong to make a distinction between
action on the psyche, the socius and the environment" (41). Specifically,
Guattari proposes a shift from a purely technocratic perspective in
Georgiana Banita 299
ecological action toward an ethico~political articulation comprising three
ecological registers: the environment, social relations, and human
subjectivity (28). Dillard's novel, I believe, is a hybrid illustration of
Guattari's social ecosophy-which consists in "developing specific
practices that will modifY and reinvent the ways in which we live as
couples or in the family" (34)-and his mental ecosophy, leading us "to
reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage
of time, to the 'mysteries' oflife and death" (35).
Before I attempt to give substance to this outline, I want to disabuse
readers of two misconceptions that this sketch may have aroused. First, it
is not my purpose "to analyze Dillard's knowledge of current
environmentalist discourses or her interest in ecology as a discipline or
fonn of political activism. As it has already been noted, "although Dillard
is a good distance from the ecological vision propounded by ecofeminists,
deep ecologists, and a number of environmental ethicists, she holds subtle
and not-so-subtle views that should be reckoned with" (Smith 1994). In
fact, I believe that Dillard developed her locale-oriented ecological
understanding-or what others would call "bioregional ethics" (Murphy
24, also Cheney 1989)-as a result of her interest in the natural world and
what might constitute our best relations to it. For my purposes, her work
prior to The May trees is germane only to the fashion in which it represents
experiences of natural phenomena and an ecological awareness distinct
from that displayed in the novel under discussion. Second, I am not so
concerned with the general importance of erotic relations in defining
ecology, but rather in how a particular text hinges on such connections and
therefore alerts us to the implications of extending ecology to what
Guattari calls "immaterial species," which include both love relations and
literature itself. The novel not only actively follows the development of a
poet over several decades, but often resorts to literary and philosophical
examples, textual or biographical, in an effort to abandon scientific
discourse and reinvigorate aesthetic paradigms. In Guattari's The Three
Ecologies it is also artists who provide the most valuable insights into the
human condition, although Dillard does question the concept that 'written'
or recorded experience-in painting, music, or otherwise consigned to
artistic form-comprises the whole or even a representative part of human
2
experience. This transversal network, rather than the possible (in)fidelity
of Dillard reproducing the theoretical pronouncements of Guattari's "three
ecologies," is the focus of my interest.
 The Ecology of Love
300
Love and Marriage
Weare moral creatures [... ] in an amoral world.
-Dillard, Pilgrim 172
Dillard sets her story in Provincetown and Downeast Maine, beginning in
the 1940s. Against the background of the dunes and beaches around
Provincetown, the plot unfolds around the courtship and marriage of
bookish, Ingrid Bergman look-alike Lou Bigelow and the metaphysically-
minded carpenter Toby Maytree, whose romantic involvement and
fourteen-year marriage begins and ends in passion, with abandonment and
betrayal in-between. In the sparse economy and ecology of the dunes, Lou
and Toby renounce conventional values, monetary and other purchasable
goods, and restrict their serene, unencumbered lives to a barely standing
dune shack, where they indulge in painting (Lou) and poetry (Toby), far
from the rat race, only sparingly relying on classical forms of labor: "They
embrace the rigors that go with living deeply in that landscape, and at the
same time they seem idle, up to very little beyond cocktail parties, serial
marriage and the reading of good books" (Robinson), the latter aspect
bestowing on the characters an almost dilettantish flair verging on
intellectual sobriety: between them, the May trees go through about 300
books a year.
Until a babysitter around town (Deary Hightoe) accidentally enraptures
midlife-troubled Toby and disrupts the idyll for a period of twenty years,
failing, however, to lastingly interfere with the couple's inner life before
and beyond her. In the meantime, Lou absorbs the shock and methodically
imposes serenity on herself, also in an attempt to do better than her own
mother, in her tum abandoned with similar expediency, while the couple's
son, Pete, retains a lasting resentment of his father and his emotional
restlessness. Listing, like Diogenes, all the things she does not need-
grudges against Toby and Deary probably the top of that list-Lou
becomes ever simpler and even monk-like as the years pass. Twenty years
later, after Deary's crippling heart failures and an accident that leaves
Toby unable to care for her, the two return to Provincetown to seek Lou's
help. The forgiving wife takes them in until Deary's death two months
later, when the Maytrees silently resume their marriage, with little
apparent transformation but much under-the-surface adjustment.
Throughout the novel, most of which features outdoor scenes, natural
impressionistic settings surround the characters, who traverse shifting
sands and tides or gaze at the deep-black night sky, free from ambient
light, studded with accurately named constellations, So unlikely would
such an unhampered view of the night sky be today that Dillard considered
Georgiana Banita 301
naming her book Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution, but eventually
caved in to her publishers, who did not fall for the joke. Light, however,
acts as the environment for all of the novel's human and biological goings-
on, just as it works, on a much larger scale, as the currency of life and the
universe, considered by Thomas Berry (and others, see Lovelock 1987,
Dowd 1991) as "tlle primary sacred community" (Berry 16). "If there were
such a thing as cosmic realism," Marilynne Robinson warmly quips in her
review of the book, "The May trees would be a classic of the genre"
(Robinson) ,3
This unflagging attention to simple natural surroundings not only acts
as a counterweight to Dillard's philosophical impulses but is the main
pivot around which her juxtaposition of sophisticated meditation and
ordinary action revolves. The grand scales of nature, Dillard suggests, do
not diffuse but reinforce the intimate and momentary sense of life
unfolding before them. When she useS the term 'albedo' in reference to the
look of sand by night (the albedo of an object is the extent to which it
diffusely reflects light from the sun; the term has its origins in the Latin
'albus' meaning 'white'), Dillard points to the subdued relation between
ordinary human experience and a vast universe that seems coeval with its
concrete physical incarnations in stone and sand, living and dead particle.
It is a universe that appears compassionate and generous, like the
characters themselves, yet free from sentimentality. By the end of the
novel, we realize that the people we have watched reeling from the blows
of their fortune reassume their initial posture-and resume their
interrupted love-in the marmer of grass springing up after a gust of wind
has passed: without memory to retain the damage, or any lasting
impression beyond a momentary shudder and the thrilling awareness of
inevitable change, the thrill of animals' homecoming at the end of their
seasonal migration: "The novel proposes that there is an involuntary, even
unconscious shaping of character, individual and social, that comes with
weathering, and that, in yielding to a wisdom no one could earn or choose
and for which they have no language, people conform themselves in ways
something like the accommodations landscape makes to weather and time"
(Robinson). Already in 1980, David L. Lavery spotted Dillard's interest in
and ability to notice the smallest natural details, her alertness to what he
calls "major weather" (Lavery 257), The ebb and flow of love corresponds
to the changing tides of nature,
Even more, when she wishes to mark the passing of Toby's second
wife Deary, Dillard deviates from the human perspective, otherwise
eddying among Lou, Toby, and their son Pete, regarding the view through
the slow eyes of a reptile who is and is not a witness to the transcendence
302 The Ecology of Love
going on in the human world; all he notices is a seamless transition from
life into death, as if the two were undivided, while the rift that inspires so
much tension and anxiety among humans leaves him as nature left him:
cold: "Yankee the turtle crawled out from under the couch and stretched
his snake neck. He stood square as a pack mule waiting its load, like the
lowest totem-pole animal resigned to shouldering all the rest, or resigned
to lifting the seas that floated the lands, if this was that kind of world. He
regarded dead Deary with the obsidian calm of a god" (181). To the
witless creature human suffering seems petty, and his innocent
indifference throws a derisive light on what would otherwise count as the
last 'dead serious' moment of a life. Dillard's vision of creation as perhaps
not the friendliest or most communitarian could not have been any clearer:
"I alternate between thinking of the planet as home-dear and familiar
stone hearth and garden-and as a hard land of exile in which we are all
sojourners. [... JWe don't know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it
doesn't seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless
mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the
innocence of the other creatures-from whom and with whom we have
evolved-seems a mockery" (Teaching 150-51).
Although Toby (and, for that matter, Lou herself) may be described as
"a poet of possibly serious aspiration and minor but respectable
attainment" (Robinson)-one of his poetly books, we learn, appears from
Wesleyan-the novel refrains from praise or condemnation of any kind of
achievement, thus relativizing poetry-writing as an occupation while
stressing its features as a barometer of (self-)awareness. Moreover, after
his reunion with Lou, Toby ceases to care ifhis work will last and gives up
on acquiring what Keats called "knowledge enormous" in favor of
something slighter and infinitely more satisfying, "knowledge slim" (205):
dotting on his young grandson Manny, taking long walks, falling asleep as
Lou cuts his hair. At this stage in his writing life, Toby reaches the status
of "an inchworm leading its dimwit life" (Dillard, The Writing Life 552)
floundering around, getting nowhere, just as Dillard had predicted every
writer would. In his assessment of techno-scientific progress and
consequent mutations in the development of labor, Guattari observes a net
increase in the amount oftime available to "potential human activity" (The
Three Ecologies 28), which falls into two categories of leisure:
"unemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety,
and neurosis" (28) or "culture, creation, development, the reinvention of
the environment and the enrichment of modes of life and sensibility" (28).
It is clear where the studied simplicity of the May trees' existence would fit
in. The novel's supporting cast also features economically nonconformist
Georgiana Banita 303
characters: the party-giving Reevadare Weaver, the full-bearded dune
shack dweller Cornelius Blue, and Jane, the non-dissertation writing
dau~hter of New York professors who marries Cornelius, twenty years her
selllor. After Toby's defection, Lou takes pains to keep outside the world's
a~celeration. Faced with the question of what she should do with her day,
DIllard responds "I open my eyes" (Holy the Firm 12). Silent witnessing,
then, serves the greater purpose. 4
Ecology and Love
Vietnamese legend calls the earth the realm of desire.
-Dillard, The May trees 40
As Guattari reminds us, the etymology of 'eco' is the Greek word oi"kos
meaning 'home,' so by extrapolation, ecological balance can be said t~
entail a delicate symbiosis between ourselves and our homely
surroundings. It is impossible to conceive of the self outside of its natural·
habitat, and vice-versa. In The May trees, Dillard not only provides a
hospitable reading of this concept of ecology, but supplies the aptest
testament to date of her commitment to what an early critic called her
"literary ecology" (McFadden-Gerber 5), which she understood as devoted
more to natural speculation than self-exploration. Literary ecology, I
believe, in fact requires both in equal measure.
If some have (unfairly) regarded Dillard's first nonfiction book as the
"meteorological journal of an egomaniac" (Slovic 66-67), The May trees
could be labeled 'the cosmic Kinsey report of two erotomaniacs.'
Throughout the novel, the conceptualization of love-its attendant
circumspection, caution, and ceremonial formality-remains central and
continuo~s. It is, however, not without its tangles, knots, sea changes,
weak pomts, and intersections, which in the end only make it more
interesting. The May trees often dissolves (the word "solvent" comes up
quite often) into a study of its characters' unconscious emotionality, of
their minds' maneuverings in and out of love. The key signposts along the
way are initial infatuation, marital sexuality, separation, and final reunion,
whereby the novel lets the protagonists reclaim each other without
sentimentality. The early, heady days of romance contain scenes of rapture
and a certain innocence as to the workings of sentiment, Lou wondering
about books' failure to have anticipated her current feelings. 5 The
protagonists' impassioned life as a couple becomes even richer after the
birth of their son Petie, but plunges dramatically after Toby takes up with
the bohemian Deary, a crisis followed by a period of calm for Lou and
guilt-ridden torment for her estranged husband, who decides to stay with
304 The Ecology of Love
Deary long after his passion subsides, in an attempt to reclaim his moral
high ground while mulling over love's stages in his confessional
notebooks. 6
Her earlier disclaimer notwithstanding-"I don't write at all about
ethics. [... ] The kind of art I write is shockingly uncommitted" (Yancy
960)-Dillard clearly embarks here on a fonn of terrestrial ethics of lived
rather than ideal love, culminating in an emotional atheism, an acceptance
of human and erotic mortality that corresponds to Guattari's "atheist
awareness of finitude, of the mortality of the species, the planet and the
entire universe, and not an illusory belief in immortality, which is only a
misplaced contempt for life" (Pindar and Sutton 16). At an earlier point in
her writing life, Dillard had lamented Westem society's move from
"pantheism to panatheism" (Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk 76), but The
May trees recuperates a sense of the sacred from its very theological
abstinence. The quest for meaning, Dillard concludes, has limits imposed
by an unbridgeable gap between human beings' idea of the world and the
reality of nature, one that we cannot grasp: "The boundaries of sense are
actually quite clear," she observes, "we commonly (if tacitly) agree that
the human world has human meaning which we can discover, and the
natural world does not" (Living By Fiction 138).
This limitation manifests itself in various fonns of evasiveness.
Foremost among these is an intriguing defacement of personal identity in
the novel. What Suzanne Clark notes in relation to Dillard's subdued
authorial voice also applies to the May trees, who seem not so much the
subject of the novel's complex consciousness but subjected to it: "when we
read Annie Dillard, we don't know who is writing. There is a silence in the
place where there might be an image of the social self-of personality,
character, or ego" (Clark 107). The novel's genealogy confinns this
astringency. Eight years in the making, The May trees originally stretched
over 1,200 pages, citing much historical and natural detail, before Dillard
decided that the skeletal love story would be stifled by such richness. The
217 pages that remain occasionally do read like a best-of sammelsurium-
as the exact terms of the plot often remain obscure and the sentences seem
to have been clipped from other contexts and strung together, gem-like.
The novel seems to shrink not only in size but also in intensity. Rather
than understanding nature, love, and their interconnections by leaming
more, Dillard seems to say, we need to unleam, un-know, and rely more
on momentary vision in the guise of epiphany or heightened unself-
consciousness.
The investigation of awareness and self-consciousness are, in fact, a
significant and constant feature of Dillard's work, which displays both a
Georgiana Banita 305
"sustained roar of ecstatic consciousness" (Slovic 63) and moments of
ponderous self-scrutiny. Indeed, The May trees often describes objects that
seem to lift off the page, invested as they are with dimensionality,
presence, "a sharp sense of the ontological strangeness of creation and the
mystery of our place in it" (Robinson) but above all an exquisite sense not
only of what people are aware of, but exactly how. Dillard's attention to
the quiddity of the world is thus extended to encompass thoughtful
meditations on the stillness and thrift of conscious perception, its maudlin
shifts and uneven temperatures. Through a careful attunement to the outer
world, Dillard aspires to a state of self-transparency which in Pilgrim she
labels "innocence," that is, "the spirit's unself-conscious state at any
moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and
total concentration" (pilgrim 82).
Such high-strung receptivity has been a hallmark of Dillard's fiction
ever since Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, although rarely has her illuminating
foray into consciousness attained this sublimity, since here, for the first
time, Dillard juxtaposes the mind's monotony to a description of actual
living beings, who can mouth her endless musings? The constant reversal
of perspective from sand dunes to night skies suggests that phenomenon
which Dillard earlier described as "the vertical motion of consciousness
from inside to outside and back" (Dillard, "Fashion" 57). "The interior lif~
is in constant vertical motion," Dillard remarks, "it dreams down below; it
notices up above; and it notices itself, too, and its own alertness" (57).
This altemation of self-forgetfulness and self-attentiveness comes to life in
the tide-like undulation of consciousness in the grips of emotion-abstract
love or corporeal sexuality, the novel seldom specifies which of the two.
Dillard's "commitment to awareness" (McConahay 106) therefore relies on
a permanent shift between consciousness and its opposite, which in tum
corresponds to the dialectic of emotion and reason as parts or successive
motivators of love. Perhaps it is its very ability to grow in the rifts between
one swing and another that love's potent consistency lies. Because, as John
Elder remarked, what interests Dillard above all are the "shifts in human
consciousness" (178) rather than its fidelity to one thing or another.
Ultimately, these shifts amount to a process of fragile evolution.
On numerous occasions, Dillard insisted that writing is a process of
unself-conscious contemplation (Dillard, Writing Life 43), and above all a
process, thus reflecting Guattari's eco-Iogic, concemed as it is with "the
movement and intensity of evolutive processes" (The Three Ecologies 44):
"It is a logic of intensities, of auto-referential existential assemblages
engaging in irreversible durations. It is the logic not only of human
subjects constituted as totalized bodies, but also as psychoanalytic partial
306 The Ecology of Love
objects-what Winnicott calls 'transitional objects, institutional objects
('subject-groups'), faces and landscapes, etc." (The Three Ecologies 44).8
In Dillard as in Guattari, contact with nature is evidenced by its intensity
rather than its duration, the conscious knowledge of biological systems or
the formal detection of ecological design. This is especially significant if
we consider that Dillard, like Guattari, is familiar with scientific concepts
such as the Darwinian evolution, Big Bang theory, Einstein's relativity and
quantum physics, which compel her to alTive at' and accept the human
observer's unsure footing in the world, a vision of chaos, starkly
"dysteleological" (Becker 411) and as a result she remains quite
ambivalent about the cohesiveness of the nahlral world. The emotions of
heightened vitality which emerge in The May trees appear likewise in The
Three Ecologies, as Guattari pits rationality against attentiveness, favoring
the latter. By retaining a constant attention to the world outside and within,
the mind latches onto fragments of the world which encapsulate and make
scrutable those sensations that would otherwise overflow the mind's
container. Such fragments resurface in the form of musical motifs,
descending figures, or what Guattari calls refrains: "Under the generic
tenn of refrain, I would place reiterative discursive sequences that are
closed in upon themselves and whose function is an extrinsic catalyzing of
existential affects. Refrains can find substance in rhythmic and plastic
forms, in prosodic segments, in facial traits, in the emblems of recognition,
in leitmotifs, signahlres, proper names or their invocational equivalents"
(Guattari, Cartographies 257; Guattari Reader 162).9
"The Scandal of Particularity" 10
Destiny is not inscribed in an infrastructure. Capitalist societies secrete a
society, a subjectivity which is in no way natural, in no way necessary.
One could very well do something else. What I refuse is the idea of an
inevitable and necessary program.
-Guattari, Soft Subversions 277
The novel's micropolitics of desire (in Guattari's sense)lI runs in sync with
ecological practices, allowing emotional betrayal to function as vector of
'dissent' in Guattari's understanding of the tenn. According to Guattari,
ecological praxes "generally seek something that runs counter to the
'normal' order of things, a counter-repetition, an intense given which
invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations" (The
Three Ecologies 45). To use Guattari's theoretically inflected vocabulary,
the detelTitorialization-also literally, as Maytree relocates to Maine-
enables the assemblage of connubial desire to evolve in a constructive,
Georgiana Banita 307
processual fashion (45). Just as Progogine and Stengel's refelTed to the
necessity of introducing into physics a "nalTative element" seen as
indispensable for the theoretization of ilTeversible evolution, the
haphazard events in Dillard's novel introduce progressive elements in the
course of "lasting love," where periods of estrangement punctuate and
exacerbate an emotion, propelling it to mahrration. The "a-signifYing
rupture" of marital betrayal may well be the root of anxiety and guilt, but
at the same time it "summons forth a creative repetition that forges
incorporeal objects, abstract machines and Universes of value that make
their presence felt as though they had been always 'already there,' although
they are entirely dependent on the existential event that brings them into
play:" (45)-i.e., May tree's unexpected elopement with Deary, and his
accIdental' return twenty years later.
Not 'accidentally,' Toby leaves his wife Lou for Deary (and Maine) the
day after Petie is hurt in a bicycle accident, his decision bolstered by his
wife's willingness to forgive the criminal driver. Toby thereby mistakes
h~r ~apacity for forgiveness, in fact a refusal to take on the role of piteous
VIctIm, as weakness. Twenty years later he himself would be the one hurt
and in need of sympathy. As existentializing event, his accident opens up
"new fields of virtuality" for May tree, who renews contact with his
estranged wife and thereby regains his self-confidence, his "event-centered
singularity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 7) in the manner of Guattari's patient
who takes .up driving and thereupon undergoes an existential
transformation. The suddenness of the accident brings about an organic
change, the singular event reactivating a hidden pool of sensation over
which twenty years' repeated shamefulness and guilt have stratified into a
crust of passivity. The catalyzing power and enormous repercussions of
the event in fact stand in stark contrast to the actual corporeal change it
causes, namely May tree's physical impairment and helplessness, as an
extension of Deary's already terminal paralysis.
Under th~se circumstances, to put it with Guattari, not only does
exception prove the rule, but it can just as easily deflect or recreate it (52).
By according the husband a means of venting his frustrations with the
inescapable doldrums of a lasting relationship, the more-than-temporary
affair distills a kind of mental ecology that does not overlap with a strict
adherence to morality, but even runs against the grain of received notions
of partnership and the "cycle of deathly repetition" (The Three Ecologies
39) imposed by emotional dogmatism; or, as Guattari argues, "rather than
tirelessly implementing procedures of censorship and contention in the
name of great moral principles, we should learn how to promote a true
ecology of the phantasm, one that works through the transference,
308 The Ecology of Love
translation and redeployment of their matters of expression" (57). The
May trees' separation and reunion marks a resingularization of their
"lasting love" against both moralist manufacture imposed by social
conventions but also, or primarily, by intemalized preconceptions that
place anxiety, guilt, and shame in the way of singularity. As Guattari
laments through an apt metaphor of self-consummation, "human modes of
life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating [... ]
family and married life are frequently 'ossified' by a sort of standardization
of behavior [... ] It is the relation between subjectivity and its exteriority
[... ] that is compromised in this way, in a sort of general movement of
implosion and regressive infantalization" (27).
Guattari's response to this crisis is a call to action. And this is where he
diverges most clearly from Dillard's mostly non-interventionist approach,
as it transpires from three decades' work that records without judging,
witnesses without protesting. Nowhere does she betray the slightest
willingness to overcome a fundamental passivity, which she explains by
resorting to her favorite themes of detachment and inscrutability: "I looked
detached, apparently, or hard, or calm, or focused, still. I don't know. [... ]
These things are not issues; they are mysteries" (Teaching 64). Everything
she sees-violence among animals, emotional violence among humans-
she accepts. Like Lou, she tolerates everything as a fact of life, takes no
course of action and refrains from recommending one, resigns herself to
the "amoral careen of nature" (Ronda 486) and continues to lavish her
sympathy on Toby, Deary, Pete, and everyone else, indiscriminately, and
thus somewhat impersonally. Hence, perhaps, the notable absence of
dialogue in the novel, the long, non-interactive passages of meditation, the
significance of paralysis as a recurrent trope. When the May trees find
tendemess again, the overwhelming sense of separateness almost cancels
out their reunion: "Now in compassion they bore, between them, their
solitudes each the size of the raveled globe" (199). Just as familiarity bred
contempt-and drove Toby away for a long intermission-it is contempt
that forges this new familial alliance, one of mutual estrangement, beset
with friendly but uneasy alienation. The novel thus yields the sense
communicated in all of Dillard's work that "the lot of the human on this
planet is to look around, arrange things a bit, make peace insofar as
possible with whatever is, face the inevitability of death, and just live"
(Smith 1995). In other words, the ethics of care propounded by Dillard is
quite different from an idea of responsibility on behalf of the environment
(see Fuller 1992). For Dillard, 'caring for' does not mean taking up the
cause of ecology, but merely developing a fondness for life in its multiple
forms.
Georgiana Banita 309
Furthelmore, it seems to me that what Dillard also shares with Guattari
is a reliance on a shift from a human-centered to a nature-centered system
of values, which is the core tenet of deep ecology: "Deep ecology is
concemed with encouraging an egalitarian attitude on the part of humans
not only toward all members of the ecosphere, but even toward all
identifiable entities or forms in the ecosphere. Thus, this attitude is
intended to extend, for example, to such entities (or forms) as rivers,
landscapes, and even species and social systems considered in their own
right" (Sessions 270, emphasis in original). This even-handedness seems
to empty emotionality-be it with regard to localities such as the
Provincetown dunes or to human beings, lost or recovered--of all
substantive content: if value and worth reside everywhere, it resides
nowhere and ceases to be the basis for making distinctions and decisions.
To the extent that it applies this notion of generalized 'inherent worth' to
intersubjective relationships, Dillard's novel illustrates the disturbing
effects of deep ecology on human relations.
It is in this context that the novel's shifting conception of the relation
between love and will gains significance. From a staunch supporter of
romantic notions that chart the bifurcation of emotion and reason, May tree
ultimately reaches the conclusion that some form of conscious and
12
rational, even ethical investment always underpins emotional decisions.
This complex connection is, in fact, the engine of temporal progression
and the yardstick by which nonnality and dissent, fidelity and betrayal,
departure and retum can be measured, although not fixed in the kind of
erotic catechism that would preclude fluid 'inter-course' between these
artificial categories. Guattari's argument runs along very similar lines:
"The unconscious remains bound to archaic fixations only as long as there
is no investment directing it towards the future" (38); "as a general rule,
and however little one works on them, individual and collective subjective
assemblages are capable, potentially, of developing and proliferating well
beyond their ordinary equilibrium" (40).13 If we take this equilibrium to
arise from a polarization or "hyperseparation" (Plumwood 1993) of
morality vs. betrayal, commitment vs. libertinism, and other culturally
constructed telms that always imply a hidden power relationship of the
superior term to the inferior, the May trees' unconventional choices in love
can be said to undermine such mastery models, opting for an idea of love
that denies strict polarizations and overcomes the hyperseparations at the
heart of anti-ecological thinking.
This view converges with Guattari's perspective of environmental
ecology, with its focus on the world in its biological diversity, as only part
of a larger ecological endeavor that would ideally include a mental
 The Ecology of Love
310
ecology regulating the habitats and systems of human relationships as
well. "Here is a solid planet," Dillard muses, "among these fixed and
enduring features wander the flimsy people. The earth rolls down and the
people die; their survivors derive solace from clinging, not to the rocks,
not to the cliffs, not to the trees, but to each other" (The Living 351 ).14
Notes
1 Dillard's first novel, The Living, was published in 1992.
2 "Decades' reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love
identicaIly save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed
only-but it was something-that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but
not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote
something down. An unfair sample" (119).
3 Consider for· example this magnificent passage: "The planet roIled into its
shadow. On the high dune, sky ran down to his ankles. Everything he saw was
lower than his socks. Across a long horizon, parabolic dunes cut sky as rogue
waves do. The silence of permanence lay on the scene. He found a Cambrian calm
as if the world had not yet come; he found a posthumous hush as if humans had
gone" (33).
4 For a detailed analysis of ocular metaphors in Dillard's works see Fritzell 1990
and Legler 2000.
5 "Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it.
Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not
have recognized it. Time to read everything again." (31)
6 Here are some of the most striking erotic contentions: "Falling in love, like
having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death.
That is the joy of them" (2); "There in her garden under a locust, Reevadare told
Lou her favorite part ofmarriage:-It's a marvelous way to get to know someone!"
(26); "Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable
men by its very awfulness" (117-18).
7 Before the publication of this novel, critics could safely assert that humans made
only "cameo appearances" in Dillard's work (see Smith 1995).
8 Guattari has repeatedly stressed this processual conception of society and
subjectivity, perhaps most eloquently in the foIlowing statement: "(The) idea of
process if fundamental. It assumes that one has discarded the idea that one must
absolutely master an object or a subject-and that [... ] analytical research is given
a dimension of finitude, singularity, existential delimitation, precariousness in
relation to time and values [... ] There are neither ends nor means; only processes;
processes auto-constructing life, auto-constructing the world, with mutant,
unforeseen, unheard-of affects" (Soft Subversions 277).
9 See also the section "Of the Refrain" in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus 310-350. . Harper & Row 1982).
10 Pilgrim 80.
Georgiana Banita 311
11 "D"eSlre IS everyth'mg that eXists
. before the opposition between subject and
object, before representation and production. It's everything whereby the world and
affects constitute us outside of ourselves, in spite of ourselves." (Guattari, "A
Liberation of Desire" 205)
12 "Wishing and doing, within the realm of the possible, was willing; love was an
act ·of will. Not forced obeisance, but-what? The obvious course of decency?
Innate knowledge of goodness? Was it reasonable to love the good and good to
love the reasonable?" (187)
13 Instead of a unity or series of coherent structures, Deleuze and Guattari see the
world as a system in which "everything escapes, everything creates" (A Thousand
Plateaus 142), where the social "is something that never stops slipping away"
(Deleuze, "Codes" 271, cited in Halsey 39). In this world "there is always
something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance
apparatus, and the overcoding machine" (A Thousand Plateaus 216).
lOne sentence in The Maytrees reads almost like an intentional reply to this, or
wiser continuation: "The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not
that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions.
We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock" (34).
Works Cited
Becker, John E. "Science and the Sacred: From Walden to Tinker Creek."
Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas 62 (1987): 400-413.
Berry, Thomas, and Thomas Clarke. Befriending the Earth: A Theology of
Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth (Mystic, Conn.:
Twenty-Third Publications, 1991).
Cheney, Jim. "Postmodem Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional
Narrative." Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117-34.
Clark, Suzanne. "Annie Dillard: The Woman in Nature and the Subject of
Nonfiction." in Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Ed.
Chris Anderson (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1989).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Dillard, Annie. "To Fashion. a Text." in Inventing the Truth: The Art and
Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1987): 53-76.
-. Living By Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).
-; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
-. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York:
-. The Living (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
312 The Ecology of Love Georgiana Banita 313

-. The May trees (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques
-. The Writing Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Dowd, Michael. Earthspirit: A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Pindar, Ian, and Paul Sutton. "Translators' Introduction." Felix Guattari.
Christianity (Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications, 1991). Three Ecologies (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 1-20.
Dunn, Robert Paul. "The Artist as Nun: Theme, Tone and Vision in the Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London:
Writing of Annie Dillard." Studia Mystica 1 (1978): 17-31. Routledge, 1993).
Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision ofNature (Urbana Robinson, Marilynne. "The Nature of Love: Annie Dillard on Family,
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Cape Cod and a 20-Year Love Affair." Washington Post (June 24,
Fritzell, Peter. Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type 2007): BW05.
(Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990). Ronda, Bruce A. "Annie Dillard's Fictions to Live By." Christian Century
Fuller, Robert C. Ecology of Care: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the 101 ( 1 9 8 4 ) . '
Self and Moral Obligation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, Sessions, George (Ed.) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century:
1992). Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New
Guattari, Felix. "A Liberation of Desire." The Guattari Reader. Ed. Gary Environmentalism (London: Shambhala, 1995).
Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 204-214. Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry
-. Cartographies schizoanalitiques (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1989). Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez
-. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992).
Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). Smith, Pamela A. "The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard: A Study III
-. Soft Subversions. Trans. David Sweet and Chet Wiener, ed. Sylvere Ambivalence." Cross Currents 45:3 (Fall 1995): 341-59.
Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996). Yancy, Philip. "A Face Aflame." Christianity Today 22 (1978): 960-61.
-. The Guattari Reader. ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
-. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The
Athlone Press, 2000).
Halsey, Mark. "Ecology and Machinic Thought: Nietzsche, Deleuze,
Guattari" Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10.3
(December 2005): 33-54.
Keller, Joseph. "The Function of Paradox in Mystical Discourse." Studia
Mystica 6 (Fall 1983): 3-19.
Lavery, David L. "Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard." The
Massachussetts Review 21 (Summer 1980): 255-70.
Legler, Gretchen. "'I Am a Transparent Eyeball:' The Politics of Vision in
American Nature Writing." Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New
Essays in Ecocriticism. Ed. John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington
(Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2000): 243-50.
Lovelock, James E. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979).
McConahay, Mary Davidson. "'Into the Bladelike Arms of God:' The
Quest for Meaning in Thoreau and Annie Dillard." Denver Quarterly
20 (Fall 1985): 103-16.
McFadden-Gerber, Margaret. "The I in Nature." American Notes &
Queries 16 (September 1977): 13-15.

C. 1315 - 1640: WHY EUROPE?
WHY NOT CHINA?
CONTINGENCY, ECOLOGY
AND WORLD-HISTORY
JORGE CAMACHO
When Deleuze and Guattari revived that old monster of speculative
thought, the Philosophy of Universal or World History, they did so
following a rule seemingly intended to exorcise the ghosts of previous
metaphysical excesses. "First of all," they affirmed, "universal history is
the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessities" (Anti-
Oedipus 154). With this philosophical manoeuvre they intend to open. for
thought a complex vision of history, full of unpredictable accidents and
unnecessary encounters that may have happened there and then but might
as well have happened elsewhere in other times or, as they said, "might
never have happened" (Anti-Oedipus 154). Perhaps more than anything
else, we may argue, it is this condition alone what makes possible a
contemporary philosophical appropriation of historical material.
To construct their version of such appropriation, Deleuze and Guattari
took their cue from a major puzzle ("an eminently contingent question,"
they wrote), dear to historians and widely debated by their contemporaries:
"why Europe, why not China?" (Anti-Oedipus 244). This couple of
questions (which may be in tum almost infinitely sub-divided) refers
broadly to the theme of 'the rise of the West': the development and
consolidation of a European dominance-economic, political, scientific
and technological-across the world. Most importantly, it refers
concretely to a process generally acknowledged to lie at the heart of this
puzzle: the conformation of a modem capitalist economy, or world-
economy, out of the dissolving structures of feudalism marking the end of
the medieval period. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is only from the point of
view of capitalism that a universal or world history may be retrospectively
generated.
Jorge Camacho 315
Three time~, once in each volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
and. the ~ther m Wh~t Is Philosophy?, they conjured up this puzzle. In
~ntl-Oedlpus, th~ sO!Id power of ~ Chinese despotic State (exemplified by
Its curb on navigatlOnal expanslOn) is contrasted with the generalised
process of dissolution that in Western Europe allowed for the well-known
conjunction-explained by Marx and later on by Maurice Dobb-of two
dec?ded ~n~ det~rritorialized elements or flows, free workers and money-
capItal, glVlng nse to capitalist production (245-46). Up to this point,
Deleuze and Guattari remained within the limits of a Marxist historical
perspecti~e for the definition of the problem and the answer provided.
~ater on, m A Thousand'Plateaus, the puzzle suddenly reappears, this time
m the. c~ntext of a discussion about the spatial or geographical
detenmnabons of the nomadic war machine and the various instances of
the Sta~e apparatus (384). New and wider paths are explored this time.
Followmg the work of Annales historians-Fernand Braudel Pierre
Chaunu and. Maur~ce Lombard-the answer is emiched by consid~ring the
agro-ecoiogical mfrastructures of rice and wheat cultivation as
determi?an.ts for th.e divergent paths of development that State apparatus
and capItai1st machme followed in China and Europe.
It is .certainly true that, despite its recurrence the concern for this
~isto~ical . pr~blem an~ their ~ltimate acceptanc: of an ecological or
geohistoncal explanabon remamed largely tangential within Deleuze and
Guattari's wor~. Moreover, contemporary enviromnental history is already
~apable of tellmg us much. mo~e than what these French philosophers and,
mdeed, t~ose Ann~les histonans, could tell us about the ecological
processes mvolved m the aforementioned historical sequence. As we will
see below, problems of demography, epidemiology and climatic change
a~e als~ necessalY considerations in a full account of the process of
dIS.solubo? at.the en~ of th~ Middle Ages. The problem of proper
phIlosophIcal mterest IS that, mtroducing variables of natural geography
~nd ecology, D~leuze ~nd Guattari seem to be aiming at reinforcing the
Idea of a matenal contmgency or even precariousness at the heart of the
world-historic~l pr?cess vi~-a-vi~ all re1ll11ants. of faith in rationality
thereof. Even If theIr ecologIcally mformed historical explanation needs to
be ~pdat~d, con~plemented, and perhaps even, in some respects, corrected,
theIr phIlosophIcal framework seems uniquely suited-at least in the
context of contemporary European philosophy-to integrate the insights of
recent ecological history into a philosophy of (contingent) world history
and, furthermore, to explore a much needed articulation between ecology
and political theory.
316 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
In the course of their brief discussion about the ecologies of European
and Chinese civilizations, Deleuze and Guattari spelled out, largely in
passing, a conclusion that may be taken as a basic principle for ecological
histOlY and, for that matter, for a possible conceptualisation of political
ecology. They wrote: "States are made up not only of people, but also of
wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities" (Thousand Plateaus 385)
Such a simple enunciation must be taken as a principle for it reminds us
that: first, ecology is thoroughly implicated in the problems of social
formation, and thus, should occupy an important place within political
theory; second, heterogeneity, or more precisely, an ontology of
heterogeneous assemblages or associations, is the condition sine qua non
of ecological thinking. It is particularly in this second aspect that the
eminently ecological character of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is to
be found.
It is mostly"certain that when Deleuze and Guattari revisited· the
problem of universal history and, supposedly following Marx's rules,
exorcised the ghosts of metaphysical necessity in the name of a history of
concrete contingencies they were aiming at Hegel more than any other
figure in the tradition of philosophy of history. In this respect, it is hard to
avoid recalling and putting to play the most common rendering of Hegel's
thoughts on world history as precisely that monster which (at least from
the point of view of the analytical tradition) philosophy ofhisfory must not
become-neither in content nor in its methodology: an a priori, hyper-
rationalist exercise of thought that imposes its scaffolding onto the
historical material, conceptlJalising the course of historical development as
a progressive achievement which displays a thoroughly necessary and
coherent structure. For many Hegelians, past and contemporary, this
caricature is simply the outcome of a superficial approximation to the
master's intricate conceptual domain.
Precisely on the problem of contingency, Emil Fackenheim argued:
"the entire Hegelian philosophy, far from denying the contingent, on the
contrary, seeks to demonstrate its inescapability" (quoted in Forbes'
introduction to Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of World History xi). If
that is the case, the misconception is to be found right at the root of
Hegel's reception for, in the very notes to his Lectures, the idea is
captured: "The sole aim of philosophical enquiry is to eliminate the
contingent" (28). This problematic relationship between philosophy or,
indeed, Reason, whose natural territory would seem to be necessity, and
the apparently contingent individual events and actions of men, is
Jorge Camacho 317
precisely the object and particularity of Universal History as approached
by Hegel. He wrote:
It is only an i~lference from the history of the World, that its development
has been a rational process; that the history in question has constituted the
rational necessary course ofthe World-Spirit. (Philosophy o/History 54)
It seems quite correct, then, to argue that the manoeuvre employed in
~egel's fr~me.w0rk is not the elimination of the contingent but, to be clear:
~ts s~bordIllatIOn under a higher principle, namely, the realization of Spirit
III hIstory. In this sense, the particular events or individual actions that
compose historical development are not of the order of the necessary: in
and on themselves they may as well have happened differently or not
~appened at ~ll. It is for this reason that there appears in Hegel nothing
lIke a predestIll~d s.tructure ~f historical development. What belongs to the
reahn of necessIty IS the desIgn of the spiritual process: what those events
and individual actions have achieved in being instruments to the 'cunning
of Reason'.
Th~ re~ognitio~ of s~ch int~icate relationship between contingency and
necessIty III Hegel s phllosophlcal history allows us to better grasp what
Deleuze and Guattan are after when they proclaim universal history as a
theatre of bare contingency. Ostensibly, what they invite us to do is to take
contingen~y in ~ts .own terms without subsuming it under any higher
metaphys~cal pnn,clp le: no essential destiny and no ultimate design.
Whereas III Hegel s thought, arguably, what matters is not so much the
contingen.t indi.vidual facts b~t the higher principle that supposedly acts in
them or 1ll spIte of them, III a philosophy of history such as the one
advocat~d by Deleu~e a~d Guattari .(whether or not they actually
accom~lIsh~d the fe~t IS a ~lff~rent questIOn) what matter are precisely the
br~te. histoncal ~ontl11gencles III themselves devoid of any meta-historical
pnnc~ple. In thIS sense, one is even tempted to say that Hegelianism
remalllS a philosophical history whereas a philosophy of pure historical
conti~ge;'1cy wo.uld achieve the status of a properly historical philosophy.
It IS lllterestlllg to note from the point of view of our present concerns
that Hegel's fr~mework .was already very close to 'geohistory' or maybe
even to geophllosophy III the sense advocated by Deleuze and Guattari
un~er the influence of Braudel (What is Philosophy? 96). The Gennan
phllosopher would have certainly agreed with these latter in the contention
that geography ?r 'geohistory' provides a 'milieu' for philosophy or, in the
tenns appropnate for his conceptual framework, for Spiritual
development. Th~ struc~ure of the historical process is laid out by Hegel
over the two dImensIOns of history and geography: the historical
318 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
development of the Idea is, at the same time, a geographically coherent
movement. "The History of the World travels from East to West," he
wrote, "for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning"
(Philosophy of History 163). Even more interestingly, many of the
geographical and ecological features that he considers important from the
point of view of his philosophical World-HistDlY are the same that will
reappear later on, devoid of metaphysical garments, in our discussion of
contemporary explanations for the rise of Europe. Surely, in the face of
these coincidences, at least two important aspects that distinguish it from
what must be a truly contemporary 'geohistorical' perspective must be
strongly stated: first, the aforementioned subordination of historical data to
a metaphysical inference, namely, the higher principle and agency of Spirit
or Reason; second, the consideration of natural or geographic conditions
as a backdrop or stage, for the most part static, and external to the properly
Spiritual reahn of World History. For Hegel, Physical Nature in itself is a
Rational System and thus, "the natural connection that helps to produce
the Spirit of a People ... is an essential and necessary basis" (61, 134).
However, geographical or natural conditions, Hegel tells us, are extrinsic
to the process of Universal History that properly "belongs to the reahn of
Spirit" (61). Where Hegel spoke of Nature as a theatre for the world-
historical process, today, as we will conclude, we can speak of it as an
actor proper.
Hegel's 'geohistory' works its way in a process of elimination: torrid
and frigid lands, the Southern ends of continents, the New World, Africa,
"the Unhistorical" (157), are all deemed irrelevant for the world-historical
development. In Asia, with its river-plains, the appearance of agriculture
commands the development oflegal structures and thus the dawn of World
History, but no more. Finally, it is in Europe where Spiritual development
will find the appropriate milieu: a milder inter-mingling of natural-
geographical types (upland and steppes, valleys and river-plains). Most
importantly, it is only there that coastal land takes full historical
significance:
stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land is wanting to the
splendid political edifices of Asiatic State, although they themselves border
on the sea-as, for example, China. (Philosophy ofHistory 147)
Ultimately, then, the rationality of the European destiny of the World-
Historical development is grounded on these "essential and necessary"
geographical conditions. If there is in Hegel an answer to the questions
"Why Europe? Why not China?" it is already a 'geohistorical' one. But
even Europe as a whole is no unity for the consummation of Universal
Jorge Camacho 319
History and further eliminations are required: northern and eastern regions
that perpetuate the connection with Asia, as well as the Southern regions
or, indeed, the whole of Catholic Europe (were development was fettered
by religious subjugation and conflict) are discarded by Hegel. Finally,
even England (and perhaps the Netherlands, we could say), was no match
for the Hegelian ideal for it was there that ''particular Rights and particular
privileges" (566) contravened most forcefully the development of common
Right or Objective Freedom-the Spiritual achievement of the German
monarchy.
From a present point of view, it is obvious that the inclination towards
'particular rights and privileges' that Hegel found in the England of his
time corresponded with the development of a concrete political and
economic process that would acquire significance well beyond Hegel's
consideration. Isn't it possible to argue that capitalism-and the world-
historical import of its development-remained something of a blind spot
in Hegel's teleology? Or, more precisely, that it was the historical
emergence of capitalism first and foremost, more than any philosophical
quarrel, what had already disproved Hegel's World History-in its
substantive content if not in its form-and fundamentally transformed the
conditions for the conceptualization of an alternative version?
An early but clear exposition of the philosophical alternative followed
by Deleuze and Guattari, the one proposed by Marx, appears in The
German Ideology. The possibility of World History is now predicated on
the basis of an empirically established (and thus, contingent, we are to
think) premise: the world-wide intercourse of otherwise local people made
possible by the development of the capitalist world market. As Marx and
Engels write:
only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal
intercourse between men established ... and finally has put world-
historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.
(German Ideology 47)
In this way, a philosophy of history is intended to be replaced by a
properly materialist and scientific endeavour: a theory of world history
whose primary condition is the empirical study of the development of the
single historical element or force capable of establishing a universality of
human relations. Here, the postulation of historical finalism or teleology
gives way to a properly scientific and political prediction that,
nevertheless, seems to reinstate necessity perhaps more forcefully than in
Kant or Hegel's philosophical histories; a prediction later stated in Capital
in this way: "the immanent laws of capitalist production itself' produce its
 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
320
own negation "with the inexorability of a natural process" (1 :929). Such a
reference to the laws of natural causality was by no means intended as a
simple analogy. From that early exposition of the materialist outlook, it is
clear that Marx thoroughly conceives human history and the history of
capitalist development as a veritable fragment of natural history at large.
The first fact to be established is the physical organisation of [human]
individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature .. , The
writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their
modification in the course of history through the action of men. (German
Ideology 31)
For the most part, however, the study of those natural conditions
remained extrinsic to historical materialism as a science of social
formations. A passage from political economy to political ecology was still
wanting. l
What is certain is that, from Marx onwards, the possibility of a World
History (at least of the modem period) cannot but be predicated upon an
account of the origins and development of a capitalist economy-in itself,
an empirically established and thus contingent fact entirely dependent of
natural history. Interestingly enough, a certain consensus exists about
Marx's failure to produce a coherent explanation of the historical process
that produced and brought together the elements of a capitalist economy:
monetary wealth and 'free' labourers/means of production. According to
Jean Baechler, for example, Marx explanation oscillates between two
poles: either the elements "can crop up only within the framework of the
capitalist system," and thus what is offered is really a theoretically closed
tautology;
Or, they are mutually independent but have been completed by being
joined to each other; in this case, the birth of capitalism is t~e re~ult of pu:e
chance, a conjunction of several series of causes, a conjunctIOn that, III
other respects, is altogether highly improbable. (21)
Quite significantly, in rejecting altogether the Marxist. definition a~d
explanation of the problem, Baechler seems also to conjure away thIS
second possibility. As for Marx, it is certain that, at least in the mode of
theorization proposed in Capital, concerned with the necessity of natural
laws he seems to evade such contingent explanation in favour of the
mod~l of a seemingly necessary tendency: from small private property in
the hands of labourers to the expropriation of it by capitalists (and the
subsequent concentration in a few hands) to the expropriation of capitalist
Jorge Camacho 321
property by a communist revolution (1 :927). Yet, there is in Marx,
specifically in the loose and scribbled character of the Grundrisse, a frame
of mind tamed only later that seems more receptive to the precariousness
of the historical process. All the same, with or beyond him, it is precisely
in the direction of that second option, favouring the contingent if not
chance encounter, where we are moving.
Against Baechler's argument, it is possible to argue that there is in fact
a consistency linking the explanations propounded in Grundrisse and
Capital; a consistency, moreover, in tracing the proper origins of the
capitalist mode not to some internal or tautological presupposition but to a
veritable pre-history iIfwhich, it is true, more often than not Marx seems
unwilling or unable to dive. The historical sequence is, at least in an
abstract and descriptive mode, quite clearly expounded. Capital, Marx tells
us, begins with money or, more precisely, "with wealth in the form of
money" (Grundrisse 505) The source of that wealth is circulation; in
concrete historical terms, the formation of capital is made possible, first of
all, by the accumulation of two kinds of wealth or capital: one emerging
from trade or commerce, merchant wealth, and the other from usury
(Capital 1:914). Marx recognised already, as Deleuze and Guattari do
along with almost any contemporary historian, that if this accumulation of
wealth was a sufficient condition capitalism would have sprung up
anywhere and much sooner than it did: in Greece, in China, etc. What
accumulates towards the end of the Middle Ages in the hands of merchants
and usurers in Europe only takes historical significance when it finds
available to buy means of production and 'free' labourers-in the double
sense of propertyless and emancipated from the structures of serfdom and
guilds (Grundrisse 507; Capital 1:874). This points, of course, to the
precondition for the process of 'primitive accumulation' that, as Marx
wrote: "is not the product of capital, but the presupposition for it"
(Grundrisse 505). As Marx explains: "Only in the period of the decline
and fall of the feudal system is there a gold mine for labour in the process
of becoming emancipated" (510). Here lies really the crux of the problem:
the dissolution of feudalism.
The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic
structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the
elements ofthe former. (Capital 1:875)
In the Grundrisse, Marx provides only some general remarks about
how monetary wealth or the extension of an economy of money slowly but
steadily transforms the old modes of production-originally focused in
use-value or production for immediate consumption and only marginally
322 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
trading on the surplus production-to the new modes explicitly focused on
exchange-value or the production of commodities. Later on, in Capital, he
mentions "the rapid expansion of wool manufachlfe in Flanders and the
corresponding rise in the price of wool" (1 :878) as the main driving force
behind the dissolution of feudal structures in England. Nevertheless, the
explanation of the economic problem involved in this dissolution is
substituted by a description of the political and violent solution it required:
expropriations, evictions and enclosures. He wrote: "We leave on one side
here the purely economic driving forces behind the agricultural revolution.
We deal only with the violent means employed" (Capital 1:883).
As we pointed out before, in Deleuze and Guattari's work the
recommencement of Universal History is predicated on the possibility of
an analysis of the development of capitalism (Anti-Oedipus 153-54). This
mode of history, they explain, must be retrospective since-as Marx and
Engels also thought-it is only the emergence of capitalism what creates
the conditions for universality. And yet, it could be argued, if this is the
case, universal or world history proper should only be predicated of the
period that opens up with the emergence of capitalism. However, for
Deleuze and Guattari capitalism has always virtually existed, that is, it has
existed as a potential haunting all forms of society. For this reason, their
universal history is a retrospective account of the different forms of socius
or social machines that World and History have witnessed as so many
solutions for maintaining coded and territorialized the flows that would
otheIwise achlalize the terrifying potential. The historian Fernand Braudel
explicitly agrees with them at least in this key aspect:
I am tempted to agree with Deleuze and Guattari that 'after a fashion,
capitalism has been a spectre haunting every fonn of society'~capitalism,
that is, as I have defined it. (Wheels Commerce 581)2
Most importantly, their formulation of history is contingent because,
over and above the concrete conjunction that gave rise to capitalism, there
is no essential destiny or reason: capitalism is no telos or final cause for
historical development. Finally, it is also singular because for Deleuze and
Guattari the conjunction that actualized the capitalist machine has
occurred geohistorically only once. This the real puzzle; as Braudel points
out, capitalism-a full-blown capitalist economy, that is-while it
emerged and succeeded in Europe during a specific, if long-extending
period failed to do so almost everywhere else in the world (Wheels
Commerce 582). And thus, the questions are posed: "Why Europe? Why
not China?" (Anti-Oedipus 244).
Jorge Camacho 323
Regarding the second question, Deleuze and Guattari follow Braudel in
highlighting the problem of navigation: why did the Europeans and not the
Chinese (or the Arabs for that matter) conquer the high seas? And while
they quote the historian giving a geohistorical explanation-the West is
confined on its "narrow 'Cape of Asia' [and thus] it 'needed' the rest of the
world"-they go beyond into the libidinal dimension to argue that in
China "desire remains caught in the nets of the despotic State" (Anti-
Oedipus 244).
Contemporary historians highlight at least three large-scale, inextricably
related conditions that may have acted as hindrances for the development
of a capitalist world-economy centred in China: geography, agro-ecology
and the power of its Imperial or Despotic political apparatus. All of these
bear upon the widely debated issues of Chinese navigation, circulation and
trade, and the possibility of accumulation of capital.
Circulation is, according to Braudel, the first and foremost pre-
condition for the emergence of capitalism in the stage of world history.
"The wider circulation stretched its net, the more profitable it was"
(Wheels Commerce 582). Likewise, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that
geographical expansion was a "key pre-requisite" for the development of
capitalism or, more precisely, of the capitalist world-economy that
constituted the solution to the problems emerging in the dissolution of
feudalism (38). Considering this, the brute geographical determinations of
China, when compared to those of Europe, may be seen as the most
primary constraint. The point is simply that the distances to be covered in
China, and Asia more generally, are enormous in comparison with those of
Western Europe, particularly with the state of transport technology of the
time:
overland journeys, sea-voyages and half-wild zones of underdevelopment
were all of exaggerated proportions ... By comparison with the great
wastes, the thriving zones seemed even narrower, lying along the routes
travelled by ships, merchandise and men. (Wheels Commerce 582)
Quite accordingly, Braudel finds precisely in some provinces with
coastal strips exceptional examples of a "certain form of Chinese·
capitalism" that never fully managed to escape the gravity exerted by the
power established in the inward-looking expanses of China's mainland
(Wheels Commerce 582). Taking this kind of geographical considerations
even further, David Cosandey has proposed a singular explanation for the
divergent paths of East and West in terms of what he calls
"thassalographie" (271-315). According to his theory, the divergent fate
of Europe and China fmds its most primary determination in the
324 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
differences between the complex coastline of Western Europe,
characterised by inland seas, gulfs and peninsulas-correspondingly
conducive to· maritime navigation and thus to trade-and that of China,
exhibiting less of these richly articulated geographical contours.
The second type of long-enduring structures that contemporary
historians highlight to explain the fate of Europe and China in the decisive
period that gave birth to the modern world is associated with the
fundamentally different agro-ecologies of the two regions. Indeed, it is
precisely this point that Deleuze and Guattari invoke in the Treatise on
Nomadology to introduce ecological determinations in the explanation "for
the victory of the West over the Orient" (Thousand Plateaus 384-5).
According to them, the "more rigid agency" characteristic of Oriental or
despotic formations of the State is to a great extent the solution required to
maintain captured a series of natural or bio-geographic, technological and
human components. Working comparatively, they characterise first such
components as they are found in the European State-form providing a
sweeping picture of the agro-ecological infrastruchlre of late Middle Ages
feudalism:
forest-clearing of fields; agriculture-grid laying; animal ralsmg
subordinated to agricultural work and sedentary food production;
commerce based on a constellation of town-country (polis-nomos)
communications. (Thousand Plateaus 384)
To this European medieval techno-agro-ecological formation, they
contrast the components found in China:
deforestation rather than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult
to extract or even to find wood; cultivation of the type 'rice paddy and
garden' rather than arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part
outside the control of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked
animal power and meat foods; the low communication content of the toWll-
country relation, making commerce far less flexible. (Thousand Plateaus
385)
Certainly, in this argument they were closely following not only the
much-disputed thesis of Karl Wittfogel but also Braudel's work. The latter
writes regarding rice cultivation:
All in all, an enormous concentration of work, human capital and careful
adaptation was involved. Even then nothing would have held together if
the broad lines of this itTigation system had not been firmly integrated and
Jorge Camacho 325
supervised from above. This implies a stable society, state authority and
constant large-scale works. (Structures Eve/yday 149)
Travelling along similar lines, Wallerstein has included these series of
factors to explain the lack of a wide-expanding navigational thrust in
China around the 15 th century. Following Annaliste historian Pierre
Chaunu, Wallerstein connects the development and characteristics of rice
cultivation in China with its lack of motivations for expanding overseas. In
general terms, the agro-ecological'choices' (as Braudel would have put it)
of Europe-that is, wheat and cattle-were geographically extensive while
rice cultivation in China was intensive: "requiring less space but more
men" (Wallerstein 63).
Surely, however, geographical constraints and agro-ecological
infrastruchlres are not sufficient to account for the problem of a somehow
crippled Chinese navigation or, for that matter, the non-development of
capitalism in the Oriental counter-power of Europe. Even if agro-
ecological structures are thought to account in some way for the character
of an Oriental despotic formation, there are also properly socio-political
features that contemporary historians, including Braudel himself, adduce
to characterise Chinese Imperial power as a hindrance for navigation and
the development of capitalism. For example, much in the same way that
Cosandey did later, John A. Hall argued that a fundamental difference
between Europe and China was one of political fragmentation vis-a-vis
unity. In the latter, political and military power was at least equally
extensive than the underlying Chinese society or societies. Although it
wasn't totalitarian as some have imagined-being constantly challenged
by internal and external groups and in constant need for restoration-the
Chinese Empire, according to Hall, acted like a "capstone" and prevented
"horizontal linkages" from forming (23). Such power asserted itself most
forcefully during the iate medieval and early modern period: it controlled
the autonomy of cities, curbed down an early-developed naval strength
and, between 1371 and 1567, forbade all foreign trade. Wallerstein has
also emphasized the historical importance of the difference between
China's Empire and the medieval Christian civilization, which was not an
empire, for it lacked political unity or centralization, but also not yet a .
world-economy. Regarding navigation once more, he goes on to argue that
not only Chinese agronomy for the most part hindered all motivations for
geographical expansion but, had Chinese society actually needed to
engage in oceanic exploration and trade (as, indeed, certain groups did), it
would have been
 ...
326 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
restrained by the fact that crucial decisions were centralized in an imperial
framework that had to concern itself first and foremost with short-run
maintenance of the political equilibrium of its world-system. (63)
Nonetheless, and just in order to distance ourselves from Hegel's vision
of China irremediably closed upon itself, it is worth remembering the case
of the great admiral Cheng Huo (Zheng He). During the fifteenth century,
the Muslim and eunuch engaged in a series of voyages that lead him as far
as the island of Hormuz, at the doorstep of the Arab world. After his dead
in 1434, all further attempts to resume sea exploration were curtailed by
the official bureaucracy of mandarins. Commenting on this case and
reinstating to a certain degree the precariousness of this historical problem,
Braudel writes:
we can for a moment imagine what would have been the result of a
possible spread of Chinese junks towards the Cape of Good Hope, or better
still to Cape Agulhas which served as a southern gateway between the
Indian and Atlantic Oceans. (Structures Everyday 407)
An overview of the structural hindrances found in China, however,
only partially points to the almost opposed structural advantages found in
Europe. Michael Mann provides a great synthetic overview when he
writes:
In the medieval era, agricultural-cum-navigational opportunities were
exploitable by a historically conjunctural, but internally patterned, set of
overlapping power networks. These were (1) the normative pacification of
Christendom; (2) small, weak political states ... and (3) a multiplicity of
partly autonomous and competitive, local economic power networks-
peasant communities, lordly manors, towns, and merchant and artisan
guilds. (18, emphasis added)
Braudel mentions two further features fmmd in Europe but absent in
China that may have proved to be the decisive socio-political structure
allowing for the development of capitalism. European nobility and
bourgeoisie, unlike their Chinese counterparts and Imperial bureaucracy,
had "the faculty of accumulating wealth and of passing on this wealth
from generation to generation in a snowball process." Moreover, in
Europe, merchant families constituted initially only a second-best class
that took advantage of economic and political opportunities to acquire
power by means of "parasitism, exploitation and finally absorption"
(Wheels Commerce 595).
Jorge Camacho 327
Nonetheless, even such a large-scale structural overview disentangles
neither the actual historical conjuncture that witnessed feudal dissolution
and capitalist conjunction nor the mechanisms involved. The first question
remains: Why Europe? Specifically, as Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "Why
[or, better, How] did capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?"
(Thousand Plateaus, 558n60).
In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia they follow
Marx's classic account as put forward in Capital, which locates the origin
of capitalism in the conjunction of two elements or flows:
on one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked,
having to sell his labour capacity; and, on the other, decoded money that
has become capital and is capable of buying it. (Anti-Oedipus 245)
As we have seen before, to account for such conjunction it is necessary
first to account for the release (deterritorialization and decoding) of those
flows. Following Marxist economist and historian Maurice Dobb, Deleuze
and Guattari reject the previously widespread idea (which arguably
underlies Marx's explanation in all its versions) that simply the growth of
commerce and the extension of a money economy had been sufficient to
bring about the dissolution of feudal relations-whose first signs were the
commutation of labour-services for money payment and the lease of the
manorial demesne for money-rent. As they recognize, "capitalism does not
lead to the dissolution of feudalism, but rather the contrary, and that is
why so much time was required between the two" (243). Commerce and
the money-economy, they argue, are not sufficient to bring about the
transformation of the socius, "that is, to induce the birth of capitalism"
(242-3). But then, in a sleight of hand that prompts us to recall Baechler's
critique of Marx's explanation, Deleuze and Guattari conjure away the
explanation of the crucial step in the process. Dissolutions, they point out,
"are defined bya simple decoding of flows," and these decodings, they go
on, "have always existed; history is full of them" (244). Strictly speaking,
they reject one explanation (the extension of commerce) for no
explanation at all: as if feudalism had simply died or dissolved of 'natural
causes'. And while certainly we can't blame Deleuze and Guattari, as'
philosophers, for failing to offer an historical explanation, isn't an answer
like this somehow disappointing in the context of a universal history of
contingencies? If the premise for their philosophy of history is the
actualization of capitalism, and the conjunction that allows for such
actualization is intelligible only as a product of the dissolution of
feudalism, isn't something important missing in their contingent universal
history? Interestingly enough, recent research has proposed novel
328 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
explanations that may allow us to continue along the lines propo~ed by
Deleuze and Guattari and reinstate, even more forcefully than they dId, the
problems contingency and ecology in this world-historical process.
. Dobb himself-despite Deleuze and Guattari's lack of attention to it-
postulates a first step in the progressive assemblage of the capitalist mode
of production. Extending roughly over the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries this transitional period is characterised by the two parallel-but
not, for him, causally connected-processes we have been encountering:
on one hand, a generalised crisis and even "advanced stage of
disintegration" of feudal economic structures based on serfdom; on the
other hand, the rise of corporate towns, the expansion of trade and the
concomitant emergence of a merchant class (19-20). To account for the
first of these he put forward this explanation:
such evidence as we posses strongly indicates that it was the inefficiency
of feudalism as a system of production, coupled with the growing needs of
the mling class for revenue that was primarily responsible for its decline.
(42)
An important point of Dobb's hypothesis was that the landlords'
growing need for revenue was met, up to the fourteenth c~n~ur~, by a
growing population that severely declined afterwards precIpItatmg the
economic crisis of the feudal system (48). North and Thomas have
followed this route to propose a broadly Malthusian explanation for the
crisis of feudalism. According to them, the classic form of the manor and
the economic relations on which it was based were originally dependant
upon the existence of abundant land (and thus relatively scarce labour
force), political fragmentation and the centrality of an economy of
production for immediate consumption vis-a-vis a still inci~ient mar~et
economy during the Middle Ages. However, the la~e medIeval pe~lOd
(characterised by all those geographical, agro-ecol?glCal, technologIcal,
economic and political features mentioned above) WItnessed a spectacular
frontier movement.
Population expanded, regional and interregio~al .commerce revived; ~ew
techniques were developed, and the classic instltlltlOns of both manonahsm
and feudalism changed beyond recognition. (North and Thomas 33)
During this period, the development of the market and t~e ch~nging
ratio between land and labour began to push transformatIons m the
economic relations: even if the "customs of the manor," acting as
sedimented struchrres,
Jorge Camacho 329
reduced the speed of the transition, the lords and serfs ... were increasingly
willing to commute labour dues to money payments on an annual basis,
and the lords to rent out their demesnes. (North and Thomas 22)
Reaching the thirteenth century, the best available land in Western
Europe had for the most part been colonized; geographical expansion had
either ceased or continued only on marginal lands but population
expansion continued until the beginning of the fourteenth century. Then
the feudal order centred on the manor reached a critical conjuncture:
Population growth, increasing land scarcity, and diminishing rerums to a
growing population in this period proved to be a fall in the living standards
to the point where famine and pestilence pressed on society, reruming the
cycle once more to a ratio of labour scarcity and land abundance. (North
and Thomas 23)
As an outcome of the dramatic fall in population, the ratio between the
relative factor prices of agricultural labour and land tipped in favour of the
former. This time around, however, given that the market did not retreated
completely and the conditions of political fragmentation remained, the
landlords were incapable of maintaining territorialized the flows by
colluding to reinstate a 'second serfdom' as it later occurred in Eastern
Europe. Given that the possibility for the peasants of escaping to the town
was also a constant threat, this process brought about a "momentary
impoverishment of the seigniorial class" (Bloch in Wallerstein 26),
accompanied by a generalised cessation of clearings, recession of
settlements, the beginning of the process of enclosure and engrossing of
lands, and the renting or selling of estates to better-off peasants; in sum, all
the characteristic features of the dissolution of feudalism that set free the
elements brought together by the capitalist conjunction.
In Dobb's as well as in North and Thomas' account, the order of the
cycle that lead to crisis and dissolution took the classic form-fama,
pestus et bellum-posited as the inescapable outcome or secular trend
driven by the inherently expansionist character of the medieval system of
production: all good land having been occupied and population still
growing, a drop in· productivity and diminishing returns brought about
famines that set the stage for the Black Death and violent conflicts to prey
on the remaining population. Following historian Gustaf Utterstrom,
Wallerstein considers another important variable that prompts him to
characterise the crisis of feudalism as a veritable "socio-physical
conjuncture" (35). According to the former, climatic cycles or changes
were "decisive factors" causally connected to the demographic and
330 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
economic cycles that marked the period: severe winters in the fourteenth
and early fifteenth century, corresponding to economic recession, mild
winters between the later fifteenth and middle sixteenth century,
corresponding to economic expansion, and severe winters again in the late
seventeenth century. And while Wallerstein follows other historians like
Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in expressing doubt about
the explanatory primacy of climatic change over other factors, more recent
research has insisted upon the important role played by climatic cycles in
the crisis precipitated at the end of the Middle Ages.
"The year 1315," writes Hubert Lamb,
when the grain failed to ripen all across Europe, was probably the worst of
the evil sequence which followed. The cumulative effect produced famine
in many parts of the continent so dire that there where deaths from hllnger
and disease on a very great scale, and incidents of cannibalism. were
reported even in the countries of western Europe ... Thereafter. the
fourteenth century seems to have brought wild, and rather long-lasting
variations of weather in western and central Europe. (195)
According to him, the generalised wetness of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries brought with it an "unhealthy time" with a multiplicity
of diseases preying on mankind, but also on animals and crops: mun{ains
of all kinds, ergotism, and most notably, of course, the bubonic plague
(199). Given that climatic variations brought about as well a widespread
desertion of farms and village settlements and transformations in
agriculture and husbandry, Lamb feels entitled to conclude that
There was a complex of factors in which climate was deeply involved,
rather than the Black Death and economic troubles alone or the intellectual
questionings of the time, which brought the end of the old medieval era.
(200)
Walking alone the same lines, Neville Brown has developed an even
more interesting account of the "bad weather crisis of 1314-22 in Northern
Europe," a period he calls "the Dantean anomaly" (251).3 Following
Lamb, he locates the origin of this climatic anomaly in a ridge displacing
southwards a polar front that, recurring during this period, sustained
"quasi-continuously a wide cyclonic circulation of moist and unstable air,
polar in origin" (251-2). Most significantly, Brown argues that a climate-
driven "downtmn from 1275 or thereabouts undoubtedly played a part in
the economic turndown or levelling out of Europe in the late thirteenth
century" (256). Stepping once more into those counterfactual hypothesis
that serve only to highlight the contingency and precariousness of the
Jorge Camacho 331
course of history, we fmd Brown arguing that Europe as it existed could
have, "in principle," come out of the economic recession: in principle, that
is, "except for the Dantean anomaly" (256).
As it may be clear now, the historical 'plateau' to which the title of this
piece makes reference includes the "medieval prelude" to the assembling
of the capitalist machine: an historical conjuncture in which the complex
network of factors differentiating Europe from China and other world-
civilizations proved decisive. According to Braudel, Wallerstein (67-8)
and others, as we move into the long sixteenth century, c. 1450-1640, it is
possible to witness already the progressive actualisation of a capitalist
world-economy and thus to start thinking about something like such
'victory of theW est over the Orient' that most intrigued Deleuze and
Guattari. At this point, however, and despite the fact that it is during this
period that the proper history of the capitalist. conjunction begins, our
historical account must give way to some theoretical or philosophical
conclusions.
Perhaps noticeably, we have constructed the account of the process
almost in a regressive and upside-down fashion in order to highlight the
intervening variables that may allow us to conceive the historical sequence
as a thoroughly socio-ecological process. Despite the fact that Deleuze and
Guattari only partially hinted upon this dimension, a mutually enhancing
relationship can be established between their philosophy and an
ecologically informed historical perspective.
Immediately following their brief discussion of the agro-ecologies of
wheat and rice as determinants for the rather different development and
organization of the State-fonn in Europe and China, Deleuze and Guattari
propound a singular conclusion: "States are made up not only of people
but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities" (Thousand
Plateaus 385). By relating the political form, development and organization
of Chinese and European civilizations to a complex of components that
includes much more than just human individuals, Deleuze and Guattari
point to what cannot but be conceived as a veritable political ecology
where the natural (and technical) ecologies that subtend, surround or, more.
precisely, intermingle with humans in social formations may be said to be
not only politically shaped but also politically shaping. Moreover, while
such ecologically oriented perspective remained for the most part marginal
within their Universal History and their theory of social formations, it may
be seen as an underdeveloped but entirely consistent extension to political
theory of their general ontology of assemblages.
332 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
They rehlrn to the problem of feudalism precisely in one of the
expositions of their tetravalent theory of assemblages. For Deleuze and
Guattari, an assemblage-the name given to the multiplicities that
compose being across all strata of reality-may be characterised along two
lines or axes. Over the horizontal axis, it is comprised of two segments or
dimensions: on the side of content, there is a "machinic assemblage of ...
bodies reacting to one another"; on the side of expression, we have a
"collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of
incorporeal transformations" (Thousand Plateaus 88). Over the vertical
axis, assemblages have, on the one hand, vectors of territorialization or
reterritorialization, which stabilize and bind them to their actual
configuration; on the other, they have vectors of deterritorialization that
pull them towards movements of mutation and open them towards the
virtual. Manuel DeLanda has followed Deleuze and Guattari in proposing
the concept of assemblage and such tetravalent model as a viable building
block for ontology, particularly social ontology (New Philosophy 8-25). Of
special interest for our discussion is the corporeal dimension of content or,
in DeLanda's phrasing, that of "components playing a material role"
because it is there that the problems of political ecology, as defined above,
are largely played out. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari relate "the material or
machinic aspect of an assemblage" to a complex field of relations between
bodies of all kinds (Thousand Plateaus 90). In the context of a social or
political ecology, such complex would include not only human bodies-
and certainly human bodies of all types-but also nonhuman nahlral
bodies and technical ones. "Tools are inseparable from symbioses or
amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage"
(Thousand Plateaus 90). It is thus that Deleuze and Guattari provide a non-
exhaustive inventory of the components to be found in a machinic
assemblage of feudalism:
the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal,
and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the
stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies. (Thousand
Plateaus 89)
To these, many others could be added: the heavy plough, the harness
and the horseshoe; the biogeographic components of the European
continent, especially those found in the North, with its forests and wetter
soils; the articulated coastline that allowed for the expansion of trade;
perhaps even the mild winds that according to Utterstrom allowed for all
the growth in the medieval period; all these should be considered
components of the machinic assemblage under question.
Jorge Camacho 333
At this point, it is possible to enunciate a first principle for the political
ecology that appears from this perspective: social or political formations
are heterogeneous assemblages of human and nonhuman components.
When Deleuze and Guattari affirm that "States are made up not only of
people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals and commodities", when
they characterise the material or machinic aspect of assemblages as an
intermingling of bodies of all kinds, they are pointing to what is perhaps
the main feature of assemblages in general: heterogeneity. Deleuze
explained:
What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of
heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between ...
different natures. (quoted in DeLanda, New Philosophy 121n9)
Indeed, if there is one feahJre that most clearly expresses the ecological
character of Deleuze's ontology as well as Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy in general-revealed in their constant references to transversal
relations across natures, like the famous image of the wasp and the
orcpid-is precisely the importance given to heterogeneity and
heterogeneous relations. 4 As one ecologist recently argued:
Heterogeneity is ubiquitous, and almost nothing in ecology can be
understood without taking account of it. Far from being merely a source of
inconvenient noise in our experimental results, heterogeneity is the very
essence of ecology. (Thompson 559)
This is precisely what the term 'assemblage,' which enjoys a wide
currency in ecological studies, most perfectly caphJres-perhaps even
better than the original French agencement used by Deleuze and Guattari.
The issue of the heterogeneity of social formations or the role of
nonhuman components in them has been most clearly developed by the
social theorists loosely gathered tmder the umbrella-term of actor-network
theory (ANT). As John Law explained:
the crucial analytic move made by actor-network writers [is] the suggestion
that the social is nothing other than patterned networks of heterogeneous
materials. This is a radical claim because it says that these networks are
composed not only of people, but also of machines, animals, texts, money,
architectures-any material that you care to mention. (Law, Notes Theory
2)
Did not Deleuze and Guattari glimpsed the same problems later
developed by actor-network theory when they wrote, once more, "States
334 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
are made up not only of people ... " or when they delineate the machinic
and material aspect of social assemblages? In a recent exposition of their
theoretical framework, Bnmo Latour proposes a series of conditions to
recognize the work explicitly belonging to the ANT framework or that
could be implicitly associated with it. The main one is precisely the
recognition of nonhumans as proper actors within the social world, that is,
components capable of bringing about a difference within the association
or assemblage in question (Latour 10-1,46-7,67-72). This may be taken
as the second principle of the political ecology advocated above: not only
are social assemblages heterogeneous, that is, composed of human and
nonhuman components, but according to the particular configuration, these
latter may playa determinative role. In the framework of actor-network
theory, this recognition requires the adoption of what Law calls the
'principle of generalized symmetry.' "Depending, of course, on the
contingent circumstances, the natural world and artefacts may enter the
account as an explanans" (Law, Technology Heterogeneous Engineering
130-1).
The decision to include nonhuman actors in an account of social
formations emerged, for actor-network theorists, out of the intuition that
human social relations alone are not sufficient to sustain the patterns that
we may call a social order. As Latour explains: "It's the power exerted
through entities that don't sleep and associations that don't break down that
allow power to last longer and expand further" (70, see also Law, Notes
Theory 2). Deleuze and Guattari's reference to a complex field of human
and nonhuman components to account for the more rigid, stratified, and
territorialized power of the Chinese Empire is largely concurrent with such
perspective. Most importantly, the role of nonhuman material components
(natural and technical) may not be only to territorialize or reterritorialize
political assemblages but, according to the contingent configuration, to
drive them towards processes of deterritorialization. This is clearly
illustrated in Law's analysis of the Portuguese maritime expansion that
coincided with the medieval prelude to the capitalist conjunction.
According to such analysis, the nonhuman components that were involved
in the "heterogeneous engineering" of the Portuguese deterritorialization
included: the sailing ship in its fourteenth and early fifteenth century
design as well as the caravel used later, the then recently available
magnetic compass and even the winds and currents between Portugal and
the Canary Islands (Technology Heterogeneous Engineering 118-9).
It is possible to revisit, from this perspective, the problem of the
dissolution of feudalism. What were, according to the account proposed
above, the material components driving vectors of deterritorialization
Jorge Camacho 335
through the machinic assemblage of feudalism or, more precisely, through
the population of assemblages characteristic of European feudalism? As
we have seen-interacting, of course, with the economic and political
structures we mentioned-these were: the agro-ecology of wheat and
cattle driving an extensive, frontier movement; the 'geographical-cum-
navigational opportunities' found in Western and Northern Europe for
commercial circulation; finally, and perhaps most significantly, the
climatic front feeding what Brown calls 'the Dantean anomaly' and the
plagues that followed it to prey on the population proving decisive for the
final dissolution that set free the elements for the capitalist conjunction.
At this point it seems that we have, for the most part, superseded the
postulates of an old philosophy of history represented by Kant, Hegel,
perhaps even by Marx himself. As Deleuze and Guattari argued,
geography-be it ecological or natural, human, social, mental:
wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility
of contingency. It wrest it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the
power ofa 'milieu.' (What is Philosophy? 96)
A history of long-enduring structures, dissolutions and conjunctions-
all of them contingent-substitutes a history of reason, necessity and
finality. History as a theatre of exclusively human and spiritual
development is supplanted by a history of heterogeneous assemblages or
associations between the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the world-
historical character of this development is conditioned only by the
configuration a capitalist world-economy; more precisely conceived,
according to Jason W. Moore, as a veritable "world-ecology" (431).
It is reasonable to think that, in world-history, what holds for the past
will hold for the future. As Deleuze and Guattari recognized, those in
charge of the axiomatic scaffolding of our capitalist world-ecology are
"tormented" by all kinds of flows: certainly of goods and money and
people but also of matter and energy (Thousand Plateaus 468)-
coincidentally, of these latter, major relevance have acquired the flows and
fluctuations of an atmospheric tendency that conditions the survival of the
very world-ecology that precipitated it. As it's always the case, from the
point of view of the current historical conjuncture it is impossible to
foresee for how long the world-historical process will continue and if so
what vectors will prove decisive, what dissolutions and conjun~tions:
deterritorializations and reterritorializations will be required to warrant
such continuation. Ecological contingencies, in any case, will most
probably be determinant.
 ...
336 c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China?
This piece has made use of Deleuze and Guattari's work in order to
argue for a re-visiting and re-conception of the philosophy of world
history that integrates the insights coming out from ecological or
environmental history. As it has been pointed out, the outcome would be a
vision that highlights material contingency (as opposed to rational
necessity) and the heterogeneous associations between human and
nonhuman nature. Moreover, a concern for heterogeneous relations
understood in the widest possible sense-which is well in place in Deleuze
and Guattari's philosophy-was proposed as the particular trait of all
proper ecological thinking. Given that the emphasis has been on the role of
nonhuman nature as an efficient (although never sufficient) cause within
human history, the effect has been to invert the usual direction of
ecological concerns, which most often and appropriately focus on the
much more urgent problem of human action as determinant for the 'fate' of
nonhuman nature. It should go without saying that these two aspects, the
natural future of humanity and the human future of nature, are one within
an immanent plane that was rediscovered for philosophy by Deleuze and
Guattari. It is precisely such plane what must constitute the measure for
any properly contemporary thought.
Notes
1 Some work has been recently devoted either to rediscover the ecological
dimension of Marx's thought in general or to specificaIly integrate ecological
considerations within a Marxist theory of capitalist development. See, for example:
Foster's Marx's Ecology and O'Connor's Natural Causes.
2 Braudel's qualification is important: Deleuze and Guattari, foIlowing a certain
Marxist orthodoxy, restrict historicaIly the definition of capitalism to refer to a
later stage where it constituted a proper industrial mode of production: Around the
sixteenth or seventeenth century? Perhaps even as late as the eighteenth century,
given their reference to industrialism. In the same movement, they extend it
ontologicaIly to cover the whole social field: as a "fuIl social body" (Anti-Oedipus
246). For Braudel, as is weIl known, capitalism in the past-but always in
principle-was not a 'system' extending over or below the whole of society
(Wheels Commerce 238) Thus, he finds it much earlier in history-already
between the thirteenth century (in the Italian city-states) and the sixteenth century,
a period where it was more 'at home' in commerce---while restricting it
ontologicaIly: for him, capitalism proper appears only at the 'commanding heights'
of the economy, both in exchange and production, "as the realm of investment and
of a high rate of capital formation." (232; see also Braudel, Perspective World 57)
3 The Florentine poet Dante Alighieri died in 1321.
4 In DeLanda's version of this ontology of assemblages, heterogeneity is not "a
constant property of assemblages but ... a variable that may take different values"
Jorge Camacho 337
(New Philosophy 11). This manoeuvre is intended to conceptualise organisms and
species as assemblages. We do not fuIly agree with DeLanda's caIl to treat species
as assemblages in themselves and thus, effectively, as mereological sums or
"larger individual whole[ s]" as if individual organisms had a relationship of parts
to whole with the species to which they belong (27). For this reason, we maintain
heterogeneity as perhaps the main property of assemblages.
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Century Vol. 3 (London: Collins, 1984).
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(London: Routledge, 2001).
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Marasme Presente (Paris: Arlea, 1997).
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Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006).
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Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988).
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-. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum,
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Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London:
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York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
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Routledge, 1995).
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Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). .
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INSECT TECHNICS:
INTENSITIES OF ANIMAL BODIES
JUSSI PARIKKA
[... J cultural and technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup,
for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The
industrial age defined its the age of insects ....
-Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 69
insects, as media. In other words, the essay approaches the notion of
"ecology" through an overlapping of media ecologies and "nahIral"
ecologies framed through the discourses of entomology and physiology.
Furthermore, this formulation means expanding the familiar notions of
"media" towards a Deleuzian framework where the term resonates with an
ecological understanding of bodies. In such a take, bodies are vibrations
and foldings with their environments, a theme that was developed in
ethological research and then adopted by Deleuze and Guattari. In this
essay we will see how this theme is useful in a reconcephIalization of
media as environment of interactions, translations and foldings between
heterogeneous bodies. In this context, animal bodies mediate and contract
not only the rhythms of nature, but are mediated as part of the construction
of modern media as well, as conceptual figures but also through the
measures of biopower in physiological research. We need the concept of
ecology to tmderstand the complex translations between animal bodies and
modern technical media and we need an understanding of environmental
relations not as determining structures but as potentials of interaction. A
body's mode of being emerges and develops in the midst of a resonating
milieu. There is no body without another body, which implies vibration,
variation and movement as primary synthesizers of bodies in ecological
relations.
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari explain how the world
contracts different vibrations and how different natural entities act as
condensations of the cosmos. The way a plant forms and senses itself is
through contracting light, salts, carbon. Through this contracting or folding
340 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
"it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its
composition: it is sensation itself" (What Is Philosophy? 212). Brains are
not found only in the heads of humans and animals, but microbrains
inhabit the inorganic world as well. The world is media, in a manner of
sensation and contracting, even though Deleuze and Guattari constantly
avoided using the specific tenn of "media" as for them it applies only to
mass media of communications. Still, it is possible to continue from their
philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards directions of a natural philosophy
of media where the tenn starts to encompass the recording of time in
rocks, the capacities of transmission in plants and animals, and the weird
sensations of insects that perceive not only through eyes and ears, but
through chemicals as well.
In fact, recent years of technological innovation have embraced exactly
insects and the like as perfect models for media design. In the 1980s, the
cyborg became a pre-eminent symbol of the late-modem conflation of
biology and technology. This all too familiar figure was, however, always
weighed down by a degree of anthropomorphic baggage, largely due to the
widely distributed idea of Man and his prosthesis being the characteristic
mode of conjoining biology and technology. Yet, since early cybernetics, a
panorama of other biological examples was also discussed in a
technological context, from viruses to flies and rats to insects. Indeed, at
the same time as the man-machine boom was approaching its peak years,
other ideas of non-human models of organization and perception were
emerging both in media design and consequently in media theory as well.
In this context, the epigraph above from A Thousand Plateaus becomes
clear: insects, germs, bacteria and particles do not just denote biological
categories of knowledge, but can simultaneously be seen as carriers of
intensities and potentials. What defines an insect? Its structure, its
evolutionary path, its position in the ecology? Deleuze rejects in Henri
Bergson's vein any such spatializing modes of understanding entities of
nature and culture and opts for a more ethological brand of analysis:
natural, cultural and technological bodies are defined by their potentials
for interaction and enaction, the potentials of what they can do instead of
what they are. However, the insect/technology-coupling can be found
already from the nineteenth cenhlry onward.
In entomological research and popular cultural discourses of the
nineteenth century, insects suddenly emerged not only as interesting
examples of the animal world, God's tiny creations, but also as entities that
expressed alien fonns of perception, sensation and organization. Books on
entomology can be read as curiosity cabinets: they are filled with
descriptions and tales about different ways of perceiving the world,
Jussi Parikka 341
uncanny affects and alternative enviromnental relations. Think of the
cicada that stays almost inert in a state of waiting for 17 years before
coming out of the soil to mate for a brief period. Or think of the insects
that sense primarily through chemicals instead of for example vision as we
humans. Similar examples are the reason why Jacob von Uexkiill, who
was a big influence for Deleuze's Spinozian ethology, was enthusiastic
about all those different animal worlds that folded the cosmos so
differently than the human senses.
In this essay, I focus on the idea of looking at insects as media
themselves. By excavating a certain archaeology of Deleuze's ideas,
especially Bergson's notions on "insects technics" as elaborated recently
by Elizabeth Grosz, the point is to think through some of the consequences
of what a more enviromnental, ecological and biophilosophical
understanding of "media" could entail. In this framework, media is
considered somewhat parallel to a Deleuzian understanding of a body: it is
a force field, a potentiality, an intersection point where forces of the
cosmos contract to form certain potentials for affects and percepts. Or,
perhaps more accurately, the body is fonned at the crossroads of affects
and percepts, a superject in the sense Deleuze adopted from
A.N.Whitehead. Thus, as Rosi Braidotti explains, the "Deleuzian body is
in fact an ecological unit." Bodies/media work only through relatedness
where "this enviromnentally-bound intensive subject is a collective entity;
it is an embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes
and transforms energies and forces" (Braidotti, "Politics + Ecology" 211).
This ecological ontology challenges fundamentals of media theory,
especially the anthropomorphic models of the philosophy of technology
from Ernst Kapp's prosthesis theory at the end of the nineteenth century to
Marshall McLuhan and the subsequent ideas of prostheses and humans as
the key models for analysis of media. Instead, a tum towards Deleuzian
intensive enviromnental relations and Bergson's early ideas concerning
insects from 1907 gives rise to new, non-anthropomorphic modes of
cultural analysis (Grosz, The Nick of Time). I The essay focuses especially
on two themes: the capturing of animal intensities as a key goal of modem
biopolitics, and the grounding of an understanding of media technologies
not in the human body, but in that of insects. In this task, Bergson's
philosophy of instinct provides a good grounding for an understanding of
technics of nature where technology is not just tied to the genesis of the
human being, as so many of Bergson's contemporaries suggested.
342 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
Insect Technics
The modem entomological discourse offered since the early nineteenth
century a curious view into microworlds of animals. In this context,
insects were often grasped through their weird capacities for perception
and interaction. However, a much more ontologically interesting take that
tried to dispense with the long tradition of theological and teleological
thought was introduced in Bergson's Creative Evolution in 1907. For
Bergson, the insect offered an immanent fOlm of original technics, with
the body of the insect acting as an instrument in its own right. Instead of
limiting the concept of technology to the work of intelligence only,
Bergson proposed that there exists several potential ways for engaging
with the materiality of the world. This exhibits the dynamic creativity of
nature-hence the notion of "creative evolution." Bergson thought that
intelligence (as with humans) expressed perhaps the ability to create
instruments as flexible tools for the control of nature, but instinct2 (as with
insects) was an altogether different mode of connecting with the
environment; turning oneself into a tool by folding with the immanent
milieu. As Bergson illustrates, the insect is less a haphazard biological
curiosity than an important figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
for opening up questions of ontology, materiality and technology that are
still relevant in the context of contemporary culture oftechnical media.
Darwin had given the original impehls to think of nature as a force of
"perfection" in his Origin a/Species (1859). For him, natural selection was
a kind of immanent process that allowed structures to evolve into
perfected forms. This evolution was a continuous and continuing process,
implying nahlre as a perfection machine. 3 Nonetheless, Bergson suggested
that we could differentiate the diverse modes of organisms and tools to
shed light on the problem of evolution, offering a vocabulary of technics
to help with the ontology of dynamic nature. Bergson was a diligent critic
of certain modes of Darwinism that were too keen on imposing passivity
and habituation with the environment as the goals of organisms and
evolution. Instead, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, for Bergson, life has no goal
or telos. It is a mode of differentiation whose future forms we are unable
to decipher. This approach implies a radical openness to a variety of forms
of life beyond our perceptual world or even carbon-based life as we know
it (Grosz, The Nick a/Time, 215-6). Here Grosz points towards Bergson's
philosophy as a precursor to contemporary artificial life scientists and the
quest for potential forms of life. In fact, Bergson seems to occupy a key
position in the realization that more primitive forms of life could be
integrated into a novel understanding of life, artifice and matter. Deleuze
Jussi Parikka 343
underlines a similar point in his reading of Bergson. The environment is
not only an external condition for an emergence of an organism
(matter/life) but something through which "the living being manufactures
a body, a form, for itself" (Bergsonism 103). Deleuze continues to explain
that this is the problematic of life, or, life as a problematic, or a "stating of
a problem" that matter poses.
Grosz writes that for Bergson life is a process of overcoming itself.
Bergson reads this into a diagram of differentiation where 1) animal life is
differentiated from plant life (immobile), and 2) animal life is divided into
instinctive and intelligent. However, the divisions are not mutually
exclusive. There remains a potential of becoming-plant in animals and that
of becoming-animal in plants, which suggests the continuously open-
ended orientation of the world that defies pre-determined mechanistics or
thinking in terms of "essences,,4 (Grosz, The Nick 0/ Time 218). A
temporal approach to the intensive becoming of entities bypasses the
dangers of mechanistic and finalistic modes of understanding: the world as
an open-ended becoming, something that Deleuze tried to understand
through Bergson, but Grosz claims we can fmd already in Darwin's
thought.
Bergson argues that in animals two tendencies reign: instinct and
intelligence. Bergson insists on seeing the mode of instinct not merely as
an automated response a primitive animal (like insect) structure gives to a
stimulus, but also as a mode involving "discernment and attunement" with
the environment (Grosz, The Nick a/Time, 224; Bergson 142). The insect
has for Bergson "two modes of action on the material world", either by
creating a direct means via its own organism or by constructing an indirect
assemblage which acts as an instnnnent with which to fashion "inorganic
matter" (142). This two-fold solution represents the interlinked nature of
instinct and intelligence where insects as well are at times ilaccompanied
by gleams of intelligence." Bergson's examples are the bees who can
"invent new and really intelligent arrangements to adapt themselves to
such new conditions" (142). The body and structure of an insect can
become its natural tool even if they would have to "extend" their bodies as
part of arrangements with their changing environment, as Bergson writes.
The main difference to tools as they were understood in early twentieth
century culture is that with insects, the tools are their own bodies and
tendencies. In this context, Bergson's ideas of the force of natural instinct
as a machine of perfection indeed sound close to Darwin:
Instinct finds the appropriate instrument at hand: this instrument, which
makes and repairs itself, which presents, like all works of nature, an
infinite complexity of detail combined with a marvellous simplicity of
 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
344
function, does at once, when required, what it is called upon to do, without
difficulty and with a perfection that is wonderful. (140)
Bergson thus offered an early translation and explication of insect
capacities in terms of technics of nature. The force of ins~cts was ~ue to
their capacities of smooth interaction with nature and Its matenals, a
tracing of the intensive qualities of the surrounding environment.
Considering the topic of this essay, Bergson's enthusiasm for instincts and
animals provided an early theorization of the insect body as a technology,
or media, in itself The insect turned from a biological object into a sign of
creative technics of nature, an alternative solution to problems posited by
life. The insect's body becoming a medium in itself should be understood
then as a variation on a Bergsonian theme. The insect's body was disclosed
as an alternative way of relaying the impulses and problems of the
environment and producing itself as a novel "technological" solution. Here
technology turns from a human cultural enterprise into a folding of
intensive forces in environmental relations. It signals a creative tension
between life and matter as intertwined. Life is conceptualized in the
Bergsonian ontology as a process of articulating or respondi.ng t~ pro.blems
posed by matter. "The construction of an eye, for example, IS pnmanly the
solution to a problem posed in tenns of light" (Deleuze, Bergsonism 103).
Construction becomes detached from a social constructionism to refer to a
process of ontogenesis where evolution is understood as a fabrication, a
technics of a kind. Next I will turn to early theories of technology and how
they articulated the idea of technological evolution as springing from the
human form and how a Deleuzian-Bergsonian focus might help us to
bypass that anthropocentrism prevalent in such theories of media and
technology.
Origins of Technics
Throughout the nineteenth cenhlry insects spread from biology to :ari~us
other cultural discourses. Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes how the Vlctonan
enthusiasm for entomology and insect worlds is related to a general
discourse of natural history that as a genre defined the century. Through
the themes of "exploration" and "taxonomy" Lecercle claims that Alice in
Wonderland can be read as a key novel of the era in its evaluation and
classification of various life worlds beyond the human. Like Alice in the
1865 novel, new landscapes and exotic species are offered as an annchair
exploration of worlds not merely extensive but also. op~ned up by an
intensive gaze into microcosms that endlessly vary m SIze and shape.
Jussi Parikka 345
Uncanny phenomenal worlds tie together the entomological quest;
Darwinian perspectives inspired both biological accounts of curious
species and Alice's adventures into imaginative worlds of twisting logic. In
taxonomic terms, the entomologist is surrounded by a new cult of
archiving in private and public collections. New modes of visualizing and
representing insect forms of life produced a new phase of taxonomy as
public craze instead of a mere scientific tool. But here again, the wonder
worlds of Alice or the nonsense poet Edward Lear are the ideal points of
reference for the nineteenth century natural historian and entomologist:
.And it is part of a craze for discovering and classifYing new species. Its
advantage over natural history is that it can invent those species (like the
Snap-dragon-fly) in the imaginative sense, whereas natural history can
invent them only in the archaeological sense, that is discover what already
exists. Nonsense is the entomologist's dream come true, or the Linnaean
classification gone mad, because gone creative .... (Lecercle 204)
For Alice, the feeling of not being herself and "being so many different
sizes in a day is very confusing" (Carroll 42),5 which of course is
something incomprehensible to the Caterpillar she encounters. It is not
queer for the Caterpillar whose mode of being is defined by
metamorphosis and the various perception/action-modulations that
transformation brings about. It is only the suddenness of the becoming-
insect of Alice that dizzies her. The insect body suggests here an
alternative. composition of forces and capacities. Whereas Alice is used to
being defined by a certain stability of her human body, the continuous
metamorphoses in the novel gesture towards worlds more familiar to
insects, like the caterpillar.
As precursors of ethology, such natural historical quests (whether
archaeological, entomological or imaginative) expressed an appreciation
of phenomenal worlds differing from that of the human with its two hands,
two eyes and two feet. The bodies analyzed and mapped were not
restricted to already defined capabilities, structural fonns or mere
evolutionary trees. Instead, in a manner of Deleuzian ethology of forces,
these explorations were after the potentials, affects of bodies. In a way,
this entailed a kind of extended Kantianism interested in the a priori
conditions of alternative life worlds. Curiously the obsession with new
phenomenal worlds was connected to the emergence of new technologies
of movements, sensation and communication (all challenging the Kantian
apperception of Man as the historically constant basis of knowledge and
perception). Nature, viewed through a technological lens, was gradually
becoming the new "storehouse of invention" (New York Times, 4 August
346 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
1901)6 that was to entice inventors into perfecting their developments.
This shift also reveals a change in the contemporary understanding of
technology-one that marks the rise of modem technology by the end of
the nineteenth cenhlry-which has usually been attributed to an
anthropological and ethnological rum. As Georges Canguilhem notes, the
new appreciation of technology as art decoupled it from a strictly rational
register. This then connected technology as part of the telos of humanity as
defined historically through anthropology: technology became the defining
threshold of the human being in contrast to animals. Unlike Descartes'
understanding of the equivalence of mechanics and living organisms, Kant
suggested at the end of the eighteenth cenrury a reconsideration of technics
in terms of human history. Skill preceded knowledge, just like machines
preceded the scientific knowledge of them. Canguilhem quotes Kant:
Art, regarded as a human skill, differs from science (as ability differs from
knowledge) in the same way that a practical aptitude differs from a
theoretical faculty, as technique differs from theory. What one is capable
of doing, as soon as we merely know what ought to be done and therefore
are sufficiently cognizant of the desired effect, is not called art. Only that
which man, even if he knows it completely, may not therefore have the
skill to accomplish belongs to art. (Canguilhem 60)
Canguilhem maps the advent of a philosophy of technology that sought
to find the origins of such a skill as art (as a productive, practical faculty)
in the anthropological layers of human nature. As one of the key thinkers
of early philosophy of technology, Ernst Kapp introduced his famous
theories of technology as an extension of the human species in 1877 in
Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte
der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. In this early precursor of later
cyborg theories and ideas of organ projection, Kapp proceeded to think
technology as based on the human body. The human being is the measure
of all things (Der Mensch das Maass der Dinge), a proposition that was
meant as a continuation of the Kantian theme of perceptual worlds. There
is no way to break beyond what we as anthropological human beings
perceive, which was not a reason for mourning, but instead an instance of
pride. For Kapp, loyal to the Western tradition of thought, the human
being as a self-conscious mind was the privileged caretaker of the natural
world. Yet, Man is his physiological body, which extends as part of the
world, interfacing inner with the outer reality. Kapp was highly
appreciative of the physiological understanding of the bodily substance of
being, but regarded the human being not emerging from the animal but
coming after the animal (Kapp 21).7 This paradigm relates to his curious
Jussi Parikka 347
in~erpretation of the recapirulation thesis, proposed by Ernst Hackel. For
Hackel, th~ en~bryo of a~y orga~ism recapitulates in its ontogenesis the
~h~l~genetIc h~story of Its species, a theory that underlined how every
mdl~ldual was m a way a perfect condensation of the whole history of its
speCIes. Kapp adapts this theory to an anthropological and world historical
frame: each human being is a recapirulation of the whole of animal
kingdom, being the potential of any animal whatsoever (Kapp 18-20).8
~hrough the human form, technology and animal kingdom are hence
contmuously connected. Yet for Kapp, the human hand remained the "ur-
form" of technics. The creating and laboring Man was, for this
contemporary of Karl Marx and fmmer srudent of the Prussian state
education system, qualified as superior to the non-reflexive animal. The
anthropological notion of technology valued the hand as the "natural tool"
from which artificial cre~tion stems. Human history was the history of
labor ~here ~o~k was logIcally one mode of activity (Thiitigkeit), but only
CO?SClOUS actIVIty was valued as work. Hence, for animals, work does not
eXIst, eve~ though bees and. ants might seemindustrious (Kapp 34). This
re~alls Heldegger's later claIms that the animal is poor in the world and
WIthout a self-reflective possibility to understand the world as worlding.
For Kapp, tec~nology was a priori fixed as part of the human body,
perhaps not as a SImple organ projection, but in any case as a co-evolution
of the human and the technological. The eye provides the model for the
camera obscura and other artificial modes of visualization and the
muscles .work in conc.ert with new machines of industry. The t~legraph is
formed m pat'a~lel w~th the nerve system as a co-evolutionary system,
thereby r~sonatmg WIth Kapp's general anthropology of human culture.
T~e ~edla technological exteriorization leads to a Hegelian kind of a
dlale~tlCal emergence to new levels of self-consciousness, echoing later
twentIeth century McLuhanite and Teilliard de Chardin inspired views
(Kapp. Hartmann). Canguilliem notes, however, that this theory
encountered already early on severe "stumbling blocks" with such
technologies as fire and the wheel, which clearly do not stem from the
human body (Canguilliem 61). The insect media perspective provokes
another ~halle~ge: how. about looking at media in radically ecological
terms as mtenslVe potentIals? What if the human being as a media form is
only one mode of carrying potentials, and different animal and cosmic
forces are to be seen as lessons in "alien media"? Such themes have been
e~abor~ted not only in science fiction 9 but also in ethology and meticulous
blOloglC~1 a~d ethological research into animal worlds of perception and
commUll1C~tlOn. However, despite the emphasis on extracting a critical
understandmg and ontology of media from such ideas, much of animal
348 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
affects have been defined and captured in terms of the biopolitics of
modernity. This context ties closely with the above-mentioned theories of
technology but also feeds towards an understanding of the intensive
potentials of animal bodies, as I will illustrate further below.
Animal Captures
In the physiological research so dear to Kapp, the thresholds of human
sensation and perception became a crucial field of research for the aspiring
media culture. This development emerged alongside the need to provide
infonnation on the human-animal physiology for the new rationalization
and organization of labour and what spun-off into new creations of modes
of sensing in visual media culture. The physiological understanding of the
human organism provided the necessary impetus for research focused
specifically on perception severed from the human observer, leading to the
subsequent rationalization, reproduction and control of physiological
events. This can be deciphered as a key field of biopolitics of modem
media technological culture (see Crary). In physiological research, the
human being served as the storehouse of sensation and perception, as in
Johannes Muller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (from 1833
on). Muller's work exemplifies research that focused on the interfacing
layer of sense organs between the outer world and the inner consciousness.
Senses were seen as the indispensable layer that infonned animals of the
environment outside them, an interface that also detennined the mode of
orientation for a specific animal. Tones perceived are detennined by the
quality of the sense of hearing, just as light and colors are qualified by the
specific energy of nerves of vision (MUller 255). Senses are seen as tools
with which to grasp the world, world-forming probes and modes of
folding the inside with the outside. In developmental biology, resonating
views of organs as tools and organisms as complexes of instruments were
proposed by Wilhelm Roux at the hIm of the century, later criticized by
Heidegger (213). What Heidegger embraced, however, at least to a certain
extent, was Jacob von Uexkull's 1920s appreciation and development of
Muller's ideas into his own ethological approach to the world.
As Jonathan Crary explains, Muller understood the body as resembling
a factory of decentralized actions, "run by measurable amounts of energy
and labour" (88). Life was primarily a set of interconnected
physiochemical processes, and the body became an inventory of
mechanical capacities (Crary 89). Indeed, not just human beings, but also
animals and insects, were seen as part of this storehouse. In the early 1826
work Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinns, Muller addresses
Jussi Parikka 349
the sense thresholds of insects. The later work Handbuch der Physiologie
des Menschen, and especially its second part, similarly addresses the
visual capacities of insects, spiders and other "lower animals," noting the
peculiar .aggregate vision of insects. (Miiller 305-312). Consider Crary's
observatIon of how Miiller, also writing as part of the Kantian legacy
concerning the perceptional apparatus of human beings, nevertheless
already stands at the crumbling point of Kant's apperception as the crucial
and indispensable synthesis of perception:
When MUller distinguishes the human eye from the compound eyes of
clUstacea and insects, he seems to be citing our optical equipment as a kind
of Kanti.an faculty that ?rganizes sensory experience in a necessary and
unchan~lllg ,,;ay ..But I11S work, in spite of his praise of Kant, implies
somethlllg qUite different. Far from being apodictic or universal in nature
like. the "spe~tacles" of time and space, our physiological apparatus i~
~galll an~ agalll shown to be defective, inconsistent, prey to illusion, and,
111. a clU~lal manner, susceptible to external procedures of manipulation and
stimulatlOn that have the essential capacity to produce experience for the
subject. (92)
Physiological research was keen on animal modes of perception as
well. I~portant in addition to Miiller's early remarks concerning animal
perceptIOn and movement were the famous later experiments by Etienne-
Jules Marey. Marey, known for his pre-cinematic research on the nature of
perception and movement, occupied himself early on with animal motion.
In La Machine Animale (1873) the creator of various mechanisms for
tracing the movements of the animal body addressed comprehensively the
muscular and mechanical characteristics of movement and flight of
n~merous classes .of animals. Even though Marey acknowledges the long
hIstory of analogIes between machines and animals he underlines the
importanc.e of this parallel for the research this specific era of
tec~ological measurement of animal bodies. It is not only a valid parallel,
wntes Marey, but also of practical use: studying animals allows us to
engage with the basic principles of how mechanics work, with the
addi~ional possibility of offering a synthetic counterpart for the moving,
sensmg alllmal (Marey, La Machine Animale VI). In an age of technical
speed and movement (railroads but also navigation and flight) Marey's
underlining of the importance of research on nature and natural ~ovement
~or the .progress of Mankind seemed to offer insights into the physical
mteractIOns of bodies with their envirolllllent. Accurate research provided
a tool for optimizing certain repetitive acts and movements which
resonated with the emerging sciences of optimizing labor movem~nts, for
350 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
example. The work of cutting (into) time from Marey's work to devices
such as the Phenakistoscope, the Thaumatrope and the Zoetrope (note the
direct reference to animal life) provided a new understanding of the nature
of time but also of space that could now be optimized and rationalized, as
in the factories or the emerging entertainment industry (most evidently
cinema). Yet, this did not exhaust the contingency and chance inherent in
the tensions of time and media technologies as argued by Mary Ann
Doane.
In addition to a number of other interests, Marey stands as one of the
early pioneers of insect media. For example human bi-pedal locomotion
remained merely one potential example of how movement could be
conducted (contrasted with for example the four-legged movement of the
horse), opening up a panorama of nature to be analyzed in their discrete
moments of movement. Insects were a special case of flight for Marey,
interesting due to the huge pace of wing movement as well as the sounds
emitted from that process. In La Machine Animale, the questions regarding
insect flight were: 1) the frequency of wing movement, 2) the successive
positions the wings take as part of the loop of movement, 3) how the
power of motion that moves and upkeeps the movement develops. The
same key questions were also expressed in various other publications
reporting on Marey's insect studies (La Machine Animale 188; "Note sur Ie
vol des insectes" 136-9; "Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the
animal kingdom" 226-85).10 The practical dilemma was how to record the
movement that was beyond the human eye to perceive. On the one hand,
Marey saw the acoustic traces left by movement as indexes of the
frequency, but on the other hand, more accurate research equipment was
needed. Proceeding from observation to potential causes, the so-called
graphic method, and especially Hermann von Helmholz's invention of the
myograph in the early l850s for registering movement in graphical form,
provided invaluable assistance in hlrning continuous movement into
distinctive and analyzable units ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in
the animal kingdom" 227). The achml wings were taken here as indexes
and harnessed so as to leave wing marks on a blackened paper, traces of
the points of the continuous movement ("Lectures on the phenomena of
flight in the animal kingdom" 235).11 The result was a graphical
representation of various kinds of movements, at best like beautiful
abstract lithographic art. Thus, it is no wonder, as Marta Braun argues in
her book Picturing Time, that Marey's way of caphlring temporal
intensities into a media technological form found resonance later in
modernist art, for example in Marcel Duchamp's work, where Marey's
positivism was turned into a fascination for temporal perception detached
Jussi Parikka 351
fro~ the e~eIyday ~abit~al ~uman way of seeing the world. A new way of
seeIng artIculated m sCIenttfic and media technological contexts (later
celebrated by such filmmakers and writers as Jean Epstein) was connected
to a search for new perception/action-connections that moved beyond the
human eye/hand-coup~e. Perception moves beyond the human perception
to cont.exts technologIcal (the nonhuman eye of the movie camera) but
~lso ammal ~the nonhuman affects and percepts lived through for example
msects.) ThIS r~presents the new phase in perceptual techniques tensed
between the ammal and the technological where beyond registering the
non-human we can talk about the ontogenetic potential these machines
express (see Manning 85).
An expression of Marey's interests of particular relevance here was his
artificial insect creation (1869), a tool for theoretical study. In a model
construct of wings moved by an air pump and inserted on a drum, Marey
was capable of reproducing the flight patterns of insects (wing stroke
patte~s in t~e fom: of an .eight) that allowed him to measure the capacities
of a~llnals m theIr envI~onments even better than the originals. The
questIO? was ho,,":, the wmgs and their potential allowed such a "rapid
tra~slatIO~ of motIve force" ("Lectures on the phenomena of flight in the
ammal kmgdom" 246). Marey's experiments soon attracted interest
beyond France. For example, various U.S. newspapers and publications
were keen to report on curious interfacing of animal locomotion and
artificial creation. The papers expressed the undoubted potential in
Mare~'s researc~ for the emerging topic of human flying. Scientific
American underlmed how Marey's experiments are useful to aeronauts
"and those aspiring to be aeronauts" ("The Velocity of Insects' Wings
duri?g Flig~t" 241_:'6).12 Certainly, war and the continuous effort put into
~ndmg ~enal. solutIOns t? warfare is a key context for understanding the
mterest m ~y~ng and aenal movement of bodies. The U.S. had just come
out of the CIvIl War and France and Prussia were on the verge of their war
a~oun~ ~hat time. War.~rovides an exemplary context of the workings of
bIOpohtIcs as a mobIhzation of population(s) but also research into
efficient solutions in organization and projectiles for example. If a crucial
part of the analysis of moving bodies with Marey and others was to focus
on the problem of perceiving bodies in motion then the solutions in
milita~ conte~t to. pro~ucing bodies into motion and subsequently
catchmg them m theIr mohon was of utmost importance. 13

352 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
Marey's artificial insect creation. (La Machine Animale 207)
In another example, Harper's monthly underlined the fascinating
prospects of the apparatus of Marey. which al~o demonstrated the
importance of coupling of organs with theIr surroundmgs:
By an improved artificial apparatus, Professor Marey has succee~ed in
simulating with entire accuracy the movement ofthe meIJo1branous wmgs .of
insect in flight, to wit: the raising of the body above a gIven leve~, a.nd Its
forward motion in space. The apparatus shows clearly th~t It IS ~he
resistance of the air which imparts to the wings the figure-of-eight ~ot1?n
referred to as the same curve was described by the wing of the artIfiCIal
insect, which, of course, only received as its motor rectilineal movements
of elevation and depression in the wings. It is, therefore, erron~ous to say
that a movement of torsion is voluntary on the part of the msect, and
assimilated to the effect of the action of a helix, in screwing its way
through the air. ("Flight of Birds and Insects")
Animal bodies were seen as potentialities that could exceed
themselves, raising the body above a given level, to qu~te a line .from the
Harper's Monthly article. The flying, intensive ammal bodI~s.. were
surpassing the level of the human body eager to tap into the possIbIlIty of
accelerating itself beyond its everyday movemen~s on two legs. By
analyzing the defining thresholds of hu.man. percept~ons .and mov~ments
the physiological agenda was able to pmpomt the dIffermg potentIals of
Jussi Parikka 353
diverse animal bodies. This phase of analyzing and (re)producing
machinic and insectoid perceptions marks a special phase of capturing of
affects (pre-personal, a-human) as intensive capacities. As a form of
bioproduction that instead of limiting cultivates processes of life, the
intensive qualities of even primitive life were understood early on.
Naturally this represents a veIY different epistemological framework from
that of Deleuze's or Bergson's. In biopolitical production, even though the
nonhuman forces are acknowledged, the intensive potentials are translated
in terms of spatialized modes of knowledge and reproduction. They freeze
the intensive forces of the cosmos as Deleuze and Guattari characterize the
mode of production of science in comparison to for example art and
philosophy. All of them are "fonns of thought or creation" (What is
Philosophy? 208), but they work in different modes and with different
relations to the forces of the world: it is the "task" of science to slow down
the variations and bring about functions and prospects.
In addition, such scientific translations parallel with the rise of modem
media technologies. As Pasi Valiaho has argued, Marey's work stands as
an interesting interface of experimentalization of life (sensation,
locomotion, etc.) and cinema. For Valiaho ("Simulation, Automata,
Cinema: A Critique of Gestures" 15), both are defined by their quest to
"quantify, enhance and perhaps even to (re)produce the 'animal
machine.",J4 Through the creation of measurable abstract yardsticks, the
animal became translated from an intensive assemblage into an extensive,
spatialized temporality that could be repeated~ven without the animal.
In a corresponding fashion, Akira Mizuta Lippit has referred to the
appropriation of animals by (and into) technical media as an emblematic
part of modernization. The disappearance of animals from the actual living
worlds of urbanized Western societies was paralleled by the incorporation
of animal affects and intensities in the emerging media technologies of
modernity, cinema in the forefront.
The graphic inscription machines of Marey (and of the whole field of
physiology dedicated to excavating the energies of the body) worked
beyond the henneneutic register of meaning and obediently translated the
language of nature into visual form. Valiaho argues this to be a creation of
a certain kind of a "degree zero" of perception, severed from the human
observer, registering life before the intervention of hermeneutic meaning-
making. Writing ofthe registering machines, Marey notes
These machines are not only destined to replace the observer, in which
case they perform their role with ove1whelming supremacy, but they also
have their own domain where nothing can replace them. When the eye
ceases seeing, the ear hearing and the sense of touch feeling, or when our
354 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
senses give us deceptive appearances, these machines are like new senses
of astounding precision. (La Methode graphique 108, qtd. in Viiliaho,
"Simulation, Automata, Cinema" 19)
But if the graphic method of registering animal life referred to and
created a technological plane severed from the conscious observer, it also
implied the intensity inherent in other forms of life than human, The
machines marked for Marey a new mode of sensation of "astounding
precision" but in a parallel movement, animal life introduced the ideat~at
the Kantian determination of the perceptive qualities of the human bemg
were not the only ones possible. Instead, there was something akin to a
foreign planet of perceptions waiting to be excavated and reproduced. This
relates to alternative ways of understanding technology. 'Intelligence' can
be seen as the ability to select and reproduce wanted actions and 'instinct'
as non-reflexive, continuous folding with the world. The capturing of
instinctive life by analytic intelligence is one way to express the
interfacing of continuous life processes with quantifying discrete units of
analysis.
Insect Media: From Intelligence to Instinct
Biopolitics has been in the wake of Foucault defined as the key field of
modem politics. Following Foucault's work of the late 1970s, when he
mapped the modem emergence of sovereign power, caphlring human life
through the notion of species and its generic capacities has been a key
theme of research into biopolitics. In Giorgio Agamben's influential take,
this has lead to an analysis of how politics takes as its subject not only the
speaking human being but the interface towards bare life as well. In this
context, biopolitics can be seen as focusing on the thresholds of society
and the biological, of bios and zoe. However, this should lead to a more
radical take on the politics of life where life is not only the bare life of the
human being, but more generally the intensive animal life that is de-
personal and that human beings share with animals. In this context, t~e
work by such scholars like Jonathan Crary has been exemplary 1ll
expanding the field of biopolitics to encompass the emergence of modem
media culture in the nineteenth cenhlry and the practices and discourses of
capturing of intensive qualities in perception and sensation. What I want to
suggest is to expand this inquiry into the animal bodies and figure~ that
have been central to a politics of life that is non-anthropomorphIc-a
theme that I feel can contribute a lot to theories of media as well. Theories
of technology and media are parallel discursive constructions to the
biopolitical practices of modernity and hence merit to be integrated to a
Jussi Parikka 355
cultural mapping of the origins of modem media culture. Hence a
Deleuzian and Bergsonian perspective on the intensive potentials of n~n­
human actors can provide a way to understand the environmental
ecological relations nature and media are embedded in. '
Even though Friedrich Kittler has noted how early technical media in a
way filled in "[w]hat people can no longer see or hear" (648), insects
(coupled with technical media) also functioned as media. Animals
provided insights into the previously unseen, unheard, unsensed. The
figures of the insect functioned as a weird reality in themselves where the
familiar notions regarding perception and movement did not hold. Instead,
in a parallel enterprise to the emergence of technical media that likewise
challe!1?ed the phenomenological world of the human being, insects'
capaCItIes paved the way for experimental takes on folding with the world
of finding novel action-perception circuits. Quite concretely, nonhuma~
models of capacities of bodies-swarming, novel sensations and
movements, etc.-have been emerging in the recent years in media theory
and design. This parallels with the philosophical work done by Deleuze
where the question of the nonhuman becomes a motor for theories of
ontogenesis beyond the phenomenological human form. As Grosz
explains, Deleuze was not so much interested in affects of a human subject
which leads to his distancing from phenomenology;
[De leuze is] interested in that affect that opens us up to what is unliveable,
whereas phenomenology is interested only in that which we can live and
exp~rience even if it remains the latent structure of our lived experience.
So m place of Husser! and his place at the origin of contemporary
phenomenology, we always have to put Nietzsche, because he shows that
force is greater than affect, and force is unliveable by a subject. Deleuze is
interest~d in intensitie~ which are unliveable by a subject and which open
the subject up to an mhuman power. He talks a lot about the inhuman
powers of the universe itself, of cosmic forces, for example. (Kontturi and
Tiainen 252)
In this sense that follows Grosz's understanding of Deleuze, I argue
that we can use various nonhuman entities as vectors towards such
"inhuman powers." What is fascinating about animals is exactly their
capacity to inhabit alternative territorial relations to that of the humans as
well as live through alternative affect worlds (such as the famous tick's). In
various ways, this is parallel to the fascination with technical media that
works much beyond our phenomenology in terms of speed, memory and
calculation.
But crucial notions relating to ecology, the intensive environmental
relation and the animal or insect question can be tracked already from an
356 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
"archaeology" of Deleuze's thought, especially Bergson. Hence I want to
push further the aforementioned idea that the Bergsonian perspective can
in fact bring about a novel understanding of technology as insect technics.
Technology and culture can be seen as carrying similar intensities and
potentials as insects, bacteria and the like, and furthermore-to reiterate
the main thesis of this essay-insects and animals can be seen as media in
themselves, understood in the sense of intense environmental relations.
As Grosz explains in her rehabilitation of Bergson as part of current
considerations concerning the nature of technology and materiality, for
Bergson various forms of life (plants, insects and vertebrates) were ways
of responding to the events and problems that "nature addresses to the
living" (Nick of Time 13).15 In this context, one way of conceptualizing
this would be in terms of technology, which Grosz sees as the "inevitable
result of the encounter between life and matter, life and things, the
consequence of the living's capacity to utilize the nonliving (and the
living) prosthetically" (Time Travels 137). Instinct becomes then one
prosthetic/technological solution to a coupling with an environment and
the plane of problems it posits. Curiously, we thus fmd from Bergson an
orientation towards instinct-insect-technology where tools are not
separated from the whole of the living organism. Instead, there is a new
form of holistic assemblage that acts as a technics in itself beyond a binary
setting of natural instincts vs. intelligent technics. Bergson was very
familiar with Marey's work and the two were also personally acquainted
when working on psychic phenomena in experiments organized by the
Psychological Institute of Paris in the early years of twentieth century
(Braun 279-280.) Yet, Bergson's ideas gave a radically different emphasis
compared to those of Marey who believed in the overcoming of the
limitations of human vision by dissecting movement into discrete
observable images and graphs. For Bergson (28-31), the surpassing of the
human senses was rather part of the ontology of duration and continuity
that defines the way bodies fold and mutate with the world.
In contrast to instinct, intelligence is another form of technology /
orientation, but it is not, however, any better: "Instinct perfected is a
faculty of using and even of constructing organizing instruments;
intelligence perfected the faculty of making and using unorganized
instruments" (Bergson 140). Actually, tools constructed by reflexive and
intelligent orientation are not organically coupled to the user and remain
"imperfect." Paraphrasing Bergson, tools of intelligence might be hard to
handle, but as they are molded from "unorganized matter", they can be
adjusted to a diverse number of goals and uses, which simultaneously
raises the user ("the living being") to a new level of capability in relation
Jussi Parikka 357
to its surroundings, giving it "an unlimited number of powers" (Bergson
140-1; see Grosz, Time Travels 137-8).
. Th~ .notion of abstracting "intelligence" can be relayed to the agenda of
bIOpohtIcs framed above. Biopolitics as the capture of the intensive
potentials of (animal) life resonates with the idea of reflexive reproduction
~nd abstraction of the capacities of the human being, but also of animal
hfe. Bergson's idea of instincts, and prosthetic technologies based on the
embodied instinctive lives of for example insects, proves a crucial
theoretization of the minoritarian theme of insect technics. In contrast to
Kapp, an~ the dominating understanding of the anthropology of technics,
the mtenslVe non-personal animal life points towards a biopolitics of life
what-.so-ever, .whic~ historic~lly has been a theme since the emergence of
techn~c~l medIa dunng the nmeteenth century (of bodies and technological
capaCItIes not modeled merely on the human being) and media-
theoretically emerges with the novel philosophies of time and evolution as
with Bergson-as emphasized repeatedly above. The body of the inse;t is
a body capable of such affects and perceptions that the human body is
not-a fact that has wider implications for any theories of technology
relia~! on the centrality of the human being. To be exact, for Bergson
quahtIes precede the bodies they are attached to and thus have a certain
ideal existence that only coincides with its variation. Perception tries to
keep up with this continuity of change by fixing it on entities that are the
mobiles in movement, but the primacy is in the movement. The bodies of
for example arthropods are special ways of cutting the material continuity
of t~e. world :vhere .their bodies also stem from a much wider continuity of
vanatIon. ThIS cuttmg, then, affords them specific possibilities for action
(Bergson 300-1,367).
In this sense, the body of the insect-or in general the animal bodies in
mod~rnity-~r~ becoming "media" in themselves: serving as important
medI~t~rs wIthm the frames of modem biopolitics, acting as packets of
capaCItIes t~ be "reverse-engineered" but also "mediating" percepts and
affects preVIOusly unheard or unseen. In this context I am proposing, we
could argue following Braidotti's (Transpositions 37) Deleuzian
perspective that life as the raw animal zoe, not just the social life of bios,
becomes perhaps both an object of capture for biopolitics and also in a
sense its subject: mechanisms of capture tracing the in~ensive life of
animals as blocs of capacities. Animals are not interesting as examples of
organic unity or "naturalness" but due to the power of differentiation of
nature, their ability to come up with new, unimagined solutions. In this
sense, the idea of looking at insects-and other animals-as media in-
themselves follows from the ecological immanence of Deleuze's ontology
358 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
which refuses the dualism of nahlre vs. cuI hIre, or human vs. non-human.
Instead, bodies are products of ethological, environmental forces and
exhibit various potentials through experimentation in their relatedness. As
Braidotti argues, this signals the core of Deleuze's political ecology as
ecosophy which looks for potentials of bodies beyond the human
organization ("Politics + Ecology).
Notes
I In addition, on insects and contemporary cultural analysis, see for example
Eugene Thacker's article "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes. Part Two" and Rosi
Braidotti's book Metamorphoses. Braidotti has recently continued on similar ideas
as Grosz when emphasizing the immanent and multimodal lessons that we could
learn from animals: "The strength of animals is that they are immanent in their
territories and environmentally bound: insects and animals mark their territories
acoustically, olfactorily, by their own sign system" (Transpositions Ill).
2 Instinct was a much-debated theme during that period. Often referred to as a
mechanical reaction to external impulse, contemporaries of Bergson were
continuously also keen on debating a strict distinction between instinct and
intelligence. Instinct was often divided into further two more precise modes: open
and close, where only the latter was deemed as a mechanical and predictable
reaction to external stimuli, as John Mullarkey (78) explains. However, despite the
seemingly dualist nature of Bergson's division, the two are more in the manner of
tendencies than clear-cut categories.
3 "When we see any stmcture perfected for any particular habit, as the wings of a
bird for flight, we should bear in mind that animals displaying early transitional
grades of the stmcture will seldom continue to exist to the present day, for they
will have been supplanted by the very process of perfection through natural
selection" (Darwin 149).
4 Bergson addresses this in terms of tendencies. Even though life is differentiation
and emergence of specialized tendencies, the traits of elementary directions are
preserved. Bergson (136) writes how "[t]here is no intelligence in which some
traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more especially no instinct that is not
surrounded with a fringe of intelligence ... all concrete instinct is mingled with
intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover, neither
intelligence nor instinCt lends itself to rigid definition: they are tendencies, and not
things" (112-9).
5 In a style to some extent reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, in E. van Bmyssel's
The Population of an Old-Pear Tree, or Stories of insect life an everyday meadow
is disclosed as a vivacious microcosm in itself. The harmonious scene, "like a great
amphitheatre" (2), is filled with life that easily escapes the (human) eye. Like
Alice, the protagonist wandering in the meadow is "lulled and benumbed by
dreamy sensations" (4) which, however, transport him suddenly into new
perceptions and bodily affects.
Jussi Parikka 359
6 Later, in th~ 1~20s, William Wheeler saw this even as a special defining instinct
~f ~nts: the mstmct of craftsmanship (and also the instinct of communication)
1~~~ntIfic Observations of Ants and Etymologists." New York Times, 29 Jul;
7 In Kapp's ant~ll·opol~gical philosophy of technology, the human being's key focus
was to ~e ~n Itself: [D]er Gegenstand des Menschen nichts anders ist, als sein
gegenstandhches Wesen selbst" (138). Kapp's influence was later acknowledged
by .for. example Alfred Espinas, in 1897, who adapted Kapp's ideas of organ
projectIOn as the key element of philosophy of technology centered on action (what
he called pra~eologie). The worker remains unconscious of his intertwining with
the tools, .whlch seetn as natural extensions of his capabilities. The machinic
ensen;'ble. IS not ~erel.y an extensio~l but an articulation. As Espinas notes, the
~achme IS a cO?ldmatmg system wluch has to remain unconscious for the worker
!n ord~r to functIOn properly (45-6; 84-5.)
T~e Ideas also. amounted to a hierarchy of morphological elements so to speak,
cultIvated l~ter m Fr~nce by Espinas. Lowest were the reflexive and instinctive
forms of WIll, and hl~hest the voluntary and (self-)conscious appropriation of
~echnology as a mastenng of nature. (Espinas 281-3.)
As . Deleu~e ~nd Guatt~ri write: "Science fiction has gone through a whole
evolut!on ~akmg It from ammal, ve?etab.le, and mineral becomings to becomings of
?oa~tena, Vlmses, mole;ules, ~nd thl?gs Imperceptible" (A Thousand Plateaus 248.)
Even though Marey s studIes on msects took place fairly early in his career end
?f the 1~60s, he returned to the analysis of their movements in the 1890s, cdtting
mto theIr movements at a camera speed of 1125000 of a second. (Braun 166.
Marey, "Le vol des insects etudie par la chronophotographie" 135-8) "
II F M . . .
or . ~rey, m~ect fl.lght was .not a phenomenon ofthe muscles and organization,
but theIr mteractlOn wltl~ e~peclally c~rrents of air. The insect wings for example in
t~e dra?on-fly ,,:ere ?ptlmlzed to adjust to air currents: "Thus the reaction of the
aIr: which combmes Its effect and acts perpendicularly upon the surface which it
stnkes, can be decomposed into two forces, a vertical and a horizontal force· one
serv~ng to elevate, and ~he second to propel the animal" (244). The insect ~as a
f~ldmg of~orces of physIological organization and the environment.
Marey hImself also engaged with plans of engine powered aircrafts. Around the
end of the 1870s he collaborated on such plans with his assistant Victor Tatin
(Braun 49-51).
13 Th·· I
. !S IS re ated to Paul Virilio's often mentioned ideas relating to war and
10glstIc~ of perception (Virilio 63.) For example the French War Ministry was
supportmg research into flying apparatuses at the end of the nineteenth century.
One of the exampl~s th~t could be cited include Clement Ader's 1890s design that
was ~odelled on blOlog~cal mov~ments (resembling a bat) and aimed to produce a
new kmd of a war maclune-AvlOn III (Siukonen 53-6.)
14 On the biopolitics of modern cinematic technologies, see Valiaho, The Moving
{~age. Gesture and Logos circa 1900.
GI"O.sz. herself has recently developed these ideas towards a neomaterialist
apprecIatIon of art that stems from a wider ontology of nature, rhythm and
360 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies
vibration. Bodies and art are contractions of the vibrations of the world (see
Kontturi and Tiainen).
Works Cited
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Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
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Builder 3:1 (January 1871): 14.
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New York: Dover Publications, 1998).
Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of
Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
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(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 209-11.
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Braun, Marta. Picturing Time. The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-
1904) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Bruyssel, E van. The Population of an Old-Pear Tree, or Stories of insect
life (New York: Macmillan and co., 1870).
Canguilhem, Georges. "Machine and Organism." Incorporations. Eds.
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992).
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Roger
Lancelyn Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massch.: the MIT Press, 1992).
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Edited with an Introduction and
Notes by Gillian Beer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1987).
- . What is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson
(London and New York: Verso, 1994).
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Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA and London, England:
Harvard University Press, 2002).
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Germer BailW:re, 1897).
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(Durham: Duke University Press 2004).
- . Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005).
Hartmann, Frank. Globale Medienkultur. Technik, Geschichte, Theorien
(Wien: WUV, 2006).
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Flnltude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).
Kapp, Ernst. Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur
Entstehungsft,eschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten
. (Braun~ch,:eIg: Druck und Verlag von Georg Westermann, 1877).
Kittler, Fnednch. "Man as a Drunken Town-musician." Trans. Jocelyn
Holland. MLN 118 (April 2003), 637-52.
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Darwin: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz." NORA-Nordic Journal
of Women's Studies 15:4 (November 2007): 246-56,
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(~Inneap~lIs ~nd London:. University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
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seances et memoires de la Societe de biologie, 1868 4e serie tome
cinquieme, 136-9. ' ,
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[translated from the Revue des cours scientifiques, for the Smithsonian
Institution] Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian
Institution, for the year 1869, 1871,226-85.
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Bailliere, 1873).
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Vingtieme annee, premier semestre, 30 Januar 1892, 135-8. '
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362 Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies

Muller Johannes. Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen fiir

Vo;lesungen. Zweiter Band (Coblenz: Verlag von J. HOlscher, 1840): CONTRIBUTORS
Siukonen, Jyrki. Uplifted Spirits, Earthbound !d~chines. Studies on ArtIsts
and the Dream ofFlight, 1900-1935 (Helsmkl: SKS, 2001). "
Thacker, Eugene. "Networks, Swarms, ~ultitudes .. Part Two CTheory
5118/2004, http://www.ctheory.net/arhcles.aspx?ld=423. last accessed
September 19,2008. . .. BERND HERZOGENRATH teaches American Literature and Culture at the
· ·1· P ul "The Aesthetics of Disappearance." The Paul VmllOReader.
VIn Goethe-University of frankfurt and at the University of Cologne
10, a . . .. 2004) 57
Ed. Steve Redhead (New York: ColumbIa Umverslty Press, ,- (Germany). He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster
(Rodopi 1999), and the editor of From Virgin Land to Disney World:
81. .. f G tu " Nature and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today (Rodopi
Valiaho, Pasi. "Simulation, Automata, Cinema: A Cnbque 0 es res.
Theory & Event 8:2 (2005), last accessed 08 April 2008. .. 2001), The Cinema of Tod Browning (Black Dog 2006), and
_. The Moving Image. Gesture and Logos circa 1900 (Turku: Umverslty DeleuzeiGuattari & Ecology (Palgrave 2008). His fields of interest are 19th
of Turku Publications, 2007). and 20th CentUlY American Literature, Critical Theory, and CulturaliMedia
Studies. He has just finished a project of a 'Deleuzian History of the
American BodyiPolitic' - future publications include Edgar G. Ulmer:
Essays on the King of the Bs (McFarland), and Travels in Intennedia[lity):
ReBlurring the Boundaries (Mellen Press), both forthcoming 2008, and
The Music ofJohn Luther Adams (forthcoming 2009).

PATRICK HAYDEN is Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. He

teaches and researches in the fields of political theory, critical theory, the
history of political philosophy, international political theory, and
globalization. He is now working on a new book that builds upon the
thought of Hannah Arendt to examine dimensions of political evil in a
global age.

ELIZABETH GROSZ teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies

Department at Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey.
She is the author of The Nick of Time (2004) and most recently,
Chaos, Territory, Art (2008), texts linked to the place of the human body in
nature, culture and art.

LeyJa Haferkamp was born in Istanbul, Turkey, where she attended

Istanbul American Robert College and Istanbul Technical University. She
received her M.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of
Aachen with the thesis "Towards a New Anthropo(morpho)logy:
Transformations of 'Artificial Man' in American SF." Besides teaching
American LiteratureiCulture at the University of Cologne, she is currently
working on her PhD thesis on "The Poetics of Immanence: Deleuzian
Perspectives on Contemporary American Eco-Writing (Dillard, Snyder,
364 Contributors
Hiaasen)." While her fields of interest include American literature (esp.
19 th and 20th century), critical theory and process philosophy, her research
focuses on the intersections of literature, philosophy and science.
Forthcoming publications include texts on Pynchon, Deleuze and eco-
criticism.
MICHAEL MIKULAK is a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University. His current interests revolve around ecocriticism,
cultural studies, globalization, urban wilderness, critical theory, food
politics, and ecotourism. His thesis is about the convergence of discourses
in food politics and global warming and the ways in which capitalism is
responding to the environmental crisis. In addition to examining the
growth of a green corporate culture, his thesis explores the limitations and
possibilities of a politics of the pantry in addressing broader questions of
ecological modernization, sustainability, and the politics of the everyday.
He has published on topics ranging from bioregionalism, radical
environmentalism, Marxism, and Deep Ecology.
ANTHONY LARSON is Maitre de Conferences in English Studies at the
Universite du Maine in Le Mans, France where he teaches American
literature and contemporary theory.
TOM GREAVES gained his PhD from the University of Warwick with a
thesis on the ecological thought of Martin Heidegger. His research
interests include ecological phenomenology, philosophy of nature and
ecological poetics. He has been active in various environmental
campaigns, including the international movement against large dams. He
is currently writing an introduction to Heidegger entitled Starting with
Heidegger and is associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, UK.
ALISTAIR WELCHMAN is a professor of philosophy at The University of
Texas at San Antonio. He has written widely on Deleuze, Schelling and
Kant, and is co-editor of The New Schelling. He is currently co-translating
Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation.
EDWARD P. BUTLER received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New
School for Social Research in New York City in 2004 for his dissertation
The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus. Since then, his articles have
appeared in Dionysius; Methexis; The Pomegranate; and Magic, Ritual
and Witchcraft. His research interests include individuation and
An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] 365
with Deleuze/Guattari
multiplicity in philosophy, the ontological dimensions of theistic
cosmologies, and the ethical disposition toward the non-human.
ELENI IKONIADOU is a PhD candidate at the University of East London.
Her re~earch addresses the digital impact on spacetime and expansive
perceptIOn, through a symbiotic relationship between technoscience and
?ew me?ia art. Eleni's re~earch interests include contemporary philosophy
III relation to art practice and new technologies, theories of affect
machinic materialism, and techno culture. '
Heroux
IRVING GOH is with the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell
~niversi~y. Hi~ research focus is in continental philosophy, and its
Illter~ectIOns WIth ?ther. disciplines such as literature, politics, culture,
archItecture, et~. HIS artIcles have appeared in Cultural Politics, Theory
Culture & SOCIety, Social Identities, Fast Capitalism, genre, and Jordan
Crandall's Under Fire 2. He has published on Deleuze-Guattari and
p~litics ~n C:Theory. His two essays on the question of community and
fnendshT III Deleuze and Guattari are currently being published by
symploke (2007 and 2008). In 2006, he was Visiting Fellow at Harvard
University, and Visiting Scholar at the Asia Research Institute-National
University of Singapore from May-Aug 2007.
JAMES WILTGEN received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA, where he
focused on the development of television in Brazil. He teaches in the
Department of Critical Studies at the California of Arts in Valencia
California,. offerin? courses in critical theory, film, and political economy:
He has wntten artIcles on contemporary theory, film, and the contours of
Sado-mo?etarism. At ~he ~resent time he is working on a book addressing
genealogIcal, ethno-hlstoncal, and schizo-analytic issues of war, peace,
and the state.
~THERINE E. YOUNG is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political
SCIence at Colorado State University. Her dissertation, entitled The Animal
Paradox: Toward an Animal-Centered Politics looks at the animal
subtext within the Western canon that renders ani~al bodies exceptionally
and ironically political.
VINCENT J. GUIHAN is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Mediations
Program at the Institute of Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton
University in Ottawa Canada. His work addresses the representation of
366 Contributors An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] 367
with Deleuze/Guatlari

animals III imaginative work, particularly the contemporary Canadian JUSSI PA~KKA teaches and .writes on the cultural theory and history of
novel. new me~Ia. He has. a P~ III Cultural History from the University of
Tu~ku, ~Illland an~ IS Semor Lecturer in Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin
PAUL LEWIS teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of UmversIty, C~mbndge, UK. He is also the Co-Director of the recently
the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. His principle research interests founded .Angha Research Centre in Digital Culture (ARCDigital). Parikka
are in the philosophy of science and technology, social theory, and has pubhs.h~d a. bO?k on "cu!tural theory in the age of digital machines"
occasionally aesthetics. He is also a founding member, with Jennifer (Koneoppl, III FInnIsh) and hIS Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology
Khoshbin, of Refarm Spectacle, a conceptual arts group. of C0m,puter ~iruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, Digital
FormatIons-senes (2007). Parikka is currently working on a book on
GEORGIANA BANITA is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the "Insect Media", w"hich focuses on the media theoretical and historical
University of Constance, Germany. She studied English and American interconnections of biology and technology. In addition, two co-edited
Literature and German literature at Yale University and the University of books a~e forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other
Constance, where she also held a lecturer position. Her dissertation (The Anon:abes from t~e Dark Side of Digital Culture (Hampton Press) and
Ethics of Seeing in 9/11 Representation) and other writings address the Medw Archaeologles. Homepage: http://www.jussiparikka.com.
confluences of ethics, literature, and the media after 9/11, as well as
contemporary discourses of diversity and globalization. She has published
several articles on American poetry (among them "The Same, Identical
Woman: Sylvia Plath in the Media," MlMLA Journal 2007), the fiction of
Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, and Khaled Hosseini, as well as essays on the
theoretical works of Charles Taylor, Michael Ignatieff, and Raymond
Williams. Her most recent publications include "Decency, Torture and the
Words that Tell us Nothing" (Peace Review 2008) and "Scorched Earth
Tactics: Preemptive Ecopolitics in the Aftermath of 9/11" (Parallax,
2008).

JORGE CAMACHO was born in Mexico where he shldied for an

undergraduate degree in Communications at the Universidad
Iberoamericana. Having spent a few years as a practitioner in digital media
and film, and following a brief experience in the editorial field, he made a
move towards academic research. Residing now in London, he completed
an MA Cybernetic Culhlre: Media, Digital Arts and the Body-Machine at
the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies of the
University of East London. After graduation, he received a postgraduate
scholarship to undertake doctoral research at the same institution. His PhD
thesis is engaging with the problem of control, as theorised by Deleuze, in
relation to the techno-political ecology of contemporary urbanism. His
forthcoming publications include an article on the political ontologies of
Deleuze and Antonio Negri, in the light of recent social movements in
Argentina, for a special issue of New Formations dedicated to the theme of
Deleuze and politics.