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Introduction |
Summarizing his deeply idiosyncratic work, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes writing about others as a sort of buggery or immaculate conception that is the result of taking an author from behind and giving him a child (N, 6). Deleuze is still quick to distinguish his project from outright falsification. He st... |
Deleuze once told a friend that a worthwhile book performs at least three functions: polemics, recovery, and creativity. In writing the book, the author must reveal that (1) other scholarship commits an error; (2) an essential insight has been missed; and (3) a new concept can be created. You will find all three is thi... |
Picking out a particular strain of thought: scholars of new materialism turn to realist ontology by way of Deleuzes metaphysics of positivity. The basis for the realist side of Deleuze is perhaps best evinced by his biography. Those who knew Deleuze consistently note his firm commitment to joyful affirmation and his di... |
A different Deleuze, a darker one, has slowly cast its shadow. Yet this figure only appears when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt. Emerging from scholars concerned with the condition of the present, the darkness refashions a revolutionary Deleuze: revolutionary negativity in a world... |
Timely Connections |
Michel Foucault half-jokingly suggested in 1970 that perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian (Theatrum Philosophicum, 885). It is easy to see how boosters have used this phrase to raise the profile of Deleuze, who was far less popular than Foucault or Derrida during the initial reception of poststructu... |
What would make Deleuzes thought especially timely? Critics such as Slavoj ?i?ek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism (Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, The founder of BuzzFeed wrote hi... |
Ours is the age of angels, says French philosopher Michel Serres (Angels, a Modern Myth). Armies of invisible messengers now crisscross the skies, tasked with communication, connection, transmission, and translation. As inspiring as they may seem, they also compel us to embody their messages in word and act. Click, pok... |
Dark Deleuzes immediate target is connectivity, the name given to the growing integration of people and things through digital technology. Acolyte of connection and Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently declared at the World Economic Forum that soon the internet will disappear as it becomes inseparable from our very be... |
Many traditional concerns have been raised about connectivity. Almost all use the conservative voice of moral caution. A band of Net Critics warn that technology is developing more quickly than our understanding of its effects. Popular media, the great screen of the collective unconscious, materialize fears about runaw... |
The mad scientist criticism of technology misses the mark. The trouble is not that myopic technicians have relentlessly pursued technical breakthroughs without considering the consequences (forgive them, for they know not what they do; ?i?ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28). The antidote for such ignorance would ju... |
Philosophically, connectivity is about world-building. The goal of connectivity is to make everyone and everything part of a single world. The cases made for such a world are virtuous enough—Kantian cosmopolitanism wants perpetual peace, Marxist universalism demands the unity of theory and practice, and Habermas would ... |
When connectivity is taken as a mantra, you can see its effects everywhere. Jobseekers are told to hop on to the web (While your resume can help you get the interview for a new job, a fully optimized LinkedIn profile can bring you more business, more connections, and can increase your professional reputation!). Flat hi... |
Instead of drawing out the romance, Dark Deleuze demands that we kill our idols. The first task is negative, as in Deleuze and Guattaris schizoanalysis, a complete currettage—overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and dest... |
Hatred for This World |
We need reasons to believe in this world, Deleuze demands (C2, 172). We are so distracted by the cynicism of ideological critique that we too easily dismiss the real world as an illusion. The problem is exaggerated even more now that we mistake knowledge for belief, a confusion fed by growing databases of readily avail... |
Deleuze refutes the image of Nietzsche as a dour pessimist. Flipping that image on its head, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche is an unparalleled thinker of affirmation. But in doing so, even Deleuzes masterful pen cannot erase the many moments of negativity that impregnate Nietzsches work. Deleuze thus turns his eye to Ni... |
How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out the origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as real, so-called reality. We can destroy only as creators.—But let us not forget: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to cr... |
Dissatisfied with Nietzsches implied goal of destruction, Deleuze inverts the phrase into destroy in order to create (DI, 130). This formulation appears over and again in his work. To name a few places: in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism destroys what came before to create its own earthly existen... |
There is something disarming about the sincerity of Deleuze and Guattaris definition of philosophy as the art of constructing concepts (WP, 2). Yet it feels odd in an era full of trite invitations to being constructive: if you dont have anything nice to say, dont say anything at all, if constructive thoughts are plante... |
Deleuze would have hated todays images of creativity—there is a great violence in comparing the fabrication of concepts to any happy means of construction; concepts are friends only to thought, as they break consensus (WP, 4–6, 99). Concepts are not discovered but the result of a catastrophe, Deleuze and Guattari say, ... |
Productivism is Dark Deleuzes second object of criticism (connectivism being the first). It may be possible to distinguish concept creation from productivism, for the latter is commercial professional training that aspires for thought only beneficial from the viewpoint of universal capitalism (WP, 14). Maintaining such... |
Dark Deleuze does not philosophically quibble with creation. But it is easy to get drowned out by those who praise Deleuze for his joy. The difficulty with joy is that it lies in the slippage between metaphysics and normativity. Michel Serres, for instance, remains steadfast that Deleuzes death must have been an accide... |
Deleuze corrupts the holism of an already heretical Spinoza through an old atomist proposition: the relation between two terms produces an independent third term. (Sometimes the relations of two bodies may agree so well that they form a third relation within which the two bodies are preserved and prosper; S, 239; H, 10... |
The powers of the outside, a component of Deleuzes thought largely driven underground, offer an additional escape. First, there is this books key pivot point: Deleuze and Guattari establish in Anti-Oedipus the autoproduction of the Real, which is a passive process that occurs largely beyond human understanding. Confusi... |
We must correct Deleuzes error: failing to cultivate a hatred for this world. It begins with the ambivalent joy of hatred—What my soul loves, I love. What my soul hates, I hate (F, 23; ECC, 135). Or to echo Proust, we must be harsh, cruel, and deceptive to what we love (P, 92). It is not even that Deleuze never mention... |
From the Chapel to the Crypt |
There are those who have hitherto only enlightened the world in various ways; the point is to darken it. Some speculate that humans first pondered the ways of the world under the brilliant light of the heavens. On that vast celestial stage, the gods played out great dramas of arts and culture. This cosmos also inspired... |
A more modern story begins in 1609, when, upon hearing news of the Dutch invention of the telescope, Galileo created his own. Almost immediately, Galileo was peering into the dark quadrants of the moon and illustrating its angle of illumination. These discoveries would lead him to loudly endorse heliocentrism—replacing... |
The most immediate instance of lightness, connectivism, is the realization of the techno-affirmationist dream of complete transparency. The fate of such transparency is depicted in Fritz Langs Metropolis. In it, the drive for complete communicability elevates transparency in the false transcendence of a New Tower of Ba... |
Crypts are by their very nature places of seclusion. Early Christians facing public persecution fled to the underground catacombs below Rome, where they could worship in secret (Essay upon Crypts, 73–77). Early basilicas contain crypts as a second church under their choirs, featuring a vaulted ceiling, many columns, se... |
From the crypt, Dark Deleuze launches a conspiracy. It is fueled by negativity, but not one of antimonies. Following Freud, negation is not a necessary by-product of consciousness. The lesson to be drawn from him is that negation is finding a way to say no to those who tell us to take the world as it is. To this end, t... |
There is an affective dimension to our conspiracy. Pessimism becomes a necessity when writing in an era of generalized precarity, extreme class stratification, and summary executions of people of color. The trouble with the metaphysics of difference is that it does not immediately suggest a positive conception of alien... |
The conspiracy Dark Deleuze is a series of contraries. Contraries are not poles, which are dialectical opposites that ultimately complement each other. To distill a central argument from Deleuzes magnum opus Difference and Repetition, philosophy has (to its detriment) taken the nature of thinking to be the establishmen... |
Listed in what follows are the contrasting terms. In the column on the left, I list a series of tasks. Across each column I have placed two contrary approaches, one joyous and one dark. The association each term has to its contrary is purely incidental. Each terms contrariness is not given, as if one implied the other—... |
My ultimate purpose is to convince readers to completely abandon all the joyous paths for their dark alternatives. The best scenario would be that these contraries fade into irrelevance after Dark Deleuze achieves its ostensible goal: the end of this world, the final defeat of the state, and full communism. It is far m... |
The Extinction of Being |
The Task: Destroy Worlds, Not Create Conceptions |
The conspiracy against this world will be known through its war machines. A war machine is itself a pure form of exteriority that explains nothing, but there are plenty of stories to tell about them (TP, 354, 427). They are the heroes of A Thousand Plateaus—Kleists skull-crushing war machine, the migratory war machine ... |
Make thought a war machine, Deleuze and Guattari insist. Place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside (TP, 376–77). Two important inventions follow: speed and secrecy. These are the affects of the war machine, its weapons of war, which transpierce the body like arrows (356, 39... |
Make the whole world stand still. Indeed, it may be the only way to think the present in any significant sense. To be clear: the suspension of the world is not a hunt for its conditions of reproduction or a meditative rhapsody of sensations (DR, 56). It is thought that treats the world as if struck by an unspecified di... |
There are those who say that we already have one foot in utopia; but would it not be more suitable to say that we have both feet firmly planted in a present slouching toward dystopia? Deleuze and Guattari call on utopia in their search for a new people and a new earth (WP, 99). They look to Samuel Butler, dissecting hi... |
It should have been an apocalyptic book, laments Deleuze, disappointed that the old style Difference and Repetition did not make apparent a key implication—he killed God, humankind, and even the world (xxi). The Death of God began long before Deleuze, who sees Feuerbach as completing it long before Nietzsche with the p... |
The Subject: Un-becoming, Not Assemblages |
Subjectivity is shameful—subjects are born quite as much from misery as from triumph (N, 151). It grows from the seeds of a composite feeling made from the compromises with our time: the shame of being alive, the shame of indignity, the shame that it happens to others, the shame that others can do it, and the shame of ... |
For some, the world is made up of assemblages, and all assemblages are subjects. In no time, people, hurricanes, and battles all get addressed in the same register (as all subjects should be afforded proper names)! Although this is, perhaps, technically true, such assemblage-thinking misses the point—it reduces subject... |
The undoing of the subject is un-becoming. Deleuze withholds praise for the subject but does not deny it a place, unlike Althusser, who theorizes subjectivity without a subject (Badiou, Althusser, 58–67). But subjects are only interesting when they cast a line to the outside—in short, when they stop being subjects (wit... |
Existence: Transformation, Not Genesis |
Philosophy has always maintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract (DI, 259). Foundations thus hold a special place in philosophy, with philosophers obsessively writing and rewriting the book of Genesis. It is Kant, the great thinker of the genetic condition, who finally turns the phil... |
Ontology: Materialism, Not Realism |
Our appetite produces the real. But do not mistake the real for a simple projection—it is real through and through. I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desire, says the streets of Paris in 1968 (Anonymous, Graffiti). In response, Deleuze and Guattari say that the real is not impossible,... |
A superior materialism constructs a real that is yet to come (TP, 142). It does not follow so-called new materialism, which is really just a new form of animism, but Marxist materialism as the revolutionary subversion of material necessity. Deleuze and Guattari find their superior materialism by exchanging the theater ... |
Difference: Exclusive Disjunction, Not Inclusive Disjunction |
Too much! is a potential rallying cry—too many products, too many choices, too much of this world! Instead, become contrary! Difference, for Deleuze, is the result of a disjunctive synthesis that produces a series of disjointed and divergent differences (LS, 174–76, 177–80). Importantly, these differences can be immedi... |
Global capitalism quickly caught on. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have shown us how it rules over a virtual Empire of difference that eagerly coordinates a wide arrangement of diverging differences while also producing many more of its own (Empire, 44–45, 138–56, 190–201, 339–43). Capital is now indistinguishable fr... |
Advancing toward Nothing |
Diagram: Asymmetry, Not Complexity |
The ‘nothing (Heidegger), the ‘trace or ‘différance (Derrida), the ‘surplus always exterior to the totality (Levinas), the ‘differend (Lyotard), ‘the invisible (Althusser), and the ‘pariah (Arendt), ‘the jew (Lyotard), the ‘migrant (Virilio), the ‘nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), the ‘hybrid (Bhabha), the ‘catachrestic re... |
Complexity is snake oil in the age of singularity—everyone and everything is a unique snowflake, what relations they can establish is not predetermined, and what they can become is limited most by how well they apply themselves! Any criticism of complexity must take into account its three levels: complexity as a fact, ... |
Deleuze outlines his case for asymmetry in Difference and Repetition. Everything we know is the work of a calculating god whose numbers fail to add up, he says (DR, 222). The effect is a basic injustice, an irreducible inequality, that is the world (222). If the calculations were exact there would be no world, Deleuze ... |
Asymmetry is ultimately a question of combat, even if it is formally established diagrammatically. Its best realization was the twentieth-century guerrilla. The guerilla demonstrates two things about asymmetry: first, each side is opposed in terms of its strategic imperatives, but second, as each side varies in orienta... |
we fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The Nor... |
Fact: while the United States was fighting a war, Vietnam was engaged in combat; one for domination, the other for freedom (ECC, 132–35). This is how Marxist struggles for national liberation raised formal asymmetry as a resource for world-historical proportions. Mao defeated the national army of China with guerrillas ... |
Affect: Cruelty, Not Intensity |
The story of a tyrant: finding his cruelty mollified, God burdens the world with infinite debt. Before him, memories were written on the body in a terrible alphabet so as never to forget them (AO, 145). This system was cruel but finite, which allowed it to form elaborate crisscrossing systems that warded off the centra... |
Ours is the most cruel of all worlds (DI, 108). Cruelty has a lighter cousin, intensity, which induces the event of individuation that affirms difference without resorting to extensions depth (DR, 233). The definition of intensity as felt has been the source of incredible confusion. Having reduced intensity to a specia... |
Artauds Theater of Cruelty gives shape to the way forward. He would be amused by the cinematic experiment of A Clockwork Orange. His theatrical cruelty targets those who see themselves as Alex—those who complain, I can no longer think what I want, the moving images-are-substituted for my own thoughts (C2, 166). The res... |
Organization: Unfolding, Not Rhizome |
Enough with rhizomes. Although they were a suggestive image of thought thirty-five years ago, our present is dominated by the Cold War technology of the Internet that was made as a rhizomatic network for surviving nuclear war. The rhizome was a convincing snapshot of things to come, but Deleuze and Guattari left out a ... |
A contrary path: cast a line to the outside! These lines are found in folds, which are what connects a world where relations are external to their terms (H, 101). It is through the external bridge of the fold that a world where terms exist like veritable atoms communicates through their irreducible exteriority (DI, 163... |
Although called joyous by some, the great unfolding sparks an experience of terror driven by the question, how far can we unfold the line without falling into a breathless void, into death, and how can we fold it, but without losing touch with it, to produce an inside copresent with the outside, corresponding to the ou... |
Unfolding operates through conduction, not communication—at least according to Jean-François Lyotard in Libidinal Economy (254–62). As a conductor of affects, unfolding does not build capacities through the accumulative logic of rhizomes, which changes through addition or subtraction. Unfoldings disconnection is not th... |
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, hair, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with ... |
Though Lyotards account is compelling, we must remain more vigilant. For what is it that fuels capitalism if not the massive energy generated through the unfolding of bodies? This is what inspires the famous line of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, whereby the constant revolutionizing of the forces of production l... |
Ethics: Conspiratorial Communism, Not Processual Democracy |
Democracy should be abolished. Spinozist champions of democracy, such as Antonio Negri, consider Deleuze a fellow traveler. Some Deleuzians have even tried to smuggle democracy back into his metaphysics, some even pervert him into a liberal. Yet Deleuze lumps nothing but hatred upon democracy—summarized by his mocking ... |
Deleuze happily embraces a Marxism so anti-State that it refuses the project of democracy. It is up to us to render his Marxism in darker terms than Rancière, who would rather break down the state through the democratic dissensus of aesthesis acting as the power of an ontological difference between two orders of realit... |
Breakdown, Destruction, Ruin |
Speed: Escape, Not Acceleration |
Deleuze and Guattaris accelerationism has been too tarnished to rehabilitate. The idea was hatched by Nick Land, who held a charismatic influence over the students of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick during the late 1990s. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattaris insistence on accelerating th... |
Commenting later on Williams and Srniceks The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, Land gleefully accuses those leftists who speak favorably about capitals destructive forces as conditional accelerationists (Annotated #Accelerate (#3)). He says that they can only distinguish their position from his own by way of ... |
A truly dark path undoes everything that makes up this world. Deleuze and Guattaris proposal to accelerate the process follows from R. D. Laings clinical prescription for more madness in our veritable age of Darkness (AO, 131). He supports the mad in turning the destruction wrecked on them into a force of dissolution a... |
The best breakthrough is making a break for it. Deleuze is fond of repeating Black Panther George Jackson, who writes from prison that yes, I can very well escape, but during my escape, Im looking for a weapon (DI, 277). The phrase applies to far more than Jacksons literal imprisonment in San Quentin—what he really wan... |
Escapism is the great betrayer of escape. The former is simply withdrawing from the social, whereas the latter learns to eat away at and penetrate it, everywhere setting up charges that will explode what will explore, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape as a revolutionary force (AO, 341). The same d... |
Flows: Interruption, Not Production |
The schizo is dead! Long live the schizo! Schizo culture appealed to a society seized by postwar consumer boredom. Cant we produce something other than toasters and cars? How about free speech, free school, free love, free verse! It is no exaggeration to say that the events of May 1968 were sparked by a Situationist in... |
Militant discussions of infrastructure, blockage, and interruption are refreshing—since the first free laborers threw a shoe in the machine, sabotage has been an important tactic of resistance. But with the elliptical dynamics of capitalism, which poses its own limits only to overcome them for a profit, interruptions c... |
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