Ken Baumann

The Beginner’s Guide to Deleuze

Over lunch, Christopher Higgs and I talked about Gilles Deleuze. I was saying how a lot of
my friends–Chris, Blake Butler, and Derek White, to name a few–are really into his writing,
especially the ginormous book A Thousand Pleateaus, co-written with Felix Guattari. I’ve
tried to read it and get into it a few times, and kept putting the book up, scared off by not
being able to immediately comprehend the text, not being able to decipher the numerous
codes, terms, coinages. Recently, I changed. I picked up A Thousand Pleateaus again and
flipped to a random chapter and read. I enjoyed it, and am enjoying it. Like my experience
with Finnegans Wake, there are lucid swathes that I feel I understand, and then there are
times when it’s packed dense or just orgiastically conceptual and I tune out a bit. But that
process of coming in and out of lucidity is nice. Sort of trancelike.

I mentioned asking Chris some questions about Deleuze, his thinking, the books. I’m sort of
acquainted with his ideas through the book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (amazing
book!), and what Deleuze I’ve now read. But, let me ask you/Chris some maybe dumb
questions.

Firstly: Why should we read Deleuze?

Deleuze is the future. He is almost the now, but not yet. Just out of reach, just over the
horizon, he is akin to the force that makes the sky pink after the sun sets and pink again right
before the sun rises. He is both pre and post everything, like the feeling before a meal of
being famished followed by the feeling after the meal of being stuffed. He does what no
other thinker before him could do: he upends Plato, he quiets Hegel, he puts all the little
thinkers to bed

Over lunch, Christopher Higgs and I talked about Gilles Deleuze. I was saying how a lot of
my friends–Chris, Blake Butler, and Derek White, to name a few–are really into his writing,
especially the ginormous book A Thousand Pleateaus, co-written with Felix Guattari. I’ve
tried to read it and get into it a few times, and kept putting the book up, scared off by not
being able to immediately comprehend the text, not being able to decipher the numerous
codes, terms, coinages. Recently, I changed. I picked up A Thousand Pleateaus again and
flipped to a random chapter and read. I enjoyed it, and am enjoying it. Like my experience
with Finnegans Wake, there are lucid swathes that I feel I understand, and then there are
times when it’s packed dense or just orgiastically conceptual and I tune out a bit. But that
process of coming in and out of lucidity is nice. Sort of trancelike.

I mentioned asking Chris some questions about Deleuze, his thinking, the books. I’m sort of
acquainted with his ideas through the book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (amazing
book!), and what Deleuze I’ve now read. But, let me ask you/Chris some maybe dumb
questions.

Firstly: Why should we read Deleuze?

Deleuze is the future. He is almost the now, but not yet. Just out of reach, just over the
horizon, he is akin to the force that makes the sky pink after the sun sets and pink again right
before the sun rises. He is both pre and post everything, like the feeling before a meal of
being famished followed by the feeling after the meal of being stuffed. He does what no
other thinker before him could do: he upends Plato, he quiets Hegel, he puts all the little
thinkers to bed.

Consider it this way: if we imagine the past as a hallway full of doors marked dualism, binary
thinking, either/or, mind/body, transcendence, then Deleuze makes philosophy contemporary
by drawing a series of escape hatches on the ceiling of that hallway and marking them
multiplicity, schizoid thinking, both/and, non-dialectical materialism, immanence. Deleuze is
open, associative, connective. Deleuze is digital, affirmative, productive, innovative. In him,
we have a blueprint for navigating the 21st century.

Okay, I better stop there for now. I can get pretty wound up and easily begin sounding like a
preacher – I think my wife mentioned to you how I am sort of like a proselytizer for Deleuze.

But to respond to something else you said: I think many readers share your experience of
being “scared off by not being able to immediately comprehend the text, not being able to
decipher the numerous codes, terms, coinages” when first encountering his work—
individually, and with Guattari. It’s a totally valid response, but it’s also a manageable
hurdle.

Here’s the trick: do not bother trying to comprehend or understand the text. A desire for that
level of control will only hinder your ability to experience it, use it, think it, and become it.
To apply an analogy, I do not need to understand or comprehend my car in order for me to
experience driving, to use the car to get to the grocery store, to think about the fact that I am
sitting motionless while simultaneously moving rapidly through time and space, to become
an extension of the car or vice versa. (In this way, Deleuze has really helped me formulate
my general approach to all works of literature: I do not care to comprehend them or
understand them in any way. I wish instead to experience them and use them and become
them.)

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ll share this great passage from one of my favorite
contemporary thinkers/writers, Steven Shaviro, which serves as a great primer for
understanding Deleuze’s approach and also frames an additional answer to your question,
Ken, about why we should read Deleuze:

Deleuze’s treatment of the philosophers he writes about is a complicated one: one that is
obscured more than it is explained by Deleuze’s flippant and notorious comment about
impregnating the past philosopher from behind, in order to produce a monstrous offspring.
Deleuze is always closely attentive to the words, and the concepts, of the thinkers he is
writing about. He quotes them a lot, and paraphrases their points using their own
vocabularies. At the same time, Deleuze never provides an interpretation of the thinkers he is
discussing; he is uninterested in hermeneutics, uninterested in teasing out ambiguities and
contradictions, uninterested in deconstructing prior thinkers or in determining ways in which
they might be entrenched in metaphysics. All this is in accord with Deleuze’s own
philosophy: his focus is on invention, on the New, on the “creation of concepts.”
It’s not a matter of saying, for instance, that Plato and Aristotle and St. Augustine were wrong
about the nature of time, and Kant or Bergson are right. Rather, what matters to Deleuze is
the sheer fact of conceptual invention: the fact that Kant, and then Bergson, invent entirely
new ways of conceiving time and temporality, leading to new ways of distributing,
classifying, and understanding phenomena, new perspectives on Life and Being. A creation of
new concepts means that we see the world in a new way, one that wasn’t available to us
before. This is what Deleuze looks for in the history of philosophy, and this is why (and how)
he is concerned, not with what a given text “really” means, but rather with what can be done
with it, how it can be used, what other problems and other texts it can be brought into
conjunction with. Deleuze writes about philosophers whose ideas he can use, or transform, in
order to work through the problems he is interested in (full text here).

Like the avant-garde or experimental or innovative artist/writer, Deleuze is a philosopher of

the new. He is all about thinking in new ways, which seems like a damn fine reason in-and-
of-itself to read him, in my opinion. Of course, that also makes him difficult, which makes
your Finnegans Wake comparison truly apt.

How can we use his philosophy in everyday life? Does he supply new or preferred ways
of not only thinking but being? In other words: if I was looking for philosophy to guide
me ethically and aesthetically, how does Deleuze show me how to live?

Danger warning! Deleuzian ethics are unconventional in ways that tend to piss people off,
especially Marxists!

Prevailing wisdom would suggest that opposition is essential to change. Put in Hegelian
terms, a thesis meets its antithesis in order to create a synthesis. Tit for tat. Action is met
with reaction. For example, the government or big business or whomever does something you
dislike, so you protest. They throw a punch, so you throw a punch. Back and forth.
Eventually, this way of thinking tries to convince us, the tides will change. Eventually my
punch will be the knockout punch, and those aggressive forces that pushed me to react will
meet their doom. (“And the meek shall inherit the earth.”)

This is, unfortunately, a fantasy. Action will always prevail. Reaction will always fail. (Did
protest end the war in Vietnam? Did protest stop the war in Iraq? Did protest stop the
destruction of collective bargaining in Wisconsin recently? — No. It did not. Why?
Because protest is reactive, not active; it is negative rather than affirmative; it assumes the
subordinate position “I am against X!” rather than the dominate position “I am for X!”) It is
the myth Nietzsche exposes in his groundbreaking and devastating Genealogy of Morals, a
book that is central to my understanding of Deleuze’s ethical applicability. For Nietzsche,
Deleuze, and myself, direct engagement is a mistake. Diffuse or indirect engagement is
preferable. Diagonal rather than horizontal or vertical attack. Non-Euclidean game plans.
Rhizome rather than root, molecular rather than molar, dynamic rather than static: reroute the
flow of power toward new creative constructions. Think of it like a tug of war: the
opposition relies on your engagement, on your antithesis. Without it, they would fall on their
butts in the same way a person would fall on their butt if you were playing tug of war and
suddenly let go of your end of the rope. By engaging with the opposition you merely serve to
validate and empower that opposition. The only form of power one can truly wield is the
power of action, of affirmation, of creation. Let go of the rope! You’re tired of going to the
grocery store and finding fruits and vegetables from overseas, which have been treated with
cancer-causing chemicals? Don’t bother fussing with the management or writing a letter to
your congressman…let go of the rope and go build an organic community garden. Action.
Creation. Do not be duped into thinking that you can win a battle against the powers that be
– they are the powers that be because they took action, because they created something.

This also imbricates Spinoza’s view of ethics, which serves as the other major pillar of my
understanding of Deleuze’s ethical applicability. For both thinkers, affirmation engenders
creation and negation engenders destruction.

In everyday life, this means reconsidering our actions. It means asking oneself: am I acting
or am I reacting? Am I creating or am I destroying? Am I affirming or am I negating?

That sort of speaks to the ethical issue. In terms of the aesthetic, I think Deleuze can help us
in everyday life by encouraging us to foreground difference, to find beauty in difference, to
seek heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, to focus our desire toward the unfamiliar, the
strange, the new. A Deleuzian aesthetic is predicated, at least in part, on change, movement,
transformation, repositioning, shifting, flowing, mutating, multiplying, generating, and, of
course, magic.

If you could give someone a Deleuze bundle of five items, what would it contain? (It can
include anything: any of Deleuze’s books/essays, anything Deleuze writes about often,
other texts, other media, a desert root system, etc.)

Wow, tough question. There is so much good stuff out there, so many options. And it really
would depend on what angle a person was particularly interested in exploring. Thinking in
general terms, here is a bundle of five possible entry points:

An Introductory Bundle

*First, I would give them Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche, because I wholeheartedly agree with
Michael Hardt’s opening statement in his Forward to the revised edition: “This book is, in my
view, the best introduction to Deleuze’s thought.” (You can read Hardt’s entire Forward here.)

*Second, I would give them Michel Foucault’s critical examination of Deleuze’s first two
books of independent philosophy (Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense) called
“Theatrum Philosophicum,” which opens with Foucault’s famous statement, “Indeed, these
books are so outstanding that they are difficult to discuss; this may explain, as well, why so
few have undertaken this task. I believe that these words will continue to revolve about us in
enigmatic resonance with those of Klossowski, another major and excessive sign, and
perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.” (You can read the whole thing
here.)

*Third, I would give them the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, which contains Deleuze
& Guattari’s concept of the Rhizome. (You can read the entire introduction here.)

*Fourth, I would give them this lecture on Deleuze by Manuel De Landa, which elaborates
lucidly on crucial concepts such as expressivity and morphogenesis.

*And fifth, I would give them Félix Guattari’s book Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972—
1977, because one of the most effective ways of familiarizing oneself with Deleuze is by
seeing him through the eyes of his longtime collaborator.
As an added bonus, I’ll offer three other useful bundles…

The Background Bundle

Five works to inform, expand, and enhance one’s engagement with Deleuze:

*Baruch Spinoza – Ethics

*Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals

*Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution

*Antonin Artaud – The Theatre and Its Double

*James Gleick – Chaos: Making a New Science

The Secondary Bundle

Five works that utilize or otherwise illuminate Deleuze in ways that I have found particularly
provocative and/or useful:

*Steven Shaviro – Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics

*Bruce Baugh’s essay “How Deleuze can help us make Literature work” (which has been
anthologized in the collection Deleuze and Literature)

*Gerald Bruns’s essay “Becoming Animal: Some Simple Ways” (published first in New
Literary History, 2007, 38: 703–720, but also included in his newest book On Ceasing to be
Human)

*John Rajchman – The Deleuze Connections

*Alain Badiou – Deleuze: The Clamor of Being

The Case Study Bundle

Five entries to get one thinking about the application of Deleuze’s philosophy:

*David Markson’s Author Quartet (Reader’s Block, This is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point,
The Last Novel)

*William Burroughs’s Cut-Up Triptych (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova
Express)

*Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle

*Captain Beefheart – Trout Mask Replica

* Ryan Trecartin – P.opular S.ky (section ish)

And finally, your favorite sentence or paragraph from Deleuze’s writing.

Okay, I’m not going to over think this or second guess my first impulse, which is this:

Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms
that are yet to come. (A Thousand Plateaus 4-5)