"Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses" Reviewed by Joseph Nechvatal

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A Book Review of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses by Jussi Parikka (Peter Lang Books, 2007, 327 pages) by Joseph Nechvatal


{loop:file = get-random-executable-file;if first-line-of-file = 1234567 then goto loop;prepend virus to file;}
Fred Cohen, Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments

We cannot be done with viruses as long as the ontology of network culture is viral-like.
Jussi Parikka, The Universal Viral Machine

One could be forgiven for assuming that a book with the title “Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses” would be of sole interest to those sniggering hornrimmed programmers who harbor an erudite loathing of Bill Gates and an affection for the Viennese witch-doctor. Actually, it is a rather game and enthralling look, via a media-ecological approach, into the acutely frightening, yet hysterically glittering, networked world in which we now reside. A world where the distinct individual is pitted against - and thoroughly processed by - post-human semi-autonomous software programs which often ferment anomalous feelings of being eaten alive by some great indifferent artificiality that apparently functions semi-independently as a natural being.

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes concerning the ramifications for a creative and aesthetic, if post-human, future. Digital Contagions is impregnated with fear and suspicion, but we almost immediately sense that it also contains an undeniable affirmative nobility of purpose; which is to save the media cultural condition – and the brimful push of technological modernization in general – from catastrophically killing itself off.

This admirable embryonic redemption is achieved by a vaccination-like turning of tables, as Parikka convincingly demonstrates that computer viruses (semi-autonomous machinic/vampiric pieces of code) are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but rather essential traits of the techno-cultural logic itself. According to Parikka, digital viruses in effect define the media ecology logic that characterizes our networked computerized culture in recent decades.

We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular technological and humane strings that have attained virtual consistency. Our current inter-network ecology is a comparable combination of top-down host arrangements wedded to bottom-up self-organization where invariable linear configurations and states of entanglement co-evolve in active process. Placing the significant role of the virus in this mix in no uncertain terms, Parikka writes that, “the virus truly seems to be a central cultural trope of the digital world”. (p. 136) Indeed digital viruses are recognized by Parikka as the crowning culmination of current postmodern cultural trends - as viruses, by definition, are merger machines based on parasitism and acculturation. So it is not only their symbolic/metaphoric power that places them firmly in a wider perspective of cultural infection; it is their formal structure, in that they procure their actuality from the encircling environment to which they are receptively coupled.

Moreover, with the love of an aficionado, Parikka lucidly demonstrates that computer viruses are indeed a variable index of the rudimentary underpinning on which contemporary techno culture rests. He astutely anoints the indexical function of the virus by establishing not only its symbolic melancholy power in relation to the human body and sex, but by folding the viral life/nonlife model (**) into key cultural areas underlying the digital ecology; such as bottom-up self-organization, hidden distributed activity and ethereal meshwork. In that sense Parikka describes network ecology as both actual and virtual, what I have elsewhere identified as the viractual. (Briefly, the viractual is the stratum of activity where distinct actualizations/individuations are materialized out of the flow of virtuality.) But some viruses do not simply yield copies of themselves, they also engage in a process of self-reproducing autopoiesis: they are copying themselves over and over again but they can also mutate and change, and by doing so, Parikka maintains, reveal distinguishing aspects of network culture at large.

I would add that they mimic the manneristic aspects of late post-modernism in general, particularly if one sees modernism as the great petri dish aggregate in which we still are afloat. So computer viruses are recognized here as an indexical symptom also of a bigger cultural tendency that characterizes our post-modern media culture as being inserted within a modern (purist) digital ecology. This aspect provides the book with a discerning, yet heterogeneous, comprehension of the connectionist technologies of contemporaneous techno culture.

But beyond the techno-cultural relevance, the significance of the viral issues in Parikka’s book to ALL cultural production is evident to anyone who has already recognized that digitalization has become the universal technical platform for networked capitalism. As Parikka himself points out, digitalization has secured its place as the master formal archive for sounds, images and texts. (p. 5) Digitalization is the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us in what we do - and which accounts for our cultural feelings of vacillating between anxiety and enthusiasm over being invaded by something invisible - and the sneaky suspicion that we have been taken control of from within.

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual allegories, antibody a-life projects, various infected prosthesis, polymorphic encryptions, ticklish security issues, numerous medical plagues, the coupling of nature and biology via code, incisive sabotage attempts, anti-debugging trickery, genome sequencing, parasitic spyware, killer T cell epidemics, rebellious database deletions, trojan horse latency, viral marketing, inflammatory political resistance, biological weaponry, pornographic clones, depraved destructive turpitudes, rotten jokes, human-machine symbiosis as interface, and a history of cracker catastrophes. All are conjoined with excellent taste. The shock effect is one of discovering a poignant nervous virality that has been secretly penetrating us everywhere.
Digital Contagions’s genealogical account is proportionately impressive, as it devotes satisfactory space to the discussion of historical precedent; including Turing machines, Fred Cohen’s pioneering work with computer viruses, John von Neumann's cellular automata theory (i.e. any system that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism), avant-garde cybernetics, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Creeper virus in the Arpanet network, the coupling machines of John Conway, the nastily waggish Morris worm, Richard Dawkins’s meme (contagious idea) theory; and even the under known artistic hacks of Tommaso Tozzi. Furthermore, the viral spectral as fantasized in science fiction is adequately fleshed out, paying deserved attention to the obscure but much loved (by me, anyway) 1975 book The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner and the celebrated cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; among other speculative books and hallucinatory films.

But the pinnacle of interest, for me, of this engaging and educative read is its conclusion where Parikka sketches out an alternative radical media-ecological perspective hinged on the viral characteristics of self-reproduction and a coupling of the outside with the inside typical of artificial life (a-life). He correctly maintains that viral autopoiesis undertakings, like Thomas S. Ray's Tierra virtual ecology art project, provides quintessential clues to interpreting the software logic that has produced, and will continue to produce, the ontological basis for much of the economic, political and cultural transactions of our current globalizing world.

Here he has rendered problematic the safe vision of virus as malicious software (virus as infection machine) and replaced it with a far more curious, aesthetic and even benevolent one; as whimsical artificial life (a-life). Using viral a-life’s tenants of semi-automation, self-reproduction, and host quest; Parikka proposes a living machinic autopoiesis that might provide a moebius strip like ontological process for culture.

Though suppositional, he bases his procedure in formal viral attributes - not unlike those of primitive artificial life with its capability to self-reproduce and spread semi-autonomously (as viruses do) while keeping in mind that Maturana/Varela’s autopoiesis contends that living systems are an integral component of their surroundings and work towards supporting that ecology. Parikka here picks up that thread by pointing out that recent polymorphic viruses are now able to evolve in response to anti-virus behaviors. Various viruses, known as retroviruses, (***) explicitly target anti-virus programs. Viruses with adaptive behavior, self-reproductive and evolutionary programs can be seen, at least in part, as something alive, even if not artificial life in the strongest sense of the word. Here we might recall John Von Neumann’s conviction that the ideal design of a computer should be based on the design of certain human organs - or other live organisms. The artistic compositional benefit of his autopoiesic virality theory, for me, is in allowing thought and vision to rupture habit and bypass object-subject dichotomies.

I wish to point out here that although biological viruses were originally discovered and characterized on the basis of the diseases they caused, most viruses that infect bacteria, plants and animals (including humans) do not cause disease. In fact, viruses may be helpful to life in that they rapidly transfer genetic information from one bacterium to another, and viruses of plants and animals may convey genetic information among similar species, helping their hosts survive in hostile environments.

Already various theories of complexity have established an influence within philosophy and cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and adaptability, but Parikka here supplies a further step in thinking about ongoing feedback loops between an organism and its environment; what I am tempted to call viralosophy. Viralosophy would be the study of viral philosophical and theoretical points of reference concerning malignant transformations useful in understanding the viral paradigm essential to digital culture and media theory that focuses on environmental complexity and inter-connectionism in relationship to the particular artist. Within viralosophy, viral comprehension might become the eventual - yet chimerical - reference point for culture at large in terms of a modification of parameters, as it promotes parasite-host dynamic interfacings of the technologically inert with the biologically animate, probabilistically.

So the decisive, if dormant, payload that is triggered by reading this book, for me, is an enhanced understands of pagan and animist sentiment which recognizes non-malicious looping-mutating energy feedback and self-recreational dynamism that informs new aesthetic becomings which may alter artistic output. Possibly heuristic becomings (****) that transgress the established boundaries of nature/technology/culture and extend the time-bomb cognitive nihilism of Henry Flynt. This affirmative viral payload forces open-ended multiplicities onto art that favor new-sprung conceptualizations and rebooted realizations. Here the artist comes back to life as spurred a-life, and not as a sole articulation of the pirated environment of currency. So the so-called art virus is not to be judged in terms of its occasional monetary payload, but by the metabolistic characteristics that make art reasonable to discuss as a form of extravagant artificial life: triggered emergence, resilience and back door evolution.

(*) A computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an "infection", and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a "host".

(**) Scientists have argued about whether viruses are living organisms or just a package of colossal molecules. A virus has to hijack another organism's biological machinery to replicate, which it does by inserting its DNA into a host.

(***) Retroviruses are sometimes known as anti-anti-viruses. The basic principle is that the virus must somehow hinder the operation of an anti-virus program in such a way that the virus itself benefits from it. Anti-anti-viruses should not be confused with anti-virus-viruses, which are viruses that will disable or disinfect other viruses.

(****) A heuristic virus cleaner works by loading an infected file up to memory and emulating the program code. It uses a combination of disassembly, emulation and sometimes execution to trace the flow of the virus and to emulate what the virus is normally doing. The risk in heuristic cleaning is that if the cleaner tries to emulate everything, the virus might get control inside the emulated environment and escape, after which it can propagate further or trigger a destructive retaliation reflex.


Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
http://www.nechvatal.net/

A 28 min. viral symphOny by Joseph Nechvatal may be downloaded as an mp3 file for free at UBUweb here:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/nechvatal.html

Edgewise Press is publishing a book this Winter containing selected writings by Joseph Nechvatal called "Immoderate Moments Selected Writings on Art and Technology" http://www.edgewisepress.com/main.html

Read the full post here - with comments discussion at the bottom of each page.

'The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze' Conference Report

'The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze' Conference took place on Saturday 7th July 2007, a sunny day which a stiff breeze kept from becoming too hot. Delegates and speakers came from across the country and from abroad to Greenwich University's Maritime Campus on the banks of the Thames. Sessions took place in Queen Anne Court (pictured above) and began with two parallel sessions.

Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, gave a paper entitled 'Deleuze, Husserl, Kant: Transcendental Intermediaries.' She brought into play the as yet undeveloped encounter of Deleuze with Husserl and argued for its importance. This would allow the invention of concepts to be explored in new ways. The outcome of this encounter is an understanding of Deleuze different to that provided by his encounter with Kant's Ideas. This paper was able to reveal new aspects of Deleuze and take these forward, pointing the way for Deleuze scholarship.

Edward Willatt, PhD student at Greenwich, delivered a paper entitled 'Reason, Desire and Incompleteness' in the other parallel session. He sought to show the role of reason's desire at the heart of the advance of cognition in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason using Deleuze's reading of it. This involved relating Kant and Deleuze through the notion of the problematic Idea, providing the unity of the activity of the faculties, and the 'object=x'. The latter notion brought us to Deleuze’s essay 'How do we recognise structuralism?' Here the 'object=x' demands an ideal thinker or hero of structure who is equal to thinking the 'object=x'. This was related to Deleuze's concern to provide the Transcendental Unity of Apperception as the ideal thinker able to affirm his own 'object=x.' Among the questions after the paper was one about the nature of reason. In what sense is it formal and logical? For Kant there is a real sense in which it unifies the activity of faculties, providing its energy. Questions followed that concerned the scope of the comparison made by the paper. Does understanding really rely upon reason or is it the other way around? The paper sought to argue that reason and understanding imply one another but Kant’s veneration for the understanding make this a contentuous claim. Also questioned was whether the ‘object=x’ involved in Deleuze's philosophy of difference could be related very closely to Kant's ‘object=x’ which embodies his transcendental logic of identity and resemblance. Does Kant not seek to account for the move towards complete unity of cognition in contrast with Deleuze’s concern with pure difference? There is perhaps a sense in which Kant sought to give a complete account of cognition but, despite himself, made incompleteness essential to cognition when he kept finding problems that kept his thought open. Thus the problem of the organism in the Critique of Judgement and the problem of matter in the Opus Postumum mean he can never, and should never, write his promised 'metaphysics of nature' (Critique of Pure Reason, Bxliii). A further question concerned the 'dice throw'. Should we, with Deleuze, want to get rid of everything so as to affirm the 'dice throw'? Could it be said that certain structures must remain? It would be a case of taking forward Kant's concern but perhaps establishing something other than the categories as that which must remain.

After lunch another two parallel sessions took place. Filipe Ferreira, of the New School of Social Research in New York, presented a paper entitled 'Bergsonism and Critique.' He sought to show Bergson's role in a radicalisation of transcendental idealism and the critical project. Bergson's Matter and Memory was engaged with so as to elaborate his theory of matter and the notion that the body is pure matter, something taken forward by Deleuze. The nature of problems for Bergson was subject to analysis. Deleuze and Guattari's 'Body without Organs' was developed as the body made into a problem. Latent references to Kant in Matter and Memory were developed. The crux of the matter was located in the notion of limitation, the limitation of the unconditioned totality which is assumed by Bergson. For Kant this total reality is beyond possible experience. The Amphiboly in the first Critique was explored for its four different ways of thinking about nothing. The horizon of the complete determination of reality was developed as 'the pure plane of thought as such.' The problem is how we get from this ideal to what is determinable. Kant seeks to provide such limitation by limiting possibility using sensible conditions. Yet for Bergson, it was argued, the totality or complete reality is assumed when we assume the brain or the smallest part of matter. In this way he united Bergson, Kant and Deleuze through the problem of limitation, emphasising how Kant stands apart from the two later thinkers whilst sharing in this problem. Questions after the paper included one on the role of memory in Bergson's thought. In the paper it was argued that limitation is to be understood in terms of perception and not memory. Deleuze's investment in a plane of thought as such was developed as an indeterminate plane of problems. This meant that the Body with Organs was the ‘object=x’ or pure objectivity. In this sense, the speaker argued, it problematises life. Another question concerned the role of pure subjectivity – was this not to be found in the Body without Organs? Also discussed was whether Bergson offers us an account of the 'encounters' which are a part of the processes of individuation in Deleuze's thought.

In the other parallel session Matthew Hammond of the University of Exeter gave a paper entitled 'Picking over the Bones of David Hume.' The paper began with Kant's views on Hume and how he found him to have approached, but not fully realised, a synthetic principle. Kant's concern with time was emphasised, something taking us beyond mere empirical repetition to the unity provided by the understanding. This was insightfully related to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. Here it was argued that Deleuze has allegiances to both Kant and Hume, appreciating the Kant's emphasis upon time and the Hume's emphasis upon repetition. The differences between Kant's and Deleuze's treatment of Hume was considered. Kant wants to get beyond repetition to 'a single experience.' For Deleuze repetition is to overcome the present that repeats. In time repetition becomes primary. Hume also offers Deleuze a self in time which he uses to develop Kant's fractured or divided self. Also discussed was the passive synthesis of habit in Hume, to which Kant responds with an active synthesis to account for it. Yet for Deleuze we do not need to have an active synthesis from the start but can begin with passive synthesis, in this way accounting for active synthesis. For Deleuze, it was argued, Kant's notions come to rely on the passive synthesis and understanding of time that he finds in Hume.

After a tea break the conference re-convened for the keynote session. The speakers were Daniel W. Smith of Purdue University, who has this past academic year been a visiting fellow at Middlesex University, and Paul Davies of Sussex University. Dr Smith gave a paper entitled 'Deleuze, Kant, and the Post-Kantian Tradition.' This began with Deleuze's destruction of self, world and God as the three great forms of identity. The role of Solomon Maimon in Deleuze's reading of Kant was developed in depth. Maimon argued that Kant had rejected the demands of a genetic method and like Deleuze he sought to extend critique, with difference operating in the conditions of real experience. It was suggested that Deleuze takes forward Maimon's 'coalition system' because he writes upon the thinkers who were to be united in it. Deleuze's essay on the Critique of Judgement, 'The Ideas of Genesis in Kant's Aesthetics', was discussed. Here Ideas are thrown back into sensible nature. This means that anything that is is a multiplicity. The theory of Ideas is then a way of thinking the theory of being. Deleuze's Cinema books were also discussed as the elaboration of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, showing a space and time that other arts don't show. This wide ranging linking of Kant and Deleuze continued with the argument that What is Philosophy? at last gives us Deleuze's own Analytic. This is despite Deleuze's commitment to univocity which precludes there being any categories. The Critique of Practical Reason was also located as a theory of desire where desire is defined in causal terms, causing the actuality of its representations as objects.

The second keynote paper, given by Dr Davies, was entitled 'Regulating and Inventing Concepts.' This began with Deleuze’s notion that concepts can be invented. In Kant regulation and the concept are conjoined. Reference was made to Kant's logic lectures and his placing concepts in the context of judgement. It seems that concepts cannot be radically new or invented in the first Critique. Yet, it was argued, in the third Critique this may be challenged by reflective judgement. This relies upon judgement coming before concepts, a unifying operation found in both first and third Critiques. Reference was made to the attempts to improve Kant's concepts by two different traditions – that following Frege made use of the function and that following Hegel used systems. This story of the improvement of Kant's account of concepts and their use was said to make the conceptual 'a site of genuine problems for philosophy.' It was then argued that Deleuze seeks to engage with a Kant who is not yet either continental or analytic. This is how we can understand Deleuze's account of the concept. Can we find in Kant the notion that a concept is accompanied by an event, something that would make an excess over the concept into the material for extending concepts. It was suggested that here Kant and Deleuze do share the same experience, thought or predicament. In the third Critique we still need judgement to go first. Deleuze sees creativity and inventivity here, and argues that it was there in the first Critique as well. He seeks a discordant accord in the third Critique, the hidden disunity and difference between faculties. It involves an inventivity already there in the first Critique, overcoming the impression of the primacy of the regulative. Yet, it was argued, despite Deleuze's efforts the rule clarifies the concept throughout Kant, blocking the inventivity that he seeks to find. The distinction was in this way made between the concept referred to an event and the concept referred to a rule.

A very 'strange encounter' indeed is seen here taking place outside Queen Anne Court.

We would like to thank our speakers very much indeed for travelling to Greenwich and delivering papers which made this conference very exciting and productive, contributing a great deal to Kant and Deleuze scholarship. Many thanks are also due to delegates for contributing to intense and invigorating discussions. We would also like to thank the philosophy department of the University of Greenwich for their support for the conference and for Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group over the first year of its activity. Given that the Kant-Deleuze relation is a relatively new area for study we feel that the conference has opened new paths and questions that demand very much attention. Volcanic Lines events will continue in the Autumn term and we will work further on Deleuze's encounters. At some stage we hope to focus some sessions upon Solomon Maimon's work as a much neglected thinker whose importance for the Kant-Deleuze relation demands to be recognised, as Dr Smith’s paper showed.

Please feel free to add to this report and to continue the discussion by clicking on 'comments' below this post.

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Colloquium - Mick Bowles on 'Understanding: Spinoza, Kant, Deleuze'

7th June Colloquium - Mick Bowles (Greenwich) 'Understanding: Spinoza, Kant, Deleuze'


On the 7th June 2007 Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group met for a colloquium delivered by Dr Mick Bowles of the philosophy department here at Greenwich. We are very grateful to Dr Bowles for giving this vital and highly productive paper. The status and value of the understanding must concern us given that it has been maligned by philosophies of difference, including by Deleuze's own critique of the 'image of thought' in Difference and Repetition. The paper raised such questions and revealed to us their very great importance. How do we account for Kant's veneration for the understanding? Mick drew us into the question 'what is unity?' The transcendental logic shows Kant's reverence for the understanding and we were made to see the importance of appreciating this. Spinoza's love for the understanding was introduced in relation to his conception of the will. For Spinoza affirmation is the logic of the understanding.

Mick developed Spinoza's investment in the understanding. He wants to get to 'complete understanding' as soon as possible. Kant does not conjoin reason and understanding, thus in contrast to Spinoza it is not connected to its own genesis. It was emphasised that understanding for Kant 'pulses with activity', even if its origin is not explored. Spinoza's thought was related to Quine's work where the system comes before the part, the whole is 'a space that is already there'. The role of incompleteness was also developed, involving the swarming of possibilities. Thus for Spinoza, Mick argued, we need to engage with the productive understanding. There is a then a 'swarming of the virtual' but for Spinoza the understanding ensures that 'there is no going back.' Death is for Spinoza 'not knowing what to do' and thinking never seeks this, it is rather sustained by conatus or striving. Avoiding death makes understanding productive and energetic.
Deleuze's reading of Spinoza was engaged with, bringing us to the 'third kind of knowledge'. This is manifested in the point of ‘collapse and flow' which is called, amongst other things, the 'object=x.' At this point 'the force of production swarms.' Concepts are constructed because thought is animated by this point. The limits of the relations between Spinoza and Deleuze were also developed. Understanding is for Spinoza different from the intensity of relations, in contrast to what happens in Deleuze’s reading of his thought.

The paper brought out the very deep role of understanding in Spinoza and Kant's thought – showing it to be complex and inescapable. We were brought to appreciate that seeing understanding as simply detachable from their thought is not an option. In this sense Deleuze's readings of both of their systems have certain limitations. Indeed, we must ask whether we cannot read Kant or Spinoza against Deleuze in their encounters with him. Does there need to be understanding if we are to avoid death or to have something that survives the ‘throw of the dice’? All these questions and more were raised by this deeply fascinating paper.

Please feel free to continue the discussion below this post by clicking on 'comments.'

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14 APRIL Integrations #1 Workshop on Deleuze and Calculus

The Integrations #1 workshop on Deleuze and the differential calculus took place on Saturday 14th April at Greenwich University's Maritime Greenwich Campus. It was a very productive event indeed. We would like to thank Bat for giving an absolutely invaluable and extremely effective presentation on calculus in the morning session. Our thanks are also due to the participants who took part in the discussions. The afternoon session focused upon Deleuze's use of 'the so-called barbaric or pre-scientific interpretations of the differential calculus' in chapter 4 of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.

The morning session allowed us to get to grips with this extremely dense chapter and consider how calculus is being used here, its status in Deleuze's thought. What made this discussion particularly relevant was the recent paper by Christian Kerslake at Middlesex University's 'Deleuze and Rationalism' conference. He developed a case for developing Deleuze's reference to the 'esoteric history of differential philosophy' in terms of certain starnds of esoteric thought. The the work of the 'bright stars' differential philosophy Wronski and Maimon certainly involved such traditions. It seems as if these pages have now become a pressing challenge and a problematic for Deleuze scholarship, taking on a life of their own that challenges our assumptions about his work. This does not deny the role of mathematics but may put it in a new light, one that differs fundamentally from Manuel DeLanda's reading of Deleuze's use of maths.

Further reports on the events will follow here and contributions are very welcome indeed (e-mail volcaniclines@hotmail.com with longer contributions or leave a comment to this post).

Here are some useful texts and references provided by those who attended the workshop:

1. Here is a link to a highly relevant transcript of a seminar given by Deleuze (many thanks to Nathan Moore of Birkbeck College for this):

http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=42&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2

2. The following are texts particularly useful for philosophers exploring mathematics (many thanks to Robin Mackay of Middlesex University for this):

KLINE, M. Mathematics in Western Culture. London:Penguin 1990 (originally OUP 1964).

Chapter XV 'Grasping the Fleeting Instant: The Calculus' (pp247-268) gives an easy to follow account of how differentiation works in a simple case.

For those who want to go further, the only good technical book I've found which doesn't simply launch into equations and 'how to do it' instructions is:

EXNER, G. Inside Calculus. New York: Springer, 2000.

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'The Actual and The Virtual' Workshop Discussion

This is a report on the discussion that followed Nick Midgley's presentation on Deleuze's essay 'The Actual and The Virtual' from Dialogues II on 19th February 2007 at the Volcanic Lines Research Group's workshop. The discussion began with the notion of ‘dramatic identity’ – this seems to resonate with Deleuze’s version of the Kantian schemata as developed in ‘The Method of Dramatization.’ He traces dramatic structures like Kant did in his attempts to relate concept and intuition. It was argued that 'The Actual and The Virtual' does have a Kantian flavour since ‘brevity’ means that the manifold is immediately represented. Does the reference to a ‘spatium’, along with the brevity which makes indeterminate, resonate with the intensive spatium that in Difference and Repetition is the dramatisation of Ideas? Reference was made to Bergson for whom perception is characterised by a gap, the centre of indetermination which distinguishes the discontinuity of the actual from the continuity of the virtual. The virtual centre of indetermination draws together the actual discontinuity around it because it draws upon the resources of its continuity to produce a singular and attractive determination. This is described by Deleuze as ‘emission and absorption, creation and destruction’.


At this point Deleuze’s Logic of Sense was related to the discussion. Here states of affairs are distinguished from bodies and events. We have a three-fold synthesis of time as in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze finds in the Stoic conception of the body the non-actual self which corresponds to the contracted self and individual in Difference and Repetition. The action of the body is the body going to the limit of its power of individuation.

The role of memory was also discussed. The ‘Combray moment’ in chapter two of Difference and Repetition allows us to access pure memory. But is the crystal we find in ‘The Actual and The Virtual’ closer to the ‘Eternal Return moment’, the ordinal structure, being a before and after moment of crystallization. It was argued that rather than any leap into the pure past, invoking perhaps an existential subject, we need eros. Deleuze can be said to leave Bergson behind when it comes to accessing the pure past because of his leap into the pure past. The eros moment explains the encounter and we don’t need to jump or leap to the Eternal Return, as if collapsing levels of Deleuze’s system and suggesting that through thought or Ideas there is a privileged access to Being. The argument rests upon keeping open the ways of accessing the past rather than privileging thought and making the subject beholden to a moment of revelation after which nothing else seems to be left. If we leap to the Eternal Return we seem to give up all reference to the actual and yet in this essay we find that virtual encircle the actual like a cloud. If the eros moment explains the encounter this places the encounter in everyday life, it is the affect that allows perception to occur.

Developing this point, the case was made that saving the pure past for ourselves is related closely to notion of apprenticeship for Deleuze. Eros is forced onto you and this invokes ongoing encounters or an infinite learning. The virtual that encircles the actual seems to develop a crystalline individuation and suggest that we must think the past through individuation, the common limit of the past and future. The film ‘Citizen Kane’ was mentioned – at the beginning a crystal ball shatters. Does this take you to pure memory? The event that shatters the actual – a kind of interruption that makes it impossible to say what is real and what is imaginary or a dream. It was argued that rather than a leap into the past we have the crystal as an eruption into a meta-stable situation, bring us closer, it could be argued, to the virtual encircling the actual. The seed seems to always be needed – it is what gets the system going. Temperature changes the types of structure that will form. This resonates with the earlier account of intensities in Deleuze’s work and with Manuel DeLanda’s work on Deleuze.

Can the crystal be regarded as an assemblage? Both are half actual and half virtual. They both seem to be individuating systems. Reference was made to Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy where there are no objects, only combinations and forces. In Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole, it was argued, there appears to be a big tension between the depth of the individual and the enormity of the virtual. There seems to be a risk that one or the other takes over, leading Deleuze to seek a circuit of the expansive horizon the virtual with the contracting that sustains an individual. ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ seems to draws these themes together. This was related to a possible film scenario where a character looks in the mirror and cannot see who they are. Individuation as a process seems to be crystallization here, individuation as a circuit. The reference at one point to dissolution seems to relate this to the earlier conception of ‘a system of the dissolved self’ as seen in Difference and Repetition chapter 5. In the last paragraph of ‘The Actual and The Virtual’ we find the distinction, upon the plane of immanence, between the actual’s ‘own virtual’ in its circuit of crystallization and its relation to the whole of the virtual (referring ‘to virtuals as to other things in the vast circuits where the virtual is actualised.’) This draws on the notion of contraction already mentioned in the essay and stages an expansion-contraction. It was argued that here we see that the problem of individuation, as a process ‘between’ actual and virtual, recurs. However, this was the subject of some debate. The persistence of individuation as ‘the third thing’ or level (as it appears to have been in Difference and Repetition) was disputed. This developed from the debate over the leap into the past versus the encounter with the past: do we have the individuated subject of encounters ‘between’ actual and virtual or the actual leaping into the virtual? Is the actual embedded in its cloud, it crystalline circuit, as well as relating to the whole of the virtual or is it exposed to this whole in abstraction from its individuation? This fundamental debate will no doubt continue productively.

Is going into memory a counter-actualisation? We need, it was argued, an empirical moment and not merely a leap. We cannot simply posit transcendental conditions as abstract and non-empirical. We have no representative access to the past and need an encounter, something that is non-representative. Bergson’s intuition appears unexplanatory, a ‘cop out’. What is it? How do we show that one intuition is better than another? It needs to be made rigorous, Bergson writes, but how? We need the structure of the encounter and Deleuze gives us this. The specific encounters can be selected by intuition as being true to their encounter. Thus we ask: Has the novelist constituted the affect? At some point you encounter yourself having an intuition – a contraction of the past – bang! Event! Rigor demands a method to say if I am actually doing this or not.

What do you encounter? In Derrida we have the aporetic moment and in Lacan the objet petit a. For Zizek you encounter the moment and then you’ve got the virtual. With Derrida, it was suggested, we get monotonous repetition because anything can be deconstructed. Yet for Deleuze, the virtual problem is of this text and not just any text, it is its own problem (its own virtual thanks to the crystalline circuit of its individuation).

A final point was that images come to sound more like forces because they are always in the process of acting and reacting.

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On four poetic formulas which might summarise a Kantian philosophy

Reading Group Workshop on Gilles Deleuze's Essay 'On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation

The presentation delivered at the start of the session can can be viewed by clicking here.

Workshop Discussion

Desire in Kant was clarified in terms of its lower and higher use. How do we explain moral acts that don’t happen for reasons of instinct, appetite, interest and other ‘natural’ causes? However, the good life is what must be accounted for and ‘the good is what the laws say’. The kind of person ia key rather than what happens in particular empirical cases. The moral order connects things, through moral Ideas, that otherwise have no connection and a series of actions that cannot be explained. What is the continuity behind the good life? It must be the law which neither imposes or offers any particular commandment or instruction because then it would not have the force of pure or higher desire which lacks nothing. Desire seeking what it lacks in empirical cases of action is transcended by this lack and we lose the immanent production through desire that Deleuze seeks.

The relation with Anti-Oedipus was brought up. It was pointed out that this is a critique of desire as lack. It was questioned whether morality is ‘causal’ – is it not ‘productive’, bringing about something new? The pure and empty form of the law is not particularised and therefore cannot be equated with a chain of particular causes. It was argued that this involves ‘catching yourself in a completely subjective productivity.’ The force at the heart of thought and desire in the Four Poetic Formulas expresses the practical reality of the virtual.

It was suggested that in Deleuze, Lacan and Kant desire is positive and pleasure is negative. Desire is a desire for its own productivity, one that does not exclude different desires through a sum of possibility. Is desire anthropomorphic? If so, maybe ‘force’ is better and ‘cleaner.’

The selective test of desire for the sake of desire, the pure force of our thought, brings us to Nietzsche’s concern with a will that wills itself again and again. It is purely autonomous desire.

The space which Hamlet’s inhabits was then discussed in order to engage with Deleuze’s pronouncement that he is the first hero to need to time to act. Chaos of strange, demonic, maybe Dionysian, events – the breakdown of a space of action that requires clearness and distinctness. Yet these bewildering events come together because the (absurd) logic behind them, that which relates them, is a ‘time out of joint’ which Hamlet discovers and through which he acts. He finds the force of desire not through judgement and calm thought but thought’s own delirious limit. The events are held together by the thread of this time so as to contract a decision or act. We cannot say that Hamlet’s soliloquies lead to or explain his act, they do not reason towards it but do productively and profoundly attain the madness of reason through which acts emerge spontaneously and without a causal trail.

This was related to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling where the time of modern subjectivity prevents him from getting to the faith Abraham had. He had no subjective time but Kierkegaard is stuck in it. With faith we are not paralysed by this time.

In this subjectivity of modernity, also the subjectivity of the world or time of the city (the modernist milieu), stasis comes from everything happening at once, coming from all directions simultaneously. (Perhaps marketing has this effect) However, the existentialist says that I don’t know who I am until I make the decision. It is then best not to think because no subject produces action, it comes from nothing. The subject doesn’t pre-exist the decision. The space is then constructed from a minute and almost forgettable act.

Perhaps, it was suggested, the knowledge-action split in Hamlet can only happen in time. The end of the play comes together through a time ‘out of joint’. Hamlet isn’t just tormented by a decision between options because this would just be a space of possibilities and not the exhausted ‘any-space-whatever’ we encountered in Deleuze’s ‘The Exhausted’ at a previous workshop this term. Also, such a torment has already happened to heroes in plays – Hamlet thinks on a wider plane than that of possibilities. He thinks about individuation and his own being or production. His torment about his fathers ghost shows him split between the familial love of his father and the horror of the undead. The ghost is described in terms that invoke Shakespeare’s’ philosophy of nature, its Dionysian and demonic aspects. Could it be the devil simulating the image and voice of his father? Torn by love of father and sense of evil, something found in the imagery of his experience of a father both terrifying and attracting him (as the groundless ground does for Deleuze). This is to involve for Deleuze how things are produced (split between Apollonian and Dionysian). The ghost could be seen as exteriorizing something that speaks the truth of his own unconscious to him, his own thought or desire as an other. The ghost forces upon him the terror and attraction (‘to be or not to be’) of his own production, his own groundless ground. Hamlet’s subjectivity is exteriorized and referred a dramatisation of Ideas that exceeds his sense of possibility and movement. He is taken beyond possibilities to the production of things.
The role of the ghost was linked to Descartes’ demon who gets rid of the certainty of the law through an argument from illusion.

The Copernican turn in Kant was brought up – does it introduce the thinking of time through concepts of possible movement? With Hamlet, on the contrary, we get to madness and subjectivity made external via the thread or labyrinth in the world, the time of the world or city.

Deleuze’s reference to ordinal and cardinal time in the first Poetic Formula was discussed. With the ordinal there is no measure for knowing how long things will last – this is not rational, things can be all at once and procrastination results. The cardinal is discreteness, deadlines and order. For Kierkegaard the internal movement of passion in the soul is the intensive and ordinal time.

We have ‘succession of determination’ after the act and yet this is not existentialism.

A final point was again on the Copernican turn where everything turns around the subject. Transcendental subjectivity nevertheless avoids talking about objects in order to become the whole world prior to subject and object. We do get to the limitations of possible experience in the end but find before this a line of flight according to Deleuze.

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On Deleuze's essay 'Bartleby: or, The Formula"

The text for today’s workshop was Deleuze’s ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ from Essays Critical and Clinical whose subject is Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby The Scrivener.’ The workshop began with a presentation by Neil Chapman of Reading University which really opened up the exciting and deeply challenging themes of the essay. This very late essay was related to another late work: ‘Immanence: A Life.’ The concern here is with encounter with life itself rather than with a particular life. This was related very productively to Giorgio Agamben’s work ‘Means Without Ends’ where naked life is an abstraction from complex forms of life. Naked life involves the dominant power’s way of understanding people as containers or blanks. For Agamben the proletariat must be imposed on a pure life. Forms of life in Agamben were related to Wittgenstein’s language games. The development of political and ethical themes opened up what is most profound and difficult to grasp in the essay ‘Bartleby; or The Formula.’

The presentation developed Agamben’s notion ‘bare life’. Also explored was the move Deleuze makes in relating Melville’s story to Robert Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’. Deleuze’s concern with the Proletariat suggests that here we have the man without qualities versus the sovereign state and in the American Immigrant we have the man without qualities developed in terms of a notion of ‘brotherhood.’ The American Immigrant here was explained in terms of idea that the immigrant can start from nothing (from bare life) and achieve the American dream.

The ‘foreign language produced within language’ was introduced in terms of leading up to the moment proper to ethics. This was related again to ‘bare life’ as the idea of life abstracted from particularities in Agamben which is therefore a vessel that can receive content. Deleuze’s reading of Bartleby seems to put forward an ethical program via a concept of ‘bare life’ because we have a formula – ‘I would prefer not to’ – that also blind to difference. We need then to be at a level prior to the emancipatory iteration of ‘we are the people.’ Does Deleuze suggest this?

The reference at page 72 to ‘the schizophrenic vocation of American literature’ was analysed. Does the notion of ‘vocation’ lay out how literature produces an ethical program? Given that things can happen in language, how do we move to the idea that these things should happen?

Reference was made to Baudelaire’s project of finding the epic in the everyday – like Deleuze he rejects the particular as the mediocre. Bartleby is an ‘original’ according to Deleuze. Jacques Ranciere argues that this original should be linked to the eccentric – there is no mimesis, he does not imitate and cannot be imitated. Bartleby is inexplicable, he is from no where. [This echoes Deleuze appropriation of Samuel Butler’s ‘Erehwon’ as ‘a disguised no-where [and] a rearranged now-here’, Difference and Repetition, p. 356 n. 7]

Stuttering is a difference we can’t understand and yet this is to be productive. At page 85 Bartleby offers a new humanity and this throws light on things around him. This leads to the federation of brothers found in the American Revolution. At page 84 alliance and blood pact are affirmed.

The discussion began by noting that in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ the filial is valued over alliance. This was linked to Deleuze’s critique of the familial in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ where the family is code. Philosophy arises because familial kingship structures break down. It was suggested that a concern with blood pact and brotherhood could refer to Deleuze biological account of individuation, suggesting the doubling of the production of particulars through their embryonic and more open relations (reference us back to ‘Difference and Repetition’, chapter 5). However, this reading didn’t seem to us to work given that the relevance of biological is not established by the text.

The appearance of a really existentialist movement, referencing Kierkegaard and his account of Abraham in ‘Fear and Trembling’, was suggested. Yet the nothingness of the will and nothingness of particulars and generals invoked by Deleuze seems to affirm the fullness of the virtual or ‘the whole of chance’ (as he terms it in the conclusion of ‘Difference and Repetition.’)

The references made to Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’ were also discussed. The novel seems to offer a nihilistic, boredom ridden milieu with no real answers. Does this relate to the productive and affirmative milieu we find in Deleuze?

A more positive account of the nothingness Deleuze invokes was sought in the pairing of Bartley’s immobility and silence (the original) with the Attorney’s line of flight (the prophet – but not the prophet of doom). This event seems to be a global event and so in a work of art it is difficult to have two of them. This is then a very productive just as a point of freezing in a physical system where everything is involved and changes. It was suggested that Bartleby inverts Sartre because he chooses not to choose. There is then an anarchy but not a human one. Reference was made to the wasp becoming orchid which in Deleuze models occurs through random choices. Yet it seems that in the human choice structure ‘the original’ (Bartleby’s formula) can randomly cut things up.

The nature of the production which is grasped prior to anything particular was also discussed. At the start of the essay Deleuze writes that ‘Bartleby The Scrivener’ is a literal text. The novel is then on the same level as life itself – it literally activates or presents an operation that is at work in how experience is productive. This was related to Deleuze’s invocation of a primary nature and of the line of flight. The latter is ideal like the ‘white light’ also mentioned (p. 83), traversing particulars but also being found in itself prior to all particulars. The prophet character as a line of flight occurs alongside the primary nature character in Melville who is either demon (Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick’) or Angel (Bartleby). This is developed by Deleuze at page 84 where he argues that demons and angels recognise one another – they need to break the law of the Father to do this, returning us to the notion of brotherhood, a community of celibates: avoiding both Father and sex so as to continue Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis. We sense that this is not at all a particular community produced ready made by the formula – as if celibacy were to be practiced and families broken up – but rather a concern with how particulars are produced. There is nothing particular about the formula of what occurs in its vicinity – this is rather ‘a zone of indetermination’. Psychoanalysis involves the Father and sex symbolically and so, for Deleuze, projects the products into the production as structural conditions or archetypes. He argues that production must not resemble its production so that celibacy and loss of father are virtual or productive conditions instead of being particulars of some actual polis.

A further point raised was Deleuze’s use of the American Revolution rather than the French revolution. If revolution produces community (through Ideas that do not resemble any particulars) and necessarily involves violence (the demon – Ahab) and refusal ( the angel – Bartleby) why not use the French Revolution? Could not Danton and Robespierre be the angel and demon characters? Is it because Napoleon imposed himself as the father figure on the liberated ‘bare life’? The universalism invoked by the American Revolution seems to appeal to Deleuze insofar as rather than respecting or letting difference be this politics values what difference does. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ the war machine is positive and creative. At page 87 taking to the road, being open to all and never trying to save other souls is affirmed. This notion, reminding us of Jack Kerouac, was related to Lyotard’s libidinal economy. Marxists have for a long time been arguing about the need for capitalism first before you can have communism. There is one interconnected whole which make capitalism and communism inextricable. Negri argues that the conditions are right for creating a bifurcation point. Kerouac’s ideal life involved simply moving on if the police Hassle you. This communal living is an alternative to familial structures. Is this permanently just a route out producing communities that are too flexible to solidify themselves?

The notion of a patchwork was explored as involving no pattern but with a formula for the size of the patchwork and how patches are joined. Likewise dry stone walls interest Deleuze because while it is easy to take down and move them they have a certain, necessary structure. This was related to Warhol’s painting where there is variability around a mundane concept because the variation is really around its Idea. Could we say that although the American Revolution failed it is interesting because it is a patchwork. It was suggested that philosophy must fail and so not build a new community but be like Bartleby. It is useful in the end for a philosopher to say that I’d prefer not to say.

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'A fantastic decomposition of the self.' Deleuze on Individuation in 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation:
'A fantastic decomposition of the self.' Deleuze on Individuation in 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Linking 'a fantastic decomposition of the self' with its individuation means that the self is disconnected from its established notions of itself in order to connect it with its own production. Deleuze's concern with the production of experience is developed in his engagement with Samuel Beckett in The Exhausted Hereafter 'TE'). He develops the continuity of production behind the discontinuity of what has already been produced. He finds that the latter, as discontinuous and countable, is exhausted or decomposed by the doubling of its own production in Beckett's work. This is effected through an art or science of exhaustion. A ‘fantastic decomposition’ is then a stage in the process of production or individuation that Deleuze is concerned with.

This presentation seeks to follow the stages Deleuze identifies in Beckett's uncovering of the production of real experience and to grasp the nature of this continuity behind the discontinuous. Our concern is with the account of individuation this provides and how this dissolution of produced or composed terms must in fact be presupposed.. In this way we find that for Deleuze composition and decomposition must form a couple that are inseparable.

Exhaustion is first specified as a rigorous purification that grasps the conditions for the production of experience. In order to explain this Deleuze straight away distinguishes it from tiredness. This point is crucial for the whole essay and for the account of individuation we are seeking to locate. The distinction is put succinctly in the following passage: 'The possible is only realised in the derivative, in tiredness, whereas one is exhausted before birth, before realising oneself, or realising anything whatsoever.' [TE, 152] Exhaustion is then a condition of experience's ongoing production, a condition in place before anything is established because it concerns a level that is pre-individual. It is a stage of the production that is always already underway. It is only after 'birth', or after the individuation of the self that is always ongoing, that realisation can be conceived. Realisation is derivative or a feature of what is already individualised because it concerns 'the sum of total possibility.' [TE, 152] Only already produced terms can form a sum because they are discontinuous and countable. Thus the possible is 'realised in the derivative' because it produces a tiredness that comes from our attempts to realise different possibilities concerning already produced objects and meanings, and according to the different preferences and goals we have accumulated. This is the sum of possibility that is tiring but restricts us to the realm of what is possible on the basis of what has already been produced. Exhaustion is much more profound because it invokes the horizon of a continuous production and allows Deleuze to conceive individuation in terms other than the realisation envisaged on the basis of a sum of possibility. Continuous production is also developed by Deleuze in terms of the notion of multiplicities. We find an elaboration of this production through continuity as it is opposed to discontinuity or discreteness that excludes this production through the internal resources of the multiplicity: 'Riemann defined as “multiplicities” those things that could be determined in terms of their dimensions or their independent variables. He distinguished discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities. The former contain the principle of their own metrics (the measure of one of their parts being given by the number of elements they contain). The latter found a metrical principle in something else, even if only in phenomena unfolding in them or in the forces acting in them.' [Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 39].
We also find here an echo of the first page of Difference and Repetition where repetition is distinguished straight away from generality. The latter involves resemblance and equivalence whilst repetition involves irreplaceable singularities. Deleuze argues that ‘To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent.’ [Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Paul Patton translation, Athlone edition- hereafter 'DR'), p. 1]. We shall see that for Deleuze exhaustion also attains a production of the singular and in this way is to account for activity.

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze identified the ideal game of the dice-throw as the horizon of the future which did not operate according to a sum total of all possibility:

'Nothing is exempt from the game: consequences are not subtracted from chance by connecting them with a hypothetical necessity which would tie them to a determinate fragment; on the contrary, they are adequate to the whole of chance, which retains and subdivides all possible consequences.' [DR, p. 283]

The continuity that replaces a sum of possibilities ensures that all the resources of the game are in play and nothing about the result is presupposed: '...a game which would be nothing else but play instead of being fragmented, limited and intercut with the work of men.' [DR, p. 283] In The Exhausted Deleuze develops Beckett's exhaustion in a way that echoes this earlier work strongly. It does not concern countable terms, or the sum of previously accumulated products but new distributions of the singular. In Difference and Repetition we find that between singularities or differences – which are the resources of the dice throw – there is a continuity which makes them distinct-obscure. In other words, their distinction and richness as distinct Ideas is realised through their relations, the obscurity that expresses their continual interactions. Throughout The Exhausted we witness a concern with attaining continuity by dissolving or decomposing forms but this must be the condition of new compositions or individuations. We find an echo of the distinct-obscure and the clear-confused of Difference and Repetition in composition-decomposition. They model the process of production, providing the resources of decomposition (as with obscurity or confusion) behind the singularities involved in an account of composition (as with distinction or clarity). Deleuze finds an account of the singularity in the ‘image’ which we will come to later. It is the horizon of exhaustion that is really productive for Deleuze and is behind the distributions and distinctions that allow us to conceive of a sum of possibility in the first place.

Deleuze finds in Becket an 'art or science of exhaustion.' It is an accumulation of what has been produced constituting a sum which must be exhausted in order to uncover the productive process. Deleuze writes: 'Beckett's characters play with the possible without realising it; they are too involved in a possibility that is ever more restricted in its kind to care about what is still happening.' [TE, p. 153] Exhaustion as an art or science proceeds through 'exhaustive series, that is, exhausting series.' [TE, p. 154] Deleuze writes that for Beckett there is to be an 'inventory' of the decomposition of the self. [TE, p. 155] This art or science of exhaustion sees different arrangements multiply, showing for Deleuze the openness of this horizon because all these permutations, this inventory, attains a level of continuity. The decomposition of the possible, of the sum of possibilities that make up the self and set boundaries to its relations, involves inclusive disjunction as the means of attaining continuity. This is the continuity of a common production shared by all terms but something which is preindividual and requires the ungrounding of compositions such that new compositions may arise.

We find this continuity through exhaustion in Beckett's novel Murphy in the following line: '“Yes or no?” said Murphy. The eternal tautology.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 27] If we took our bearings from a sum of possibilities we would not find this a tautology because the different and exclusive possibilities, the ‘Yes or no?’ would not have been exhausted. Realisation of possibilities proceeds through preferences and goals as it calculates with a sum that is tiring due to its enormity. Yet this sum is discontinuous and so unable to realise production through continuity that exhausts every term capable of being combined in a sum. It excludes the previous preferences and goals, closing off potentials that may otherwise be encountered and made use of. For Deleuze Beckett seeks to avoid this exercise of 'exclusive disjunctions' [TE, p. 153] by decomposing previous compositions in the continuous production that is common to each one. In Murphy the assortment of biscuits 'would spring to life before him, dancing with the radiant measure of its total permutability,...' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 57] The art or science of exhaustion is a matter of having 'learnt not to prefer any one to any other', making each interchangeable, as with Murphy's biscuits. Elsewhere in the novel Beckett writes: 'Murphy was one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 40] Such continuity, where things are related by their production, rather than being isolated by an essential or fixed composition, establishes the 'fullness' that Murphy cannot partake in until all produced and subsequently established distinctions are exhausted. It is the fullness we find in a production that does not resemble its products, one that cannot be modelled on the accumulations or previous products which are discontinuous or a sum of possibilities. They find this when they cease to be a sum through their interchangeability and place in an exhausting/exhaustive series. They are continuous in a way that undermines distinctions and our use of distinct things in action for certain ends. However, this process must produce new compositions capable of new actions if it is to have a productive relation to individuation.

For Deleuze we must therefore see the potential 'springing to life' of Murphy's biscuits as a stage in the account of individuation. Exhaustion must not be a hopeless surrender to 'the undifferentiated, or into the famous unity of contradictories, nor is one passive: one remains active but for nothing.' [TE, p. 153] The ‘life’ in question is that of production with the horizon of continuity and not the discontinuity that prevents things from relating and having a common production. We don't find this if all differences are cancelled because then everything is related but by being the same and not through difference. On the one hand exhaustion attains a production which does not resemble its products – it is called 'Nothing' – and yet it must be productive through difference and in accounting for the production of the new. What is this Nothing? It is the 'Nothing, of which each thing is a modification.' [TE, p. 153] Nothing is continuity freed from the discontinuity that holds among produced or composed things. Each thing merges with its own production which is precisely 'Nothing' because it does not resemble any 'thing' that has previously been produced. Murphy's learning 'not to prefer any one to any other' means giving up the oppositions between composed terms that stand in the way of total permutability and continuity, a principle of production itself through which all things relate. Combination of cases shows what is between every case, what is behind their composition and qualified extension. Deleuze seeks in Beckett what is continuous behind the continued distributions of discontinuous terms and the activity, involving significations, objects, habits, goals and preferences, that this makes possible. This echoes Bergson's concern with the breakdown of the 'sensory motor schema' which Deleuze develops in Cinema 2 [cf pages 20 and 45]. In Beckett one is no longer able to stir one's limbs but one must not lie down because this is tiredness. To lie down is to be active in a way directed towards the getting rest and having energy for the next day. With exhaustion there is no such goal or preference because these are undermined by the scope of a production where nothing must be presupposed about what can happen next and no calculation made about the future.

How is 'the fantastic decomposition of the self' to involve the milieu in which individuation takes place? Exhaustion must be a process common to every term, one found by combination through inclusive disjunction to include every term and so exhaust their isolation. Deleuze writes: 'The combinatorial exhausts its object, but only because its subject is himself exhausted.' [TE, p. 154]In this way the difference between subject and object is to emerge from the production that exhaustion returns to. Actual activity has come to an end so that terms – subject, object, thing – may find their common production through their shared exhaustion, through their merging with the continuity of Nothing. This is again continuity in 'the formless and unformulated' that must nevertheless be coupled with the formed and formulated. This relates to Deleuze’s critical assault on language at the end of the essay – words are 'so burdened with calculations and significations, with intentions and personal memories, with old habits that cement together that one can scarcely bore into the surface before it closes up again.' [TE, p. 173] This emphasises how all subjective terms must be overcome. The subject is decomposed by the horizon of the future and milieu of individuation where the time of the future is played out again and again in new organisations of space, in new compositions enabled by continual decompositions. We have so far been concerned with the first way of exhausting the possible – 'forming exhaustive series of things' [TE, p. 161] – but we have already found that Deleuze finds further levels in Beckett.

According to Deleuze in Beckett’s work we find a language I that exhausts the possible with words, with exhaustive series, but we need a second language in order to exhaust words themselves as a further stage of exhaustion and decomposition. [TE, p. 156] This is the language of voices, characterised as blendable flows or waves by Deleuze. His notion is that Beckett exhausts words by relating them to Others who emit them. The Other is a possible world. Yet rather than existing as something given or unproduced this Other is itself accounted for by being exhausted. The possible world of the Other is 'Long since exhausted, without our knowing it, without his knowing it.' It is exhausted in its turn such that the Other forms with me 'the same dead foreign language'. [TE, p. 158] The Other and myself are the same character, both exhausted, as with subject and object, as with Murphy's biscuits. Again both 'merge with Nothing' in the sense of escaping all produced terms and their discontinuity. However, we see with the self and Other a structure involved in the production in experience of individuated or composed entities. This echoes Deleuze's notion of the Other-structure in Difference and Repetition which is a stage in the production of experience but takes its bearings from a production that is continuous. At Difference and Repetiton page 282 Deleuze elaborates 'The delineation of object, the transitions as well as the ruptures, the passage from one object to another, and even the fact that one world disappears in favour of another, the fact that there is always something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed – all this is made possible only by the other-structure and its expressive power in perception. In short, it is the Other- structure that ensures individuation within the perceptual world.' Yet we must also go to '…those regions where the Other-structure no longer functions, far from objects and subject that it conditions, where singularities are free to be deployed or distributed within pure Ideas, and individuating factors to be distributed in pure intensity. In this sense, it is indeed true that the thinker is necessarily solitary and solipsistic.' Deleuze here argues that the Other-structure ensures individuation but he wants to preserve 'regions where the Other-structure no longer functions.' These regions are the continuous production in question but must nevertheless be productively related to the Other-structure. Deeper levels of exhaustion in Beckett concern very positive notions about regions prior to the Other-structure which we shall now move on to investigate.

Deleuze finds a critique of language of language in Beckett’s writings. He finds that words are bound to the particular and general for Beckett and will seek what is universal in the visual and aural. Yet the universality of a continuous production must not detract from its production of the singular, the production of new compositions through decomposition is via a process of exhaustion that brings us to the continuous again and again. Deleuze identifies a third language in Becket through which this stage of exhaustion is dramatised. This language is not concerned with combinable objects or transmitting voices, as were languages I and II respectively. It concerns Images and an 'any-space-whatever' which are respectively the time and space of production rather than of products. These are positive notions that are reached through exhaustion and so they are productive time and spaces that are behind produced times and spaces.

Let's concentrate first on the Image. It is said to 'ascend to the indefinite'. In Beckett's words, in Murphy writing about the character Celia, 'Then it was finished, the days and places and things and people were untwisted and scattered, she was lying down, she had no history.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 86] The Image is a ritornello and a process, making it independent of both objects and memories. The Image is then not a personal memory, It resounds and it colours, making it a process within experience itself. It cannot be a psychological property of the subject because subject and object have already been exhausted, their difference having been shown to be itself something produced. Now we are concerned with processes of production and not with attributes of an already produced entity. As Deleuze puts it – '...the image is more profound because it frees itself from its object in order to become a process itself, ...' As such it '...no longer needs to be realised in a body or object.' [TE, p. 168] The names, combined exhaustively in language I, and voices of the Other, exhausted at the limit in language II, are then interrupted by the pure Image. The Image attains the indefinite because discontinuous possibilities and the opposition of self and Other have been exhausted. Yet it remains completely determined. Its complete determination must arise through the continuity of the production of which it is part. It must realise its distinction through obscurity. It resounds or colours through the resources of a continuous, obscure-distinct, production. This allows it to operate and occur in the ongoing production of experience, rather than being bound to previous forms or being unproductive in experience. In Beckett's words, describing Murphy: 'He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as thought reeled upward off a spool level with his throat.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 141] These scraps are completely determined but belong to no body or object, they operate as a process in experience without presupposing the forms and compositions already built up.

Deleuze strongly identifies this re-thinking of the image in Beckett as affirming the production of the new. The Image must be the new and never set up a barrier to the new by conserving a content. With the image 'what counts is not its meagre content but the energy it has harvested.' [TE, p. 160] This shows that exhaustion is wholly positive insofar as it leads us to something other than a content that would accumulate as yet another composition. The image never lasts very long because it is singular, 'inseparable from the movement through which it dissipates itself.' [TE, p. 168] It is continuous with the production of the new and therefore will not accumulate or solidify a content because this would block the new images to come and its role as a process that makes different and opens a new horizon. They merge with 'the dissipation of their condensed energy' such that they are singular and do not prescribe contents but offer a new relation through which content can be composed differently. Rather than following from previous compositions of content according to a linear succession of time the image is an instantaneous production that interrupts this succession: 'There is a time for images, a right moment when they can appear or insinuate themselves, breaking the combination of words and flow of voices.' Yet this break must also exhaust combinations and flows, it must be 'a moment very near the end, an hour close to the last.' [TE, p. 161] This is a clearing of the space of composition through decomposition. This is also developed in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, see pages 80-84f.

If the Image were to have a different temporality it would have a different horizon and operation. It operates in the instant. We can refer to the problem-solution structure which means that a problem does not establish new form of individuation but establishes a horizon for forms of solution or individuation. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes 'The Idea of fire subsumes fire in the form of a single continuous mass capable of increase. The Idea of silver subsumes its object in the form of a liquid continuity of fine metal.' [DR 171] This is a continuousness that does not resemble what it produces, this having been exhausted. For this reason it must interrupt the course and succession of its products, forms of solution or individuation, rather than simply supplying it with ready made forms. We do not then copy the content of the image but realise new connections in the instant thanks to how diverse new images or potentials coexist in the Idea. One form of realising the Idea or image must not dominate because for Deleuze the actualisation of virtual Idea is differenciation rather than being marked by resemblance or generality. For this reason we find that Beckett's notion of falling preserves the necessary temporality of the image. Deleuze quotes the following passage from Beckett: 'The image is a pant, a breath, but it is an expiring breath, on its way to extinction. The image is that which extinguishes itself, consumes itself: a fall. It is a pure intensity, which is defined as such by its height, that is, by its level above zero, which it describes only by falling.' [TE, p. 170] Therefore in The Exhausted the dissipation of energy is shown to be positive – it ensures a singular Image and one occurring in the instant and therefore not being accounted for by the linear succession of time. Deleuze quotes Becket writing of 'the simple games that time plays with space, now with these toys, and now with those.' [Beckett, ‘Texts for Nothing’, p. 74] This captures the intervention of an instantaneous Image in space, the problems set for space to solve which draws upon a time of production. Thus one Image does not follow from another in a linear and actual succession but each occurs in the instant and relates in a non-linear and continuous time. It is what Deleuze elsewhere calls, borrowing the concept from Shakespeare, a 'time out of joint.' ['On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy' in Essays Critical and Clinical, also published as the Preface to Kant's Critical Philosophy]

The second aspect of the language III, 'any space whatever', does for space what the Image does for time. The 'any space whatever' is populated and well trodden – including by us and yet it is neither here nor there. Deleuze finds that in Beckett a manner of walking is a ritornello just as a Images are. Thus 'Any-character-whatever' 'traverses the square following a given course and direction.' This motor ritornello is a conveyor belt because it is a movement with no object. Here it is a question of exhausting space. Just as linear time is overcome by the instantaneous time of Images and their virtual coexistence, so qualified and extended spaces are overcome by 'any-space-whatever'. It is not organised by established representations, neither by words, objects or memories. Its potential organisation involves the instantaneous time of the image, the injection of problems which it responds to with solutions, precisely individuations or compositions of the self. Here elements are defunctionalised, homogeneous and are thus defined only as parts of a space, ensuring continuity as in the case of images coexisting in Ideas. This clears the ground because it ensures that forms produced in the past and accumulated do not determine how space can function in its encounter with the Image. This is space open the horizon of the future through its capacity to respond to the time of the image.

Developing the Nothing with which everything merges there is a ghostly dimension that further elaborates the continuous production Deleuze seeks in Beckett's work. The latter is ‘Nothing’ from the point of view of the produced, the actualised and with its sensori-motor schema. It is then ghostlike from this perspective, what Deleuze calls 'The ghostly dimension of an indefinite impersonal'. [TE, p. 166] Yet it involves a fullness attained through exhaustion, something Murphy saw as a potential in his biscuits. We reach the indefinite and impersonal through the exhaustion or decomposition of words, memories and objects. Images are played out when the time of Image is staged in the 'any space whatever'. We have 'a woman, a man and a child without any personal coordinates.' They are ghostly because they do not resemble already composed forms. Ghostlike is the life without the forms that define what has been composed and made personal. These Images are processes that trigger new forms, new solutions or individuations, and so must themselves ‘fall’ away rather than becoming established and must not prescribe a content. The impersonal and indefinite can effect any self through its own exhaustion or decomposition, they belong to no-one or thing and so are pre-individual. They do not resemble what they produce. They are the instances of a renewed problem and ghostly because they do not presuppose former solutions and do not resemble them. It is ghostly that the order of succession of what has gone before doesn't count because 'All parts of space plunge into the void, each revealing the emptiness, into which they are plunging.' [TE, p. 165] They reveal emptiness in their lack of reference to the organisation of space and time, abandoning all precedent or basis in a sum of probabilities.

It is in music that a continuity is to be found that avoids the terms Beckett is said to exhaust. It is adequate to the space we have reached so that:
'It is onto this ghostly frame that the music is hurled, connecting voids and silences, following a ridge line like a limit to infinity.' [TE, p. 167]
This is a ‘frame’ without established and personal coordinates. ‘Infinite’ here is the continuous production we have been concerned with. 'Void and silence' are connected by this continuity because they are its interventions in language and experience, they are singular or remarkable images connected by a continuous production. They are connected by a rhythm that orders their occurrence not according to linear succession but according to a non-linear production brought about by the coexistence and interaction of these images in a continuous production. Here difference relates to difference. The instantaneous images can be connected only through the production they are part of and this is expressed by rhythm rather than by given ways of connecting things. Rhythm is the time aspect of music and involves the grouping of units of time into larger and larger groups. All sorts of groupings and connections can emerge through rhythm and this makes a productive movement. This accounts for new distributions of words, subjects and objects in an ‘any space whatever’ because both time and space are free of presuppositions and able to respond with new compositions to the image that occur in the instant. These images must all be continuous but not according to their successive occurrences in a linear or chronological time. They relate through rhythm and its groupings, a ‘time out of joint’.

Deleuze writes that for Beckett: 'Music succeeds in transforming the death of this young girl into a young girl dies; it brings about this extreme determination of the indefinite like a pure intensity that pierces the surface,...' [TE, p. 173] Here 'this' thing which has a place in the succession of products, of words, of objects, becomes instead an Image, a process of death made singular. This is because the images occurs without being tied to any body or object, it is indefinite and impersonal, ghostly because it is preindividual. In this way all definite and personal terms are exhausted and this image emerges from its relation to all other images and relates what it produces in an 'any space whatever' to all other productions. In his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Deleuze talks about the difference between 'distributive unity' and 'limitative unity.' [p. 84-85]The former is separation without isolation and expresses the continuity of production which is attained through exhaustion. This rhythmic being and union that separates the selves who are realised and makes them individual in very different and creative ways. Yet it does this by relating their singular production to the whole of production, through the unlimited continuity of this. Deleuze refers to Beckett's television work as using music or vision to loosen the grip of words, separating or even opening them up. This is when they encounter their outside, the continuity that produces them but also demands they make way for the new. This gives them a unity that distributes anew, breaking solidified orders. This means that Images can interrupt words and objects but rhythm ensures new distributions or groupings of images are always occurring and none is established. It means that whole of time is always brought into play. This is for Deleuze to clear the way for the ever new that is only realised through this whole: 'Visual image is carried along by the music, the sonorous image that rushes toward its own abolition. Both of them rush toward the end, all possibility exhausted.' [TE, p. 169]

Deleuze asks whether there is salvation for words in a new style where they open up by themselves. This would be 'A music proper to a poetry read aloud without music.' [TE, p. 173]The succession and the discontinuity we found with the sum of possibility would need to be overcome it the rhythm and an ‘any space whatever’ were to be realised in a style that overcame the solidified and habitual. Deleuze refers to Beckett's practice of boring holes in the surface so that 'what lurks behind' might at last appear: 'to allow for the emergence of the void or the visible in itself, the silence or the audible in itself...' [TE, p. 173] This void is continuous and so refers to the 'in itself' without division into forms or compositions. This echoes Deleuze concern in Difference and Repetition with how 'Ideas occur throughout the faculties and concern them all.' Deleuze suggests we take the social multiplicity or Idea – 'it determines sociability as a faculty, but also the transcendent of sociability which cannot be lived within actual societies in which the multiplicity is incarnated, but must be and can be lived only in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new).' [DR, p. 193] The faculties are structures involved in individuation and respond to the transcendent object, the Idea where the variety of 'the social' coexists ‘in itself’ and with the whole of time, suggesting again the distinction of Idea through their obscurity. Deleuze is concerned with the 'in itself' of the visible and the audible also in order to realise in individuation an images produced by the coexistence of all the varieties of the visible or of the audible.

Referring to Beckett's late works Deleuze characterises his style: 'Sometimes short segments are ceaselessly added to the interior of the phrase in an attempt to break open the surface of words completely, ... And sometimes the phrase is riddled with dots and dashes [traits] in order to ceaselessly reduce the surface of words,...' [TE, p. 173-174] This exhaustive process operates between the words to uncover their common production in the linguistic Idea or multiplicity. Deleuze argues that a new style is needed because of the problem of how visions or sounds are to be distinguished. This concerns the problem not simply of minimal distinction between sounds and visions but their differenciation, the production of very different sounds and visions through the audible in itself and the visible in itself. At this point the rhythm of a production that groups images in new ways, realising new connections between these processes, is operating. The surface is broken open or reduced in this new style such that we are closer to the Idea and its production of images by bringing together diverse visions and sounds into the common production that realises the ‘in itself’ in different ways. Finding the Idea in which the variety coexists is to find the point of exhaustion where new images are produced in order to give rise to new compositions or individuations upon an 'any space whatever.'

This conclusion has tried to draw together the ‘art of science of exhaustion’ through the theme of individuation. This theme seems to recur throughout Deleuze work and he seeks to account both for continuity and for the discontinuity that is a condition of action and relations between individuals. The account of the time of image and of the ‘any space whatever’ provides an account of how new singularities can be distributed. The problem of accounting for the non-exhausted or composed through exhaustion and decomposition are great and with in more depth in other of Deleuze’s writings. Indeed it is one of the productive problems animating his thought as a whole. However, it is in the space and time of production uncovered in The Exhausted that we grasp the potential for individuation provided by exhaustion just as we do find in other apparently destructive and negative terms elsewhere in Deleuze, from fractures and cracks to schizophrenia and discord.
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The discussion during the workshop was very rich and productive. One issue raised was about the value of exhaustion over a process of fragmentation. Isn’t a fragment more appropriate to Deleuze’s own mechanisms of production? This would suggest that a fragment is injected into the process of production. Another issue was the mention of the sublime at page 170 The Exhausted. If the sublime involves fear, awe and alienation does this equate with exhaustion? The sublime reaches a peak – the zenith of sensation. However, it was argued, for Deleuze exhaustion still involves sensation, it still involves a zenith but one that falls away such that the sublime is never established or fixed.

A connection was made to the move beyond action and the notion of the rhizome where everything is connected to everything else, this is where intensities happen. It cannot be put in an intentional, conscious or logical sequence.

The move beyond the possible to the production of the real led the question to be raised of whether exhaustion is positive in Deleuze but negative in Nietzsche, despite their common ground. Exhaustion in Nietzsche’s critique of morality involves being hypersensitive and involves alcohol, luxury and decadence, bring about reaction rather than action.

Deleuze philosophical notion of energy was related to his critique of entropy. This was referred to Derrida’s notion of dehiscence in the image of the bud of a flower bursting where most of what is released will die but all are of interest. The excess of dehiscence leads to chance driven encounters and avoids a linear and chronological succession or causality.

The example of an animal walking across a desert was suggested as a case where life will push until it drops. Exhaustion will only come with death. It was asked whether exhaustion is moral and humanistic in Deleuze or physiological. This echoes debates about whether the notion of ‘becoming other’ in Deleuze is human centred. This was related to Kantian structures, invoking a human anthropology, and the problem that it is contradictory for the subject to be got rid of in a specifically human way (cf. Keith Ansell Pearson Germinal Life [Routledge, 1999] especially pages 188-189).

Reference was also made to Beckett’s characters and how they keep returning in his work – he calls them all back and they keep moving all the time, reappearing.

Also mentioned with the collection of stones talked about in Anti-Oedipus, echoed in Beckett’s Molloy. Here the notion of constructing desiring machines out of a heap of stones is developed.

Is The Exhausted the closest Deleuze ever got to writing about death? Death is not the end because the life or singularity of the image comes from its fall or dissipation. It becomes a ballistic image, it was suggested. This was related in the point in Difference and Repetition where Deleuze talks about personal death and impersonal death. The latter is going on all the time in the life span of an actual entity, singular points composes the body and compose thought in relation to an environment and in relation to thought in the widest sense. Singular images each die or fall, intensity tends towards zero. As exhaustion death is impersonal and seems to go on continually. The life span between birth and death was discussed – we cannot make a whole of this series. Other series are multiplied by the complication of the whole. It was suggested that constituting a series is itself yet another event in a life and that we cannot therefore get to ‘the’ series.

The three languages which Deleuze finds in Beckett (page 156) were discussed and it was argued that the later texts of Beckett strongly emphasise the relevance of this model. Words come no longer to be used. It was suggested that triads come up a lot in Deleuze – yet it was also noted that we can find many four fold structures. Deleuze uses lists all the time, including the eight postulates of The Image of Thought at the end of chapter three of Difference and Repetition. However, it was suggested, we tend to expect lists to be exhaustive. The importance of more than two terms – such as actual and virtual – was brought out in relation to the danger of the actual falling into the virtual unless other terms involve the virtual in the actual, as individuation can be said to do, as can the doubling of spatio-temporal dynamisms in the emergence of an 'elementary consciousness' (something talked about in Difference and Repetition at page 220). Death is for Deleuze to clear the ground for the virtual production that is continually involved in actualisation.

Another area developed was the role of Klossowski given that Deleuze says he got the notion of intensity from him. Deleuze and Guattari saw ‘disjunctive synthesis’ as a way of describing the essential nature of Kossowski’s fictions. Klossowski’s work on Nietzsche’s wrestling with his own physiological states of sickness was developed and this revealed its deep relevance to Deleuze’s engagement with Beckett. It was a question for Nietzsche of whether he should be on the side of his body or his thought – they were in a battle against each other. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style expresses the incoherent forces going on beneath consciousness but without representing them. This develops a pathos of thought. Reference was made to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science where he criticises Spinoza for arguing that we need to understand rather than condemn. Nietzsche sees this as seeking a neutral position of understanding when neutrality can only be a temporary truce of the forces of the unconscious involving the lowest energy and no feeling. Yet in Deleuze exhaustion is correlated with a particular possibility of thought, a new distribution of images or singularities. For Nietzsche things can’t cancel out and Deleuze takes this over. Unconscious forces are all different in kind. The production of an agent, of a sensory motor schema, comes out of this unconscious. Exhaustion then is about getting beyond agency but to have individuation you have to get back to it too.

Deleuze's criticism of European Buddhism was raised because here the right balance, the right level of energy, involves disinterest. Beckett, it was pointed out, is often accused of nihilism. It was suggested that Deleuze’s anti-Kantianism leads him to affirm in Beckett the exhaustion of possible experiences. This again lead to the problem of whether we have the physiology of exhaustion or a specifically human exhaustion. Kant’s work in The Critique of Pure Reason was characterised as involving the exhaustion of the possibilities of cognition via the excessive movement beyond the limits of the rational that defines 'the human' in Kant.

It was argued that in Beckett there is a whole system of at work that keeps things moving.

The theme of the ‘any space whatever’ was related to Deleuze's Bergsonism and the notion in Bergson that you can only see the image when you are free of all movement. The image is what sets everything in motion.

Also discussed where passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra where Zarathustra is forced to lie down and how he is opposed to 'the philosopher of sleep'.


Bibliography:

Beckett, Samuel (1993) Murphy, Montreuil and London: Calder Publications.

Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum Press.

- (1998) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London and New York: Verso.

- (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press.

- (1989) Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The Athlone Press.

- (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books.

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