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MARK LUSSIER Blake, Deleuze, and the Emergence of Ecological Consciousness Gilles Deleuze (often in collaboration with Félix Guattari) sought to move analytic philosophy and theoretical psychoanalysis beyond ‘‘abstraction’’ and toward a ‘‘transcendental empiricism’’ already present in earlier philosophic work. This remarkable combination of traditionalism and innovation describes a state elusively beyond any linguistic epistemology—yet resident in any experiential event—and o√ers a method to capture individual experience of ‘‘pure immanence.’’∞ The emphasis Deleuze placed on event and experience stimulated the energetic analysis of their interrelations by Alain Badiou, turning philosophy away from cognitive mapping through Kantian categorical imperatives and re/turning it to the world. Rereading ‘‘the role of rhythm and sensation in Kant’s philosophy’’≤ and adopting a position equally grounded in ‘‘the Substance of Spinoza[’s]’’ pantheistic model of life,≥ this return also required ‘‘a radical break with the demands of the self,’’ a rejection of Enlightenment dualism, for pure immanence can only be an experiential event when ‘‘consciousness becomes a fact . . . when a subject is produced at the same time as its object.’’∂ Under such conditions, consciousness as ‘‘fact’’ flows into a ‘‘domain of pure intensities,’’ whose existential topography ‘‘is composed of intensive and di√erential dimensions . . . in a continual state of flux and transformation .’’∑ Within this terrain, ‘‘identities are lost.’’∏ This territory of infinite possibilities requires a paradoxical individual act of deterritorialization ‘‘to subvert [the] standard . . . gridded territory of conventions, codes, labels and markers.’’π This space exists at the event-horizon where subject-object relations break down, which vibrates ‘‘with the creative potential of endless evolutions and innovations.’’∫ Contemporary physical terms populate the preceding remarks because the unique demands made on theory by ecocritical discourse require interdisciplinarity, since such criticism emerges from what Freya Matthews terms an ‘‘ecological self’’ and what Danah Zohar blake, deleuze, and ecological consciousness ≤∑π terms a ‘‘quantum self.’’Ω The motive for ecological discourse emerges from a con/fusion of consciousness and cosmos as an ‘‘assemblage,’’ another Deleuzian concept brought to bear on ecocritical problems, where ‘‘each thing gets defined by what it connects to and where it leads.’’∞≠ Like Deleuze’s thinking, Matthews’s argument extends from Spinoza to the new physics, and the thrust of Zohar’s argument returns sensate experience to the construction of reality. Both, I argue, attempt to articulate a philosophy capable of achieving what John Keats termed ‘‘negative capability ’’ as its primary perceptual mode—the ability to rest in ‘‘uncertainties.’’∞∞ Blake’s description of this perceptual location occurs in his poem Milton: ‘‘There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find / The Moment & it multiply. & when it once is found / It renovates every Moment of the Day if right placed.’’∞≤ Blake often associated ‘‘Satan’’ with the ‘‘Spectre [as] the Reasoning Power in Man,’’∞≥ and these ‘‘Watch Fiends’’ are both perceptual and temporal. The renovation of the ‘‘Moment,’’ the eternal and infinite spacetime of the imagination itself,∞∂ creates rippling waves of potential transformation, whose panpsychic fibers form, in Deleuzian language, deterritorializing ‘‘lines of flight’’ that ‘‘defuse’’ ‘‘into a single harmonious wave.’’∞∑ This experiential assemblage will be termed ‘‘ecological consciousness’’ hereafter. This ecological view is necessarily positioned in a zone of interaction between micro- and macro-events defined by principles of ‘‘interconnectedness and non-localizability of particles and . . . their inherent dynamism,’’ as well as the ‘‘less radical principle of indeterminism.’’∞∏ However, this state can be experienced only by the willed sacrifice of self-consciousness. The problem confronting any act of ecological engagement, then, can be found closer than one might imagine, in self-consciousness itself. As Deleuze argues , ‘‘ ‘the self’ is only a fiction or artifice,’’ and Zohar makes the same observation, noting that, from within the new physics, such a self ‘‘is just a chimera.’’∞π Ecological acts rest upon a preceding mental event, resulting in the emergence of ecological consciousness. This event is perhaps best de- fined as an experience of intersubjectivity, a state of heightened awareness of implication within a broader field of interconnected forces. Yet, for such events to achieve the ‘‘endless evolutions and innovations’’ posited by Deleuze , the state itself cannot be disconnected from the body of experience.∞∫ Deleuze and Guattari advocate such a mode of consciousness in A Thousand Plateaus, which o√ered the concepts most fruitfully applied to an ecological criticism predicated on movement beyond a rigidly defined self:∞Ω ‘‘A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or...

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