Reactivating Deleuze: critical affects after cultural materialism

A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

—Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (4) [emphasis mine]

New “theoretical” horizons are starting to open up on the scene of historicist criticism—or, rather, “old” ones, and it’s about time. If, as Adorno argued, philosophy lives on because the moment of its realization was missed, one can only hope that the same untimely life is not perpetually in store for the astonishing work of Gilles Deleuze. Then again, one might well hope otherwise, for Deleuze’s philosophy has untimely hopes as well as timely ones, even though academic criticism, given its present list of worldly concerns, is insensible to goals other than those that applied theorists can already sense and register, and by now perhaps too well.

Deleuze has the power to change the goals and subjects of criticism as well as serve them—a power, a theoretical capacity, that most critics at present fail absolutely to demonstrate. Such failure of demonstration, in Deleuze’s still unexplored terms, signals an act of de/valuation—a living sign that a certain limit to what criticism can think and do has been “realized” (think Adorno again). Moreover, it is “signs” of this sort, in a way consistent with his larger philosophy of affects, that Deleuze teaches us to read. What is devalued by current criticism (and in no sense deliberately, but rather reactively, implicitly) is any way of reading the world that moves astray from the explicit subject areas and goals that encode current critical rhetoric and its affects (for Deleuze, the two are never distinct)—that is, astray from articles, conference papers, dissertations, and books that foreground gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. as their subjects, and which seek the enhanced cultural enablement of differences of this recognizable sort as their “practical” goals.

These subjects and goals are of unquestionable importance to critical pedagogy and progressive politics. In the estimate of this reader, only an uncritical reactionary of the worst kind would be “against” these subjects and goals, or oppose the practical politics with which they aim to coincide. What Deleuze reminds us, however, is that theory can do other things than transform itself dutifully into common-sensical language and practical alterian politics. Theory can also, in addition to pursuing instrumental goals and perhaps at the same time, invent or pre-form new “sense” altogether, and move at speeds different from those compatible with the going quotidian or academic instrumentation. (All that theory needs to do this is a body capable of doing it, which always implies more than one body, if not the always-to-be-hoped-for critical mass). Theory would be the end and not just the means that untimely sense takes on in senselessly one-dimensional worlds, and not least when this one-dimensionality, even in the admirable and desirable spirit of social alterity, appears of necessity in academe itself. In Deleuze’s terms, theory would be a particular percept—the actual life of sense and values possibly to come, unrealizable within the exigent limits of current sensibility.

If this sounds like Adorno again, it should. As Fredric Jameson suggests, in academic times saturated with orthodox critical moves and counters (to say nothing of the far worse orthodoxies outside academia), Adorno’s appeal to difficulty, rethought beyond order-words such as “avantgardism,” “hermeticism,” and “elitism,” might be good for nineties critics, or at least some of us, to reconsider. Certain critics are beginning to suggest that Deleuze, too (who could out-think the aforementioned list of metonymic accusations in his sleep), might offer different and even untimely things to academic criticism, yet they lack Jameson’s auto-critical agenda and edge. Deleuze, of course, has not had the same academic influence in North American literature and cultural studies departments that, among poststructuralists, Derrida and Foucault have had (and in roughly that order). Yet one can begin to sense that if our academic will-to-application has its simultaneously good and bad way with things, this might change.

By any critical standards, Deleuze...