Cartographies of Style: Asignifying, Intensive, Impersonal

Style sweeps away, infiltrates, and overturns the signifying components of language, producing new percepts, surprising and splendid individuations, at five in the afternoon, an afternoon in the steppe.¹ Taking this position, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari counter the tendency in art and literature to turn style into an operator of identity. No longer treating style as the marker of a unitary signification, of a personal origin, or of a defined genre, they redefine it as asignifying, impersonal, and intensive. Nevertheless, there is nothing uncertain or reactive about these subtractive formulations, whose critical impact ignites a creative explosion.

Indeed, of what does style consist? In literature or in art history, style usually exercises a personological, identifying, and signifying function, sorting exceptional works from unimpressive or minor ones. Style is the hallmark of a habit that refers to an average level of language use or of art production, and personifies the genius artist in possession of a unique, transcendental ego who, in the classic version, deploys the norm in an exceptional way, or, in the romantic version, creates the norm. Exemplarity or exception: the normative strategy of style reveals itself in this process of distinguishing major works from minor ones. Even if we ignore its tendency to establish hierarchies and we consider only its descriptive function, style establishes a repertoire of morphological forms and classifies by subsuming and identifying a plurality of objects under a common label. Any application of a label is part and parcel of this double movement of affiliation and exclusion; in this case as well, style serves to identify a difference, but a difference only as a form of identity.

Style thus depends entirely upon a political epistemology of normativity: a principle of identification, it acts as a unifying form, molding creation, regulating the production of works and of their statuses in the genealogical and capitalist mode of appropriation, filiation, and inheritance, reproducing the logic of persons and goods. The history of style constitutes a veritable policing of attribution and authentication, one that functions vertically, through the ordering of a hierarchy of works, genres, and epochs, as well as horizontally, through the designation of a zone of spatiotemporal placement, of inclusion, and of material transmission. Style is thus caught up in a theory of individuation, politically and theoretically favoring the personal, the unitary, the stable norm, the established trait. Beyond its function of classification and attribution, it judges the quality of works in order to exclude or to condemn, to disqualify or to normatize: style is an archetype factory.²

Deleuze and Guattari completely transform the question of style by reexamining style from two points of view: the individuation of any enunciation whatsoever and individuation in creation. Style does indeed engage in a process of individuation, but it does not function according to the model of an author who is the original, proprietary owner of his or her traits, organically centered on his or her ego.³ Throughout his work, including that done in collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze favors a different model of individuation, one that is modal rather than substantial and that is defined not as a body, a subject, a form, or an organ but rather as an event, what he terms a “haecceity.” These modal individuations of the type at five in the afternoon are defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected, that is, as longitudes or compositions of relations of force, complex relations of variable speeds (speeding up and slowing down), but also as latitudes, variations in power, and affective vicissitudes.

This new politics of individuation transforms stylistics and reverberates in linguistics, literature, and in all fields of art and explains why Deleuze often speaks of non-style in order to emphasize the polemical aspect of an “absence of style” that he defines as “the inspired power of a new literature”:⁴ “but you have to be careful with people who supposedly ‘have no style’; as Proust noted, they’re often the greatest stylists of all.”⁵ Of what, then, does this non-style consist? Didn’t the romantics...